Suspect is a clunky way to do pvp. When a group is suspect they must face attackers one at a time or leave someone to die alone.
Higher abyss tiers should just be excluded from hisec.
And/or abyss runners should randomly encounter one another.
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Based on the trending PCU - What new players?
Says she as she throws a stick of dynamite into the water.
Mostly the ones I imagine 
Some of my friends are new players. Long Tall Sallie is one and Natalie Patrovita is fairly new too.
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Thar she blows!
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Actually a lot of abyss runners are getting ganked on exiting the abyss.
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Something I wonder about with this question, meaning the over fishing one, is new players.
Eve apparently has a very low new player retention rate, and it seems to me that this would lead to the ones who don’t leave just getting better and harder to catch or kill.
What I wonder is not so much if there’s less fish, but better adapted fish, if all the less adapted ones get culled then you wind up with fish that know how to fight, flee, or hide. They also likely know what to carry and when and where they can get away with it.
When I was new I got blown up all the time, then, as I learned more this decreased to the point where it became rare. Lately it’s increased again due (for me) to largely CCP driven apathy, they made the stuff I like to fly less fun so now I spend more time in stuff I don’t want to be in a d have quite literally stopped paying attention a lot of the time. That’s beside the point though, the point is I went from new and doing really stupid things to being a bit more experienced and really hard to catch.
I’m not completely clear on what causes the new player retention problem, but I would bet that’s what the lack of fish problem is, if you want to eat more fish you are going to have to become a better shark.
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I think that factor is more that overall players are adapting and improving, rather than new players.
While plenty of groups prey on new players, the kind of targets being discussed here that are declining are mostly ships out of the reach of newbros.
On the abyss runners issue, I think most people would prefer that such powerful income sources had more interesting PVP interaction associated with them than just suicide ganking.
Now we know where the flood of one time use catalyst alts come from. I wouldnt be suprised if 80+ % of the logged in numbers are alts
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I agree, and that’s what I was saying, people get better over time and learn to adapt. What I’m also saying is that maybe since there’s so few new people coming in there’s just a lot more people who have adapted.
One thing about stuff like the abyss (and ratting in general) though is that people need somewhere to recover from losses, I’m one of those people who doesn’t look on external websites to find out in advance if I can survive stuff, I just go and find out for my self, it’s expensive.
My PvP experience is close to 100% loss, and according that requires some other form of income, all of which have been nerfed to death. This is why I’m ditching four out of five five paid accounts and only keeping the newest one who’s only focus is PvP, I expect to be broke on a constant basis for a long time, but like with anything else I will adapt and (hopefully) become harder to kill.
I’m not saying I’m going to be a juicy fish, but for a good while I expect to be a killable one with an aggression problem.
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How strange that Scarcity leads to shortage of all sorts of targets, who would have thunk.
In that respect, it was also predicted.
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I like you.
One issue is of course that many people will look at risk and the time/effort/cost of their investment and decide not to partake of it. I for one could do high level Abyss quite easily but because I got the odd dc and this was something that caused me to lose my ship and my pod I deemed the risk to be too great.
When I looked at doing escalations in nullsec, I could have done them with a little bit of effort, however it meant taking more risk and moving something expensive into other systems while I could quite easily make decent ISK in a VNI at the time with little real risk of losing them, not like that Escalation Marauder. Especially as that Marauder had to be immobile to do that content.
There are many reasons why they no longer find many whales, your suggestion is quite correct because many older players are better at assessing risk.
Blingy Widows and Marshals are solid choices for doing DEDs and escalations, especially after the changes come in soon. Much safer travel and you’ve got a cloak for safety. Either way, when you understand how people hunt gated complexes like that you can make it near impossible to be caught (with the right tools).
I do not disagree with you in terms of their ability to run this content and their survivability, the rewards are also great. If I was still playing as an Omega I would perhaps try that, however what I found when hunting people doing this content with others is that step one was to make them leave the DED or escalation, step 2 was to set up to nab them when they went back to finish it.
A lot of people would give up on the site if disturbed and if someone is actively hunting you then often it is better to just go and do something else for an extended period.
Personally I think it’s well balanced content, very safe when done correctly, but with different ways for hunters to attempt to catch you and various methods you can use to check your safety. Even if hunter and prey are not on grid at the time, there’s interaction going on and judgement calls being made. The isk incentive and content mechanics are there to incentivise both sides putting blingy ships on grid, which generates incentive for participating in a fight.
The beauty of doing them in black ops is that you can have a scanner/cyno alt going around to find an alternative site and safely bounce around your region if one site gets camped.
Risk taking in this game is one of the core areas totally broken.
What is extremely underestimated is the amount of people who have interest in Eve and would pvp but would not characterize pvp as their core mode of game play. I was one and in my prime there were hundreds like me.
The risk taking isnt what part of space you play in or the fit you are flying. The true risk taking in this game is to try and play the game a way differently than ccp wants you to play.
In the old days the toys of the sandbox were put into the pen and I daresay some consideration to their weight and texture was made. In the modern era changes are slapped up on a wall and if 10 people who won a popularity contest concur then its an innovative idea.
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Scarcity of players, yeah.
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I would say let the carebears do their thing, hop into a frigate and come on down to the Amarr Minmatar faction warfare zone. I usually don’t do swarms but I’ve dabbled in 2v1s and 3v1s on occasion, especially if I have the idea that I can pop one before I explode. Most swarmy thing I fought was a gang of six punishers at the open. I’d definitely say that 1v1, maybe 2v1, is preferable, all things considered. Currently, the LP farmers have flipped most systems to Amarr control so most of the combat will be found in the remaining Minmatar systems where Minmil is trying to fend off both the farmers and Amarrmil.
I started in 2020 so I’d consider myself a new player by EVE standards. Most of the folks I teach are newer than me.
There are loads of new players pouring in, however, their first few days in eve suck so they quit.
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I know. I had the hardest time getting my friends to join. Still working on a few more.
CCP’s referal program is good but more can be done. Like, maybe, a free fully-fitted Catalyst every month for those under 5mil SP.
The log-in rewards are good tho. I encourage CCP to keep with that.