Unlike ESS, MESS (Mandatory ESS) is forced onto you - it’s in every system, like the sun, already deployed.
CCP wants us not only to “protect” it, but to sit on it for 3 hours until it releases our ISK.
And then there’s “reserve bank”, keys for which is not available. I wonder if they are going to release it in a way so that it’s not available to ratters, only to have us pay an obnoxious price to get our ISK out of that bs, or to have 23/7 vigil on it to prevent someone with a key from stealing our ■■■■ while we do everything we can to procure a key. Both options are at “not even going to consider this ■■■■■■■■”, so CCP can hear the door when I slam it from the other side.
0 rats killed for the last week, 0 rats will be killed in nullsec until this stupidity is revoked and whoever came up with this is publicly shamed, and, hopefully, fired and blacklisted from game design, goes to some chinese mobile dime-a-dozen games developer studio, and rots there in his ■■■■■■■ dreamland.
No they’re not: decreasing character isk/hr by some small percentage isn’t going to affect botters because bots are scalable-- the botters will just add another two supercarriers and they’re sitting back where they were pre-nerf. It’s individual, actual human players who will be penalized by these changes.
Get out, Utter Nonsense. I already explained in detail why am I extremely salty about those changes.
They do least damage to blocs, and most damage to me, who already carried the brunt of disruptions, while for super ratting krabs, many things aint even qualify as disruption.
They do even less damage to bots, all they have to do is scale up 20% and steal their own ■■■■ regularly, and that’s it. I can’t throw 20% more me at the problem like they can, so as a player vs bot, I’m at a loss here.
They take away my ability to play solo outside of alliance prime time, which, due to covid, became my playtime, by no choice of mine.
All in all, it’s the same as blackout. CCP is telling me to get in a bloc in a super, or die, again. Since this idea is also not getting past you in the last thread: I’d be there if I wanted to, or if my objective was to be a spacerich megakrab - then I’d definitely be spinning supers in some safe space. I definitely can do it, yet I’m not there, get it?
And if someone still thinks blackout was a not bad idea, he just wasn’t smacked with the PCU graph in the face enough, needs a compulsory grade school math course, and probably a brain transplant, because current one is gullible enough to believe in CCP blackout damage control propaganda. This time CCP is probably more prepared to fake public PCU data and has damage control measures for gullible people in advance, but guess what, still ain’t gonna fall for it.
I don’t disagree about the prior state of ISK fountains in Dominion sov-- but CCP largely dealt with that issue when they nerfed supercap ratting. Human players don’t run supers anymore-- only botters deep into remote regions. With the proliferation of blackops gangs now (what began as occasional, small gangs of bombers or T3Cs a few years ago has devolved into omni-present, large gangs-- at busy times, it’s not uncommon to see fleets of 50-100 polarized bombers in these hunting fleets, with numerous instances of smaller groups), ratting in carriers is no longer a thing (again, unless you’re in the most backwater regions). Ratting in BS isn’t a thing. The only thing people really do anymore is rat in Myrms (or dumb people in Ishtars) because hotdroppers have covered literally entire regions with armies of AFK-cloaking prospects and bombers that are ready to jump anyone who rats. Ratting is not a real thing anymore-- there’s absolutely no need for any additional nerfs, yet CCP are doing a compounding pair of nerfs simultaneously? Why?
You must not have much experience flying in populated or contested space. Delve residents have faced constant roaming gangs and armies of AFK cloaking alts for years-- well before the start of this latest war. Yes, if you could arrange to do your PvE in moon-time, you’d sometimes be left in peace, but in any normal-people timezone there are gangs moving around all the time. For the most part, Goons figured out ways to deal with the harassment, but CCP have been hard at work nerfing those too. Not to mention the fact that most people who come hunting for ratters are themselves hyper risk-averse: they’re not looking for fights, they’re looking for ganks. If CCP put arbitrary restrictions on how you can play in the vicinity of ESSs, these guys are just going to theorycraft the most risk-averse, slippery gang composition they can. It will probably take them eight minutes. They’ll zoom in, either take easy kills, take the ISK, or they’ll run away the moment anyone brings an organized defense. There is no reasonable mechanic CCP can implement to force people to get into a fair-and-sqaure brawl in EVE: it’s not a thing.
My friend is making 100-200m a night multiboxing Orcas. Sure, it’s not a metric tonne of isk (and certainly nothing compared to super ratting in years past), but it’s also extremely scalable and involves negligible effort or risk. Unless you’re just feeling nostalgic (as I sometimes do), why would you put all the effort into running around nullsec sites in some expensive PvE ship, having to bridge your ratting ship around to find somewhere that’s not AFK camped, having to stare at your local window constantly for fear of being tackled by an interceptor if you look away for six seconds, all to make what: ~60m isk an hour now on a good day? To say nothing of post-nerf? It’s not worth it at all.
[quote=“Black_Pedro, post:516, topic:277014”]
I’m sorry, but nullsec is not suppose to a safe farming zone where you don’t have to defend your stuff. If your “playstyle” for lack of a better word is such you can only live in nullsec by avoiding every fight, then perhaps you shouldn’t be there afterall.[/quote]
Can you not see how dumb this rhetoric sounds? This is literally exactly what Goons did with Delve. EXACTLY what you are describing. We hunkered down in a region, maintained a small footprint, brought out huge, expensive toys and actively defended them. What was the response? The Reddit elite PvP whiner brigade screeched and screeched about how they weren’t getting enough dank, zero-effort frags because when they dropped their worthless bomber gangs onto tens of billions of ISK worth of capital ships, we’d cyno in FAX and supercaps and kill them or make them run away. So they clutched pearls and cried and wrung their hands until CCP nerfed literally everything in sight: supercap damage application, boson effectiveness, pulled HAWs from titans, nerfed supercap EHP, nerfed cynos into the ground, changed the pirate AI so it would kill drones and fighters, nerfed Rorqual mining, nerfed Rorqual mining again, nerfed Rorqual mining some more because why not. Nerfed anom contents, nerfed anom respawn rates… do I need to go on?
Nullsec has always been a “safe farming zone” at least comperable to what we have today. In the ancient times, we ratted in asteroid belts. Local was still there. Ratters still ratted. Ratters still preferred to warp to a safespot or POS rather than engage in an honourable 1v1 elite PvP duel with whatever hostile happened to jump into local. It’s always been this way. If anything, today’s environment is better for the hunters-- who now have easy access to covert hotdrop ships and other tools which we could only have dreamed about back in the day. We used to have gangs of people spread around regions in cloaking Vagabonds and recon ships and we’d have to figure out ways of stalking the target to see what they were doing, moving our gang into position through stargates without spooking people, lining up a tackle using a ship with terrible, cloaked-cruiser scan res, and then jumping everyone in and get warped over to the target before the tackler died. These days you what, wait until your friend with the 150 prospect alts tells you something is ratting, get on the blackops, right-click bridge to, press F1? It’s literally never been easier to hunt ratters.
You’re preaching the the choir here: I’ve spent most of my time in EVE trying to live in hostile space hunting ratters, industrialists, and everyone else who tries to move around in space. I know how much damage CCP’s dumb game design did to the economy: I’ve been playing since 2006. A lot of people told them at the time that what they were doing was dumb and would destroy the economy-- they did it anyway. RIP, the value of ISK. But I’d rather them err on the side of “too many people farming too much” than on the side of scarcity. We’re heading toward a scenario where nobody can make any useful quantities of money, yet prices remain as high as ever. Meanwhile, CCP are out there slinging marketing speak about the need for “Risk vs Reward” and “Meaningful interaction” and “avoiding troll-like behaviors.” If nullsec is supposed to be so dangerous, why are they letting players spam tetherable structures literally everywhere? Why are they letting jump bridges and Keepstars and stargates all sit together on the same grids, so there’s nowhere to ambush people? Why is most travel in the game accomplished by jump drive, bridge, or nullified taxiceptors? If CCP wanna talk about risk-aversion and “troll-like behavior,” it’s clearly they who are trolling us: for a bunch of people who talk mad game about risk and reward, they’ve done a masterful job at nearly eliminating the risk of nonconsensual PvP from their game. The only people they’re still picking on are the newest or most casual players: those who want to play alphas (and so can’t taxiceptor around or bridge or run nullified T3Cs), and those who actually need entry-level activities like mining or ratting to sustain their wallets. I don’t see this being about risk:reward at all: it’s simply a money-grab: make it impossible for low-time or casual players to refill their wallets in nullsec. Make their labor a complete waste of time. Force them to spend more real money. If CCP are legitimately trying to rebalance risk and reward, they’re going about it in the most Fozzie way possible: force a bunch of arbitrary, gimmicky mechanics onto the playerbase in an attempt to compel some kind of tournament-like, vaguely-consensual, elite-small-gang-PvP gameplay. Dumb. If they want more risk in their game, there’s a thousand other, much more interesting and consequential places they could start. They don’t want real risk-- they want a bunch of ISK-poor newcomers to buy more PLEX so they can repeatedly welp more T2 frigates into a perpetual series of compulsory ESS showdowns. It’s just like Fozziesov: about the illusion of risk, when the reality is a bunch of very average players consistenly slap-fighting one another as they win or lose a series of “battles” fought in frigate and destroyer hulls. Low-stakes, managed “risk” and cheap thrills. PS: losing more on your dead Harpy than you made all night ratting last night? PLEX packs are on sale today! 10% off and free SKIN!
The joke is gonna be on people like us, who enjoy fighting people, when most of the PvE activity moves to highsec and there’s nothing to do in nullsec’s barren, trit-less wasteland anymore.
Bounties from nullsec ratting - 1.7T ISK a day is a lot of ticks, and seems to provide very little content to the sandbox. Much of what you say is pretty subjective like most things we seem to be discussing, but what isn’t is how out-of-whack this ISK generation is with destruction amounts even today in nullsec.
I think is mismatch of our understanding stems from the fact that nullsec isn’t one uniform and monolithic place. Of course there are going to be busier places/times and more active places/times, and more quiet ones and these changes will impact them differently, and themselves might change behaviour.
The thing is, the ESS is intended to change behaviour. Only CCP has all the data, but even with that I’d expect any changes made to all of nullsec to disproportionately affect some people/places more than others. Collateral damage I guess?
At the very least, you can’t know how this will affect the game. It’s fine to make predictions, but I’m going to wait and see not only these changes, but the rest that are in the pipeline before declaring the game impossible to play or the resource redistribution a failure.
Lol. Putting 4 Orcas into a belt for 4 hours will get you 100m-200m ISK for little effort but that is a pittance. You’d make many fold that more with 4 ratters in nullsec even with a 50% nerf to your income you might take, worst case from the ESS, if you dock up to every challenge, and there is one every hour of every day. And that is not to mention that CCP Rattati even specifically singled out Orca highsec mining as something they are looking at rebalancing (read: nerfing).
But that’s fine. Different strokes for different folks. If you and your friends want to spend your time in-game performing a safe, low APM activity like semi-AFK highsec mining then go for it. Eve is great because it supports all kinds of players and types of play. However it seems to me that highsec is better suited for that low-attention style of play, not nullsec.
CCP seem genuinely interested in tightening up the worst of the passive, scalable income sources these days. Even though it seems normal to us Eve veterans, it really is kind of strange how powerful and tolerated a strategy like multiboxing is when you stop to think about it. Adding another account to collect mostly passive income is by far the easiest and most lucrative thing you can do, and that probably shouldn’t be the case.
Not in terms of raw ISK and mineral output. Past decisions (which you can blame squarely on CCP) turned nullsec into a unbridled spigot of wealth that completely, and dangerously outpaces the modest amount of destruction there.
I’m not going to comment on a subjective thing like the experience of living in nullsec over the past two decades. Sure, many changes have happened for everyone, many aimed at making the experience more “casual”, some of which have been detrimental for the game.
At least this change doesn’t seem to be another in a long list to make the game easier. It adds some complexity and new element to the sandbox, which sure might get cheesed, but things had become so stagnant and solved CCP had to do something to change things up. People were already drifting away from the game, and the economy was on a collision course with collapse.
I am going to assume almost any change is good when CCP is trying to make the game more interesting and promote interactions and competition until I see evidence otherwise. There are plenty of changes CCP makes I don’t agree with, but when they are aiming them at a good place, it’s hard for me to be the bitter vet and mutter “Eve is Dying” or have the hubris to think I know the game better than CCP with access to all the data they have.
This is designed to make the game better and nullsec more interesting. Things like relative income and thus risk vs. reward can be easily tweaked, so there is no point getting hung up on specific numbers.
That said, complaining that your low-attention income is being nerfed is a valid complaint that impacts you and it should be heard, but I also think that outcome is completely intentional by CCP so .
Yeah, this is likely solvable. Eve Echoes, for all its failures showed you can actually move activity to nullsec if you make the income differential great enough. No one seems to play in highsec there from what I hear, because it pays so poorly. Some more knobs will need to be tweaked to make nullsec worth the time and effort, or even better: dynamic systems created that automatically incentivize braver play. But it should be possible.
Even if it isn’t and I am wrong, this can always be reverted like the blackout was. I think it is fine to let CCP try these changes, spend some time tweaking knobs, and if they can’t get it right, well then they can nerf the new feature into the ground and let the risk-averse and effort-averse farmers make their way back to nullsec.
However, if they get this right, and it even partly achieves their vision, then the game will be much better off than the current status quo.
It’s not just about wealth creation though, It’s about investment required to capture/defend that space.
Want to mine in a belt in highsec? whats your investment? 500K for a venture and 2 lasers? Cool. Go out, mine, drop at NPC station, Rats are easy to tank
Want to mine in a belt in Null? You need a much tankier ship so you are looking at a few hundred mil for that. want to be able to drop it off at a station? a few hundred mil more to setup that station. need to own the space? a few hundred mill more for the IHub/etc. Want to get the ship you bought out there reliably? can’t AFK Autopilot through high sec, need to have a JF, or a massive escort, so there’s another 10Bil required. Finally, after spending 10-15Bil, you are now able to start mining, but you could get jumped at any point. Now you also need to defend this space, and since that requires capitals, you need to start deploying Sotiyo’s, want to be able to still use those chars instead of having them sit offline? a Keepstar, with the changes to Quantum cores? you’re now looking at 300Billion to get setup and running and defending and you still havn’t actually produced any capital ships yet.
The Reward values in Null sec arn’t about making profit, it’s about covering the investment to be able to do it in the first place.
What kind of mushroom do you smoke? I really want to know! Hallucinogens are bad for your health, remember this. Switch to smoking potatoes, it is safer.
Then find an alliance that matches your hours. “I can’t play solo at maximum efficiency in the empire-building section of the game” is a feature not a bug.
I’d be there if I wanted to, or if my objective was to be a spacerich megakrab - then I’d definitely be spinning supers in some safe space.
If your goal isn’t maximum ISK/hour farming then why are you whining about this so much?
Probably because it is nullsec space that gives rise to the largest and most spectacular battles in which super-ships are earned, built and destroyed. And you always have to be there to take the battle at any moment.
In addition, this is a place that can be called Homeland. This is where I began to live, this is where my corporation is located, and for this I will fight.
This is you, there is no homeland, no flag, no alliance. You wander where it is more convenient for you and you earn more.
You cannot understand what a corporation is. These are not just words. Our nullsec place, won with the blood of our friends, is our history.
You can wander like rootless dogs and offer others to eat, where there are more scraps.
What can an empire boast of, lowsecs? Are they writing about you? Have you entered the Guinness Book of Records? You are nobody and are trying with all your might to turn everyone under your “nothing”.
The Eve launcher pointed to an ESS information update on CCP TV on Twitch. It was inconvenient for my timezone. Was anything substantive learned about the ESS problem during the broadcast?
The ESS was already down voted on initial deployment.
A good compromise would make the new ESS vulnerable. If players want it in THEIR space, then they will protect it. Unauthorized deployment of structures will be destroyed.
Respect the Sand box.
I guess my argument is that nullsec isn’t now-- and hasn’t at any point in the past-- been a suitable environment for “low-attention play.” Certain people on this forum are constantly crowing about “how safe nullsec is,” because of “perfeact intel channels,” and “FAX on standby,” but the reality is that even in their imagined scenarios, nullsec is fundamentally not a safe place.
What we have is a lot of wannabe PvPers trying to find excuses for their own ineptitude. While many of these types have been posting on EVEO and Reddit for years about how “nullsec is safe” because of things like, “perfect intel channels,” or, “FAX on standby,” actual, competent PvPers have been in Delve stealing billions of ISK worth of excavator drones, hazing deadspace-fit faction BS, and successfully hotdropping carriers, supers, and Rorquals. The actual reality is that even pre-war Delve-- widely regarded as the most developed, “safest” nullsec region-- was serving up fountains of juicy killmails for people who actually had some aptitude for PvP. There was a day where Goonswarm lost 30 Rorquals in a single sitting. Deaths of carriers to bomber gangs were ubiquitous-- several per night at least. Hels tended to die once a week or so. Nullsec has never been “safe.”
I have two issues with this:
While the MER does indeed show a continued ISK faucet problem, look at the distribution of the ISK: yes, there’s still a ton of ISK flowing from bounties. But the fountains have moved away from actualy, player-inhabited regions and toward backwater regions widely understood to be populated primarily by botters.
If CCP want to do something to make the game harder or riskier or penalize cowardice, there are better ways to accomplish that goal than implementing this bizarrely-complex and arbitrary ESS concept. For example, why not simply transition from direct-deposit bounty payments to a system where rats instead drop physical token items in their wrecks that are redeemed for ISK? Now, if a ratter prefers to warp to a safe at the first sign of trouble, the roamer can simply roll up on grid, hold the field for a minute, and loot the tokens. Change MTUs so they have an un-anchor time and are publicly accessible so anyone can cruise by and pull the loot out. There are so many infinitely-more-organic ways CCP could pursue their stated goals that would be much more elegant solutions.
Well I wish CCP were as self-aware as Netease: it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if you give people an easy way to make money and a hard way to make the same amount of money, most people probably aren’t going to choose the hard thing. If you want people to head out into nullsec space and risk nice ships trying to get rich, there has to be a possibility of actually getting rich. That’s not going to happen in a nullsec where each ratting Myrm stands to make ~40m isk an hour on a good day, and 20m/hr if stuff gets stolen.
Again, a few points:
I personally have never experienced “low-attention” farming in nullsec-- I’ve always had to pay close attention to what I was doing or accept the high likelihood that I’d lose my ship. IDK what nullsec region you’ve spent decades living in that’s free of harassment, but every region I’ve ever lived in has had plenty of roaming PvPers wandering around.
It’s not “my” income: I haven’t ratted in years with the exception of times I field bait ratting ships to kill PvPers or times I join my friends to periodically grind up ADMs so that we can keep our space defensible and give our new players a way to make isk.
Obviously I can’t speak for every EVE player, but I’ve spent almost fourteen years truly living in nullsec (IE-- without highsec or lowsec alts for alternative income streams): I’ve played both the hunter and the hunted and gotten pretty good at both roles.
From where I sit, I obviously want to live and play in nullsec. Goonswarm have gone above and beyond in our efforts to create a habitable, productive region by organizing and helping each other to an extent few other organizations have proved capable of. Our prize for our efforts has been for CCP to continuously nerf almost every aspect of our creation. I understand why they had to nerf things-- I was one of the people criticizing the system they created and its absurd output. What I’m saying is that they are going too far with it: I’ll say it again-- I am a player who absolutely would prefer to live in nullsec, but I feel like it’s not going to be practical looking forward. If, hypothetically, Goonswarm were to lose our war in Delve (and all our infrastructure with it), I don’t think I would bother trying to rebuild in nullsec. The costs (in ISK and man-hours-- remember the man-hours required to constantly defend all this stuff also have value) are already pretty suspect relative to the benefits. We already have all the infrastructure, so I’ll continue to use it. But if we have to start over? Even now it’s probably not worth it. Post-nerf, it definitely sounds like a waste of time. I already make more money just looting the wrecks we make in PvP than I would ratting. Ratting is a waste of time right now. Mining is a waste of time right now. There’s no way that this ongoing nerf-schedule is sustainable. I feel for the newer players who are trying to get into this game as people scream at them to show up in 250M-ISK Muninns for big, meat-grinder battles while CCP simultaneously announce that Myrmidon ratting represents an absurd ISK faucet that needs to be shut off. It makes me nervous when my friends who absolutely know what they’re doing and are more capable than most of making the best of things in nullsec are all moving their ISK making out of null. If PvE leaves nullsec, the only thing left to do in 0.0 will be to show up for consensual sov-related fights. Everything else is unassailable: industry and trade all happen by cyno and between adjacent Upwell structures-- there’s literally no way to get kills out of those activities. Travel happens by travelceptor or yacht or nullified T3C: can’t interfere with that. PvE is the only the only activity left that really enables non-consensual PvP.
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