That depends …
For someone who’s flying according to the principle “only fly what you can afford to lose” the wasted time is a much greater loss than the ISK value of a destroyed ship.
Most of the time in EVE, PvP combat losses either don’t matter, or the player has taken a calculated risk …
… expect, of course for relatively new players, who don’t know enough to calculate the risks, and are also negatively affected by “income starvation”.
BALOS !!!
“I SUMMON THEE !!”
Making the game into a boring grind doesn’t prepare new players for anything. It does encourage them to leave EVE for more interesting ways to spend their time though.
Instead of selecting people with a high threshold for boredom, the game should be teaching them how to play. The NPE doesn’t even come close.
Except, that “income starvation” is something you are just pulling out of your behind. It´s simply not true. Again, new players have it easier to make ISK and to replace losses than it used to be in the past. And not just compared to the very early days.
The income of new players over the years has constantly improved.
You say you understand the game. But you fail to see that the only ‘safe area’ in EVE online is when you’re docked inside a station.
High sec space isn’t safe. It’s relatively more safe than low sec, null or wormhole space, but it’s not safe. Players are allowed to shoot eachother in high sec space by the game rules. Well, they’re not allowed by the ‘space police’, Concord, but game mechanics allow you to turn your safety to red and shoot illegal targets. See the distinction here? In high sec you are allowed to shoot people, but it’s illegal.
Because without illegal actions, we cannot play space pirates and without space pirates EVE wouldn’t be EVE.
To quote something I read in the Rookie Q&A earlier today: the SOE Epic Arc is 50 missions, paying an average of ISK 100K per mission.
It wasn’t enough even 10 years ago.
I don’t know about current rookie mining, and I don’t plan to test, but I did get an estimate about two months ago of “3 million per hour”. Halve that (people always report their best ever hour, and ignore setup time, market interaction time, and getting to their next activity) and you can afford to lose a few frigates, but not enough to learn basic PvP without a degree of economic stress.
Why doesn’t EVE give rookies 20 free combat-PvP-optimized frigates, but one at a time, with replacements only if they lose them in PvP combat, and a 2-4 weeks maximum duration for the offer?
Because it’s not “realistic” enough?
In a game where free-fall reaction-drive vehicles behave like submarines, there’s room for providing rookies with a bit more help to get set up in the game.
To be honest, I think one of the basics of EVE is to play PVP with a bit of economic stress. You choose the fit based on what you’re willing to lose. Without economic stress I would have a lot more greens and purples on my ships, but that’s just ships. EVE as a whole exists because of an economy that is stressed to provide more ships for people to explode in PVP.
Giving rookies a ship when they start is a nice move. Giving rookies a new ship at the press of a button (have you seen the new ‘gimme a corvette’-button?) is a nice move. Giving rookies 20 free combat-PvP-optimized frigates is a bad move as it doesn’t teach newbies fitting, it doesn’t teach them how to replace their ship on their own and it doesn’t teach newbies the value of ships.
Sure, new players can use help. But instead of giving the man 20 fish, teach him how to catch fish on his own.
And now compare that to earlier days in EvE.
When I started there were no career agents. We did not have specialised mining ships. Making 3 million per / hour would have been a wet dream. I had to mine for hours and hours straight over several days, to even be able to afford my first cruiser!
You get more than that today from the career agents alone. We did not have such effective tools available from day 1 either. We did not have ventures. We started with our shitty unbonused rookie ships with a laughable cargo space with an income rookies these days would not even undock for.
On top of that we did not even have a whole lot of alternatives either. There was no stuff like explorations where you can easily make millions in your first few days.
It took me several weeks of mining in a fleet with people, putting effort into building up a corporation to even work half way efficiently to even be able to afford my first battleship.
From there over time CCP added more and more ways to make money and made them available for new players as well.
I am not saying that CCP should dial it back to where it was back then. But speaking of income starvation and claiming that these days it would be hard, to replace losses is simply far from the truth.
My point stands, it´s easier than ever to recover from losses as new players and you get so many goodies on day 1 that even an unlucky gank on your first venture out of a rookie system can be easily recovered from.
-> There is no income starvation at all.
I would agree that it´s harder to get into PvP these days, as there are far more variables, because of the vast amount of available ships alone. But the time it takes to replace 5 frigs these days is a joke compared to what it took back in my early days to replace even one of them.
And I am totally fine with it being easier to replace losses these days, if it allows people to spend more time PvPing or makes them more willing to even try out PvPing.
Speaking of income starvation is flat out dishonest.
So much this…
This is the exact reason why I didn’t understand the skills on demand change. The argument was that the market was too complex and people didn’t understand it.
Teach players to use the market and understand what they are buying. Don’t give them a button to press and still leave them clueless about the underlying system.
What?
also: JunjoMX BlackStars | Character | zKillboard
this is rather sad and the only time you were killed in high sec by another player is your own damn fault.
I thought so as well.
Darth
Try playing as a genuine new player (very difficult for an experienced player, but perhaps not impossible), and maybe it would be interesting to continue this discussion.
The numbers still don’t add up for the majority of new players.
It doesn’t matter if it was tougher long ago. It’s 2019, there are a lot more alternatives, and gamer expectations are different.
That ‘wasted time’ for you is a valuable learning experience for others (like me).
I started EVE two years ago. 2017 isn’t 2019 but it’s not that much different. Yes, my income as newbie was low, yet earning 1 million ISK in my venture felt like a lot to me; it could easily replace my venture in case I lost it! Sisters of EVE rewards weren’t that big, but after I did the whole chain I did have enough ISK to buy a few more ships and waste some hard earned ISK on my first ship skins. Ships may not last, but looking pretty in space is a permanent investment!
Anyway, the most fun I had in EVE was to figure out how to sustain myself. It may be different for you, but if EVE had given me all I needed for free and ISK was meaningless, I don’t think I would have kept playing.
Everyone is suddenly a new player when they lose, and plenty of the people shooting other players are new themselves. Eve is a PvP game, and the fact there is no real protection from the other players is a core idea. You almost always can’t know the backstory of who you are shooting, so invoking some eBushido code is meaningless given the nature of the game. If you had to second-guess how skilled or new your opponent was before engaging, nothing would happen in this game other than pre-arranged, consensual fights.
Sure, there is always room to help new players ease into the game better, but really almost every player that pulls the new player card just doesn’t want to be playing a PvP game - they are here to play some farming or industry simulator which Eve is just not.
Defending your stuff is part of the game. Losing your stuff is part of the game. The highsec mechanics are overwhelmingly in your favour, giving you the complete high ground in any PvP encounter. If you don’t want to engage with the ruleset so overwhelmingly in your favour, you basically don’t want to engage in PvP at all with another player which begs the question, why are you playing a full-time PvP sandbox game in the first place?
What are miners doing but gathering resources and producing stuff? They should be the primary target of anyone seeking to “destroying the sources of resources of [thier] enemies” and are complete fair game. Why are you not shooting miners with that philosophy?
Perhaps there is some language issue here, but I am really not sure what your problem is with Eve. This is one of the handful of games where piratical acts are even possible. If you like that, you are in the right place. If you are having issues being on the predatory side rather than always being prey, I suggest you do some reading, or find a pirate group to get you up to speed. If you don’t like the fact it is possible you are on the receiving end of this piracy, you are playing the wrong game, and I suggest you move on and find something more in-line with your expectations.
EVE should be more brutal to new players to weed out the weak so that only the strong can survive. We don’t need EVE to become safer.
Remember when you started?
By your losses you do!
I’m not even sure. The only thing I can make out in the long poorly written rambling post is that OP wants new players to be able to opt-out of combat.
I think he mostly wants unlimited protection for people who self-identify as new players.