It’s part of what I see as bad design choices in EVE. PvP is okay, harsh unforgiving world is okay, that’s what we all sign up for.
The problems stem from the fact that the only way CCP seems to be able to set up PvP opportunities and harsh consequences are all very one-sided, and/or they require players to be available at any and all time periods with an adequate defensive force.
It’s a little more ‘realistic’, because hey, reality doesn’t get scheduled for your convenience. But as the OP said, what it amounts to in EVE is that in general, groups of people can disproportionately inconvenience other people.
And the mechanics don’t really even favor the attackers. Attack/reinforcement timers are really awkward, the process is tedious, the fights aren’t particularly fun. You really have to go out of your way to cause significant harm. Unfortunately there’s no shortage of players in EVE who are so bored and have so few other interesting things to do that they are willing to go the extra mile just to pi55 in somebody’s cornflakes.
CCP will talk about the ‘extensive social engineering that makes EVE what it is’, but what it looks like to me is half-baked design and lazily programmed mechanics that lead to boredom and frustration for too many players - attackers and defenders both.
I wouldn’t exactly call it a death spiral - virtually all games lose players as they age significantly - but it’s definitely a significant factor in EVE’s problems with retaining players.
So not a troll, just a bit thick in the skull… TIME gives you more STUFF, which gives you an ADVANTAGE when used against players who have LESS time.
An almost unrecoverable advantage, unless you think someone who spent half the time you have has the skills to fit ships to counter what you have available, or the ISK to build ships that can compete with those shiny faction mods…
Meh, I wasn’t even going to stick to this forum… I really just wanted to let the community liaisons know that they lost more paying customers because the current meta is a sandbox where only internet bullies can play with sand castles…
I’m still gonna play… for a while anyway… Just sad to see my buddies stop playing a game we all found fun once, because not everyone’s fun is treated equally.
Oh, so you’re one of those kids. The “wah wah, everyone else playing has a head start and I’ll never catch up!” That explains enough. Like I said at the beginning, some kids have the balls to cut it. Looks like you and your friends don’t. Tough cookies, dear.
And I effectively already do this, in a trivial way. When caught in space I routinely jettison all cargo. Just to cut down the kill mail “score”.
Unfortunately, cargo containers typically get “caught in the tubes” when you eject one full one and then try and do another. Which usually means you can’t eject most of the cargo before dead. Most annoying.
I have thought about pre-packaging my holds in 27,000 m3 lots so that I can jettison multiple containers at once. But, that was previously considered an exploit as apparently multiple containers on grid would cause an appreciable lag. And based on above, I don’t know if it is still physically possible anyway.
Either way, dumping all cargo should also be a legitimate and supported mechanic.
A troll AND thick… cool… I don’t care if we’re equal. I care that you can use our inequality as a direct advantage against me without my consent… scootypie
Mostly because it’s a good game that PvE people want to play too… My whole point was the game owners lost revenue because the ONLY want a PvP game. A game with such a rich environment should allow options not force conflict. /end
You raise an interesting point I had not considered. With ships, I absolutely mean self-destruct when under attack, followed by loot drop which you expect attacker to scoop.
But, when would you be able to self-destruct in a structure? After you have been war-decced makes sense. Even after you are reinforced. But why then wait until the final attack? If the policy is to enable scorched earth, maybe you should be able to self-destruct when down to structure but also loot your own wreck??
I have already done this, again in a trivial sense. My low sec athanor was splashed and there was no drop. Attackers left. I then salvaged my wreck and recovered 150 M isk to reduce my losses. This further underscores how artificial the kill mail system is as it cannot distinguish between isk destroyed, recoverable or even actually recovered.
Welcome to EVE, kid. You consent to unsolicited pvp as soon as you undock. It’s part of the game, and if you can’t handle that, you’re not cut out for eve.
And when it was a more focused pvp game eve’s subscription and activity grew every year.
They had to nerf hi-sec pvp like wardecs before players started to leave. THATS why ccp lost players because they chose people like you, that never stick with a game anyways, over their core playerbase.
It does!
You can not put a structure up and never face a wardec. But you OPTED IN.
Yes, people with more interest in, and time actively spent on, PVP are always going to win against me. That and the fact I don’t fight back. Ever. I just die and move on. No correspondence. No comments.
The No is you still have option of spending time passively. Sounds corny. But if you are making isk doing PI when you are not there, the trick is to make enough isk that when you do incur losses it’s “ho-hum”.
I took 1B isk loss recently by buying out mercenaries. They went away, my losses were maybe 10% of risk if I’d had to replace everything under threat. I then traded inventory that was already in the same structure under attack and replaced my “cash-in-hand” loss that same day.
OP, sorry about your loss. Structures are a significant investment to set up, and if the wrong Corp finds it, can require even more investment (and help) to defend. I have considered placing my own structure, but soon realized it would be more for content creation, not so much for making isk.
With that said, there are a few advantages given to the defending party in a wardec:
You get to set the vulnerability timer, consider a time when your friends are best able to defend- and attackers are least likely to be on
As the defender, you can invite other parties to help you defend (at no cost). Reach out for help- there’s a lot of people looking for fights who’d be willing to help. If the Corp attacking you is known for being a bully- you’d probably get even more people willing to help.
These strategies won’t work in every scenario, but they are important considerations to think about.
“if 50 percent of your player base consists of people who thrive on the tears of others”
I suggest Hello Kitty or a game geared for pre-teens as clearly you can’t deal with adversity.
Structures aren’t permanent. That’s why I never put any down because I assume they’ll be blown up eventually. The maths is quite simple. If the rewards of a structure > the expected loss, then put one down, KNOWING it will one day die. Otherwise, use NPC stations or someone else’s structure. Or join up with other people so the loss of the structure is split. Everything blows up in Eve. It’s infamous for being a harsh, unforgiving MMO.
The reason this being a pvp sandbox, and you just built yourself a sandcastle
Believe based on what? Knowledge? Experience? Hopes and dreams? Assumptions?
A BS can defend itself against half a dozen cruisers that aren’t terrible?
It’s a PVP sandbox, if all you want to do is build cool sand castles and have others “leave you alone” then you misunderstood what a pvp sandbox is.
On top of all that Zkill shows that you lost 7 structures… SEVEN! And you come here stating that you fully expected a single digit corp of which some aren’t really active to be able to control and defend that? And you want to be taken serious?
This bad “revenue” argument show up too often in the forums. You can’t claim CCP is “losing revenue” because some people leave the game as some aspect is not to their liking without looking at the entire balance sheet and accounting for how many people that same aspect attracts and keeps. Fine, Eve may not be for you for some reason, but that same reason may make it the game for someone else, or even that reason may enable something else that even you like about the game.
The reason Eve is such a compelling game for so many people not primarily seeking heart-racing spaceships fleet or dog fights is exactly because it is a competitive, dangerous world where your actions have meaning and the virtual goods you collect and build have value. Sure, there may be the very rare confused person that stumbles upon Eve and loves it for the 2003-era PvE mechanics, but almost everyone that claims to be a “PvE” player and should therefore be immune to “PvP” is actually competing in the shared economy of the game trying to amass wealth. The game is only compelling as you can (theoretically) lose stuff and so can others so stuff needs to be built.
Eve as a PvE game would be boring and pointless. In fact, most of what is wrong with the game right now has “too easy/too safe” PvE as a primary root cause. Yes, CCP could do a much better job shaping the conflict and encouraging meaningful competition over objects, rather than the meaningless “good fights” meta they seem to have embraced in the last decade or so, but the fact that your choices (including deploying a structure) put you at more risk to the other players is working as intended.
If you don’t want to defend an Upwell, don’t deploy one. Essentially everything can be done in an NPC station, or you can use a public structure. Just like if you don’t want to encounter another player without the deterrence of CONCORD on your side, you don’t enter that wormhole. Risk vs. Reward. But if you don’t want any possibility of loss or conflict with another players, and just want to click and be rewarded, then probably you are indeed playing the wrong game. To be fair, this game is balanced so most of the “harshness” and “risk” in Eve is an illusion, but it’s true, you can actually lose things, or have stuff destroyed by another player. If you can’t accept that, even if it enables the economy you enjoy participating in, you will ultimately never be happy in Eve and probably should cut your losses and find a more suitable game for you and your military buddies.
I have quit this game a bunch of times. Then I eventually accept that it was my shortcomings that led to my loss. So I quietly slink back and work on my game some more. I’m just glad that I never posted one of these “Eve sucks because I lost” threads myself.
