Isnt it pretty much already held by a few large groups.
Not as much as you think. Pure Blind, Tribute, Fade, parts of the east, Providence⌠Thereâs more that should be on that list, but they collapsed during the Blackout.
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Not really, there are still a surprising amount of small groups hiding away in little pockets of space.
Provi used to be a good example of this - Since BO it has sadly lost a lot of its small groups.
I see, you are out of rational arguments.
For me the only way to break the numbers game is via âsocial pressureâ on larger groups. Know, trust and motivate everyone in your group for the common goal, or fail.
- resource depletion - penalize overfarming, bears have to agree on rules to not ruin the space for weeks/months
- make supercaps a consumable for larger sov holding
- tags instead of bounties, no auto-tax, increased interdiction risk
- player gate connections only within one allianceâs space
- ESI access to mails, wallets, market, jobs and other critical information only behind two-factor, so no third party has access to
These being a bit of the stick part, to incentivize smaller groups, you can make it super easy mechanic-wise to flip and hold one systemâs sov. But as soon as you own more, it becomes exponentially more difficult to flip and hold more. I know in this simple way it can be gamed, but other measures may prevent this.
And people out there (reddit) wonder why they rarely see CCP devs posting regularly, taking Q&Aâs, or asking for player feedback when itâs 99% toxic rhetoric and salty whinging.
Players demanded action on stagnation, they got a taste of it (no local) and it was weeks of constant complaints, doom and gloom, and âIâM LEAVING THIS GAMEâ. Then when it was pulled back- The pendulum swung the other way with (even today) constant doom and gloom âwah wah game is ded nowâ.
If I were a dev/community member why the hell would I poke my head up and face that mess?
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Quoting Hilmar? For real. Heâs blaming players whine for game stagnation (sic!). Game developers develope the games not players. They should know what is wrong with their products and take actions respectively. Internet hate is not going anywhere. BTW what happened to all that ignored feedback CCP was given and didnât take action on? Like ghost training for example? Players are fed, sick of hidding head in the sand.
Not at all. Iâm simply describing the impression your previous posts have given. You continue that foolishness here. âKnow, trust, and motivate everyoneâ, while claiming youâre not inherently opposed to large groups. Can I perhaps interest you in a little something called Dunbarâs Number? Because that suggestion, right there, would mean functionally limiting groups to getting no larger than about 200 actual people.
You canât know everyone in a group bigger than that. Thatâs what bureaucracyâs for. Everyone in the same corp can know one another, while the corp directors and leaders at the alliance level all know another. And it repeats at the coalition level, where the leaders and diplos of the various alliances know one another.
You canât trust everyone in a group larger than about 200 people, either. Not the way you clearly mean, trusting them based on direct social cohesion. It simply doesnât work. Trust at scales larger than that comes from enlightened self-interest, as does motivating them. And thatâs clearly not what youâre advocating⌠because thatâs how it already works.
So either youâre saying the status quo is good, because thatâs what youâre arguing for, or you have an inherent problem with large empire-building groups. There ainât no middle ground, Iâm afraid.
And your suggestions, again, either fail on the basis of human nature and direct experience, or literally are what weâve already had, and didnât do a damned thing to convince people to hold less space. Here:
Or, you know, they go nomadic. We already move half the damned supercapital fleet every two weeks to hoover down moons in Querious, Fountain, and Period Basis with multiple full fleetsâ worth of Rorquals. Weâve already seen the way PL used to utterly oppress people when they were nomadic. Do you think having Goonswarm moving like a plague of locusts across nullsec would be a good thing? Do you honestly think that anyone who wants to hold sov would even bother playing the game if the Imperium was inevitably going to swing through their space and destroy everything they have, just so we can consume their resources and move on?
They wouldnât. It would not be worth the effort.
Already addressed. Telling your customers âyeah, youâre effectively going to have to pay more for the same returnâ doesnât retain customers. It drives them away.
Introduces additional complexity and tedium without any actual improvement or expansion of options. Again, itâs just going to make people decide âyou know what, I donât need to pay for a game that throws more utterly pointless busy-work in my pathâ.
Literally exactly how things worked with the old jump bridge system. That is how things worked when the CFC owned 40% of null, N3 owned 40% of null, and the DRF owned 18% of null. Didnât exactly work to keep footprints small, did it? So, you know, direct experience says this idea doesnât help.
Again, youâre just introducing needless complexity and curtailing peoplesâ ability to coordinate with one another for⌠nothing. Whatâs the immediate improvement this, on its own, offers to players who now have to do a lot more data transfer manually, themselves, just to maintain the same level of coordination? None? Congratulations, more needless roadblocks == fewer customers.
Your sticks are bad. AlsoâŚ
No, you canât.
Either itâs super easy mechanic-wise to flip one systemâs sov, or itâs super easy mechanic-wise to hold one systemâs sov. Because if itâs super easy to flip it, it ainât super easy to hold it, and vice versa. Someone had to be holding it when you flipped it. FFS, you canât even manage to be internally consistent in a single sentence.
Leaving aside the whole conflation of dev/community member like theyâre the same thing, why would a dev poke their head into dealing with the community?
Cuz itâs their job. The ones who donât have that as part of their job? They shouldnât. They should leave it to the ones who do.
Exactly. I would see that already as a very large group of people in a video game.
What I meant is upkeep cost for the sov, not a defender bonus, although it might be possible to arrange that. Just give it to small sov holders. If you lose a concrete system again, just grab the next one from a big alliance.
Itâs not. The large raid guilds of the 40-man era had more, to say nothing of the old 72-man EQ raid days. And EVE?
Even groups like LowSechnaya Sholupen, who donât tend to hold sov, but rather hunt in small packs all throughout southern lowsec, have more than 3x Dunbarâs number. You are demonstrably ignorant of what a âlargeâ group is, especially in EVE, as well as how groups work. Perhaps you should actually get out in the ecosystem and get some experience dealing with people. You might even end up not wrong once or twice.
Anything you set up for a âsmall sov holderâ, a large sov holder can pull off without difficulty. Worst case, we spin up an alt-corp and set it up as a âsmall sov holderâ while still administrating the damned thing ourselves.
In literally all of human history, there has never been a problem that a large group could not solve better, faster, than a small group. Even when a small, focused group for specifically dealing with a problem is preferable, the larger your group, the easier it is to find the people needed to be in the small group.
That is why human civilization exists. Stop trying to invent a perpetual motion machine, and work with the landscape of human behavior that youâre going to have to work with. Itâs the only one youâll get. People will always behave like people.
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Have fun with dozen of mini alliances where the mechanics actively prevent those working together. No player gates in between, no standing, etc.
If blackout has show us anything - it is that safety does NOT come from players.
In null it has become evident, due to the response to BO, player safety comes from the free intel provided by local.
It is true that larger entities with the manpower were able manage BO more effectively and respond to threats as they occurred (as they could before BO) but the drop in their player activity shows a distinct lack of trust in said player provided protections.
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Do you realize that you just contradicted yourself?
If the larger entities were able to manage BO more effectively, what resource did they have that the smaller groups did not?
More people. More players.
Yes, there was some attrition. That doesnât change that basic fact. Local is a tool players use, but the safety itself is provided by players. Local doesnât drop supers to save someone. Local doesnât coordinate response fleets. Playersâ ability to provide security was slightly reduced without Local, but what provided the securityâwhat there was no security withoutâwas, as you have indicated right there, not Local. It was players.
Welcome to the age of the ACL, player-owned channels, and out-of-game coordination. Once again, I strongly encourage you to get even a tiny bit of experience with the things youâre talking about. You might like being right, from time to time.
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Players, Players, Players you say ⌠and yet the facts show activity dropped.
What was in place before BO was not enough to cover the loss of the number one player protection free intel from LOCAL
Edit - Spin it what ever way you like the fact remains if BO was not a problem for you then you wouldânt be complaining about it
They are on reddit and I already made fun of him for them.
As for the rest, this was totally different from putting diesel in a gas engine. CCP didnât know the result, and given how often weâve surprised them with how we do things they donât expect, I donât think itâs reasonable or fair to say that blackout was an obvious mistake.
They tried something. It didnât work. They rolled it back. That is how we want them to iterate.
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I am not saying they should have left it in the game. Iâm saying the sign goals behind it werenât completely stupid, which many seem to think is true. Those people are wrong.
By some parts of the player base. Not sure why not ha isnât fixed entry points or cynos would make WH safe easier to deal with no local, though. If anything it makes it harder. But I can see that having local and it becoming a crutch for so many would result in issues adapting when it was taken away.
Chat channels are a tool?
Obviously they donât understand nullsec. At least not the empire builder part because they canât have any real experience with it. I agree that the faucets were declining but this was the biggest hit to the faucets. And I think the complete drop off in some regions was more bottinf related than small groups just not logging in.
And youâre wrong. You are not a developer. Let them develop. Tell them what needs to be developed. Thatâs the job.
Of course activity dropped. Activity dropping doesnât mean players werenât providing security. It only means that some people felt that the security players provided once they were deprived of the tool that is Local was insufficient.
The BO wasnât a problem for me. I was the guy actively encouraging people to let CCP try things, to give them a chance. My problem is how CCPâs utter failure to understand people, and inability to clearly communicate in an effective way, caused a major degradation in the willingness of players to give them that chance.
When it was just the Blackout, some folks left, yeah. But look at those facts youâre talking about. Look at the actual numbers. What do we see?
We see a large hit on the first weekend. Thatâs the system shock, the initial âWTF izzis bullshittery??â thatâs inevitable. Any time you make a significant change, youâll see a shock like that. Then we see things start to recover. Not completely, but that second weekend, we actually do recover most of the losses of the first weekend. Some of that is hunters coming back to the game. Some of it is bots adjusting. Some of it is krabs hearing from their friends ânah, itâs ok, you just have to be alertâ and deciding to give it a try.
Then the July 24 TiS interview happens. Itâs not released until the 26th, but yeah, people started to get wind of what was said even before it was over. Matterallâs a nice guy, but he runs a shop that leaks slightly more than a bullet-ridden sieve.
Thatâs when Hilmarâs statements about the âChaos Eraâ[1] hit. More importantly? Thatâs when the paying customers start to hear things like the CEO saying that the devs donât know whatâs going to happen, and shouldnât try to understand it. Thatâs when people hear the CEO literally throw the entire development team under the bus for the last 5+ years of work.
And we start losing people again. Pretty much immediately. Go look at the EVE-Offline charts. Look at the difference between Jul 24 and Jul 25. What kills the recovery isnât the lack of Local. Itâs Hilmar. Itâs the goddamned CEO of the company telling his customers that CCP is just throwing crap at the wall with no idea if any of it is any good. And heâs promising changes âevery weekâ⌠Changes that donât actually happen.
What does the damage to PCU is nice, normal, old-fashioned investor uncertainty. If you tell your customers you donât know whatâs going on, if you give them the impression that you donât have the first frickinâ clue what youâre doing⌠they donât trust you. And if they donât trust you, they stop paying. They stop investing their time. They go do something else where they can at least feel like âok, thereâs a plan hereâ.
People arenât coming back because âoh, Localâs backâ. Theyâre coming back because theyâre cautiously optimistic that CCPâs given up on the chaos nonsense. And itâs only cautiously right now because absolutely nobody from CCP has given them any communication to tell them if the half-assed chaos crap is continuing or not.
But not how we want them to communicate. Because theyâre not communicating. And if Vegas is more of what we got in Berlinâmore lack of communication and vaguaryâthis will not go well.
1. Chaos. Chaos is good. The game needs chaos. The game needs a whole lot of upheaval. You know what doesnât need to be chaotic and uncertain, with lots of upheaval? CCP. Seriously, if Hilmarâd talked up the Chaos Era while making it seem like CCP had a plan? Totally different response. To do chaos right needs a lot of planning on the part of the developers. Ask any tabletop GM: you need to know what curveballs youâre going to throw. You might not know how players will react all the time, and if youâre being honest, you know your players will surprise you⌠but you need to know what youâre going to do. Then, when the players react, if something you donât anticipate happens, you look at what youâve got planned and decide how to get the players there, or if you need to shuffle some things. But at no point do you look surprised. You never let them know you werenât ready for it. Hilmar didnât just let players know âwow, that reaction surprised usâ, Hilmar told players ahead of time âWE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT WEâRE DOING!! YAY!â And thatâs just shooting yourself in the dick. Thatâs not chaos. Thatâs ineptitude.
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Ex-CCP Greyscale certainly agreed with you, in 2011. But perhaps some of these nomadic operations, enforced by âprocedural distribution / regenerationâ game changes to be less predictable than what you do now, would result in a greater spread of your forces in an effort to collect as much of the goodies as possible. Other entities might see smaller groups of your capitals that they might think they could take on, made more possible by changes to that fleet brought by rumored planned nerfs and/or upkeep costs.
Or everyone sits at home, all the resources go to Jita, everyone bloodlessly sells what they have and buys what they need, to fuel wars for other purposes or just asset collection / stagnation that Olmeca Gold fears. CCP giving Jita 4-4 a facelift suggests they donât plan to force it obsolete, any time soon.
It wouldnât result in that, no. Thereâs simply no reason weâd intentionally spread ourselves thin enough to be at risk like that. Far easier to just systematically burn down everyone elseâs space, over and over again, until they give up. I mean, it wouldnât be a good move, in the long run, but human nature is human nature. Path of least resistance says burn everyone else out, so sooner or later, yeah, thatâs what all the big groups will settle on. And the biggest super fleet wins, in that scenario.
It may be like with BO. People wonât adapt if they have no content to play (resources to mine) and just wonât login or going nomadic. Every change will hit the wall beacuse over the years CCP cater to wrong crowd. BO showed it. Chaos era is over which is good imo, but developers will be more carefull knowing PCU may drop faster tgan they think even when there is SP event going.