What’s this thread even about?
It started off good, then it got ganked by the anti-gank activists
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Do keep in mind that your personal, singular experience and choices don’t really translate well to what hundreds of thousands of new players (or old players) experience. You still seem hung up on “the anecdote” as your reality check, while dismissing decades of numbers that detract from your arguments.
And your viewpoint seems to have changed quite a bit since you decided to join the gankers:
Interesting how much “retrospective hindsight” you’ve been applying to your view of EVE lately.
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Well, originally I kind of felt that arguments about ganking were like a “tempest in a teapot”, all sound and fury, signifying little. As in there was 10 times as much argument as the actual situation warranted.
I also felt a lot of statements were frequently made and accepted about ganking/PvP, like “no profit in ganking noob ships so nobody does it except for larfs”. So I tried to gather some statistics to ‘drill down’ (as you said in your video), to the underlying reality.
Turns out the issue is a little too fuzzy and our data access a little too clunky to do the kind of analysis I wanted. Still turned up some interesting numbers though.
And of course, the “more argument than actuality” part practically proves itself.
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Oh but it does. Being fairly risk-averse myself…if I can cope with ganking, anyone can.
Yes…shall we get the Pope to declare that officially a miracle on the Eve forums ?
wow thats enought for me to buy ships for more 10 years of PVP
ty dude 
i mean i hope i win because I’m sooooooooooo creative
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It still is, because con artists create and operate the NFTs. 
The guy you replied to is a troll who’s been complaining about various issues. I suspect he tossed out the ridiculous offer as bait, so he could flag all responses.
Peruse the name.
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Thanks Charzai,
I didn’t connect those dots until you pointed out.
Except the only thing they’ve managed to do is kill the game more. Ganking nerfs only hurt retention. This game has traditionally retained new players by blowing them up then recruiting them but CCP has removed all ways to blow them up and any incentive to recruit them (because you can’t use remote support in high sec).
The only way to retain new players is with PvP. PvE quite simply isn’t the focus of the game, furthermore a healthy PvP scene means a healthy player-driven economy which will attract PvEers anyway.
Furthermore, trying to appeal to casual players in an MMO is stupid AF and has repeatedly failed for multiple companies. MMO is not a casual genre. Period. Doesn’t mean casuals can’t play it and have fun, it does mean you shouldn’t really take them into consideration with changes because they’re going to join/leave on a whim anyways because they’re casual.
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I think recent data shows they’ve made good steps.
Have you got any reliable evidence that ganking nerfs hurt retention?
For you. Your preference is PvP, that doesn’t mean that everyone who comes to the game comes here seeking pure combat with other players. The game has always been broad and in my opinion it’s the constant neglecting of PvE aspects that have caused the most damage. It’s understandable because for a long time nullsec battles were the big attention getters in the media so that’s where they put their focus. Now they need to shift, and they seem to be, just slowly.
Casual players aren’t just people who are fickle, they are often just people who don’t have the same amount of time as the historic sweaty guys that dominated the market did. They want to log in, have some fun, log out and they’re more likely to have the disposable income to pay for it. Sure, they may move on but others will replace them and they still will have pushed revenue into the game.
That’s not to say the sweaty gamers aren’t part of the market. It’s not about appealing to one or the other exclusively, it’s about finding a balance.
Right, that’s not a player we can retain so why is CCP so focused on trying to? We should be focused on trying to market the game for what it is (a dystopian PvP sandbox) and trying to retain the folks actually suited for this game (the hardcore PvP MMO crowd). Everything else would fall into place.
The fact has always been, the hardcore players set the stage for the casuals to have fun, you have to balance the game around your most dedicated players or the game will just fail the exact same way almost every other MMO I’ve played has failed.
Casual players won’t have fun with an overinflated market, they won’t have fun without FCs, they won’t have fun with endless riskless competition that makes everything they do worth pennies. All of this lines up when the hardcore players are the MAIN group being considered with changes.
The casual player just isn’t retainable and will only stay/leave based on the state of the ecosystem that is RUN BY HC PLAYERS. If you ■■■■ that ecosystem up you’re not retaining anyone because you lose your biggest asset, your dedicated players actually maintaining the content for everyone else.
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Removed an inappropriate post.
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This eternal debate isn’t between the “hardcore” PvP players and the “casual” PvE players. It’s actually between the “hardcore” PvP players and a different group of “hardcore” PvE players. Let’s just call them griefers and carebears, respectively, for simplicity.
Anyway, the carebear group is advocating for a change to game dynamics that would replace the griefers with a revolving door of temporary, casual PvE players who play for a few weeks/months and then quit. But they don’t actually give two rat shits about these casual players. Likewise, while making claims about wanting to improve the “financial health” of the game (which is quite honestly none of their business), they don’t give two rat shits about it either. They’re using these two talking points (helping the poor newbies and making EVE more profitable) because it makes their arguments seem more just, and publicly puts them on a sort of moral high ground.
In reality though, the reason why the carebears are advocating for this is because an environment where all of the griefers are replaced with 2-month temps is the absolutely perfect environment for them. They get none of the freighter/Hulk/Orca deaths, and a constant stream of customers to buy their low-end products, which are the easiest to build, and the build requirements of which synergize perfectly with their safe-space turbo-farming gameplay.
These 2-month temps would also seed the market with PLEX, because they wouldn’t be able to compete with the carebear turbo-farmers on the market, which further allows the latter group to not just have the total freedom to do whatever they want without danger or restriction, but to also engage in an endless cycle of buying back their ISK from their PLEX suppliers by selling them the goods that they produce by grinding on their PLEX-subbed accounts; goods that are inevitably lost to player attrition in abandoned hangars as the 2-month temps quit the game out of frustration and boredom, which creates perpetual demand for the carebears’ production. In this sort of environment, PvP-based destruction actually isn’t necessary for maintaining the economy, because demand is created through player turnover alone.
In isolation, these causal relationships might be difficult to discern, but when you combine both the social and the economic aspects of the game into one model, it’s not difficult to see how it all comes together, and what the true motivations of the people clamoring for change really are.
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Always curious to see the “hardcore PvP crowd” (you know, the ones hanging out in highsec, ganking soft targets) both attesting that PvPers are the one true market of the game, the ones CCP designed the game for… and then also accusing the “casual carebears” of driving game development and basically plotting CCP’s road map for them.
I mean, high sec carebears are the group that can’t even get organized enough to vote in a CSM candidate or two. But yeah, they “force their agenda” on CCP like nobody’s business.
If the game is really driven by the “dedicated”, long-term “hardcore PvP” players… one wonders why CCP is unable to hear their never-ending cries for attention?
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We are all just a bunch of whiners here trying to push an agenda upon deaf ears.
Also, I was under the impression that the CSM’s were token positions to make the players feel like they havea say, but in reality the CSM’s have about as much ability to grab CCP’s ear like the rest of us.
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As a wise man once said: If voting could change anything, they wouldn’t let us do it…
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False equivalency fallacy.
A governmental democracy, sure.
But CCP is a business and the bottom line trumps any sort of democratic process or resolution.
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Funny how it never seems to work the other way round. In what way does your ‘in my opinion’ trump anyone else’s ?
Says who ? Or is this just your ‘in my opinion’ again…which we can safely ignore.
Broad sweeping statement. Have you got any reliable evidence ?
Broad sweeping statement. Have you got any reliable evidence ?
Where’s your evidence that it’s not ‘balanced’. ?
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You made some good points in that post. There are many aspects connected to pvp in hisec, and they rarely get highlighted in threads trying to discuss the unbalancing aspect of providing a “safe hisec”. And, in my opinion, safety has to come from behavior, and not from CCP making it impossible to be unsafe. Along the same line of thought, I wonder what the attrition rate is of new (or older) players who mostly stay in hisec for their entire Eve career, staying as far from pvp as they possibly can. You know what I’m getting at.
On a parallel note: one doesn’t have to be a “hardcore” pvp’er or pve’er to take a part in this never ending debate. Any Eve player with a mature overall view on the game’s aspects can write something useful and constructive. However, with the furor visible in the countless anti-gank threads, or the ones (like this one) that try to come up with data or attempt to discuss the subject in a dispassionate way but get flooded with endless repetition of the same arguments, it is hardly a surprise that the discussions end in the usual chaos. One would almost say that there are no people present willing to read and absorb the other viewpoints, let alone review their own positions.
Denying that hisec pvp is a core aspect in the design is also denying that changing it has profound implications on every other aspect connected to it, including the impact it has on new players not having to learn at an early stage to deal with danger - and let’s admit it, real danger comes from the most dangerous and cunning of critters, another player. Once a new player realizes that nowhere is safe, and learns the danger needs to be dealt with, he/she is ready to leave hisec and open up the game. I, for one, would not want to keep a new player a day longer in hisec than absolutely necessary for him/her to become aware that hisec is not The Game, most game content - pve and of course pvp - takes place outside of hisec. Keeping hisec pvp alive lowers the threshold for lowsec, nullsec, pochven and regular w-space.
There are of course no public data to support my “hunch”. Perhaps ccp has some, or could get some.
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