I understand where you are coming from in your explanation above, especially bumping, however this is next sentence I disagree with.
After certain time the game gets into a kind of balance and you mess with it at your peril. Nullsec has two major vulnerabilities that people want to tinker with, asset security and local. One of the reasons I left nullsec was a growing conviction that CCP would remove asset safety in some way.
I might be wrong, but I think simplifying access to information wouldnāt have caused too much trouble. Itās certainly possible to change things too much by adding or removing information, but it could have been done in small steps over many years to avoid major disruption.
Look at local: as far as I can make out, itās used to identify whoās in the system, even stealthed ships. That data could be provided in any number of different ways. And IMO in much more interesting ways than the chat system. Using the chat system itself just means thereās one system to serve two distinct purposes - in my experience thatās a sure recipe for inappropriate compromises.
More generally, since information about the environment is so important, what information is available where should be an active design decision.
Star citizen is likely to be finished around the same time as the heat death of the universe, Elite Dangerous is basically just a community whining about ever having to interact with other players despite playing an MMO, other sci-fi sandbox style games are all single player, who exactly IS the competition?
No, the reality is EVE doensāt want to be like every other game out there, because at that point it literally has nothing going for it and will actually die due to being just another generic game in an ocean of generic games
Its called killing them back, if they were ganked they got a killright which they can activate for free for the next 30 days up until they actually manage to kill the person in question, there will never be an effortless way to get back at them as the person being killed should be expected to have to put effort in to getting his/her revenge
So, what DO you do in EVE exactly, are you running missions/ratting without ever selling loot or buying anything from the market?
That is great and all but usually these are alts people login to gank, donāt login again for another few months and/or only login for griefing, etc. and especially with the location agent and watchlist, etc. changes often theyāve done their business and logged out again before you can find them even. Or in the case of scammers never leave station, etc. etc.
Not sure why Iām telling you that though from the look of your killboard youād already know and just making an insincere argument.
EDIT: Iād have been quite happy to help these people get a bit of pay back, etc. if there had been any meaningful way to do it - took part in my fair share of highsec wars, etc. in my time of playing.
So you donāt like that the game is balanced around something that ended up being an intel tool by accident. Yeah I can see that. But still it is there and it identifies risk in system. The balance has built up around it. Yes it can be better, but often KISS (keep it simple stupid) is better.
What concerns me most is that itās counter-intuitive for newer players. The lost opportunity is just incidental.
In a PvP game, it should be easy to get started with interesting PvP, but in EVE itās not.
What Iāve observed is that the people most likely to move forward with EVE are not āaverage MMO gamersā. Which is consistent with the retention-rate issue, and an indicator that thereās potential room for improvement.
Though TBH I think Fortnite may have grabbed most/all of the current crop of previously uncommitted online gamers. This weeks āEconomistā says they see 7 million concurrent players o_O
Well yes, but still not a major issue if properly explained in the tutorial.
I agree with you, as such I would start off new players with better core and race skills. But I have to say that Eve is much more than just a PvP blow things up type of game.
That is the niche, and people will come to Eve when their reactions slow a bit, I hopeā¦
Seems a bit like Overwatch to me as a game, and the Economist is really a worthless rag and I say that as someone who subscribed to it for over twenty yearsā¦
By selling on the market youāre competing with other players, like i said, PvP doesnāt exclusively mean shooting each other and nearly all activities in this game end up with you competing with other players in one way or another unless you live your life as a hermit
Not the ship position. Not even the character name. Only a sound indication (https://youtu.be/HzzxMaSUBjU). If you are alert you realize that there is someone else in the system searching (scanning).
Dscan, dscan, dscan - living in wormholes was crazy in that respect - Iād come out to highsec stations to buy stuff, etc. and find myself instinctively trying to dscan in station!
I think thereās something fundamentally odd about having a game that is based on interacting with other players (either running from them, selling to them, buying from them, engaging in combat with them or working together with them) making it harder to locate other players by removing tools that let you know who is in the system you just entered or who entered the system youāre in.
If weāre worried about it being too easy to escape huntersā¦ fine. Add more tools to allow hunters to quickly find and engage other players. Put a 30 or 15 second timer on disengaging an offensive module and engaging your warp drive to allow tackle to land. Make whatever changes you want to address that perceived issue.
But donāt make it so you harder to tell if someone is present. That just seems dumb.