Is the assumption that the arena players would spend similar amounts of time within the sandbox as they do in the arena. I would not spend anything like as long roaming as I do in the arena. Others might have a different answer though.
PvP in EVE is rarely self funding. I know some people can win enough to break even or consistently make a profit in the arena but the great majority will not. According to the new year video I got 17bill isk poorer last year. This means the people fighting in the arena are either using their existing wealth or interacting with the sandbox to gain wealth. Either way it benefits other players, manufacturers, hunters and market traders.
The problem isnât really JSH, itâs the OP who misused it to describe what is going on in EVE. OP has been very unhappy with EVE and does nothing but cry and whine at every opportunity and found this video and went âIâm sure I can spread my misery using that video even moreâ.
The point JSH made is that things become easier, more braindead and take less effort which thus removes the feeling of accomplishment, many games have become more about dopamine than serotonin to try and keep people addicted and to keep that going they (need to) add more and more dopamine hits over time where the game gives more rewards, higher numbers for even less effort.
Thing is that CCP went the other way, they reduced easy/low effort/high reward play styles and suddenly all those folks need to actually think, adapt and put in more effort. Not many games or MMO do that and therefore EVE doesnât really fit JSHâs points (which are good points, just not for EVE).
But whatâs the difference between if a player would lose ships in the arena versus losing ships outside the arena? Theyâd lose stuff either way, which impacts other players, manufacturers and market traders either way.
âBut in arenas I can lose stuff faster!â you may say. But is that true? I could lose ships at a higher rate in arenas, but my ISK income is still the same. So outside the arenas I might lose ships at a different rate, but that would change my spending on ships, so in the end I can lose ships and modules worth a certain amount of ISK at the same rate: the rate that I get ISK.
So to conclude, this is not an argument in favour of arenas, but neither is it against.
I do not think itâs that simple that players not fighting in space would be 1:1 equal to players in arenas.
You may say that not every arena player might otherwise be spending time in space, but forget that you only need a few of them to start content elsewhere which could and would draw other players to join the fight as well.
PvP requires other players to be available in space to fight. And if other players arenât roaming (because theyâre doing arenas) the players who are still roaming in space find fewer others to fight. These people will have fewer interactions. Have less fun. They stop roaming.
Player interaction is a vicious (and virtuous) circle: roaming and fighting in the game universe requires a healthy amount of other players to be there to interact with.
Arenas cannibalize on that healthy amount of players in space. Thereâs a limited number of EVE players thatâs willing to engage in PvP and any players that spend that time in arenas rather than roaming the universe reduce the amount of possible interactions outside arenas, making the game less fun for players outside arenas, making it more likely that people stop roaming.
Even if arenas only take out a few players from the rest of the universe, that can have a much bigger effect on the amount of players that arenât roaming the universe anymore.
The problem with seeing PvP as not self funding is one of your mind, friends, not of the game mechanics.
If you find a blingy ship not paying too much attention, you can PvP the â â â â out of them, and then fund your activities with their shiny shiny loot.
Is this more difficult to do than warping to a beacon and shooting rats? Yes. Is it more lucrative? Also yes.
Game mechanics seem in balance in that respect to me.
Re: the video and Eve. Eve is currently doing both sides of this coin, which is why things are going so disasterously. On the one hand, they have removed a lot of the easy farmable tasks in nullsec that brought a lot of isk / resources / demand to the economy. A lot of people brought up in Eve following this gameplay loop of scooping infinite isk for a few hours then go on a F1 monkey blob fleet (expand timeframes depending on FC availability) for fun are really struggling at the moment. This should not be ignored. There have also been a lot of nerfs to higher-end PvP gameplay and suchlike, making capital escalations, refitting triage, wormhole HA brawling and so on less viable in a quest to balance around nullblobs.
At the same time, Eve is also struggling with having made other core gameplay areas a lot more complicated - industry at higher levels, small structure mechanics / gameplay, etc. Again, this has been done in the same quest to balance around nullblobs.
The real fundamental issue is that, at the scale they currently exist at, nullblobs are effectively game breaking for any other playstyle. Additionally, as they have never been supported by any kind of in-game mechanics (beyond alliance level), thereâs no real lever to pull to assist in designing around their current scale and influence. So really, CCP is kind of stuck with either designing the game for gigantic blocs of 10s of thousands of players at a time, or designing around everyone else that plays the game. Unfortunately they need both sets of people to give the numbers they need to keep the lights on.
Not sure I would want to get lumbered with that herculean task if Iâm honest, but there you go.
Not for long , if you have been paying attention you will notice how things are being split up so they can be edited individually to balance null without messing up the rest and visa versa. (Have some faith in CCP)
I donât really want to say here in-case its a spoiler for anyone. But if you want a hint look at star warâs and how the rebels are able to exist in a universe dominated by the imperialâs.
Who can wipe out their entire cities without any effort.
I was in this case referring to arena PvP. Which has limits on what you can use. This weekend I was about 10th and I only just broke even. There will be plenty of people who spent 100s of million isk taking part and this one was just t1 cruisers. I lost billions in the recent 1v1 Battleship arena.
Of course if you drop on expensive ships you can make isk. I am unsure how challenging the PvP is in this case.
If I try really hard to get fights and roam in Black Rise on a Saturday and Iâm lucky, then Iâll get less than 1/3 of the number of fights I can get in the arena during the same timescale. So the volume is significantly higher than I can manage to find in the sandbox.
This weekend 55bill isk worth of meta 4 fit Thoraxes and capsuals died in the arena. There will also have been billions in drugs, ammo and cap charges used too. I realise that this is relatively small change in the overall sandbox, but it is also only a small number of individuals who take part. Also this was a slow event too. If you know where to look you can see the spikes in the market from previous arenas.
I used to roam around Amamake, itâs mostly a wasteland now. The players who I fight now in the arena, are not the same players. So while I understand your point, I think that the effect of some players choosing to do the arenas hasnât had a massive effect on the sandbox. Something else has.
Like I said, itâs not 1:1 the people that left space to PvP in the arenas that directly causes those players to not be in space anymore, but also impacts other non-arena players who for their PvP relied on other (arena) players to be out in space.
If players A, B,C and D had regularly fun in a certain system and C and D move on to arenas, you probably wonât see A or B anymore in that system either as their gameplay is gone any time B or A isnât online.
Itâs a vicious cycle. For PvP interaction you need other players to be out there, and for them to be out there the game needs a healthy amount of players in space for those interactions to happen.
Every point he makes in the video is reflected in available features in EVE and in the development strategies and approaches by CCP. Thereâs nothing click-baity about this video when it comes to EVE and how it describes a big host of issues that has been plaguing EVE for the sake of making it âmore accessible, easier and less time consumingâ.
A certain someone said that you need to put in more effort to get more rewards. The presence of abyssal PVE and PVP counters that point completely. You donât need any meaningful effort to engage in either form of easy, extremely well-rewarding PVE and easy, predictable and uninterruptible PVP. Both take away player interaction and replace it with effortless and meaningless activity to keep you busy instead of experiences to amaze you. Thatâs one point that this video brought forward and which is perfectly reflected by an EVE mechanic.
It was a multi tiered strike that cleared low sec out:
Citadels and changes to R64 moons: There where some R64âs in low sec which some powerful big alliances grabbed onto, but they changed over to lvl 5 mission agent locationâs.
Filamentâs: Instead of people roaming from high sec through low to null to get content they now go straight from jita all over nullsec avoiding low completely, so less traffic less pvp and then pvp minded people are less incentised to live there anymore.
FW Botâs, before the bots in jackdaws Fw used to be pretty good isk for a pvper so it made it sustainable to live there but with the lp value depreciated by the botâs it is not so great anymore.
On the other front the the Mining changes made it decently profitable to live in low with the prices of gas mining. But Iâm not sure how many people in low ever really where into mining in the first place, so it attracted more high sec and null sec people than low. Maybe those high/null people became low people not sure, hope so thou.
I think there might be something else we are missing. The people who I used to see usually werenât in big groups and there seemed to be a gradual decline over years - before filaments.
Not saying these werenât factors, but I wonder if it simply was a decline due to lack of changes/ new content/ boredom. Afterall, how many comet 1v1s can you have before you decide to move to another game. Low sec feels neglected.
Eve is falling apart for two reasons.
The main one is that for years EVEâs owners have used it as a cash cow to take money out of and invest in piss poorly conceived diversification projects. Such as an FPS in an already saturated FPS market.
Instead of investing that money back into the game.
Secondly, It is because the attention span of the average 12-24-year-old is about 30 seconds now. So a long-form game like EVE just doesnât appeal to new players.
In the rush to push an agenda you missed some key elements within that video. You want adversity, absolutely and the player base is that in Eve, no question, however he mentioned balance in terms of the adversity, you have to get it at the right level. It is of course subjective and difficult to get right. Damn good video and spot on.
Those, we had a guy come in pick off a couple of people, be insulting in local, he came in when I and another were active and went into a dead end system, so we camped him, he logged off for a while, he made two attempts but had to crash the gate. In the end he filamented out.
And what about the adversity of breaking through the entry gate camps into 0.0 to be able to pick off people, or getting out in the end, but no he popped a Filament and the locator confirmed him in Cobalt Edge where he killed an observatory?
It is why most people donât really understand this video.
Not a personal attack, but step back and understand what filaments do in terms of reducing adversity?
As a foot note, one of the reasons so many gankers have left the game is the lack of adversity. Their opponents have had their game play nerfed so much that hardly anyone does it, so the ganker feels unfulfilled and give up, some spend most of their time trying to wind up people for a personal vendetta to try to get that adversity, but it is not happening. Amusing thoughâŚ
Interpreting this type of video is always fun, because everyone has an opinion on it, still Eve is long lived because of what it is.
If that were true, the game would be dead and buried already.
A bunch of players having fun, duking it out in an arena didnât kill the game. It may actually keep them in the game, because they are getting entertainment.
To put things into perspective: fly through high sec or low sec systems, pay attention, maybe occasionally dock up to check your suspicions and youâll see that most logged in player characters, are docked up at any given time.
Canât shoot these guys either. Delete all NPC stations and upwell structures then? Generally speaking, you cannot force players to do ANYTHING, other than leave a game.
On Abyssals, there are good arguments for restricting farming without being out in open space, but those are economic reasons. There is no production in the arena, only minutes of entertainment.
If CCP were to delete something trivial that some players enjoy, because they had to enjoy something else instead⌠that would be right up their alley, but it is also a sign of absolute creative poverty.
If an MMO cannot even thrive and have an arena for a little diversion, it has fundamental problems that need to be looked at first.
They are getting it in a safe, predictable and non-open-world environment. This is exactly what this video is talking about. The easy entertainment fix takes away important facets of the game and replaces them with shallow, meaningless and detrimental activities.
These players are in the game but they might as well not be because all they do is fight or farm behind walls that no one can break to ruin their entertainment. Ruining someone elseâs entertainment is the lifeblood and basic gameplay principle of EVE, however. These arenas destroy this basic gameplay principle.
Thatâs a retarded argument that could come straight from CCPâs design department. Someone docked in a station or structure doesnât take away anything from the game. While they are docked, you can do your thing like running an escalation or anoms or a mission. The difference between someone docked in a station and someone farming in an undetectable abyssal trace (because itâs in a deep safe far away from dscan range) is that you are not safe in your mission or escalation. You have to keep checking dscan for combat probes or other people coming into the system. You have to be aware of your surroundings. The instanced farming takes that away because itâs not necessary.
Likewise, filament travel takes away the needed awareness requirements to check people in local, know certain smartbomb hotspots or camper hotspots. All that is not necessary anymore with filaments because you just skip these locations.
Doesnât matter, or at least should not. An MMO should be able to survive a lot of players clowning around a great deal of the time. We already are doing that, with or without arenas.
Do you really think a player who happens to be in the mood for the arena, but not for roaming, is suddenly going to do it anyway, if you take away their avenue?
For a themepark MMO, that even has ambitions to be a sandbox, there should be a lot of room for a many different playstyles.
Players not walking neatly in line and not doing a specific thing whenever they log in, shouldnât be a problem at all.
That is seems like a problem anyway, is the sure sign that we have a real Problem somewhere else and not merely some easy-to-fix challenges from a YT vid.
, if you have been paying attention you will notice how things are being split up so they can be edited individually to balance null without messing up the rest and visa versa. (Have some faith in CCP)