Its a dream.
A beautiful dream.
I donât mind searching 10 systems for a meal.
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If getting more players into the game is the primary goal, CCP could probably double the gameâs population within a month or two just by turning off all PvP, and pushing a few articles about it through the gaming media.
That would be the exact opposite of turning up PvP risk, and having the âcasualsâ leave the game in frsutration.
So, doesnât this mean that we should all come together and ask CCP to turn off the PvP?
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And here in lies the major problem in the game. If they just took that attatude, I would be outta of a job! 
Not really. Carebears do their absolute best to avoid PvP. Hardly anyone is getting fights with them, and 95% of those âfightsâ are suicide ganking them at a gate. This lack of content is the reason why nobody will notice their absence.
If all the industrialists and miners and logistics folks left Null or left the game entirely youâd see most people quit in frustration, not jump in to fill the gap, because suddenly theyâre being forced to do something they didnât sign up for.
Except, again, this is not going to happen. Youâre never going to have all of the industry players leave because many people are doing industry as their primary goal and are seriously invested in it. The people in danger of leaving are the âMINERALS I MINE MYSELF ARE FREEâ idiots, whose sole contribution to the game is to drive down prices for smart industry players who understand concepts like opportunity cost. Those smart players would love for the idiots to ragequit and stop screwing up their game of competitive capitalism.
Again, see above, yes. Who do you think runs the incursion groups, writes the Level 4 and 5 mission guides, and does all that PvE?
People who are doing PvE as a means to an end. I believe that people will optimize their mission farming for maximum ISK/hour because they need ISK to fund something interesting. I am very skeptical that there are very many people who are masochistic enough to genuinely enjoy EVEâs combat PvE for its own sake. Itâs such an utterly menial task once you figure out how to do it, you might as well play a âgameâ where you click the âGIVE ISKâ button as fast as possible until you get tired of watching the number go up.
Again, these are the folks who populate the game and create âcontentâ for everyone.
Nonsense. The people endlessly solo farming the same menial tasks are not providing content, theyâre sitting in their private pseudo-instance ignoring the rest of the game as much as possible. Replace them with NPCs and nobody would ever notice.
Because there are players like this in every aspect of the game. I once met someone who basically did occasional mission running on the weekends and would load up on cheap T1 hulls with Meta/T2 fits and go out on the weekends for a few hours and basically just get into fights, not caring if he lost the ships.
And now youâre moving the goalposts to talk about PvP players who interact with the rest of the game and invest effort into making things happen, not PvE-only solo farmers.
Youâd be surprised.
Didnât PH admit that âcuckoldâ was secretly actually the #1 search category in western countries?
Please donât give CCP new ideasâŚ
Nah, and I donât think youâre correct about that either. Eve has its little niche and it needs to diversify and improve without actually leaving it. Thatâs part of why all games decline over time, but thatâs an entire other thread.
See, this is what I meant earlier about you and the other commenter and assuming things. Iâm talking about âcasual playersâ and not everyone who is casual about Eve is a dedicated âCarebearâ. In fact Iâve generally found that most people that someone like you would call âcarebearsâ actually do PvP, they just want to do it on their terms.
As you said earlier, everyone has to earn their ISK somewhere.
Agreed, but the âall the casuals leavingâ thing was your attempt at a point, not mine. This is just the end of the slippery slope, thereâs plenty more ground up-hill from this ridiculous end-state.
Even if most of them leave, or at least enough to materially affect ship supplies and prices, youâll probably see people get more risk averse, less good fights, and people leaving as a result. Not a bunch of PvP junkies taking up industry.
Mostly on T1 stuff, which is high volume and the people doing this stuff rarely expand into large and expensive items because theyâre just building with what they mine.
Seriously, Iâve talked with plenty of industry folks over the years too, and these guys have very little effect outside of a few T1 hulls. If they ever push prices down too much then someone either buys out and re-lists their hulls or scraps them for minerals.
T2 ships and guns are basically safe from these guys, and most of their cost is in BPs and Moon Goo anyways.
And if you mean only the actual literal âMINING IS FREEâ guys then yeah, those actual literal people are a tiny fraction, but the people the sort of changes being discussed here would drive off are a lot more than just those guys.
Like, have you seen clicker games? Have you seen how many people download them?
Seriously, I canât do nothing but PvE, at least without people to â â â â â â â â with in fleet, but itâs pretty relaxing after a long day of actually hard stuff to come home and do something thatâs almost entirely within my control and isnât too hard.
In fact thereâs a ton of games like that.
And yeah, most of them are single player, but almost every MMO has some gameplay equivalent because itâs a popular way to play games.
Again, assuming thatâs the only thing these people ever do, which is a bad assumption. The vast majority of people in this, or any other MMO, play the game in several different ways. Quite often between the weekend and the week night.
Iâm not moving anything, Iâm trying to clarify so you understand here.
That guy wasnât particularly odd here. That person isnât a PvP player, they didnât describe themselves as such, and the majority of their time was spent on PvE but they PvPâd on the weekend. If you wreck their ability to do one thing you also remove them from the other thing.
Ah, thatâs the US. Canât just have a good sex party, they have to turn it into a whole shame and humiliation thing and pretend not to like it. What would be the EVE equivalent? An anti-ganker with a bunch of gank alts who occasionally âanti-ganksâ one of them to prove how pure he is?
There is probably no perfect in most things.
However, CCP has proven that their core idea of risk vs. reward basically works when they get it mostly right. There should be increasing costs, and increasing risks, as a group gets more value and benefits out of the corporation. They should forced to make trade-offs and choices and there should be no âbestâ choice, but a series of viable places on the risk vs/ reward continuum where a player can choose where they are comfortable.
We arenât even close to that. The current system basically took corporation mechanics out of the competitive game completely - you always get all the candy with none of the cavities or obesity. Taxes, hangers, even structures (because of the ACL allows you to trivially dodge wars) are all yours for free with no trade-offs. Wars only work at all as a mechanic to fight directly over structures, and even there they have problems CCP was unable/unwilling to address with how multiple parties interact with each other.
They took the easy, expedient choice and basically hard deleted wars from everywhere they could that wouldnât cause even bigger game design problems. Ok, software development itself is a series of trade-offs and choices to make on how to spend a limited resource budget, but as expected, just deleting stuff doesnât drive activity and didnât apparently in this case.
Thatâs all fine, and maybe CCP should delete more systems that they canât maintain properly, but letâs not pretend the changes were for the new players, or ever had a chance of increase activity on their own. That was just a narrative spun by people with misconceptions of wars or clouded by the emotion of a past experience in the game.
There is a better war system out-there. One that is largely opt-in, where there are objectives to fight over, and choices to be made by corporations on how much risk and reward they want to take on. One that will get players to play the game. CCP just chose to do other things, and pruned back the old system in the most expedient way possible. And as expected, total activity declined when there was less things to do in highsec.
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Oh, no, they werenât misconceptions. Those people knew exactly what they were doing by making those claims.
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Your interpretation is incorrect.
CCP were watching the activity of players. The players who were in a corp which had war declared against it (because wardecs donât directly affect players who arenât in a corp which has had war declared)
They tracked the players, regardless of what said players did.
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So, Iâm not sure what you mean about the ACL being used to âdodge warsâ unless you mean just using someone elseâs structure, in which case that was the case with the old war mechanics.
Pretty much same with taxes and hangars.
Taxes have never been hard to dodge unless you actually wanted to be in a corp with friends. You can just make a one man corp with a generic name and if someone ever, for some reason, war-decâs you then you just jump ship and create a new corp. Itâs mildly frustrating, but doesnât really impact your gameplay at all. Mostly it just disincentivized creating real corps with real communities of players in them.
At this point NPC Corp Taxes are just an incentive to get people out of those NPC corps and into player run ones, theyâre not any sort of mechanical penalty for being safe from wars, and thatâs how itâs been functionally for most of the last decade.
Same with Hangars. They basically just lessen frustration. You can replace them with one guy with a spreadsheet and maybe an alt, or a bunch of station containers, but thatâs a pain and âless frustrationâ isnât a great trade off to make players take in exchange for risk.
All of that said, if thereâs something Iâm missing here with the Access Controls then please explain it to me. By all means Iâm a fan of loop holes being patched here.
This I have to disagree with. Again, back to my time in Eve Uni, we saw a LOT of wars, and Eve Uni was directly responsible for at least one of the war-dec reworks because we simply broke the War Dec system so badly.
Back around the first big round of war-dec changes Eve Uni saw a marked drop in player activity and retention from war decâs until the directors basically reworked the entire admissions and graduation system so that no one ever had to actually join the corp to participate and graduate, because âOMG thereâs a war!â was actively scary to a lot of players with shiny new ships (to them) who didnât want to lose them.
It wasnât everyone, by any stretch, but it was definitely a noticeable and quantifiable effect.
This, at least, I agree with you on, and Iâd be happy to see CCP take another stab at the War Dec system now that theyâve seen how this one played out.
Iâm also not that surprised that it isnât that much of a priority though.
I donât think High Sec Wars are the massive driver of content and player retention that some people seem to think they were. Yes they were a small niche in the game, but a lot of that activity was basically just ganking with a slightly different risk/reward curve. I suspect in terms of absolute player numbers the banning of input broadcasting probably had a larger single-point effect.
Thankyou for clearing that up.
Sounds like the instructors were trash, then.
Would you care to explain this a little and clarify beyond just a rather low effort insult?
Because Eve Uni has survived and thrived longer than almost any other group in the gameâs history, so theyâre clearly doing something rightâŚ
If the instructors in such a large organization canât prepare their members for wars, explain war mechanics, and get them to not be afraid of wars, then theyâre trash. And really, it takes all of 12 seconds to explain that people shouldnât go to two specific systems, in order to mitigate the chances of being attacked by something like 90%. If they had to game the system to avoid wars, they werenât doing their jobs. Simple as that.
Ah, so, this is just ignorance on your part on how Eve Uni works. Or something.
Eve Uni absolutely does do all of that, but Iâm not talking about graduates, or even people who have been in the Uni for a few weeks, Iâm talking about people who are just entering Eve Uni and may have only been in the game for a few days.
I have literally walked people through plotting a navigation route to Aldrat because they had no idea how that worked.
As to your âsolutionâ here, that basically doesnât work. At all. At least for the Eve Uni use case. It wasnât two specific systems, it was Aldrat, Jita, anything on the pipe between the two, any major trade hub, and anything within about 10 jumps of Aldrat for a lot of these wars. The general policy before all of this was that if the Uni was at war you either dropped Corp or you couldnât undock in anything that wasnât a combat ship and in a fleet if you were anywhere near Aldrat, because the only thing Eve Uni had found that worked was to deny these guys easy kills completely. Otherwise you were expected to drop for the war duration or be on a combat footing.
That stopped working as soon as War Decâs became something that went on basically forever, hence the changes to the system that didnât require you to join the actual corp to participate.
Especially since some classes have in-space practical portions to demonstrate certain concepts or try things out in practice, and the whole reason for having everyone around one system was to facilitate that. Making it massively impractical to both teach people and avoid that one system.
Because the ultimate goal of Eve Uni is to train pilots, not to get them killed or drive them out of the game, and you either have a wildly unrealistic idea of what it takes to herd cats teach new Eve players, or a wildly unrealistic idea of what Eve Uniâs wars were like. Or both, I dunno.
Some players will be good, and some will be bad. Most will be somewhere in between.
But of the bad ones, some can be so bad, that theyâre beyond redemption. I have met such players. Theyâre the ones who take hours just to figure how to turn the game on, days to create a character, and then get stuck on the beginning tutorial because they donât understand what to do when the game tells them to drag their mouse to spin the camera back and forth before proceeding to the next instruction.
Some players are beyond saving. Expending energy to bring them up to the same level as the average is a very wasteful effort (and ultimately futile, since theyâll fail the second theyâre let loose).
A lack of compartmentalization is a managerial deficiency.
Just because there are âinstructors,â doesnât mean that they themselves are perfectly skilled. On the whole, is the organization doing well? Sure, but there are still plenty of oversights, and opportunities to improve.
I routinely teach (more so in the past, when I was more active) new players how to PvP. And I donât mean like âokay get the Rifter, weâre going on a roam and youâre going to learn how to tackle!â I actually teach players how to win, right off the bat, which involves explaining focused aggression, psychology, and generally turning a player not into someone who can fly in a nice little gang and fulfill a role, but someone who targets the enemyâs insecurities, and is able to absolutely terrify them; that is to say, not just a soldier, but a killer.
Teaching someone how to âknowâ is not the same thing as teaching someone how to âwin.â Iâd venture to guess that the leadership of EVE University tends to view the game through the classic lens of âmake ISK and then use it to fit ships that you lose in fleet PvP ops.â But there are other ways in which you can approach the game. Fighting doesnât necessarily have to be an end in itself, like some form of end-game content to which players need to âgraduate.â It can also be the means to an end thatâs completely different; a tool in a toolbox needed to accomplish oneâs true goals.
If all youâre doing is taking months to train up a bunch of F1 monkeys, then of course theyâll be afraid of wars. Itâs much less scary to risk a ship thatâs covered by a replacement program while youâre in a fleet of 200, than it is to jump into some murderhole with a friend in an attempt to assassinate some blinged-out ratters, while risking stuff out of your own pocket. Teaching players to manage their fears and emotions is just as, if not more, important than teaching them how many shield extenders to put on their Drake, and which ammo type to use against a Zealot.
Want to know the very first thing I teach players about PvP (aside from rudimentary stuff like explaining the purpose of key modules in a PvP fit, which I tell them to read about first)?
I teach them how to control their heart rate in a fight.
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