There were definitely some fun times when former null sec players thought they were the meanest fish in the pond when coming back to hi-sec. But they would try to use null doctrines in small gang station games.
Zealot goes squish.
I don’t know about pilot skill, but there’s a difference in situational awareness and independent thinking. So i know what you’re getting at.
To make isk…is that the fotm excuse people are using atm.
Sounds like you can’t answer the question.
Again, this is just bad thinking and not true. I’ve seen plenty of people over those years go from awkward as heck to competent, calm, and collected fleet commanders.
Also, again, plenty of people aren’t particularly interested in starting out in combat PvP, or doing it much at all, and Eve Uni wants to be welcoming to those people, as does the game as a whole.
This works for boot camp in the military, it’s not a particularly good general philosophy for teaching people how to play a game that they want to play for fun. I’m sure it works for you, and for a certain type of person, but if Eve Uni did that with everyone who crossed their door step they would have shut down years ago.
Yes, Eve is a fairly niche game, but if CCP had taken your philosophy I don’t think the game would have ever passed 10,000 players and it would have died a death. There is, in fact, such a thing as being too niche.
I mean, I’m theory crafting here. I’ve never been in that position. Ultimately though anything that the game allows is mechanics, and that was something the game allowed.
Even without corp flipping or simply mining in an NPC corp and selling on an alt, or any one of a number of other “cheap” solutions it’s a lot cheaper, especially as mineral prices went up back then, to mine and risk than mine and pay half to someone else.
Yup, I’m not saying it was, or is, a good mechanic, but it exists, and just like reworking the war mechanics removing it entirely was never going to be quick or easy for CCP. Ultimately I think they’re basically trying to remove the incentive to do so for most players, which has probably mostly worked, but it’s also possible the war mechanics have swung too far the other way.
Unfortunately I don’t think I ever got an answer on how ACL was causing exploits.
Yeah, it’s a different set of skills and tactics, but I think Destiny is right that small gang warfare in High and Low requires more individual pilot skill and creativity than most Null fights. That’s not to say that if you cloned a 10 man pirate gang into a 500 man fleet they’d do particularly well, at least without a good Null FC, but I’ve seen what happens when random null folks end up in Low and High and try silly-buggers… it’s not pretty, but it is hilarious 
I’m not talking about “awkward” people with potential. I’m talking about the ones who get told to click a flashing UI element by the tutorial, can’t figure it out for 45 minutes, go on the forums to post about how the game is total ■■■■, and insult the first person who tries to help them.
Most players are normal/average, and will do well if taught properly. The problem is that many “teachers” here feel obligated to try to save the worst of the worst, and then their entire program and set of standards revolve around these irredeemable players. You can see an example of that in another front-page thread in GD, in which I discuss player training with someone else.
This might be a game that people play for fun, but it’s still an environment in which you’re risking your life in direct combat with others. If this were just a regular old game, then people wouldn’t feel like they’re having heart attacks when they get exposed to PvP.
If you treat PvP as some kind of threat, or a chore that one must get through in order to be able to do the things they actually like, then of course players will be afraid of wars. From your words, it sounds that this is exactly what Eve University is going.
The outcome has less to do with training the right people, and more to do with managing expectations. The style of training used is just a means to an end.
This philosophy was EVE’s guiding principle during the time when the game was new, which was also the time when it was growing the fastest. “EVE is a harsh universe,” “EVE is not for everyone,” were literally things said by the developers themselves.
Exactly. The PvE side almost always has a massive advantage if they’re smart enough to use it, but because they’re stuck in the perma-victim mindset they never will.
No, there really doesnt
I’m glad you agree!
Because they expect CCP to make it safe for them.
Yup.
Which, in my view, justifies jacking up the NPC tax to something like 60%. If you don’t want to defend your stuff, and you don’t want to hire players for security to defend your stuff, then you’re going to pay out the ass for being immune to the violence.
Thing is, miners don’t pay corp tax.
Can jack up the NPC refinery fees, or lower the NPC refinery efficiency.
Now, I realize that someone can still grind rocks in an NPC corporation, then trade the ore to an alt that’s in a player corporation, and that’s pretty bad. Maybe NPC corporation members need to flat-out be given lower CONCORD protection in terms of slower response times, with an initial grace period upon leaving the corporation that’s on a cooldown (so you can’t reset it by jumping back and forth).
Players should be incentivized to join player corporations. Since PvE income is at record-high levels as it is, the only incentives left are sticks.
Move to Null
Join big Null block
PVE in complete safety
Get rich
Occasionally hit F1
Hang out on the forums telling everyone how much better you are than them
Win Eve.
Haha, Rudokop roleplays as a Highsec demonhunter? What??
Could be worse, could be weeb anime.
These people effectively don’t exist. They either fail out at the tutorial and quit, or they lose this attitude.
The “average” player isn’t going to be comfortable getting dumped into a war in their first few weeks in the game, most won’t in their first month or more. I speak from experience here, and I’ve had to talk more than a few of the hundreds of new players I’ve met into being more comfortable in wars.
Plus it’s a lot easier in Eve Uni where SRP is available.
I feel like you’re either conflating different sets of traits, or you’re taking the type of new player you seem to meet, for whatever reason, and generalizing them to every new player in the game, and that’s not accurate.
Yes and no. Plenty of people have this sort of reaction in other games, it’s one of the reason a lot of people are just bad at PvP. They tunnel vision, lose situational awareness, and/or panic. That said, Eve PvP is higher risk than most, but that’s also why CCP has been careful in how much PvP exposure people volunteer for.
I’m recounting info that’s years old here, specifically I’m referring mostly to the time around the first round of war-dec changes. Don’t take anything I’m saying as directly reflecting Eve Uni’s current policies or procedures, I’m not up to date on those.
All of that said, Eve Uni’s policy regarding wars was built out of necessity. Eve Uni isn’t just training PvP pilots, they’re an org that’s trying to be available and open to everyone, and teaches a lot of different things. It was also due to the fact that most of the wars Eve Uni dealt with were troll-decs, eg exactly the sort of war that the current system was designed to punish.
It’s really difficult to run a class with a practical component if you’re at war and don’t have a combat fleet on standby, and if you do have combat ships handy then they’ll almost certainly just be bored, since the WTs will only show up if there’s no actual threat.
The policies around that time were designed to starve the troll-decs by denying them easy targets to pick off because that’s what was, through trial and error earlier on, determined to be best for the Uni as a whole. Those policies did evolve after the war-dec changes made it so Eve Uni was basically always dec’d by a few semi-inactive idiots, but the policy of allowing people to “join” and stay outside the corp remained.
Yes, and that’s still true, but as I said there’s such a thing as being too niche.
Eve didn’t really start growing until 2006, when it started to get some polish, and it didn’t really take off until 2008 when CCP had started to really shave the hard edges off the game. That compromise between “harsh universe” and “fighting the game mechanics” is what really made Eve a great game.
See, this has never been part of Eve’s “harsh universe”. The game has never been “shoot anyone anywhere without consequences”, and the balance of those consequences has always been on the aggressor in High Sec.
The former there is just going to drive new players out of the game. Incentives need to be a careful balance of carrot and stick, and that’s all stick.
Also most of that PvE income is coming from out in Null space, in player corps. Level 4 missions and other High Sec pastimes haven’t been more than like 30% of total PvE take for years.
And if you want to incentivize people to join player corporations then reworking the war dec mechanics to make people in basic corporations more vulnerable is going to do the opposite. It would be far better to use carrots here, and make the structures attractive for people to use.
TLDR, please try to be more concise and resubmit.
I disagree with this. The trick is to immediately explain that a state of constant war and violence is the default state of the game. I know that some people won’t like hearing this, and might end up not logging in again, but everyone else is instantly saved the hassle of having to restructure their expectations down the line. “This is basically DayZ/Rust, but in space, and without the zombies.”
I play a lot of FPS games, and while this is most definitely the case for survival games, I’ve never met anyone who gets the shakes from generic shooters like Battlefield/CoD games (I’m sure there’s an outlier somewhere, of course). This leads me to conclude that the threat of losing progress is a critical component in having such a reaction.
But the current system has actually made this worse? In the past, players still fought over material things, but these days, the system is so restricted, that you literally send out wars to anyone you’re able to, just because there are so few viable targets.
This seems like a good opportunity for information warfare. If the hostiles don’t show up because of the presence of a fleet, then you can pretend that you have one. Conversely, this is Baiting 101, and a good commander should be able to score some shame-inducing kills on the “trolls” with nothing but a fleet of newbies who are pretending that they’re popping their Veldspar-mining cherries.
You can get a crazy-good combat setup from a Venture with a bit of expenditure, and EVE-Uni doesn’t sound like an organization that’s short on funds. Can you imagine some high-sec hardman losing a ship to 30 Ventures? I would cut my stomach with a butter knife if that were to happen to me.
And like I’ve been saying, if growth is CCP’s primary concern, they should turn off the PvP, remove the market, and add loot boxes.
CCP’s biggest mistake with regard to high-sec balancing has always been making it seem that security is “free.” This is why corporations are either full of “carebears,” or full of “griefing scumbags.” The former group feels no need to retain the latter group in its ranks, because after all, why do you need another player to fight for you if CONCORD will protect you at no cost?
And while you’re somewhat right about the numbers (they might be skewed a bit too much - null-sec generates more income per capita, but not like 12 times more), null-sec also falls into a wholly different cardinality of spending, with their massive station and capital fleet expenditures. My underlying claim that the wealth generation-to-effort ratio in high-sec is fundamentally broken is not entirely disproved.
Miners are loot boxes…