If I can spend PLEX to buy some keys to open them up instead of shooting them, sign me the hell up.
The problem with this is that itâs just not accurate. The first thing we end up explaining to most nervous newbies is that youâre actually very unlikely to be attacked in Eve. Especially if youâre careful and follow a few simple guidelines.
Most of High Sec is fairly safe to the majority of players. Most of Null and Low is not unless youâre on the same side as the locals.
Also the end result of trying to market Eve this way would be the same as making it this way. It would drive off most of the players and the game would die. If you want that gameplay experience then fine, but I donât think Eve is the game youâre after to get it.
It definitely makes it more common and more likely, but there are degrees of that reaction beyond getting the shakes. Tunnel Vision being the most common in my experience.
When did I say that the current system made this worse? The point of this thread is that there should be more war-decs, not fewer.
Also Iâm not sure if youâre familiar with how things were under the old system, but thatâs basically how things have always worked. The only difference was that the pool of players was larger, and anyone who was dumb enough to have someone get killed was likely to have the war dec continued.
And we absolutely got up to that sort of thing, but the key thing there being âpretendâ. Newbies donât make great bait, and the actual people learning âmining 101â or âLogistics 101â want to actually learn the stuff, not just act as bait.
I mean, yes, I havenât seen or pulled off that specifically, but the Uni Low-Sec Camp did pop an overconfident idiotâs Carrier with a kitchen sink fleet while I was there. He didnât quit the game, but he did go find other things to do for a week or two after that.
And as Iâve been trying to say here. Thatâs not what Iâm talking about, but there are still degrees here. A game can be niche and still be successful, but if itâs too niche then itâs going to die. CCP needs to keep things within the line between Eve losing its character and Eve losing its playerbase.
In my experience this has less to do with Cost/Benefit and more to do with the two groups just not getting along well. Theyâre playing the game for different reasons and want different things out of it.
When those groups do get along they tend to end up out in Null in one of the big Alliances.
Itâs not 12 times more, but if you remove Incursions from the equation itâs pretty close. The most populated High Sec regions are paying out equivalent bounties in a month to the least populated Null regions.
Which brings me back to that whole âthe carebears donât want to work with the PvPers to get protectionâ. Thatâs basically what Null is. You move out of the bubble of High Sec safety in exchange for a massive pay bump and having to rely on other players, or yourselves, for protection.
How many little noobros have you killed with this terrible mentoring?
EVE University is such a scam!
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It is intentionally inaccurate, because it yields good results. Itâs better to have a new player asking âwhy havenât I beet attacked yet, if you made it sound like it happens all the time?â instead of âwhy did I get attacked, when you said that it should almost never happen?â
Agreed with Aiko; this is a massive fail on the part of the educator(s). All you guys argue with me about my methods, but out of the new players Iâve trained or guided, not a single one left the game because of adversity (outside of the ones who quit instantly after I gave them the initial breakdown). Some quit because the game didnât hold their interest, or because they didnât like the gameplay, but no one quit because of ganks or wars or whatever.
Everyone gets some degree of tunnel vision, but thatâs not the same thing as fear.
No, I mean that Iâm the one whoâs saying that it got worse. Some people are of the opinion that wars were âfixedâ somehow, but as someone who both does wars, and sits in corporations that get incoming wars, I can see that thatâs not actually the case.
Wars have been my primary EVE activity since about 2008 (essentially when I started this corporation). Before that, I was a low/null-sec player since my first day in the game. My expertise with regard to all things related to wars is, at this point, beyond exceptional. Now, this isnât entirely a flex, as I freely admit that Iâm clueless with regard to some other aspects of the game, such as null-sec fleet doctrines, and top-level group PvE content. Although I donât think it would take me a long time to learnâŚ
My issue with this argument is that the safety crowd always says âwe just need a few more changes,â âjust one more nerf,â âjust a couple of new gameplay updates to make EVE appeal to more than just a few thousand people in the entire world,â etc. etc. But they never stop saying this. It just keeps being repeated forever.
We can plot the way that this game has gradually progressed in terms of balancing on a scale of sorts, and weâd be able to see that itâs almost exclusively moved in a direction in which nonconsensual PvP has been getting nerfed.
So, my question to you is, since youâre saying that this game can be niche but successful, âwhen does it end?â
Necessity brings people together.
So the only reason that these groups donât get along well is because not enough necessity exists in the game to bring them together as a matter of survival. This, if anything, serves to reinforce my point.
Outside of some outliers (e.g. renter farmers), most players go to null-sec with the expectation to be required to fight in some capacity. Which is the reason why 70% of the gameâs population resides in high-sec (not counting a few hundred players like me); because they donât want to fight, anyone, ever.
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Initially wars cost 2 million ISK and were accessible for everyone, including rookies,
which apparently was a great thing otherwise the game wouldnât have survived.
Then CCP pushed them to 50 million ISK, to turn them into a feature for the more richer people.
People grouped up, to deal with the increased cost and nothing got better.
Then CCP decided to push it to 100 million ISK, told us retarded excuses reasons the masses of idiots out there happily accepted. Barely anything has changed and even less got actually better.
This could be misconstructed. The silent majority likes and accepts the game as it is,
including all its dangers, otherwise they wouldnât be playing it.
Iâm not sure they donât want to fight.
They might simply not be seeking it actively.
They still accept when theyâre getting their asses handed to them.
I thought this should be clarified.
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From what Iâve heard during my wartime infiltrations, this isnât actually the case. A big portion of the player base, whether by their own inherent beliefs, or by virtue of having been âcorruptedâ by improper guidance during their newbie stages, wishes wholeheartedly that PvP didnât exist, at all.
Itâs just that most people either donât know about forums, or donât care enough about them, to make their voices heard.
It really does come down to this: if you want to make a PvP game, you have to shove the PvP down the playersâ throats, because if you donât, the majority of players will choose to fully opt out of it every single time. If you donât believe me, go on the forums of any open-world survival game, and look at what people argue about the most.
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And the answer to that question is generally either âyou broken one of the simple rules we taught youâ or âyou got unluckyâ, and the vast majority of people are fine with that.
Itâs far better to be pitching the game in a way that will get people in the door rather than one that will actively drive people off.
Case and point, Eve is still known in the wider gaming community as âspreadsheets in spaceâ and is still fighting the perception that itâs a ton of math and accounting and not very exciting, which I think we both know isnât accurate.
And how many people was that, and out of how many people?
Again, Eve Uni trains thousands of people, and is very effective at it. To the point that CCP saw such an increase in retention from Eve Uni members and graduates that they flirted with giving Eve Uni special privledges, though that was quite a number of years ago and Eve Uni informed them it was a bad idea and said âno thanksâ.
Where did I indicate that people applying to Eve Uni were quitting because of ganks or wars? Eve Uni doesnât have this problem, and it also doesnât have people quitting on being accepted either⌠
Fear, excitement, anxiety, these are all very related emotions and all cause a similar variety of effects. Itâs all about intensity, not really the emotion being experienced.
Iâve seen people tunnel vision on someone attacking them because of fear, or on someone theyâre attacking because of excitement. Similarly Iâve seen people get jumpy because itâs their first fleet and while I canât say for sure they were shaking, they definitely miss-clicked more than a few times.
Neither of these is part of the group likely to think that it got âfixedâ though, which is the smaller corps with few if any corp-level assets, who before these changes were pretty likely to be war-decâd more of the time than not, at least if they had anyone active near any major trade hub.
Then you should be more than familiar with the revolving series of wardecs that any corporation with active players could expect under the previous system (the one from around 2011 or 2012 to a year and a half ago).
Well, yeah, because itâs generally someone part of a specific segment trying to justify a change that they want to the game, because people have a hard time relating to people who arenât themselves and tend to over-estimate the number of people who are similar to themselves. Iâm pretty sure youâve been doing it in this thread.
In this case though Iâm trying not to do that. Iâm sharing my experiences and what I think CCPâs logic is, since Iâve come into contact with a larger and broader swath of the playerbase than most (at least non-F1 related contact anyways).
As I said, thereâs a line, and generally speaking itâs about how many people youâre going to lose vs how many you stand to gain. My strong supposition is that CCP saw a strong trend of people joining the game and either failing to find a corporation or joining one, the corp gets war decâd, and then the corp falls apart and the players leave the game. Since a lot of these corps are going to be too small or new to pay your merc fees thatâs not a solution.
Itâs possible CCPâs solution didnât help, but looking at the long-term trends in Eve Offline, and adjusting numbers down a few thousand PCU for COVID, it at least hasnât hurt things much. Optimistically it may have arrested a slide thatâs been going since the F2P launch in 2016, since barring the blackout drop and COVID numbers seem to be pretty stable year over year since the change.
It doesnât, until the game shuts down. Games need to change and evolve with the times if they want to keep an active and engaged playerbase.
Necessity might bring people together, but it wonât keep them together, and it wonât make them like it. If people arenât enjoying their game experience then they can just leave the game all together.
In short, what youâre advocating just doesnât work because a game that forces people who actively dislike each other to play together isnât likely to succeed. This is why most FPS games these days offer ways to mute chat entirely.
No, plenty of them want to fight, they just donât want to fight all the time. They want some control over their PvP beyond whatâs offered in Null. People are inherently risk averse, and if Eve didnât offer a graduated scale of risk vs reward it wouldnât be successful.
Iâm not sure what sort of corps youâre infiltrating, but I suspect itâs biasing your sample.
Back in my days in Eve Uni like half the war-time jokes were about over-enthusiastic and blood thirsty newbies.
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TLDR: Try being more concise. Thank you!
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:coughs in merc:
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When you think about both of those answers, neither is actually good for a new player to hear. One is too controlling, and the other too discouraging. Meanwhile, mentally preparing players for the worst will allow them to be pleasantly surprised when they find that their hardened skills and mental perspective actually enable them to survive and thrive.
Iâd say roughly a quarter to a third flip you the bird and uninstall on the spot.
And you said that they avoid this by essentially gaming the system. Open EVE-Uni up to wars full-time, and see how many quit because of them then, under the current training methodology.
Once again. all of those feelings are different from fear. Fear is what leads a player to avoid combat in the first place; being anxious or jumpy doesnât. Getting âthe shakesâ is linked directly to fear, specifically. Anyone who does dangerous, small-scale PvP is aware of this, because itâs something weâve all felt. Itâs an emotion we beat out of ourselves with exposure and philosophy. Meanwhile, I canât think of a single time I felt anything similar in big blob null-sec warfare.
See how your preceding reply answers the following one?
The reason why some corporations received revolving wars were two-fold:
- They expended no effort in order to present themselves as hard targets.
- They made mistakes such as living near hubs, visibly using autopilot, etc.
If what youâre saying were true, then corporations like my own wouldâve been getting wars too. But that never happened. Why is that?
So your stance is that itâs okay for nonconsensual PvP to keep getting nerfed until the game is dead? Or that you canât stop it from happening, so why even bother?
Hereâs a more important question for you: how much more do you personally think wars should be nerfed?
Why would they dislike each other? Given the choice to have military personnel in your corporation, you would opt not to if you didnât need them, and thatâs understandable. But to say that if you did need them, you would necessarily dislike them, is a pretty crazy argument to make, and really spits in the face of some of the best corporations that have existed in EVE over the years.
Seriously, think about what youâre saying: that PvE and PvP players hate each other so much, that they would rather quit the game than be grouped up, because just being within each otherâs presence as allies would make the game not fun for them.
Seriously?
No, they donât. Maybe you havenât played with these people? Go park yourself into a bona fide high-sec carebear corporation, and hang out on voice long enough to hear them talk about how âPvP griefers should just get cancer and die, they just make the world such a bad place for regular people like us.â
Youâre really looking at this through rose-tinted goggles, trying your best not to come to terms with the reality of the matter being that this game is full of people who shouldnât be playing it.
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War decs as they are meant to be played:
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Did you watch the prequal?
Aiko with sound effects!
Its like on baby difficulty or something.
If war decs were more specific rather then a blanket they would be more often used. Options like to declare war on all enemy corp members found in asteroid zones or be able to declare war within a certain radius of a system at a cheaper cost than current. Having a war sec just blanketing all has far to many negatives. Pirates will still be able to gank haulers en route to trade hubs or a high sec corps area of activity can be disrupted.etc.
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It makes no sense to assume that the silent majority does not wish to play the game for what it has to offer. They wouldnât be playing it, if it wasnât how it is. Itâs actually hard not knowing what EVE ONLINE is about, when someone tells you about it.
Weâre living in 2020 now. Itâs extremely unlikely that literally anyone who plays a PC game is unaware of the fact that the game has a forum or a subreddit. Pretty much everything has a forum/subreddit/discord nowadays. The 90s are 20+ years behind us.
Furthermore, whenever a game company fucks up bigtime, forums etc. are being flooded with complaints made by people who never before cared about posting simply because they had no â â â â â â â reason to do it. Itâs not an awareness thing, itâs an âiâm happy and have nothing to complain aboutâ thing.
Thereâs this phenomenon I canât find the term for. Itâs like when you watch the news, where they tell you about people who dislike something, creating the effect that people believe there must be a significant amount of people who dislike this something.
Fact of the matter is:
If the silent majority didnât approve, theyâd not be around.
Iâm summarizing, the actual way to put it is generally nicer, gentler, and more explanatory than âyou done f-d upâ, and it works just fine in my experience. The vast majority of people take those losses in stride, generally find themselves more than compensated by the generosity of the vets in the channel, and go on to learn from the mistake.
Some, obviously, donât. Thereâs been plenty of embarassing losses on Eve Uniâs killboard over the years.
The problem with your approach is that it doesnât have any of that nuance. Itâs one size fits all, and if it doesnât fit you then you never even sign up for the game. It has the same problem as the âspreadsheets in spaceâ perception the game is already struggling with.
Yeah thatâs way worse than Eve Uniâs attrition rate over the first month, let alone the initial application/acceptance.
I said they did back with âWar Decs V1 and V2â, Iâm not sure what theyâre doing these days, but probably something that takes advantage of these new mechanics.
And again, my guess would be not many would quit because Eve Uni is pretty adaptable and would find some way to accommodate the people who donât want to deal with war decs while learning things other than âhow to warsâ.
I mean, yeah you wouldnât, because then you have a thousand of your closest friends around you, and thatâs inherently comforting.
Anyways, Iâm happy to let this drop. We agree on the high level points here, weâre just debating semantics that I donât think really relate to the thread topic anymore.
Youâre almost right here, but not quite. You donât need to live near a trade hub, or use autopilot, to have been war-decâd. I once got one just because I flew through Niarja, and I lived way off in the arse end of High Sec. The war dec ran for a week or two and then expired because the guy didnât get any kills out of it. But I was, at that point, a quite old player and more than smart enough to check my mail, notice the war, ect.
I dunno, Iâm not familiar with your corporation. Possibly itâs because youâre a âhard targetâ, possibly you were just too small to bother with, or possibly you were just lucky. Most of the small corps I knew under the old system got war decâd at least once though.
I mean, the answer to the first two is âneitherâ. I think CCP has been nerfing problem spots, and non-consensual PvP is going to naturally end up as one of those because it is, by definition, asymmetrical, and simple economics says that itâs almost never going to be profitable to pay someone to defend you unless you have significant capital assets at stake, like say structures, as long as there are other ways of dealing with the war available, and people are quite clever when it comes to âother waysâ.
As to wars, I think the current system is actually pretty good. Iâm not here calling for more nerfs, though I do think if there are some exploits or loopholes in the current system they should be patched out.
I didnât quite say that, though I do get where you could get that from what I said and I apologize for the lack of clarity.
What I mean is that the more PvE focused players are generally unlikely to get along with the more PvP focused players because they have different focuses and interests in the game, and in my experience the two sides donât âgetâ each other very well. Case and point, the comments in this thread about âpeople find PvE fun!?!?â
Thatâs not to say that everyone is like this, but my point is that the players that are like this tend to end up in Null or Wormholes because they can get a much better return on their time out there, and an ability to get along with people who play the game differently is, to some extent, required in Null these days.
Thereâs a difference between âPvP griefersâ and âPvP in generalâ. Generally speaking when people talk about PvP griefing theyâre referring to people who are only looking, at least from the perspective of the person saying it, for an easy kill with little to no actual resistance.
Eve Uni got plenty of these people war-decing it over the years. They were generally the ones who suspiciously disappeared for a week or two every time they lost a ship, or even dropped the war after they found a hundred man Frigate Fleet chasing them around the trade hub.
Someone can hate âPvP griefersâ and still enjoy taking ships out into Low and Null on roams because then theyâre in a combat ship and looking for a fight.
Thatâs not to say there arenât people who think Eve should remove PvP, but theyâre in the extreme minority and generally live off in a dead-end High Sec system with a Level 4 agent, basically just enjoying the visuals of the game and watching their wallet go up.
Iâm speaking from my personal experiences here, which are that a lot of different people can play and enjoy Eve. As well as some observations on the changes CCP have made to support some of those people that you would see excluded and driven out. To me you seem to be doing your best to disregard CCP clearly indicating that they disagree with your take on âwho should be playing the gameâ.
In EVE-Uni, maybe, but not out in the wild, where most of them either get no guidance at all, or even worse, get guidance from bottom-feeding, no-skill carebear corporation CEOs.
Some of those people will quit soon anyway. Where do you think Hulk-mining or deadspace-CNR-missioning bears come from? Theyâre those exact people, who just happened to stay in the game past their original expiration date, like a cup of yogurt lost in the back of the fridge.
Itâs the first one, and only the first one. Even small corporations get wars, if they provide incentive to attackers.
Carebears hurt themselves with their own ignorance. Then donât understand that in order to get much less violence done against them, all they have to do is spend some time learning to understand it, and showing that theyâre not afraid to use it. Itâs like some kind of convoluted misinterpretation of the sunk cost fallacy.
Is it? Wars have been reduced to attacking cheap structures while the other side is asleep.
Oh, no. They use that term as a catch-all to describe anything with regard to player combat. Maybe you just havenât experienced itâŚ
Try sitting in one of those corporations yourself, as I suggested earlier.
Theyâre not the minority anymore, and havenât been in about ten yearsâŚ
CCP has been doing a mighty fine job of disagreeing with their own take on who should be playing the game. âEVE isnât for everyoneâ isnât a phrase that I invented; they did.
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hIgH sEc NeEdS mOrE wArDeCs. 