It would be really handy if one could link a skill to a specific fitting in such a way that when the ‘skill trained’ message comes up one doesn’t have try to remember what one trained that skill for in the first place.
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The newcomes won’t have any clue about the past, they will see what’s ahead of them and how they will keep the account going
My narrative fits really well with the player drop after May and questions the newbros ask in the Rookie Channel almost everyday
Questions like:
-If I sub for a month can I still fly this ship?
This tells us that the account maintenance is in their minds
I think I exposed my view on the matter
I spilled all that because I worry that people start making plans about butchering EVE before considering the topic of account maintenance
I’m not going back to the thread unless people call me (which won’t happen at all)
Certain games offer people permanent unlocks by paying for a subscription once, in order to make the first taste more tempting.
It’s no surprise that people wonder if EVE offers such unlocks as well.
EVE is not such a game, every Alpha pilot is equal and ‘Ex-Omega’ players have no ingame advantage over other Alpha players.
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yes i have 156 accounts…less than 10% are omega though. Lucas i guess has more than that and they are all omega according to him.
I don’t at all support any form of PvE only protection in Eve. If someone really wants to gank you, they should be able to. If you’re willing to pay the cost (literally) it’s absolutely legitimate gameplay (and warfare/competition).
What I would like to see, and what seems to be coming, is for ganking to have a bit more of a risk/reward calculation. At the moment you know the cost of any gank and it’s basically a question of numbers. Does the cost of the Catalysts/Tornados outweigh the average loot drop of the target (based on cargo or fit). Those ships are sufficiently inexpensive that it’s pretty easy to turn a profit ganking with virtually no risk.
From leaked changes in the works it looks like CCP are going to take two approaches to addressing this gameplay, essentially increasing the cost, and pricing some opportunity targets out of the ganking market, so to speak, and also removing the ability for alpha accounts to be used to circumvent the security status/standings aspect of committing crimes in high sec space.
I know they won’t be popular with everyone but I think they’ll probably help with player retention in high sec. I don’t think they’re terrible changes. It’s important that players feel that their goals are achievable and that they can’t be undone completely by someone who only has to put in only trivial effort. It’s also important that PvE players are exposed to the threat of PvP and that sometimes it comes knocking and steals their lunch money, especially if their choices lead to compound their personal risk (by just piling on more and greater bling, for example).
If you really want to, you can still gank anyone you want to - the consequences being cost and status - both of which can be recovered.
We hear this every time ganking is nerfed. Every time it happens, it’s “finally being fixed” so that there is “finally risk for gankers.”
How many more times?
Can we just have the final destination nerf already that completes the job of balancing ganking so that it finally has the “appropriate” amount of risk and reward? Because we all know this isn’t the last time it’s happening, so why act like this time it’s finally the change that brings the required amount of balance?
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The irony is, Lucas is totally against ‘P2W’, yet I cannot believe anyone is actually literally paying the £2000 a month it would take to pay all those subscriptions. So there must be PLEX-ing going on, and that totally relies on P2W people actually buying PLEX.
It would be interesting to see if there’s a difference between the numbers PLEXing for PvE vs those PLEXing for PvP. This is surely something that would affect a ‘PvP Only’ region of space.
Yeah I totally get that frustration. I don’t think raising the cost incrementally forever is a sustainable approach either - and pissing off the gankers to the point they give up entirely and quit is no healthier for the game either. Mission runners (of which I am one from time to time) also can’t just be left alone to get fat the slow way around - which is ■■■■ for the economy and also isn’t gonna hold anyone’s interest indefinitely.
I don’t think the leaked changes really protect the average bling marauder, though. It feels to me like it’s more directed at preventing ganking miners for sport. But what do I know about what CCP are thinking?
Do they know?
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It’s not enough in my opinion, no.
@Io_Koval
I have acknowledged people’s claim that it shrinks the sandbox, I just don’t agree. I’ve not harangued people for having that view, I’ve not called them ignorant and I’ve not claimed they aren’t making a point. Conversely I’ve expressed my opinions and Ms Zemara has done all those things to me.
It’s fine for us to have opposite opinions and it doesn’t make either side wrong, it doesn’t make either side ignorant, it doesn’t mean either side should be silenced and it doesn’t mean either side should leave the game.
There is nothing for you to disagree about. The size of a sandbox is determined by the diversity and rich kinds of interactions that players can use to interact with each other. It is not based on player count. Your position is fundamentally about removing kinds of player interactions in high sec. This is literally shrinking it. There’s nothing to disagree about here.
This is why I make allegations about you arguing in bad faith: you overly-rely upon the civil language of “I acknowledge you believe what you said, but I disagree” to really and truly insidiously dismiss the other side’s points and craft a faux air of “debate”. You’re not debating, no matter how nicely you put it.
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I’d wager they make no difference whatever to people leaving. I’ve even looked up corp leavers from our corp, a good statistical source of data, and found that only a small percent were ever ganked ( note…these are all cases where a Concord notice of biomassing is issued…not just random ’ oh, I think someone may have left’ ). Most people seem to leave within the first week…despite getting free implants ( which I myself obtain in bulk from Jita ) and despite a corp promise of free mining ships and free combat ships, and safe mining fleets. These people are not leaving because they were blapped !
My guess is that many just find the learning curve too steep, or the grinding too boring.
Absolutely not.
There are many issues to this approach, a few are pretty easy to see:
- Omega costs just went up to keep this game afloat, without adding the service and maintenance costs of an entirely new cluster and then dealing with the potentially very divergent outcomes of world changing events such as the Triglavian invasion. It multiplies CCPs costs.
- It will split the playerbase over two separate instances of the game, diluting both. Weakening the economy of both, reducing production in both, and reducing active players at any given time in both. Basically, in a game which is suffering because of a reduced paying player base it would dramatically further reduce that player base - potentially below the critical mass that maintains available gameplay.
- What would be the incentive for PvE Hi-Sec players to play in the existing instance? How would the existing instance function without its veldspar and isk faucet? Conversely why would PvP player play in the new instance when they can’t even prosecute their primary gameplay in 25% of all systems?
The anticipated changes absolutely very heavily affect the ganking of moving targets (e.g. transiting freighters and marauders, marauders active in mission sites, etc.), and do very little to protect static targets like miners.
Also, many gankers absolutely will quit over these changes, as they already said they would, because the amount of coordination it will require to pull off ganks even on AFK targets and without AG interference will be extreme, on top of yet again needing even more additional accounts to ensure everything runs as smoothly as possible.
I think you’re right about new players, most likely - but a large part of the recent drop in players must be longer term players. It’s not just churn - especially in an older game. The rate of change has altered significantly.
If it were only new player churn, average numbers would be more or less stable.
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So there’s nothing for me to disagree with, as long as I accept your definitions? The problem is that I don’t.
I think forced PvP removes player options as well as pushes out players and that fewer options and fewer players leads to decreased activity and decreased “diversity” anyway. Having a large variety of players is what creates diverse content in a sandbox. Declaring that anyone that doesn’t play like you should leave, or that the game shouldn’t cater to large demographics of gamers isn’t a way to grow or even maintain the size of the sandbox.
I will absolutely defer to your greater personal experience on this.
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These players you’re talking about have numerous kinds of ways to interact with the universe to address whatever “options” were removed for them. The response is for those individuals to buckle up and quit being a victim, just like everyone else.
The path is not remove kinds of interactions for everyone – driving out existing players who do use those interactions – and shelter those individuals who weren’t going to do those actions anyway.
It’s very clear you only care about one kind of player and only one and want to give them preferential treatment. The rest of us treat all players equally by making all options equally accessible.
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Bear in mind that people are often looking at concurrency, and concurrency is simply not the same thing as ‘number of active players’. One could have the exact same number of players logging in for less time, on average, and the concurrency would go down.
What’s more, we have no real idea what new players gravitate into…whether it be PvE or PvP or mining or business. So we have no idea whether increased PvE opportunity would even retain more players. I would like to think that PvE events draw in new players who end up doing PvP as well. That would be good…and might even make a PvE specific area worthwhile. The trouble is that a lot of arguments here are simply based on what people assume…and there’s a complete lack of real data to support.
This was in response to him saying that there should be a zero PvP server, so costs would be the same.
As for splitting the playerbase and moving highsec players, yeah, that’s the point I was getting at. Griefers like to say “lets have a PvE only server and watch people get bored” because it’s a deliberately unplayable scenario, a server with only production and no destruction.
But when you suggest a server with highsec combat limited to consenting PvP they don’t want that. The reason is that they know it would be popular and likely it would be more popular than the original server once all the PvE players who refuse to play EVE because of the griefing pile into it.
I don’t actually think a new PvE only server or a new safe highsec server is the right approach, I think they should restrict highsec PvP on the existing server