Don’t forget yachts 
Fair, I actually missed that bit, but I stand by my point. If I really want to get a scout through that gate camp I can throw one cloaky and six or ten cheap frigates through it, or have some kind of pre-arranged safe spot off the gate that’s not in the direction they’re bubbling, or find a wormhole, or just wait until there isn’t a camp on that gate and then go through.
Intis can’t even light Cynos anymore, so it’s not like they can get the rest of the fleet through to them.
Sure, but even if this was removed there are ways to deal with what you’re describing, and they’re not that hard. Meta MWD on a T1 frig for one. Sure maybe you don’t get away the first time, but if you jump a bunch through at once most of them will unless you have a lot of people, and if they’re really determined they could just smash your camp.
And yeah that’s potential content, but you’re not set up for a real fight (as far as I can tell from your example) and would probably run from an actual threat to your gang, and if you do successfully block people from jumping around then those people won’t get to be part of the other content, which is the fights they’re running to.
Sure you could argue that your tactics should be rewarded, but I’m not sure that’s more fun for everyone than the current state of things.
Exactly! See? Nullification isn’t necessary!
See!? Yes!
Yes! All these things!
Yeah, I think we just have slightly different views on what the game is about: you think of it in terms of “it’s a game, it shouldn’t demand too much effort and it should be fun!” I think of it as a sort of simulation of total war in which the party that best allocates strategic resources should be rewarded.
In fairness to me I feel like there are other areas of EVE gameplay (highsec, lowsec) that are better-used to serve the purposes you’re describing: for example, any sub-2 second ship is effectively un-tackleable in lowsec, but that doesn’t bother me so much because it’s lowsec, and the stakes are intended to be lower there: there’s no conquerable space, there are fewer valuable resources, you can’t bubble or bomb or build supercaps or any of these other things. It’s meant to be consequences-lite, a place where players can experiment with risk if they want to in return for relatively modest rewards.
I just think the risk-mitigation should end when you hit 0.0. Nullsec is meant to be a lawless frontier where your choices matter. You’re right, of course: for the most part, me and my ten friends aren’t equipped to handle a fleet or even a large gang coming to break up our gatecamp. But that’s guerrilla war for you: while we can’t expect to prevail in a stand-up fight, I think it is reasonable to expect that a small group of people who know what they’re doing should be able to pick off lone players. And as you pointed out: it’s not like that’s unfair-- there’s absolutely multiple avenues for counter-play. The defender can wait you out, they could make repeated attempts in disposable ships, they could try their luck in a fast interceptor or covert-ops frigate (like I did), or they could move in convoy or simply break up our gatecamp / counter-camp. The insulting thing is, we already have to contend with every one of these strategies-- all of which involve a lot of man-hours and general un-fun on our part. There’s nothing fun about being repeatedly hotdropped or having supercaps and HAW dreads stationed on the gates you’re trying to camp, but it’s at least a fair counter-play that someone on the other side also has to invest time and money in (the time aspect being most important IMHO): if they stop, you go back to killing things. Interceptors don’t cost anyone time or money: they’re dirt cheap, easy to supply, and don’t require any time or effort to utilize to great effect. They’re just too easy.
I get it. People want to get to fights. Of course they want to get to fights. I’m sure everyone on all sides of a fight also want to win that fight, but not everyone can get what they want all the time. Unless we want nullsec “content” to go back to the pre-arranged, consensual, grudge-free sparring matches that we’ve seen for years and years now in times of peace, the game needs mechanisms that reward increased commitment to a total war effort. There must be consequences in these conflicts. That means that if I and my friends set out to make your lives as miserable as possible and you’re not prepared to organize any kind of response, we should be able to tear you to pieces. If an entity is unwilling or unable to organize a defense of their space, their members should die alone and in misery. If that means that they don’t bother logging in for the next day’s strategic ops, so be it: that means the game is working as intended. Nullsec wars are meant to be total wars: wars of attrition. You don’t generally win a nullsec campaign based on superior tactical handling of an engagement: you win by slowly grinding away your opponent’s will to resist. When enough line members become too discouraged, or too poor to replace their losses, that side folds. That, IMO, is what separates nullsec from other parts of the game, and it’s what separates EVE from other MMOs: nullsec internet spaceships are serious business, and there’s no place for casual “I win” buttons in total war.
I don’t think bubble immunity on a small/cheap ship is required anymore like it was back when the idea was conceived. There used to be insane bubble gates that secured a pocket for weeks and months (can’t recall there being a timer on anchored bubbles), so you needed inties to even get a point on what’s on the other side.
Stationary bubbles have become a rare sight apart from 1-2 bubbles currently in-use by the ladies and gents camping the gate, but that’s about it. Certainly wouldn’t say the mechanic is overused to the point of necessitating the existence of nullified frigates.
Could be argued that lone players are dependent upon those mechanics to safely carry their BPOs worth many billions around, which they otherwise likely couldn’t do safely at all. But that also raises the question how ‘safe’ nullsec production and logistics have to be exactly.
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You may have a cause/effect problem here. When bubbles worked, people used them. Now that people have a workaround that turns bubbles into mere space decorations, the bubbles are less common. If you got rid of the interceptor nullification, bubbles would become effective again, so . . .
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I don’t think these two things are mutually exclusive here. The difference is that I view the mechanics as the rules around which that war has to be based. You could make, and people have made, the argument that jump drives make logistics too easy and hard to disrupt, and that it should be made harder. CCP, rather clearly, disagrees having made it easier over the last several years.
I believe something about the fraying sanity of logistics operators was noted at several points.
There will always be risk, and mechanics and decisions that mitigate that risk. The difference is the impact those mechanics have on gameplay.
Right, sure, but lets look at this from a gameplay standpoint.
If I’m forming up a fleet, and put out a call for players, then if there’s no easy way to get there I, as the FC, need to push all my players to be at the staging point, organize travel in groups, enforce discipline, ect.
All of this is hard work, and not actually that much fun for either side of the equation.
The FC will burn out faster the more little details he has to manage, and while in real life he’d have a massive staff to handle things for him this is a game and the number of people willing to do these sorts of things is finite. See previous comment about crispy-fried Logistics Officers.
On the other side the members now have extra hurdles to jump over to get to the actual fight, which is the fun bit for all involved. To simplify somewhat, this turns it into a case of either you disrupt all the rest of your gameplay to make sure you’re in position ahead of time, which may mean you don’t actually play for some time ahead of this. Or, you have to schedule your real life stuff around making a form-up time for the move so that you don’t get picked off by harassing gate camps.
Neither of these is particularly hard. Null survived with just these sorts of tactics for ages, and it was pretty rare that harassment like yours could be said to have made a major difference in a battle.
The difference is in the player feeling around this stuff, and the enjoyment that they get out of it.
There’s three things here that I want to sort of pick at a bit…
First, your ability or inability to camp gates or jump bridge nodes doesn’t mean you can’t make your enemy’s lives miserable, it just means this one method doesn’t work so well.
It also doesn’t mean that an unprepared enemy is going to win unless you’re equally unprepared in some way. I’ve said it for years, every time someone’s asked for some wonder-mechanic to make small groups able to fight off big ones, that’s not how things work. When David beats Goliath it has, in historical terms, always been because Goliath has made some serious error.
The problem with your chain of logic here is that, to a certain extent, someone simply ceasing to log in is a fail condition from the game creators’ perspective. CCP wants these conflicts to have meaning, but they also don’t want them to drive people completely out of the game, because that’s bad for the game in the long run.
It’s far better if the road to winning or losing is fun for everyone so that when one side loses they can do something like go off to High, Low, or NPC Null, dust themselves off, and start rebuilding.
So, my supposition here, is that CCP has found that allowing people to move themselves around relatively quickly and easily is better in this respect than the alternative, because dying alone to a 10 man gate camp isn’t particularly fun for either side. You get a tiny hit of satisfaction, the person on the other side gets the feeling of whacking their head into a brick wall. The net “fun” generated is, I suspect, negative, and allowing someone to just get themselves down to a fight isn’t really going to materially affect the war if there’s no ship for them to use when they get there.
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First of all, I just want to say thank you for reading and making awesome posts. I’m really, geuninely enjoying our back-and-forth.
I totally hear you on this notion, and I think nullsec logistics gameplay makes a great case-study in the influence of “quality of life” improvements in long-term meta / game mechanic shifts. You’re 100% correct that a lot of people-- including a lot of people who worked in alliance logistics and had extensive, first-hand experience with the misery of managing nullsec logistics-- lobbied very hard to streamline these processes and reduce burnout. Goonswarm in particular had a few leading voices in these pushes.
I understand where people are coming from: logistics stuff certainly isn’t what most people would call “fun.” But at the end of the day I also feel like there’s a fundamental disconnect between what people say they want to do (or not do) in the game and what’s healthy for the game. To stick with nullsec logistics as an example, I’ve definitely been affected by CCP’s changes over the years: when I started playing EVE, jump freighters were not a thing and POS were used for both sovereignty control and industry. While I never worked for an alliance-level logistics organization, I did maintain my own network of moon-mining and reaction POSes (often spread across multiple nullsec systems). I also spent a lot of time shooting at and defending POSes, as well as supporting friendly logistics operations by flying in escort fleets (back when you needed to actually escort regular freighters around to accomplish stuff).
CCP’s changes to nullsec logistics (introduction of JFs, decoupling sovereignty from POS with the Dominion expansion, drastically reducing POS mod anchoring times, simplifying fueling by introducing fuel-blocks, and finally just replacing POS’s functions with Upwell structures) have definitely minimized the burden on alliance logistics departments and line-members alike: logisticians simply have a lot less to do (far fewer structures required, configuration vastly simplified), and things like pre-set, fire-and-forget reinforcement timing mechanics mean that apart from defensive gunning, and the occasional (simplified) fueling, structures don’t require much tending-to. For line members, POS shoots are a thing of the past: this means way fewer timers to contest (some systems under POS warfare had like fifty moons, each of which became its own battlefield), less time spent bashing structures, and less investment required to contest sov (entosis links can go on almost anything, DPS-caps mean no requirement to bring large or expensive fleets to deal with structures).
If we base an analysis on people’s complaints, all these mechanics changes sound like improvements. But as someone who actually played through all these eras, I don’t feel my EVE experience has improved overall as a result of these changes. Yes: admittedly EVE has become less demanding. Setting up reactions in an Upwell structure is orders of magnitude less effort than building and operating a series of reaction POS used to be. And anyone can do it: you don’t need to compete for moons anymore. Sov warfare is so much easier: you don’t need to buy an expensive ship, there are way fewer things to do, the timers are fewer and more predictable, etc. Never have I ever had to fleet up with fifty other people multiple times per week to do long, boring freighter escort ops. Heck, even small-gang PvP is-- in some ways-- easier: I know I’ve been complaining about the inefficacy of gatecamping in the interceptor era, but on the whole it’s literally never been easier to get big, shiny killmails in nullsec. Where before I used to have to put a bunch of effort into lurking about in expensive faction cruisers or HACs, today all one needs to do is show up, hop in a stealth bomber, and wait for someone to spoonfeed “content” to you in the form of a covert cyno on some unfortunate ratting ship.
But like I said, I don’t feel like these improvements have improved my overall experience as a player. IMHO with every major QoL improvement, EVE just gets less interesting and engaging. I feel like the less the game demands from me-- be it in terms of time required to fiddle with own projects, or time demanded by my alliance to participate in strategic stuff-- the more time I spend sitting on my hands, wishing for something to do. Less logistics work required = fewer things I need to do to make money. The simplification also means that a handful of dedicated logisticians can now simply handle alliance logistics solo: there’s no need for line members like me to be involved anymore. Nobody pings for a freighter escort op. Nobody asks me to donate my time helping to anchor POS mods. Nobody needs to show up to rep incapped POS guns in preparation for the next strat op. The massive simplification and de-escalation of stakes in sov wars means fewer skirmishes are fought, and the engagements that do happen do so in cheap, disposable ships that nobody really cares about.
This is getting way too long, so to summarize, I guess: the more casual-friendly CCP make the game, the more they dilute the game’s stakes. I know people complained at length about the time investment required for _____ fill in the blank. But I think the thing people have lost sight of is that it was precisely this toiling and misery that created the stakes for nullsec gameplay. There is a reason that conflicts between alliances back in, say, 2007 were absolute no-holds-barred hell-war grudge matches: whether you were the aggressor or the defender, a lot of people had to absolutely pour their hearts and souls into their side’s efforts. The amount of time and effort people used to devote to this game were truly wild: I recall days during our first war with BoB in the south where I’d spend literally 20-30 hours at a time just FCing small gangs used to harass the enemy between strategic timers. Sometimes there’d be so much round-the clock activity that you’d have things to do all day long within a single star system as part of the endless tug-of-war of the POS grind-- the hostiles start to log in and sneak outside their POS shields to rep guns, time to form a skirmish fleet to push them back in. Etc.
Nowadays, it’s totally commonplace to spend hours every day sitting around waiting for something-- anything-- to happen. During the biggest war New Eden has seen for years, I’m sitting in hostiles’ primary staging systems and there’s nothing happening at all that’s interactable: JFs, caps, and supers cyno onto Keepstars (sometimes we kill the cynos, every once in a while there’s that idiot that jumps their JF to a cyno beacon). Interceptors trickle in and out. Freighters and T2 haulers warp back and forth between citadels and industrial facilities (but on the same grid, so the only way anyone gets caught is if they’re literally blind). If you’re a really lucky boi, someone might take a (probably stabbed) Epithal out for a PI run. Small gangs of equally-bored locals might undock and try to harass you if you kill a hauler, or might proactively camp their own system’s gates because they have nothing better to do. The whole game just has this miasma of toxic inactivity to it: like everyone’s just sitting around, spinning ships, waiting for “content” to be spoonfed to them. Half the time I can’t even persuade people in my own group-- one theoretically predicated on small-gang guerrilla warfare-- to come out and even try to harass anybody: if it’s not a capital kill being handed to them on a silver platter, they’re not interested.
Again, I more or less agree with most of what you’ve articulated here: it’s absolutely possible for people to surmount challenges posed by gatecamping with a little organization. That definitely puts some additional demands on players and their FCs. Yes, it may cause accelerated burnout (although I don’t agree that we can equate being “burned out” on a campaign or not logging in for a few stratops to quitting the game: I don’t think most people who got frustrated once because their fleet ship got ganked before they could reach a fleet op straight up quit– even if their coalition lose a big war, they probably don’t quit the game-- they go somewhere else and join another entity). The only place I disagree with you is on the notion of, “What’s fun.” What’s fun for who? Yeah, plenty of people want gudfites (a big fleet fight where they can show up and dunk). Everyone wants the killmails, and most people want to do as little as possible in order to get them. But EVE wasn’t built just to cater to people who want dank frags. Some people want the frags, other people just want to solo-play and earn money, or build things. Other people like to uboat.
I don’t think CCP need to design the game solely to cater to the gudfites crowd. Maybe I’m just too old, but I don’t understand people’s obsession with casual gameplay. I especially don’t understand it in EVE, which is possibly the least casual-friendly game ever devised. There’s a whole marketplace of e-sports-like games for people who just want to log in for an hour or two and blow each other up-- I don’t see why EVE increasingly tries to cater to that kind of audience when the game is like fundamentally not aligned with that kind of gameplay: not only does casual play kind of fly in the face of the game’s foundational philosophy, the game engine can’t even cater to that kind of action effectively due to technical limitations.
IDK. I’m getting too tired to continue writing. I hope any of this has made any sense.
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If casual means “an hour or two,” how long do you think a typical (non-casual) Eve playsession should be?
All I know is that when I sit down to play EVE, it usually ends up being at least 3-4 hours, often significantly longer. Four to six hours might be a decent median time for me? IDK. Even if I just log in for a casual hotdrop fleet (about the lowest effort or commitment thing you can do), it’s usually at least 1-2 hours just for that fleet. At the long end of things, some days I’ll just be logged in all day-- shall we say something like 10AM to midnight? I’ll take breaks where I leave the computer of course, and lots of the time I’ll just be keeping an eye on my clients in the background while I do other things, but it’s not uncommon for me to run clients basically all day long.
I’m not suggesting that everyone needs to play this long. But I also don’t think the game should be designed to enable people to successfully prosecute nullsec total wars on a casual gamimg basis where you can log in for 45 minutes like its a League of Legends match. Half the reason that I do the guerrilla warfare stuff that I do is that I found it difficult to accommodate mainfleet ops: I don’t have a predictable enough schedule, and even under a best-case scenario ops tend to be centered outside my timezone, usually beginning before I get home from work and wrapping up just about the time I can log in. So I found another way to contribute to the war effort, where I can log in and ~twist the knife~ on my own schedule. Mainfleet ops aren’t (or at least, weren’t) the only way you can participate in a war.
Thanks to you as well sir. It’s always a pleasure to have a civil and informed debate over stuff like this
This I 100% agree with. The trick is that this particular axiom cuts in every direction. What any of us thinks is good for the game may not be supported by evidence, and barring some very basic statistics CCP are the only ones with access to that information.
For example login rewards feel really dumb for many people, but they’re actually quite effective at motivating people to play a game regularly.
I mean, personally I think they all were improvements, and not all of them were done for logistics reasons. This one I want to specifically call out, because while I wasn’t out in Null during this era I have a very vivid memory of being on coms with someone (can’t remember if it was Eve Uni or Incursions) who was at that moment also on another coms for a dread fleet that was burning through an entire system of POSes and had been for hours.
That was, I think, the main memory most people have from this era.
Sure, in theory every POS could be contested, but in practice that almost never happened. You got, at best, a little harassment and lost a Cyno ship or two, and the big fight was over one POS and things pivoted around that engagement. The POS spam was basically just a way to make your enemies bored out of their skulls for daring to invade your space.
There’s something I want to grab onto here. “Time required” and “toil and misery” are two different things. 4-6 hours spent shooting essentially abandoned POSes with timers is “toil and misery”, that same amount of time spent in a pitched fleet engagement is fun content (TIDI not withstanding some days…)
And I do agree with you that some of the small-scale “stuff to do” has been a casualty of these improvements, and if you want to propose changes, or better yet additions, of stuff to drive smaller scale fights I’d be more than happy to support that. I don’t think it needs to be exactly the same sort of stuff we saw previously though. POS Gun repping drove some fun content, but that does’t mean we should just make Upwell structures able to be disabled piecemeal to try and bring that content back.
Yes, and there are some great stories out of that era, but also… how many of the people from that era are still around? And how many of those people left for months or years long breaks from the game after those conflicts because they burnt out?
And I’m not saying that a little difficulty directly caused anyone to quit the game, but I think too much of certain types of difficulty eventually get people wondering why they’re even playing, and that’s when they quit. Or when the game no longer fits into their life anymore because it’s so demanding.
Alarm-clock fleets are fun for a while when you’re in your 20s, but when you’re in your 30s with a job and family you start to look a little crazy to the people around you and the toll on your body becomes less worthwhile.
Which sorta brings me to this.
There are different ways a game can be “casual friendly” and I think Eve is trying to be more “casual friendly” in terms of time investment required for a given play session. The playerbase is getting older, and people with careers can’t really afford 1-2 hours of prep just to get to the shooty-bits because they might only have a couple of hours to play total on a given week night.
I know I’m pretty much in that position myself, which is why Eve has been on my back burner for a few years. Even if all I want to do is a bit of group PvE in Incursions I need to move ships around, and if I’m only doing it a couple of times a week I need to do it more or less every time.
I’m not saying they need to cater to the “gudfite” crowd. Definitely not. But I don’t necessarily think shortening that loop between log-in and “shoot something” is that bad.
That also doesn’t mean that I think your issues around sitting on your hands are good either. That sort of thing has as much potential to wreck the game for people as 200-POS bash sessions did back in the day.
Toward that end, have you considered organizing small-scale structure bashes with your group? It really doesn’t take that many people to reinforce an Astrahaus, and if your enemies are using them as logistics waypoints then you can have a significant impact on their logistics by reinforcing them, and if you time it right then they’ll have trouble defending them all at once. That’ll take more than 10 people, but it may be effective.
Now I also think there’s more stuff that should be made available for smaller groups, but I’m not sure what that is, and I think it should be smaller scale on both sides of the equation. CCP haven’t done very much with Small class structures, remember the Astra is a Medium, so that’s a potential option.
And yes, good post, I think you made a lot of good points!
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I feel like this was definitely true towards the end of the POS warfare system, after strategic campaigns were min-maxed to death and the meta had reached its final evolution. In the beginning, people’s approach had been to build the nastiest, most heavily-gunned POSes they could in order to deter or slow assaults by taking out as many attacking dreadnoughts as possible (we called these, “Death Star POSes”). These POS were great content generators in their day because they could only be attacked by large remote-repairing battleship fleets or dread fleets. They also had tons of external modules (guns, ewar, neuting batteries, etc) which needed to be incapped by attackers and repaired by defenders. These POS were quite exciting to fight over. Eventually, though, as people gained ISK and SP and dreadnoughts became more prevalent, POS reached a point where even Death Stars were comically out-gunned by attacking forces with dreads numbering in the hundreds. By the end, people (us-- Goons) figured out that a more efficient way of slowing or deterring attackers was simply to erect what became known as “Dick Stars”-- large Caldari POS full of internal shield resistance mods with little to no armament. These POS simply had absurd levels of EHP: they weren’t designed to be actively defended, but rather to simply inconvenience enemies by eating up tons of siege cycles. They were easy to build (few mods to anchor) and didn’t require massive repair operations between assaults since there were few mods outside the shields and the ones that were deployed (if any) were of little importance.
Anyway, historical anecdote aside: I feel like the same continues to be true of Citadels and will probably be true for most any set of sov-related structures. The vast majority of citadels destroyed thusfar in Fountain and nearby lowsec systems have been un-contested, with only some of the Keepstars seeing any kind of significant, active defense. People are loath to fight things out when they’re significantly outnumbered and the stakes are not high. And it’s not just Goons: when we invaded Tribute (I think it was Tribute-- I was deployed elsewhere), NCdot neglected to mount any serious defense of their structures. Hard to blame the parties involved for their strategic choices when game design has all but ensured people will lack any kind of logical reason to contest things.
Not wrong. The new sov system has failed us again in this regard, though: it’s not like sov-wanding is a more exciting mechanic than shooting POS. At least POS gave people a chance to fight for top damage on killmails with their dreads
Honestly I would love to work on CCP’s game design team and try to address these content deficits. At one point I started writing a series of articles for INN about an alternative sov system-- I had the first two or three big articles written but gave up when the initial article had almost zero interaction. Generally I feel like pontificating about specific changes is incredibly futile: CCP don’t even listen to feedback they solicit that’s addressing specific features they’re proposing, much less more general commentary on issues they haven’t chosen to address. My basic idea centered around a return to hitpoint / damage-based sov gameplay that would somewhat resemble POS warfare, but where sov would be determined by Upwell structures on planets rather than POS on moons (thus reducing by an order of magnitude the sheer number of structures involved).
Since we’re not game designers employed by CCP, maybe I’ll just move along and point out a gameplay element that I think stands out as a content creator-- if an imperfect one: FLEX structures. While it’s sort of become a running joke that all TAPI have been able to do in this week’s war is occasionally reinforce jump bridges, I genuinely think JBs are generating more content than just about any other sov-related structures in the game right now. The implementation is not perfect: I fundamentally hate the idea of damage caps since it actively encourages people to attack in the cheapest, most inconsequential gang compositions. I hate the stupid gimmick mechanics like the fact that the structures point you every time you begin attacking them (??? where did this paradigm even come from???), the fact that the structures have three hitpoint layers but only one reinforcement timer (I like the one timer, but why have three layers? Why not only have armor and hull? Why?), and the fact that they auto-repair (I think the whole mechanic of automatic repairing is garbage across all structures-- there’s just no reason for that mechanic to exist. If people are just pinging some damage onto your structures to trigger alerts and annoy you, that damage will repair itself courtesy of shields automatically regenerating slowly over time. If they’re doing enough damage to get to the armor and hull layers, that’s a serious assault that should require player intervention to un-do). But-- all this said-- I think it’s awesome that CCP created a struture that’s useful enough that people value it, fragile enough that it can be contested without necessarily causing a fleet battle, and short-lived enough (only one, short reinforcement timer) that it can function as a frequently-recurring source of content. It’s definitely a decent proof of concept: that if you implement objectives of varying sizes, people will show up to contest them. If they’d make some that triggered fights more interesting than destroyer slap fights, that would be even better.
Couldn’t agree more-- I did a lot of round-the-clocking in my 20’s, am now early 30’s and don’t really have the stomach for fleet ops anymore. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t younger people ready to take my place-- anecdotally there seem to be plenty of EVE players who are younger and relatively new to the game. They can do the alarm clocks-- it’s just CCP have decided not to ask them to.
Its inevitable that people’s lives will change, and some people will have less time for EVE than others. I’m one of those people (it’s part of why I almost exclusively focus on small-gang stuff now). But I think it’s a mistake to try and twist the game in various directions just to try and retain those same players indefinitely in the same roles. It’s OK for life to change and for fleet fights not to work out for you anymore. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other people who’d take up that mantle. There may come a day when I don’t even have time for group play at all: if that happens, maybe I’ll run off and solo PvP. Maybe I’ll quit nullsec and do lowsec or highsec stuff. Maybe I’ll focus on production or exploration instead of PvP. I don’t know what I’ll do, but I feel like EVE would be a healthier place if other people still had hell-wars.
We usually find things to do: we’ll go hotdropping (I could do a whole separate rant on how overpowered covert drops feel still, and how it manages to provide big kills but also is one of the most boring things I’ve ever done and I feel like it’s poor game design that’s unfortunately still necessary to preserve some kind of balance due to other isntances of equally-poor game design), or if we can’t even find targets for that, we’ll sometimes go attempt to stir the pot by reinforcing FLEX structures. We try and keep ourselves busy. Tonight we joined some Stain locals on a Tornado fleet and spent an hour and a bit slowly sniping a TAPI battleship fleet to pieces as they attempted to kill some Athanors. They had about twice our numbers but couldn’t keep up with the harassment and finally gave up: it was fun.
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I believe they also tended to have neuts and/or EWar as well, but yeah. Basically just frustration generators.
The game moved on though, and it wasn’t going to go back to how things used to be because people found “better” ways to deal with attacking enemies.
Sure, but at least now you can split up a large fleet and it won’t take you 6-8 hours to deal with everything, it’ll just take 1-2, unless the enemy actually shows up in which case there’s some content to stave off the boredom.
I don’t think there’s anything that can really be done about this. If all the stakes are high then none of them are, because all of this is relative, and if you limit structures to one per system (or something) then people will find ways to abuse that too.
Yeah, but it’s also kinda hard, for me at least, to blame the game design either. As I said above if all the stakes are high then none of them are. If I have a Carrier hull in every structure then I don’t care if I lose one, because I’ve got tons more.
Also it’s hard to blame people for not fighting a losing battle. Losing is rarely fun unless you can make a really good fight out of that loss, and creating mechanics that do that and aren’t abusable on the scales Eve works in is really hard. Heck even at the scale of a 5 v 5 MOBA match it’s pretty hard to not have one side snowball.
The prevalence of AoE in recent updates might be intended to help this somewhat, since more ships = more target density, but functionally it doesn’t seem to be having that effect, at least that I can see. If I’m wrong on this please let me know.
Sure, but at least this is over sooner. Fighting for top damage on a POS isn’t much of a fun contest, especially when basically everyone is bringing Revs because they need to not run out of ammo halfway through the grind fest operation.
So, I can offer some general insight here, having majored in game design and all. This isn’t going to be hugely nuanced, and I can’t speak to CCP’s internal process beyond the tidbits we’ve gotten from devs and the CSMs over the years.
That said, I find it’s generally more useful to talk in terms of problems than solutions or suggestions.
If I’m working on a design and the players bring me a problem then I can work with that. I can take it, incorporate other feedback from other portions of the playerbase, and try to get a solution together that addresses as many concerns as possible and/or addresses things in the best way possible.
If the players are bringing me their ideas then it’s a lot harder. Unless that idea is obviously and absolutely perfect, and it probably won’t be. Even if it is perfect it won’t be obvious, there will need to be tests and checks and it’ll basically get torn down and built back up in the process. So if it’s not perfect then I need to take that, deconstruct it, and try and figure out exactly what problem the player(s) suggesting is is trying to solve. This is fraught with error and can result in a wrong conclusion. Sometimes it’s hard enough to figure out what the actual problem is from a complaint, let alone an idea on top of a complaint.
For example if someone’s complaining that X ship is “weak” and should be buffed by increasing its damage bonus on the hull well is the damage really the problem? Maybe it’s the tracking, or range, or it doesn’t have enough grid space for a MWD, or it needs an extra low slot for damage, or… you see the problem.
As for “CCP don’t listen” I personally disagree, they do listen. More than most devs, and I’ve played a lot of online games over the last ~15 years. The trick is that they try to listen to everyone, and it takes a lot of time to come around to addressing some things, so when your part of the game has a very specific and pressing complaint it’s easy to feel like they’re not listening. To them that complaint is one of hundreds from dozens of gameplay areas, to you it’s your whole world having a glaring and obvious flaw.
Going to just go through a couple of these and point out reasons I think they exist…
For this one it’s pretty obvious. Fleets and fleet comps were getting so big and damage heavy that structures were becoming one siege-cycle snooze fests for the big players, but if a small group attacked one it would take hours. I sorta suspect the turning point was the “Titan-fleet” doctrine and the time PL DD-d a station to death in about 5 seconds.
Probably to force people to stay and engage, to at least some extent. Remember from the early days of Entosis warfare when people would just flit around in single cheap ships and Entosis anything, running away whenever anything showed up?
This is probably just mechanical consistency. There’s no reason not to have shields, and the overall HP total is going to be the same either way. In general in game design you want there to be a solid reason for there to be an exception to a rule, in this case everything has shields, armor, and hull, so these do too.
This I don’t have a good answer for. The closest I can come up with is it might be something to do with the damage caps that made them have to prevent manual repair of the structure. If you could manually repair you’d either need a repair cap, or you’d need to have the damage cap calculate “net damage” after repairs, at which point things turn into a DPS fight again… overall it’s just messy, I can sorta see this being a solution to that.
Even if that’s the case though I agree there’s probably a better solution here, that would let “structure repair fleets” be a content generator again. This might be a problem to push CCP to address, since it’s obvious, simply defined, and has precedent in past content without needing to revert things to that state.
Sure, there are new players, but plenty of young people have time constraints too. More of them are available, sure, but by having content that’s accessible to shorter play sessions you open up options at all age groups.
Plus it’d be a pretty big slap in the face to the vets to have content requiring time they literally can’t commit to. I’m not sure how much complaining there would be around this, but I think the game would definitely lose players over it.
I sort of agree here, but I don’t think that a big war with lots of fighting requires all of that fighting to be massive engagements. You could still have a knock-down drag-out war made up of a ton of small skirmishes over small but important structures, like JBs, where the actual fleet op stages are only a few hours and therefore accessible to everyone.
Incursions are, weirdly enough, a good example of this sort of content. An Incursion FC may run a fleet for six hours before stepping down, but the average time any given person is in that fleet is somewhere around 2-3 hours, with some trending longer and some a bit shorter. People rotate in and out over the course of an evening and the fleet can often run close to 23/7 around the weekends.
I’m not touching this one with a 10-foot pole. I sort of agree with you, but I also agree that if you want to change these dynamics it’d require a massive redesign of, like… most of Null. From the PvE and mining up.
There’s also the problem that these ops don’t really affect much most of the time unless you get stupidly lucky. Most of them are just picking off PvE or Mining ships as targets of opportunity.
This seems like something to push for more of. More FLEX stuff, more opportunities for small gang action, ect. It feels like there’s a solid template here, CCP just need to expand on it more.
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CCP has some unique problems because the game is so old. There are structural problems that have built up over years and years. There is also a wide mix of players from veteran to new, hardcore to casual.
CCP has the unenviable problem of trying to fix problems without breaking the game.
I feel like it’s not that hard: just remove asset safety. Lose your stations, lose your stuff. Bonus points for removing one of the worst-configured and most exploited mechanics in the game: recalling here the time my own alliance swapped a Fort for a Keepstar in a system we owned, that had at least ten other Upwell structures in it the whole time, where the game decided I’d want my entire mineral hoard and all my capital industrial ships moved to lowsec rather than a few thousand kilometers away to the adjacent Sotiyo. Or the way hostile structures’ “cargo drop” feature is used by my friends as a way to export loot to lowsec. Or the recent story about how that full-time structure thief discovered that he could go around sticking one unit of tritanium into every Upwell structure in EVE in order to receive notifications any time an Upwell structure was unanchored anywhere in empire space. The game would just be better off without such a poorly-executed feature.
Oh, I get that trying to tear down and reverse-engineer some random player’s “idea” is a pain. But that’s not the kind of thing that makes my blood boil when it comes to what the game design team does. What absolutely infuriates me is when the design team announce a feature that’s clearly at the end of its development cycle a week or two before deployment. They post a feedback thread. An array of players with expertise highly relevant to the subject matter affected by the new feature point out twenty completely obvious reasons that the new feature won’t work as intended and is a bad idea. Game design changes absolutely nothing and push the feature to TQ as-scheduled. Feature then turns out to be a bad idea. On a good day, maybe game design acknowledges that the feature, “May require future balance passes, but we’ll look at the data first.” Broken feature then persists as originally configured on TQ for years before CCP make any adjustments, and by the time they do usually other things are more problematic anyway.
Game design shouldn’t be “listening to everybody” when it comes to new features that only (or predominantly) affect one area of gameplay or group of players. Their feedback threads are constantly full of people who have no idea what they’re talking about saying, “This feature sounds great! Good job!” This is doubly true when the feature in question is perceived as a “nerf to gankers” or “nerf to nullsec blocs”-- there are certain entities in the game that most of the population love to hate-- even if their only knowledge of these groups or their activities comes from news articles.
Why should game design look at a “mixed bag” of responses or feedback and conclude, “We’ll just have to wait and see what happens” when the majority of supportive posts are from people with no relevant expertise, while responses from people with relevant background knowledge are saying, “This is a bad idea and here are six blatantly obvious ways this change will backfire or otherwise not function the way you intend it to?”
I have to run right now, but I’ll write more when I get back.
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This actually got discussed to death in the original threads on the Upwell structures, when CCP first introduced asset safety. Basically, the problem with this is that then there’s almost no incentive to actually live out of an Upwell Structure, ever, and that means they won’t be terribly valuable or used beyond the strategic implications in Null or the production and mining ones in the game as a whole.
Why keep your stuff in an Upwell structure when you could find an NPC Null station, or one in High or Low Sec, and keep most of your stuff there, keeping just enough in the Upwell structure to live off of?
The Risk/Reward curve on Upwell Structures with no asset safety of any kind is just utterly horrible, to the point that I think most people would stop actively using them if that was removed. Not that they’d stop existing, mind you, they’d just stop being actively used by players for most day to day things if it could be avoided.
And yes, Wormholes don’t have it, but that’s because they’ve never had it, and living in a WH is different, and… yeah, all this got hashed over. Basically the conclusion was that it would be worse to not have it than to have it, even with the potential problems.
I’m always happy to agree that something could use more iteration, though a lot of those things just seem clever.
Also the “shunted everything to Low Sec” thing you experienced is, I think, a feature not a bug, but I’d have to double check the mechanics. I believe asset safety always prefers Stations over Upwell structures.
So… this is kind of an unfortunate reality of game design, and software more generally. I can’t really defend it, because from a player perspective it sucks, but I hope I can at least shed some light on it.
First off, the whole “posting something a week before go-live”. Quite often these features aren’t in a state to receive feedback before the point they’re posted. If CCP post “hey we sorta intend to do this thing” then what they’ll get as “feedback” is a dozen design proposals spread across ten different threads all picking things apart, making random assumptions, and generally providing very little actual feedback. You need something concrete to get actual feedback, and to have something concrete you need to be almost done.
Which brings us to scheduling. This is kind of a problem in software generally, but especially in game dev. These people can’t afford to spend months tweaking and perfecting something. They have other stuff they’re scheduled to work on next, and other people want that stuff to be done. So there’s a limited amount of actual feedback they can take and run with without blowing the schedule, and generally speaking there needs to be a very convincing argument for a major rework of something like this.
Which brings me to the whole “why is CCP taking this thread of __________ people’s feedback”, and basically the answer is because they don’t know your subject matter experts from adam. They’re not actually paying attention to anyone in that thread who doesn’t make a cogent argument unless they bring 1000 of their friends and there’s a really big outcry. And I don’t mean “the thread feels overall negative” because that’s kinda expected.
I like to bring out the example of the Marauder rework for why every thread will always be people hating an idea. For anyone who doesn’t remember this, Marauders were due to be reworked and got their shiny psudo-siege module. A ton of people showed up in the Version 1 thread for the design, complained that this was a bad rework, the ships were going to suck, no PvP application, ect… CCP then said they’d heard the feedback, went back and reworked the design into their V2 proposal. Aaaaand even more people came out of the woodwork saying they liked the original one better, CCP had ruined it, the ships were going to be useless for PvE, ect. In the end CCP ended up with a small iteration on their V1 design, because all the people who liked it pretty much said nothing until it was changed.
In general the best way to change CCP’s mind isn’t to be a “known expert” because any given person at CCP probably doesn’t know who you are unless they either A. know you personally, or B. you’re on the CSM. What does work is a well presented argument, preferably backed up with numbers and/or concrete examples.
Even then though, if you want CCP to go completely back to the drawing board on something you basically need to convince them that it’s worse than the current situation in almost every way, and that’s pretty unlikely. 
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Asset safety is already gone.
It’s not gone, it just got nerfed in the case that the structure isn’t fueled for 7 days.
False. If you put your stuff in a citadel, that stuff is no longer “safe.”
If you want to call it “asset sort-of sometimes safety,” fine. Shutting off the asset safety some of the time under certain circumstances - you cannot rely on it anymore, so it does not fulfill its original purpose.
Eh, not really. It sucks for anyone who kept their stuff in a random Citadel and walked away from the game for a while, but for an active Corp or Alliance it still very much exists.
If someone stows their stuff in a Goons Keepstar right now and goes on deployment for a year they have no fear that their stuff is going to disappear. At worst it’ll end up in Low Sec somewhere because while there’s some risk of that Keepstar dying there’s basically zero risk of it staying completely unfueled for a week.
Equating player actions to fundamental game mechanics is preposterous. However, you actually seem to believe that, so good for you.