I’m sorry, what? We advocated against passive income, and we still do. Moon mining used to be 100% passive income. You set up the tower, and then just collect goo a few weeks later. Now you actually have to mine it. We want renting—another passive income for the landlord—gone. Live in and use your space is the agenda we’ve pushed.
‘Safety’ comes from activity, from real people at the keys willing to jump in and save one another. It comes from playing the game.
To be fair, we’ve said that about a lot more than economic matters. They never listen. But yes, Rorquals? We didn’t want them even this good, let alone the obscenities they were when the rebalance happened. Fozzie came out and openly said he knew they were ‘too good’, but figured things could be dialed back.
Nerf rorqs hard. Remove supercapitals entirely, or come up with a new use that makes fleets of 200 of them pointless. Fix citadels so that ‘asset safety’ comes in the form of friends who help you not lose the bloody thing in the first place. Give smaller groups a way to enjoy the ‘I can get out of this thing and fly something small and kinetic’ advantage that supercap pilots in the big groups have—reducing the need for Keepstars for those small groups.
Just understand that, having had All of EVE™ come try to kill us before, that no matter what the changes are, we’re going to do our level best to make sure we’re capable of fighting off every last one of you bastards at once and mock you for your failure.
After super proliferation happened and your advantaged secured it is always more convenient and expedient to reverse course in the interest of “appearances.”
While theoretically and on the surface very admirable and top notch philosophy etc…
… said activity is kind of cancer. There’s not really any way to get around the fact that a lot of the base activity (mining, ratting, mission running, most PvE in general in fact) is mindbogglingly dull and requires damn near a lobotomy to make even remotely desirable. This is a problem, when there is no path to success that doesn’t require a very sizable chunk of your community to engage in this day in and day out, 23.5/7, forever. Having an organization lean and combat focused just isn’t possible, unless there are potential passive incomes or ways to turn PvP combat focus into at the absolute very least ISK reserves.
I do like the idea of needing to utilize space and work for your success and all… but making that translate into “Rorqs, Hel Ratting or vast amounts of VNI bots only” isn’t very good game design. It’s pretty important that CCP finds some sort of balanced way to turn PvP into a viable actual thing to do in Eve as an entity both small and large. Making it so the only path towards potential relevance as an entity is stuffing as many bears as possible in your organization is rather limiting in the end.
Oh I don’t know. On the scales of actually possible outcomes you can force in Eve, I’d say stuffing every last one of you into a single station in lowsec while everything else burned to the ground is hardly failure. If everything short of alliances disbanding is failure, I don’t think anyone’s actually succeeded in Eve so far.
I get your point, but don’t be too cocky about it. That fall from grace was very real, and it was a long one.
Generally, the way we tend to get around it is by being on Mumble together as we do it, talking and entertaining one another. It’s a social activity more than anything else.
Have you looked at last month’s MER? I think it’s fair to say that we’ve been successful, and demonstrated that when we really need to, even our turbokrabs shift gears. That was a pretty punishing optempo we maintained for a month solid or so.
Ah, but I didn’t say you had failed, I was speaking of the next time. Besides, the fall from grace, as you put it, was probably the best thing that could’ve happened to us. Trimmed a lot of the fat, bulked up on protein shakes, and then went and got a much more defensible chunk of space. Dek’s basically 3 pipes, and porous as hell.
This doesn’t strike you as a bit of a problem? That a fundamental and core activity, these days required for an entity to even function really, is so awful that the only redeemable feature you can bring up is “yeh but we can sort of… talk together. While we do it.” which holds true for literally everything you can do in Eve that doesn’t require strict comms discipline.
While this is an MMO, one of the standards to meet in terms of MMO gameplay is “Is this something someone could reliably do on their own for a bit without chewing off a leg or shooting themselves in the head?”. A lot of Eve’s core gameplay doesn’t meet this requirement. That’s a problem to me, at least.
… I don’t see how this is a response to what I said. “There is no path to success that doesn’t involve doing X and Y.” “We did a LOT of X and Y successfully.”
Yes, this I have no doubts about.
Sorry, tl;skipped around in it. Didn’t really see an option that allowed for success as an entity in PvP. I highly suspect that’s just not doable short of returning passive income options that scale with your organization’s combat ability.
Alphas are fine. Skill Injectors are not. In any way, shape or form. I completely and utterly misjudged Eve’s playerbase when skill injectors first came along. I kind of envisioned a way to sort of respecc your mistakes with diminishing returns. What happened was that the time usually needed to get the Rorqual alt, the super alt, the fax alts etc in place evaporated if you threw isk at it.
I’m not even sure if there’s any point removing them anymore. The sheer unfathomable damage their existence has done to Eve is beyond description and I can’t think of a way to fix that without both removing them entirely, and turning the Rorquals, Titans and Supers into something else entirely than they already are. Support entities only functional with vast amounts of subcaps and normal caps to support. I don’t know, Supers can become Faxes that subcaps can dock in or some ■■■■, with good command bursts and beneficial effects, but no fighters, etc.
That’s another subject that requires very lengthy discussion and others have covered that much better already.
Skill Injectors though… those have to go before anything else can even get near fixed.
lets see…
Passive moon mining > passive moon mining with siphons > active moon mining with (lots of) ships that is open to all kinds of disruptive plays
I dunno, I generally find that’s the way I deal with solo content in every MMO. I like to play solo, but socialize at the same time. Always have. Applying that to EVE doesn’t seem too different.
(Edit: I mean, yeah, EVE’s PvE gameplay sucks ass, but that’s kind of a different thing than the ‘find a way to make it bearable’ thing. As players, we can’t fix the ass-suckery, but we can make it bearable.)
Except that my point is that for a month solid, we did X, but not Y, demonstrating the capability for people to be successful even if there isn’t ‘a very sizable chunk of your community’ engaging in ratting/mining ‘day in and day out, 23.5/7, forever’.
It’s literally a direct refutation.
It’s not going to be possible to scale up PvP as a primary activity to the levels that industrial powers can manage. If it was, it would literally kill industrial activity as a viable nullsec playstyle, for the same reason that carrier pilots aren’t clamoring for CCP to make it so other players can play as their fighter pilots: it’ll always be more efficient to put those players in carriers of their own. Similarly, if you can scale ‘pure pvp life’ up to the same sizes and effectiveness as industrial powers, it will never be useful not to be ‘pure pvp’.
So you need to have a balance, and the marauding warlord pretty much has to be the one at the size disadvantage, or the whole thing tears itself apart in a glorious orgy of destruction… that is then over. And once it’s over, it doesn’t recover, because recovery is literally the less viable gameplay vs ‘just get in the reapers and shoot those guys’.
If you want the game’s environment to grow, as CCP clearly do, and not just be an endless frigate deathmatch that’d be better served by CCP keeping Valkyrie, industry has to be the better option at scale. It just also has to be possible for PvPers and PvP groups to make enough money to thrive—just less efficiently. And things like the salvage/prize ship suggestion were attempts to find ways to make that happen.
After all, right now, it is possible to have a large organization that makes money by living a purely PvP lifestyle. I even addressed that in the article: MiniLuv is 100% self-funding, and profitable enough that they pay out to the members while still maintaining their stockpiles and paying for the entirety of Burn events. They’re just not profitable on the scale that an industrial org is.
I think skill injectors might be ok if you couldn’t run SP farms. It’s the ability to have 3 characters doing nothing but churning out skillgoo on each of 1200 accounts (for one player) that makes them this bad, I think. I could be wrong.
Yeah this SP injection thing was a bad idea built on bad ideas and wrapped in a bad idea.
Skill injectors should exist, but extractors no. I would make injectors into rare exploration drops. And not the canned and predictable exploration either. The other kind, the olde kind.
Therein lies one of the issues. They automatically assume “farming” because that’s what everything automatically commonly denominates to.
Take every path of “why do you do XYZ” in Eve, and every time, ultimately, it’s going to end up being “farming”.
This doesn’t change that the activity itself has no redeeming feature. What does it matter that socializing during the activity is possible? The issue is that the activity itself is absolutely assblastingly awful. Forcing this to be an integral part of any successful entity in Eve is generally speaking awful game design.
Yup. I’m sure you guys would be where you are if you never went for Rorqual and Super spam. It surely is a possible path to success. That you can go a month without one of the two after how much time turbobearing? Doesn’t really say much. Fasting for a day doesn’t really put much strain on me if I spent the preceding week gorging.
The initial part is fair, of course. However, you’re using as an example something that doesn’t even get near what any PvP focused entity thinks of when we talk about PvP. Freighter ganking is about as relevant in this discussion as mining in WoW is to Eve Industry. It just… isn’t.
I think you’re wrong though. Industry does not need to scale better at the highest end. That’s not balanced, that’s just safe for any entity that can throw numbers at a problem without having to worry about skill or morale. Having PvP as an option that kept scaling in balance with industry cores remains balanced because it’s self-correcting. Losing will reduce your ability to win. Failure can cascade. With the way industry cores in entities work now, there’s no path to failure, and there’s no balance in that.
While one of the issues, the main issue remains how isk income scaling up means a wildly accelerating isk income when you convert it to more income characters without training time acting as a bottleneck. This translates to wildly accelerating power creep in large entities. As we have seen with Rorqual, Super and Titan proliferation. Skill Injectors removed one of the bottlenecks that could at the very least have slowed it down.
Maybe rather than just doing a local complete blackout they should had made the idea more dynamic. Maybe adding a structure into the game that enables local to be seen by allies of the owning structure. This structure can be attacked and on its destruction something prevents a new one being built for a pre determined time. Make them very expensive too. Just a rough idea and would need refining but I think a base blackout is too extreme.
It absolutely does. If I can get as much profitability from 100 combat pilots as I can from 70 combat pilots and 30 industrial pilots, I’m an idiot if I take the industrialists… because they can’t fight back. The 100 combat pilots will roll them, every time, and then the 70+30 aren’t making money. As that keeps happening, materiel prices spike, then supplies dry up, and it’s Reapers Online.
Right, but without the SP farms, would there be enough of a supply of injectors to make that happen?
Not for gathering data on how the players respond to it. You change one thing. That thing should be something you can easily undo, and ideally, something that doesn’t take a lot of developer time to set up. Then you run your test, get your data.
Adding a new structure (ignoring the structure spam issues) means dev time to add it. It means ‘ok, we’re undoing this’ gets harder. (How are you undoing it? blowing up the structures? Do people get the isk they invested back? What about the time they put into building, deploying, and defending them?)
For the initial round, this was the right way to go.