It also ignores the equally large stockpiles of resources and knowledge that players have learned and spread to each other about how to keep themselves safe, and the all that accumulated wealth that makes losses matter much less as a fraction of the bounty of New Eden. Losses today are so quickly replaced, and make such a little dent in the typical player or group’s wealth, as compared to back in the day, it is shameful that some players still choose to cry over them.
But I accept that this may not be true for the new and newer players entering a game where the veterans have so much more stuff than them, and ready access to now 15 years of accumulated experience with the game mechanics that the new players haven’t learned yet. That has always been a conceptual problem with a persistent “board game” like Seagull used to like to call it, and I do feel for newer players, trying to find their place in the game, especially those that choose not to ally themselves with an existing power bloc.
What I don’t have any sympathy for is established, five-account owning jump freighter pilots (who were created in 2005) who rage quit because they lost less than a single supercarrier worth of ISK despite the fact they have access to perfect mechanical safety. This is unlike previous generations of logistics, the first of which had to take gates in T1 haulers to bring stuff to nullsec. I have even less sympathy for those that make the baseless, age-old threat that unless they are given even more safety, Eve will somehow die.
Eve will not likely die because too many things (like explosions) are happening in the sandbox. The far more likely fate is to be smothered to death and pushed into total stagnation by the endless well-intentioned, but content-poisoning buffs to player safety and wealth.
Yet with all these changes, destruction has risen…
Which implies that EVE isn’t actually becoming safer despite mechanical changes that indicate it should be.
Which means that that accumulation of wealth & experience is vastly favouring the veterans. And the time before you become a veteran is also going up & up. It’s not insurmountable, but it certainly is harder. The graph CCP released a few fanfests ago showing average player age & number of alts showed how strong a factor that is in EVE’s meta.
Now ok, in the particular JF example here, yeah, they aren’t going to get my sympathy either. But they don’t need my sympathy for me to point out the above factors which affect safety in a negative sense for the non veterans.
Really though, the problem is not safety vs non safety, but engagement of the players in that aspect of the game. Gankers are engaged currently, the ganked are not because of how the mechanics make it work. And that’s the aspect that needs addressing.
Not really. I guess it depends how we define safety or what metrics we use to measure it. Destruction will rise as a function of inflation, power creep and player activity, regardless of the mechanics or player competence with them. The destruction metric really needs to be normalized against something else, and none of the obvious choices seem perfect to me.
I do agree with this. Everything favours the veterans and it probably is harder than ever to be a new player. Maybe not learning the mechanics as I think the NPE is measurably better, but the power gap is larger than ever and grows. SP trading made this worse, not better, and while I don’t think this is totally fatal as everyone can use warm bodies and thus new players are in demand to join the existing powers, it is less plausible than ever that a true group of mostly new players would be able to join the game and rise to rival the existing veterans, something that has happened in the past.
CCP hasn’t solved this yet, and since the current mechanics favour fortification and defence so much, the chance of even an existing group declaring war and destroying another player empire is next to nil, and shrinks every month. We have a meta where everyone is turtling and there is nothing worth an invasion (aside from the one-time target of Provi and the other places with outposts), so there is next to no chance of a new entrant shaking things up, unless perhaps if they show up with 10 000 - 20 000 active players.
I think this ganker-gankee framing of things isn’t very helpful. People that are ganked have just lost a fight. There is still a ton of engaging gameplay around how to avoid being exploded while you are farming/building, even if when you are caught the fight itself might be rather lop-sided. "“Gud fights” they are not I will agree, but I wouldn’t say they aren’t engaging even for the industrialist who has every incentive to avoid ending up as an explosion. Eve has always been built so that we are all vulnerable, and are the primary content for each other, so claiming that it is “unengaging” to lose a fight, isn’t helpful at all.
I guess there could somehow be more game play around even the lop-sided fights, but I still fail to see how even more safety is more engaging for anyone - less window of risk equals less engagement and attention from the potential prey to stay safe, and no window of risk equals basically no game at all. I’m not going to play arm chair game designer here and try to solve this issue in 5 000 words or less, but giving us more wealth and more safety isn’t going to make this game any better, at least in the vast majority of cases, and often times just drives people away. I fully get building a fun game for diverse players is a delicate balancing act, but what is needed is more reasons to fight, defend and attack, and expanded ways to make those memorable stories celebrated in that 15-years of Eve video, not additional ways to farm or haul in peace. Perhaps there is more gameplay to be had around certain types of fights, but generally I think that the unbalanced fights common in an open-world game like Eve are always going to be “unengaging” for the outnumbered/outgunned side who cannot do much at that point but enjoy the fireworks.
Perfectly safe jump drive transport is an abomination. This change was a good one to put some risk back into moving supercaps around again. Jump freighters and the other capitals are still practically perfectly safe to move even with this change, so there is still room to add a small window of vulnerability to add actual game play back to the game around jump drive movement. I think that would drive engagement, for both hunters and their quarry.
I’m thinking that will have to wait for the player-built stargates to come online, which is thankfully now on the horizon.
This is the issue. It’s not a fight most of the time. It’s a watch for 10 seconds as you get destroyed. Industrial ships are set up by CCP to be targets. Note, not advocating for safety here, just pointing out that it’s not a fight when you have nothing to do beyond watch and hope they did their maths wrong. Maybe turn an invuln to overheat if you are lucky enough to be in a DST.
I’d much prefer them to look more like WW2 engineering tanks. Or Spanish gold galleons from that era.
Heavily armoured, armed but not quite as good as a proper combat tank, with a special purpose such as transport or mining. And shift some other parts of the game to give longer in highsec (or everywhere) to gank, so that it actually is a fight both ways but still plenty of time to kill them. 99% of the time the outcome would still be the same, but you would have a chance at a 1%, and get more time to frantically hammer buttons and get that adrenaline buzz during it all.
As for the tethering changes, totally agree that it was an abomination with the totally safe super movement. And is still safer than the old POS system.