Monthly Economic Report - July 2021

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81

No, you don’t. You’re all ‘OH BUT THE TIDI’ but you seem to have no idea how undocking in tidi works. First, you’ve got to get your titans undocked. You have to also make sure you have enough titans undocked to deal with theirs in a decisive way.

Because guess what! Fitting a brace of smartbombs to clear bubbles doesn’t stop you from fitting your doomsday! So if we’re trying to get in position to shoot them, they can start lancing us right back.

And warping in dictors? Good luck. First, the dictors would need to get through the bubbles. When the bubble field is 40km deep, that means the titans can clear the interior bubbles—which is all they need to clear—while the dictors warping in still get stopped by the outer layer of bubbles. Then, you’re putting dictors in to hold down smartbombing titans? Good job, all your dictors just exploded because smartbombing titans.

That’s what HICs are for, you know? But they’re a hell of a lot slower, of course… provided you have them undocked already.

Ok, so now we’ve undocked, warped across the grid to a perch 300km off, and aligned to the KS, all before their titans can run 4 cycles of smartbombs to clear the inner bubbles? Not frikkin’ likely. And no, it doesn’t take a dread that long to align, because you just put a damned prop mod in the mids. 20s adjusted for tidi, far less than the time it takes our titans to warp, land, and align.

After all, if they’re planning this, they don’t have to have their dreads docked up this whole time. They can have them sitting on the gate. Which they’ve done in the past. And we’ve done in the past. Everyone involved in this on both sides at the command levels knows how to do what I’m describing.

This is not an issue of mechanics. It is an issue of will.

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Wow I don’t believe you actually said that. Goons bottled up in 1DQ knowing full well they couldn’t lose. Simply the fact Goons could and did simply undock hundreds of Supers and keep them safely tethered meant the war was a farce that came down to poor game mechanics rather than battles.
Have to give Goons points for using the poorly designed mechanics to such good advantage but unless they were betrayed and sov was dropped (you know, the way Goons have won their only real victories) they were never actually going to lose anything. They never risked anything worth losing.

Goons ability to talk about how good they are and how no-one can stand against them is only equaled by their ability to run and hide when they face the type of challenge they use every day.

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83

I did actually say that. And I’ve outlined at least one way it could have been handled completely differently. Do you think we weren’t worried about that?

Right, because Fountain wasn’t a long slog. The Halloween War totally relied on… what? Manny betraying PL and dropping sov in B-R, an out-of-the-way system that just wasn’t important until Laz decided ‘screw it, we’re going all in’. And Tribute! Wow, yeah, NCdot was totally betrayed there when they dropped sov… oh, they never dropped sov? Huh. We actually sent supers through a gate they had camped during that campaign, and lost a bunch of them before NCdot ran? Huh.

What flavor is that you’re drinking? Cherry Limeade? Tropical Punch? Sharkleberry?

Right, because putting a supercapital fleet on a keepstar for the hull timer, that’s not at all risky. If PAPI hadn’t waited until the last minute, that’s an even fight where blowing up the keep leaves us completely exposed, and PAPI’s got the numbers to keep us pinned down.

We. Are. Terrible. We’re generally a bunch of morons who can’t even align properly. It’s not my fault PAPI’s worse at EVE.

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It wasn’t really, tethered Supers aren’t at risk, even less so when you’ve got full tidi before anyone else “tries” to enter the system. As I said, cudos to Goons for using shitty game mechanics to"win" a siege where everything was in their favour.

I would never say Goons are Terrible. I would however say they don’t “play” Eve to win or lose. They play to win and opt out when there is any real risk.
And as you have Rattati on side changing the game to suit your too much risk vs no risk play style you should be right for at least a few more years.

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You don’t have to. We say it. We say it all the time. Any Goon who tells you ‘we’re good at this’ is lying.

Except we didn’t have full tidi before anyone else tried to enter the system. We were there more than an hour before the timer, and tidi was pretty minimal. They had structures they could have come in on off-grid in perfect safety. We know, because they did bring in multiple subcap fleets ahead of time. You know, the subcaps like Muninns, that were never going to really impact the fight.

So maybe they should’ve prioritized better.

But for all the bitching about ‘oh, the servers in M2’… if the servers had worked flawlessly, if there’d been no dropped packets, no server issues at all? It would have been worse for PAPI.

That’s what happens when you jump in right on top of millions of DPS’ worth of fighter-bombers. But quite a lot of their ships simply never came in. Another chunk of them generated killmails in M2, but respawned in T5ZI, some of them respawning docked.

And let’s keep in mind:

Supers with F/Bs out aren’t tethered. And they’re not tethered when the keepstar explodes, either. And those subcap fleets they brought in? Plenty of dictors in those.

Sharkleberry, it is.

I notice you also conveniently ignore Operation Enho, where we warped in 100% untethered titans to BFG hostile supercarriers. Enemy FCs messaged Asher to basically say ‘welp, we’re screwed’… and then the supers took next to no damage, because when BFGs hit fighter wings, the first pulse takes effect, and then because of the protections to keep fighter groups from all blowing up simultaneously, the rest of the BFG cycle just doesn’t apply. To anything.

That happened. And those titans died. Just like we burned trillions of ISK killing the first three keepstars they tried to anchor in NPC Delve with entire fleets of suicide ships, up to and including dreads.

But yeah, we always play it safe. Totally couldn’t just be them Sharkleberry lenses you’re filtering everything through. No risk at all in any of that.

By the way, back to the ‘how do you get into 1DQ?’ bit?

Guess what a coalition of 150,000 characters can do while forcing us to respond to 4 consecutive keepstar anchorings in NPC Delve. If you guessed ‘you could be entosising the 1DQ constellation so we can’t put jammers down for a month’, congratulations, you’ve hit on yet another way they could have used better strategy to avoid the entire issue they’re blaming on ‘the servers’.

They sure as hell weren’t complaining about ‘the servers’ when those Keepstar timers were ticking down, unaffected by the tidi that all our dreads were stuck in, huh? And you sure as hell weren’t complaining about Rattati when CCP made supercarriers larger, so another Enho can’t even be attempted, were you?

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Ok, as for supers with bombers out not tethered, that is true but when those Supers have thousands of bombers on a gate thousands of K’s away, I’d say those Supers are pretty safe. Having to get past thousands of bombers to actually engage the ships (thousands of K’s away) that control them, is a very poor game mechanic and really a pretty risk averse way to play a “game”.

Of course as you said, multiple subcap fleets vs Supers is simply suicide, especially when those subs can’t actually engage the supers without first fighting their way to them. Oh and as those Supers can abandon drones and tether or dock when under threat…

Burned “trillions of isk”, oh you mean roughly 1% of Goon isk? Damn that’s sad.

A coalition of 150,000 LOL. yep sure. In a game where there’s never been more than 60K online at one time (and that was only because CCP gave stuff to players to login) and the game itself goes into slowmode with 500 in a single system, where for the duration of the war the average online was never more than 24k.
All this “we were outnumbered” is just old and really quite sad from a group that prides itself on blobbing everything to ensure a win.

I don’t know who “they” are but simply the fact keepstar timers continue to count down when in full tidi is just another poorly designed game mechanic and for your dreads, they are the capital equivilent of T1 frigates - Completely disposable. Once undocked they are presumed dead, getting them home is a bonus. No-one uses dreads and doesn’t expect to lose most if not all of them.
Now thanks to team Rattati capitals and supers will be restricted to those who can afford to lose them, unfortunately this pretty much means only the largest blobs will have them in large enough numbers to be useful. Rattati did a great job restricting “Super proliferation” to those who already have them. It’s like he sat down with the Blobs and asked them how to make it so they could maintain super superiority for the foreseeable future.

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You might. But then…

That’s not the conditions where you claimed the supers ‘aren’t at risk’.

It’s really lovely that you think we’re that rich, but even if that were true, lemme destroy 1% of your assets in an environment where replacing it in a timely manner is difficult. See how significant you think it is.

Yup. 103 alliances. They made no secret of who they blued for this. I mean, look, I get it, you’re trying to move the goalposts now. But pulling the ‘lol, you blob’ about nullsec warfare, where literally TEST’s entire strategy for the last 4 years before this war was ‘get the Imperium to help against FRT’, and PanFam’s has been ‘let’s build our own goonswarm and call it Horde’ just demonstrates that unlike you, everyone else understands that the simplest way to beat someone up is ‘bring more dudes’. It always has been, and it always will be.

Are they now? Or are you horribly behind the times again? The days when dreads insured reasonably well are gone. The additional industry changes saw to that. Even now, they’re up over 5b a pop.

And we definitely see those changes as a problem for groups trying to get into nullsec. Hell, we’re still of the opinion that deleting supers completely would be best for game balance, but everyone knows that too many people will complain about that. Failing that, we’d like to see supers completely decoupled from holding space. Make it so you don’t need supers to defeat an enemy supercapital force, and you’ll see supers dying a lot more… if only because people will be less hesitant to risk them.

It’s what I, and others in leadership, have openly advocated on these boards, and it’s what I’ve told Rattati, as well: supers are a problem. Not new supers. All supers. So no, Rattati hasn’t been ‘changing the game to suit [our] play style’. We’ve adapted our play style to what works in the game CCP’s made—just like always.

Which is kinda the point, isn’t it? The mechanics that have changed have not been changes that benefit us. And the mechanics that are being blamed for ‘we couldn’t get through the gate’ were the exact same mechanics that were in place before Vily, Progod, and Manny—all TEST—started talking to PanFam about starting this war.

Failing to come up with a strategy—of which, I’ve now outlined two, and many more exist—to circumvent that potential problem is not a failure of the mechanics. Just like if your enemy is standing on top of a wall, where he can shoot you with the gun you know he has, your decision to bring a sword and swing wildly at the base of the wall does not make it gravity’s fault that you can’t hit him.

Those were the conditions in place before the war started. They knew that. They still chose to start the war, and they chose to prosecute the war without ever coming up with a plan that would succeed despite the mechanics they knew they would face.

That is not a failure of the servers, and it is not a failure of game design. It is a failure of leadership.

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88

It’s another example of poor game mechanics. Allowing structures at Super/carrier fighter control range is another. I can go on but you know as well as most and better than many how to safely deploy supers using poor game design to advantage.

With pleasure, 1% loss would still leave me with well over a trillion isk + assets. It wouldn’t be nice but isn’t a real issue, much the same as a large coalition losing 1% of their isk really. It’s a minor inconvienence at best.

And what a truely sad legacy that promotes for the game.

that to compete with the biggest blob in the game you need to form your own.
There, fixed that for you.

Wow you must have bad connections, I got 6 on contracts a couple weeks ago for 3 to 3.5 each (all with rigs and fuel) but yes my example is somewhat dated for the majority, now only large bloc groups will be able to field them and absorb the losses.

Indirectly, yes he did. Those with established Super fleets have all the cards in their hands. There will be no upcoming entities that can ever hope to compete with existing Super fleets. You didn’t have to “adapt” other than how you field them.
As you said, Supers are needed to take and hold sov - Sov is needed to build Supers. It is by design and has been well reinforced by Rattati over the last 2 years.

Yes it is, not a recent failure but one typical of CCP and their poor, shortsighted game design over the years.
Structures should never have been allowed on grid with gates.
Supers should never have been a prerequisite for taking and holding sov.
Rorquals should never have been turned into what they became.
3 “Major” changes to the game that led to the poor state of the game today.
The same three things many players including CSM (if you can believe what they say) told CCP on many forms of social media were a mistake.
Without these 3 changes Super proliferation would not be anywhere near as bad as it is, if it became an issue at all. Now CCP has again changed things to ensure only the super fleets in game now will remain for years to come.
Changes to industry has done nothing to address the “real” issue of Super supremecy, all it did was ensure that supremecy stays where it is.

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It may be poor mechanics, but it’s well-understood mechanics, which is the issue: whether or not the mechanics were to blame for PAPI’s failure to figure out a way around them. And since nobody forced them to start the war… no, the mechanics are not to blame.

It’s just as true in other games’ open-world PvP. And, you know, IRL, too. Heck, it’s even true in games where the teams start off even. You concentrate firepower where your enemy’s forces are thinnest, right? That’s still n+1. It’s just n+1 on a tactical level, not a strategic one. I’m sorry that you don’t like one of the simplest, most enduring truths of all forms of conflict, but it is what it is, and once again: everyone involved understood that.

In this case, though, n+1 lost. So while I agree, that likely made Legacy sad, it does seem to undercut your insistence that it’s a horrible, insurmountable thing.

Firesale dreads aren’t typical. :wink:

No, he didn’t. His team made a change without consideration for our playstyle. ‘Changing the game to suit [our] play style’ means doing it with the specific intention of benefitting us. That’s what you’re accusing him of doing. If that’s not what you intend to be saying, then maybe you should be more careful.

No, that is not true. You can make the argument that poor game design happened, and I don’t think anyone will argue against that. But saying PAPI’s failure is a failure of game design is just wrong.

They knew what the conditions and mechanics were.

Those mechanics could always have been avoided and circumvented with proper planning.

They chose to initiate a war against us.

They chose to make sure they would not fight our supercapitals before getting to gates of the 1DQ constellation.

They chose to not have any strategy in place ahead of time that would circumvent the mechanics that made things difficult.

That is not a failure of game design. That is a failure of leadership.

90

I left Papi’s failures behind, I was talking more in general about the state of the game. Sorry if this wasn’t clear.

That really is just another example of the poor quality of design that goes into the game. For as long as I can remember CCP leadership (those who ultimately this mess should fall on) have shown how little they know about and understand the game.

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Nobody at all has said there haven’t been poor game design choices made. There absolutely have been, and there always will be. Shockingly, CCP employs human beings. Human beings screw up. :man_shrugging:

That isn’t keeping some of us from trying to give them good advice about how to avoid those poor choices.

No, it’s not. The game developers should not be making changes based on ‘who does this help, who does this hurt?’ in terms of null groups. They should absolutely be making changes where their only intention is to make the overall health of the game better, which is what they’ve been doing. You can say those decisions have been in error, but that is the intention behind what they’re doing.

In this case, it comes down to trusting the wrong guy. Kenneth Feld has openly said on the CSM discord that he got the brief on the industry changes more or less as soon as he got on the CSM last year. Everyone else got it in October, after Feld designed a system that looks… a lot like what we got.

CCP’s been told for years that the players understand the game better than they do. So they trusted a CSM member who got elected as ‘an industrialist’. The fact that Feld, when asked questions about industry on-stream after being elected, got most of them wrong… well, kinda explains a lot, doesn’t it?

Since then, Rattati’s made a habit of reaching out to people who demonstrate that they do know what they’re talking about. Isn’t that what you want him to be doing?

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No they shouldn’t. As you said they should be made for the overall health of the game. Which from my point of view they missed the mark, by miles with the industry change to capitals.
You know why Test was able to get 103 small alliances to sdie with them to attempt what they did?
I wonder could it be that many smaller groups are tired of the Goon/Test meta where more is never enough.
CCP want to address warfare in nul, it really isn’t that hard BUT it would hurt the Blocs and so won’t be addressed.
It wouldn’t remove blocs but would make them less “needed”, which is an area Rattati and team missed. What he has done to industry only encourages /forces cooperation which should be a good thing, except it isn’t because anyone who has had dealings with the large alliances knows, you blue them, you join them or get pushed out. All this scarcity and mineral redistribution will do is see the power blocs control more space to achieve their end goals.
Lowsec is where the best mining is, expect to see hundreds of Bloc members controlling it.

It does indeed. It tells me CCP don’t have a clue. Why would you trust someone without first checking them out. It’s not like CCP don’t have access to see what he does in the game.

Of course he’s going to get a nice broad view that way. Oh no he isn’t because Eve is meant to be a sandbox, not some - He likes doing it that way so you will too.
I own Supers and a titan, (all built prior to 2015) for many years I enjoyed capital warfare. Now all bar 2 of my accounts are unsubbed simply because the playstyle I enjoyed is now gone. Adapt or leave - Not again. I’ve adapted so many times over 17 years to shitty ill thought out changes. I’ll just keep plexing my remaining accounts until I either run out of isk or CCP makes some worthwhile changes, I’ll probably die of old age before CCP do anything so I’ve probably got about 8 or 10 years to wait.

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All sorts of reasons. But it wasn’t ‘103 small alliances’. The 103 included Horde, NCdot, FRT, etc. Add in the smaller Legacy alliances. Smaller WinterCo alliances. The groups that wanted to curry favor. And yeah, plenty of people who just didn’t like us. But also, plenty of people who didn’t actually care, they just wanted to bandwagon along, get in on some juicy kills.

As for why PanFam and FRT joined in… oh, Sarge, you don’t even need to get to ‘shooting Goons’ for that. Think about it. The big superbloc that had fought PandaFam was Imperial Legacy. Now here’s Vily and Piggles suggesting a war that serves their purposes, proposed by ex-PL Manny?

Now that their assault’s failed, they’re shunting TEST and BRAVE off into corners of null they own. They’ll poach members and corps. FRT’s already gearing up to crush AoM and the new PBIC now that Legacy’s gone.

If the assault had succeeded, Legacy would’ve been overextended. They were planning to hold all their old space, and all of ours.

Remember M2? Guess who didn’t jump their supers in. FRT, PL, NCdot…

So yeah, I know a hell of a lot about why TEST was able to get 103 alliances together. Some were members of their coalition. Some really did want to go after us. -7- just wanted to stay in null after they lost Provi. And a big chunk of the PandaFam groups, including their minions, saw a win-win, even if they ‘lost’.

That is pretty common, yeah. But then, that’s why we tend to focus on the other big blocs. We only came after GotG because they came after us. Otherwise, SIGs and squads, not mainfleet. Like I said: there’s a reason Sort was willing to trust us to deal fairly, and why he and Kenshin both ended up joining an Imperium alliance.

Nah, not likely. Snuff, LSH, and others are always ready to go after the blocs in lowsec, and they’re a lot more successful at hitting us than we are at hitting them.

He’ll get a reasonably broad view, as long as he talks to enough people from enough different parts of the game. An echo chamber doesn’t help anyone. The whole game needs to be healthy, or none of it is. And nobody—no player, no CCP dev, nobody—can know the whole game. Falling back on ‘it’s supposed to be a sandbox’ is useless if you don’t accept that making it a true sandbox means accepting the catshit in the sand, too.

The more it’s a sandbox, the more the mechanics will be horrible and abusable. Worse, the more it’s a sandbox, the more N+1 becomes the ultimate strategy. It’s inescapable. Anything you can do with a small group, the big group can do while doing other things, too.

So yeah, the sandbox has to have limits. And yes, the devs will never be able to listen to all of the voices, because there too many to keep it all from turning into white noise.

And what playstyle was that? You might find out it’s not as gone as you think. You just might not be looking in the right places.

Well, then you’re pretty screwed, because adapting to changes is how life works. When you insist that you’ll only accept the things you like… well, you’re just locking yourself into a hell of your own making, where all you see is the things you don’t.

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Yeah, this is the point I got to with dear old Sarge. In another exchange, he told us that he only enjoyed Eve between 2011 and 2014 (IIRC), and has been going through the motions since.

Sometimes you just gotta be ready to let go and move on if the game ain’t for you any more.

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I have a few accounts that are still omega. I logged one of them in to see how much the cash handout was. I thought it was worth logging in for, and I did on the first day, but then I didn’t log in again, because I don’t enjoy the game anymore and logging in is tedious.

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That isn’t a “broad view”, it’s a jumble of “I think’s” in a big messy pile that still won’t address the issues for those that won’t play “bloc games”. Which sadly is going to grow further due to failed design years ago and continuing today.
I don’t care how good Rattati is or has done, for me he hasn’t even begun to address the major issues with nulsec game play and personally I don’t think he knows how to OR if they even exist. In fact one thing he is planning (capital anoms) is probably on par with Fozziesov for how poorly thought out it is. I mean why not give the power blocs another way to make easy isk while denying that isk to smaller groups, such good game design. Shortsighted poorly planned design is what led to Rattati getting a job and he isn’t doing much differently to those that preceeded him.

Not if it’s done right. Start by fixing issues that have been around for 6 years or more and go on from there.

No it’s gone, the group I played with for years joined an alliance I’ll never be a part of again. Been there done that, I’d rather leave my Supers logged off in space and my accounts in Alpha permanently.

Big difference between “adapting” to a modified play style and playing with a group that - I believe - is bad for the overall health of the game. As my name suggests, I’m an Aussie so TZ plays a big part in who with and how I play the game.

As for getting a chance to voice my opinions on Discord, I sat in there for 3 days with “you do not have permission to view this page” then gave up. Seems you only get in if you are invited.

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Or you can wait and see if they can find a dev/team to bring about change that makes the game interesting/exciting again.
I still have fun ingame at times (by going through the motions) but yes as a player who likes capital game play 2011 to 2014 was my heyday

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Sat in where? I don’t talk to the guy on any specific discord server.

Ok, but the group you played with isn’t the playstyle you had. Other people might be out there doing the things you liked to do.

Yeah, especially if it’s done right. Being a sandbox means open-ended mechanics that allow people to do unexpected things via emergent behaviors and the unexpected results of them. If there’s room for that, there’s room for those unexpected results to be hyper-optimized, because if they’re regulated, they clearly weren’t unexpected.

The more you ‘sandbox’, the less control CCP has to rein in bad behavior.

Right, because if he’s talking to people in highsec, or FW, who have deep understandings of their parts of the game, that clearly only benefits ‘the blocs’.

Ock, dude, you are wearing blinders, and the only things you let yourself see are the bad things that fit your confirmation bias. And that’s a shame.

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I got given some discord server to join, can’t remember the name offhand but yeah it wasn’t much help. I guess part of the problem is, I’m not part of a large group so don’t have access to the Discord/Mumble, etc channels Devs “visit” to get their “overview” of how different groups play the game.

When you’re not in a 5,000+ alliance, the group you belong to becomes more important and really is your play style. No point me joining a group that flies frigates when my prefered play style is Capitals, I suck in frigates so don’t fly them. I also have a few Blops I like to get out once in a while but if you’re not in a group that does blops it gets a bit boring. Unless you want to be part of a blob what group you belong to can and does become your play style.
Yeah, not really. My TZ is pretty limited when it comes to content, there are a reasonable number of groups in my TZ but sadly the better ones all belong to blob’s.

I might be but as I only care about what the game offers me they can stay on.
See you’re adding your own narrative, changing the context of my post to suit yourself.
Rattati can talk to as many different people in highsec and lowsec as he wants, doesn’t affect the issues in nulsec game play.
The issues that need addressing, to meet the goals set 6 years ago by Team Fozzie are far from being met. They will never be met becuse CCP as a whole can’t see the problems. Literally thousands of players have stopped subbing accounts because the game has lost its appeal and yet CCP ignores this. We just spent a year watching the worst excuse for a war CCP ever hosted, which they will also ignore.

Yep I’ve got blinders on, I’m a selfish ahole who just wants to play the game the way I want to play without having to be a part of a blob.

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The only discord servers I’m on that Rattati could be on are public ones, like the RP community’s server. :shrug:

I started off in a 6-man corp, and spent years there. I have no illusions about the fact that if I’d wanted to keep doing the same stuff I had been doing when they went to null, I could have found people to do it with.

The issue you’re having isn’t that there aren’t people out there doing what you want to do, it’s that what you want to do tends to need a support structure (capitals), or you just have never heard of freakin’ Bombers’ Bar (BlOps), which is an open, public group that works in all TZs, last I checked.

And you’re not willing to put in the work to help the others get better? I mean, no matter what it is in life, Ock, if you want something, you have to go and do the work to make it happen.

Yeah, that just means you don’t care about what the game offers you. You only care about whether or not the game offers you the exact same things it used to. And that’s not how anything works, ever. Even the people on ‘WoW Classic’ servers learned that one. Given the exact same experiences, you’ll respond to them differently, because you have changed. You’re not the same person you were 7-10 years ago. You’ve had 7-10 years of experiences that have shaped you over that time.

No, I was just responding to your lack of clarity. You want to focus on nullsec, fine. He’s also talking to people who live in null, but aren’t part of the blocs. Hell, go to GW, or Syndicate. -7- just took some space in… Scalding Pass, I think? And they’re not in any of the big blocs. With Legacy completely dissolving, Se7erance isn’t even part of a small bloc!

And they’re not the only group out there like that. That’s what I mean by ‘you’ve got blinders on’. You refuse to see what’s out there, because you’re insisting that CCP deliver to you only exactly what you used to have. But that won’t ever happen, and even if it did, you wouldn’t like it. Because of that whole ‘you’ve changed over the years, too’. Because everyone does.