You’re right, these carebears are a threat to the game. Maybe CCP should do something about them, like un-nerfing all of the PvP mechanics that have been eviscerated over the years.
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If it wasn’t for suicide gankers then mining in low sec would be boring and im winning that minigame.
Of course, I think most of the reasons nerf-gankers provide for why ganking is unfair are absolutely terrible. Moreover, I adamantly assert that ganking is balanced heavily in favor of prey, and that the real reason so many people die is because they make themselves soft targets through their greed, laziness, impatience, and/or lack of knowledge.
However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t think that none of their arguments have merit, or that ganking doesn’t have any problems. So rather than arguing with idiots, how about we talk about what we think are the actual problems with ganking. Here is my list:
- Many players perceive ganking as unfair, and whether this is true or not, perceptions are often more important that reality.
- Many players feel like they have no agency. Once again, this isn’t true, but perceptions matter.
- Newbros don’t have agency in practice because they don’t yet have the knowledge required to get better outcomes. Do note, however, that getting ganked as a newbro didn’t make me feel like I had no agency. Instead, it spurred me to learn how to stop getting ganked. So, I don’t think that the solution to this is coddling newbros. Instead, I think it lies in drilling into newbros a strong internal locus of control and teaching them actually useful information (i.e. might be better to teach newbros risk management strats and how to problem solve, rather than tell them to hide in an asteroid belt to mask their signature).
- Ganking is highly predictable. This contributes to players feeling like they lack agency, reinforces perceptions that ganking is unbalanced, and limits the thrill and relief of escaping ganks. But how do you fix this without dramatically altering how suicide ganking works? The only thing that straight nerfs will do is to shrink engagement profiles. Instead you’d need to address the things that make ganking so predictable. Not sure what other people think, but I believe that the reasons include:
- hunters get to determine the terms of engagement,
- Ganking mechanics have turned it into a DPS race against the clock, which makes it easy to calculate if you can kill something
- most prey make it really easy to kill them
- Of course, decreasing predictability is also essentially a nerf to ganking, which means that you would need to buff it in order to compensate. And, I’m thinking a lot of players wouldn’t be to happy with that.
- I am open to the possibility that anti-ganking might need a buff (I do not have experience as an anti-ganker), however that might also necessitate buffing ganking to compensate.
- Scrublords- These are the guys who blameshift in order to protect their ego. However, rather than be content to self-sabotage, their desire for validation and to save face in front of their peers leads them to complain that the game isn’t fair to any and all that will listen -including newbros who don’t know any better. And so they set up newbros for frustration and failure by drilling it into them that the game is unfair and that there is nothing they can do to get better outcomes. In fact, they sometimes even systematically sabotage newbros by creating what Destiny Corrupted calls “carebear puppy mill” corps. By the way, it seems like gankers think this is a much bigger problem than the average player, and I suspect that this is due to casual observation and the availability heuristic. We seek out soft targets, which means that our play style causes us to interact a lot more with scrublords and scrublord corps than the average player.
Do you think these are problems, and how would you address them? Do you have anything you want to add to the list? Do you think we should intentionally implement a player filter into the NPE in order to weed out all the whinebears?
On a side note, did you know that the communities of other always-on PvP games are having the same arguments? In fact, this is all part of what is known as… THE GREAT PVP DEEEBAAAAAAATUH!
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9 more hours till I can leave upvotes again because… reasons.
Have an upvote gif
I also take ISK.
Now who’s the philistine 
25 x cruisers to gank a JF. But whatever. Say its hundreds of crewmembers point is the same.
Try reading a chronicle about crew from 2005.
This is what you’ll face. Madmen locked inside capsules, squandering lives as if they were nothing. When you are up there you are a tool, nothing more. A slave to the will of a pilot, bound to a man immortal until his mind can no longer be cloned.
That’s the tone of the universe: Capsuleers routinely treat their crew’s lives as disposable embodying callousness, uncaring, aloofness, self-absorption.
Four months later, Daren Athaksis was confirmed as one of six-thousand three-hundred and fourteen reported casualties resulting from the destruction of the Apocalypse-class battleship “Dam-Imud.” His post was filled within three days. His family was not notified.
You can roleplay as a Capsuleer that greatly cares for his crew and wants to never have his spaceship blown up. You’ll be a very rare breed, and playing the game. As opposed to not playing the game and complaining the “Eve fantasy” is the “illogical kind of fantasy”.
In the story you link to the capsuleer is talking about war and enemies. In that sense, it makes sense to be cynical and machiavellian with respect to your crew, to sacrifice them for winning a battle etc.
That has nothing to do with the flawed logic of attacking someone in highsec knowing with 100% surety that you and your entire crew will die for no reason whatsoever.
To pretend that im against a “cold and dark fantasy world” or a negligent attitude to your crew is just strawmanning.
This is a theme explored in many sci-fi universes. Ghost in the Shell: SAC, Time Enough For Love, hell I think Marvel touches on it, etc. Once immortal, who cares about mortal deaths? It is perfectly logical, if we view it in our real world as sociopathic, to treat each of one’s immortal clones as ammo, and the lives of the mortal as expendable means to accomplish immortal aims.
The fact that it doesn’t resonate with you as “logical” does not mean I’m strawmanning here. You simply keep refusing to engage with me and instead keep repeating statements in isolation as if no matter what I say is wrong. That’s just a rhetorical technique to attempt paint me as “uncharitable” in interpreting what little conversation you are willing to offer.
Re-read the story. The capsuleer is talking to a would-be crewmember. And describes other sociopathic capsuleers who don’t care for their crew. Those kinds of capsuleers are out there, have been, and will continue to be.
Lol i was wondering why there were upwards of 200 new replies in this thread and then i got to the ISD post that there had been a merge.
So the fact that crew die breaks immersion for some players. First time I’ve heard that one. It’s quite refreshing because it touches on something that has really been breaking immersion for me. That I don’t pay my crew. I mean why are all these people on my ship if I’m not giving them isk? I’d propose that an amount of isk is deducted ever hour per member of crew. Not only would this be much more realistic it would encourage more active game play as players would be less inclined to just hang around space…….it would incentivise them to make isk.
Also that crew should get tired. If I’ve been undocked for more than 2 hours my crew should start to get weary and be less efficient. Dropping the efficiency of my ship due to fatigue that gets worse the longer I’m up forcing me to dock up regularly for maintenance.
Not to mention the management of crew morale that currently we have no ability to manage.
All of which most of us will agree is nonsense. The question really is about where the “average” person suspends their disbelief. @Carl_Stonewall its great that you rp or whatever and get into the universe but you must accept that thinking about eve in terms of “oh no…….what about the crew” buts you in a minority. Most people approach the game from a “is this activity fun, yes or no” standpoint and don’t sweat the minute details. You really cant expect an entire game to be changed on the basis of “i cant rp this in my head”.
As for ganking……. Out of all the 200+ new posts i was disappointed to see that only one (at least that i saw) addressed the connection between industry and ganking. We have already seen ore prices drop after the mining changes. There will be many factors in that happening but one of those factors is barges and exhumers got harder to kill. Less destruction………more ore making it to market. More supply……less demand.
Extrapolate that out to a 100% safe hisec and suddenly we are all mining and building in complete utopia but not making and isk as nobody needs anything. That exhumer you buy today will still be with you in 10 years because as long as you don’t leave hisec you are effectively invincible. Then the game becomes broken in far worse ways than always on PVP.
Every ship fitting becomes the same. Would we ever see a Skiff in hisec again? What would be the point with zero risk? Just park a freighter in a belt and log in with 5 alts in Hulks and scoop those cans. Nobody can do anything…….All those ships are 100% safe.
Not to mention they fact that meaningful choice goes out the window. Life in hisec at the minute consists of decisions about risk and reward. We chose where we live. We may be ok with living in gankerville and risking ships for the convenience of being near a trade hub. Or we may prefer to be in quiet space away from gankers but needing to travel if we need to buy something.
We can chose how we move our stuff. We can move it ourselves and accept the risk that the ship and cargo may be lost. Or we can pay someone to move the stuff adding collateral to the contract to completely transfer the risk to someone else for a small fee. Spending a couple of mill to avoid losing 550mill is good business sense.
We have to choose how we fit our ships. If we are mining we have to decide whether we want to fit for max yield or perhaps give up efficiency by using low slots and rigs for defence.
If ganking didn’t exist none of the above would matter. Where you lived would not matter…….risk is 0 everywhere. We could harvest and move ore and modules with total invincibility so couriers become far less important in the hisec economy. And every ship would be fitted the same as it would be a mistake not to min max for a singular purpose.
We talk about breaking immersion…….and say that the solution is to make space the same………take away fitting diversity and saturate an economy with ore. To me that is far more immersion breaking in that space would be cookie cutter stale……no events……no drama…… just clones of the same pilots breaking the game in complete safety.
I’m all for starter zones to be green safety only if it really is a problem for new players (its not……CCP has data that says its not). But that would be on the proviso that materials mined cant be injected into the games main economy. I don’t see why a minority screaming for safety should be allowed to ruin the game for everyone else.
Simple, as I roleplay as an environmental terrorist activist.
Someone has to speak for the asteroids. Someone has to make the miners pay for their wonton greedy destruction of the space environment. Especially those that destroy entire moons for their goo.
There’s my immersion. It should for yours.
Also, in terms of Aiko and crew, you could roleplay them as some sort of mafia demanding protection money after they destroyed and set fire to your shop, to ensure it won’t happen again.
Or some strange space-doom cult.
If i can jettison my crew and then you have a deal on that realism.
Lets be honest here to the fullest extent that’s possible,
This games new and old player retention is something to be concerned about.
From seeing people upset in the rookie help channel because their inexperience was taken advantage of, to seeing players, with seemingly reasonable knowledge of the game, flame in various sources like the ccp twitch channel. These warning signs of volunteer bias are a sign of a deeper problem that not everyone is so outspoken about, people aren’t sticking around.
From my limited game knowledge and the game knowledge that I’ve acquired from other experienced and inexperienced players I’ve learned that ccp intends to continue the push for alt accounts. Its their game, and if that’s the direction they want to go with, that’s nothing that we can realistically change. But speaking from my experience. when a game decides to change something that drastically, the infrastructure of the game’s mechanics needs to be laid out and thought through before openly allowing that change to happen.
Maybe its just growing pains, or maybe some mechanics have been overlooked, or some realities haven’t been considered, but there are a number of mechanics that people exploit that were designed with the intent that a player would not be using alt accounts to bypass them.
For example one mechanic designed with the intent to punish the player are public kill rights. From what I can assume was the intended function, this was suppose to serve as a repercussion for killing players and insure the security of high/low sec space while providing work for bounty hunters.
Now how it actually works is you have people who kill right farm in and around new player space and use an alt to clear any public kill right.
Another example of a mechanic designed to punish the player and insure security is how suicide ganking was intended to play out. How i would assume the mechanic was intended is a player would gank another player, have a short amount of time to either flee within the system, (to hide the loot from the victim) die, then come back after the set amount of time to loot the spoils of piracy granted that they were still there and the player was not found. How it works currently is someone suicide ganks another player, that account is sent off to die somewhere, then an alt account swipes the loot and flees the system allowing any kind of player response to be completely avoided by and overly minimizes the risk versus reward especially for a solo not alt player. With a pirate fleet, you have to split the profits buy people out of things you want, manage cohesion, and deal with people who thieve from thieves. So many aspects that drastically change the way the game is played and ultimately watered down because its easier to do so with alts than with a group.
Now these are just a few examples I’ve come across and heard about so far, I’m sure there are other examples that have caused the number of players to leave, but from a new players perspective, this heavy polarization between security spaces (at least where new players start) instead of the exponential gradation increasing as security lowers (like most people would expect) is going to frustrate a lot of new players (rightfully so given there are players who specifically hunt new accounts) in order to clot this hemorrhage of new players leaving, some kind of regulation needs to happen. Especially if this push for alt accounts is something ccp is dead set on doing. i would suggest re-evaluating any punishing consequences while keeping in mind they need to apply to both solo and alt accounts or perhaps adding and enforcing some non exploitation measure to the terms of service for alt accounts.
I understand that alt accounts still need to have their reward or people wont use them, but this is down right punishing for non alting solo players and its making new player space incredibly hostile. I wish I could speak from an older players experience but unfortunately that’s the hardest part of survivorship bias. I may not make it to be an older player. That’s not to discredit anyone else’s opinion but rather a likely explanation of how we got todays eve.
As im looking at other related forum posts im realizing a common trend with my post and others. id like to clarify this post isnt specifically about “nerfing”, its about re-evaluating current mechanics and how they operate in regards to alternate accounts lowering the risk in various risk versus reward systems.
And yet we still have literally thousands of new players in the Rookie Help channel every month, if not every week. How do I know this? Because I’m one of the bittervets in that channel trying to help them.
The problem is not ganking or alts. The problem lies solely with the newest generation of gamers. I see it every single day in the help channel. They want everything now and for little or no effort. Every time they ask a question like “how do I warp to the station” or “how do I play this?”, the first two questions that I ask them are “did you do the tutorial?” and “did you do the career agents?”. 90% of the time, the answer to that question is “no”.
Still, we try to explain the mechanics of EVE to them as best we can, usually to no avail. New players now have it much easier than we ever did, and yet all they can do is complain about how EVE is “too hard” or “not fair”. Unfortunately, EVE’s future lies with the Fortnite generation, and it’s not looking good…
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I see it too in there
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Posting in a “pretend not to be nerf ganking” thread…
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If that’s your attitude to helping new players then perhaps you’ve been trying to help them for too long. You seem rather bitter and hell bent on chalking it up to “these damn youngsters don’t know how to value anything like WE did” when it couldn’t possibly be the consistently changing and evolving mmo as they’re known to be. As for comparing it to fortnite i think you should try playing it before judging it silently from afar. And I’m sorry to break this to you as a 30 year old man myself but the passage of time changes everything, if its not changing with life we generally define that as a cancer or unhealthy. How fun would eve be if it had stayed the same since you first started playing? I’m talking graphical updates ui changes content updates the works. if nothing changed truly how entertaining would you find doing the same thing at whatever age you are now?
I rest my case…