No really, I understand your point but it’s not how you think.
I’ve done as much evil stuff to people in the game as Floppy (maybe, not sure), but it’s a game.
You play Mario, I play a mushroom. We are both vital to the game and the game can’t exist without both.
Jump on voice with floppy or me some time, you’ll find out that the PvP community is just a bunch of nice guys who view the game differently than the pve community. We view wardecs similarly to how you view level 4 missions.
That used to be a much more common perspective. If you come over and check it out, I bet you will find the common ground you aren’t seeing now.
I feel like his point is not how nice you, or Floppy might be, in a voice channel. It is that an awful lot of PVP players seem to have this duality of wanting to “sheppard da new bros” into meaningful EvE playtime, which on a lot of levels, contradicts their “salt miner/suddenly betrayal” hijinks.
He is correct that a huge chunk of the “friendlier” side of hi-sec pvp revolves around the idea that gankers want to gank you. If you respond well to the gank, they -MIGHT- be so inclined as to Bro around with you. If you respond badly to the gank, then you will be publicly humiliated for the aggressors malevolent amusement.
The interactions are seemingly, by design, set up so that the aggressor decides whether or not to reach out and form a more solid bond. By definition… The aggressor wants the victim to play in the aggressors sandbox. Not a mutual one.
This annoys some people. As does parsing the intricate meaning between someone like, say, the venerable Floppy, (o7) who says on the forums that he wants people to be more comfortable with PVP, and he wants newbros to get into it…
And also posts stories about ripping off someones mining ship, “safaris” through peoples corps, and generally being as much of an asshole as he can.
Finally, the implied “nobility” behind certain playstyles, the notion that there’s some secret side ganking that “carebears” just “don’t get” kind of insults some people. This is a game about blowing up spaceships. In this game, you get to blow spaceships, often in ways where the ship in question had no real chance. It is completely acceptable, 100% within the rules of the game.
There’s no need to pretend you don’t just like killing people in game. No need to dress it up with stories about how this one time you ganked someone, and then paid them and taught them and ho hum.
But you have no right to expect that anyone wants to line up to let you do that all the time.
Hi Mo, I nodded my head as I read through your post. It comes as no surprise these days when a fellow scallywag leaves, but is always an event tinged with sadness. I respect your contributions to the game, and always enjoyed the forum wars in which you participated.
I uninstalled EVE several months ago.
It has become clear now that CCP is working towards a carebear-friendly game in which the likes of real villains can play no part. I originally felt that the company was still somewhat interested in holding the 2 sides in stasis in Highsec, in order to retain the maximum number of players. I’ve changed my mind.
It took me a while because the changes are taking place over a very long time, so long that the illusion of stasis is maintained without great difficulty. In fact, the only reason for this is that neither the company (the business) nor the game could easily withstand the wholesale departure of a fairly large contingent of its players - and not just in Highsec. That is why the really big changes will be dropped in a heavily managed fashion. After all, if scallywag players drop out through boredom (they won’t do so all at once), it will help CCP by evening out the thinning of the ranks, until by the time the biggies drop, protest unsubs will not be a significant factor.
That’s my take, anyway.
Thing is, I think the carebears will (as you say) become as bored as us - and leave. For that type of player, there are plenty of online games out there, better written, designed, and executed.
While I don’t think you are far off, and on one level you are right that CCP is spending little-to-no effort balancing highsec conflict and as a result the game becomes more carebear-friendly each year as the easy band-aids solutions and nerfs accumulate, I am not yet willing to attribute malice to their neglect of their highsec. The longer I play this game and observe the development process of CCP, I am more convinced that Eve Online is almost a rudderless ship at this point, still trying to steer in the general direction of full-time PvP sandbox game, but severely undermanned and lacking officers with sufficient competence and conviction to pilot the unwieldy ship.
I think Falcon was genuine in his claim that most devs on the team are trying to build a gritty and competitive virtual universe rather than Space Farming Simulator 2003. However, for whatever reason in recent years, most likely a general lack of developer resources, the sailors are running every which-way implementing short-term band-aid solutions that are chosen largely based on expedience rather than good game play just to plug a leak and stay afloat (things like the watchlist, buffing freighter EHP), while the few true new initiatives to improve the game are either genuine, but misguided efforts to hook new players, or are often balanced with the short-term objective of getting players to use them rather than providing good gameplay (like the hypersafe Upwell structures, OP Rorquals/Carrier ratting, overpaying Incursions) in a shared universe. I am sure every development team wants to point to the feature they just spent 6 or 12 months implementing and see that it is embraced by the players so the temptation to make them too safe or pay too much is great and needs to be resisted by an external head developer looking at global game balance as their primary concern, not uptake of a new feature.
The net result of these accumulation of easy fixes, new player pandering, and unbalanced new features is New Eden circa 2017 - a virtual universe where everything is too safe and everyone too rich. Hunting is tedious, evasion is rampant, and taking the role of the aggressor so unrewarding that less and less people do it. Instead the preferred strategy embraced by the bulk of the players is to hunker down and spend their days fortifying space and accumulating assets for a conflict that probably will never come. Until they just quit out of boredom.
I think this malaise is the largely self-inflicted damage of years of haphazard development not malice, and while there is an element of attempted pandering to carebears and new players, I still think my vision, the original vision for Eve Online, and that of the current development team still largely align. I too am disappointed in their lack of concern or effort spent on fostering highsec conflict, and it is totally consistent that if you keep making it harder and more tedious to create content, highsec scallywags will start to quit or go elsewhere and activity in your sandbox game dries up. But ultimately I think CCP still wants a highsec with wars and crime and people shooting each other, and attribute the sad state of the game there to lack of resources and fighting fires on other fronts.
All those words mean I still have hope. Someday, they might do something so out of touch with the PvP sandbox that I can’t excuse it and I will join you Sasha. Or more likely I will myself be bored out of the game as highsec is getting quieter every month, alarmingly so now. Belts are empty of ships, ice anomalies just sit there from downtime to downtime (which would have been unthinkable a few years ago), and more systems than not have zero people in them much of the time. We have a new expansion coming up which might stoke things up a bit, but if no attention (or even thought it seems) is paid to wars and crime, I fear no amount of new PvE is going to keep players for long, not if there isn’t any real game play there. As you say, the majority of players, even carebears, will get bored and leave in the absence of any purpose or opposition and apparently already are.
So here we are. One can only hope as the decline continues and their repeated attempts to make the game more accessible to attract new players fails, someone in development will finally get desperate enough to try the Saviour’s good advice and double down on the unique aspects of the game, you know the ones that keep most of us playing and work on the conflict mechanics rather wasting time on more safe PvE or monetization schemes. There is plenty of room to build a smuggling, bounty hunting, war and law enforcement game play expansion for highsec, but I have hoped that for a while only to be disappointed by year after year of neglect and I get the sense it is probably too late. The listing boat will still be afloat for a while, but I am pessimistic that it will never be in fighting shape again. Too many content creators have left and are likely not coming back, and too few resources are being spent on the game in general.
Even if the Ascension expansion failed to boost player numbers it did at least lower the bar for past players to check in on the game. Make sure to keep an eye on things Sasha just in case things turn around and don’t be a stranger. At the very least, we can reminisce about the good old days on occasion.
I fully concur, the PVE side needs to be bumped up significantly, or abolished.
My main point is that I feel that the mass thrust of discussions like this revolves more around:
“How CCP is killing…” / “How carebears are evil…”
and less:
“How focusing on extracting tears might be damaging…” / “How we failed or are killing”…
There are metrics to show players stay in after ganking, to be sure. And ganking is in and of itself a… neutral affair. They have, You want, You take, They lose. Fairy muff, all is well.
It’s the scorn. The ridicule. The blogs. The deliberate “salt mining”. The “sudden betrayal”. The bonus rounds.
THOSE are what contribute to your navel contemplation on “the state” of the game.
Getting sploded is part of the game. Getting mocked right out of the gate is part of the problem.
Sasha is a PRIME example that you can disagree with somebody, and still remain civil. You can even learn something from them. Too often on Eve’s forums, people conflate disagreeing with the execution of a thing, with disagreeing with that thing. And then they start getting angry and hateful toward each other.
Sasha and I have not always agreed in the past, however, discussing his side of things with him has been a joy for me. I’m sorry to see that you’re moving on.
I generally concur, we have a duty to keep it fun for both sides. Many of us fail in that regard. I’ve always considered
I’ve enjoyed this thread enough to where I’m considering trying Eve again, but perhaps in a different light.
Having played Eve, pre-retribution, I can tell you that every other PvP experience I’ve had pales in comparison. I have trouble enjoying other games as much.
Eve, today, pales in comparison to the depth of PvP interaction it once offered.
Perhaps I shall try mining… and see how much jet cans help me. I doubt I’ll last, but I can try. I’ve found a decent small corp to play with, nice fellows.
If anyone wants to flip a can… you know how to find me. Just another noob in a venture…
Haha, Black Pedro; ever the deep thinker! I hope you, Mo, and Mr Robot are in good health, and prospering!
It’s interesting that you think of EVE as a ‘rudderless ship’. I was certain that wots-her-name (forgotten already!) had a pretty firm handle on where she wants to take the game, or that she’d been told by the mysterious backers in which direction to steer it.
If you’re right, then it might be that the effort to produce balance has only produced chaos, out of which nothing good comes. Perhaps it’s the lack of overall clarity of direction, surely the defining characteristic of a game rumbling inexorably toward its death.
I agree with you that pure malice is unlikely to be a factor in CCP’s game-balance initiatives; it would be so unprofessional. We’re left, then, with incompetence, at some level of either the staffing structure or of the backers. You say or imply that CCP may no longer be able to rely on a properly or fully staffed workforce, and that this may be contributing to or causing the malaise. That may be so - and let’s not forget, EVE is their livelihood - I’d not considered the effect of long-term de-staffing.
Never say ‘never’. I may be back, but in this case, absence has failed signally to increase or even to stir that fondness one’s led to expect!
I’d even taken the ‘EVE Forums’ bookmark off my browser’s bar. Perhaps that was extreme…
All the best to you Pedro. Let’s see how things turn out!
Your missing the point because your focused on only one part.
1
Few if any people jet can mine because of the ore holds. This means there are no theifs to steal cans because the cans themselves don’t exist. Reverting suspect mechanics would not fix this problem.
2
Suspect mechanics are a 1000% improvement on the old mechanics. They allowed for things like neutral 100% safe unagressable logi, Instant swapping of ships from orcas (now we have bowheads) and issues where fleets couldn’t agress a hostile theif because it was corp based.
3
Now there are plenty of people about the place suspect that if you can find you can kill. You don’t need to go looking for a mission runner if evenish PvP is your goal you can find somebody with the sense to go suspect and kill them. Alternatively learn missions and steal mission items from mission runners. Those sell well and often enough provoke a response from a PvE fit ship for you to try your luck against.
Can flipping is gone and will never come back. Suspect mechanics are a vast improvement on the old mechanics and would make things like wardeccing stupidly broken if reverted. Your wanted changes would break the game. They need to be thought through properly and looked at from more than one angle
I disagree on some points. I also take some issue with the assertion that I haven’t thought this through properly.
Your disagreement doesn’t temper the quality of my thought.
the large ore holds was a nerf on flipping, and would have to be rebalanced as well. Though, as I said above, I’d be open to other mechanics that lead to actual interaction.
you are right on some points, but logi could always be agressed once it repped (and I agree that neutral logi was in need of a nerf) and you could never drop a ship into an Orca if you were scrammed. Yes, there were some mechanics you could abuse here, but those aren’t the end-all explanation of what was going on with flipping.
war-decs are, imo, so broken in their current configuration as to be nearly worthless. I have personally given up on them as a meaningful way of creating real interaction. i think they need to scrap the current model and start over.
I think the overabundance of wardecs was what started this whole nerf-off in the first place… as it was the only non-consentual PvP that existed or exists in highsec.
Interaction is what’s missing today. You can hardly tell me that you “interacted” with anyone recently in a merc corp. Last time I played merc, I didn’t even know who I’d shot for most of my kills.
I liked the idea proposed above that pve drive people to go suspect, but we still need something to build a grudge.
With no grudges or actual interpersonal interaction, there is no opera… no matter how worthy the adversary or how many bullets you exchange.
You assume I’m talking about PvP, but I’m really referencing the actual real world emotions that make eve real. Without those, it’s not the game it once was.
I was in the middle of writing a long winded post about wars mission flipping etc and deleted it all to say this
Suspect mechanics fix alot of the old problems. Learn to use them or fail to adapt and die. When I want to bait mission runners or kill suspect baiters I find no shortage of content and tears. Nor do any of the guys I’ve trained over the years to love the same playstyle
why can’t we have both? what’s your point? that we can’t, because reasons? that’s silly. supect state and GCC both need an overhaul, so the imbalance (a lack of antagonists) can be corrcted.
Yes things changed, but it is still possible to have fun with the miners. The thing about can flipping is that it made people angry. When people are angry they react and don’t think and then stuff happens.
The way I adapted is like this: I use ganking as a way to make them angry. I warp in with a scout in a tanked mining ship and some gank alts. When the miner is dead I loot the wrecks with the scout and become suspect. Now they are angry and have a way to come back at me since I’m flashing yellow and all locks very legit since it came from looting. The mining ship I’m in looks like a weak target, because every carebear knows, mining ships are defenceless.
Once someone takes the bait I have multiple options. I usually use a Procurer as the scout ship, since CCP made it just insanely op and it can actually kill of a lot of stuff already on it’s own if PvP fitted. If they bring something heavier I have an Orca nearby, another of those defenceless mining ships which happens to have a ship bay where you can switch to a command ship or a t3 or whatever you like.
And yes from time to time there are people who will build a trap and destroy me. But that is quite rare. My last Sleipnir got over 50 killmarks before it died to a fleet of angry people from lowsec or whatever.
My point is less that “I demand the mechanics that I like” than to observe that the high-sec PvP community is curiously absent, jump after jump, in highsec.
I can’t be the only person wondering why the community is gone. Perhaps it’s an improvement, but I’m writing to say I think it’s bad for the game.
I miss the mechanics, but I think everyone is missing the content.