Only in the most trivial sense. If you want to say, “You use models which are designed by devs therefore not emergent” then nothing is emergent. And which case…you really don’t have much to contribute to any discussion of emergent game play other than being a Johnny One-Note and whine nobody is using your definition.
Hahahaha…this is a load of baloney.
Where was Delve in the MERs before the Imperium showed up and took it? Hmmm…pretty much nowhere. You might have a point if and only if you can point to older MERs where Delve was an economic powerhouse prior to the Imperium take over.
Why did Delve suddenly become so productive? Gee could it be the Imperium moving in and implementing strategies and innovations that allowed them to exploit Delve to a much greater extent than its previous inhabitants had? If so this goes to Andski’s point and weakens yours.
Tell us more about your e-bushido…
How is an AFK scout watching local? That is an extremely stupid comment. Well done.
Look, Teckos, you like to play pretend-economist, google some stuff, toss in a few links and hope to impress the rubes. And that’s okay, really. I mean, at least you’ve googled something and even understood parts of it, right?
And in your part-time job as Goon propagandist, it’s important for you to pretend that what’s going on in Null is valuable and interesting gameplay, rather than milking game mechanics for all they’re worth.
Let’s just start with “emergent gameplay”: it’s become a buzzword for “the things I like are emergent gameplay, the things I don’t are boring mechanics”. But emergent gameplay originally meant (definitions from multiple gaming sites):
“Emergent gameplay refers to anything discovered by game players that wasn’t explicitly planned and designed by a game’s creators.”
“Emergent Gameplay is the concept of creating a game that allows the player to create solutions or elements that the designer never intended.”
“Emergent Gameplay: A title where the mechanics afford the player to create new strategies and utility beyond their original intent or utilization.”
I’m pretty sure the mechanics of fozzie sov, free local chat intel, cyno drops of standby supercap fleets, Rorq panic buttons etc. are all working pretty much exactly as designed and expected. Simply combining those mechanics to make Null the safest place to operate for power blocs doesn’t make them ‘emergent’.
If you’re going to propagandize for the Goons you should at least learn a little history. Posting a regional breakdown from a single month in 2015, 2 months after fozzie sov was introduced and while various wars and power shifts were taking place (including the preludes to World War Bee) is meaningless. Yes, you post a lot of meaningless stuff and then draw incorrect or intentionally misleading conclusions from it, but this one is even more so.
Delve has been known as “the richest region in all of EVE” since at least early 2007 (BoB owned it back then).
As for “before the Imperium showed up and took it”, the Goons have been active in Delve since they helped to kick BoB out in 2009. They’ve taken it, been gutted and kicked out, spent years retaking it, yadda yadda. It’s been a major wealth producing region for well over a decade. Why do you think people keep fighting over it?
You think it’s “sudden” that delve has been productive for a dozen years now? Guess you somehow missed the changes to sov, Rorqs, ratting, botting etc. that made Delve more productive rather than something special about Goons. Or that Goons simply have the most manpower, alts, bots, renters, hangers-on and sycophants to fill the region and exploit the hell out of it. Or that other Null regions are also significant wealth producers, just not to the extent that Delve is. After all, safe and easy ISK brings all the boys to the yard, dunnit?
So let’s try less Goon/Null propaganda, and check some slightly more current data than 2015:
Based on current numbers, Delve looks to have way more “wealth creation” (bounties + mining - destruction) and way less risk than even high sec. So yeah, gonna stand by “region offering the most rewards for the least actual risk is bad for the game” on this one.
(Apologies for the quick and dirty formatting, browser started to act up on me just as I was finishing this)
Isn’t that in part, what we all do? Do you just fit random modules or do you look at the modules and look for the best fit? Max-min is rampant through out most games and especially EVE.
Actually the notion of emergence goes much further back than video games. One could even make the case it is hundreds of years old with Adam Ferguson’s statement “by human action, but not by human design.” The market process is an example of emergence. The stuff that comes out of it is rarely planned by any single person. It is often the result of a bunch of people doing things that end up producing results nobody was really aiming for.
Sure, and how is a capital/super-capital umbrella not an example of this? Was it fully intended by the Devs? I don’t think so. I think the number of titans in game was never intended. Same with super carriers. In fact, the various processes players have come up with to facilitate super capital proliferation is an example of emergence. Maybe it isn’t good, but there it is.
Okay, and the cyno-network that was implemented in Delve was not an example of this?
How about the wrecking ball fleet comp developed by the NC.?
Seriously, if anyone here has a bias it is you.
Was it? Why wasn’t it used before? I’ve lived in NS a long time on both the BoB/GBC side and on the Goons/Imperium side. And using a capital/super capital umbrella was never really a thing early on even though that capability was there.
Here is the thing with innovation, in hindsight they look totally f–king obvious. But in terms of foresight everyone pretty much thought they were stupid. In the older AFK Cloaking threads whenever it was suggested to have a fleet on standby to drop on people who were trying to kill ratters was considered laughable…yet here we are with pretty much exactly that. Granted, they don’t drop to save a VNI, but the more high value targets like super caps and rorquals they do.
So maybe it was, but you have literally zero evidence of this and it did appear well after all these mechanics and modules were put in place, so I am a bit skeptical.
Yes, deny the data. Very good. Nice motivated reasoning.
Here is an alternate theory. Goons have a huge logistical backbone and a strong institutional set up. And they have packed a very large number of people into Delve. Now if we take a simple view of GDP it is largely determined by People*Productivity (grossly stated). So just having lots of people in Delve is one reason it is seen as so “valuable”. Granted Goons propaganda has made much of it, but really it isn’t that bit a deal. If we had economic data back when goons were much more spread out and could aggregate it all up my guess is we’d see Goons were pretty good at accumulating resources. Add on the Goons strong institutional support for players and it is likely their productivity is higher than the typical player.
Yes, it is a pretty damned nice region, but it also is up to the players to extract those riches. Those who have a strong culture and institutions aimed at that will do very well, those that don’t won’t.
You want to take all that culture/institutional element away. Why? that is just shitty economics. Really shitty. It is like 1950’s economics when they were saying all kinds of dumb crap like “There can be no private light houses.” Then somebody looked and whoops.
Yes, I know. I was involved in those wars. I was a member of the GBC when Goons basically turned off BoB sov. And again when BoB reformed and took Fountain from PL. Then moved on to Delve (where they got luck with an ironic missed sov payment). I watched from the inside as IT Alliance fell apart, because their culture was ■■■■, I mean ■■■■. The petty in-fighting was astonishing. And I involved in World War Bee as well. I have been on most of the major deployments/wars in game.
There is a difference between being resource rich and being productive. If nobody is extracting and using those resources the region is not productive. Productivity applies to people, generally speaking.
And you are missing the human element. Those changes do nothing if people do not utilize them. You have a very strange view. That things happen without people. That’s just not true. You need the people to utilize them.
But there is a grain of truth in your point. Fozzie sov made holding a far flung empire very problematic. So now the Imperium is much more concentrated. In the old days, you could move around Delve and see totally empty systems. Now most systems have people in them, sometimes lots of people.
This ■■■■ doesn’t happen in a vacuum though. You discount all the work people put in doing that and pretend like it just happens. That’s crazy.
And you are making some bad comparison’s here. Nobody controls The Forge, well no players, that is. Especially Jita. And what do we know goes on in Jita, lots of people camp the station looking for war dec targets. Then there is the suicide ganking. None of which goes on in Delve because…well the Imperium controls it and they actively police their space. A threat shows up there is a good chance the Imperium will form up and go after it. That kind of thing pretty much never happens in Jita. Basically one thing is not like the other.
No it doesn’t help. When a person is AFK they cannot use third party tools like aDashboard.
And yet another player not looking at the MERs and what was going on with the money supply…
@Teckos_Pech I have to applaud your attempts, yet again, for trying to have a debate with people who refuse to see null as anything more than a hunting ground where the people there magically have everything they have with no coordination or effort put in from anyone. And it would all be better if CCP did simple action X to fix it (morons always do like simple ideas made to look extravagant).
But refuse to see it for what it really is, an empty, barren land until hundreds of people work together to destroy/install infrastructure, set up networks and implement known systems based on years of experience, where people then call their “home.” Yet they expect everyone who lives there to be okay with small, worthless groups of people in cheap ships breaking in and trying to kill their friends and family and do nothing and have no way to defend them outside of 23/7 gate camps - which they complain about too when we do it too!
Is botting an issue? I don’t think it’s as widespread as some to believe it to be in ALL of null for a moment. We can look at the metrics released to know who the real culprits are when it comes to openly allowing them within their ranks. People who try to bot in active alliances are not liked and usually disposed of quickly. Think about it, they are directly competing with actual members for resources who will actually contribute to the alliance. Sadly, unlike hunters who can view everything as prey, we still have to play by the rules of null and not shoot a blue unless we’re damned sure it’s a bot and get approval. All we can do is report them to CCP and leadership and wait for the problem to be taken care of. Unless we want to find ourselves homeless and/or blacklisted because we decided to shoot someone we suspected of being a bot and was wrong.
At the end of the day, if CCP wants to actually do something about it they need to move towards more active and dynamic mechanics for resource/isk acquisition which can be far more easily detected on their end as to if it’s a human or bot performing the repeated actions. Blackout was nice for “dumb” bots, but did nothing to actually solve the problem. In most areas made the problem worse because it chased away real players who knew the risk was too high allowing for “smart” botters to spread to more systems and use actual exploits to keep their armies safe. Finger pointing and saying null is just too safe is the argument of the ignorant who don’t fully grasp where the safety comes from and how we even got to the point that it can exist (fozzie sov, ihub upgrades, citadel mechanics, rorqs, injectors, etc) despite no change in intel gathering mechanics at any point in the game’s history until blackout itself. Yet that’s what they always point to! Even now, after seeing it chase away far more real players in a short amount of time than any single change to date at a time of year when the most competition was being released to welcome them with open arms they still won’t let it go. But alas, we have ulterior motives because we live in null and really want EVE to die so nothing we say is truthful- it’s all just propaganda to benefit ourselves.
Cry me a river dude… seriously. Get over the whole “pity us poor unappreciated hard working nullbears” bit.
There are some haters who just want Null torn down. There are people who think Nullbears and the CSM ‘made’ CCP turn Null into the Happy Hunting Grounds of ISK and resource farming. There are also people who think ‘whiners’ on the forums ‘made’ CCP make high sec safe, and people who think high sec is super safe profitable farming grounds, and people who think “the bad investors” made it all happen.
All the “he said she said” drama and the “hey we worked hard for Null!”, and the conspiracy theories etc. are irrelevant. They aren’t the issue.
The only relevant issue shows up in the player stats and the MERs, year after year and month after month. The game is slowly bleeding to death, the economy is way unbalanced, Null is the most unbalanced region for risk vs. reward. Null is boring, complacent and stagnant. High sec is boring, complacent and stagnant. FW is boring, complacent and stagnant. And on and on.
Yes, it takes a ton of people and a ton of organization and a ton of 3rd party tools and alt accounts etc. to make Null that way. Doesn’t matter. End result is what matters. Way too much farming for way too little risk.
Blackout was perhaps useful as an experiment. It was silly as a “let’s fix what’s wrong” attempt. It’s hard to tell what it really was because CCP will spin it whatever way they think looks best at the moment.
The fact is, CCP needs to do something to virtually every region (maybe less so in WH space) to get the game out of the tired repetitive rut it’s in. People farm too much because really, it’s the only “useful” thing to do while they are spinning their wheels and waiting for CCP to do something interesting.
Everyone’s been waiting for a long time now. CCP has to take action, they simply have no clue as to what action to actually take.
Stop whining that people are threatening to rock your boat. Start realizing that the boat is sinking, and someone damn well better do something about it.
I agree bots are a problem but warping away doesn’t mean bots. They are in mining ships! Of coarse the warp off! What are they supposed to do? Shoot you with their mining lasers?
You quoted from my last paragraph, so I know you had to have read the start of it. I said exactly where the focus needs to be. It’s not the golden bullet by any means, but it is at least a piece of the puzzle everyone in null has been screaming for years. We need something to fight over. The only way to make bot detection easier is to make things more dynamic and increase the apm so more timing/patterns can be detected to more swiftly remove bots as they start up, even ones that are unique and not used by multiple people.
At no point was I going woe is me, I pointed out the conflicting views of those who live in an area vs those that wish to hunt deep in enemy territory and complain no matter what strategy is used against them. As well as the blind eye turned towards the massive upkeep costs in terms of man hours to maintain said safety which I don’t deny exists. But making the systems more dynamic and introducing vulnerabilities. Such as the OA which could have given people the change to hack and turn off local or loop local name lists of connected systems also part of the OA’s network. Meaning having more OAs active in unused space creates a vulnerability in the whole network that can be exploited.
Adding- I also think citadels need caps be it system or constellations. Best way imo is to have a point system where each type has a point, and have a hard limit on the XLs. Low power should have no timers, no tethering. Tethering should be a basic toggle which has a fuel cost but does not count to high/low power. Structure mechanics need a complete rework. Such as having structures having “vulnerabilities” start appearing over time on the hull which when “killed” act to increase the damage cap on the structure moving some of the defenders advantage away the longer a fight goes on. Additionally these should be remote-repairable allowing the defender to regain this lost advantage should the tides begin to turn. The third timer on a structure should be tied to holding the sov itself. Meaning when you are attacking, if you can take out that TCU you automatically have 1 less timer to deal with on any structure in system. The second timer should go back to a stront-type system where you set a duration of RF, not a day/time. I could go on, but none of these things are “beneficial” to those living in sov null. But at least start moving some of the toxic systems in a better direction.
NS is a great bit coordination problem (or a big messy pile of coordination problems) and yet players figure out ways to solve those coordination problems. But according to some it is really the Devs solving the problems apparently.
Yes indeed you buried one sentence of “what needs to be done” in that page and half of Nullbear justification.
And, true enough, while it was only one sentence, it is a significant part of “what needs to change” in EVE. Boring, bottable, simplistic repetitive PvE is a death sentence for a game that is 80% or more PvE. So I agree, “active and dynamic mechanics for resource/isk acquisition” is a key requirement.
The OA mechanic you mention has possibilities, The citadel recommendations, maybe. I’m not into owning or bashing citadels, so I honestly don’t get why people are so bothered by them. (Not saying they shouldn’t be bothered by them, just that I don’t get what the issue is.) It seems to me that having 3 citadels in a system or having 30, it’s much the same. A fraction of a second’s align time difference maybe. If there’s an active citadel, I can use it’s services. If there are 20 active citadels, I can still only use the services of one of them. Multiple doesn’t make me more powerful or farming more profitable. (IMO, but am happy to be educated differently.)
However, a major missing component is mentioned in your sentence “We need something to fight over”. A primary issue with Null is that once you take it and set up your “Fortress of Infinite Exploitation” (which, granted, takes a lot of manpower and organization)… then you’ve got very little need to fight anymore.
In fact, all through the game, except for a few gank-for-profit types and a few “I need your tears to make my day” ego-trippers, there is very little need and very little reward/incentive for actually fighting. While Null is an issue, and excess resources are an issue, they are sort of ‘end-game’ issues that don’t need to be addressed ‘first’.
The real issue is that most people aren’t even finishing the tutorial before quitting. While this isn’t all that unusual in any MMO… I feel the early game and the early management of expectations/exposure to the possibilities of EVE is considerably more important/urgent for EVE’s survival than trying to beat Null into shape.
I did actually, I just never went into detail because while I have a dozen ideas on how this can be accomplished, it was off the topic of botting so I left it at that. I’ll just go over one possibility, and in no ways do I think it would solve everything, again just a step in the right direction of giving entities something to fight over again.
The last thing null entities had to fight over were moons. The current system is crap. Those citadel timers you don’t see the issue with is actually part of that problem. The largest part is just about everything is everywhere in excess since the moon changes and it requires active mining to obtain, which requires line members who are willing to do it. While this is great for those players willing to do it, it completely eliminated an alliance level desire to go after moons not within their own territory. It’s why low sec all but dried up after the change. It was common for null blocks to venture into low to take or protect their moons. It also allowed for smaller entities or individuals to hold moons and make some isk off base reactions. All that went away and was replaced with the crap system of today that a few people asked for, but nobody really wanted all in the name of combating “passive income sources” - even if that was what made them so desirable and generated so much content. Replaced with active miners who will run at the drop of a hat, a citadel that will take at least a week to destroy, and a lot of barren moons nobody is willing to touch because they know they’ll never be able to extract without getting ganked repeatedly.
Now that that is out of the way, one possible solution is to revamp the current moon system. Once a cycle has been completed on a moon the second module can be activated on up to X number of targeted goo asteroids a 24 hour timer will begin. After the time elapses that ore will be collected into the deliveries hangar of the owning corp at some reduced yield (rigs added to reduce time or increase yield). This cycle can be repeated until there are no more asteroids. This re-implements a portion of the passive mining, while leaving the possibility for active mining to yield far greater quantities of ore. By having the targeted ore’s marked with a tractor beam effect anyone actually ballsy enough to ninja mine can have a direct impact of what they pull in. Additionally, the siphons can be reworked such that if they are anchored directly in the path of the beam that a portion of the pull will be collected at the end of the cycle. The siphon’s content should also be 100% destroy rate if killed to avoid what happened a lot with the old siphon mechanics which was you’d just kill them and take back what was “stolen.” This way if someone successfully anchors a siphon and the defender fails to kill it before the cycle’s end there will be loss to their income.
The hope here is that be introducing a passive income these moons will regain their “value” to people to fight over in conjunction with the changes to actual citadel mechanics that I mentioned before. Specifically the second timer being timer based not time/day, and the third timer only being available to holders of the TCU in system (give WH players TCUs, come up with an excuse and just do it) which means all structures in low sec and high immediately only have shield and armor timers just like the POS they were replacing which is all we ever could have in these areas. This will make fighting over these moons far more bearable than they are currently. With any luck this will bring back some decent content to areas of space currently lacking and give null entities a reason to venture outside their borders on a regular basis rather than just for the odd war/eviction. I do realize this will very likely require a rework of what ores spawn where - I’d actually highly suggest making R32s a low sec-only spawn to give such a change a kick in the rear.
To “quickly” touch on my vulnerabilities idea from before. This is more to assist with the grind that surrounds the larger structures in tidi where subcaps should play a larger role in taking out a structure by creating more openings for useful cap escalation. and defensive logistics required to help keep it alive. Basically, repaired vulnerabilities reduce the vulnerability timer. This creates a need for the attacker to bring a subcap fleet to kill them or a defender could decide to bring the fight to an early close by repairing their structure’s vulnerabilities. From the offensive perspective, this may now be a requirement for killing any structure by requiring at least 1 or 2 of these “vulnerabilities” to be destroyed before you can reach a damage cap that will pause the timer. Killing 3-4 could allow for capital weapon application. 10 could result in auto-destruction. And just like repairing decreases the vulnerability timer, destruction could increase the timer. Obviously these should have hps and dps caps such that one cannot actually overpower the other without controlling the field and become increasingly difficult the longer a fight stretches out as more begin to appear. I’m not sure how to balance citadels such that every small entities doesn’t just get trounced like they currently do, that’s why I suggested allowing them to be repaired to at least give them more of a fighting chance than they do now. Out side of that, larger entities will always have the advantage that’s just a fact of life.
Well this turned into one hell of a massive wall of text than I intended for a “quick” response. Sorry, but I hope this at least gets the point across that we don’t just look at things in terms of zkill, but how to increase meaningful content, not just destruction, everywhere. Sometimes that requires a passive income/resource source to draw in groups that would want a piece of that pie.
Why does an architect need a ruler? A plumber a wrench?
I don’t know if you noticed, but null actually was adapting to blackout. It just made things infinitely harder than it needed to be for no gain. So much so that it drove a very large portion of the playerbase away (as in why bother when they aren’t getting anything better out of their increased workload).
So you admit it, while boasting about accomplishment. Do you have any idea how that looks?
What was assumed about local in nullsec got proven. Enjoy your bot and krab game.
I admit that it is a tool used by everyone? Yes, I think that plumbers are better off using a wrench than a hammer or their fingers. I think that architects are better off using a ruler than eyeballing everything. Can it be done without these things? Sure, but is it worth the added effort? Unlikely.
It is how we have made use of the tools over the years that sets null apart. It’s also from this knowledge and understanding from actually living here that puts us in a very good position to help CCP find ways to introduce reasonable vulnerabilities that wont chase actual players away. Just because people will quit over any change (good riddance), that doesn’t mean losing half your playerbase was suddenly acceptable.
Tell me, if you needed to make adjustments to your own house are you going to ask the burglar what changes should be done? Or are you going to go to the professionals and using their knowledge and your experience figure out the best way forward? The burglar can help identify vulnerabilities, but will give no mind to the well being of those living there as they feel you are lucky to have a house at all. Which has been shown time and again to be the mentality of those of people claiming to know what’s best for null yet admit to having never lived there and have no interest in ever doing so.
