Not just the map, but d-scan also shows you almost exactly where your potential targets may be once you’re in system. And if you have the name of a target, locator agents can tell exactly which system they are in too.
On top of that, CCP introduced signal filaments so that players can teleport directly to some null sec system where people are active which is another tool to find other players that doesn’t require people to warp to every belt in every solar system in a region in order to find a potential other player to interact with.
EVE space is big. Please explain why it is bad that there are tools to locate players?
Or are we just supposed to fly around blindly in space until we happen to accidentally stumble upon another player?
Each of those tools has downsides. As Io Koval said, map activity is delayed by 30 minutes so it’s not perfectly accurate nor instantaneous and a smart player can still hide their activities.
Good post, a cogent discussion of your opinion on the matter.
Unfortunately you make incorrect assumptions and even contradict your own reasoning within the post, so that makes your actual points mostly invalid.
Oh, and surprise! It’s another Shipwreck “it’s not the quality of the game, it’s the quality of the players that’s the problem” post. Oh well, guess it’s that time of the month.
At any rate, some good thoughts in there. I have a lot on my schedule this morning so will get back to addressing them later. Good post and good thread overall though.
PS: The ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in my post you linked are in quotes for a reason, as in, the good news and the bad news. Trying to twist that into “Kezrai thinks players being content is bad, I must address this issue” is a bit of a stretch. But hey, you’re a very limber poster!
Again, excellent advice from @Wadiest_Yong . I’d like that last part a couple more times if I could. May comment on them later. Good post, thanks for making it!
Locla was built into the game at the start as a contact mechanism, but was used by people to hunt and avoid PvP at the same time. There is a balance around it and it is fine as it is. I must say that your reply seems to be a little emotive. The first thing to note is that I do not PvE in wormholes because local is a necessary balance for me to do PvE. You on the other hand seem to need a mis-firing local, a delayed local or no local at all to hunt.
Most hunters I worked with in the past, and we had some really good ones in Tactical Supremacy liked local because they knew what was in space and whether to bother warping to anomalies or not, in fact when local was borked or removed they hated it. I was not the tackle, I left it to these guys and they were good I was DPS.
In terms of the other side I use local, I align, I pull drones and I get ready to warp out, this was when I was VNI ratting in Catch, the thing is that I picked the system to have a decent warp time too, but if I failed to spot them quickly and was slow to react I would be caught because they would warp into my site and burn to me to get point for the rest of the fleet. The thing is that with local as it is, it is a fine balance there, if you were attentive, and reacted fast you would likely get out, that is fine and good balance. If you were slow to notice, if you were warping to a site or doing something else you would be caught.
I found that most solo hunters have an issue. If you are in a slow warping and slow moving ship relying on the cloak your hunting will fail and you will blame it on local. This was what I often saw from WH players bemoaning local. I used to say bring friends and put them in interceptors, a interdictor and a DPS, they never liked that, because they think the game has to be built around how they want to play… The thing is if you are upset with local your ship choice, lack of friends and expectation on what you can catch is perhaps the issue.
Always fun to see people ask how did they know I was ratting, haha…
It is the game design.
But people are also playing for the cat and mouse avoid pew pew, that is a valid choice in this game is it not? That is also PvP too.
Now you are agreeing with me, good man.
I was disappointed because I liked the vastness and the feeling of people putting effort in, not click on map, and oh someone active there, lets go check it out…, sort of disappointed me in terms of free intel and no brain decision making…
That’s mostly true though. Too many numbers go up people who aren’t primarily interested in competing/pvping, but just gathering “more” to then cry about when they hit a wall or some of their “more” gets taken away by either players or CCP. People for whom it’s never enough, who always need things adapted to be easier, more, preferably afk and without possible interference of other players.
They want to play as if it’s a pve server that doesn’t have a player run economy (partly because that’s also pvp but also because then CCP wouldn’t need to balance because who really cares if things are out of whack), but it isn’t. And then they cry about how it isn’t and how it should change accordingly.
“Player quality” isn’t about how good you are at the game, it’s about accepting and adjusting to the fact that EVE is a competitive pvp sandbox meritocracy with all the ups and downs that come from that, both from teamwork as from adversaries. And to then actively participate in it. And in doing so they stop being an automatic victim and realise they have agency, that their choices and actions affect outcome.
Instead of “doing the act of self stimulation” by using opinions I dare people to simply list the game mechanics regardding what can be done by both parties.
If the list benefits too much one party then EVE has a flawed design and this wil reveal the truth about it.
It is simple, new players in nullsec would often ask how did they know I was ratting after being caught. And then you would show them the map, and they would realise. Used to be amusing, but has been a while as I have not seen many new players, though part of that is also that I don’t tend to get involved with new players anymore as I have no interest in recruiting or anything like that as it is too much effort and drama.
Totally that!
I am not so sure that drone boats are viable for afk play anymore, if I use drones even in belts they get shot. So most PvE is with guns and missiles and you have to be at the keyboard to do that, maybe those missiles could work though…, did not think about that will have to try that.
They would ask how you knew… The map has many little nifty tricks. I have just begun to explore all of it.
Drama isn’t why I play but a few hours of distraction is worth some effort.
What when there are no players? There is no content? Then how this game even started? It didnt had any players initially, must have been something else that made them play it…
I have seen some people on reddit complaining that its actually opposite what is CCP doing right now, that CCP wants you to spend more time in game, doing the same things. Like they would want players to spend more time in game, grinding. They even think its to show some numbers for the PA, to show it isnt as bad as it looks on EVE Offline site.
Can’t you stupid griefers understand that Dracvlad just wants to do some PvE without being disturbed by you scumbags? He needs to make ISK in order to buy ships with which he will make entire enemy fleets dock by himself.
Get it through your dumb seal-clubbing heads already that real hunters don’t just go to where they know the prey is; they go to a random place that they don’t know anything about and then start shaking every bush and lifting every rock to make prey come out! Being able to see activity on the map is cheating, just like tracking footprints would be. Real hunters wouldn’t resort to such cheap tricks, but would put themselves and their prey on even terms because that’s what real hunting is. Heh, but it’s easy to see why you all would think this way, since you’ve never done any real hunting yourselves…Heh……
“I do not PvE in wormholes because local is a necessary balance for me to do PvE.”
Wrong, the fact of being hunted makes PvE interesting, CCP has to get the balance right in that people can make choices. The most fun I had in Eve was belt ratting in Stain while people actively hunted me. Do you ever get anything right?
So Eve is an open world UPvP game with no incentives for dying and a lot of space. Naturally, most players will usually try to avoid fights that they don’t think they can win, and usually to try to disengage from fights they are losing. Thus, it would stand to reason that if CCP only provided mechanics that allowed people to hide or escape, you’d end up with very few conflicts, and even fewer kills. That is why CCP also added in mechanics that allow players to find other player and to prevent them from escaping. So, the key to a balanced and fun game is not ensuring that hunters have no intel tools or mechanics that aid them in hunting, but that all of these tools and mechanics are “balanced” (btw, I haven’t heard any devs say it, but I like referring to this stuff as fight or flight mechanics because it easy to say).
Naturally, people will have different tastes when it comes to balance, and people have different analysis when it comes to the actual state of balance. However, few would argue that the mere existence of “fight” mechanics makes the game unbalanced, or that it is evidence that victims are designed to be victims…One of those few, however, is Dracvlad.
I was once arguing against a nerf ganker, and they rattled off every buff to ganking over the past 10 or so years. They weren’t wrong in so far that all of those things did benefit gankers to varying degrees. What was absolutely amazing to me, however, was that in spite of their remarkable memory, they somehow failed to remember most of the nerfs to ganking during the same period of time, and hand waved away the nerfs that they did remember as being insignificant.
That’s Dracvlad in a nutshell. He has a very selective memory when it comes to things, views every mechanic in favor of prey and AG’s as being necessary and good, and every mechanic in favor of hunters as being unbalanced and unfair. Let me put it this way, the map doesn’t just provide intel for hunters. But, for some reason, Drac only brought up the fact that it provides intel for hunters, asserted that it gave hunters “a leg up” over prey, and then insinuated that CCP did, in fact, design for some players to be victims.
That’s how the victim mindset works. It’s like a mental flashlight that only shines on the things that confirm your belief that your enemy has an unfair advantage.
Well, I didn’t interpret what he said as a personal attack. But, even if it was intended as such, I find it ironic that you would complain about personal attacks and the forums not being an open and friendly place…while making personal attacks and making the forums a less open and less friendly place.
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