Yeah, I expect there to be extra "rules " added to the game when you join FW to create the sense of a greater organisation, and to legally allow things to happen that cant be petitioned as false by the opposing force, for example.
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Not lost on you but it doesn’t stick on me, Ramona. Taking sides hasn’t been great highlights so far in my life. I think the best side to take is mine.
I remember my first play through of Baldur’s Gate. At one point, a friend told me about the cheat console, and I ended up using it to turn my party into gods -max stats, max level, all the best gear. I went into combat, and giggled with delight as monsters exploded into chunky bits… and then I went to go loot the room and realized that it was pointless. Nothing I would ever find would ever be better than what I already had. What’s more, I realized that I would never gain another level either. A played a little bit more, but being able to steam roll through everything meant that I didn’t even have the satisfaction of overcoming a challenging encounter. I would eventually beat Baldur’s Gate, but it would be on a brand new play through -one that I didn’t ruin by sucking all the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards out of the game.
A large portion of this community have been perpetual asking for nerfs to ganking, ninja looting, scamming, neutral logi, war decks, gate camps, cloaky camping, whaling, and probably every other “non-consensual” competitive interaction in the game. This has made it harder and harder for people to engage in “Sith” play styles, reduced emergent game play opportunities, and made it easier for players to optimize towards boredom.
And, yes, CCP has done things to directly or indirectly benefit emergent game play and make it harder to optimize towards boredom. But, if you add up the vectors of all the changes, it will show that Eve has slowly been inching towards safety and boredom. And that’s because players have been asking for it. Let me say that again -people have been perpetually asking for changes that undermine players as content… and then complaining about the lack of content and the state of the sandbox. Funny how that works.
Of course, my actual position is more nuanced than, “it’s all the players’ fault.” So, lets talk about the other things that CCP has done to get us to where we are today.
First, CCP messed up by making extrinsic rewards too big during the age of abundance, and we are still feeling the aftermath of that today. See, there is actual research that shows that increasing extrinsic rewards reduces the intrinsic rewards that people get out of things, and that later removing extrinsic rewards does not reverse this. And this is why so many people are complaining about “Eve no longer being rewarding.” Of course, CCP didn’t remove any of the intrinsic rewards. But they did inadvertently hack players brains so that they no longer found the game intrinsically rewarding, and then followed that up by nerfing extrinsic rewards.
The second thing they did was make too many ships too expensive. Hilmar said that he wanted to do it in order to make ship loss more meaningful again, but it also had the side effect of making players a lot more risk adverse. Now, this goal might have worked had their been no other problems. But all these factors together seem to have acted like a perfect storm.
So, we’ve got CCP making the game more safe and boring in order to cater to whinebears, an undermining of intrinsic rewards by making extrinsic rewards too big during the age of abundance, a nerfing of extrinsic rewards in order to address unsustainable economic activity, and a more risk adverse player base thanks to nerfed incomes and expensive ships. It’s like they’ve done everything they could to make the game boring and unrewarding for a lot of players.
But how do we fix it?
Well, I honestly think there are different ways. So, the real question is which route to take. Well, over the past several years, they seem to have been tying to go with a compromise. Unfortunately, many players have mutually exclusive tastes -which has resulted in a compromise that no one is happy with. Thus, if they truly want to move forward, they need to stop trying to appeal to radically different audiences, and instead decide who they want their core audience to be. Will it be the guys that want a safer, more cooperative, more PvE and/or COPvP (Consensual Only PvP) focused experience, or the guys that want a challenging, competitive, UPvP (Unrestricted PvP/Always On PvP) focused experience?
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Why would you disapprove of a company that adopt those values ?
Obviously CCP has realized that the toxicity coming from certain players can no longer be ignored as it’s starting to manifest in ways they hadn’t anticipated.
Every company makes it a point to ensure everyone is safe on their premises, on their servers and also with the products they sell. Nothing of that is new. CCP just happens to be the Jonny Comes Lately of this party. From a company that owns one of the most toxic products out there I’d say it was about time.
1000 years ago yahtzee croshaw said that in EVE all the systems are the same
that the population wear a shoe on the head
and that he understate the appeal of a job you have to pay for
i was, oh , thats my kind of game
wen i joined there was freedom , and emergent gameplay
people had sites to contract transport ■■■■
cansinos
mercenary services
to salvage for you
to grind standing for you
back them there was no safe button so many times i got shotted by concord without knowing why
i receive heavy standing penalties for destroying stupid objects in mission
i was involved in involuntary pvp because of players exploiting the mechanics
i was scammed with complicated and obscure contracts
i was recruited to fraudulent corps that expected to earn isk from me and give me nothing back
it was dangerous , fresh , and i felt like living in a real pos apocalyptic ■■■■■■ up space dystopia
my plan back them was , i will survive , i will persevere
and my plan kinda never changed
I’m proud of being a solo pilot , of paying my plex and having my little victories
but the game changed a lot , lot less interaction and freedom
its way easier nowadays
nothing against it , bu i feel there is a lot of people that simply don’t understand EVE
even if yahtzee was right and all the system were the same the players make them different
the interaction and emergent gameplay made eve exiting and new , because people (NOT NPCS) are always a worthy opponent / allied
to me the hordes of players that appear to dislike the game , or be in the wrong place are the problem
they steer CCP boat more and more in the direction of a vanilla MMO
to me leave us alone is the best policy
no its not
to have a policy you have to have people to enforce it
imagine if there is a guy who is a jack ass , after some time , people will not help him , people will not trust him, people will not chat with him etc
you can let people resolve their problems or you can outsource to an authority
and them you create a bureaucracy of anointed ones that know more than the normal people
them step by step your human relations are switched to artificial ones , inhumane ones , them you get tyranny
see what happens in social networks , thanks god i almost never use them
ofc in the real world were some disputes are vastly bigger we have to create some kind of mediator
the less the better but is a inevitable evil
in a pew pew space game i cant understand WHY people take it so serious to a point of feeling unsafe
to me thats pure horse ■■■■
we already have stupid laws , taxes , social rituals , leaders , bosses IRL
i understand that a small percentage have some kind of mental disability and can be affected negatively by games , but back them we had broadcast for reps and other initiatives that could do some nice work in that part without needing a BIG space daddy
don’t get me wrong , I’m not agains you , thats just my opinion … and my opinion , as most of opinions , is not that worthy or important
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You keep repeating these things like a mantra, as if it will make them more believeable.
The simple fact is that there’s typically 20,000 players logged in these days at any given moment, and at any given moment there’s maybe 5 people posting asking for nerfs. That’s your “large portion”.
You say “perpetual posting” but there’s maybe half a dozen threads a month about it, on forums CCP doesn’t even pay attention to.
You keep saying “CCP has done these things because players asked for it”, but that simply moves the stupid from why “why did CCP do these things?” to “why did CCP listen to those requests?”. Even though, in actuality, CCP listened to nobody. They did what they did because they’re incompetent and stubborn. Well, and also because of strange quirks to the Icelandic mindset but let’s leave off that.
You also have literally no proof that CCP has “done these things because players asked for it”, and you’re certainly ignoring the fact that the PvP community has asked for more PvP benefits, louder and longer than any “nerf this” community. And the “nerf this” they asked for got done - resistances, WCS, ECM, etc. And the buffs they wanted got done too. It didn’t change anything, because the game design is bad and discourages almost all types of PvP except for profit-ganking.
CCP didn’t “mess up by making extrinsic rewards too big”. CCP did exactly what they wanted and got the result they wanted - at the time. Late 2016 - CCP needed to halt the massive decline in players they had experienced in the first half of the year, pump up profits and player numbers so they could put the company on the auction block.
Super Rorqs, Skill injectors and Alpha clones were all part of CCP scrambling to sell power creep and make short-term profits so the numbers looked good to buyers. Any damage they did to the economy and player expectations was irrelevant because the company had to be sold and numbers had to be achieved.
You then go wandering off into your own little headscape of “gosh CCP’s plans to nuke the economy might have worked” and " we’ve got CCP making the game more safe and boring in order to cater to whinebears" and “unsustainable economic activity” without a shred of proof or data to back it up, other than CCP’s say-so.
I trust CCP’s word on these issues about as far as I can throw Iceland.
The economic activity wasn’t unsustainable - cheap ships and plentiful resources is nothing but good for EVE. What was unsustainable was the lack of any rational activity to expend those resources on. You do have a point that when you increase rewards to a high level and then try to claw them back down to 40% of what they were, you get player dissatisfaction. Any idiot would know this in advance, and the idiots at CCP probably did know it - but decided to go ahead with it anyway.
Once they’ve made that mistake, it’s foolish to try to fix the game by “forced austerity”. Instead you create a reason for multiple glorious bloodbaths of resource expenditure, and you slowly ramp up the resources required to do things. It won’t be pretty but then, CCP threw pretty out the door a long time ago in favor of “whatever makes players spend the most money”.
You keep trying to make this into a “PvE carebears bad, PvP bravehearts good” dichotomy, as if EVE can only be one or the other.
News flash for ya - EVE can handle both, and has been for almost 2 decades now. The problem isn’t whiners crying for safe space, or gankers crying for easier kills that can’t escape.
The problem is that CCP essentially stopped developing EVE almost a decade ago. There’s been very little new content added since around Incursions expansion in 2010. Lots of tweaking and back-and-forthing while they try to adjust the game mechanics to drive everyone into Nullsec megablocs and multiple subs. Lots of changes that came and were removed. Lots of monetization.
And lots and lots of EVE money thrown away on failed project after failed project because CCP refuses to admit they’re just really bad at game development and fix their damn development process.
You can’t fix the game when the whole way you manage your design process is broken.
I can give a dozen ways to ‘fix’ EVE, and have in many posts over the years. And so have other players. There’s very little point in doing so with a company clinging to “oh gosh nope, can’t do that, POS code you know” style excuses every time they face a challenge.
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In fact its a complex ecosystem, where everyone is needed. Eliminating from it certain group will make ecosystem fail and it will be wasteland.
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You need to look at your logic, you detail two things that CCP messed up, age of abundance and then applying an age of scarcity, then you add that they made many ships too expensive. Then you say that they made it safer and more boring to cater for whinebears, but the changes you detailed are never that. Look at what you wrote, it is non-sensible…
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To be clear, I’m not against PvE, those who mostly do PvE, or any particularly play style. I’m against whinebears who respond to challenge and adversity by lobbying CCP to make the game easier for them. I’m talking about the guys who ask for things like permanent green safeties or the nuking of play styles because they are unwilling or unable to deal with competition from other players.
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They have always have been in EVE, like gankers that gank empty freighters, and that will not change, you are just wasting time. But, if that is your hobby…
There is a large number of players on the forums, in-game, and on reddit calling for nerfs to UPvP. It’s mostly centered on ganking right now, but they’ll also complain about other stuff as well. Percentage wise, most posts that get made to C&P nowadays are nerf thereads (and do note that many get merged into the nerf ganking megathread, so the actual number is bigger than the current number of threads show). And, of course, nerf ganking threads on reddit tend to be much worse in terms of proportions (for example, I once argued in a thread where there were two pro-gankers arguing with around 30 nerf-gankers in a thread that got like 250 upvotes on the original post).
C&P 2004
C&P 2022
And, of course, this is all actually part of a larger debate known as The Great PvP Debate. Turns out, most, if not all, UPvP games has portions of the player base asking for UPvP to be removed from the game (including Ultima Online, Albion Online, Sea of Thieves, Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous, and, of course, Eve Online).
But, I guess all of this is just my imagination, huh? And, I’m just blowing things out of proportion.
It’s absolutely amazing how you’re willing to ignore the mountain of evidence that contradicts your pre-existing beliefs.
Exactly, you automatically distrust anything they say that contradicts your pre-existing beliefs, and somehow either ignore, or handwave away the evidence that they have provided you. CCP has provided plenty of evidence at various points, from MER’s to their dump of graph porn at fanfest 2022. Now, you can argue that their analysis was bad, or that their data was flawed, but for some reason you went with, “without a shred of proof or data to back it up.” Why? Because that’s easy to argue, and you know that the easily bamboozled won’t fact check you?
What’s going on here? Is your first instinct just to automatically assume that anything I say must be wrong? lol
Well, I’m glad we can agree on something.
And once again, to be clear, I am not against PvE. I am invested in, and value, both PvE and PvP play styles. I’m against whine bears that respond to adversity by asking for their enemies to be nerfed or removed from the game.
Yeah, I also suspect that they have a management problem. But I’m an outside observer, so I don’t know for certain. Moreover, I’m not about to go full on space karen and start asking for people to be fired. So… not sure what else there is for me to say about it. Hopefully they get their house in order.
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Harsh, but it does look that way, two decades later, doesn’t it.
Not only does CCP not iterate on new elements brought into the game, they do not seem to learn from their mistakes. Somehow they seem to have lost the ability to put themselves into the position of the player (hence the often heard, exasperated complaint “do they even play their own game”). Everything they’ve done in the last two-three years points to it, with scarcity and the industry changes as a sad culmination in loss of revenue (established players) and failing to draw in new players.
Many words can be written about reasons, and many voluminous white papers filled with ways to salvage the game and stop the continuing erosion of the principal goal of an entertainment product: to entertain (make people have fun). One simple truth stands out: if a business is losing customers, it’s not the customers’ fault that they walk away from a product they don’t recognize anymore. In fact, we’ve been staying here longer than any company could reasonably expect. The time that it felt like devs and players together shaped the game is way behind us. Communication is abysmal currently, especially compared to the days of the o7 show and the updates we received regularly on on-going efforts. The disconnect between the game’s custodians and its players is complete, bar a few valiant efforts like NPE or FW (another niche part which will not address the overall issues with the game’s feel).
Worse, CCP does not even confirm that it has received the message loud and clear, let alone send a message that they’re aware and “on it”, thus risking an increased loss rate of subscriptions. And that puts them (and us) in an even worse position than ever before.
Possible soluitions ? I’ll shoot one straight in the face: the second Serenity server (or w/e they will call it, EvE 2.0, or rather EvE 0.2). Turning a galaxy map literally inside out won’t do anything. No one cares if hisec or nullsec is in the center. Turning hisec into a no-pvp zone will make it meaningless, unless they want to break the ingame economy by not reducing the reward as drastically as they reduce the risk. Immediate replacement of a lost ship by "payment makes ship loss meaningless (and very un-Hilmar). Compressing space (hence player density) by reducing the number of solar systems will have the effect of increased conflict, increase the rate of ship loss, and inevitably make the poor choices in indy design and time/reward felt more sharply than ever before (resulting in losing subs). All that to cater to the wishes (allegedly) of a player population in a country with huge potential for customers, where the game was always tiny (!) in comparison to most other popular games over there. That’s not even an EvE Online game they’re planning there, it has lost its identity. Their real (former Serenity) EvE players are on TQ… They’re catering to what was left over… Fortunately, this is not CCP’s doing, but a local initiative. Let’s keep it that way.
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It’s funny that you think it won’t happen here. As soon as the experiment on the other side yields a curve, they’d going to start planning local implementation without waiting to see what the long-term effects are.
That’s basically the reason why I’m going so hard at EVE right now. This is the last hurrah. We already have GMs threatening to ban gankers instead of the people making terrible rape and death threats. We’re already almost there.
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I didn’t say I think it won’t happen here - only expressed the wish to keep it away from us, and gave a few of my reasons why I think EvE 0.2 is stillborn 
Anyway, at the current trend in the curve, they’d be out of business before they could even roll it out.
Please provide some “large numbers”. I do note that you went back to 2004 to find a page free of ganking threads for the ‘before’ picture, and scrolled back to February to find one in Crime & Punishment (you know, the section that’s about criminal acts) to find more than 2 gank complaints on the page.
Go take a look at C&P now - there’s literally ONE thread on “change ganking” in the top 20. Oh and your “Nerf” megathread… which is actually “anti-nerf” clickbait.
And hey, let’s quote the guy that started the “Nerf Ganking” thread:
Whoo that’s some hordes right there! Compare apples to apples: I’m comparing current numbers (20,000 people online, maybe 5 posting about ganking issues but more like 2, really). You’re talking “all the people that ever posted” numbers.
So let’s look at those: add up all the names, ever, that called for ganking nerfs. What have you got? A thousand? Two thousand? Ten thousand? Twenty? A hundred k? Think you could maybe add up a hundred thousand separate posters that asked for gank nerfs? (Not alts, and not doubles between EVE forums and Reddit)
Ship, there’ve been nine and a quarter million people who’ve played EVE over the years. Even if you could fantasize 100k “nerf gank” posters, it would still only be 1% of players ever. And you know the number isn’t a fraction of that. That’s your “large portion” - well under 1%.
You say there’s a lot of posts on Reddit about it. How about you link, say, 4 of those posts that have been active in the last month. If there’s a “large portion” of the playerbase in on it, and “CCP is listening to them”, 4 should be easy. Just go ahead and toss 4 active links in here, I’ll wait.
Actually what’s stunning is that you keep referring to mountains of evidence but can’t actually provide any. There’s literally zero evidence that CCP has “nerfed the game” because players asked for it. They may certainly have done some things that a very small portion of the player base has asked for, but then, a larger portion of the player base asked for the exact opposite.
Correlation does not imply causation.
CCP putting up numbers isn’t proof. CCP can post numbers all day long and say “the economy was broken” but that does not mean the economy was broken. What it means is that CCP has an agenda they want to spin to the player base and they’ll post anything they can to support that spin.
I mean, CCP literally said “We had to fix Rorquals” (and they did), and then showed graphs that displayed Rorqual mining had dropped off a cliff for about a year before the fix! They only fixed it because people had already stopped “paying to win” with Rorquals. They “fixed” it because they thought it would force people to pay more and grind more to maintain their position.
No, I like your posts when they’re good, sometimes even when they’re bad but interesting. And I agree when you’re right. You just haven’t been doing a lot of that lately. Ever since you decided that witch-hunts and smear campaigns with specious arguments was the way to go.
You used to be able to fact-find and confront unpleasant truths, but that was before you went off the deep end with this crazy “the hordes of bad people are everywhere and we must stop them before they ruin everything” stuff.
And look, here we are already agreeing again! Good work!
I’ll say this: your fixation on “players ruining the game” has one thing going for it - as players, we can change ourselves, but we cannot directly affect what CCP does. Not to get things improved and certainly not to “force” CCP to make bad changes. CCP does what they do with very little connection to the player base, bad ideas or good.
It seems odd that you’re so hell-bent on saying “CCP listens, but mostly to the bad demands” and not noticing that CCP somehow misses the literally hundreds of posts of excellent feedback they get.
You want players to somehow change their entire mindset and just “pay and play”, no matter what CCP hands them. I want players to put massive pressure on CCP and PA to make core institutional changes in the way they do things.
Not hard to tell which one of those directions leads to a better game, and which one leads to ever dwindling numbers as players give up and walk away.
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No reason to be sad. Winter is comming. And then will new player stream into the game. Or maybe Winter 24/25 because Eve is right now healing itself. All the ■■■■ need to bleed out. I read that some player cant plex their 9 accounts. This is great. I see that as good news.
Because of the toxic ideology currently underpinning them. Just because the words sound nice on face value - diversity! Inclusivity! Equity!; what good person would be against any of that? - underneath lay an ideology of authoritarianism and bigotry (real forms of discrimination on the basis of people’s “identity groups”).
It’s sort of like the DPRK: how can you be against the DPRK? They’re democratic! For the people! They’re a republic!
Yes, better make sure the playerbase is safe from mean words.
CCP already has a EULA/TOS that covers in-person EVE meetups. What we don’t need is CCP policing people’s Youtube channels, Twitch streams, and player-run Discord servers/Teamspeaks.
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I hear what your saying. I was just throwing an idea out that wasn’t a nerf to anything to show that its pretty easy to spit ball ideas for such things.
While I agree that communicating via player created channels is the ideal, its not as simple as just saying that because the players are people and therefore the inconsistent element of the equation. I fairly recently started a new toon to try the new player experience and got to see the way new players are spoken to in the help channels. They are as likely to get helpful advice as they are to get some bitter npc corp vet talking to them like they are stupid. Even when well meaning players do offer advice its often just plain wrong.
I don’t think it would hurt to strengthen up the amount of information provided by the tutorial for newbeans.