So, Eve is in active development. Most people, myself included, consider this to be a good thing. It means new content, bug fixes, balance passess, and an evolving meta -which helps to keep things fresh and exciting. Of course, not everyone feels the same way towards change. Casuals tend to get hit hard, some people don’t like change, lots of people hate nerfs (whether they are justified or not), and newbros can often feel like they’ve had the rug yanked out from under them as soon as they’ve started to feel like they’ve found their footing.
So, I can certainly sympathize with a lot of these people (obviously not the dudes who get mad over justifiable nerfs). However, that does not mean that I think CCP should stop developing for the game, or that they shouldn’t ever be allowed to nerf anything. If you want to survive, you have to learn to roll with the punches. And if you want to thrive, you should learn how to benefit from change.
So, here’s some advice for surviving and thriving in a competitive game that is under active development:
Stay Up to Date- Join a community that will help you keep abreast of changes that will impact you. If you are socially isolated, you can stay up to speed through Eve News sources (such as Talking in Stations), or by making sure you read all the patch notes.
Late Adopt with Caution- If you are a late adopter into a ship or activity that has a reputation for being OP/unbalanced, you should go in knowing that a nerf might come at any time, and that you might not be able to recoup your investment before that happens.
Make use of Community Resources- If you are a casual, join a community with some hard core players. They will quickly try to figure out how to adapt to/benefit from changes, and then share that knowledge with their community. Youtubers and bloggers will often also make guides, but sometimes they are incentivized to not disseminate their knowlege with the wider community.
Watch Others- Since you’re new, you’re less likely to figure out how to take advantage of changes on your own. So, pay attention to what other players do. Not only can it help you to adapt to today’s changes, but it will also help teach you how you can adapt to similar changes down the road.
Keep a Change Jar- I keep enough liquid isk on one of my toons so that I can easily pivot if hit with a nerf, or I see an opportunity. I personally keep about 25 hours worth of isk grinding in my change drawer. I’m sure many would say that it’s too much, and that I should invest a lot of that, but I have my reasons. How much you should personally put aside depends on so many factors, and is impossible for me to answer (i.e. (1) do you yolo into new content, (2) what kind of budget do your PvP/PvE ships normally have, (3) do you want to put anything aside for skill injectors, (4) how many toons will you need to buy ships/skill injectors for, (5) how much do you want to put aside for speculating/profiteering, and so on.
Attitude- Now, I would tell you that it’s important to keep a good attitude about change, but I found that my attitude changed on it’s own. Once I started learning to take advantage of changes, I naturally stopped getting angry, and starting getting excited. So, you really only need to try to stay positive in the beginning. And, hopefully with time, you’ll stop having to try.
Oh, I almost forgot. You said that you were new, but that you had bought a rorq. Sigh… that’s a whole another can of worms, and I don’t fell like writing another wall of text. So, in short:
You cannot microtransaction your way to success in Eve. And I strongly suggest you work your way up from the bottom so that you can learn hard lessons in cheap ships, instead of hard lessons in expensive ships.
There are many games in which people all flock to the current flavour of the month, and unsurprisingly it gets nerfed later, after which people all want to play the next ‘best thing’.
In EVE such changes may not be every month, but apart from the frequency of such changes EVE is no different: You pick ‘the best’ way to play and eventually you see it get nerfed.
You can still play that way though, the numbers will just be a bit lower. People who enjoy the gameplay can continue and people who want to play like that get mad because it isn’t ‘the best’ anymore.
Now it’s up to you:
Do you insist in Rorqual mining no matter how it turns out, just because you enjoy capital mining?
Or do you try and find the next ‘best thing’? (The latter will inevitably get changed as well, as is the nature of all online multiplayer games.)
If you play for fun/hour, not for isk/hour you can have a lot of fun ingame. And if you enjoy what you’re doing the ISK will follow, just maybe not with the big numbers you wanted.
Or follow the flavour of the month and get mad each time the developers target the current flavour of the month with balance changes, which happens to be your playstyle! So unfair, it’s as if they are targeting you* specifically!
*You, and all the others that picked the current best way to break the economy.
If mining is your thing, the rorq will always be the top of that tree. Once you’ve trained it, you won’t need to train it again! If you want to use it in safety, I’d suggest seeking out one of the larger groups that can offer you protection… At a cost! If you want to use it with style, don’t do that and ninja about the place. The rorq’s natural home for the forseeable will be moon pops and ice belts, I would surmise…
Changes to null ratting… Given that it’s at least 9 months since they attempted to change drone auto-aggro and pulled it back after it broke many things, I doubt that CCP will be trying again. I could be wrong. But either way, there is more than one way to do ratting in null, and afk droneboats are probably the least interesting. Better bet would be hunting 10/10s in a T3C, much more profit though admittedly more risk.
As Shipwreck Jones has it, your best bet is to assume that any ludicrously easy isk-making wheeze will be nerfed inevitably, and keep an eye on the next thing to pop up if making max iskies is what you’re after. Or, keep doing the things you enjoy and stop caring so much about how great of an income it gives you - I stopped all mining, ratting etc many months ago, and frankly haven’t looked back, I enjoy pewpewing people far more, and that has proven to be if not profitable then at least self-sustaining.
If what you enjoy is mining in a bigass ship, then do that. You may need to join a corp or alter your playstyle to make doing so profitable enough to keep a rebuy in the bank. o7
You see your problem is that CCP listens to complaints from all the wrong people.
Who the wrong people are is usually determined by the wrong people.
I think you can see where this is going.
Your plea is going to end up in the same place.
Is this a “I have to be at the endgame of every MMO; so I RMT’ed into highend farming without knowing how the game works, because I know other MMOs and it surely is similar”- thread?
I started playing right before scarcity began and it messed with me too, but I didn’t quit, I stuck with it and tried (sometimes failing) to adapt.
The result of this is that I got better and better at playing Eve while Eve was becoming harder and harder to get better at.
I don’t know this for sure, but I think there’s a strong possibility that a lot of the people who are around our age who didn’t give up will find the end of scarcity to be incredible. We just had what might be the most violent introduction to Eve in the history of the game. Not only do we have to survive all the normal stuff all the other players experienced but we also had to fight off CCP at the same time and they weren’t fuckingaround. Hell, they placed insta-lock insta-kill Triglavian fleets around gates and stations while we were trying to adapt to all the other stuff they were changing.
If you can succeed when everything’s extra hard it stands to reason that you might do extra well when things improve.
As for this:
Yes you can and here’s why:
There are a finite number of skills and they take a finite amount of time to complete. Yes they are ahead of you right now, but if you keep training the skills you need, and you keep learning the game you will catch up.
Also look at what they are doing compete against you and think of some way of countering it.
Eve is not something you play in a week or a month, it’s something you play for years.
You can play it for short periods of time, but if you do you have to drastically lower your expectations for what you can accomplish.
One last thing.
Something you said gave me the impression that you were using real world money to speed things up.
I don’t know if you did this, but if you did, stop: you can’t pay real life money to get better at Eve. You have to use your brain.
Welcome to EVE, i stopped counting the number of times i would train in to something only for it to be nerfed shortly after, such is the joy of an ever changing set of attributes in a game, you’ll get used to it eventually
