I think Resources Wars does leave some room for interactions - at the very least you have to move around opening yourself to the primary place to interdict someone in this game: on a gate.
These though? I am not sure a 10 minute hidden signature that has to be probed down is going to generate any significant interactions of any kind. The PvE player gets to choose the time and the place for this incredibly small window of vulnerability, and does not have to take gates at all.
I’ll wait for the final devblog and to try them of course, but I think CCP actually has crossed the line here that RW was only flirting with. At least RW was trying to get players to team up with each other, not be an isolated minigame apart from the greater universe. It had them joining forces, sharing a chat channel, and moving around New Eden opening themselves to interactions, even if the opportunities to mess with the participants were peripheral or required work to implant a saboteur. These on the other hand are completely solo, and effectively impervious sites immune to outside influence that bends the pillar of the game that “nowhere is safe” past the breaking point.
The only saving grace is that at least they have unique rewards that won’t completely devalue the other resources generated in the non-abysmal part of New Eden. At least I hope that is true and there is nothing coming out of those sites but Triglavian tech and enchanting plasmids or whatever they are called.
Thanks for trying though. I appreciate all the CSM’s efforts.
I will say that this is one of the things I didn’t think about until my discussions w/ some people at FF that I’m looking to bring back to CCP - I think a “One Abyssal Per System” limit would do a hell of a lot to make these things feel better in the EVE ecosystem, and prevent people from having a ‘safe place’ in nullsec to run all their pockets there. I’m lowkey dissapointed that this wasn’t an initial concern on my end, but glad people are willing to have a good, productive dialogue with us and CCP on it.
The instance is designed to not create ‘unwinnable’ situations, just difficult ones, and you should always have the option to just run to the exit if you get bad RNG on the instance, from what I’m aware of. I’d intended to get a chance to actually playtest this new content whilst in Iceland, but unfortunately I had to miss it due to an interview I had scheduled at the same time.
That’s kind of the point - encouraging general fits to discourage blitzing. If you want to run content you can 100% optimise for exact values, missions will still exist.
I think that this feature is intended to test this assumption, and a lot of PvE players (especially more casual ones) seem super excited about it. I share your concerns to some degree, but am happy to see the feature play out first, as long as CCP is willing to iterate on it.
pfft - I think some of these plasmid’ed modules will be way better (in 1 attribute or more) than even officer gear, so they will most likely completely devalue at least 1 part of the the non-abysmal part of New Eden. BTW since you can run these in high sec, does it even matter if “nowhere is safe” is broken or not. They will be based not on security of the system but on the “strand” or w/e it is you use to open the initial wormhole. There’s literally no advantages to running this out of low/null/wh, unless of course you’re afraid of high sec ganks.
There 100% are advantages to running them in not-Highsec in terms of making it more likely to get the mutalisks/better mutalisks (as they’re rare in HS-launched ones) - They were talked about in the rountable at FF, just weren’t included in the actual presentation that was streamed because it was more of a hype/tech thing. I hate to keep telling people to wait for details but CCP is being terrible at releasing them ATM.
Note that the example shown there was a perfect roll, on the Highest variability mutalisk. It’s the ‘upper end’ of what’s possible, and you’re much more likely to get a mix of variation, especially considering that the 40% +/- mutalisks will be incredibly expensive and rare within the Abyssal deadspaces. That said, I do agree that the balance implications here are crazy and will likely need to be toned down.
Thanks for the reply, I really want to have that feature a success story and not “undead on arrival” like Resource Wars. As you said, there is more of the important details not published, so let’s hope there is a long test phase on SiSi and opportunity to have things ironed out before release.
Incredibly expensive is some officer module that costs more than a Titan. Well no more(I hope). After all it will be a feature available on demand. Still I see no reason why null is more privileged than high sec. I mean after all some null bear renter space is infinitely safer than a high sec system where random neutrals come and blow you up. But ya know w/e. If you can get podded both by the npc in the instance and PC’s outside of the instance nothing stops you from taking a short trip in a hole and doing it there. Obviously you’ll be doing it in a clone without implants but w/e.
I’m not too sure about that since they consume modules as well. They might devalue the top officer mods some by providing some alternatives with buffed lower-tier things, but I think they will also result in the the consumption of many of the lower tier modules by people rolling the dice, some of which will be worthless, thus stimulating the economy and raising prices of lower tiered mods. As long as the sites aren’t spawning new modules (or minerals and ISK) into the universe, only mutators and Triglavian BPCs, I don’t think these mutator thingies are going to cause problems for the economy.
They will be extremely safe in highsec, but really they will be safe everywhere. All the other PvE content either leaves you exposed in space, or at least forces you to travel and/or go to a specific place. These however, allow you to pick the time and place making it very easy to find a quiet corner, or fortified corner, of space, or use some feature to hide behind (I am sure clever players will find ways to get NPC to protect therm like they did with the ESS) that make it almost impossible to die.
It’s still not clear to me how these will be restricted in space or how the rewards scale, but as is it doesn’t really matter. The amount of content (AKA player interactions) this will allow is next-to-zero in keeping with their design intention to be quick, easily accessible content for solo players.
They aren’t intended to be conflict drivers, and their main design goal isn’t even compatible with that, so they aren’t going to promote much interaction at all. I get the rationale of why these things are going to exist, but you have to wonder who is making these top-level design decisions at this point. It must be embarrassing for some of the devs to go on about the shared universe, the massive wars, and increasing player influence on the universe, to then have to go onstage and be excited about the solo instanced dungeon content that is the whole focus of the next expansion and try to spin it as a important part of their grand vision for the game.
This will add nothing to the stalled plan to open new space for the players to colonize and fight over or promote player interactions in any meaningful way. It a pure play to juice player activity numbers by going after short-attention span, or time-constrained players, likely at the expense of the core vision. If we could just ignore it and let it fade away (like Resource Wars) that wouldn’t be so bad, but these mutators (and the new ships to a lesser degree) will create long-term balance headaches, ignoring completely how many third-party tools are about to disappear.
Perhaps it will work and the damage will be minimal and repairable and then more players are a indeed good thing. But adding an almost pure themepark feature is a little incoherent with the vision of a player controlled universe Seagull is still articulating and doesn’t really fit with any of the three pillars they say they are going for in the Keynote:
. Game health, balance and quality
. Deepening the sandbox
. Pushing boundaries and having fun
Abyssal Sites are only going to make the game harder to balance, isn’t a sandbox feature at all, and while it is indeed pushing a boundary, these sites are pushing the boundary of the core idea of Eve that “nowhere is safe”. I hope that throwing out long-standing, core ideas of the game in the pursuit of “fun” isn’t what they meant by the last item on that list, but when features come out like this, I have to wonder.
Ah well, enough words on something I haven’t played nor apparently even seen all the details on.
I mean realtalk the rewards will at least be infinitely better than RW’s negative ISK boxes, so I imagine they’ll get a lot more attention from the Devs long term
If this new content will be hard enough to actually destroy my ship and even pod me inside new space I’m completely agree to the fact that there won’t be any pvp opportunities with them. So I manage to survive 3 pockets of harsh environement, hostile NPC and at the end I would be ganked by pvp fitted player? That’s balanced gameplay how? It’s obvious we would have T3C waiting for us on the other side with which we can’t stand the fight. Easy kills that have nothing to do with balanced sandbox.
Can you propose to CCP that all loot from triglav space should explode on ship exploding? If not I just see another loot pinata in high sec, this time in the form of a cruiser. And more dangerous than protected null
this is not pvp, when someone know what kind of ships I can enter there, exactly know where I emerge, propablly even already damaged, how this is pvp, it’s like taking candy from a baby that has no legs. This is as described solo content, and seems pretty hard. Just because we always need pvp interaction in the game doesn’t need we already have to gave advantage to pvp oriented players, and it seems like this is the case here. Don’t even start with suspect flag, most idiotic idea ever.
Don’t worry about it. Find a quiet place (ideally with a bunch of other signatures) and there is almost zero chance of anyone coming along and scanning down your filament in 5-10 minutes. Just go sit in space in some backwater system and watch how rarely probes show up. For an extra margin of safety, run your sites during quiet server times.
But if the less than 1-in-500 chance someone randomly finds you keeps you up at night, just use one of the multitude of other ways people stay safe in this game - supercap umbrella, wormhole lockdown, a fleet of friends to keep the baddies away, or just get creative (like have an Orca waiting for you in highsec to stash the loot/swap to a combat ship/refit stabs). There are so many ways to avoid a fight in this game, you really have a full buffet to choose from given you get to decide where and when you run these.
They have no viable tools to find you. Unless you make a habit of running these things regularly in the same place and the same time of day, no one is going to notice you. You won’t even be in local (I assume) which means many hunters will just move on as there are no targets. That may change of course when these filaments are introduced, but even finding a specific signature against a backdrop of a dozen or two other sigs might not be possible in 5-10 minutes even if they arrive in the system just as you enter the site.
You’ll have to be a tad sneaky on how you run them, but I predict the number of people ganked upon exit of these sites is going to be an order of magnitude or two less common than those who lose a ship in these sites. In highsec, assuming we don’t get a suspect flag, you won’t have to even do that and can be brazen about running these in plain site. You will be more at risk docking and undocking than being ganked exiting the site.
OR there’s a signature with a tag in local that you can just find and don’t even need combat probes, cause it’s just a pve signature after all. A specifically fit ship can get 25% resolution (to identify the signature) at 8 AU’s resolution.
But that’s not even important - I’m just happy they’re giving us some encounter you can do for 15 minutes and log.
