It doesn’t remove any playtime?
You obviously havn’t been on the receiving end being in a corp as a 1 month old char getting camped into station for a week straight.
And i’m talking for the new guys not myself :]
When I started back in 2007 I started with 2 real life friend’s we where wardecked and camped 24/7 for 3 week’s we where a 20 man corp with all of us being under 2 weeks old char’s, I tried to come up with tactics to fight but we just got blobbed to death so what happend was everyone just took a long break from the game.
I came back after the 3 weeks after the wardeck dropped and my 2 real life friends stoped playing all together its sad for me to this day because I lost out on having 2 pals to game with.
If I knew what I know now I would have went straight to null with my friend’s as it’s much safer and better for getting into the game.
2 Likes
Yeah you are right. I have been a 1 month old character under several wardecs though. Even lost my iteron mk2 with all my things less a couple of frigates. Lucky for me I joined a group who wern’t complete victims and actual taught me how to live while under wardec and better still how to kill our enemies
1.) Highsec systems should only have 1-2 NPC stations total in them dependent on sec status.
ie: .5, 1 NPC station max
.6 2 NPC stations max
and so on…
2.) If you join the npc FW corp, you should immune to your factions FacPo.
2a.) As a member of that corp, you should be able to shoot any other enemy Faction NPC player that enters your Faction’s space (ie, Keep Gallente and Minnie out of Caldari space unless they are in a player corp or risk dying.)
3.) Make docking at NPC stations impossible for those not in FW that have a -5 or lower sec status/faction status/corp status.
4.) Change war dec mechanics to issuer has to own a structure in space POCO/Citadel to initiate one.
5.) Concurrent Wardecs(repaying a bill to extend it) increase 100 mill each time.
6.) Change the FW landscape, put losec systems between the Empires, and between the Empires and Nullsec.
Have a lot of fun in highsec recently, so what we need in general … more high value with risk of suspect flag opportunities. Also I would replace wardecs by suspect-kind of mechanic favoring the defender. Everyone shall be able to adhoc help the defender.
The only thing I would change about Highsec is that every stargate and station would feature a giant banner with the face of our beloved Supreme Protector, Father of the New Order of Highsec, our Saviour James 315, as he watches over all of us and makes Highsec a better place.
I think this is the least CCP could do to celebrate the man who saved EVE.
9 Likes
I think you first need to start with what highsec is suppose to be. If it is suppose to be a competetive place for solo and small groups to play I would design it one way, where as if it is supposed to be a very safe starter zone I would design it another. I think many of the problems and angst over highsec come from it being rather poorly defined. You have some veterans calling for it to be made safe because “think of the children!” yet it is also a zone chock-full of veterans making and trading vast amounts of ISK in that safety.
Honestly, the current incarnation isn’t a total failure - new players are very safe under the current mechanics while the rich, established players are more of a target. There are some examples where risk vs. reward isn’t working perfectly, and places where new players are not very safe, upstart corporations being a glaring example. But there also examples of rich players operating with impunity in ships that are so uneconomical to attack, any risk to them is largely theoretical and they can AFK gather resources for weeks.
Another problem is that CONCORD and the other NPCs are a giant wet blanket smothering much potential content in highsec. CONCORD is such a powerful finger on the scale the much of game becomes gaming the mechanics and sniping your opponent from behind the skirt of CONCORD. And the Faction Police hunt criminals more effectively than players ever could making bounty hunting and player police basically impossible.
Top level, I would redesign highsec this way:
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Remove starter systems (it’s confusing to have a safe space in a game without safe spaces) and start all new players in a safe, isolated starter constellation together. Nothing much can be made here, but it is also a safe space where new players can learn the basics. Then the default NPE brings them lowsec and have them integrated into a faction war system but give them the option to head straight to highsec or nullsec.
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Move as many corporation benefits as possible into structures (including the ability to declare wars), and add more to earn and fight over. A corporation without structures would be immune to wardecs, but given they had no structures they would be effectively equivalent to the NPC corp. Wars need more work (and a larger discussion beyond this - you can check out my Wardec Document at the Wardec Project Discord), but all this talk of ISK costs is a waste of time. ISK is, and always has been, a terrible balancing factor. Wars should be near free in a PvP game about wars and require only the risking of assets somehow. I would make wars have only a token cost on ISK, and move the bulk of the value into a module that is at risk and perhaps require some time/effort somehow to prevent a rich entity from clicking and declaring war on everyone. Killing an aggressor’s structure wouldn’t end the war, but it would be a way to inflict loss on a shy aggressor and perhaps even award the defender something for shooting it. Balancing it so that small group and solo guerrilla wars are still possible is important, but as long as the structure at risk costs similar (50-100M ISK) than the current war fee, I don’t see this being impossible to do.
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Revamp the Faction Police. Change them from dumb beat cops that always show up but do nothing into an elite SWAT team that only has a small chance of appearing. You could have them favour certain places or whatever, but the main idea is that most of the time, they don’t show up, at least for a while, so that criminals can roam space and be engage-able by player vigilantes, but when they do they are a force to be reckoned with (and powered by the new AI). As it is, it is very hard to build in criminal-vigilante game play when the NPCs always get in the way, and the benefit to highsec residents of these NPCs is questionable at best. Yes, they prevent gate/station camping, but criminals can easily get around this by just moving. The new FacPo still can show up to clear gate camps, but if criminals can’t give a proper fight, they are just going to stay docked and avoid any fight because they can’t win.
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Delete Incursions. It’s hard to argue they pay too much anymore since nullsec income was buffed so much, but they are stale, beaten and safe content, quite un-Eve like. Continue to add new group PvE, maybe even some in Abyssal Space, that is challenging but features regular ship loss, at least for the top-tier rewards. Players should be able to choose safer content if they like, but highsec Incursions skew the payouts such that nothing else is competitive. Groups won’t really engage with new content as long as CCP lets them continue to suckle on the teat of easy and risk-free income that comes from Incursions. Time to grow up.
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Make standing matter more. Empire space is suppose to be about four Empires at war yet most players happily ignore the plight of the human empires and extract maximum profit from all of them. I think it is fine to be a mercenary and play all sides off against each other and do your own thing, but if you want the best rewards from an Empire employer, it should require you to commit to a particular faction. You shouldn’t be allowed to be beloved to all of them - there should be choices and trade-off to your side. Perhaps it’s too late to change this now, but if you gave me a free hand to redesign highsec I would be should to implement real trade-offs for Empire content. It was in the original design but players figured a way around it.
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Fix hunting. Maybe this goes beyond highsec but bounty hunting and targeted wars are incredibly tedious with the current tools to find other players. But persistent conflict requires intel tools and I would add them to an Observatory Array structure that could be attacked.
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Figure out a new, interesting smuggling system. This is more of a wish list item, but it would be interesting if some items had different value based on their legality in space. If somehow smuggler (and anti-smuggler/customs agent?) could be added as viable professions/game play to highsec that would be cool.
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Implement player FOBs for criminals. Ok, this list is getting a little far-fetched and head-in-the-clouds now, but some system where player criminals were encouraged or forced to used FOBs for their activities could be interesting. You don’t want to raise the bar too high for new player criminals but perhaps players could dock at NPC FOBs and players could deploy their own ones that provide a real benefit for criminals so they really want to use them. This would allow vigilantes or the locals to clear out the FOBs to make their area safer (but not safe of course as criminals could still travel).
I’ll stop there for now. I really think though highsec isn’t as bad as people claim. New players are rarely attacked, and established players can, with effort, be almost perfectly safe. The biggest problems are that NPCs that get in the way of escalation and persistent conflicts (but you’ll always need some to make space for the little guy) and the lack of a social structure that doesn’t open you to wardecs from the rest of New Eden which is punishing on new groups, and a skewed risk vs. reward for the PvE that is limiting uptake of CCP’s recent efforts. All of these can be tweaked with moderate effort, but the real thing highsec (and the rest of the game for that matter) is missing is proper conflict drivers. That requires some more thought, but something CCP really should spend more time on in my opinion.
7 Likes
A couple of suicide Blackbirds can turn an incursion fleet into rubble pretty quickly, and generate expensive losses. Recently released new content is also not interesting for most people because it is just terrible. It does not generate income, it only costs you effort and time and it is not nearly as rewarding as it needs to be to be considered useful and enjoyable. Drifter incursions were like that, FOBs are like that, RW are like that. Abyssal sites are also just run by a low number of people, the modules from those not worth buying and a mess to figure out and your chances of generating income to compensate losses dependent on luck, not skill.
There have been many suggestions for using existing mechanics (wandering around agents, using Landmarks/Natural Phenomena for epic arc like adventures, multi-stage anomalies (Amarisen Gream’s idea I believe), and so on) to create fun, engaging and rewarding PVE experiences but CCP just keeps going with their useless experiments.
2 Likes
I’d remove high-sec. Without it could one not tell a difference and only know one way of playing EVE and there wouldn’t be any problems with it.
But since it’s there would I say it’s all in all fine as it is. Anyone who has got a problem with high-sec can move into a different part of EVE and create their own version of high-sec and enforce their own laws.
But they rarely do.
I’d love it if Incursions were risky, or actually created real competition between the various groups, but that just isn’t the case as the numbers show - it’s a farmfest. CCP has purposely made it this way closing windows of risk and the like over the years and it has wider effects on the game design - it’s why neutral logi are allowed at all and probably the main reason Command Destroyers aren’t allowed to move ships around in highsec. It was perfectly fine for CCP to want to make a safe space for group PvE, just like they did again for Resource Wars, but let’s not pretend it is anything else, and I think with the current tools CCP can do better.
Incursions are yesterday’s news. Time to try something new, and the low-risk, high-reward nature of them is stifling uptake of the new stuff. None of this new PvE is going to succeed if it is always placed on the shelf next to the easy income Incursions offer. At a minimum, Incursions need a nerf in income to make the new, more challenging stuff, more appealing.
1 Like
It’s the players’ fault actually. We do sometimes get rivalries among the Incursion groups, mainly when it’s about taking down the flagship can it happen that two groups both try to get the kill and the loot. Otherwise can it happen that the groups race each other to a beacon or even end up in the same site, when you’ll then hear the FCs switching tactics only to win a site before the others do. It’s only not quite as common as you perhaps want it to be and it’s mainly due to FCs being reasonable and effective.
Oh dear…you really know nothing about how hisec wars are funded do you? Hint, it’s not through botting or ganking.
So how much for a 100man corp to dec a 5000man corp?
This would remove the one current way of avoiding a war dec. I think most people agree that players should be have a way of not being involved in a war (whether player or faction declared) if they want.
This has been discussed at length and would only really impact the small war dec groups.
I think you mean consecutive, and if so, it’s not a particularly bad idea. Concurrent would only hit smaller wardec groups who are trying to get in on the action.
Hisec isn’t perfect, but any meaningful changes would require significant investment from CCP. Regardless of what changes you think will work, you have to ask yourself whether CCP are willing to put the resources into changing what is ultimately an area that only a fraction of players spend any time in.
No, it’s the developer’s fault. If you fail to include proper conflict drivers you are going to get little conflict. People will just sit around and farm and grind until they get bored or someone attacks them. This is a large reason why highsec is a content desert, and where the only reliable content comes from either piracy or the Herculean effort of players, like say @James_315, to make something happen in the sandbox.
Incursions could have put players more at odds to encourage racing for a prize or sabotage of the other side, but they don’t. Probably though, from a business perspective, selling safe progress is a good strategy. People want to “win” so they will in large part all gravitate towards the PvE with the lowest risk and largest payout, no matter what it is. The Incursion payouts in the MER still show what must be hundreds of players spending thousands of hours using the content even now, 6 years after it was released and barely iterated on.
That’s fine, but I hope those numbers don’t blind CCP as to why they are doing it. I’m sure the majority (but to be fair not all) of Incursion runners would click on a button in the middle of a blank screen every 30 seconds if it paid them more than Incursions and had no risk attached to it just to watch their wallet balance go up. The PvE team would instantly have much better uptake of any of their new efforts if they just removed/nerfed Incursions and attached the same level of income to the new stuff.
That’s good. I’m glad there is still a little competition amongst the groups. The mechanic is structured such to make collusion with your rivals the optimal solution so it makes sense it is rare people directly compete, but I can see why CCP didn’t want to make it truly competitive and have people lose out and perhaps stop logging in.
Again, this goes to conflict drivers. Maybe Eve really only has succeeded as much as it has because CCP has not added very many things to fight over so no one feels like a loser, but I have to say without them, the reasons to compete and fight often are very tenuous, and most people just don’t fight at all as there is no obvious reason to. I can’t help but think that some more clear conflict drivers would set goals for the less-imaginative players and drive interactions between players and groups.
I’d say it has a lot to do with the ratio of PvP players to non-PvP players in general, meaning, not just EVE but all players over the world. I don’t know any numbers, but just for the sake of creating an argument, say, you’d have one PvPer for five non-PvPers, then you will ultimately see this ratio reflect in a game like EVE. Other games keep PvPers completely out, some include a bit of it, but in a true sandbox game will you not be able to change the ratio much.
The more successful and popular EVE becomes will its description of being a PvP game keep less and less non-PvPers out and lead to overall more non-PvPers. In other words, when EVE was known to be a hardcore PvP game in its early years and only attracted PvPers, is it now attracting an increasing amount of non-PvPers until it reaches this ratio.
The increased number of events and PvE content could be an indicator of such a trend.
In the last weeks I perfected hunting in highsec, and figured, that the available intel tools are incredible powerful, if you know how to use them. I wouldn’t change anything here right now. Make it easier, and you have more hunters, more pressure on prey, leads to less prey. Also narrowing the use down by dedicated structures would be bad.
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How about making empire security status dynamic and make both side of the security status involved and fight each other?
Let’s say doing PVE or donating money(or items/LPS in a broader sense) increases a system’s security level.
Top contributors for a system can receive extra help from CONCORD, like CONCORD remote reps for example. I wonder how much would carebears pay for extra security?
On the other hand, ganking, suspect baiting decreases the system’s security level.
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I agree with most of the stuff, but I’m not sure about faction police. How about just removing this mechanic? If you are an outlaw, you are freely attackable by players. If the players don’t give a damn, you can roam around highsec freely. The anti-gankers would be able and actually required to do something about outlaws themselves. How’s that for a vigilante gameplay?
o/
2 Likes
That works for me too. 
I think the anti-gate camping function of them is a valid one, probably the only valid role they fill. You probably don’t want -10s camping gates or stations en mass, to keep solo and newer highsec residents safer who can’t contest them even though they would be free-to-shoot. If there was a small chance, and increasing chance the FacPo would show up that would prevent permacamps, I think that a compromise that wouldn’t make highsec residents that much more unsafe overall, but still allow for real fights between criminals and player law enforcers, but I am good with your idea too.
2 Likes
A new AI system is in development, iirc; we already see some of it with Pirate Strongholds. I’d like to see that with CONCORD. Perhaps they could evolve from unavoidable and artificial punishment bots into fully-fledged anti-pirate roaming fleets, hunting and engaging criminals.
In effect, the security level of Highsec systems (in regards to CONCORD response time) would shift with CONCORD fleet movements. This could broaden the playing field for pirate and anti-pirate activities throughout Highsec.
Dryson you need to lay off thr drugs man
1 Like