Obviously at the end of the tutorial give out a 10m reward and refuse activation of any stargates until the character has either bought a CODE mining permit from a certified CODE agent or doubled their ISK with one of EVEs many legit ISK doublers. In any case, on jumping through the next stargate the character should be scrammed and webbed by NPCs and ransomed for all their remaining ISK, at which point the NPC still blows them up.
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You are confusing sec status and faction standing to some extent here.
Low faction standing should absolutely result in you being engaged by station and gate guns at the very least. Note that there are plenty of stations in faction space that belong to a different faction, so it wouldnât stop you docking somewhere unless you run all 4 faction standings.
Sec status is mainly about other players so that Iâd not scream about.
Since I posted the thread, I might as well post my thoughts here to.
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Implement a new watchlist that is easier to add and remove whole corps/alliances from. Super pilots can learn to live with the slightly larger risks, but with the proliferation of those ships it hardly matters now.
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Crimewatch 3.0 gets released. Looting a can now gives you a limited engagement with the corp/alliance who owns the can. Anyone in those organizations can shoot the thief. Neutral assistance of any kind still gives the normal suspect that we know today. Booshing is now allowed in highsec and also gives a suspect.
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Security standing now affects how many rats, asteroids, anomalies, cosmic sigs, mission agents spawn/are present in a system. System security is now flexible in highsec, more PVE raises the sec status until it is no longer viable in that system. Over time the sec status decays due to lack of PVE opportunities. Mission agents move around according to sec status . The goal being that smaller groups would want to find out of the way pockets that were more lucrative, and possibly defend those pockets with wardecs.
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PVE income is severely nerfed in highsec, however higher reward PVE is available but it always comes with a suspect timer. Farming in highsec can still be lucrative but will also be more dangerous. New PVE, such as abyssal sites will give a suspect timer for anything better than tier 1 filaments. Diving back into another abyssal deadspace is impossible for 30 seconds after your invuln timer is gone.
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Remove incursions and replace with new PVE that has more risk. Either from players or the environment.
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Nerf the HP of all mining ships but give them a buff to slots and CPU/PG. Players can now trade risk for reward, ehp for yeild/cargo cap. Every time a mining ship undocks below a certain ehp it gets a popup that must be consented to before undocking. The popup will state that the miner consents to PVP by undocking and their ship can be destroyed at any time.
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Redesign NPC corps. New players start out in starter corps much like they do now. There is no NPC tax rate on this corporation. After 3 to 6 months the new player is moved to a regular NPC corporation if they have not joined a player corp yet. In the post-starter NPC corp the tax rate is 11% and it covers all activities, mission bounties, refining yield, market sales, production cost, contract rewards (both public and private), lp rewards, station trades (if no isk changes hands its a % of the jita sale price), etc. As the player spends time in the post-starter NPC the tax rate begins to climb until it tops out at 40%, this occurs over a period of 1 year. If the player leaves the NPC corp, the tax rate decays but at the same rate, so if you stay in for a year you need to stay in a player corp for a year to get back down to 11%.
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Redesign player corps. Add tiers of player corps to the game. Corps can upgrade at any time, maybe make a way to downgrade if you meet the lower criteria.
- Tier 1 - social corp. Limited number of members. No structures can be anchored or owned. No wallet divisions, hangers or roles. Cannot be wardecced. 15% NPC tax rate on all activities (same as outlined above). Cannot join alliances
- Tier 2 - Startup. Limited number of members. Can collect taxes on members and set the tax rate. Limited number of wallet divisions/hangers/roles. Can anchor limited numbers and types of structures. Can only be wardecced by 3 entities at a time. Cannot join alliances
- Tier 3 - Full corporation. Same rules as a corp in eve today, except the following. Cannot form an alliance, can only join non sov holding alliances. Limited to placing structures in highsec and lowsec.
- Tier 4 - MegaCorp. Same as a corp today. Can form alliances, can join sov holding alliances. Can place structures anywhere. Fees to declare war against these corps is greatly reduced.
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Alliances become able to hold Sov or not. Non-sov alliance can only anchor structures in highsec and lowsec and can only recruit tier 3 corps
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Make structures drop loot on destruction in all areas of space but allow groups to buy insurance that lets the items inside go to asset safety. Make it expensive and expire after a time like ship insurance but instead of returning isk it allows the items to go intoasset safety. Make structure timers shorter in highsec so killing them isnât so tedious.
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Finally revamp wars.
- Lower initial costs of wars but have them scale up in cost the more wars you declare. Use the Fibonacci sequence as the multiplier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number). This allows wars to be cheap for new groups but scale up fast if you try and blanket dec. Contrived things like fighting over structures or win conditions need not apply, but if highsec had the righ conditions that would cause corps to fight each other for scarce resources those ideas could be avioded.
- Make dec dodging harder, use a cool down system like jump fatigue but for corp hopping during wars. This prevents both risk adverse players from avoiding wars and people jumping between dec corps for targets
- Add robust surrender mechanics that allow a defender to end the war and not be re-decced again for a length of time agreed on by both parties. Allow defenders to pay their way out of decs through this mechanic, giving isk or other assets to the aggressor in exchange for ending the war and mechanically preventing a re-declaration for some time.
The problem is that a large corp with 1,000 men could wardec the victim with a 10 men corp and still have 1,000 guys looking for the vicitms and pointing them to the killers.
The main imbalance between large corps and small corps is the ability to find a target in space. Itâs the abundance of spotters, not killers, what makes life miserable to small corps decced by large corps.
2 Likes
High sec only contributes about 6% to the ISK faucets. How much more do you want to nerf already nearly non-existent rewards?
Incursions are high risk if players wanted to engage incursion runners. They already use expensive ships and fittings, which means they are juicy targets. The fact that players rather go for easy targets that donât shoot back goes to show what high sec pirates think about risk.
That is already the case as the Skiffs mine less than Macks and Hulks with Orcas as you have to dock more often. Will there be a similar popup for pirates that they need to consent and agree to tell the miner a polite and nice message when the miner outsmarts them? If they donât do, they will get banned?
Why only in high sec? Null sec and low sec are supposed to be riskier than high sec and those areas of space already provide more bonuses and benefits with structures.
Terrible idea as it must be possible again that large null sec blocks stay under permanent war dec all the time.
Already exists.
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Yup, and any change to this to allow defenders to buy their way out without the attackers agreement, then you may as well forget grudge decs or content decs. Without these, you may as well get rid of wardecs altogether as the purpose of them is lost.
The vast majority of those scouts are out of corp so you are never going to solve this problem - obviously in-corp scouts are pretty useless. Oh, and once again, please point me to the wardec corp with anywhere approaching 1000 members. If you tried hard enough, you might find 1000 wardec characters in the entire game. Thatâs 15 times smaller than PH, a quarter of the size of Karmafleet and NC. and half the size of PL. Just think about that for a second.
Now tell me with a straight face that itâs unfair for wardec corps to dec whoever they want out of these groups along with all the other large null entities. Oh, and of course I want to be able to dec all the ones who just plain piss me off. Like the ones who spout 
in local, or try to loot one of my wrecks. Or just looked funny at me.
Most incursion groups donât allow players who are at war to join their fleets - risk of the entire logi chain going suspect for example. From experience, this normally results in incursion runners immediately dropping corp when theyâre decced, or never being in a corp to start with. Nothing to do with fighting back (we actually like it, contrary to popular belief), just that generally theyâre not good targets.
I wasnât thinking about wars. I was thinking about suicide attacks like Blackbirds to jam logi ships or some Taloses to gank the paper-thin Vindicators. Wars arenât really feasible unless some arcane conditions are being introduced as ClH suggested.
i.e. âI love this game, apart from these 9,347,826 minor points Iâd like changed to make Eve the game I want, regardless of the other 33,000 players wishesâŚâ
6 Likes
Fair enough. Yeah, suicide ganking incursion runners would be very lucrative, but would be incredibly difficult - You enter the system flashy red, then have to warp to the acceleration gate and into the site - all before the incursion runners notice whatâs going on and warp away. Not impossible, but would require perfect timing and a very ignorant target.
Oh, and most importantly I want to be able to wardec the ones who people pay me to wardec. Usually for the reasons Iâve listed 
well that is the spirit of the thread? is it not? or did you not read the original post?
Maybe high sec needâs to be split into 2, high sec being a competitive space where being suspect leadâs to being rewarded and Santuary sec (1.1-1.5 cant even shoot guns at another player) where the beginnerâs start where they can explore the first steps of the game a plateau before the cliff.
What cliff? Its not like new players are dying left and right. They have to pretty much look for it to even have a chance at dying to another player.
And why would anyone even think it is a good idea to shield new players from the most exiting part of the game and trap them in the boring stuff.
In every other game this would be obvious. But somehow EVE players completely lose the focus that this is a game. Most people actually like and join the game to get some action and shoot other spaceships.
Imagine you would purchase a new FPS and on the first 10 maps the guns donât work. How dumb and boring would that be? Thatâs basically what you try to create.
7 Likes
2% of all new players in the first 15 days? Considering that has to include all the ones that never undock or undock once and never leave the starter systemâŚ
Thatâs actually a pretty big number.
Now as to not shielding people⌠that I agree with you on. It wouldnât achieve any change. as soon as they left the area they would hit any cliff that exists. And may even be more confused since itâs different to how it was before.
2% of players die in the first 15 days in a PVP orientated game. Iâm sorry, thatâs really not a lot even if you take into account alts and afks.
Your idea would be open to abuse and would need a ridiculous amount of balancing to make sure that it isnât exploited to hell and back. Worst of all it goes against everything that the has been about for 15 years. The whole point is that when youâre new you feel peril when you undock.
I donât want to see droves of new players dying as soon as they leave the station. Thatâs not what wardecs are about and contrary to commonly held beliefs, the vast majority of deaths to wardec corps are from mid to large alliances who donât live in hisec and just forget/ignore that theyâre at war. I donât see why any of this needs changing. The NPE needs improvement and maybe there can be some tweaks to costings of wars (1Bil isk is a lot less than it used to be), but war numbers and the systems around it are fine.
Itâs actually incredibly bad. To be fair though, the 1-2% is due to being shot by criminals. More players do lose ships in other ways not counted in that figure.
But yes, if only a small fraction of your new players are experiencing the core PvP gameplay over the first weeks of your game, there might be some issue with the NPE of your PvP video game. I get that engineering exposure to that is a tough ask in an unbalanced, open-world sandbox game, but it seems to me CCP hasnât tried very hard. They either should have stuck with the ultra-harsh, drop someone in space and let the wolves feed on them to get players used to the real game, or spent time crafting a NPE system that exposes, not shields players from the core game play. This half-measure of safe-space-by-fiat seems lazy and uninteresting, and does a disservice to the possibilities of this game that go on outside highsec.
I think though such exposure should take place in lowsec for a whole variety of reasons but one of which is that highsec is always going to be very safe - thatâs in the name, while lowsec offers some of the easiest, and casual PvP in the game - in fact, I would make it more conducive to newer players and smaller ships/gangs but that is a topic for another thread. Safety, while fine, isnât especially captivating or conducive to PvP, especially for a new player who is limited in the criminal and war options available, so letting them loose elsewhere (where the NPCs donât shoot you for playing the game and shooting another players) with some allies to help them might be better for retention but that is really for another topic. If a new player knows they want to do something other than spaceship combat from the start then let them go to highsec right away, but as the default it is a terrible way to show people the core element of the game.
The fact is though that even if being ganked caused 100% retention of those exploded, or had 0% and made every single one of them quit, it wouldnât make a noticeable difference in retention rates as being ganked as a new player in highsec is so very rare. There are clearly much more significant and important factors determining who stays with the game, admittedly only some of which can be influenced by CCP.
Probably in the end, thatâs the real truth - no matter what CCP does with the NPE there is a limit to what they can do. Some people donât understand what type of game this is, or misjudge their comfort with a full-loot PvP game, or want something faster paced and simpler, and all the NPE determines is if theyâll quit on day 1 or day 8. If they donât quit in the first week after being ganked, theyâll quit after 3 months when they are finally ganked or scammed or wardecced. I do think we lose too many players to boredom after they are sent off to level their Raven, and some more to a failure to connect with the greater social game that could be improved, but I think the best NPE in the world should only expect a marginal improvement in retention rates. Maybe CCP is right to spend effort elsewhere.
2 Likes
It was the OP I was responding toâŚ
Remove CONCORD and local 
For those that will whinge about any aggression, isolating them away isnât going to change that. Itâs only going to delay it slightly until they hit the real game and then complain anyway.
Maybe itâs just the way I see things, but I think itâs far better to show people what the game really is right from the start. A lot of people come here because of the type of game it is, so isolating them away from it initially (without them knowing to go look elsewhere), risks losing more players that would otherwise enjoy the game.
So this type of change might seem to resolve one perceived problem, only to create an even bigger one.
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Yea you are right, maybe the reason people get so hammered is becuase they donât realize from the get go what type of game it is and donât adapt quick enough before they go and loose weekâs of progress.
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