Siege Green - Structure Updates Now Avaialble for Testing

For large groups in NS that might be the case. For a bunch of Care Bear friends in HS (a bunch of 100M+ SP friends who don’t want to join the NS blobs) it is The Ritz.

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Most folks in NS…

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A post I made in a less-visited thread, but relevant here I think:

This is the biggest game play issue for me and my Care Bear friends. While we visit LS and WHs from time to time ,our main infrastructure and group activities revolve around moon mining. We don’t spam structures to annoy an enemy FC. We dig dirt and turn it into stuff for our group. And we don’t just build T1 stuff. Ove the last four years we have built literally every class of ship except for titans. I personally have built two jump freighters in the last six months!

The roles of structures in NS is different to their roles in HS, NS, and WHs. And the people in HS are not all 20-day old Newbros. There are more than a few of us with 100M+ skillpoints who like to dig, build, and talk socially. I have a titan pilot, but I don’t want to become a faceless line member in NS.

It seems to me that HS is turning into a scripted theme park, with many efforts being made to remove high SP players from the space.

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Your alliance has never lost a citadel.

The point of my making the statement wasn’t that “my folks are fine” because I consider everybody my folks when it comes to the game itself. My point was that there were hundreds of people who appreciated the change and were happy that they were getting better content, compared to the handful of people Bloody Ivy was talking about being unhappy about the change.

I wish that CCP had the time, resources, energy and willingness to never make a change that makes anybody unhappy, but they don’t. Every change makes somebody unhappy, every change messes with someone’s gameplay. If they make a change that inconveniences 10 people but makes life a lot easier for 1000, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to expect those 1000 people remain inconvenienced so 10 don’t have to change the way they play the game, does it?

You realize that a handful here and a handful there and another handful over there really quickly become some hundred people as well? I can tell you that every small corp member I know is unhappy with this change, even if most of them don’t raise their voice here, most don’t even have a forum account to use. Alone those in my corp and the small corps we used to work with count for more than a hundred people. And lots of others who are absolutely non-related to me have raised concerns in this topic as well. I am absolutely sure they stand for a lot more peoples unhappiness than the “250 guys you had in fleet last night”. A lot more!

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You seem to be laboring under the belief that more people play EVE in small groups than they do in large ones. That’s not the case. Arrendis did the math:

Total Characters In Alliances With 400+ Members: 353,259.00
Total Characters In Sub-400 Member Alliances*: 142,328.00

If these changes make guys in groups like mine happy, there are literally twice as many characters in those groups. Characters don’t equal accounts, and they don’t equal people, but it’s safe to say that the more characters and accounts means more actual people. And that means there are far more actual people in those groups than in the small ones.

If you honestly think that there are more folks in your small groups unhappy with this change than the couple thousand in my alliance who are happy with it, I don’t know what to tell you.

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I can confirm, I did do this math. Brisc is absolutely right: there are more than twice as many characters in the roughly 199 (it may have moved in the last 2 weeks) alliances of 400+ characters than there are in the roughly 2997 alliances smaller than 400 characters.

As a caveat, I’ll point out this does not take into account corporations that are not members of alliances, nor the NPC corporations that never purge inactive members. Pator Tech, for example, has 741,113 members. How many active? Impossible to say. The numbers we can reliably and easily obtain, though… they say the majority of active players who are in an alliance are in a medium-large one.

Thats entirely not the point. I do not doubt that there are more people (characters and real players) in large alliances than in small groups. Even if Arrendis says that he only compared “alliances”. Well, most small casual groups are not even in an alliance so they are not even counted in this “math”. But we are not in disagreement that a majority of the players are in larger groups.

The point is the following:

The number of people in small corps are not a majority, sure, but they are not a “tiny minority” that should counted as insignificant as well. We are stil talking about hundreds, maybe thousands of real players who feed CCP with cash and keep this game alive as well. Changes that benefit the majority should and can be designed in a way that the majority gets their benefits but the minorities are not hurt greatly without need.

These changes we currently see are just a little convenience change for the big groups, but a real jawbreaker for many small casualgroups, especially in WH space. Players will leave the game over this, lots of. Completely unneeded. Players that could have become the next generation of leaders or FCs or tycoons in a few years. But now we will never find out.

The player base suggested a LOT of other options to prevent structure spam that would have ended this “problem”. From smaller fuelbays that require constant attention to increased hauling requirements and longer vulnerability windows when anchoring so the problem would just go away by itself because it would become way too costly and way too much effort to maliciously “structure spam” a foreign area. And even other balancing changes that could be bound to SOV or Capitals or whatever. None of it has been even considered. The changes were made long before even asking for feedback and all the fassade of pretending that anyone would care for the small guy too was just a lie. A straight and obvious lie.

That is the main point. The game COULD have actually made better with the constructive feedback in this topic, for all players. But because of the ignorance showed here, it is now WORSE than it could have been. And thats just sad.

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Do unallied corps figure in there somewhere?

Essentially the structure changes will (by design or otherwise) see the elimination of many HS structures. In my own corp we now have more players on discord playing Valheim than Eve–and we all met playing Eve. These changes have simply driven more out of the game. At times I spent USD $1000 per annum on the game. Many people in my corp–ex players now, spent equivalent amounts. Not plex, not spending hours working for plex but spending real money to play the game.
CCP’s desire to eliminate industry/mining from HS and to maximise structure and ship losses is drip feeding the pain and is a poor choice for change management–far better to just inflict all the changes they actually want very quickly and say to the players"this is it, this is the game".

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So, assuming the numbers are about correct even disregarding the indie corps, if we loose the gameplay of one third of people so that two thirds can get easier kills, do you consider that a good trade?

If so, once the now-easy-to-kill mediums run out, what/who do you think CCP should feed the two thirds next, to keep them happy?

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In brief: no, and ‘I ask myself the same question’.

In longer form… I’m working on organizing those thoughts.

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We have four liveable types of space, four different styles of existence so the solution would be to have structure mechanics unique to each type of space would it not?

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Babies :dagger: :drop_of_blood:

PS: This thread got me thinking of parallels that could be made where a minority is suppressed or sacrificed for the ‘greater good’ :joy_cat:

Time will be the vindicator.

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Well, it would be a good start to remember the very basics of user interaction mechanics: Everything a customer shall work with shall be designed as easy and intuitive as possible. Namely KISS.

That means, the system behind structures should be

  • simple to understand: aka every structure follows the same basic rules. for example, all have 1 timer or all have 2 timers. Or each class of structures has one more timer than the next smaller one. Important is, that the system is consistent in itself.

  • all interactions around these structures shall also follow the same basic rules, how they are triggered, how long they run and how they end. You want your customers to play the game and not reading wiki articles all day long, so you basically design it in a way that even a DAU knows how to set-up and defend an Upwell structure in EvE Online after reading ONE simple page of text.

  • intuitive: which means the costs, power, benefits etc. of whatever you implement should a) fit into the current existing mechanics and b) fit into the current existing lore. Else you have a large percentage of players asking themselves who the heck has designed that stupid ****, destroying immerson and trust into your company.

The current design of upwell structures in EvE online simply violates all rules of good game design however.

  • you have now different rules for M, L and XL structures with somehow artificial and unexplainable attributes. so much that you even need different organigrams and tables to describe these rules. It’s unnessesary and overly complex without a real benefit attached to this complexity.

  • they neither scale well in comparison to other existing anchorable support structures in space (Mobile Depots, POCOs, POS) nor to existing ship classes (subcaps, caps, supercaps). Neither in costs nor benefits nor power.

  • they don’t fit into the lore, since absolutely zero explanation is given why structures behave as they do. Why should they suddenly have less or more days for their timers dependend on the solar system they are anchored in for example. There is absolutely no lore explanation given why they can’t shoot back when attacked when every POS can do that for years (and wat every player would think they do, it’s a gooddamn armed space station after all and one that is present in space permanently, even if you are not online to actively protect it. It’s absolutely mandatory that they have at least some kind of self-defense mechanism.

And you can write this list longer and longer if you really wanted. I have seen a lot of bad game design decisions over the years, not only in EvE, but hardly some of that magnitude. To be honest, a small player team of some representatives of Null, Low, High and WH space could have desgined a better structure system on one weekend.

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On this one, there is, actually… its Upwell Consortium being fucky with the firmware.

Same thing with why we needed quantum Cores, in-built obsolescence of the previous system to now require an ‘upgrade’ to function appropriately or at all.

But as with the rest, and a number of other things in eve, sometimes a mechanic is just a mechanic.

yes, lets repeat the false idea that poses were difficult to kill lmao, maybe it will make it accurate this time.

Being intentionally pedantic doesn’t form an argument of any sort. Is something wrong with you?

Perhaps you should ask yourself that question:

You seem rather desperate to get into a flame war in this thread for some reason? You should perhaps calm down and re-read what was said before you throw your ludicrous baiting one-liners in.

There was mention of being able to scare off a small fleet, but somehow you turned that into a statement about being difficult to kill, as I said in my earlier reply, I think you are a mite confused.