Recently I have seen quite a few threads pop up here mainly suggesting heavier emphasis on PVE and reduced risk for highsec dwellers and/or new players as ways to improve player retention and Make Eve Great Again (MEGA).
These ideas are usually met with resistance from the content creation people, who believe, at its core, EVE should remain hard, dangerous, and mainly PVP-oriented in order not to lose its identity and current market segment.
I am mainly interested in ideas from the latter type of players pertaining to slowing down the decline of EVE. How does EVE retain players while remaining true to its core philosophy, in your opinion?
Decisions matter. Being stupid or lazy means you lose. Being smart and proactive makes you win. No longer āeveryone gets a medalā. Stop moddycoddling pve in the name of new players.
Lower barriers to pvp such that new players (and players in general) can hunt older players. Give new players opportunity to fck sht up and be the villain. Enable rivalries to form between players by allowing foul play.
How much lower should it be? You can literally gank Ventures and mining barges in Atrons and be a super villain. You can combat probe someoneās precious MTUs and destroy them. It takes a few hours for people to train into a Tornado and create hell on busy station undocks. What more do you need?
Maybe you are in the wrong here. You want ever easier PVP without challenges. You want to see challenges removed that make people feel accomplished when they overcome them. I think that is a bigger issue than a few small hurdles into PVP.
That has led us to the current problems with super umbrellas, ridiculous Rorq mining yields, CCP being too dumb to even know what to do any more. Maybe a bit less agency would be better?
I think the main way to appeal to more players is by making the game more interesting by improving or reiterating on stale features:
Expand on the contract system by allowing more flexible contracts base on various metrics that get collected by the EVE server.
Remove the absurd reinforce layers and timer from most structures. Industrial and similar utility structures can be built as many as you want in a system but have a POCO/POS like ~24h reinforce timer but are cheap. Regular citadels (headquarters) can keep their current mechanic but are limited to only one per system.
Remove the magic asset teleportation system without replacement (at least for industrial/utility structures).
Expand on some stale features like PI and finally introduce PvP elements to it as it was envisioned like a decade ago.
Completely rework the wardec system. Base corps have no features but canāt be wardeced. To upgrade a corp you need a citadel and online corp services. Winning a war should be rewarding and losing should be devastating to a corp.
Make it possible for a wartarget to actively hide from locators
Completely rework the locator agents as they where probably never touched in over 10 years and it shows.
Bring back a watchlist like feature tied to wardec that can possibly be disrupted by the defender with some new mechanics.
This is just from the top of my head. Maybe some more things come to mind later.
Nothing is stopping new players from wardecing other people. Thatās why these useless 1 man corp wars pop up all over the place in recent months.
You can salvage your terrible security status with tags. That is already fixed and possible, and provides opportunities to do weekend ganks while doing other stuff like ISK farming during the week.
What more do you need?
That is a funny suggestion. It costs more to gank ore leechers than you get from your moon. That is why no one does it. Thatās a challenge to overcome.
Link to what? All you need is some ISK, a structure and a target.
How so? You need to elaborate more if you want to counter-argue against a full sentence point. Obtuse 5 word phrases donāt work. Or your point of ānot needing dedicated ganking altsā makes no sense. With tags you can remove the negative standing consequences from the ganks and do other things the rest of the time. The only negative consequence that remains is the killright. Most people donāt make these public. And if it was made public, you have some fun potential for a fight with someone who takes it. So even easier PVP for a new player that learns to know what they are doing.
Confront new players with the real EvE in NPE. Show them what it means to play in a sandbox with non-consensual PvP. Then they can make an informed decision about staying or leaving. Especially the aspect of loss needs to be taught well.
Kill rights and not sec status. Sec status has always been easy to maintain with a mix of ratting and ganking. But kill rights cannot be removed and essentially restrict the hi-sec character to disposal ships for a month.
Isnāt that being taught well by the Career Agents when you are forced to lose a ship in the Military missions? I think the agent tells you gently that you cannot always expect to keep your ship alive, that sometimes odds are overwhelmingly against you.
