The REASON it isn’t fun is BECAUSE the only mechanics left for a PvPer to use to get engagements aren’t fun. CODE. would’ve never been a thing had suspect baiting not been nerfed out of existence. It’s a fact and back when suspect baiting had a massive community we did get killed by PvEers all the time because the tactic was much more widespread, thus more people knew about it and were prepared for it.
There’s no incentive you can place that will make a PvPer take an unfavorable engagement and you’re not going to incentivize a PvEer to suddenly take up arms and fit every PvE ship he flies for the 1 in 1000 chance that he’ll have a chance to PvP. It just doesn’t work that way. You’re either looking for PvP or you’re not, you can’t have both. Take it from someone who has done nothing but PvP in this game for 10 years.
Furthermore, if you make it to where the PvPer can’t prepare to win most of the engagements he takes vs an unprepared PvEer (like the logi change) then he simply won’t play. So you’re left with either continuing to remove the PvPers tools, making a PvEer no safer, and leaving only the horribly binary content that we have now. OR you give the PvPer more tools, put the PvEer in no more danger than he’s already in and open up more interesting avenues of play.
You’re presenting a false dilemma, but even so there’s something to be gained by looking at it. The current (not so accurate /lol) claim:
PvPers won’t fight if they can’t win, so the game must force PvE players to face them on unfavorable terms … vs …
PvE players won’t play if the game provider (CCP) rigs the game against them, so their time is spent entertaining strangers (i.e. allowing pseudo-PvPers to gank them).
There are some obvious questions (I could make the list much longer):
Which of PvPers and PvEers is being unreasonable towards the other? Or is it neither?
Is there a natural compromise?
Is there any way for the two groups to find a compromise?
(1): Both groups are acting in their own interest. It would be foolish to expect anything else. Believing otherwise is one of many indicators that the “bittervet narrative” is a collective delusion.
(2): Almost certainly. I could suggest several, but this kind of discussion is rarely useful at best. Now we have hostile moderators here too, so there’s zero motivation to be constructive.
(3): Very unlikely. One side is “lost in the fog”, so the other will never find anyone to talk to.
CCP has already switched from “the sandbox is the design” (i.e. taking no responsibility for gameplay) to designing the experience. They will “decide” (though experience suggests they’ll use dice to make the key decisions). If I was betting I’d go with the PvE side.
I didn’t mean to say PvPers won’t fight if they can’t win, I meant to say they won’t fight when PRESENTED with an unfavorable engagement. The engagement could SEEM favorable for the PvPer and not be (the PvEer is in fact PvP fit or has a fleet of friends come to his aid). In fact this is how most fleet fights start and how engagements involving more than one person happen more times than not in Eve.
The point of that is to say, if you nerf PvPers to the point that they are not favored in ANY engagement (I’m mainly talking about suspects here) then they simply won’t play.
Also, the game is EXTREMELY far from being rigged against to PvEers. They are being coddled beyond belief. I do agree that suicide ganking and wardeccing are fairly extreme mechanics but they wouldn’t be a problem if PvPers had more interesting tools to utilize to generate engagements.
The compromise IS the suspect system. It allows PvEers to choose when they engage, and allows PvPers the freedom to setup more interesting interaction then F1 and LOL. Now CCP is nerfing the suspect system into the ground and it’s going to make a verrrryyyy bad environment in High-Sec for both parties.
I know for a fact most of my suspect baiting buddies are either going to suicide gank or join a massive wardec corp (or quit the game altogether) and I expect that the rest of the suspect community will follow suit.
I think that the bumping mechanic in terms of freighters in hisec is an appallingly bad mechanic and creates unbalanced play. All you can do is revert to insults like all of your type when you have nothing else to offer. I believe that gankers will adapt to it.
As for trying to tell me I have it easy, I make my own ease and success.
Kusion is an indy player who is min / max farming, I found the simple fact that he went straight from indy in hisec to hisec ganking says it all.
All hear from you is your anguish and anger for losing remotre reps from your suspect baiting. By the way just so you know, I am against removing neutral RR because I think it can be countered easily enough and I think it gives an advantage to groups like PIRAT in hisec. Anyway I hope you sort yourself out because removing neutral RR from what you were doing is far more difficult to deal with then what I propose in terms of bumping. All you have to do is look at what Australian Excellence was doing to JF’s in Jita. I may find him an aggressive arrogant person but he knows what he is doing.
I do admit I’ve gotten extremely heated but it’s hard not to when you are hit with nothing but a nerf bat for 10 years and then you come to the forums to have a discussion about it and all people can seem to focus on is more nerfs on emergent gameplay. As far as the bumping is concerned it’s not a great mechanic but it needs to be there. Without it CODE. would either function at a loss or only shoot autopiloters and eventually dissolve due to lack of content.
I’m not saying it would be the worse thing ever for CODE. to go away but there’s better ways to achieve that. Those ways are definitely focusing high-sec PvP on the suspect system and not the criminal system. However the way things are headed we will likely have neither eventually at which point the economy, and likely the game, will crash and burn.
We all get heated on stuff we care about. I don’t believe that CODE will die because of the ending of bumping, in fact I would think it could galvanise them a bit because at the moment the main gankers are solo playing multiple accounts and it would create more team related play and also AG would be able to mix it a bit better thus creating a better level of content.
I say that from seeing how often gankers want to try to get into a personal slanging match with me and try to get me interested in opposing their play. I don’t because it is too imbalanced, but that could change without bumping.
You and a handful of friends could completely shut them down as it stands already. More nerfs to CODE. are not what we need. What we need are more avenues of play for PvPers in highsec as this fosters an environment for new PvPers to grow and moves existing PvPers from boring binary content to more interesting and open ended alternatives.
I hear people say that, but no one ever details how, and the few times someone even started to say how they seemed to think that AG players had access to the same level of resources as they had and did not care about security status, which is very important. Merely saying it does not make it so.
I’d scheduled a serious response to this, but I’m no longer interested in being constructive (even by accident
There’s a basic answer below, but I won’t be back for a while, so I suggest you don’t reply.
The reason isn’t related to forum participants: on balance this is a nice enough place.
My experience here has been disrupted by multiple instances of “careless moderation” - most likely due to the combination of a “pointy-headed manager” with a mission and an inexperienced employee. In my experience the inevitable random errors are never rolled back, so for me there’s no point in continuing.
Anyway, back to your reply:
Note that there’s nothing here about “real piracy” here. I don’t think it’s needed. IMO good piracy targets like professional haulers should accept the risk of a suicide gank, and prepare against it (fit a tank, scouts, guards). I wouldn’t mind if someone found a way to make “commercial” PvP work for this kind of thing,but it would be an expensive vice, since CCP wouldn’t be providing any of the ISK (see below).
First, full disclosure: The idea you quoted was originally designed and posted primarily as a “lunatic trap”, so it’s never been developed past what you’ve seen already. It works quite well as a trap though
The original vision:
HighSec “pseudoPvPers” includes a large group of griefers who gank to be annoying rather than selecting economically efficient targets. They casually waste other people’s time in the process, and clearly they gain something they want. They are prepared to spend time and to accept a significant opportunity cost in ISK on one-sided ganking of helpless targets.
Their favorite targets are ISK-poor, and still learning the game. Many could be persuaded to provide targets is they were paid ISK in proportion to the gankers opportunity cost (this would be at least one or two orders of magnitude greater that highSec mining.
So we have a consumer with ISK, and providers without ISK.
Making it work without changing he game:
More full disclosure: I deliberately left the trust issue open every time I did this. It helps separate griefers (can’t be trusted, don’t trust anyone) from “real PvPers”.
If the ganker and the PvPer can find each other at all (e.g. a global channel plus standard location near each of the big trade hubs would do it), a quick negotiation via an EVE-wide channel or chat, using the usual “half in front” approach would do.
CONCORD can be avoided by the target and ganker arranging appropriate the appropriate status between them. Rookies don’t know how to do this, but all gankers do
If CCP wanted to help:
Contracts keyed to time/place/players,elapsed time. and pay off when the right ship is destroyed. This would help a lot with “two-stage hits”: ship + capsule. It’s equivalent to your thoughts on CONCORD handling payment
Ready access to/from a dedicated location (not natural for EVE, but worth a look anyway IMO)
Free-fire zones for multiples of both gankers and targets. Gankers pay by time to be there, targets receive payoff for time and for being killed. Works better with fast transport in and back (so both sides know there are enough of the other side in place
Past this stage, there are many examples. CCP would have to decide how far they too it.
Note that I’d be strongly against CCP providing any of the ISK. I see this as players paying each other for services provided/received. That way it’s a transfer of ISK plus some gratuitous destruction - it can’t be profitable for both sides.
I have to say that the ideas of industrials being more combat capable* and of the empire freighters being more like the Bowhead are intriguing ideas which could aid those who actively play rather than AFK autopilot.
*more like barges perhaps: A flight of drones and faster locking?
If you’ve seen my kill board then you know I’ve been at this a long time and I’m not afraid to risk losing a ship to indulge my curiosity or have an entertaining experience PLAYING the game. And what you should also take away after looking at my kill board is that I don’t huddle in high sec crying about EVE being unfair.
I care even less about your kill board than I do about my own and I’m not here asking you how to play the game, carebear. I already know.
After playing for years, I can tell you two things for sure: 1. EVE tries too hard to be “fair” to “PVPers” at the expense of everyone else who plays the game. 2. There will always be “snowflakes” who call everyone else snowflakes because their privilege is invisible to them; they can’t understand the game from any other perspective but their own.
No it isn’t, because alting circumvents the consequences of “bad” decisions, like the decision to be an anti-social prick. By alting, we can do that and the consequence doesn’t stick to the player, only the character, and not even that so much, now, with skill extractors. Just like your friend above, you are failing to grasp that YOUR game is not THE game.
There is literally a counter in launcher that counts how many players are online.
Kinda hard for a game to be dead with 30k players average being online all the time. If there is a game that has proven to stand the test of time its EVE. It does not go away any time soon.
Also don’t put too much faith on how many people leave the game , WOW had a massive reduction in numbers , the lowest it ever been and everyone was running ranked on the streets , screaming “WOW is dead, WOW is dead !!!”. The Legion came and it broke every record WOW had in player numbers ever. No surprise it was an amazing expansion, then next was not so great so it saw again a heavy reduction in numbers.
Players come in waves depending on the quality content of a game. But games like EVE and WOW have such massive communities even at their worst that dwarfs any other MMORGs out there easily.
Does the wider player perception of EVE and its direction match what I’ve outlined above?
30k players online at the same time
So EVE dying ?
30k players online at the same time
Does CCP care anymore?
30k players online at the same time
Has CCP made a statement about or acknowledged EVE’s downward trajectory?
