Don’t be so willfully ignorant. Or lie to make a point. Or act like a few remaining forum no-lifers constitutes anything remotely important to the game.
A massive percentage of the “people like you” have left the game. And you know that.
Just like always.
Mr Epeen 
They encourage and inspire. They create relationships. The stories of eve aren’t just born from mass warfare, but nefarious activities as well. The scams, the thefts, baiting a bling fit raven, personal wars. And the great thing about the nefarious activities and minor wars? You didn’t need high SP ships and hundreds of friends. It’s accessible. Or it was.
You understand how word of mouth spreads but don’t seem to believe it works both ways.
PVE players aren’t going away such that there will be no targets. Same as how there was no shortage of targets 5-10 years ago.
If anything there are less players to shoot now than before. Not just because of a lower player count, but from too much safety.
What’s the use in saying we need pve players to shoot, if you can’t shoot them?
Hmmm
I like cheese
But I also like peas
If only there was some middle ground product I could choose to salve my need for validation.
Sure, but let’s not delude ourselves here. When people talk about ‘content creators’, what they’re talking about isn’t scammers and awoxers, corp infiltrators and thieves. They’re talking about small gangs roaming around null shooting miners and ratters. That’s it.
And they don’t create those kinds of stories. If they did, they’d be awesome, because yeah, stories are what pulls people in and keeps them here.
Then why push them to highsec, where all you’ve really got is the gank? I mean, I don’t disagree: nullsec shouldn’t be safe mechanically… but if people put in the work to secure their space—watching for hostiles, responding to threats, and basically making their homes someplace the roamers don’t enjoy going to—why should that get shat on?
Why is a couple of guys going out to jack off over picking on miners a good thing, but people working together to make conditions better for one another bad? If we’re going to fall back on ‘but it’s a game’, well, then why should we have to work for the raw materials to do everything else?
If we’re going to play a game where we need producers and farmers, and where we celebrate personal achievement and, as you point out, ‘the stories of eve’, why should we be catering to the people who just want their stories to be easy?
Which is a better story? ‘Me and five friends went on a roam and shot up some Mackinaws’ or ‘X is the most fortified space in the game. You can’t get in without getting obliterated… but we did. And we made out like bandits’?
I know which of those I’d be telling my friends about. I have stories of crap like sneaking out of nullsec through HED-GP when AAA used to hellcamp it… in a Tempest with small guns (couldn’t train bigger ones yet, lol) and a prototype cloak. Don’t have many of ‘yeah, so this one time, I totally ran through a gatecamp in my nullified instawarp stiletto, hah!’
People put in the effort to make their space ‘secure’. Rather than whining about that, why don’t the ‘content creators’ take it as a challenge, and do something worth telling stories about?
You should go with wasabi peas and then a nice piece of pepperjack as a chaser. >.>
You mean that wasnt pistachio ice-cream?
I wasn’t talking about blackout at all when I talked about “catering to the carebears”. I was talking about the years of continuously nerfing and removing options from Highsec aggression mechanics under the constant narrative that the new players must be protected. Despite even CCP admitting multiple times that new players where not the target of the aggression but rather old players who used highsec as an effortless farming ground. Obviously this where also the people who pretended to speak for the “new players” and how CCP loses money if they don’t make highsec safer.
A lot of the people that made Highsec interesting vanished. People who liked to mess with game mechanics in creative ways, just to see CCP nerf them under false pretense. But the masses of new players that where promised by proponents of a dull and event-less savesec never appeared.
Feel free to not care. I know some nullsec players look down on highsec. Fact is it has some of the most convoluted and weird game mechanics that lead to the most interesting experiences I had in this game and that is exactly what I like about it. Sadly most of it got slashed in the pursuit of helping newbros who did not ask for this. Most of what I experienced would not be possible anymore in todays EVE.
The direction CCP takes today is vastly different. It shows that they look once again at the state of the game overall and tweak the sandbox to get a more sustainable economy. The focus seems to have shifted from the fruitless catering to the whining of certain groups out of fear to lose players, to an actual effort to enhance opportunities in the sandbox and in the process make a more interesting game that may actually attract new players and retain older ones.
This is just my current impression. I may be wrong. I will reevaluate as we see new changes coming.
Wrong char. i’m on mobile.
You’re right. I can only ever speak to the few still left.
Like yourself, who’s far longer around than I am, iirc. 
But all of these guys, the doom sayers and safety fanatics, leave eventually.
You know it,
I know it,
Xeux probably knows it,
Ramona definitely knows it.
… and I’m really looking forward seeing you around for the next ten years.
The two of us will likely stick around until the very end, am I not right? : - )
Some quick back-of-the-napkin, er… mathing, shows that with my current assets I can PLEX 10 accts for 10 years.
So, yeah. You and I will be chatting here for a while yet. Providing I can avoid another perma-ban.
Mr Epeen
There was a legimate need to redo the wardec mechanics. They had substantive data (showed to the CSM a few years ago, in fact) that showed that highsec wardecs basically caused players to dock up for a week and play something else.
Inconveniently, a week is about how long it takes to solidify new habitual behavior… so people just didn’t come back. They didn’t need to: they’d found something else to do.
And I’m not saying that because I look down on highsec. I think there needs to be valid and healthy ways for there tobe conflict in highsec. I also think CCP’s revamped wardecs were a big swing and a miss. Yes, they stopped people from wardec’ing player corps w/no structures… but they also made it impossible for multiple groups of small alliances to work together in a HS war, which had been possible before.
Worse, the problem that was supposed to solve (‘neutral’ logistics) didn’t get solved, it just moved the point-of-change from ‘change corps’ to ‘the corp hops into alliance’. And the answer to ‘why didn’t you guys take the time to build it properly from the ground up this time?’ was ‘it’s too hard’. Which is what happens when you’ve got a development culture that’s put a lot of effort into never looking at the big picture and figuring out how each part needs to fit together.
They’ve been trying to be better about that over the last 12 months, but… honestly, I don’t have much faith left in them. We’ll see what happens as we move past ‘scarcity’ into ‘rebalance’, but CCP needs to fix the fundamentals of their game. Until they do that, all the ‘dials and knobs’ they love to twist and ‘tweaking numbers’ (which even the mineral changes have been) isn’t going to fix a damned thing.
BTW, as a quick list of ‘fundamentals of the game that need fixing’.:
Anyway… I hope the are getting a handle on things. But their track record says ‘don’t trust a damned thing until it’s live’.
Interesting so as long as it matches your game style its great. What year did plex and skill injectors come in where you could bypass the grind and get a head start?
Null is getting boring because your playstyle is not to pvp but only to disrupt whislt I go and play Shadowlands and form a new habit let me know how it goes for you.
Other option of cause is to plex out my toons move back to low sec and pvp with no grind but also no real purpose.
Nope, not at all. If people want to do small-gang roaming, they should be totally free to do that. But that doesn’t mean their low-effort playstyle should trump other playstyles. And yes, I said low-effort. 5 guys spend 2 hours a night roaming, and another hour prepping for the next roam. That’s 15h per night, or 105 man-hours per week.
2,000 people put in half an hour each a night keeping an eye on their space. That’s 1,000h per night, or 7k man-hours per week… invested into someone else’s play style. That’s without going into the work needed to coordinate that many people, to keep them together and keep them willing to talk to one another, etc etc.
And it also doesn’t include the fact that they’re also putting in 2.5 hours a night of PvE, each.
So, do you reward the 5 guys who’ve put in 105 man-hours of work to the detriment of the 2,000 people? Or do you reward the 2,000 people, and completely shut down the 5?
My response is: ‘neither’. You need to have ways for the 5 people to put in meaningful effort that will give them an opportunity to do stuff, but which doesn’t make the 2k feel like their work securing their space is worthless.
Similarly, you can’t have a game that does 90% of it’s marketing on the promise of massive empires and huge groups without acknowledging the value to the game of the labor those groups put into simply existing. Because keeping those groups together is work. It’s constant work, and it doesn’t end when you logoff.
For example: Every time Rise and Team Talos do ship changes1, I have to go through, with my team, and re-evaluate what’s possible, and how our fits need to change on basically evey hull in the game. We do that so the regular line guys don’t have to, but it’s definitely work, and it more or less consumes my free time for 3-10 days out of every month. And I’ve got one of the easier gigs in leadership. And keep in mind: that’s not even time when I’m playing. In fact, that keeps me from playing. But it’s gotta get done for the group, so we do it.
That doesn’t mean small gang play, or FW, or highsec wardecs, or literally any type of play style in the game is worthless or bad. But it does mean that a balance needs to be struck, and to strike the right balance of risk and reward between play styles that involve vastly different amounts of work, in and out of the client… CCP really needs to understand those play styles a lot better. Right now, they don’t.
1. For example, how this most recent update’s given us 130km torpedo bombers that do 2800m/s… because it was going to nerf stealth bombers, right?
Half the time I struggle to believe they even understand the basics of their own game, how many of the people who make the decisions actually play?
It’s kind of weird how these “I need safe Hi-Sec space to gank in or I can’t really play” types go through such long, convoluted explanations and gloss over the actual facts in order to “prove” that hi-sec ganking and other forms of aysmmetric destruction (anything to avoid a fair fight!) is actually “good” for the game.
Kind of reminds me of the “greed is good” speech in Wall Street. Semi-plausible on the surface, but actually it’s just a thinly veiled justification for “let me plunder and pillage, it’s good for you, really!”.
All the complaining these gankers do about “high sec carebears” and yet they’re blind to all the crying the gankers do when things don’t go their way. “OMG, CCP is nothing but continual buffs to carebears!”, they say. “OMG, Blackout wasn’t really bad for the game!” they say. I mean, they still haven’t stopped crying about Crimewatch 2.0 for heavens sake, which was almost a decade ago!
Which brings up an interesting side topic. All these hi-sec gankers (the ones blaming all EVE’s ills on high sec being “too safe”, regardless of the fact that over 2/3 of the galaxy is “open season” hunting grounds), keep lamenting Crimewatch 2.0 and the way it made ganking have consequences. (Yes, it’s true, that same group that’s always saying “Ganking is cool because EVE decisions have to have consequences” absolutely hate it when those consequences apply to them.) They say Crimewatch 2.0 was the beginning of the end. Let’s take an actual, factual look at that shall we? Crimewatch 2.0 was released with Rubicon on Dec.4, 2012. Let’s zoom in to those charts a little.
You see that spike there labelled “PCU’12” (highest peak concurrent users of 2012)? That’s the login spike caused by Crimewatch 2.0. See that deep decline right after it? That’s all the gank-rats fleeing, frightened out of their gank-ships by the thought they might suffer some pain due to ganking!
You see how right after the rats scurry out, the player level rises, stays at its highest full year ever, well into 2014? And then it only starts to decline again (continuing the decline it was experiencing before Crimewatch) once the gankers slowly come back in, figure out how to math the cost of their ship loss vs. the profit of the gank, and set up new ganking systems?
Yep, that’s right - far from being the death of the game the gankers love to claim, Crimewatch 2.0 was the best thing that ever happened to EVE. The only problem was that CCP did nothing to follow it up, and eventually the gankers went back into business.
The math is pretty clear - every happy ganker means dozens if not hundred (or even thousands) of unhappy gankees. It’s not sustainable. In the end, it hurts the game population. But the gankers can’t figure that out, because all they care about is having safe, easy, weak targets available in high sec, where the gankers themselves are unlikely to be hunted by other and better PvPers.
I didn’t think we were.
I’m talking about wardecs, ganking, can flipping, ninja-salvaging, awoxing, theft…
If the end result is unhealthy, it’s going to have to be addressed.
Maybe you deserve that safety for all the work you do (and i certainly appreciate the level of talent in goons). But a healthy game just matters more.
A couple of guys jacking off over miner kills is still a story to someone. And they’ll jack off with other jack offs in a jack off Discord. Maybe a small impact economically but a big impact personally. A ‘magic moment.’
Different audiences seek different stories.
For some, watching your amazing escape will leave them in awe. Others might look at hunting mackinaws and think ‘i can do that!..’
And, at the risk of thinking of the children, new players may be very interested in the latter. A demonstration of the agency available to them and their small rag tag group. But not just new players, but any small inexperienced group.
And such groups don’t stay small and inexperienced forever…they just have to start somewhere.
I think we’ve made such stories so difficult to pull off that they’ve become too rare or everyone looks at it and thinks ‘no chance i could do that’.
Like Olmeca and his excavation drone stealing. Way outta my league.
This whole “nerds jacking off about a computer game” is an odd thing to say. The guys that are most guilty of this are the nullsec guys. One of the alliances is literally called “Fraternity.”
But then we come back to ‘CCP marketing off the efforts of massive blocs’. Can’t have it both ways: if they’re going to use us to draw people into the game, then they need to make a game where ‘a healthy game’ includes our activities, rather than actively working to prevent us from doing the things we need to do in order to have those massive fights they like to crow about.
Absolutely! And there needs to be room for the gankers, the awoxers, all the people providing those small stories… but catering to them at the expense of others is just as bad as catering to us to the detriment of other playstyles. Like I said:
As for Olmeca’s excavator-theft… nah. He was actually just chain-spearfishing with a sequence of CDs to get drones out of control range, and then scooping them for a later hand-off to a blockade runner. Not complex,but unlike all of CCP’s PvE… it’s all in the execution. Practice, you can do it 
Want to know what I struggle with ALL the time?
How people like you two can’t come to terms with the fact that PA/CCP doesn’t give a rats ass what you think. The only people they listen to are investors. And investors want to see a favorable ROI every quarter.
If that means banning you two for no apparent reason, then that’s what will happen. If removing all PVP will boost profits by 0.001%, you better start warming up your barge.
If people would take off the blinders and look back at how this game has been trending since the new overlords took over, we’d see a lot less walls of text in threads like this.
Mr Epeen
I know you agree with my post…want some extra whine with your cheese? Sorry…
Nope. They also listen to customers, because unlike most EVE players, they understand that their financials are driven by demand, not supply. If they make a game nobody wants to play, they make no money.
And that’s about the only attention a post from someone who signs their forum posts deserves.