As title says, does anyone know why CCP all of a sudden stopped doing more arenas without any communication about it? (For once it is not about bringing the old arena back)
Just stopping something without saying what exactly is going on is a bad move. Same thing also applies to the Guardians Gala and Hunt event. For the Gala we learned AFTER the estimated start date that it wont happen, while some ppl have already prepared for this event, and then like a week later or so we found out in a dev blog in a sidenote that it wont take place.
With the arenas, there was 0 communication. It is not ok to just stop events that we had the past 2 1/2 years without telling us anything. We heard in January that there is going to be some reshuffling in the company, so we expected that someone else would then manage the arenas. Now, 3 months later, still no new information.
So, what is exactly going on in terms of Proving grounds? And what causes CCP to stop them without telling anything? I mean, besides the teamoriented events, they were quite popular, especially frig and destroyer 1v1’s. People were enjoying the arenas.
Yeah, the Arena PvP was one of the contents really worth watching on Twitch, as you had guaranteed action every seval minutes, learned about useful fits or working strategies in there… unlike watching someone melt Iceblocks for 3 hours straight with the only “event” happening is 3 NPC frigs warping into the belt…
The only thing I find pretty important is the limitation of boosters and implants, as those are often too expensive for casual players to permanently rebuy/reroll, so veterans who don’t need to care for ISK to invest can always go in on perfect booster rolls with all the implants they need, while most others can not.
While it is a typical CCP blunder to stop something without and communication, I applaud them for removing this anti-EVE crap from the game. Hiding PVP away from other players just so that people can have artificial, instanced fights is against anything EVE stands for. There is no Butterfly Effect possible in any of these arenas or PVE instances. Abyss, Poochven and Abyss arenas go against anything that made EVE great. If people want more and quicker action to view, they should go out into space and make themselves available to other players for these desired interactions. The game needs more people in space doing things in space. The game does not need people in secluded, instanced arenas that keep crying for special ever more rules to keep their arena madness safe and which increasingly even encroached upon activities in other areas, like special no-fun-spoil-rules for events or population caps for exploration combat sites. It is good to see that they removed this danger to the EVE core gameplay principles.
tbh thats a useless mantra, not helping the game at all. There are also like a dozen definitions what exactly this mysterious “what eve stands for” means and people can’t even remotely come to an agreemant as everyone is convinced that his own definition is the only one of real value. Not even counted the fact that the traces guarantee a fixed dropout point so whatever “interaction” someone seeks with these players is simply delayed as they can be attacked right when they exit the proving grounds. And we have all kinds of such mechanics in the game, like people in warp, people under forcefields, people docked, people cloaked in areas where you cannot anchor observatories… all of them can do stuff (reporting about local, scanning, manipulating inventories, managing structures etc. pp) while being basically untouchable for a time.
I see the whole thing as benefitial to the game since
any kind of competitive tournaments are interesting to stream for an audience, adding entertainment and educational value, thus making the game more known and maybe attractive to new players
the destruction caused in there helps the economy be adding a demand for replacements
the rewards can be designed non-financially for a part, like skins, boosters, blueprints, rare production materials so no direct ISK comes into the game
other, more emotionally related rewards like medals or badges can be added to keep players motivated
they can be spun into the lore and immersion process, by creating acknowledged empire-themed tournaments/proving grounds for different shiptypes/group sizes
knowledge gained from the performance of certain ships/weapon systems can be used for balance purposes
So, when looking at the whole picture and not just repeating and old mantra that is not even true for most parts, we have a lot more plus than minus with these Proving Grounds in the game. At least from my point of view.
None of your POVs are grounded in reality. CCP had to increase the financial rewards for the BC and BS events considerably to make people participate in the arenas at all. They also never managed to make anyone seriously participate in any of the T2 ship events because the rewards never matched the ship loss values.
Arena streaming also does nothing to help EVE because those streams do not stream EVE. They stream a secluded, instanced, removed from the cluster activity that has as much to do with typical EVE activities as AT matches have. Nothing at all.
All of these activities are either hilarious strawmann (people in warp), hilariously bonkers (people in warp) or are activities that do not generate ISK (people docked), are bad examples (people in POS fields, as you can reinforce the POS, Bubble-screw the POS and trap people there until the timer runs out), or are simply normal in space activities (people cloaked and reporting intel). Especially the last example you can use to your advantage by feeding the scout wrong intel to trigger an attack that you counter-attack.
None of this is in any way possible in Abyss instances because none of it is in any way fun to people who only play for instanced activities. Thus, Abyss instances in any way, shape and form add nothing positive to EVE. Not a single thing.
The hundreds of viewers on these streams will most likely disagree with you. And I do too. For me, these streams were EVE-related enjoyment and you have no single point in trying to devaluate that. And when talking about the yearly AT, these are a great entertainment event which many many players enjoy. Not every stream or advertisement must show the usual everyday-business, which can be boring for basically any game out there. I’d rather watch people run T6 abyssals or Proving Events and have some nice chat about fits and balancing ideas than watching the usual “pvp roam” which consists of 97% traveling or sitting in some plex or ESS waiting for someone to show up. Or “mining streams” of someone clearing a belt with his Orca+10 Exhumers.
Thats your opinion, but just an opinion. In all of the cases I mentioned you are unable to directly interact with these players for a certain amount of time, while they can still do various activities that benefit them in some way. You will have to wait until they fall out of warp, leave the POS (you can’t bubble every POS anyway), undock and or whatnot. Same for people inside an abyssal filament, you know exactly where he will come out of it, just prepare and engage him when he comes out, the time he can stay in there is pretty limited. So, while I get that you don’t like Abyssals, they are in no way game-breaking or even hurting gameplay at all. You just seem to be unable to adapt and deal with their mechanics.
Again, just your personal opinion. Thousands of people who use abyssals on a daily basis disagree and people who regulary gank 5B cruisers for profit and tears probably too.
This does not come as a surprise for me… Cancelling or removing things without proper notice by CCP and reallocating funds for other side projects . They’ve done this many times and they’ll keep doing it. They tease you with something (like the FW update we had recently) and just when you thought things are begining to look good, it gets worse. The roadmap we had for Eve this year went out of the window with their decision to invest in the crypto thing.
Personally when we got the triglavian content I did not enjoyed it. For me it felt like totally ruptured from Eve universe and lore that it has. The abyssal dungeons, the mutaplasmids (which had more to do with the Horadric Cube from Diablo than Eve), removing systems from various regions of space to create Pochven,etc. They could have just created a new region to begin with ,without having to remove systems and player assets … What did Pochven got us anyway ? Another Eve universe highway (already had Thera) and a new very lucrative farming ground (at least in the beginings) for whales, because it’s not the new players that got to have a slyce of it.
But this is just my personal biased view of it… which does not change the fact that anyone is entitled to enjoy such content . At the end of the day I suppose having more diversity is not a crime. Some claim abyssal runs are instanced PvE sessions… well they are up to a point. No one is stopping you to scan down the entrance/exit and gank the player on his exit. Same as with the PvP arenas , no one is stoping you to participate. If you choose to not participate because it’s not your cup of tea, then don’t claim it’s instanced PvP.
Everyone has some vision on how this game is meant to be played and what Eve universe stands for, which is fine , but it does not mean that others should all play it that way . Some do just trading in this game, some just industry , some just PvP (which also comes in a lot of flavors), etc. So ultimately I think having more options -even if for a niche group- is for the better. This does not mean that I enjoyed the PvP arenas , I think they were flawed (a one week old char could end up in a match with Cable for example, there was no algorithm used in the match making) and that there was room for plenty of improvements there , but instead of improving it , they just cancelled.
What am I talking about anyway … it’s 2 months since we have Photon UI live and it’s still not polished as a final product should be. Two months and the reported bugs are still there , or at least for me they are.
Maybe they are put on hold for the time being and will resurface at some time… who can know for sure… we can just speculate about it without any official notice.
Pochven got us a space where you can have small- and midsize engagements on a local level without the constant threat of being hotdropped, wiping out your gang completely in a few seconds. The only problem with Pochven is that it is so small and linear, so it is pretty easy for one larger group to almost completely control it pretty well. Pochven could be a very interesting area if it had like 500 systems, or lets say 3 regions (1 for each trig clan) with 150 systems each and varying access levels to the gates, based on trig standing.
That’s the kind of horrible thinking Abyssal space gets you. Locking hostiles out of your area with this kind of standing system prevents interaction and guarantees much safer farming. That’s exactly NOT what EVE needs and that’s exactly what Abyssal instance madness brought into EVE.
I would have not problem to have it without the standing system. Was probably I a bad idea, I can see that argument. Nevertheless, having an area where big groups can’t power project into easily with all the instatravel cyno- and clonejump mechanics is a great thing.
I might dislike and despise Abyssal Proving Grounds gameplay in Eve, but I dislike and despise the CCP pattern of „quietly kill with no explanation“ even more. It could happen to any game feature, and this sort of opaque and oppressive behavior by devs shouldn’t be celebrated.
I am thinking this is an escalatory dev behavior of „temporary“ things like the capsuleer bounty system, ESI endpoint removal, etc.
If it can happen to features I hate it could next happen to features I like.
I was quite pleased to observe the addition of new skins earlier/later in the year as part of the Abyssal Event rewards. The strategic planning was commendable, successfully generating anticipation and excitement, although it ultimately led to some disappointment.
its not hidden, you are just not able or dont want to use a filament, or camp the trace/undock. what eve stands for does every player decide for himslef.
you can make friends/enemies in pg’s which can create content in other parts of the game as well. literally everything exploding in pg’s comes from outside, which means someone has to collect stuff, build things, transport it, list them on the market, etc. all those things happen in the “sandbox” and creat opportunities for interaction.
that YOUR oppinion, nothing more. people have different reasons why the like and play the game, or not so much/complain on eve platforms.
again, people participating in pgs are available for interaction, but apparently its just not the way YOU like.
not even a good strawnman
they were good for advertising the game and fun to watch. even smaller streamers had often more viewers when doing pg’s than their regular content, maybe this indicates eve needs more pg’s instead of less?
and yet there are deadspace pockets (even some with restrictions, uhhh), rolled wh’s and more stuff which prevents instant interaction. those are not instanced by definition, but the point is you have to wait, or deal with a certain mechanic (similar to pg traces) before you can pew those guys in it.
thats just plain wrong and made up as already explained to you earlier. stop try to tell other people how to play the game how to have fun, even if you could not be a narrowminded egocentric person for a second, its still just not your assignment.
i was by no means a proving ground diehard fan, but some formats were really nice and i also enjoyed theorycrafting for those unique scenarios. they were a nice addition/variety to the usual activities and i hope they will return in some way.
4 months+, still no news I mean, it can’t be too much effort to keep the arenas up, creating a new event takes like 30 min? Or just reuse past ones, we had some format with almost any ship type until today
oh shut up your not even posting on your main who cares what you say other than yourself who probably doesnt quite understand how to play the game anyway.
Instanced pvp is fine; hell roaming is hardly likely to net you much decent fights these days anyway… course youd know that if you actually played…
I mean, it can’t be too much effort to keep the arenas up, creating a new event takes like 30 min? Or just reuse past ones, we had some format with almost any ship type until today