There’s a few issues with that. If the cluster allowed for the kind of performance to make a supercapital multi-zone engagement something like battleship engagements of the past, you still wouldn’t get the kind of behaviour that would result in massive losses, massive enough to impact industrial output capacity.
Nullsec is napoleontic warfare. The core knows each other, they know dependancies, particularly the shared ones. The need to provide entertainment, but also the need to limit vulnerabilities. There’s other dependancies and there’s the usual ebb and flow. But it remains napoleontic warfare at worst, calculated exposure at best.
Supercapital ganks, limited engagements, headshot strikes, that all happens and will happen, but it is something different than the kind of strategic deep conflict type you’re describing.
A bit of honesty. Nobody is interested in that. This includes CCP, as they have a fine line to walk. Increasingly people invest a lot of - real - money into fancy toys, Big subsets of those groupings are likely lost as subscribers if the kind of semi-adventure they claim to seek were to become an actual one-shot-blapfest required for the kind of warfare you describe.
No matter how you approach it, there is very little real interest in making things die enough, so to speak.
Still, look on the bright side, at least Tranquility organisations limit application of these force applications in terms of parity. Its not like Serenity where supercapitals are the de facto toolset for everything. I know, people here whine about titans dropping on a freighter, but people really should compare what happens here to how Serenity has developed. It’s a good thing some of us went there and kept providing updates to the Tranquility organisation cores.
I like to think about Eve’s development in this way, CCP believe it or not are the pupils we are the teachers. How come I hear you cry, it’s simple CCP brings a peace of work lets say to hypothetical school i.e. TQ and say’s here you go it’s supposed to work this way, we as teachers take a look at the said work and say hmmm it could work that way but do you realise it also works these other ways as well and proceed to give the work a D- send it back home with the pupil to rewrite and address stated issues. Well atm CCP you get an F, sort it out guys games broken. Don’t make us put you into detention you won’t like it.
I think for the average player, EVE is largely fine as is.
Their concerns are trivial, specific and niche, and changes to them, if they happen, dont have much overall impact on the health of EVE.
The problems in EVE design only really effect the super entities, their leadership, and the overall meta between them.
However since that meta is defined by players, CCP has a hands-off policy.
In otherwords, if the NS meta is stagnant (and by extension the choices of NS entities in other sector operations where they have proxy interests), that’s the fault of players, not CCP.
CCP can lead players to water by changes, but they cant make them drink it.
TLDR: Goons have already won EVE.
Rest of EVE just hasnt realized that yet.
Imo the best thing for the game would be for everyone to join forces in an EVE Crusade against Goons. Thats guaranteed content and meta change, and no doubt Goons would welcome it. But thats as an impossible task to organize as herding cats.
Everyone else is divided, whereas Goons are singularly united and consolidated. No doubt they also have agents in all potentially antagonistic entities actively working to keep opposition divided, and ready to sabotage any effort to form up against Goons.
Well, the Casino War was exactly that and CCP ensured that the goons survived to it by headshotting the opposition how and when CCP chose to.
Some of the richest men in the server hired a power broker to get everyone fighting the goons (herding cats with a few trillion of ISK) and paid the war until CCP banned them for a timely discovered RMT, and then the war effort came to a halt.
We’re talking the same CCP that never has questioned how or why The Mittani quit his job and began living out of being The Mittani.
Be careful here. If you think that anything is Ok as long it goes against goons you might find yourself supporting thinks like DDoS or Account stealing (as long as it goes against goons).
Wow, you really take any opportunity you get to spread that lie don’t you? The casino wars was financed by a bunch if cheaters who conducted RMT. Your suggestion that CCP should have ignored the cheaters and let them in the game until another entity you don’t like was wiped out really shows how deep that hate sits in you.
What did they do to you, what did you lose? Or is it just pure envy?
The challenge isn’t organisation of such a thing It’s the reality of social psychology beyond various tipping points of force multipliers, conditional states and more of that mumbo jumbo. To keep it simple, the point on the curve where people would have really - really - wanted that, or be in a position to be inspired towards that, is past. In nullsec’s core clubs people realise that.
Organising wouldn’t be the issue. Players in EVE have time and time again demonstrated abilities which go far beyond what we see in terms of analogies in real life, for obvious reasons. It’s just that the time for this is in the past. The only things which could create conditions for such a thing are concepts which CCP cannot really touch upon. Entropy, cataclysm, environment.
Meta used to be defined by players, until just about the Summer of Rage. After that, CCP began to diminish the room available for it, removing stimuli, inserting more guided pathways, introducing segregated niches and so forth. Meta nowadays is largely what some players agree to within the constraints set by CCP and their own choices in regards to dependancies and risks.
CCP has won EVE. They’ve even nicely managed to curtail player abilitie to apply pressure through PR methods, by fracturing community constructs, by segregating and distributing information streams, by enabling less contact points with more limited abilities while being more proactive in managing media mechanisms, beyond the industry media as well as social media and game community little hubs.
What we have is pretty much a status quo which, once you remove everyone’s marketing, people accept. It may not be optimal, it may have detrimental effects over time, it may ultimately remove the very triggers player organisations depend on for deep stories, it may ultimately negate the stimuli CCP has introduced for monetary gains - but it is what it is. Seagull, bless her heart, understood this. But was never able to put it on the table.
The Casino War was EVE’s last hope to reset the nullsec meta: when a big tree falls in the forest, that allows the smaller trees to grow.
But the tree didn’t fall after CCP intervened and saved it. We don’t know what would have happen without the banning of IWI, but what we know is that CCP and nobody else than CCP removed the boot from the goons’ neck.
I think it is fair to say the ripples of CCP’s intervention in terms of effects within the game dynamic are clear enough by now that nobody can really argue with it. And yes, that timeframe - but not simply or arbitrarily in relation to goons - was the last point of curves coming together to curb or change direction of developments in null.
But there is a distinction between stating the observations, and the innuendo which floats by regularly, as well as the binary approach of smart/dumb in relation to CCP’s decisions at the time.
Let’s be honest, CCP intervenes. They have to. They are required to. Sometimes that works out flawlessly and has zero ripples. Sometimes it’s different. Yet still they have to do their job, including these parts of it. And take the flak for it. Apply a little mirroring, CCP’s actions would have been the same and come into place along the same or similar timeline regardless of actors or entities involved.
Throwing everything on CCP’s role, is akin to refusing to accept responsability for choices as players. Cause players aren’t just passive little molecules in the soup on the stove. Their choices matter.
The bigger mistake was “everything in player hands” paradigm and making the tools, allowing the Goons to entrench in Delve. Balance around scarcity and cost does not work in EvE anymore, because nothing is scarce. Everybody can fly a Titan on day 1 and 20 Rorquals to mine the minerals for it.
In many games (not just MMOs but singleplayer ones too, especially strategy games) things are also balanced by stuff needing maintenance / upkeep to function. No personal experience but as I understand capital ships require fuel to operate but that is just one thing.
What about capitals also requiring maintenance to keep operational (which would involve manufacturing spare parts and/or requiring actual materials, so in the end require minerals spent on a regular basis to keep functioning)?
Though this may still favor the big power blocks and might not change anything or even make things worse, not sure, but thought I drop in the idea maybe it can be worked into something useful.
The winging about the Keepstar is funny as hell, though.
They tend to run away with their dirty factionsupers too.
Oh. An they try to mess up the server. ECM-burst-Griffins anyone?
This war is funny as hell.
and what would that achieve exactly? removing supers from the game wouldn’t diminish the industrial potential of the large empires. it would just lower the “end game”. do you really think that your alliance with their 50 some odd dreads would stand any more of a chance against goons with a 5000 capital fleet instead of a 500 super fleet? of course not.
but right now, you can dreadbomb a single super and do a hell of a lot more isk damage than you loose. having supers in the game actually gives MORE opportunity for the smaller entities to punch above their weight class, because it gives something for them to actually punch at.
or would you rather go back to the days when PL/NC where the only capital power in the game (even if they only had a couple hundred of them) and no one else even stood a chance of getting the same kind of firepower.
while there are some very valid arguments against capital and supercapital proliferation. it has done more to even the playing field than to unbalance it.
Lets agree to disagree on that one. There are just too many countless and better ways to level that playing field without going into proliferation.
Add to that the whole proliferation rate has been to a fairly large extent fueled by multiboxing and botting. There is not a single mid or large entity in NS that didn’t look the other way when gaining ISK or recourses for their cap fleets. Many actually directly supported and do support their “friendly” bots directly, starting with territory protection, getting mass payoffs in various forms to leave them alone etc.
And that’s just a starter, then there come the actual direct issues that cap proliferation causes.
In some ways, but that was more due to the ripple effects of CCP’s intervention (one which was right, necessary and appropriate) impacting both conditions and momentum of developments at the time.
The paradigm of “everything in the player’s hands” actually ceased to be around the time of the Summer of Rage. Prior to that, yes, this was the case. After that, hell no. But it still lingers, and in many ways most foundation elements of EVE, even now in F2P, are rooted in exactly that.
It’s a bit funny, CCP once stated they had no clue why EVE grew in the early years, other than people making stories and CCP chasing after what players did trying to compensate, mitigate and so forth. Some of that was blatant, like when they chased us in Concord ships because we tanked Concord, even killed Concord. Some of that was less obvious, like stepping in after people figured out cross-regional trade with npc trade goods and titan portals. Difficult parts of that were the aspects of sovereignty and null sec conflicts following the seeding of NPC stations and those pesky shield mechanisms.
The gist of it is that in spite of what some players and some CCPians believe, EVE will always be an emergent dynamic, and thus be rooted in “everything in player hands”, albeit with CCP trying to cut it up in neat little boxes with respective triggers for opiate economics. It is too complex to be anything else, it depends too much for retention/acquisition on it (as Dancey found out, not something one can compensate with a strict technical/mechanical model approach) and above all it isn’t the mechanics of it which connects people, it’s the raw interaction and exposure of, by and between people busy overcompensating for not having a body but an abstract (ship).
Where things break is first of all the impact of CCP’s venture changes following the Summer of Rage, influencing the priorities set for revisiting EVE Online the product, having to chase after player instigated developments on a product level after having lost touch (remember the Iteration trauma), and introducing F2P at the exact time where CCP should first have caught up with projections instead of first doing F2P and then managing New Eden while getting sidetracked with other projects and resource allocations.
Players bear responsability for going apeshit. Always. But CCP also carries it. Always. Both players and CCP tend to see the whole thing as something they stand seperate from, in reality everything is a part of it, impacting and rubbing off back and forth.
EVE is life. And crazy as it sounds, life needs both weeding, gardening, planning, culling and ■■■■ happening. From all parts. It’s a good thing that everything in terms of choices for behaviour rests with players, just like it is a good thing that everything in terms of choices for paths and options rests with CCP. But the intrinsic interaction between those two parts got screwed, we’ll not go into reasons here, suffice to say that the relation got cold, detached, slow and in some important ways more determined by agenda’s than by anything else.
That is what created the room for status quo, napoleontic warfare, detached marketing, relaxed botting rules, force multipliers tipping over through (predictable) social psychology and so on.
This tainted relation continues. At CCP there’s the product and the venture. Among players there’s the clubs and the meat.
The irony is that a lot of people can put the finger on the pulse of this, even demonstrate the crunch points on the decision timelines, both players and CCP staff. At the last Fanfest, a few of the old boys running more than one show on more than one side in null pointed to the exact same relational and conditional stress points and various CCP staff at some panels. But they all stuck to their positions, regardless. Interests, trauma, etc.
The really sour part, is that they all recognised that as EVE is life neither the strict behavioural nor the strict mechanical model can solve issues present. They all recognised that the customer/CCP perception and communication challenges are the most structural issue of all. They all were brutal in pointing to the irony of EVE being a pressure vat of life yet not having any of the challenges which life itself by default has, and which makes it adapt no matter what behaviour or technical states. Entropy, cataclysm, environment. Yet again, everyone stuck to their positions. Status quo must > all. Cause of dependancies, targets, tresholds.
Keep in mind that the opposite of what you describe as “everything up to players” is the model of ST:O, something companies like EA and others consider the shining beacon of managed mmo ventures.
Here’s a thing: extremes are never good. So neither far end of the same slipper scale are optimal. A fixed position only increases stress. So EVE must find some movement in the middle. That means by and with both players and CCP.
It’s ironic that the biggest actor in terms of affecting status quo has not been any technical or mechanical change, or any organisational decision, or any agreed upon conflict whatsoever. The only actor in terms of effects on both angles has been little fenomenons like Bomber’s Bar and others. Now obviously when something like that happens you start to cushion it and comfort it and eventually bribe it to go somewhere else before you start feeding it zones and kills you can accept or even turn into your own local entertainment. But it says a lot that little things like (as one example) Bomber’s Bar with its outbound (!) marketing and its anti-status quo choice model has had tons more impact on military economics of blocks than anything else between those blocks.
It’s the reality of social psychology beyond various tipping points of force multipliers, conditional states and more of that mumbo jumbo. To keep it simple, the point on the curve where people would have really - really - wanted that, or be in a position to be inspired towards that, is past. In nullsec’s core clubs people realise that.