@discobot quote 
It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop. — Confucius
While of course you are largely correct Sasha, and much of this inaction and honestly, downright strange choices in game design come from some fear of a mass exodus of people who play Eve primarily as a linear-progression game. Highsec needs to exist, should exist, and does to support smaller group and solo play, but somewhere along the original designed was corroded a bit by the flood of carebear tears that are regularly provoked by any loss, player caused or otherwise, by a segment of the player base.
While there are indeed no shortage of true carebears (short definition: players who feel entitled to a single-player gaming experience where they have control over who can interact with them), I don’t think they are as common as many think. I think much of the whining to CCP to change their game comes from people otherwise happy to play the game, but just have a wee case of childish butthurt over a loss and their first reaction is to come to the forums or other social media and complain that the game is broken or accuse the other guy of being a sociopath because their goal was scored on when they we not looking (or maybe even watching Netflix?). The anger is normal, even if it is misdirected outward rather than inward, and most of these players will calm down and even if they don’t fully conceptualize it, realize that much of the awesome aspects of this game are enabled by the fact that nowhere is safe and sometimes they will be on the losing end of a contest.
The thing is though, 7 years of buffs to highsec safety have not produced the swelling in player numbers the carebear apologists promised. I’m with @yellow_parasol thinking that the carebears are in full retreat now and CCP has given up on pandering to people playing the wrong game. They finally, for the first time in a decade, maybe ever, have turned up the inherent risk in highsec with these FOB NPCs that will gank miners without warning. A step in right direction to teach players to actually play the game and not treat it is as a pretty screensaver. Only the laziest and most inept (and unlucky) players are ganked by casual criminals, and only the richest and most risk-seeking are ganked by the professionals - almost all other activities, like 99.9%+ in highsec never encounter a criminal attack. These NPCs are even easier to avoid, but at least they present a theoretical risk to the most lazy, AFK play. Highsec is safe enough to the point that CCP can’t reasonably expect more safety to bring more players.
It would be one thing if making highsec safer produced increasing player counts but only the opposite seems to have happened. Dangling that carrot in front of CCP doesn’t work anymore and I expect we’ll see CCP experiment with other things now to get people playing in highsec. As highsec activity keeps dropping, so does the influence of certain agitators and I think the future is brighter for those looking for a more interactive highsec experience.
I expect most of CCP’s focus will still be on implementing their vision of structures and opening new space so I don’t expect much to change, but if development time does find its way to highsec I am more optimistic that it will be spent on increasing player interactions and engagement, rather than just nerfing highsec PvP yet again as became the sad trend of recent years.
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Pedro, I’m happy to be corrected (and to have my views amplified) by someone who so clearly is both a fan of EVE and a reliable analyst of its sometimes confusing innards.
Thank you.
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You wrote somewhere in the very this thread that gankers have good organization and win through grouping players. And it’s very social activity, etc…
And now it’s about alts…
Something is wrong here.
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Doesnt everyone use alts?
I certainly dont get my hands dirty personally.
I don’t think anything is wrong, as such, Mr Rabbit. Sometimes I fleet-up for activities and sometimes I don’t. But. If I want to suicide gank effectively as a solo player, one extra account (as a minimum) is mandatory.
In the very first line of the post you quoted occurs the phrase ‘…would find it difficult to manage (not talking about fleets)’. My italics there.
It’s obvious that a fleet of gankers can manage without alts (but don’t tell the Kusion clan or the Tax Collectors…), if they can gather the necessary DPS, etc., but that a solo player would struggle to achieve the same efficiency.
You may be relying on your memory which, like mine, sometimes falters. Usefully, there’s a link to the post you quoted at the upper right-hand of the quote itself.
Hey, I’m Discording better!
I disagree, it’s totally possible to share a playstyle with a carebear, and not be one; it’s not what you do, but how you do it. There’s more than one poster in this thread that shares a playstyle with carebears, yet are anything but.
An Eve player, regardless of playstyle, uses the existing mechanics to their advantage, a carebear petitions for the mechanics to be changed to their advantage; all the while refusing to use the existing ones to gain that same advantage.
A PvE player in the former group would fall under @Patti_Potato_Patrouette’s classification of carefulbear, in the latter carelessbear.
It’s an attitude, not a playstyle.
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And like all attitude, it only reflects the opinion of the beholder.
My point is, people use this without any explanation, only to then disregard the point of view of the so-called carebear.
That is, as an insult.
The only people you can call carebears (without insult) are those who call themselves carebear.
Hi Anderson, your attitude and opinion are (unremarkably) your own.
Seen in that light, the remainder of your post is scarcely worth scanning, let alone reading…?
Attitudes and opinions - no matter their origin - are out there for examination and analysis. @Jonah_Gravenstein has provided a useful definition and explanation of the term ‘carebear’.
You should welcome his effort, and the efforts of others you denigrate, in helping us all to post with clarity, impact, and pertinence.
I’m fond of the carebears myself; I see them as wayward children needing guidance and encouragement. Alas, the most effective way to bring that to them currently is via the Light Neutron Blaster II and some Void S. I would it were not so; that lengthy conversations in Local and Private Chat were as effective.
Nothing makes a carebear sit up and take notice like a well-executed suicide-gank.
I don’t mean passive income, if it sounded like that. Gankers have a kind of (emphasis on that) guaranteed income, if they do enough ganks. As you’ve pointed out further up, a gank group will often calculate necessary investment (ship loss) and possible loot drop in ways that average drop > average loss. The second reason is that there seem to be an endless amount of people who make bad decisions and put a lot of valueable cargo into freighters, t1 haulers or the likes and/or haul such cargo in ways that screams for someone to pop them. Since they operate in Highsec, they can prepare their gank in relative safety, meaning scanning ships will be left alone and the only risk that is not completely calculatable is possible, yet unlikely, intervention by other players during the gank.
Whose fault is that? The opportunity is there for others to intervene. For instance many gankers can be shot at before the shooting starts without concord interference, due to their security status; a friendly with a web or two can sling a freighter into warp extremely quickly.
The gank doesn’t start when the shooting does, it starts the moment Lady Luck frowns upon a person who makes a poor choice and decides to put eleventybillion isk into an untanked freighter, undock and hit autopilot.
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Absolutetly. It’s always surprising how many people will ignore lower than -5 in highsec, instead of at least pointing it. So other players being unwilling to initiate PVP is certainly part of it. To be fair though, it isn’t that easy to intervene, especially in case of freighter ganks, as the gank chars will possibly just log in for the gank, quickly travel to the target and log out again. A player who is salty enough to seek revenge would have to bait them with a loot pinata and not only could that turn out to be a bad (or hilariously bad) idea, but also all they get is this talos or purifier killmail. So while it’s mostly the PVP avoiders fault, the unlikelyhood of player intervention also comes from gankers being good at their game and anti-ganking - as far as I know the mechanics - seems to be a very tedious job. Thus the salt, I guess.
Sure. Even if it isn’t autopilot, ganking only exists because people do such stuff. I mean there can never be enough gankers to shoot all potentially profitable targets in highsec. Take alone all the Level 4 Mission runners…
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I appreciate the rare rational approach to the problems. I can’t think of any easy solutions to facpo, only complex ones. however, I also find it arguable that suicide gankers should be forced to manage their sec status to prevent thrmselves from becoming the easy targets for vigilantes. This would act as a soft cap to ganking and force gankers to be much more selective of their target instead of doing it every 15 mins because it is cheap and they can. The ss penalties for ganking and consequences of varying security status could be adjusted if need be.
It would also be nice to see vigilantes rewarded and to have some reward for a high sec status. This would make the games noto system function more similarly to ultima online.
It’s nice to see you find fullfillness in post only people who agree with you will read.
As I pointed before, your choice of terms prevent your post from showing anything constructive - in this post
I just wanted to remind you that “carebear” has no intrinsic semantic and as such its use prevents discussion between people - as you just showed in the beginning of your post.
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Carebear isn’t an insult, it’s a basic descriptor for a playstyle and a finer distinction for an attitude.
I’m primarily a mission runner and small time industrialist/trader, as such many would say that my playstyle is that of a carebear, which it is.
However, my approach to the challenges of playing as a non combatant neutral in an all but lawless space wild-west full of skullduggery and shenanigans, populated by immortal miscreants, scallywags and rapscallions, is where the distinction lies. To me the chaos that surrounds me represents opportunity, other players are challenges to be met, ship loss is a factored cost; others see these things as barriers.
Ultimately I am a prey animal, and I’m ok with that. I either choose to fully utilise the tools that I have been given in the form of ships, modules and game mechanics to become wily prey, or I do not and become just mere prey.
Gankers are usually more than happy to explain how to become wily prey using the existing mechanics to become virtually immune from their attentions by being harder to kill than the other guy.
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I’m not sure whether I understand you, Anderson (no doubt you’ll correct me!), but what you seem to be saying is that since there is no agreed definition of the term ‘carebear’, all discussion including that word is pointless. Is that it?
I want to be clear that it’s not only your inability to come to grips with the term that renders it useless (to you); for the rest of us - in the main - it does not and should not stifle debate.
A quick (Google) glance at terms upon which scientists disagree (or agree to disagree) threw out the following:
Paradigm Shift
Epigenetic
Complexity
Race
That’s just the first 4; I looked no further. Having a generally agreed definition is a great thing - where it can be achieved. In any case, I’ve never known anyone to regard his own view as invalid simply because he’s unsure of the definition of a key word. Quite the opposite…
As to my stated reluctance to scan (let alone read) your post, I meant that, if I regarded your attitude and opinion not worth investigating, that is how I would act. If I really closed my mind, I’d not have read, digested, and responded to your post. I read most posts fully - unless the poster makes a terrible, avoidable error…
If you find nothing constructive in my post - fine! I can live with that.
As to the first line of my post (‘your attitude and opinion are (unremarkably) your own’); this may have confused you for, I confess, the construction is unusual. It means that it is not remarkable that your attitude and opinion are your own; it is perfectly normal that they are so. You’ll see that I was merely trying to save words, and not to call your attitude and opinions ‘unremarkable’. Though they seem unnecessarily combatively put.
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Gankers are usually more than happy to explain how to become wily prey using the existing mechanics to become virtually immune from their attentions by being harder to kill than the other guy.
You are absolutely right.The whole ganking culture always seems to go out of their way to explain how they are doing it and what you need to help prevent it to happen to you. They want the prey to become tougher, they seem to relish a good,hard fight over another dumb indy kill. They even post specific guidelines/tactics to aid their targets. Yet, week after week, people afking,auto piloting, cargo expander tanking, or hauling too expensive cargo for the ship type fill the loss boards. As I posted before, until the majority of the losses consist of players doing everything right and still losing ships, mechanics shouldn’t be changed to accommodate lazy, uneducated (in EVE), and the self-centered who feel the game needs to change to fit their specific needs.
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Thank you for this interesting answer.
long useless explanations out of the main topic
Please consider the following question as being genuine (they are). I’ll just adress the first part,
it’s a basic descriptor for a playstyle and a finer distinction for an attitude.
because I think that precisely this definition makes it something unsuitable for discussion.
What do you think “a carebear” can be applied to ? A player? A character ? An activity ?
What are your rational criteria to affirm such an entity belongs to the group of “carebears” ? Are you sure they are shared by everybody ?
IMO “carebears” refers to players who don’t want to invest time in the more time-intensive pvp-oriented activities in eve, and like to chill in the game - like a one-hour mission with eve music.
But this is only my definition of carebear and as you can notice, it only represents a trend, not a formal definition. So the line between carebears and non-carebears is very blur.
When I run NS anoms in my VNI am I a carebear ? When I put a point on it, does it change ? when my alt is cloaked in the anom ? When I welp a ship or two per month ? When I join corp activities which may not appear on zkillboard ? When I forcefully cut market prices in order to reduce the resources of a trader when I identified his main activities ?
I think some of those activites I will put them in the “carebear” group and not you, or the opposite - because precisely there is no formal definition.
(basically) to me talking about “carebears” is talking about something that has no reality, it’s just a phantasm. And as many phantasms, everybody has its own version, and its own taste (appreciation ?) of it. Especially some people use it to justify their haughty attitude.
Because you know, carebears don’t know anything about the REAL eve, do they ?
Pls stop responding to people like Jonah, techno or patty or yellow, as doing so has only contributed to the derailment of the thread and produced nothing of value. These guys have their own ridiculous personal definitions for everything and can’t be reasonable or rational. These forums have become their entire social life for a reason.