Yes and no. It’s true for large strategic moves but you can have tons of fighting during peace days. Delve was having tons of it during the best of days as there were gangs coming in hunting.
However, all of that went away with cyno changes and industry nerfs because CCP has been “balancing” the game for gankers which assumes that rest of us pay CCP just so that we get a pleasure to provide targets for the gankers. Strangely enough that assumption turned out to be somewhat of an error so the effect of balancing for easy ganks resulted in empty space. Just like the idiocy that was blackout.
In balanced systems the ratio between the pray and predator is somewhere along the lines of 10:1 so it’s not very strange that some of the smarter gankers have realised that removing all pray from space doesn’t really increase their chances of getting a nice gank.
Same with capital fights where cyno changes made escalation more problematic and has turned capital fights into all or nothing affair vs. what was a lot of small engagements. Yes, it kinda sucked to get caps dropped on your ganking fleet but every now and then there would be mistakes and you get to enjoy nice kills, and, besides, you are in a kity doctrine so will run away at a smallest hint of combat.
Correct, which for a studio is a pain. But then again, they should have made a game
It means that CCP requires to engage in being an actor in the kitchen. In many ways this is almost like whether god did his thing and left the clock to tick or whether he intervenes with floods or whether he, or she or it, whichever, runs the experiment through iterations of cyclic evolution - together with the actual hamster. Or ape. Well, you get the point.
Sucks to be a studio who created something like this But, there is old history there, CCP moved away sharply at a certain point from being anything but the reluctant mechanic. Anything beyond that was first PR and extremely selectively - and for very good reasons carefully - milking hamster brains.
The iterative evolution is in its current format is to create cycles of a higher cause for instigating chaos periods which get ever shorter. There’s a warning there.
EVE needs entropy. Besides chaos. Scarcity is a necessity, but it is a tip of just one iceberg.
EVE needs the other half of the equation, the thing that prevents calcification IRL: innovation. If there were ways players could disrupt the status quo by creating something better, that makes existing fleets need overhaul or replacement, that’d be the real game-changer.
That could temporarily prevent calcification, up to the limit of the potential innovations, while intoducing power creep.
There are games on the market where real player innovation is a significant part of the game (for example an RTS programming game) but even those games seem to run, after a fun time of innovation, into a stale meta eventually when the gameplay is optimised.
Riot games and other gaming companies use another way that prevents stagnation: continuous nerfs, buffs and changes to the game, that shake up the meta and require new ‘solutions’ every time.
It seems CCP is partly following that way as well, for a part: new abyssal pvp forms with different rules each time to prevent stagnation for the 100 people who play it, and of course the impactful economy changes.
I believe that this is the correct way to prevent stagnation, as there will always be a limit to innovation within a stagnant game world, so if we want a changing meta and innovation, there will need to be external inputs to change the game world for players to react to.
But then you’re hitting an innate limit deriving from “it is also a game” part. Players cannot create, thus they cannot innovatie. The studio provides what can be created. It provides features, paths, design, options.
There’s some wiggle room, but not much really.
Status quo is something which oddly enough is never the constant, even though humans think this, and often think they want this. It’s tied to the basic needs thing. Status quo flares up when wealth / means to wealth become concentrated, most of the time due to effects of scale.
Think of it like a business. The startup is what creates wealth and labour opportunity. The enterprise is what concentrates wealth but in its optimalisation and scale focus destroys labour opportunity.
The “compromise” as such is not creating better, but creating different. In accordance with different paths to affect consequence in the game of destruction. Problem is, there’s only one path there because CCP figured out that it didn’t matter how much they spent on XYZ they would still get the same return so spending it on X is better because it involves less resources.
Thus CCP enforced a status quo on the dynamic of the game Creating its own problem. There is a certain sense of irony in all this.
It’s not news to them. At least upstairs. They’ve had many, many, many warnings over the decade. From players, from VC, from academic advice, and so forth. But it is understandable. There is business. And there is a game. We’re making a game, right? Right? Nope. You can turn it into one, but that really is killing the golden goose.
There is a funny yet sad thing to observe in player behavioural dynamics where it comes to one of those little but vital concepts behind the curtain we usually call “destruction”. The OODA Loop available space, it’s all rather technical but here’s the thing. Any strategic environment has one dependency shared with any tactical environment, the necessity of space for a multitude of OODA Loops. It is from this where behavioural paths to victory / destruction / movement and so forth follow.
That available space has been shrunk. The result is that player behaviour optimises along specific paths and loops. The number of which has decreased consistently over the past 8 years. That isn’t healthy. And it shows. Now you can revitalise the trenches and the field, but as long as that loop space remains limited and the behavioural path volume shrinks, you have a serious problem. Because human behaviour requires more than singular optimised paths.
Particularly when it’s about having fun, making the kill, milking the field and so forth.
Now I don’t doubt that on a developer level a lot of lights have been seen. This really comes down to a studio problem. Vision, budget. In that sense this is a game of short term versus long term gains.
You want innovation? You ask too much. But ask the right thing, and you might get space again for diversity and player ingenuity in OODA Loop applications.
It is natural that from optimalisation status quo follows. See my previous post, there is a lot of confusion in this largely due to the influence of neoclassical political economics on canon and curricula of other disciplines of education. We see optimisation as a holy grail. It is however stupendously costly in toxicity of effects. It destroys labour, it destroys innovation correlations, it destroys even the magic triangle of R&D/SMB/LocalProduction in what we call the real economy. Look at the US, painful example these days where no matter what school economists follow, they all have a problem of “well oops, that’s a tangible problem”.
You’re right that CCP is copying. Which is fine, if only it was just a game. No other studio has the problem of the equivalent of a pressure cooker filled with humans who overcompensate in creating virtual lives there It’s a flawed approach, and it shows. It creates an endless cycle of diminishing returns as the format itself loses effectiveness because humans are a quite odd species
Short term, long term. CCP needs to make up its mind. You either reduce it to a game right now, or you give birth to the very same problems which once caused traumas upstairs we’re no longer allowed to discuss. The alternative is going back to why it all took off. What made it grow.
Yeah, damn those M1A2 Abrams! The power creep in the cavalry line from Horses w/out stirrups is just insane!
Power creep is, in fact, the point. Power creep is what makes older fleets obsolete, and forces them to be replaced. Power creep is the introduction of HMS Dreadnaught into a world of pre-Dreadnaught battleships.
The trick with power creep is that you need to make sure there are multiple potential directions it can creep, so people find different ways to improve their ■■■■, and then end up beating the hell out of one another’s differently-optimized fleets.
No, I’m saying that is the real challenge for CCP—to develop code that adheres to underlying principles, and then uses those principles to allow players to iterate and create.
Like I said, such a situation will temporarily allow optimisation, but will inevitably be optimized into yet another stale meta if the underlying game is unchanged.
Only continuous changes to the game could allow players to reinvent themselves continuously.
‘Allowing players to create and iterate’ expecting it not to eventually hit a stale meta is not a real challenge, it’s an unrealistic challenge.
I didn’t mean the current underlying game. I meant any underlying game - if it is unchanged there will eventually be a stale meta.
Best case would be an underlying game that changes by itself through a few phases, forcing the playerbase to follow each change and thereby changing the meta into the meta that fits the current phase. But in that scenario you would still have a collection of stale metas which dictate the best strategy to use at each phase of the game.
Only if each phase of the game is completely unique and is not cycling through them, the players would be able to continuously invent new strategies. But eventually ‘adapting to current game phase’ would be dictated by the best strategies to adapt, resulting in a meta telling you how to form the next meta.
All of that is based on the idea that a game without external input will become predictable and result in an optimal ‘meta’ strategy, no matter how unpredictable you make it.
The only way to truly make it unpredictable, is to have human input (CCP) shaking up things every now and then. And that’s what they are doing.
Saying ‘develop a game that allow players to continously iterate and create’ is equivalent to saying ‘create an NPC enemy that players cannot solve’. You may be able to delay the inevitable by making the system more complex, but it’s simply impossible in the long term.
That’s why you have to build it to adhere to certain principles, and have the complexity and interconnectedness to prevent optimization. Instead of, for example, ‘I want to make my ship shoot better’, the game lets you work out things like a way to produce a slightly lighter alloy with the same strength as the current one.
Now how do you use that? It’s more expensive, obviously, and production will take longer at first. So your industrial power slows down, but you can use it to build new guns that, because they’re lighter, turn faster, so track a little better. Or maybe it’s being used in armor plating, to be lighter, and make the ship faster.
Eventually, it’s gonna be used in all of those, but production takes time to scale up, and you have to weigh the improvement with ‘how often do I retool everything and rebuild things? how long does it take to produce the turrets, the armor, the hulls’ etc.
And that’s just one change, that can be further iterated on. And maybe it has drawbacks, like ‘it’s lighter, but also bulkier right now’, and you need to improve that aspect of it.
And you have thousands of aspects of hundreds of materials—and combinations of materials—that might be able to be improved. Some lines of research will, after all, always be dead ends. Build on principles, not end results. Let the end results… be results.
Then you also get the issues of how much time and effort it takes to make each breakthrough, how well someone might reverse-engineer it from salvage, or steal specs, etc. Would it be difficult to build that game? Time-consuming? Of course. But that’s how you fix EVE, because anything less… will just seize up again, over and over.
Build it right, and you only have to build it once.
This already exists, you can optimize your ship to shoot harder with more expensive ammo or turrets, produce faster by investing more time and money into blueprints, ships that get lighter with drawbacks from nanofiber modules, being able to steal enemy specs by looking at their ship fittings in kill mails, etc.
Sure, you want it more complex and with more options to delay the final optimized state, but it seems you want a fresh EVE where all of this is new and far out of reach, instead of current EVE where everyone has figured out how things work and what the optomal strategy is. I get that, because a game is most fun and dynamic when people are still in the optimisation phase, where new strategies can be found that have never been applied yet.
It’s just not realistic to expect any game to not eventually get to the optimized state that we are in now.
The state of optimization can be delayed, or can be shaken up regularly with external input (such as CCPs economic changes), but any game will eventually be optimized, given enough time.
No, it doesn’t, because that’s all end-point upgrades. I’m talking about something that works at a far more fundamental level. And, those things are all coded on results. ‘X module means Y% improvement or Z raw hp increase’. That’s exactly what I’m saying needs to be avoided, because it’s easy to optimize.
Again, build on principles, where the improvements get done, and then layers of recursion and interaction influence how those improvements actually perform.
‘Realistic’ is exactly what I’m saying needs to be added. Because optimization like we see is an artifact of the limits resulting from the code.
It’s not about making it ‘new and far out of reach’, it’s about making it open-ended, so there is no end-point optimization, and making it conform to underlying principles so that the possibility for improvement can always be offset by the increased effort needed to make that improvement.
No matter where you add the extra complexity, the game would eventually be optimized and have a stale meta. Adding the complexity only delays that point.
That’s why the potential for change has to be built in. The whole point of what I’m saying is that making that change to how the game is built means it’s not unchanging. But the work then doesn’t have to be done by a small pool of devs with limited time and limited understanding of the game they’re making. Instead, it gets distributed out to the players, as part of the act of playing the game.
Let’s say there’s a 0.01% improvement that’s possible. When do you run out of 0.01%s to add? I mean, last time I checked, multiplying by 1.0001 can still continue up into infinities…
(edited to fix my notation. fingers getting ahead of brain)
I had a changing strategy in mind while talking about potental for improvements. Eventually that will hit a stale meta no matter the complexity of the system.
If you are talking about number improvements, then yes, there is no theoretical limit.
The realistic limit will be the point where the game is broken because your instawarping titans cannot catch the titans of the the enemy because of too much powercreep, amongst other issues.
While powercreep to that point would take a lot of time, the mid term issue is that it will be impossible for new players and groups to catch up with established players and groups. Currently there is a limit to how much a player can do with their ship with maximum skills and ISK and while a new player won’t immediately get to that point, they aren’t that much behind after a few weeks of training. Now add unlimited improvements and new players better give up trying to join such an unfair game.
The short term issue is that the game will get unbalanced because players will invest most time and ISK into improving the most effective doctrines to stay ahead of their competition, which makes any other strategy or ship type even worse because players ignored those. While a gaming company would nerf the best ships and buff the worst ships to diversify the gameplay and meta, players would do the exact opposite.
Power creep is bad. And definitely when done by players.
Then you’re not working the tradeoffs properly. So you can build an instawarping titan? Great! How much time does that take? How much money does it take? Remember, your production facilities don’t auto-upgrade, and neither do existing ships. You have to rebuild the infrastructure, and then rebuild the hulls.
No, it won’t. When your fleet’s obsolete, what’s the best way to replace it? It’s not to scrap it, not really. It’s to replace it in steps, and sell off the old ships. The people who buy them can then use them to reverse-engineer the tech in them. That’s how technology propogates: someone makes something, someone else figures out how to copy it, often by taking it apart.
And thus, each upgrade slowly disseminates, cross-pollinates, and ‘new’ versions of things slowly become the new baseline version. I mean, you don’t have to start off with a horse and engineer your own mercedes out of it, right? It’d work the same in EVE. Yes, there would be ‘cutting edge’ powers, but even that could be offset by the NPC empires having a slow, procedurally-determined and racially-flavored chain of progression. The Amarr making armor tougher, while the Gallente make it faster. Caldari and Thukkers improving shield tech. Republic / Sebiestor engineers making whatever they can get their hands on just better in tiny ways.
Players are always looking for ways to make the un-loved ships work through unexpected means. Do you really think that would change? And while one group is investing in improving their Eagles (for example), they still have to upgrade and replace those ships—which should definitely not be a case of ‘push button, upgrade done’. And while they’re upgrading them, someone else might be attacking them… and they’ve only got half a fleet.
It’s not like we haven’t seen massive swarms of small ships taking out larger targets in the past.
Trust me, I can see exactly where you’re seeing all of this… but it only happens if it’s half-assed. Go deep enough on this, and all of those problems fade out.
EVE’s strengths come from where it emulates reality. Its failures come from where it tries to simplify it.
That is ambitious, I mean the reason we got rigs for ship modification rather than being able to mod ships stats is database space right? Thousands of aspects of hundreds of materials is a whole hell of a lof of db entries because Eve would need everything possible figured out before hand … which is totally the opposite of what you want.
Can Eve even work the way you describe? I’m fairly sure it can’t and even if it could I doubt there is the dev/programmer talent left at CCP and I am absolutely sure that the management would look at the costs and laugh.
