3 Likes
Time to go to sleepā¦ yesterday I wet my toes into a more dedicated AI imagery place than Gemini and was left unimpressed. They give you some free tokens and turns out that their version of nano banana just took like 40% of my daily tokens and then generated the most hideous version of the manga convention prompt, far worse than what Gemini hands out in quantities enough to have like 30 renders of that prompt and its iterationsā¦
Probably I donāt know how to fully take advantage of that tool (probably for sure), but, jesusā¦ all I wanted was more resolution, not a version of my girls taken out from a trashbin of rejects already rejected form different trashbin.
(A far cheaper to use AI, Flux, somehow thought that I wanted a anime image despite the prompt stating realistic photograph. Also replaced the red playboy bunny suit for no less than 4 versions of red dressesā¦ with bunny ears. And after feeding it a WIP prompt, it merrily ignored āfull length portraitā to churn a series of American shot portraits, for ~reasons~)
Unimpressed I am.
And now Iām off to bed. Night night people!
Also: not AI
Photograph: Cambodian civil war: A Cambodian girl stands with her rooster and two kittens next to her fatherās rifle at a marshalling point in Siem Reap Province, Cambodia, Oct. 10th, 1974, by Tea Kim Heang for A.P.
3 Likes
Try prompting it for ācomic conā rather than āan anime conventionā.
2 Likes
You mean the crowd that started the game? When pvp was the draw? When you had nothing to mine in except a battleship? Itās not called EVE/Everyone vs Everyone for nothing. 
You should have been here in the early days of the game and the forum. And I donāt even blame pvp whiners like you about it. I blame the null sec whales for it all. CCP started to listen with their wallet instead of developing a care bear game for players like you/them and left EVE as the nitch game it was. So, I again ask you, was losing 2/3s of 50k paying accts with numbers still growing worth it for what the game is now with the numbers skewed by nonpaying accts?
I started in 08 when CCP promised there would never be a way to catch up with the āBitter Old Vetsā that existed even back then. I accepted that challenge. I wish you were here for the early forums where players were āslightlyā less forgiving! 
3 Likes
I remember in 08 ( also my birth in the game ) when i couldnt get a single person in my gaming group to play this game. They all said that they would never catch up because of the way the spās were earned. I didnt understand their reasoning back then. I was likeā¦well its the way its supposed to be. Ive been here longer, ive done more than you have, Ive earned where i am in the game. Thats the way it should be. Unless i quit playing, you should never be allowed to catch up.
Its like real life right? I mean if im 10 year older than youā¦then youll never catch up to me unless i pass on. That always made sense to meā¦but apparently to nobody else i gamed with all them years ago. 
4 Likes
I think itās called experience? 
But to be fair, thereās always some young buck who is going to be better if they make the effort. Just another part of life. 
4 Likes
wow it has been a while since I last saw that poster.
@METACAT would likely approve
Iconic motivational poster.
2 Likes
I too started in 2008, and played and paid until 2017. And after the Incarna fiasco I did what little I could to convince CCP that they needed to listen to the quiet people that filled highsec with population and padded CCPās pockets for a pitiful amount of developer time, instead of the loud minority who didnāt even pay with cash but PLEX bought from highseccers who paid with cash.
The message I tried to convey, in different ways, was that PvE provided a predictable and dependable reward for player time. Something that PvP can not deliver unless your game is pure PvP and has been built from scratch to make losses bearable, because most players will lose more than they win and punishing them with the inability to play for any amount of time is suicidal.
CCP somehow thinks that thatās OK based on people who didnāt mind being unable to play for a week after their lost their first shiny ship. CCP was so dumb that they even fell for the survivorship bias: āplayers who got ganked early on played for longerā, same as āno surviving bombers had any hits to the cockpit and engines so thatās fine, letās armour the wings insteadā.
Anyway, all that is past. CCP has gone F2P, has hiked subscription price, has monetized everything under the sun but selling AT ships and golden ammo and now are essentially undoing changes in order to change anything (5 years ago: ātravel too expensive, make ansiblexā, now ātravel too cheap, trash ansiblexā) and you know that whatever they do the Goons will profit the most from it in another successful iteration of Goons online with a side of Chinese mafia.
And the really funny thing is that even now I would come back to EVE if CCP just released a few new Level 4 missions and they were as difficult and rewarding as the old ones butā¦ new.
Someone there in Reykjavik knows thereās 500,000 former players waiting for that whistle to be blown and come back.
Also there are a few hyperinflated egos in the way of agreeing that EVE Online was a game paid for by highseccers and it hasnāt gone anywhere since they were driven away. A game without highsec majority, that used to have hundreds of thousands of paid accounts and now is a couple of downturns away from selling golden ammo.
PS: just noticed that I didnāt mention the āsoloā aspect of getting something for your time without a need to wait for others. Iāve been saying the same shĀ”t for too longā¦ 
3 Likes
Really?
2 Likes
Based on 9.5 million accounts, thatās a rough estimate on how many people ever were a solo PvEr in EVE Online. 
3 Likes
and theyāre all out there, just waiting for the changes you want, to come back are they?
4 Likes
I donāt know why you are so confrontational, nobody is gonna hurt your little niche game. CCP is with you, they canāt run away and go make any other game that pays them better than EVE Online.
I donāt expect, ask or demand anything from CCP nor EVE Online, let alone changes to whatever it is now.
What I said, is that if they added more Level 4 like the old ones, I would come back to try them, and I wouldnāt be alone in that return. Which is true, but itās not gonna happen. So your little internet corner is safe, I am not a threat to it.
3 Likes
Iām not being confrontational, thatās all in your mind.
I just find your arguments risible.
Please keep posting them, Iām enjoying this.
3 Likes
Nobody said that. But there is a pool of former players who quit because of lack of the content we played, and at least I would come back and put my wallet where my mouth is if CCP obliged.
I already have a game and a company to give money to for doing a better job than CCP ever has, and coming back to EVE is not something Iāve fancied since I quit for good in 2017 and EVE went F2P so I can come here and have fun without giving them any more money.
But as I said, CCP had a larger customer base before they neglected the solo PvE highsec majority, and here they are, without that majority and just a pale shadow of their peak population (specially considering the amount of bots that supposedly are out there).
And yet I would give them money again if they gave me something for it. Not gonna happen, so your game is safe until they ruin it.
3 Likes
How about a system that is only available via a portal that is the s a dead space gate that will send pilots into a team battle and the entire setup is like faction wars yet instead of 1 vs 1 it is like 6 on 6 where the team uses a pre fitted ship that is accessible via the only station and the ship canāt be taken out of the system.
This would make sense for a battleground queue to b able to gain access to the system.
2 Likes
Correlation is not causation.
2 Likes
The important thing is that there needs to be risk. I agree that EVEās PvE is lacklustre and neglected in so far as we all want more people in the game and doing this content. Where we differ is in where this PvE should take place. I want it to be very lucrative and exclusive to lowsec, so that it will get PvE players exposed to the PvP gameplay, and provide opportunities for the PvE player to evade and PvP players to hunt. You, presumably, want it to be done in highsec, which means it cannot be particularly lucrative since highsec players very seldom lose their ships.
3 Likes
Just bring back the Proving Grounds.
3 Likes
The lure of highsec PvE was (is?) predictability and reliability. You put 90 minutes into it, and your reward is predictable and mostly assured (not completely, but wastes of time were unusual) so you can count on getting something for your time.
And time is the most precious commodity for game developers. Whales will spend thousands because of time (grind vs buy). Even CCP had to start selling time (Skillpoints) once they drove away their core paying demographic.
The second part of the lure was progression. Same mission, different ship, different fit, different strategy. Make your own challenge. Worlds Collide in a drone ship, maybe? Buy something else, try something else.
Incarna and the prospect of grinding for apparel was there. And later CCP also missed the chance to grind for your little house in the space prairies and released whatever the structure meta is now.
The people who played EVE wrong drove up the numbers, and now that we are gone, the people who āplay it rightā are who you are. 22k online on a good day, paying 40-something million $ a year as in 2011 but after 15 years of inflation and hiking the subscription by 33%.
And now Iām off to bed.
Also: a century agoā¦
Photograph: Oskar Schlemmerās concepts for the Triadic Ballet, 1922.
Bonus: dancer Daisy Spies in costume for the Triadic Ballet
3 Likes
What losses did you experience? Ours where so small it cost us hardly anything. Pure pvp when your good at it makes a profit.
If you joined in 08, how did you miss the 2/3rd loss of players in 14 never to be replaced?
3 Likes