Ha ha ha. The ‘why did my loot warp off’ threads would be beautiful.
But it feels kinda, i don’t know, forced, mechanical and “essential”. And also trivial. Having to fit a module thats giving me no benefit other than stopping a boss warping off just feels like its a formality. Especially if the AI is as crap as it is. I mean is this rat going to warp in and zip right over to you like they usually do? Or will it actually pull range and make you work to point it? And how long before it just warps off again. Lots of the event sites are run in battleships…… so not necessarily easy to get in range depending on the various warp in points.
Do we not just end up with a situation where the sites are run as they normally are but you have an alt in tackle ready to warp in at the commander spawn and hold him while you dps the sh*t out of him? Probably less of an inconvenience than hobbling your fit to fit a scram? You know how eve players are…….they never do things they way that was intended. They always find their own ways. In which case id say its debatable whether it would result in more PVE players participating in the emergent opportunities.
Players that like a shield tank will scream…. And probably rightfully so. As its effectively taking away a mid slot and reducing effectiveness of those fits. Not getting into that but it would change the balance between armour/shield tanks across the board given that fitting one isn’t a choice. It’s a necessity.
Support the objective but like everything in this game the changes/consequences are far more wide reaching than commander spawns need to be pointed.
I think this is a mistake, though a line of reasoning more likely to get the green light. Tie things to incentives and rewards and soon follow the people who exploit it, and soon after that, the people who feel like they should be entitled to the same rewards as someone of another ‘play style’.
There was a story I read a long time ago where a math teacher said given one wrong assumption you can prove anything. A student said ‘Given that 2 = 1, prove that you are the pope’. The teacher says “The set that contains the pope and I contains 2 people, but 2 = 1, so it contains just one person, therefore I am the pope.”
The proposal that every play style is equal is a falsity that can be used for anything by anyone. That a game has to cater to all types in all ways at all times is ridiculous, but it’s why wardecks are in the state that they are today. Somewhere along the way we got the idea that we needed to change wars so they’re opt in, even though they always were? Or that we needed to increase the cost because PvP wasn’t expensive enough? Because PvE wasn’t ‘equal’ enough?
What we have done with wars is take them from being a tool accessible to any player to a tool only accessible by a shrinking list of elites that now have to incentivize people to front the cash now required to present themselves as victims for their sport. We’ve done this to carve out a niche for people who don’t want to PvP in a PvP game. New players aren’t PvP players because they can’t afford to be, and that’s our fault, but we’ll double down on it with more war nerfs before we admit our mistake and give wars back to them.
There is only one appropriate cost for being war eligible: zero. Bar that, as close as you can get to that number so you don’t have to subsidize it with ‘incentives’. The people you want in a PvP game are the ones who want to PvP, so why do we go to such great lengths to make it inaccessible and then double back with a subsidy? Just let people fight if they want to.
I think wars should be the norm in highsec, not the exception. I don’t mind large corporations having to absorb large costs to declare war, but small corporations should have small costs to declare and (again) zero cost to be war (or ally) eligible to make low stakes war between small groups economically viable.
Bringing all that back would cause quite a fuss among those who think that PvE is an ‘equal’ play style instead of an ancillary one. It wouldn’t bring back all the people who were driven away by increased safety and increasingly predictable gameplay instantly, either. I have my doubts it could be done even if someone in CCP was dedicated to the task and had the power to see it through.
In short you can try to cobble together a facsimile of the rich content ecosystem we had when everyone could partake in war for any old reason they desired by using new rules or rewards, but it will just be a mechanical doll devoid of heart that’ll have the fun optimized out of it to maximally exploit the incentives in the short term, and defanged or dismantled when it fails to produce the soul of conflict that players actually long for: Reasons of their own to fight that go beyond mechanics, rewards, and boredom.
Now the question becomes how much of an incentive will convince the players to become war-eligible?
Etch and Qia already beat me to the point that high sec players are already discarding better opportunities to make more ISK. How much do you reckon will incentivize players to make the switch?
Definitely going for the griefer design, but with good reason. There would be no requirement other than the attacker has to pony up a lot of ISK.
There’s nothing more honest than declaring: “I’m going to bribe Concord to look the other way for the next two weeks, while I personally hunt you down in high sec and it’s worth a lot to me.” An honor really.
The target would get some warning in advance, but there would be no complicated rules, no room for loopholes.
It also scales fairly:
Want to bring in more allies? They have to burn ISK, each.
Want more targets to choose from? Burn more ISK for each target. Upside is that the attacker gets to be very specific which specific players in a group he wants, instead of just everyone who happens to be in some corp.
The balance lies in the responsibility of the attacker to appear beatable, else the defender will just slip out and do stuff like fly cheap frigates in low or do explo in null or WHs.
So in such a system a brand new player could come onto the forum for advice. Inadvertently say something that annoyed a 10 year vet in game with trillions in the bank. That vet decided to teach the upstart a lesson and declares a war indefinitely.
He could, but this would destroy the trillionaire vet before it destroyed the newbie.
Declaring alone isn’t enough to make any difference after all. He’d also have to make good on his word and personally keep going to high sec to go after the newbie.
Meanwhile everyone sees this and the vet can be decced on by anyone else.
He’d be losing valuable time to shoot a few t1 frigates and pay for the privilege with his ISK and reputation.
He’d also be risking ships as he becomes a target himself, to anyone who likes to pay ISK to get involved.
I guess we could also exempt recent accounts, but it wouldn’t be strictly necessary.
You think? How many frigates could the trillionairre vet throw at such a war?
By destroy you likely mean “cost 0.1% of their in game worth and expose them to the risk of further wars which they have both the capital and experience to deal with efficiently without impacting their gameplay in any real way.”
There are countless ways such a system could be used to pile onto players and ultimately make the game unplayable for them.
The newbie wins, because he has no investment yet. You can spin up infinite number of alpha accounts in this game. He’d just move on to the next account.
Meanwhile mr. Vet or his cronies will become those guys to everybody else in the game.
We can already pile up on players. Gankers do this already. Null sec is built on the idea. Conventional deccers also hope to pile up on smaller corps.
The difference here is that now a commensurable cost for the attacker is added.
This is true, or would be for many newbies, but they would be quitting due to HONEST advertising.
Suppose* we wanted to single out and make it our life mission to target a newbie, then we already could do a much easier job with the cheap tools the game gives us right now.
(*not my personal style, but hypothetically speaking)
We’d just fund our army of alts to gank the same newbie with a different toon over and over. We’d lose our ships to Concord, but that wouldn’t help the target one bit.
The target wouldn’t know who or what hit them, or why. There would be no warning and no red name on the overview.
A declaration would actually be the more upstanding thing to do, compared to what we can already do right now.
I like the sound of this maybe add in a scaling cost , so a small group can war Dec a large War mongering group for free , on the other hand a peaceful corp without any wars would cost a fair bit to engage
One of the most fundamental is that any system you put into place to “incentivise” the new player will be instantly co-opted to benefit the old player.
There are no exceptions to this rule.
An addendum to this rule is that the old player will find a way to make this “incentive” a punishment for the newer player.
At least currently the punishment is that ships blow up. And for the newbie that means 15 minutes that the ganker can’t can’t again for. Allowing them to move. And it would only be catalysts or similar.
This new system means that the attacker could potentially identify the players home station. Blow the player up on undock…… because it’s a war it’s legal. So they can just sit there till the newbie tries to undock again…… and boom…… and boom…… and boom. In whatever ship they want because Concord won’t intervene.
I was thinking more along the lines of: follow around with a scout alt and strike with another alt only when they attempt to do something, like a mission or mining job. That would hurt and confuse more and it’s our hypothetical life mission after all.
Well first of all the idea is to apply the multiplier to all income, not just mining.
Second, this is fine. Let them sit and be poor and stew in their own impotence while their peers prosper. That’s kind of the whole point behind this sort of transactional system. Besides, the multiplier can be adjusted to swing the percentage of converts toward the desires outcome, as it wouldn’t be a zero-sum mechanic. Maybe at a 25% multiplier, 15% of players would switch over to war eligibility, but at a 45% multiplier, 60% of players would switch over. Everyone has a price.
I think that you’re also somewhat misunderstanding players’ motivations in the game. While I’m sure some players as you describe do exist, most players I’ve met have been primarily motivated by some form of wealth/power gain.
This isn’t exactly an original idea. Stuff like this has been getting proposed since the game’s early years.
This is a simple balancing issue. If the necessity to sacrifice 1-2 slots for tackle modules becomes the norm, then all that’s required is to adjust shield tanks as a whole to be as effective as they are today with fewer modules. All this requires is to make current shield tank modules about 10-20% more efficient.
As someone who has done a lot of wars and other high-sec PvP shenanigans, I can tell you that this doesn’t really happen. The fears behind forum alt-posting are for the most part misplaced, because…
…This is true. Someone going after a new player based on forum interactions would likely receive a lot of in-game blowback.
Once again, as someone who has vast experience with wars, wars aren’t actually conducted in this manner. Vets don’t throw infinite frigates at each other, and the true loss for veteran players comes not from taking a wallet hit, but taking a hit to their reputation by showing losses on their kill board.
Like for example, imagine I’m blowing up Cilly over and over again because I think she’s an idiot for using a Caracal for anti-ganking. Well, if a powerful, fearsome, and virile paladin like Dracvlad came along and blew up one of my ships in her defense, I probably wouldn’t be able to show my face around here anymore. In fact, I’d probably just straight up permanently quit the game if that were to happen. My trillions would be entirely irrelevant, because no amount of money would be able to wash away the shame of getting bested by an honoUrable white knight who enacts revenge for my dastardly deeds on behalf of the meek and the bullied.
All of this said, I’m against a system of interpersonal wars, because I feel that would cheapen other forms of interpersonal PvP like theft, suspect-baiting, and any improved bounty-hunting system we could see in the future. Wars should be reserved for political entities, not for individual actors.
Once again, no one is proposing that war eligibility no longer be optional. Second, are trillionaire vets griefing newbros a common occurance? Don’t get me wrong, I have no doubt that there are turds that intentionally target newbros, but out of all the people I know, I’m unaware of a single person that does this. In fact, quite the opposite. I’ve had other HS PvP’ers get on my case for killing newbros, and had to defend myself (i.e. I don’t specifically target newbros, I just don’t bother to check character ages before attacking, I don’t think newbros should be coddled, and I will frequently send emails to newbros telling them what they did wrong [and sometimes get called condescending in the process]).
Speaking of which, I don’t think we should coddle newbros. I think it stunts their growth as players and leads to bigger frustration down the road, and I personally found both the danger, and learning to avoid it, to be a fun and rewarding experience. I joined Eve university when I was 12 days old, and spent almost the entirety of the next 10 months wardecked. In fact, I lost my first ship to a war target the same play session that I joined. Of course, I didn’t particularly care for losing a ship, but the danger certainly made things exciting, the close calls were exhilarating, and I absolutely loved giving guys the slip. Unfortunately, this wasn’t meant to last. I got better and better at PvP avoidance and risk management, and CCP would make several changes to highsec PvP that negatively impacted it’s prevalence. And today, my biggest threat when PvE’ing today isn’t PvP, or even the environment, but disconnects. And, I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with that.
Of course, I have no doubt that there are many newbros who don’t want as hardcore of an experience as I do. But I still believe that:
we do newbros a disservice by coddling them (which stunts their growth as players),
I dispute the notion that older players targeting newbros is a widespread problem,
and I don’t think we should get tunnel vision when it comes to our newbros.
Yes, newbros are the future; and yes, CCP should definitely keep them in mind when designing the game. But veteran retention and the preservation of PvP play styles and emergent game play opportunities are also all things that are important to Eve’s future (and how fun the game is). Thus, I don’t think that they should be perpetual collateral damage in the quest to broaden Eve’s appeal by casualizing it.
almost no one attack new bros because they are poor , poorly fit , give no bragging right or good feeling./loot wen you kill them
that said like @Shipwreck_Jones i don’t check info on who im fighting , i do it after the event wen i look at the killmail , wen the dude have a loot of kills / expensive loot im happy , wen the dude have 0 kills i think meh
btw i don’t attack shuttles , noob ships or capsules
i think there is a lot o exaggeration on the part of new players because of "that ship i lost that time " syndrome
as much as they don’t have zkill acounts most of the killers have , so we expect to to se a LOT of loses , and the most complaining members usually have one loss or don’t apear on killboard at all
