First, you’re ignoring the fact that for there to be content in this game, there needs to be players. AFK ratting guy may not be paying the company directly, but he is out in space and that makes him a target, which is important.
Second, yes, folks buying plex are subsidizing players who don’t choose to subscribe or buy plex but still play enough to earn the isk to buy plex to sub their accounts. They are, by necessity, spending far more time in the game than they otherwise would have - that time has value to the company, because it’s a player engaged in content, and in EVE if you’re logged in you’re a target for somebody 95% of the time. That’s a benefit for the company.
Given how mindlessly repetitive much of the PvE content is, making it low impact so that you can do other things isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
That point is when you can generate hundreds of millions per hour running multiple clients requiring low to no attention.
People have raised the point that PvE is boring and needs a rework multiple times, but those same people don’t bother doing abyss, which is very entertaining PvE content imo, simply because they can’t rake in hundreds of millions while paying no attention to the game.
pve with drones died, even fleet-based ratting with drones set do defense wont work. dominixes are useless and botters just make one more makro for locking up and spam f4.
its useless to lock up every frigate and spamming f . drones got useless.
thx for killing another part of pve
It’s been a while since you could rake in hundreds of millions while paying no attention to the game, but regardless, there is a place for low impact PvE. It’s just 100% mining now (for now, at least) rather than both mining and ratting. I can still see both sides to this coin.
The content already exists in high-level WHs, Incursions etc. No need to scale it down further–all that would do is drive players towards huge groups many players wouldn’t want to be part of because of complexity, politics and “being a number.” There’s already a palpable “too big to fail” symbiosis between the largest groups in the game and CCP that IMO is rather unhealthy.
There is no-one playing on an Omega account that CCP has not gotten money for. If you do not like people PLEXing their accounts, don’t sell PLEX.
And yes, it is the logic behind CCP’s microtransaction model. All of CCP’s microtransactions run on PLEX. PLEX can only enter the ecosystem when someone pays CCP real-world money. Every PLEX used by anyone, no matter what they use it for, was money paid to CCP. CCP’s microtransaction model is scale-independent, and considering the number of Barge, Exhumer, Orca, and Rorqual SKINs that exist and have been sold, there is no way to rationally claim the idea of multi-boxing miners was not baked into their model.
Worse, when the Rorquals were originally changed to be the obscenities they have been for the last 4 years, CCP Fozzie was not at all shy about the fact that in part, those changes, as well as the skill injectors, were partly being made to drive PLEX sales as people injected so they could multibox Rorquals.
So sorry, your claims about their model are completely misinformed.
Not even possible. At the height of its harvesting power, a single Rorq might make 1b/hr, if it was on a jackpotted R64 moon with a very high % of R64. And not only are those rare, that assumes you can mine that for the full hour, which—given how many people will swarm onto an R64 even w/out a jackpot—you’re not going to do. You might get half an hour.
This is not at all what CCP is trying to address. CCP is trying to address the glut of resources and ISK compared to where they think those things should be, not ‘zomg, people have lots of alts and multibox’. Don’t believe me? Go watch a fleet of Orcas in highsec making more money than highsec mining’s ever been able to do, now.
It is autoattack.
Get into a fight in LotRO, hit ` to initiate autoattack.
Get into a fight in WoW, right-click to initiate autoattack.
Get into a fight in EVE, hit F1 to initiate autoattack.
That’s literally all it is: the automatic, base attack at regular intervals that keeps happening without additional button-presses. At most, you have to reload every few minutes.
No, I’m coming at this from the angle of ‘if CCP wants players to not be looking for the easiest way to do their PvE content with minimal actual attention, they need to make engaging content. If CCP wants to make engaging content, they need to actually understand what gets people engaging with the content’.
EVE needs more engaging PvE content. EVE needs missions and ratting and mining that are more than ‘lock target, push button, wait’. You want people to not AFK? Don’t give them ‘just turn on autoattack and you’re fine’ content. You want people to actually be out there, engaging with what they’re doing, you need to make things they can engage with.
Am I saying this isn’t an improvement? No. I’m saying this will annoy the people CCP has trained for 17 years to be as AFK as possible, but it’s not enough. They need to do more. They need to go farther.
But I’m not gonna lay it out here on a site the devs avoid actually reading as much as they possibly can, because that’s a waste of my time. So it looks like I’m writing another article after all.
Eve is a sandbox, a game i have been playing from nearly the beginning.
And yes I’m an alt to my main characters. In my eve character video i was in the top 10% to 17% in game for my activities for those who keep barking on this game doesn’t work in H sec. And i don’t bot.
The saying goes don’t place all your eggs in one basket.
In eve this refers to game types, we need all types of players in eve to give variety for different play styles and for the game to function, if you remove areas of the game it will probably collapse. No one style is right or wrong
i do have 2 corporations and predominantly now play in high sec. The various changes that have been done this year have forced my mainly industrial activities to become near impossible to carry out the various things i did for it to be worth the effort.
Now again more pain, it isn’t about hitting an F button. drones should attack a NPC rat if they are shooting your ship. For example I’m in a mining ship (that is already getting reduced ore types) with no turrets or missiles and my target locks are asteroids. i have to unlock a rock and re lock a rat, in an orca this takes some time, which i have to repeat 4 times for the 4 rats. Why is this a good thing?
i have always paid my accounts by sub with the very occasional plex in the early days , but i have un-subbed my 2 omega accounts after the last mining changes along with many other players who i have known for a long time. and predominantly now play on alpha characters hoping this doesn’t get worse.
Stop ruining the game for the many who have done the PVP being told what to do and have set up their own way of playing eve allowing social interaction with others along with a variety of play styles.
The online figures show the amount of players online has already fallen by 15% ish over the last 3 months, these changes will make it worse.
i could rant about the many skills, BP worked, trained and lost over the many changes and reverted changes over the years, but it is what it is.
Would be nice to fix the many game faults that have been ongoing for over a year now.
I don’t really have faith that ccp is able to or even knows how to introduce dynamic pve that would actively reward attention. plus eve players are lazy and will want to try and make their activities as low effort as possible regardless.
AFK Mining in HS hourly income: average 15Mish, but ceiling is around 20Mish per character.
AFK Null Ratting hourly income: average depends on ship, but a myrm could get 45M/h, which was actually considered very low income for a null sec player.
Ishtar seems to be able to rake in similar 60M/h as VNIs of old.
See the issue here?
It’s at least x3 times the income for the same amount of effort put in the game.
As for the risk, it’s debatable if a paper thin mining barge is under the same risk of being ganked as a ratter farming isk under a blue donut with a cloaky neutral in system.
None of this should matter though, because yesterday I was still ratting in a gila while watching youtube, and pressing F whenever a target died, so my drones would move on to the next one.
I only really bothered paying attention to deal with frigates spawning at the start of each wave, but I left my drones dealing with cruisers+ when they were left because I didn’t need to pay that much attention to it while they slowly shaved their HP down.
Semi-AFK is still completely possible and viable.
Paying ZERO attention to your multiple clients running in the background and checking on them when your timer goes off is not, and that’s a good thing.
CCP 's expressed intention with both PLEX and alpha clones is that they want people out there in space. People out there in space can be shot at. People not in space cannot be shot at.
That’s how they built this game, with that intention, for 17 years: “All we care about is that you’re in space where you can get shot at.”
AFK ratters and miners? Can be shot at. Bots, which react and get safe without human interaction? Those are bad. Those are a problem. Some afk dumbass in his Hel who dies to a dozen stealth bombers? GOOD. Let him be a dumbass. Let him die.
If he’s paying attention, and he doesn’t die? Then he’s not AFK, because if he’s away from the keyboard, he literally did not dock his ass up and cannot be paying attention to the game.
Is there a ridiculous amount of money? Sure. But these measures don’t address that. These measures just make it harder to do the same work in the same time with the same tools. Nerf bounty payouts more if you need to reduce cash flow. Sell game time for ISK directly for the holidays if you want to get more ISK out of the system.
That’s something that only one of CCP’s changes actually does: the Quantum Cores. None of the rest of it gets ISK out of the system. Destruction doesn’t remove ISK, it just moves ISK from the ratter to the guy who built his next ship. Reducing the amount coming into the system doesn’t take ISK out. Ship insurance literally just adds more ISK, because whatever you paid, it pays out more.
All the anger at multiboxers is completely misdirected. It’s not misdirected because multiboxing isn’t bad. Multiboxing is stupid and should never be the optimal way to play the game. But for seventeen years, CCP has trained players to do exactly that.
MMOs are skinner boxes. The act of playing an MMO is the act of being a rat in a maze: you learn to run the maze the way the guy in charge wants you to run it, so you get the cheese.
You can’t take what amounts to the entire time it takes to produce an adult human being, conditioning people to behave a certain way, and then tell them ‘YOU ARE BAD FOR DOING WHAT WE TOLD YOU TO DO FOR SO LONG, THIS RULE IS NOW ELIGIBLE FOR MILITARY SERVICE’. They’re not bad, and they’re not ‘freeloaders’ as some people like to call them. They’re players, doing what the game company taught them to do.
If you want to teach them to do things a better way, you have to have the new way offer new cheese.
I’m not talking about the drones there. They’re made the drones into what the guns have always been: autoattack. Again: it’s not enough. They need to go further.
