Look in the space around the station. You should see a freighter with a bucket icon (be sure to enable all brackets)
Isn’t that because 80% of the playerbase doesn’t interact when any given specific piece of content? Given “don’t like it, don’t engage with it,” I think it’s pretty clear the objeciton to Proving Grounds is purely ideological because it’s instanced.
Instanced content has no place in a video game.
You’re not running short on targets are you?
1 Like
How are Proving Grounds any different than Duels? (other than not being able to get out of Proving Grounds)
Regarding the Warpath opportunities:
Honestly? They are an absolute and utter mess and I don’t think anyone at FC actually thought stuff out.
Cradle of War was marketed as a player-driven war effort.
“Every action brings your empire closer to victory.”
“Your success depends entirely on you.”
“Your actions will leave a lasting impact.”
Sounds great.
The problem is that the actual opportunities don’t feel like a war effort at all.
Contributors at this very moment:
Amarr: 3957
Caldari: 5838
Gallente: 4699
Minmatar: 4589
Let’s start with hacking.
“Hack in Caldari Bulwark”: 950 cans global. Individual top-out of 4. So you need 238 chars doing it, since you can’t over-contribute. 238 is an easy number. Nothing to criticize here.
Now look at Amarr:
“Hack in Amarr Bulwark”: 33,250 global. Individual top-out: 4. So you need 8,313 characters.
Eight thousand three hundred and thirteen. In an empire that currently has fewer than 4,000 contributors.
How exactly is that supposed to work?
Now line up all four hacking objectives:
Amarr Bulwark: 33,250 global → 8,313 chars
Caldari Bulwark: 950 global → 238 chars
Caldari Lowsec: 420 global → 105 chars
Gallente Space: 60,000 global → 2,500 chars
Minmatar Bulwark: 6,650 global → 1,663 chars
Amarr’s bulwark hack is 35 times the size of Caldari’s bulwark hack. Same activity. Same kind of space. Thirty-five times.
And it isn’t just hacking. Pick literally any shared activity and the same randomness falls out.
Capture/Defend Complexes - the exact same activity for everyone:
Amarr: 2,700 global, 225 chars
Caldari: 2,700 global, 225 chars
Gallente: 9,000 global, 750 chars
Minmatar: 12,000 global, 750 chars
Why does Minmatar have to flip or hold 12,000 complexes while Amarr and Caldari sit at 2,700?
Destroy Hostiles (NPC rats). Same idea, just shoot rats:
Caldari (Caldari space): 260,000 global, 10,000 chars
Gallente (lowsec): 14,625 global, 563 chars
Minmatar (highsec): 356,250 global, 7,125 chars
Caldari needs 10,000 characters’ worth of ratting. Gallente needs 563. Eighteen times the grind for the same gameplay.
Now the Combat Missions:
Amarr “Complete Advanced Combat Missions”:
Global target: 15,000.
Personal contribution: 1.
That means you need 15,000 completed L3/L4 missions.
Which also means you need pilots with the standings, ships and skills required to run L3/L4 missions.
Meanwhile Gallente gets “Complete Basic Combat Missions”.
L1/L2 missions.
Global target: 9,500.
Personal contribution: 1.
So one empire gets a task that almost everyone can participate in, while another gets a task requiring standings investment and more advanced characters.
Why? Where is the balancing logic?
The industry objectives are just as strange. Players probably spending ISK to lose ISK for the privilege of participating. Apparently industrial gameplay now means donating money to a progress bar.
The PvP objectives have their own issues. Destroying militia targets sounds reasonable until you realize that only specific ship classes count.
- Navy ships do.
- Pirate militia ships do.
So what happens if players adapt and start flying cheaper T1 non-navy ships?
You can have active PvP taking place throughout the warzone while the objective barely progresses because the wrong ships are exploding.
That isn’t rewarding participation. That’s rewarding players for gaming the objective system.
The mining objectives are probably the best example of accidental cooperation.
- Public Orca fleets formed.
- Veterans invited newer players.
- People actually worked together.
But the system itself doesn’t encourage that behavior.
Nothing incentivizes public fleets over private alliance fleets. Nothing encourages established groups to bring in newer players. Nothing rewards cooperation beyond filling a progress bar faster.
The community created the cooperation. The design didn’t.
Let people overcontribute (if needed: lower Payout than the initial contribution). And let people turn in their personal contribution even if the overall goal is reached already so people can still contribute, even if fleets of Orcas and hulks already finished the mining mission in a week.
In general speaking of all missions: Those numbers are so wildly different that they don’t look balanced around participation, accessibility or population. They look random. And that is the core problem. None of these opportunities feel connected to a larger military campaign.
- Mine this.
- Hack that.
- Build x ships.
- Run one mission.
- Kill twelve targets.
Then forget the opportunity ever existed.
Where is the strategy?
Where is the empire-wide coordination?
Where is the feeling that millions (exaggerated, I know we are in the thousands) of capsuleers are contributing toward a common war effort?
Most opportunities feel like disconnected AIR Career Program tasks attached to giant progress bars.
And because over-contribution is impossible, players are actively discouraged from participating once a target gets close to completion.
Let people over-contribute. Reduce payouts after the personal target if necessary. Because right now players can show up ready to help and effectively get told: “Sorry. Somebody else needs to fill the bar.”
That’s not how you build community participation. It’s how you teach people not to bother participating next time.
Right now these opportunities mostly incentivize one thing: Creating more alts.
13 Likes
I’m just waiting for all this to end. I don’t care who wins. I’m not going to compete against multi-botters.
3 Likes
If I recall correctly there were 3v3 and 5v5 proving grounds as well as 1v1.
Also there’s no chance of 3rd parties interfering.
But it’s instanced, and thus not what EvE should be.
1 Like
I’m glad you crunched the numbers. I have no idea how any of these goals are going to be completed unless there’s some hidden mechanism that has yet to be revealed.
3 Likes
I might have gone crashout in my edits, but I think I’m done with editing now…
1 Like
IA Slop content aplied to programing (mainstream and cool way to go… until we get a nuclear war for this dumb blind demiurge) is the only reasonable answer.
I made a comment about the size of the rewards considering user time investment (most important and undervalued resource) vs risk (risk of unacomplishment and negative return of investment) vs reward (isk per hour or valualble items) vs inflation (rewards items were destroyed or consumed any soon? they will be farmable or limited resource?) vs current popular gameplay loop (mean isk/hour by percentile of players: starters, mid level, advanced, multiboxers) and drew the same conclusion as you, albeit less exaustive.
As a tiny single player with mid grade level of experience about the game tricks (3 years), I think rewards under 20m/h were a waste of time. Its not a random number. You cannot earn more by automatic anomaly easy farming (mining or combat) than by active participating in a given content. Real user comitment must be rewarded at a significant level.
Theaters of war rewards for activities non multiboxer friendly must be at last the same size as warpath event/homefront operations (why I can mine HF rock for 12m+rocks value in 10 min and theathers is 200k +rocks value for 4 full pioneers. Multiboxer friendly activities may be downscaled acordingly in terms of balance to favour real users before N+1 scaling. Lobbying N+1 scalers can stay in their perfectly safe f(n)ull sec farms forever.
Idea of theaters of war is ok, application is a monster IA mess depite they deny this. They must fire up some lazy devs, managers and QoL testers.
1 Like
if you ask the dude who keeps demanding they bring it back, he swears its the best thing since sliced bread… FC swift even said they want it in the game, but it just doesn’t work on the current trajectory.. won’t stop said player from bringing it up constantly.
1 Like
Did anyone actually test this update before releasing it? This is no longer just about constant bugs and strange UI behavior, but also about basic Player Experience issues.
Another frustrating addition to the list: after claiming the Starkman Champion title, you receive a Probe Penumbral Shadows SKIN as a reward. As with all previous rewards and bonuses, the first instinct was to check the Redeem Items tab. Finding nothing there, I started searching through items on all stations, assuming it might have been delivered to my home station.
I was already about to submit a ticket about yet another bug when I learned that this rare item — a reward for completing an event milestone — is delivered directly into the ship inventory.
Why? Rewards like this have always gone to Redeem Items. Please stick to a single, consistent standard instead of introducing exceptions that only confuse players.
8 Likes
This courier objective… Global progress 100% completed within minutes or anytime since DT and later when I logged in and tried to look if any new objectives were available. ONLY 114 contributors were required. And since you can do agents objectives from any stations, regardless of empire space, it was a very easy one for the Caldari. I’m glad since I want Caldari to win, but I’m mad because that’s an objectives I was not able to participate in and progress my own milestone.
And those who root for the other empires have something to be mad at, because this one was too easy/quick to complete, compared to their objectives.
Gallente security level 1 and 2 agents (same level as the Caldari distribution agent objective) needs a few thousands contributors (probably 3k) in comparison (currently 776 contributors for 27.9% completion).
3 Likes
Caldari Campaign: 4/30. By now it’s obvious which faction received preferential treatment in this campaign update. The Minmatar community demands an official investigation into who keeps giving Caldari the VIP treatment!
For example, the hacking objective in Caldari Bulwarks requires just 950 points, whereas the Minmatar version requires 6,650 points. The imbalance is hard to ignore.
Capture/Defend Complexes: 2,700 for Caldari and 12,000 for Minmatar.
6 Likes
Real life has enough corpofascists winning a rigged game, shoehorning it into Eve is redundant. Dud content and no reason to resub.
3 Likes
There’s nothing wrong with this “event/expansion” other than the balance is non-existent, the campaigns are mostly dailies, the hacking sites are (inevitably) recycled, nothing about the presentation speaks to the great clash of the empires we were promised, and most days there is absolutely nothing to do outside FW/mining. I don’t mean to get hyperbolic, but this is the worst event/expansion I can remember in a decade.
6 Likes
I’m still holding out some slim hope that it gets more interesting towards the end…
1 Like
Do not hold your breath as you would suffocate…
3 Likes
I’m fully expecting to be completely and utterly disappointed.
1 Like