There are two distinctions here:
- the game mechanics
- the actual situation
You think they are both changed in a way that makes highsec more dangerous? Why?
I claim you’re an idiot for stating opinions as facts.
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I think at the heart of your questioning is this: how do we know high sec is safer or more dangerous?
I think the unsatisfying answer is: we can’t know.
I think your two distinctions can be reiterated as the hard limitations the game imposes and the players’ responses to those limitations.
I can’t review all the changes CCP has implemented to the hard limits of the game. There have been so many in the past 10 years that it would just take a long time and a lot of words. It would be impractical.
I think a more compact approach is just to look at the interplay between hard changes and changes in player behavior. Let’s take suspect flagging for example. Players went from flagged to a limited and calculable number of players to being flagged to . . . everyone. Players can still steal. Players used to be able to neutral rep without CONCORD; I don’t know the current state of that. Players can now attack assets like Mobile Tractor Units. And nothing is to stop newbies or anyone from being baited into shooting those suspect players. The only change is the added risk to the suspect players in not knowing exactly who would be aggressing them. That makes it more dangerous for them. That does not make it safer for anyone aggressing them.
The behavioral response to that, from what I’ve seen, was that many players decided it was too risky to attempt to bait people. Well, that’s a response to an INCREASE in danger, not a decrease. It is not the change CCP implemented that made high sec safer. It was the response to an increase in danger that made high sec safer . . . if it even IS safer.
How about killrights? It used to be that you could suicide gank someone and you only had to worry about that person and their corp, maybe their alliance. I’m not quite sure if it extended that far. After the change to killrights, a ganker has to worry, for 30 days, that anyone in high sec or indeed low sec, might activate the killright and kill them. That is inherently an increase in danger for the ganker, but it doesn’t make anyone safer.
The player response was a bifurcation between players who were willing to risk a global flagging at any time and players who were deterred. Some people, hardened PVPers, have no trouble with the increase in risk in high sec because they either don’t live in high sec or because they are always ready and even seek out dangerous PVP scenarios. Some players couldn’t stomach the increased danger. Does CCP bear the blame for people being deterred by danger, thus making other people safer by their absence? Do we evaluate that as “high sec got safer” or “high sec got more dangerous”?
How about 1 more, citadels? There were always stations that players could dock at to be safe in, even accessible to players with bad standings and low security ratings. Citadels didn’t make anyone immune to attack, except in systems that didn’t already have stations, so they marginally made such systems safer. However, not everyone can dock in every citadel in high sec. Player groups that field citadels are at risk of war declaration. There’s lots of ins and outs to the feature.
The player response was for gankers to put citadels in strategic places as forward staging points and observation posts. Anyone seeking the safety of stations already had it. Instead, they have been used to allow for shorter warp cycles to ambush points. They allow easier logistics for attack and give no benefit for defense. Not in high sec. In other words, their introduction has been used to increase the risk posed by groups like CODE. in high sec.
Do you have any examples of a feature addition or change that did not result in more risk to someone or that shifted risk from one group to another?
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Theres a big button on the EvE website of community and several instances of directing people to the Forums.
Where there is a New Player area.
I dont know how it was missed earlier.
I claim you’re an idiot for not being able to differentiate opinion from fact. 
Here’s a fact: There were no Triglavians ganking players in high sec asteroid belts 10 years ago.
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I got a fact, I mailed the OP offering help, I never got a reply. OP doesn’t give a feck, neither should we.
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I just cited a little snipped, but I think it summarizes your agrumemts very well. I think you have a point and you argued it very well. I think it is indeed the case that some things like suspect baiting got more dangerous for the aggressor so people stopped doing it. Actually I started doing it after the change because it is still viable.
I think it is also fair to say that changes like this are a HTFU or GTFO moment for gankers and not everyone is willing to adapt, so overall the criminal population is shrinking. That isn’t a problem if new players are taking up the profession of crime and don’t have an issue with the increases difficulty.
As for the Citadel example, sure they benefit the gankers. Even more so now that they print free noobships you can use to pull CONCORD.
Again, well argued.
Another point I saw mentioned that goes into the same direction is that overall the players optimize and find new ways to use game mechanics in unintended ways, so this in itself increases the power of criminals without CCP even changing something. This is obviously true for every activity in this game, not only ganking.
However 
I would argue that the nature of the nerfs/changes that happened to highsec aggression mechanics increase the difficulty for new and solo players to participate in criminal activities. This will effectively lead to less criminals. At the same time the remaining criminals get more efficient so that compensates a bit for it on the part of that the destruction is still relatively high.
In the light of your other examples that is indeed a good question. I will have to think a bit more about this point and will answer it later.
EDIT: just a point I want to add about how gankers optimized over the years I forgot. One of the biggest changes that boosted CODE.'s activities was without any doubt skill injectors. The suddenly allowed to create whole fleets of omega ganker alts at zero or today marginal cost. You can basically scale to whatever damage you need for free this days without much effort.
I actually warned of this in the very first post about those injectors and was vehemently against them, but no one took it even serious while only a few months back (or was that after that, can’t remember) they all cried for limitations to alphas so this couldn’t be done this way.
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It is part of a skill to understand that setting and using keybinds for maximum efficiency is a must. There is skill behind being aware of the fact that the less time it takes to do something, the better you will be compared to others.
That’s also why using hotkeys, instead of using the mouse (like for CTRL+C and CTRL+V), will always be superior. The ones who believe otherwise are those who are slower.
Yet you don’t know the game. You haven’t played it. You’ve gained zero experience. Your first point confirms that those with higher brainskills will always win against otherwise equal opponents.
The story is out there, plentifully. If you had cared about a story, you would have looked for it. I can tell that you didn’t, because there is plenty of be found. It’s not just the Chronicles, it’s also the wealth of daily news that have some meaning which we often do not even understand until at some point.
Like, for example, the aquisition by Pearl Abyss. It was foretold in the World News.
This is incorrect due to the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have been new players and reached beyond that eventually. You are projecting. The problem here is clearly you, otherwise all those people would not be here.
You have the wrong understanding of what “Destiny” means. When someone blows you up, that is a part of your Destiny. Believing that “Destiny” means you only get what you is nonsense. Death is always part of ones Destiny. Always. Literally.
This game makes something completely obvious, which people usually not think about, stand out.
Many people would disagree, which means the problem here is you. You are looking for something, and instead of looking at the one place where it originates from, you’re looking everywhere else.
The problem here clearly is you, as you yourself are probably aware of. Other people have friends and play together. You are doing something wrong. What might that be?
You are looking for something idealised and romantic.
It’s not the game’s fault. You will never really be happy, because what you’re looking for does not exist. You might find something you wrongly perceive as “perfect” eventually, but at some point you will come back into this sad state you’re in right now and the cycle will repeat itself.
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Just as a small datum, not proving anything:
In Sep. 2014, “Total Destruction” amounted to .8 trillion ISK. No regional breakdown provided.
At the beginning of August 2019, “Total Destruction” amounted to 1.35 trillion ISK, more than 68% higher.
Since they started showing regional breakdowns in April of 2017, high sec has consistently shown more total destruction than other regions.
Not direct data, but 68% higher destruction with fewer people in the game sounds like a significant increase.
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Well, to be fair you can construct anything by just picking two points. Would be more convincing if you a) link the data source and b) show some more numbers and how they develop so it’s clear it’s no outlier.
You, uh, know the MERs are published by CCP and publicly available to anyone with a search engine right?
Feel free to construct as many intermediate data points as you care to google. I no longer do the research homework for forumites because most of them appear immune to reality and published data when it conflicts with their preferred beliefs.
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Why so jumpy? You didn’t mention your data is from the MER, so how should I google it.
Also not sure why you didn’t like the articles where you got that data from you cited. Have you for example noticed in the two MER you linked, how the export/import from in Citadel more than doubled? Don’t you think that has an influence?
You are right but also look at massive change in what people are using to fight with thanks to the Rorq fiasco. When this is that much ISK to burn, people start flying (and losing) bigger ships which makes the ISK lost number look huge.
Original numbers were made in response to the “high sec is more/less dangerous” point being discussed.
Most destruction occurs in high sec.
Pretty sure ‘flying expensive ships’ (and losing them) in high sec isn’t the cause of a 68% increase in destruction. If anything, that only means that expensive ships are being lost in other regions, and even more ships are being lost (relatively and quantitatively) in high sec.
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Is that 68% value strictly for HS only? You didn’t implicitly state that so…
Also, where do you think a lot of the stuff and from all that ore is sold? A lot of wealth flowed from NS into HS so that is a factor. Stations, ships, modules, etc…Hence why Jita is the #1 system for losses (ISK wise)
One change doesn’t make the whole of hi sec more dangerous than 10 yeras ago. Have fun. I am done with you.
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Sigh… I don’t know why people state completely unsupported opinions in here all day long, but every time I put actual data into a post people are all like “Wait are those numbers 100% perfect and verified and completely explained?” Especially since they then proceed to ignore them if they don’t agree with their chosen beliefs anyway.
Here is the way it works. “Total Destruction” is for all of EVE. Until (iirc) April of 2017 they didn’t even give regional breakdowns, just totals. Also, even when they show ‘by region’, some of the Forge overlaps into Low Sec, some of Domain overlaps into other sectors, etc. So you never get HS-specific numbers and you have to guesstimate the trends over time.
The long-term trend shows, for example, that most destruction occurs in HS (The Forge, The Citadel, Domain, Sinq Liason, Metropolis primarily). Monthly variation depending on wars, events etc. of course.
We can assume that if most destruction occurred in HS back in 2017, and on most months ever since (from MER Regional Breakdown), and that if overall destruction has increased by approx. 68% since 2014, then it is almost a certainty that destruction in HS has increased by something fairly close to 68%.
Since ship limits/combat restrictions in HS mean that ‘more expensive’ ships are unlikely to be destroyed there en masse, then the only way for the increase to occur is for either many more ships being destroyed, or much more valuable cargoes. Likely a mix of both.
Obviously the data is too fuzzy to make a firm guesstimate how much more or less ‘dangerous’ high sec is compared to ‘back in the day’, but it certainly does not appear to be significantly ‘safer’.
(Note: Someone who is good at integrating data from Dotlan, zKillboard and the MERs could probably come up with more accurate/targeted numbers. Not really worth the trouble for me. People believe what they want to believe, even those who manage the company.)
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I just asked a question I didn’t ask if they were perfect so how about turn the drama knob back down to 1 and try again…
But you are right that until one can analyze what is being destroyed there is not much point in extrapolating one way or another.
My guess is that the increase in ISK value is due to increased freighter traffic from NS and increase station destruction as there are so god damn many of those things around. I’d love to know the ship lost numbers…
Anyhow…thanks for the reply and I hope this is touched upon more…
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Yeah. You make my point. Eve loses new players because it is filled with a holes.
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Says the guy calling others names…