If you’re a game dev and you grow to hate a feature you’ve made, would you simply remove the feature, or keep it around purely so you could continue to despise it?
If CCP secretly hated highsec, why would it exist?
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Just remove high-sec. Problem solved.
Money, since the VAAAAAAAST majority of paying players live in highsec, removing it would mean “quite literally” the death of eve, as CCP wouldn’t make enough revenue from the people living in low and null to pay the bills.
CCP in all likelihood “does” hate highsec (At least most of them do from both past actions and comments.) that’s from past comments by many of the devs themselves on the old forums and various eve events, but they can’t afford to remove 3/4 of the paying players from the game.
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Indeed. I don’t think CCP are foaming at the mouth with thoughts of sabotage as highsec brings in plenty of cash, but it has been shamefully neglected. The only new content we get apart from the crappiest Resource Wars sites are sites requiring big fleets.
They need to give smaller players a route to take stepping stones from the newbie paddling pool to the olympic size swimming pool that is the rest of the game, and it needs to be optional rather than FOB punishment fleets shutting down systems.
Juicier rewards will attract people. Small team missions with a regional or constellation wide “Looking For Work” channel or board to help players meet. Shared experiences, bonds form, friendships, new corps and a greater likelihood of people staying around for a longer time.
Whether or not CCP will do anything is anybodies guess. I suspect there’s too many shinies on the way for the Grand Pimpmongers and their space rent boys and high sec will stew for a few more years yet.
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I think you are grossly misinformed about whats out there.
I’m not speaking so much of blue donut space but teamwork and the new opportunities it brings. I know what’s ‘out there’, having played on various alts since 2005, a donut shaped cess pit tbh. It’s all about opening up new horizons for small time and solo players in kiddie steps and forming new social groupings.
I wouldnt know, every time Ive gone anywhere thats apparently interesting, a big “Not Welcome” sign appears. WHs, Low and NPC Null are mostly wastelands with little to nothing to do as it is.
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I got that feeling too tbh, though I managed to raid a few WHs for gas and shinies and did a few roams it’s all too paranoid to be fun.
Im not sure what you mean, running from the mob is usually the only fun I find out there.
Working with others, that I find too paranoid to be fun lol. But I came to realise about 5 years ago that solo play was not particularly long lasting or enjoyable for the most part and so mostly just wandered about.
What happened? It fizzled. It was a very small thing, with essentially Alpha content which not even Alphas have a reason to bother with. It isn’t clear whether CCP was attempting to revert the demographic disaster going on in highsec, but that hasn’t worked so far. The Rubicon Plan, started 2013, is effectively killing highsec to achieve insufficient gains with nullsec.
Why? Misled by information they gathered in 2012-2013, CCP focused to develop nullsec gameplay to achieve maximum player satisfaction but that led to the dissatisfaction and loss of the more abundant highsec players, thus putting CCP’s only viable product in a bad demographic trend.
And here we are. The latest buffs to nullsec have effectively nerfed highsec by 30% flat, and that is showing as highsec losses population but no corresponding population gains are seen in nullsec. People, when told to leave highsec, are leaving it to go play other games. Wisely, IMO.
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Different strokes for different folks I guess. I had some fun in FW but I was pretty poor at it. I never tried running a stabbed frig, for example, as it seemed to defeat the whole purpose of having a rumble with someone and more like cheesing for isk.
Made a few friends in EVE and that’s one of the few things that even keeps me using alpha clones rather than walking away.
Good job no one noticed.
Well, that was their plan, but as usual with CCP it hasn’t worked as expected… or barely worked, if at all… which wouldn’t be an issue if CCP hadn’t bet the farm on it. Ooopsies. 
Im not sure how not making any real improvements to Null while tweaking High counts as betting the farm on something.
They are betting their player base is too invested in the game to quit no matter how much they f**k up.
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Thats pretty much all businesses who let managers decide ■■■■ without listening to the frontline staff.
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Question: "What do our players want to do?"
CCP’s Answer: “they want to own and control space”
Thus Rubicon Plan was designed and has been implemented.
The problem is that no, players didn’t wanted to own and control space. At least not enough players as to keep a viable revenue. And those who wanted or would want it, aren’t happy with the changes made to keep their content fresh.
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Yeah, they do. How they control it though and what ownership means is what was mostly missed.
Also if that was true, why did they make it impossible to attain?
The moon mining changes were MASSIVE for smaller groups living in NPC null. It both kicked the majors off our moons and gave us the ability to fix our t1 mineral baskets, and thus support production of both t1 and t2 things locally if we wanted to.
I’ve personally moved an old ship building business from dodixie to syndicate. Can you imagine anyone thinking of doing that a year ago. Everyone would laugh at you.
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No, CCP made it unfun to fight for control of space. There is a balance to be found, that is not easy to find, and its very difficult for CCP to iterate on, because it affects 50,000 people and their military strategies.
The flipside is that if you had a small organisation that just wanted to hold one system, you can in fact do it. castabouts holds a system on behalf of cas npc players like me for example. Not because we are particularly strong, but simply because its a pipe system, it requires discipline to live in, and nobody else really wants it.
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