When PvE is not PvE and games are not fun

PvE Gameplay Center Missions
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In my opinion the OP makes some fair points. I personally think there are some fundamental issues with how people view and play the game and the echo chamber/cesspit of the community, especially these forums and on reddit.

Instead of discussing what the OP brought up, you’ve literally all jumped on the bandwagon: “If you dare post/complain/make a suggestion to moderate the more rabid players, to adjust the game to suit more play styles, you’ll be met with a barrage of derision from many of the community …”

You’ve got freighter pilots being ganked left and right with no real recourse, The net result being trade hubs being a shadow of what they once were. You have mission running gankers ganking pilots who can’t get a leg up to something better.

The problem with Eve is that certain styles of gameplay take enjoyment away from other players, and PvP players who want more content but keep pushing new players out of the game by doing generally unpleasant things.

While I think PvP and player interaction should be at the heart of the game, Eve and its player base could certainly do a lot more to ease players into the game instead of the kick in the teeth some newer players will end up experiencing, only to leave the game in frustration.

My opinions:
*Highsec ganking is broken as are the highsec mechanics in general
*Large alliances have too much influence and power over the game
*Local should be delayed as nullsec K-Space is carebear
*Crime and punishment mechanics are lacklustre, that outlaws can even dock up in hisec is stupid
*Alphas shouldn’t be able to change safety, if you decide to become a criminal you should wear the consequences, not make a new account

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22

Yup

That about covers a lot of the general main issues. Personally I would really like to be able to go back to NS but its such a cesspool of utter ■■■■ altogether with LS not too far behind that I just don’t see it happening. There would have to be some truly extrordinary corp / alliance for me to join, but I see nothing of the sort, just same ol’ ■■■■ thats been there for too many years.

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Maybe. Highsec mechanics do stifle player interaction and force certain metas which could perhaps be more interesting. I think most people will agree that there may be a better system for a high security space where you still are at risk to other players, but I haven’t seen any concrete proposals of how to make that work. CCP has spent a lot of effort on CrimeWatch and related mechanics to make a safe-ish space that still allows criminals to serve as some small amount of risk, at least to the richest players, and while I can imagine there is a better system, I am not sure what it is.

The one we have works pretty well. Most players are never attacked, or if they are they lose only something of little value, while yet it is still possible to profitably attack the rich and complacent who fail to protect their stuff. This protects newer players, leaving the pirates to focus on the wealthy. I think this works fine. I only wish there was more room for reaction and counter-reaction between criminals and their targets, as the current NPCs shut down things pretty quickly and only leave a handful of viable strategies to attack other players in highsec and almost no room for escalation.

This I don’t see, although I am not sure I fully understand your point. Do you mean outside of the game, like the CSM and such? Because in game, the large alliance have almost no effect on highsec. There perhaps is a little more than before, what with the market Fortizars, but even the highsec POCOs are apparently mostly owned by highsec entities, not nullsec groups. The highsec mechanics pretty much prevent them from using most of their might, at least in relevant ways, leaving them very little influence in highsec.

I agree. There should be iteration on local as an intel tool. It is too powerful as is. That said, there should be ways for sov holders to know who is in their space, but not in the free and perfect form it is today.

How can you have criminals in highsec to both commit crimes and for vigilantes to chase them if they can’t dock up? And besides, if I have good standing with some corporation, why wouldn’t they let me dock, even if I have a habit of shooting other capsuleers? CONCORD isn’t their boss.

Maybe now that there are public player-owned stations, this could be reconsidered, but ultimately there needs to be ways for criminals and non-criminals to interact in the same system if you are going to claim you have built a game where criminal is a viable profession. And you probably would still need some asset safety or other way to prevent people from being locked out from their stuff because they podded someone they shouldn’t have.

That makes no sense. How can they wear the consequences if they can’t even commit a crime in the first place?

Alts have been around for ever, and always will be - you are even given two of them for free with each account. This isn’t an issue and it is perfectly fine to have one of your characters be a good guy carebear, and one a dastardly pirate. Besides, alphas aren’t used by criminals, outside a few niche cases, largely because the multiboxing restriction makes them a poor choice for a profession so ably served by - actually pretty much requires - having multiple accounts. Locking their safety to green would accomplish nothing, other than perhaps prevent a newer player from fully exploring the game or playing with their friends who happen to be criminals.

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Are you saying that there is no “zero to hero” path through the game, like in others?

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I think Sol, you are living proof that there very much is.

But really I am commenting because you provoked a thought. What if all these unhappy farmers that grace these forums aren’t really upset that the game doesn’t anoint them a winner and hero, but rather it is the very dystopian and capitalistic goal they succeed at that makes them unhappy? In some other games you save the realm or get revenge or defeat the evil, but in Eve, at least for ISK-obsessed carebears, you win by amassing a bunch of stuff. Many of them succeed at this, yet still complain about how the game isn’t fun or fair, despite the fact they “won”.

Maybe some humans just can’t be happy with such a victory. Sure, it sounds good to be a rich industrialist, but in the end, their victory is disappointing and unfulfilling. Maybe Eve never can have a narrative that satisfies them in the same way as being declared special and saviour of the universe by the game, at least if they set out with such simple and puerile goal, and at least for these compulsive accumulators, they can never be happy in New Eden as not only is it a pretty meaningless goal, but there is always more to accumulate.

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That’s far too deep for these forums, and (who am I kidding) EVE players in general. Nothing ruins the game more than the philosophical implications of their terrible behavior.

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Thank you :blush: though I was talking about some predetermined path of course. :blush:

You bring up an interesting thought.

Hmmmmm…

Can you expand on this? I have too many thoughts for this, and some are rather loosely connected.

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There’s plenty of solo pve in eve. If you can’t do it without being griefed then you’re too greedy or just bad.

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It’s kind of a well explored philosophical concept. You have the Ascetics, who believe that owning stuff reduces your happiness. There’s the central concept of Buddhism where attachment causes suffering. Even Christianity has the whole “money is the root of all evil” thing that they more or less ignore. The Hedonists believed that happiness was found in yes, physical pleasures but that the simplest of the physical pleasure brought the most happiness. Pretty much every philosophical school of thought has something about hard work being what matters most as opposed to the results. @Black_Pedro is sort of riffing on that idea, that no matter what the software design, they won’t be able to overcome that core philosophical/psychological concept.

Congratulations, you understand what you replied to. Or at least half understand it. The other half is that when you do PVE the way you’re describing, it sucks. It’s not fun.

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Thanks. I had a completely different train of thought about this.

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Yeah, basically that.

Carebears will never be happy as the goal they have set for themselves - the pursuit of ISK - is intrinsically unsatsifying. It’s not that the game is freeform and fails to provide the hero affirmation they are used to from other games, rather it’s the affirmation it does provide doesn’t make most humans happy.

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anyway, dont get fooled by suggesting this and that improvement to the game, so many other new players can join the game… It is a Chimera: the CCP server cant even handle the present player load with their stupid TIDI. How is good to attract more player with such and such suggestion about Local Chat, s h i t K-Space or broken Criminal Status?

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How exactly “am I describing it?” I’ve done lots of solo pve, in hisec and nullsec, and its pretty rare to get bothered. I’ve found it fun. Part of the fun is doing it without getting caught/noticed/killed. It’s eve, people can come and try to kill you anywhere if they really want to (most of the time they don’t bother), but generally even if they really want to you can do something to at the very least, not die. If putting effort into not dying hurts your optimal, on-paper isk per hour, and that ruins your fun, then I really don’t know what to tell you.

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That’s not what it seemed you were first describing. It seemed you were describing the sort of PVE where you set up in some backwater highsec system where nobody ever goes, and you grind out lvl 4’s day after day “without being griefed.” Which is both the sort of PVE the OP seemed to have been looking for, and is also the sort of PVE that drives so many players to quit.

What you’re describing now is definitely more fun, but the game is designed so that’s a niche form of PVE. Also when I’ve dabbled in that sort of PVE it ended up feeling like I was wasting my time, since I could have made way more isk doing the crappy sort of PVE.

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Well, I’ve done backwater level 4s too. It’s not any less fun than missioning in a major hub, although maybe you make a bit less money. But you don’t get ganked. OP wasn’t complaining that solo pve is boring, OP was complaining that there’s no solo PVE without getting griefed. If you think hisec missions are “aids,” I’m not going to argue with that. Hell, if you say all the solo PVE content in Eve sucks, I’m not going to argue. But OP was saying you can’t go solo without a cloud of griefers following you. And I know for a fact that’s wrong. Most people leave you alone. And it’s not even like you can’t fly shiny or high DPS ships without getting ganked. You can totally be a deadspace/officer whale, as long as you’re not also totally clueless.

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Yes!

Seeking stuff never makes happy. It only satisfies temporarily, until the next fix is needed. This has parallels in consumerism, where people buy ■■■■ to feel better until it bores them again and they need something new.

They are, basically, relatively mindless slaves to their own reward systems.

I actually have a friend who is not really a carebear, but a hardcore MMO player. He calls it “end gamer” and he is closing in on his 50s. He is a highly creative person, but he thinks he has things “figured out” and then they bore him. What really happens is that he simply gets bored because the game can not fancy his reward system anymore, so he looks for a new game that achieves that for a while.

The marvels of modern science. Dare I call it abusive.

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It’s the difference between frustration relief and self achievement .

Frustration is driven by the social need of finding its own role in the society.
Self achievement requires you to make your own goal, without requiring the acknowledge of your environment.

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I’d guess most players could make more isk with a backwater agent as they can get a higher isk/lp return.
Lanngisi is great for blitzing, but the LP is way lower than many other corps.

Allistra pretty regularly trades in the 2-3k isk/lp range with fed navy webs, Afterburners, and MWDs. You can sometimes get even more with tracking comps, but those usually have lower volume. They have a lv4 agent in Siyi with a pretty small constellation 2 jumps max for normal missions, it’s even a 0.5 so you should get near max LP payouts. Although if you are running burners you probably have to go a bunch of extra jumps. LP Store - Return on ISK - Aliastra - The Forge Sell

in general the servers are fine, they have some problems when people cram 1000s of people into a single system though. In most other games you are lucky if you can have more than 10 players a side so I have to say it’s a problem I’m willing to live with.

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39

Well the volume should be part of the evaluation of the corporation

I personally check the isk/lp of each agent’s offer by considering I have 1M LP to spend, which in turns give me the number of offer to trade, thus a given number of items to buy/sell.
Then I get the price of items at direct value , and compare the sell value after taxes minus the cost to the lp involved

This takes volume into account

eg if you look at SoE’s probes
LP Store - Return on ISK - Sisters of EVE - The Forge Buy
1800 LP /offer thus I need to make 556 trades
this requires

  • 556 * 1800 = 1 000 800 LP
  • 556 * 1200 = 667.2M isk
  • 556 * 10 = 5560 combat scanner probe

this produces

  • 5560 sister combat scanner probe

the cost in isk is 667.2M + 161M (sum of 5560 first value for combat probe in The Forge)
the gain in isk is 2B118 (sum of the 5560 first values for soe combat prob in https://evemarketer.com/types/30486/buy The forge) *0.99 (taxes)

total gain is 1b269
per LP it is 1268 isk/lp

Of course after that, I purchase my items at long-term and sell some of my produced items at SO.
But this tells me how much I am sure to make.

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