Why eve's population is low, and its major problems that should be focused on

@CCP_Falcon
I know you are busy making a game but please take time to consider the following

Alright, this post is going to be a bit aggressive toward you ccp guys, but if you read it, and consider it i would have imparted upon you 17 years of experience in game design and heavy research. these are going to be very hard positions for you to budget on, because i know how stuck we designers can get in a games creative direction. please consider these with serious thought and consideration

Player Population Rates
First and foremost, the reason why eve never acquired large amounts of population at the start was due to two factors you did not consider, or did not hold to be of significant value to change the design direction of the game.

Both Requirements, and Complexity Dictate the potential population of a game; Thus if you want to fix population rates by default you need to make the game more “mentally accessible” to other players.

High Sec Griefing War
I do recall being a heavy advocate for issue like war-dec spam and to have some sort of change (like that one which was brought today as “war eligibility”) that would ultimately stop this type of behavior.

I was told “its a stupid idea, it will never work, you will ruin eve, etc” Yet here we are and people are all the happier for it.

> I Want to mention this because there is a very serious problem in eve, and it is the creative direction of the game. constantly we are seeing you development team’s reps propagate this “scamming and cheating, and abuse is good for player retention” nonsense.

I have a list of really difficult questions to ask to debuke this position, but i will leave it for now and only leave ccp with a “slap on the hand” and just say "The truth is that while “grinding for new things” is good for player retention “regrinding for them” is not. I expect inexperienced designers to make that mistake, but now that this is out in the like let me be clear by saying "in absolutely no way, what so ever, under the beautiful blue sky, in the dark of the universe, under a rock is this ever, ever, ever a good thing for players, or player retention

Lets be clear about something as we continue
Either 1. Eve is a game that is realistic or 2. Eve is not a realistic game. I would like, I demand an official reply on this knowing what position the development team has.

Addressing the problems

Now moving on to war-dec griefing like issues in eve

  • Allowing people to scam and get away with it is not in any way realistic. There are “punishments” that need to be impediment. IF eve was to be good, we’d need to find a way to bring players to accountability that they CANNOT ESCAPE FROM. For example, if loads of people reported someone for scamming, and then concord came and locked them up for x period of time, we’d have an “realistic” society with “Punishment”. another option is if isk became tainted in some way that allowed the transfer to another toon to flag both accounts as scammers. This would have a huge impact on scamming. These are both impractical solutions to these problems, but something needs to be done about this.

For now what we can say is

  • We cannot pod them
  • They can simply just make another account and start all over
  • On the main account they have no accountability

High Sec Suicide ganking

Another one that really needs to be tackled. Lets be truthful and say “afk mining is a big problem”. It is the reason some entities exist (like code) or claim to exist. However, allowing the players to go around high sec under the “Banner of doing what is good for the game” (which is total BS by the way) is not a proper way to address issues.

This area of the game needs to become stricter, and more harsh replies from concord.

  • Increase the rate at which you lose standing for aggression from 0.10 (or what ever it is now) to 1.0 per a hostile action
  • Remove “get in ship” option from “open space” (as -5.0 players are using alts to bring themselves ships to suicide gank to avoid the entire mechanic of concord.

> In the past if i shot someone and kited concord around the system, i’d have a gm yelling at me almost instantly. So why is code allowed to circumvent these mechanics?

Nullsec space usage
ok seriously, can you please do something about limiting both the size, and the amount of space a single alliance can control? And work war decs into null sec sov taking. Either make it required (i’d rather have it that way) or make war decs reduce the time to capture space from an enemy (either skip or reduce timers?)

** Corporations**
Oh boy this is one that has been avoided like mining. You need to PURGE. Purge the crap out of corporations with inactive rates. you need to make closed corporations AUTO DELETE after 30 days of being closed. and you need to REMOVE TICKERS, because they are a horrible mess for corporate creation. Also the flag options could really be redone. its horrible, limited, and god aweful looking. break the same base code, it will be an improvement over what we have.

this should be a start in the right direction for serious problems.

Oh and on the topic of retention

The reason why the game is not keeping people is because there is no “demand” for players to have corporations. For example they dont “think” that they “need” a corporation enough. When the psychology of a player is at the point of “dependency” upon corporations, they will need it. when this happens a surge of people will go to create content.

In essence eve violates this by blogging into one group, removing … no… Diluting the need to have a corporation to acquire the content. The population of the alliances is what is killing the games retention, and population. If only you would listen about this how much you’d fix this game.

I was looking for a good Minmatar FW corporation but none seemed to be actively recruiting so I thought a few days about what would be a cool name / corp logo and after tooling around I came up with:

98593414_128

THIS WE’LL DEFEND

Cool name huh? It’s been taken before, by a closed corp which seems to have borked Eve Who and my Eve Online official phone app. It thinks I’m still in Republic Military School. Maybe new corporations need a day or two but yeah like you alluded there does seem to be some bugginess in corp creation/management.

There is no practical way to police scamming in a game like Eve. Scams run a whole spectrum from borderline like say under/over priced orders, to straight out lies. I’m all for tightening up the UI to eliminate low effort scams based on confusing another players, but when players are free to enter into complex social and business relationships, disputes are going to arise and CCP would need a whole legal system to try to sort out who is in the right in many cases.

They aren’t. You can’t kite CONCORD anymore and delaying or avoiding their retribution is a declared exploit. CODE. avoids the much weaker Faction Police who you are allowed to fight and evade, but not CONCORD.

No one was talking about evading. I was making the point that they are abusing the system like evasion by using alts to get around negative security status rates that would other wise result in death by concord (or faction police).

By driving a ship out to the gank site, being ready to get in them, and jumping in they give themselves a few additional seconds of killing.

Simply removing the ability to enter a ship from being undocked, or untetherd would resolve this problem.

Moving CONCORD around is legal and intended gameplay. I agree though, it is rather silly.

I would just remove CONCORD as an NPC entirely and replace it with a magic CONCORD death ray that explodes criminal ships after a set number of seconds. They serve no purpose since you can’t fight them and they make a whole bunch of server load.

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Its not needed and the ships themselves do serve a purpose, immersion. the killing criminals part is not an issue, its them being able to do things like dock, get in ships out side of stations etc that cause the problems

if -5.0 prevented docking or such things it’d be better, but im afraid as a designer what that will do to the magical world of alt spam. maybe a solution is to make pirate ships that can be bought at specific low security area’s that only can be piloted by -5.0 players, and prevent -5.0 players from accessing the main economies technology, or ships.

How would criminals operate in highsec if they couldn’t undock? There would be no room for criminal:victim or criminal:vigilante interactions.

If you like the NPC ships but not the difference in response time, it then seems simpler to me to just to reprogram CONCORD to respond with the same time whether or not they have spawned, or no matter where they are in the system.

Otherwise, you’ll still have the problem if a pair of gankers decide to ‘ping pong’ CONCORD back and forth across the system.

Your a smart one, arnt you?

They would not. that would be the punishment they have to take. As a experienced pirate i can tell you naturally people just move toward low sec, and in ways that is both good and bad (good because it gives low sec purpose, bad because its hard for new players to visit low sec due to such experienced pvpers being there).

You confused me with all this talk of CONCORD response times being your issue. If you just wanted to make highsec safer by locking out criminals, you should not beat about the bush and declare your intention.

Personally, I think highsec is plenty safe enough and the Monthly Economic Report supports this view. Only a fraction of a percent of what is moved around highsec is lost each month. The minor chance of losing something is all there is to give meaning to fits any make player choice and behaviour mean anything. Plus criminals in highsec are free targets for white knights and vigilantes so locking them out is only going to decrease content in this game.

So no, I think your proposal is a poor one unlikely to ever be implemented. Feel free to suggest that highsec should be even safer, but I wonder at those who do as if CCP never considered it before.

I dont want to make it safer.
I want to make it so that the individuals violating it repeatedly cannot do it for prolong periods. Im ok with the occasional suicide gank, however, i think after 5-6 of them it should be “no go to high sec until you earn it off”.

this is a good solution to countering the problem of not having a proper “punishment” for that type of behavior. In essence, they have circumvented the entire punishment system to reap the rewards.

im not trying to stop it, i am trying to stop it from taking place for prolong periods, or for entities existing purpose for this purpose.

Why should transferring ISK between toons be some sort of automatic scam flag?

I transfer ISK between my money-making toon and my exploration toon all the time. I’m sure I’m not alone.

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that is not what was said.
Go read it again.

You wrote this:

How did I misunderstand?

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player a scams player b
player b flags player a
player a sends isk to alt (player c)
player a and c get a scammer flag.

Okay, that’s less obnoxious.

its just one of the many ways we can create accountability. Im not against scamming, i am against scamming and not being punished or accountable for it.

not doing anything is like saying “robbers should rob a bank and police should not care”

So all I have to do is:

  1. Roll an alt
  2. “Scam myself” with my alt
  3. Flag my alt as a scammer
  4. Have my alt send ISK to Naari Naarian

You’re now flagged as a scammer.

Some great, experienced game design there. Great job.

In addition to not being a game designer, you also aren’t an experienced pirate either.

4 Likes

i spam a link afew times get reported alts sit in jita doing all day everyday still there so much for fairness

It’s more than fair.

Jita local cesspool is a valuable instructional tool.
If players fall for a scam there and learn it is a valuable lesson.
If they fall for another or even more then they deserve it.

Your spam is just spam.

totally fair

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