Header art by Empanada
“I hate the direction Eve is going, I miss the good old days when capitals and supercaps didn’t blob everything and counter subcaps completely.” This is a complaint I keep seeing on Reddit.
My response is: “What game were you playing?” Were you playing the game with remote AoE doomsdays? Or the game with tracking titans that could doomsday any subcap ship and win any engagement through attrition? Perhaps you were playing the game before jump fatigue, where you could move fleets across the galaxy with cynos. Maybe it was during the time of spider-tanking carriers with sentries? Or perhaps it was during assisted fighters from inside POS shields.
The argument for YEARS from the people with supers and titans: my ship cost billions of isk; it should not lose to a fleet worth less than it cost. The same people are now crying about how Goons have too many titans and supers and are unassailable by subcap ships. Hunters constantly whine about how Rorquals (10b isk) are unkillable with their 30 man bomber gang (1.5b isk). They constantly talk about how it used to be better for hunters.
Hunting what? No one mined; barely anyone ratted, let alone with a carrier or a supercarrier; hunters were few and far between. The amount of targets to hunt in the current Eve META has never been more abundant. Carriers and Rorquals die on a daily basis; there is always some kind of content to be found for roaming gangs. Yet, everyone seems to pine over the past. The moongoo empires, OTEC—passive isk generation through moons.
What Is So Different Now?
The game has changed on a massive scale. Everything listed above is a symptom of the changes, not the cause. The core philosophy of the game has changed. I once described the training system as a great thing. You could queue up your skills and play something else. You didn’t have to login every day and grind anything. You could play for 1 hour, or for 16, and your character would not be any better. You would have more isk if you were ratting, but that would not change the prices on a super, nor would it change the speed you train into it. Eve was basically plug-and-play.
Eve, today, is not. The game rewards active, frequent playing like never before. The more you play, the better off you are. Skill injectors, Rorquals, ratting, even the sov system. They all lead to one common conclusion: time spent = progression gained.
Moons themselves are not something you fight over anymore. R64s still exist in spirit, but they are far more spread out and they still require people to mine them. That change is one of the biggest shifts in Eve. You no longer fight over a moon, then secure it, and finally let the alliance rake in the goo. The alliance sets it up and the player has to come back 30-50 days later to mine it before it’s worth anything. Most people view this process as not worth the time and risk, and thus no one bothers fighting over it in the first place because no one wants to start the frack process. We especially see this in lowsec, or in regions of space that may be considered too dangerous.
Remove injectors; remove Rorquals; remove the changes!!!
Unlikely to happen. The previous, passive version of the game was fine for a few years. However, we just passed the 15 year mark. Any player starting the game now would be so far behind, they’d likely not play. We saw CCP acknowledge this with an increase in starting SP, alpha accounts, etc.
The game isn’t going to change, so you need to. Understand the way the game is going with regards to wanting new blood, wanting players to actively play the game, or don’t, and just quit. Provide feedback that is more than just “REEE SKILL INJECTORS KILLING GAME REEEE.” Understand that the game you played 10-15 years ago isn’t the same, and neither are you, or the players, or the devs.
Harden the fuck up.
Triumvirate Titans and Supers Down in LS
Eve Online: Some Radical Ideas
ABYSSAL ONSLAUGHT
Pew Pew
Titans were a huge mistake from day 1 with the whole “giant space dicks” stuff. They were never a serious part of the design of the game and just got out of control. I think the original idea is there’d only be a few in the whole game.
“Any player starting the game now would be so far behind, they’d likely not play.”
Is that not a massive problem? Are you basically saying that CCP should close up the game and just keep it as an old people’s home for the current players?
October 28, 2018 at 8:41 amM4A1cc Pew Pew
At least CCP was smart enough to nerf doomsdays.
October 28, 2018 at 10:40 amRonny Hugo Hansen Warelius Pew Pew
“Is that not a massive problem? Are you basically saying that CCP should close up the game and just keep it as an old people’s home for the current players?”
That’s the point he’s making, without skill injectors eve would never grow. With skill injectors however, if you play a lot you can “move up in the ranks”, as it were. And then fly more cool ships.
October 28, 2018 at 12:03 pmCalvin Smith
“Any player starting the game now would be so far behind, they’d likely not play.”
I actually find it both hilarious and sad that people fail to realise this.
October 28, 2018 at 9:50 amGarreth Vlox Calvin Smith
I find it sad that people think that is true in the day and age of skill injectors that allow you to catch up to a 5 year player 15 minutes after joining the game and injecting and choosing skills.
October 28, 2018 at 9:58 amM4A1cc Garreth Vlox
Sure, if you want to spend a small fortune. A lot of people don’t want to spend the kind of money you are hinting at. There are a lot of people who don’t like the fact that if you lose a ship or a pod, that is it, they are gone. Too many people are use to playing WoW, where if you die, you just come back, with ALL your stuff. So, let’s use your analogy on starting the game with the use of skill injectors. We will do a Rorq pilot (These seem to be the most popular.). 6 million skill points for a bare minimum, that would be roughly 14 injectors. At 710 million isk per injector, that will cost 9.9 billion isk. Then you need the Rorq. A decent fit Rorq, (One that will survive) will cost you 10 billion isk. Then through in the skill books, and other little things, another 1 billion. So, for 21 billion isk, you can go out mining in 0.0 with one of the big alliances. 21 billion isk will run you roughly 250 dollars, plus the 15 dollars to make your account omega. So, 265 dollars later you can join in on the fun in 0.0.
The amount of people playing this game has gone down since the last time I played in 2008. There would be 45k+ people on during the weekend, when was the last time you saw that? Personally, if I didn’t have the toons I have when I returned, I would have never come back to the game.
October 28, 2018 at 10:22 amRob Bobbie M4A1cc
This is accurate. Skill injectors are not bought by new people.They are used to skill up alts of very established characters. Nobody in their right mind is going to spend that kind of RL money on a game they just started.
October 28, 2018 at 10:23 pmCarvj94 Rob Bobbie
I’d say it’s not so black and white. Vets skill up their alts and new players think they need to be able to fly a capital ship to win at pvp. At most I think vets and their alts buy up 60% of the market. You and I might not wanna throw real money at the game but there’s plenty of people who’ll drop $1000 if they think they’ll be able to extract tears in a new MMO they just found.
October 29, 2018 at 2:31 amGarreth Vlox M4A1cc
People pay 10 times that much on games like BDO and Star citizen without flinching. The gaming world has changed and CCP had to go with the flow or go broke.
October 28, 2018 at 10:38 pmLord Ixlandis
Hi, CCP, Elite Spartan PvPer here, I got blobbed by filthy blobbers and had a cap dropped on my face. Rather than accept the fact I got out-numbered and out-gunned beyond what my elite skills can handle, can we please remove caps and mega-coalitions from the game? You know, so I can be king rather than those hordes of people working diligently together.
October 28, 2018 at 9:58 amM4A1cc
CCP needs to further expand the amount of skill points new players start with. What little they get, plus the extra 250k is nowhere near enough, imo. Some will say “They can use Skill Injectors”, that is both stupid and absurd for an argument. New people are not going to want to make a big investment into a game they barely know. If it was a valid argument, then hundreds of people would be flocking to EvE. As it is, numbers are still far lower than what they were 10 years ago. When you signed on during the weekend, you would see 45k+ people online, now you are lucky to see 34 to 35k people on. This tells me EvE is slowly dwindling, a loss of 10K+ people per weekend is a huge number when it comes to EvE. A 25% loss of player base for the weekends. In order to get new blood into the game, CCP needs to do better for new players.
October 28, 2018 at 10:37 amM4A1cc
Where is the story about “The Outrage Over Jump Gates”? I was interested in reading about jump gates, instead I got sucked here by a headline that now seems more fitting for The National Enquirer!
October 28, 2018 at 10:39 amIreadthis
The whole catch-up mechanic is actually just a ton of power in people like the author’s hands. It’s far to expensive to provide meaningful catch-up of 15 years playing the game in any real way.
October 28, 2018 at 11:44 amAiyana MacLaughlin
Lol Eve needs one of 3 things right now none to really attract new players none of which are gonna happen.
1. Total reset . not gonna happen due to the amount of money people (myself included) have invested in the game.
2. Second shard . Would ruin the biggest claim Eve has to fame and realistically would not do really any good as all of us that have been playing for awhile would know how to game the system and we would quickly be back to the same ole same ole.
3 Eve 2.0 . Possible but in order to succeed in the current gaming market it would have to be a care bear version which I think would sell nicely but a large number of current players would do anything they can to ruin/kill it because it would not be a “REAL” Eve without the ganking / harassment >.<
October 28, 2018 at 1:47 pmGuilford Australis Aiyana MacLaughlin
It’s helpful to distinguish between changes that are intended to improve the game (which the author discusses) and changes intended to attract new players. They aren’t always the same thing, and, indeed, the EVE community has questioned whether some examples of the second kind of change (Alpha clone states, free-to-play, skill extractors/injectors) have improved the game.
I think your second and third points are possible, though I agree they won’t happen. The only way I can picture CCP attracting a ton of new players would be to create a spin-off game that is more accessible and forgiving than EVE, though with enough shared material to make players *feel like* they’re still playing in the big leagues with all the grizzled hard-asses from the old EVE. I suppose it’s conceivable that Pearl Abyss could provide the resources CCP would need to build this kind of experience.
EVE has never been like other MMOs (including the often-compared WoW) which routinely put out massive expansions with new territory, new classes, new skills and higher skillpoint thresholds, and a new story to explore. They are huge, immersive, fully-contained new experiences of the sort that EVE has never offered. Besides wormhole space and the (much more modest) Abyssal sites, I can’t think of comparable expansions in EVE’s history. Other games market these expansions as entrance points for new players and allow them to experience something completely new along with veteran players. This model has been very successful for other games, but, for whatever reasons, CCP has spent its time and resources making incremental improvements (for which we are grateful) rather than large, accessible expansions.
October 28, 2018 at 3:26 pmDrahma Lhalma Guilford Australis
Perhaps a new Eve Gate that opens into a second shard. The gate only allows certain size ships, favoring exploration – perhaps even a new Capital Class ship that is set up for exploration. Call it the settler class and include a ship bay for small specialized ships. Essentially, this becomes the reset area, so that new players can start fresh, or grizzled vets can start over, using what they’ve learned from before. If it fails, open up the gate and make it a new region of space, if it works keep opening regions.
November 6, 2018 at 3:35 pmCarvj94 Aiyana MacLaughlin
EVE 2.0? You mean the mobile version that’s coming out next year where pvp will be too awkward to have fun with unless you play it on a tablet?
October 29, 2018 at 2:34 amPunky260
Asbolutely on point. Thx kcolor
October 28, 2018 at 2:00 pmCarvj94
Plus even if you spend 5000$ on injectors and max out half the available skills you’ll still suck and die to a veteran flying a T3D with his out of Corp alt. Really it takes like a year to learn the game and train the skills you need to do anything at least at a mid range level.
October 29, 2018 at 2:37 amDeni'z von Meanace
Remove supers from low sec, no more gate camping of HS to LS gates on SC. split KS weapon up to 2 categories anticapital and antisubcap. KS DD should be able to pop up Titans/SC wing with ease.
October 29, 2018 at 4:44 amAlot
Too big to change but I like the idea of decreasing the cost of titans to a 3rd but have their effectiveness hamstrung unless equipped with a decaying fuel cell which lasts 3 months, takes 2 months to construct and costs a 3rd of a titans current price.
That way you don’t land up with permanent assets which large alliances can crush other people with but rather permanent maintenance drains for any alliance that decides to maintain super fleets – and with the setup time to get dormant supers operational, the advantage is with attackers – especially those who can produce cores in secret.
Though changing the setup to this would be a notable insult to players who had trained all the way up to the current more powerful titans.
October 29, 2018 at 7:28 amAsia Park
I thought this was a story about “Jump Gates.” More fake news? I liked the article as written but you need to rethink the title.
October 29, 2018 at 11:53 amGeneral Thade
I actually think we baby new players too much so when they get to play the actual game they cant survive.
October 29, 2018 at 4:52 pmMatt Critchley
The article focuses a little too much on the block level play and misses the more average perspective of smaller alliances, wars and gameplay of the masses.
Here’s my take on why eve truly suffered through mechanics.
Logistics and the old Moon system made things die a death by inches.
Back as a roaming FC some ten years ago, you could take a kitchen sink group or a decent fleet comp and go roaming. You would find meat and potatoes targets – people in belts, and make a kill or three. Defenders then needed to clear you out because back then, you didn’t have anoms – you ratted or mined belts, or mined t2 moons or did DED sites. So a fleet would come out and you would get a fight.
Now that fight would usually be a brawl where even a winner would be mauled. I had fights where we took 10 guys and even beat fleets of 20-25. Even if you lost, you would make some kills, and I can remember many nights where we lost but were grinning when we respawned back home as we looked over shiny HAC or CMD kills in return for our cheaper but better setup and insured ships. It was one major reason why back then killboards held a lot more allure.
After logi, I saw things gradually shift to one side running, or docking up. Or fights where one side wouldn’t break and the other lost near everything to no kills in return. This wasn’t fun gameplay. Sure you got plenty of trolling out of it if you won, but it ended the era of ten guys saying ‘fuck it let’s try it anyway’.
Next – the moon system changed alliances in a big way. Many kicked out industrialists or casual players, and were only interested in making block fleets of 150km battleships to hold moons, and maybe rat a bit. When you roamed these beasties, they docked up and ignored you – their core income came from moons, which were safe. This hurt gameplay.
Roaming began to see less and less targets, less ways to cause fleets to come out and fight, and gradually what fleets did come at you, were usually in prepared comps with several or more logi than you had. Sure there were ways to counter it a bit, but it didn’t help the core problem. Core roaming pvp suffered and suffered hard.
Meanwhile, T2 moons would be harvested by a handful of people with alts, t2 exported to empire, mins brought in from botters in empire (another problem that got hit properly a bit too late), and used to create endless super proliferation at a huge rate.
Keeping those supers safe meant having allies when you deployed. So powerblocks grew faster and faster. Alliances fought 1 on 1 wars over sov less and less. And roaming to interdict their money making and inevitable fleet replacement was no longer effective. It was structure bashing or nothing.
Large coalitions eventually meant a rise in rental empires.
Anomalies made roaming harder – more sites ratters could be in meant far more time for them to gtfo when you roamed in. We were vets of a decade by this point, skilled and experienced enough to plan carefully, and even then we had roams commonly where we spent 1-2 hours for no kills.
Not to mention the increased resource density from anomalies and upgrading means less need to war over territory. Less content drivers. You get the idea.
And yes, eventually in low sec or quieter regions you’d get supers dropped on you from major alliances with that t2 production who now were bored and trying to find a use for their large ships outside of block warfare. One reason the jump mechanics changed were to stop groups like PL from catapulting super fleets all over the place to dogpile on small fry.
End of the day, CCP had great ideas, but I believe Eve has suffered from a case of unforeseen consequences.
Sorry for the long post, but it’s a complicated issue that was never going to be short to explain a view on.
October 31, 2018 at 3:19 amOlmeca Gold
This article is beyond ignorant.
Yes, capitals always had exceptional capabilities.
But at no point in Eve’s history if you roamed in a region you’d see a boson titan at many of the out gates, a super/carrier camping many of the in-gates, mining ships having an accompanying spare supercap just to guard them, capital umbrellas capable of suppressing the largest dreadbomb fleets ready to drop 24/7, and so on. That’s what’s new. It’s called proliferation. That’s what people are complaining about. When relative expensiveness and inaccessibility of capital ships stops being a factor on whether people will use them, the exceptional capabilities of capitals become unjustified. And that includes fatigueless jump.
It’s also a lie that the new Eve rewards activity. The new Eve rewards activity given that you join the largest coalition. It’s not like other people want to be inactive or don’t want to use their space. It’s just that nobody else has the luxury to 20-box Rorquals under your level of safety, merely because their umbrellas are smaller. You (or other bigger fish) will just go bash them if they tried. So the imbalance starts from the very fact that someone will always have the largest umbrella. The job of CCP is introducing diminishing returns and counters to that, which is what people are demanding, and what all the discussion about capitals are about.
This article seems to be an example of how you brainwash your playerbase with ignorant self interested perspectives of game balance. So they’ll believe there is nothing wrong with mechanics that specifically favor them, and they can go defend them in other mediums. You operate literally like a cult. You don’t have to take the game that seriously you know. You should be able to call imbalance imbalance, despite the fact that they favor your playstyle. Afterall it’s still just a game, and a balanced Eve is good for all of our interests.
November 1, 2018 at 2:40 amMoomin Amatin Olmeca Gold
“But at no point in Eve’s history……..”
As a new(ish) player I can state that in Dek when I started there were caps being dropped on just about everything. You can see this for yourself by just looking at Zkillboard.
“It’s also a lie that the new Eve rewards activity.”
You are not helping your supposed points by making such a claim. To then go on about “brainwashing” and “cults” seems to show that you know you are on shaky ground.
If you have any actual evidence to support your claims then I would be only too happy to review it. But I think that we both know that you simply really really dislike Goons and are always looking to blame your woes on them. Evidence of this can be seen with your reddit user should anyone care to check https://old.reddit.com/user/olmeca_gold/posts/ .
But as you claim to be so knowledgeable can you point me to a time in Eve history where there has been “balance”?
November 1, 2018 at 3:35 pmOlmeca Gold Moomin Amatin
I roamed in Goon Deklein plenty of times.
You sure were dropping caps on just about everything (which I didn’t say otherwise). You had the best maintained capital umbrella back then too.
You did not have boson titans on most gates. You did not have on grid guardian cap accounts for mining ships. And more importantly, you did not sufficiently proliferate FAXes to render any 100 man hostile dreadbomb ISK negative (often with 0 kills).
All those meant you still did not have the safety levels you now have. One could exhaust your umbrella fatigue to get kills. Or stay outside the umbrella range (Deklein had bad range). Or roam in subcaps your space without being worried about getting bosoned or bubbled + fightered to death at gates. Or could bring a huge dreadbomb and kill substantial stuff before losing the dreads. You too can go check on zkill, for example, how dreadbombs were a thing in Deklein (and Delve) up until the point you proliferated enough FAXes. Nobody does them anymore, and those who do fail miserably.
So previously you could catch someone not paying attention to local, then after even if they were at the keyboard you would kill them. The only way someone dies in Delve now is being totally afk (so they either get inhibbed, or they don’t PANIC/CYNO before dying to a 100 man bomber fleet).
So the more you proliferate, the safer your space gets, so you mine and proliferate more. And then all kinds of problems arise.
PS: I do dislike Goons. But I did not begin to dislike Goons out of nowhere. First you disliked me due to my view of game balance, and due to your members acting like cult members defending cult interests at all costs. Only after you have thrown all kinds of shit on me due to my balance concerns, and due to my ingame activities, I have begun to dislike Goons. But you are now acting exactly how cult mentality would demand. Anyone who doesn’t agree with your self interested view of Eve balance must in actuality “dislike Goons, grr Goons”. That’s generic Goon cult mentality anyway. Your leaders have coined the concept of “grr Goons” to make that exact move available.
November 1, 2018 at 4:33 pmMoomin Amatin Olmeca Gold
Thank you for your response.
When you were roaming Delve prior to The Casino War the game mechanics present were very different. There was not a boson titan on every gate as bosons did not exist. FAXs did not exist either. Fozzie Sov did not exist and at one point nor did jump fatigue. At that time if you came into Dek the likelyhood of you dying to an overwhelming force was a common event. But the force would be in the form of Domis, Zealots or whatever the flavour of the day was.
Then CCP changed the landscape of the game. I would argue that the biggest loser due to those changes were the Goons. Even back then Goons knew what was up and had reduced their Sov holdings greatly. The future was going to be all about player density in the systems that you owned and how to extract as much as possible from that space. As soon as Goons hit Delve that is exactly what they did.
After two years of building infrastructure and banging the capital drum the Goons unveiled what they had been working on. In very short order the coalition of the north collapsed in a heap that now fights among itself for whatever reason they care to put forward for the day.
The main point in this is that the Goons did not sit idle. They knew that things were changing and made plans to account for such changes. Was it all risk free in Delve? Of course it was not. The D-W jump beacon incident only showed that care was still required. Even with your own efforts you made claims about how much you were hurting the Goon efforts in Delve in your posts from 2 years ago or so.
Alliances that have looked at the Goon model and gone “that seems to work” are doing pretty good for themselves. Albeit there are not a lot of alliances doing so as so many failed to adapt, preferring to rely on previous methods of income and power.
The “GRR GON HAT GON” thing came from the enemies of Goons. Goons just decided to own it. In truth it is probably one of the things that binds us the most as Goons. But as much as you may claim that Goons are unassailable please do remember that at one point the Goons were the new kids on the block.
Two years ago there were many claims that Goons would not be able to field a fleet of more than 200 sub caps ever again. At that time the enemies of the Goons convinced themselves that they had won. The reality of which has only recently dawned on them. The only response I am really seeing to the latest victory by the Goons is for calls to nerf those elements that others think are responsible for the Goons recovery and increase in power. So go ahead and get nerfs for FAXs, Rorquals, Titans, Supers and whatever else you want to get nerfed in order to level the playing field. Let me know what you want to get nerfed and I will do my best to help. The reason that I am willing to help in such a cause is simply that it will hurt everyone else way more than it hurts Goons. If you should get all the nerfs you want then you can also expect a change to your own gameplay. If bigger and shinier ships are no longer viable to use outside of war operations then you condemn yourself to shooting T1 cruisers and similar. Also remember that being prepared, willing to commit and the ever important n+1 will still defeat those who roam into your territory.
My question to you remains though, can you point me to a time in Eve history where there has been “balance”?
November 1, 2018 at 9:51 pmOlmeca Gold Moomin Amatin
First thing to remember, the OP of this post was asking what changed since past 2 years, so that now people whine about capitals.
When I was roaming in Goon Deklein there were no FAXes but there was triage. The point of me pointing to FAXes was how you were able to stop dreadbombs after proliferating sufficient capital logi. You used to be able to succeed in killing lots of capitals with dreadbombs. Even with triage, Deklein Goons weren’t able to stop crowded dreadbombs. Now you can, thanks to proliferation. Change #1.
You wanted to merely contradict me, so that you pointed out back then titans didn’t have bosons and carriers didn’t have fighters. That actually supports my argument vs. the OP. When I was roaming in Goon Deklein titans/supers weren’t essential gatecamping ships. Now they are. They gained new capabilities which the OP was asking for. Titans can make gates unpassable. Fighters’ decloaking capabilities are insane. You used to be able to subcap roam much more freely in Deklein. Now you can’t. This doesn’t mean there aren’t any subcaps roaming. But less. Thanks to proliferation/new capital abilities. Change #2.
When I was roaming in Goon Deklein there wasn’t supers/titans guarding each mining fleet. It meant if a mining fleet was caught, chances are some ships will die. Now there are for most fleets. You land on grid, can’t even kill a barge. Another effect of proliferation. Change #3.
And soon you’ll have umbrella without jump fatigue.
And soon you’ll have excavator stealers’ methods being nerfed by CCP adjustments chain booshing.
I heard “Goons were knocked down so bad but worked so hard their way on top” point of view from so many of them. That’s your pride speaking. But that’s another cult myth. “Biggest loser due to changes” weren’t Goons. You were upset back then, and your cult leaders were disseminating ideas on how CCP is nerfing you, and your members were putting their unshakable faith in those ideas. All those people failed to foresee through the changes, just like you failed to foresee through how MER publications actually would help you recruit people. You lost space, you lost your periphery alliances, but excess space or the periphery did not mean much anymore.
Past 2 years of changes essentially tripled the reward to the alliances offering “recruit anyone you can get, provide safe anomaly farms, let them build up to capitals, then let them give us +1 in our titan fleets” kind of contract. Particularly tof these alliances, the mechanics further singled out the one with the biggest initial capital umbrella. Because that one would be able to provide 100% safety to their krabs, and others wouldn’t. By definition, if you don’t have the largest umbrella, there will be someone who can contest yours. Now, you always had this kind of contract, and you had the biggest umbrella among these alliances. It was bound by game mechanics to find itself on top, which is what happened.
Meanwhile, you didn’t find yourself on top because others “failed to realize Goon model was working”. For some like NCPL, they merely didn’t want to play Eve with such contract. Even when they had the umbrella to sustain it. That contract is an entire playstyle. It means playing together with all those Rus and Chinese RMTing Rorqual multiboxers and worry about their safety. NCPL wanted to have their closest relations to these people as external entities which pay rent. But if the game says you need to be otherwise to win nullsec warfare, they are within their rights to say “fuck that”. Many others, from GOTG to SOLAR to FCON and all worse entities, wanted to PvE, but didn’t have the largest umbrella. Consequently most of them were absorbed by Goons. Idk if you remember oldest MER’s but Cobalt Edge/Outer Passage was mining almost as much as Delve in the beginning. People with bigger umbrellas farmed their PvE ships, so they joined the alliance with the biggest umbrella. GOTG wanted the Goon model, but didn’t have the umbrella to sustain it (and their allies NCPL didn’t want the model). Again, the game only allows for 1 alliance employing the playstyle. Not only Goon linemembers, but also CCP/CSM are also failing to recognize this. And that failure will be essential to this game’s eventual death, given current trajectory, in 2-3 years.
When it comes to the Goon linemember, you guys are just too immersed in your playstyle and too indoctrinated by articles like this, to see things from the other side. That’s what I meant by “brainwashing”. You kept dropping capitals to anyone in Deklein, and now you are doing the same in Delve, and you think nothing has changed while many things did. The changes just didn’t involve you. And then you found your alliance shrinking on the map after Fozzie sov, and then found yourself having to relocate after WWB, and then witnessed all that economic growth in Delve, and heard stories about how Goons were the smart and hardworking ones to deserve it. You were too immersed to realize that’s mostly a change in game design. And thanks to the cult brainwashing completely destroying your ability to put yourself in other people’s shoes, you failed to realize others didn’t “fail to adapt” but just said “fuck this”. Either left the game, or left their alliances to be absorbed by Goons.
To answer your final question, there was never a full balance in Eve. But we can talk about more balance and less balance, more content and less content, more reasons for people to keep playing this game or less. It is obvious that Tranquility is more balanced compared to Singularity. The claim is it is also less balanced than its previous states.
And those imbalances cost the game the people who play it. Zkill shows a reduction since 2013 in deaths of every kind of subcap, despite how cheap things are right now. Other sources will show you how online counts and subs reduced 2/5 to 3/5 since 2013. If you are an interested fellow like me, you could use Google Trends to search eve related keywords and see and even more severe trend of reduction. That suggests the real people (as opposed to alts that fill all those subs and online counts) playing the game reduced even beyond 3/5. One (not the only) of the reasons behind this is how CCP buffed the “Rorqual multiboxer” lifestyle beyond imagination (and no, the yield nerfs mean nothing, they were just meant to make people get more Rorqual accounts), to boost short term sub and profit numbers, before the sale to PA. CCP invalidated lots of other playstyles. From subcap roams, to “elite pvp”, to selectively recruiting alliances, to solo blops, to renting. All this created a huge vacuum of content and caused people to quit. But despite the reduction in the number of people playing, from the extractor sales and increased subs to due Rorqs, CCP managed to keep the game’s stats on paper afloat before the sale.
But these measures were only short term, meaning when the last Goon who wants one gets his capital alt, CCP will begin to bleed profits. And now that we end up with an absolutely broken ecosystem, with all but “Rorqual multiboxing vertical farming” lifestyle invalidated, it’s all downhill from here. Particularly with people like the OP in utter denial of what’s happening having voice of the majority of the game’s community, even the community will fail to realize what went wrong.
And sadly, those who are really on top of your alliance don’t even care about any of that. They do all this brainwashing because they just want the largest community possible to leech real dollars from. The medium changes time to time (it was targeted ads and book kickstarters before, now it’s twitch and crowdfunding). But the story is always the same.
November 2, 2018 at 3:45 amMoomin Amatin Olmeca Gold
I think that it is important to recognise that there are different playstyles and motivation from all the Eve players. In this, no single play style is “correct”, as you would expect from a sandbox environment. Hisec mission runners care not for the complaints of nullsec roams and gatecamps. Station traders do not care for mission runners. And so the list could go on, but I am sure you get the point.
Equally there is the commercial motivation to consider from both CCP and PA. Also note that Eve is quite an unusual game in player base and longevity.
Kcolor states in his opening paragraph that the article was prompted by yet another round of vocal complaint from certain parts of our community. His piece reflected on the past as not being quite as rosy as some would like us to collectively remember. Kcolor then goes on to explain that things have changed in some quite fundamental ways. He then closes with a prediction that some of the changes put forward as common complaints will not be rolled back. His position is then backed up pointing out the moves by CCP to get new blood into the game and to keep them there.
In that very brief summary of Kcolor’s article I personally have no complaint. I think that he is generally on point.
With your response you seem to maintain that proliferation is the problem here. This is something that I personally think is just a perfectly natural thing. People are going to catch up at some point. Especially if those who think that they have won in Eve by having the largest ship no longer log in.
When Goons pulled out of the north during The Casino War it was a deliberate move. Goons had dealt with a load of changes under a perfect storm of events. Mittens chose Delve very deliberately. Not only did it have history for Goons, but it was far enough away from those they had just fought and had a great geography for defence. There are many other reason why Delve was a great choice. And it was a choice. Mittens has said many times over that there is no way we could have done what we have if we had stayed in Dek.
Things changed, Goons adapted, those who have not have died. Goons are not alone in adapting, Legacy are also doing pretty OK from what I can tell. When you state that Goons have not changed their playstyle you are correct, but possibly not in the way you think. Goons are empire builders with a little bit of cheekiness. Goons also happen to be very good empire builders. As you rightly point out the MER was a great recruitment tool for us. Will all of those flocking to the Goons stick around should they happen to go to war against all of Eve again? I strongly doubt it. But some might and Goons have a track record of surviving. Helping to rebuild the Goon empire is my greatest accomplishment in Eve to date. I think that others also share my sentiment.
You go to some lengths to detail that the success of Goons is not due to their effort but only through the changes made by CCP. Not sure I can get behind that to be honest. At the end of The Casino War membership of GSF was about 15k. This was comparable to PH. Yet GSF has doubled in size since and yet PH has not. Why is this the case? What did GSF do that PH did not? Why is PH not in the same position as GSF? Because last time I checked, PH recruitment is less picky than the Goon one.
I must confess I am quite amused where you state “you failed to realize others didn’t ‘fail to adapt’ but just said ‘fuck this’ to the invalidation of their Eve identities and lifestyles”. Because in that sentence you confirm that those who left failed to adapt because their game style was invalidated by CCP.
There are more words I could write about this, a lot more. Between us we have already written enough for a couple of articles at least. But I will try to wrap things up with something that I hope we can both agree with. The future of Eve is completely dependent on new blood coming into the game. The efforts from CCP show that this is something that they have recognised and are looking to improve. Wardecs are likely to be removed or completely re-worked. The New player experience continues to be refined and improved. Will CCP do everything perfectly in the future? Personally I doubt it but that is not through any specific fault. CCP are dealing with a game that has existed for over 15 years. Very few games can make such a claim. As such CCP are dealing with issues that few other games will ever have to consider. The one thing I do know for myself is that I think that Eve is a very interesting game. One that I will continue to play all the time that it is.
November 2, 2018 at 3:50 pmSorin Orii
TL;DR —
November 1, 2018 at 3:23 amEve, today, is not. The game rewards active, frequent playing like never before. The more you play, the better off you are. Skill injectors, Rorquals, ratting, even the sov system. They all lead to one common conclusion: time spent = progression gained.
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EVE Is like Magic: TG – not pay to win. Pay to play, yes. But anyone with a common counterspell can keep a black lotus from coming into play. Develop better playing strategies. Quit complaining. Playing the game allows for people to develop relationships which are essential to achieving goals. It is the goal of any company to try to keep its userbase actually using the product.