I explained how EVE should work towards a state of equilibrium between the producers (miners, haulers, industrialists), the primary consumers (the gankers and pirates), the secondary consumers (the PvPers, small gang and large gang, the people that defend an alliance), and the scavengers.
The EVE ecosystem is a nebulous concept if you've never experienced it. The balanced ecosystem, it is something that used to exist. Well before my time in the game. But it was there. All the moving parts working in harmony. Back when people worked where they played. Where if you did your thing in nullsec, you did all your things in nullsec.
This was back in 2003-2007. Back before the game was highsec-centric. This was back when nullsec was the place to be. This is where players gravitated. It was where the stories were being told. Where the money was to be made. Highsec was where every player began, but players wanted to be out in the wilds, the frontier. It's where you could make your mark upon the game.
As time moved onwards, families moved into the game. They wanted to be safe. If they weren't safe they wrote to their government. That government, CCP, wanted to please. So they gave these new settlers what they wanted. People stopped moving out of highsec. The rewards were there, and the risk was ever dwindling. Suburbia began to encroach upon the ecosystem. The delicate balance was lost. The game slowly, but ever so surely, became highsec-centric. Fewer people saw any need to risk it all on getting rich out on the frontier, because getting rich could be accomplished from within the gated community of highsec.
Granted, to make the suburb metaphor work, you have to invert the EVE political map. Highsec, the center, are the suburbs, the gated communities. Nullsec, the outer ring, is the inner city, the hillbilly wasteland. Even though inversion, the metaphor still works.
Don't believe me though. Here is what it was like from a fellow that lived it:
Once upon a time, before the bad days of an unbalanced hi-sec and null sec anomolies, nullsec dwellers used to use the belts to make their money, ratting and mining. This meant nullsec was packed with nice juicy targets busy making ISK to pay for their PVP ships.Those 2004-2007 years, why is that not the game anybody wants to play anymore? Why do people continue to push for more highsec-centric mechanics from CCP? What was so terrible about that EVE Online? Why is highsec-centric EVE preferable to the ecosystem as it once existed? Has the evolution of how we play EVE, how we function as a massive group, been for the better?
This plethora of targets attracted numerous fast moving gangs who roamed throughout nullsec looking for their 'Daily Raven'. As this activity caused a loss of ISK to the large alliance members, defensive gangs were often created to fight the aggressors, gate camps set up to catch them as they roamed through the alliances territory, jump bridges used to get ahead of a roaming gang, to kill them as they exited an alliances space.
An alliance that didn't defend in this way quickly started losing members as ISK making became too difficult and moral crumbled, this meant that a small PVP corp, living on the edge of an alliances area could have a real impact on the daily life in nullsec, the easy targets of ratting Ravens and miners started the whole PVP food chain, which could escalate up and up until alliances were fighting each other. All aspects of PVP were being created from small gangs up to large alliance fleets.
This was how it happened back up to 2007. Back then I was losing ratting ships in the belts to roaming gangs from CoW and Tri, and roaming through Geminate and the Vale interrupting Pure and Hydra's ISK gathering activities; some we won some we lost, but it was always entertaining.
No-one back then moved to hi-sec, null was where you earned the big money, afk cloaking was un-heard of, why bother? You could disrupt someones industry by actually playing the game.
Now the targets are gone, some safely away into anomolies, but most back into hi-sec to earn safe isk. No easy targes in the belts, no roaming gangs, no defense fleets, no FCs trying to stay three steps ahead of another gang as a running battle develops across 30 jumps. No fun, just AFK cloakers and big blob sov grinds.
This is the Eve we need to get back to, because nowadays it's easier to go to hi-sec to earn ISK, meaning none of this game play takes place.
"No-one back then moved to hi-sec, null was where you earned the big money, afk cloaking was un-heard of, why bother? You could disrupt someones industry by actually playing the game."
ReplyDeleteafk cloaking was un-heard of... that sounds good. would be nice if we get back there. Going to high sec to make money ... well yes some do it some don't. There is money to make in 0.0 but with anomalies and hidden belts it is a bit more safe and with the huge blue donut the intelligence system spreads far and wide.
A gang comes, finds no targets and leaves. Most hide under pos because why risking a ship if they will go soon and leave bored?
Farms and fields sounds good but you won't find cattle to slaughter on the fields. Thats just a one sided enjoyment and would not last long.
My take would be (like somewhere hidden in the F&I forum) to enable gangs to raid and hack I-Hubs and ore processing facilities. If you don't fight the raiders they will steal some of your isk.
Hacking I-Hubs: losing X% of Bounty to the hacking fleet ofer Y hours.
Hacking ore depots: Stealing the passive income or disabling it for X hours.
Same would be cool for Moon Goo but assaulting a pos is a bit harder than an I-Hub.
(if someone is interested the thread is named "small gang activity or 'a reason to fight'")
The problem is not that high sec is too good but 0.0 has to few ways to harm the enemy. Cloaky camping is most likely the single most lucrative way to harm. But I guess most would enjoy if they could play active to harm the enemy.
think of high sec groups forming up raiding fleets to go out and raid the low and 0.0. They will have fun and profit and the local residence have something to fight against and a reason to do it.
It's nothing to do with high-sec. Null-sec is broken. The average null-sec line member can't make decent ISK in null-sec space.
ReplyDeleteThe reasons?
Low rewards
High risk
Cloaky campers
Crap infrastructure
"low rewards"
DeleteCompared to highsec. Because CCP moved their development towards a more highsec-centric system.
"Cloaky campers"
This didn't matter in the old days, because there was much roaming and PvP. This is mentioned in the article, in the story-time section.
Poetic, that "roaming" was boring back then, too. I think people were still high on the possibilities of EVE in 2004, and that's why null was a bit more exciting. A sandbox may look deeper, more limitless in its early days, than it actually ends up proving to be in the longterm.
DeleteAlso, one thing you neglect to even consider in your formulation, and which seems like the 800lb. elephant in the room, is that the nullsec of yore is not the nullsec of today. Back in that "golden age" there actually seemed to be possibilities in null, room for players to really make a mark. Now nullsec is Wal-Mart. I'd say that this, in combination with perceived danger or inconvenience, is why most high-sec players don't make the move. It's a frontier that has already been settled.
That's one of the things I really dislike about how you frame this issue, Poetic. You cast all the blame on high-sec, and seem to completely disregard the possibility (nay, likelihood) that nullsec politics is its own worst enemy in terms of drawing high-sec players in. I don't think that most players want to pledge fealty to some huge alliance just so they can experience the "privilege" of living in null. That's the sort of instinct which can feed conflict in a nice way ("I'm not going to give in to Wal-Mart!"), but the blobs are so strong that there's no hope of starting something new and making an incursion. So what do these players do? They stay in high-sec doing whatever, or they join FW, or they join WH corps.
Null needs to be retooled and reorganized, and I don't mean adding more ISK faucets. That's just not a great solution, and the existing powers would more than likely just find a way to monopolize them anyway. It would just be more money flowing into their pockets. No, CCP needs to make drastic changes that will cut down on the blue-ing of nullsec, and actually nudge players more into direct conflict. In other words, remaining static, pulling income passively out of tech moons should hurt somehow. There should be some diminishing returns introduced in order to spur activity, spur conflict, and make it possible for large alliances to be thrown off-guard if they aren't quick enough to adapt. That would give smaller teams of individuals an "in" to their own nullsec path. They wouldn't be forced to work at Wal-Mart as a matter of course. I can tell you that this is all a lot of us are asking. So many people really want to be in nullsec, but they feel like there are no more real possibilities out there. We have a point, and I think you've been ignoring it, Poetic. It's a glaring error in your position.
Anonymous has it right as well. His summation closely mirrors what I was trying to say with some different points thrown in. Da Dom is also right when saying Nostalgia is a seductive liar.
DeleteHuman greed. The families you are talking about went from a "on the frontier" game style to a bunker mentality, hiding in castles and fighting the isk war, protecting "assets". It is a new game, less about spaceships and more about isk grind and playing meta.
ReplyDeleteWith the way the game is going toward a mainstream market CCP might as well just add "opt out of pvp" and "opt out of pve". That way the bears can have their safety and the rest of us can at least have some fun without worrying about isk until some new indie studio rises to the challenge of making that sandbox experience live again.
ReplyDeleteAfter GW2 most of the industry will of course move to completely seperate PVE and PVP (outside of RvR/WvW scenarios) or drop one of them altogether (Camelot Unchained, Neverwinter). A perfect climate for a new take on CCPs original vision.
Tis a sad day if Eve comes to that.
DeletePlease leave and take away your idiotic ideas.
Nostalgia is a seductive liar
ReplyDeleteThat quote was SO on the mark. The gradual changes become not so gradual when you look at the entire picture then-versus-now. As I have said before, it is so important to keep balance. I now hisec mine about 90% of the time and would in theory want hisec to be completely safe. But I don't. It would ruin the game for everyone. I will keep saying we need people like you and James315 to keep pointing out all the little things that may tip the balance too much in one way or the other.
ReplyDeleteEverything your correspondent describes is still possible, although there's been a general and fairly severe nerf to ratting income (both from highsec L4s and from nullsec anoms) since 2007. The difference is that the older players bought into the conceit that nullsec was where you went to stake your own claim, and they left high sec behind to do so. The new ones have optimized their tactics around the game's mechanics, whatever the result. They have certainly optimized high sec PVE far beyond the degree that most high sec denizens would even consider.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, the PVP paradise your commenter describes could happen today, it just doesn't. (The fact that single-player PVE content has been nerfed across the board is a strong disincentive to PVP, but that's another kettle of fish.)
This post certainly illuminates James 315's stance better. If the goal is to bring back the good old days by main force, and sod anyone who likes high sec for what it is, then his position is still blunt force trauma, but at least it's directed at the problem. I doubt that it will work as well as he things it will, and I imagine that he will discover that game-mechanical solutions to human problems tend not to work so well (see also: CONCORD), and that trying to force people to do anything in a game tends to backfire (see also: Incarna).
The meta of EVE is risk management, which is a direct and inevitable optimization of "risk/reward" and "PVP with consequences." Good luck changing it.
I buy the whole risk v reward argument, null sec and especially low sec being not worth it etc. and the concept of the pvp food chain. The piece that I'm missing though is the inequity in the industrialist <-> primary consumer interaction. When industrialist and primary consumer meet, the only choices the industrialist has is lose or not play the game. In an MMO where crafting skills are in the same scope as combat skills (increasing one is at the cost of the other) the industrialist can not compete on equal footing with the combat pilot in the combat arena yet the combat pilot can force the combat arena upon the industrialist at their whim. Yes the industrialist can get another pilot to protect them, but now you have one side requiring two players to play the game vs the other side only needing the one player.
ReplyDeleteIf we want to encourage the producers as you say to move to low and null sec then we need to solve the issue where an equal amount of players from one group can force the same amount of players from another group to not play the game. That might not be important in a macro sense, but this is a video game and it is very important at the individual level.
There has to be tools that a producer can use to either fight back or avoid the primary consumer while still playing the game. All other things being equal, if one type of player can force another type of player to stop playing the game at their whim, no one's going to want to be that other type of player.
I've been playing Eve since 2005. I was part of that era mentioned in 2007 in Geminate/Vale with Hyrda, Tri and Pure.
ReplyDeleteI will admit that I am getting confused by this debate. I'd like to ask some questions. No Tinfoilery here, just debate provocation.
Is it being argued that Nullsec is more safe or less safe than Highsec? Should one be more safe than the other?
The design "intention" at one point was to make Nullsec more rewarding because of the higher risk involved.
Is it really an AFK cloaker that prevents the "fun" in Nullsec? Is Nullsec no longer seeing roaming gangs because Ratters are deep within an anomaly and the gang can't find them fast enough?
If Nullsec is empty with everyone flocking to Highsec and no roaming PvP gangs anymore, how has Nullsec become high-risk?
If you remove general safety/security from the discussion on both, does Highsec or Nullsec have the potential to earn more ISK?
How is it there are Low Rewards in Nullsec? Is it due the limited market availability vs access to trade hubs? No NPC Mission centers? No Factional Warfare? What kind of rewards does Nullsec need to be attractive, or do they just need to be bigger than the rewards found in Highsec?
Aren't "rewards" more associated to the Producer part of the ecosystem? Are there Consumers in Nullsec anymore?
What is it that is being argued here?
The statement from your source is the most altruistic view of how nullsec "was" back in the day.
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't until mid 2005 when outposts could be built in Nullsec allowing true colonization of space, so for the most part until then Nullsec was either empty, or had populations clustered around the seeded conquerable stations or POS outposts.
Roaming gangs in nullsec were slow-moving affairs as almost nobody had full sets of warp to zero bookmarks (back then the closest you could get was warp to 15).
Probing was an art-form, requiring not only the in-game skills to use the things (much fewer in game skills for them at the time) but also required must better control of where the probes were placed in relation to the target. Subsequently made better over time but only really moving over into something widely used with the release of Worm holes in 2009.
Even in those days Nullsec was marginally better for making isk and the majority of the isk in nullsec came through mining of the local zydrine and Megacyte heavy rocks, or near constant ratting which was only sometimes vulnerable to roaming gangs. alt scout sat at near every chokepoint system (similar to now). Burn Eden made their names with the supposedly ineffective afk cloaking/cloakers/ganking.
I'm hard-pressed, other than for some very specific times where small corps/roaming gangs had anywhere close to the effect mentioned. Jump bridges and the ability of the "home fleet" to project out to distant points of space in extremely short periods of time has contributed far more (imho) to the death of small/mid sized gangs impacting ratting than any other single item, even anoms.
none of that is to say that any other parts of your post are wrong. Highsec centric gameplay does ruin nullsec and other aspects of the game, BUT the idea that 2004-2007 was the "high point" and we have moved away from there is mostly false. The biggest death to small gang and medium gang impact was the cries to nerf nano that resulted with the major speed changes late 2008. Without the solid ability for small fast gangs to strike and escape before jump bridging response fleets could seal them into pockets, small and medium corp impacts on the nullsec game slowly dwindled and died to the point where it sits now. Not quite dead, but not effective either.
You people seem to forget the EVE player population has increased greatly since the 2004-2007 years. A good part of that reason is that CCP has made changes to highsec so that new players don't get smashed in the face as soon as they start playing the game. So the new players finance the game so that the big null players can squat on their behinds in nullsec and lay in their rivers of isk.
ReplyDeleteMy corp chooses to live in highsec yet we still engage in roams to WH space, low sec, and occasionally null. And we do those roams in cheap ass T1 ships that don't bankrupt us if we get podded. We don't want to join one of the big political alliances because we do not want to become one of the fawning pet crowd that seems to infest and camp nullsec.
So please don't tell highsec how we should be playing our game. Come and kill us in your big shiny ships if you wish. We won't stop you. Put your money where your mouth is. Just because you guys sit on your asses and glare at each other with boredom in nullsec sovs doesn't mean it is the fault of highsec occupants that no one is fighting in nullsec.
To be honest highsec doesn't need a nerf - it is just fine as it is. What does need a nerf is the ability of nullsec alliances to take over entire sections of nullsec space.
I wrote a rebuttal for you, it be wordy.
ReplyDeletehttp://uglebsjournal.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/hi-sec-not-killing-null/
Title says "ecosystem", indicating ecology.
ReplyDeleteContent says "economics", then "nice anecdotal vignette".
You were much closer to "ecology" when you were talking about producers (prey), primary consumers (mid-rung predators), secondary consumers (apex predators), and scavengers, though you were still using economic terms to describe those "ecological" roles. lol.
If you were really interested in talking ecology, you might discuss instead how the apex predators of lowsec gorged themselves on the lower-order prey animals (miners, missioners, and plex-runners), virtually eliminating their population, then turning to "consuming" each other and calling it "Fight Club". ;-)
Or you might discuss instead how hisec's "flora" (belts, rats, and plexes/anoms) are fixed in type and population, and approaching scarcity as it is, let alone what would happen if hisec received a massive influx of ursa curis. As luck would have it, I already handled that for ya. ;-)
I've been playing for two months, I spend about half my time in hi-sec and half my time in low-sec. I don't see why the 'big blue donut' should be appealing to me.
ReplyDeleteRight or wrong, I have the idea that the fun starts in null when you can handle and afford to replace a battle ship. Many null corps pay lip service to new players, but also post desired skill plans that look to be about 10+ M SPs. A year in when a can fit a navy issue battleship with t2 guns and avoid a few spares, I'll check out null.
I'm not avoiding null because I can make more ISK. I'm avoiding null because I don't see what I can contribute to a super-cap fleet yet - and that's what I read about in themittani.com or the other blogs. If null had lots of small gang warfare with cheap ships, I'd be there instead of low sec.
If null corps want new players, they need a better job of explaining why null is fun for noobs.