Backstage - OOC Forums
EVE-Online RP Discussion and Resources => EVE OOC Summit => Topic started by: AOkazon on 08 Aug 2013, 13:04
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[Extremely mild spoilers for Pacific Rim below]
[... thread preview defeater space...]
So, I'm just riffing off the bit in the prologue where the narrator talks about how "we got really, really good at winning" and how Jaeger pilots were more like rock stars than soldiers, and it reminded me of Incursions.
High-sec Incursions get farmed into the ground by people with very, very, very expensive ships. These are battleships that are turned out like sports cars; fighting vehicles that at the same time are anything but grim, pared-down machinery of warfare. You could easily imagine luxurious interior appointments, on-staff massage so the gunnery crew don't get RSI... [Joker@ME2]real leather seats, Commander[/Joker].
Low/null-sec Incursions? Uh... yeah, hrm. I'd love to come defend you against harvesting and enslavement, but someone might hurt my Machariel...
So, combined with the natural fame-generating potential of capsuleers... you have a blinged-out, hyper-televised 100% victorious war starring people's favourite athlete/captain/heroes, side by side with Nation freely pillaging and kidnapping in the unglamorous, dangerous systems next door, where film crews certainly aren't going to travel, let alone Incursion fleets.
:D
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[Extremely mild spoilers for Pacific Rim below]
[... thread preview defeater space...]
So, I'm just riffing off the bit in the prologue where the narrator talks about how "we got really, really good at winning" and how Jaeger pilots were more like rock stars than soldiers, and it reminded me of Incursions.
High-sec Incursions get farmed into the ground by people with very, very, very expensive ships. These are battleships that are turned out like sports cars; fighting vehicles that at the same time are anything but grim, pared-down machinery of warfare. You could easily imagine luxurious interior appointments, on-staff massage so the gunnery crew don't get RSI... [Joker@ME2]real leather seats, Commander[/Joker].
Low/null-sec Incursions? Uh... yeah, hrm. I'd love to come defend you against harvesting and enslavement, but someone might hurt my Machariel...
So, combined with the natural fame-generating potential of capsuleers... you have a blinged-out, hyper-televised 100% victorious war starring people's favourite athlete/captain/heroes, side by side with Nation freely pillaging and kidnapping in the unglamorous, dangerous systems next door, where film crews certainly aren't going to travel, let alone Incursion fleets.
:D
Holy crap, this is the best solution for the immersion breakage of Incursion farming EVER.
I LOVE YOU.
(http://i3.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/101/623/are-u-a-WIZARD0.jpg)
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I'm personally all for taking all in-game actions as RP, which makes the typical incursion farmer - the one that only farms high sec incursions because they'd otherwise have to risk their ships - the Eve equivalent of:
(http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090730134530/harrypotter/images/thumb/6/66/LockhartCos.PNG/250px-LockhartCos.PNG)
Very heroic, indeed!
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This is just a great way of looking at it. I really want to read a chron about it now lol.
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...I thought this was a given from the beginning? That the answer was that capsuleers are a self-serving lot, and they've calculated where their efforts are best rewarded?
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...I thought this was a given from the beginning? That the answer was that capsuleers are a self-serving lot, and they've calculated where their efforts are best rewarded?
CC
This is why even most of high-sec incursions close after the Nation forces start withdrawing, barring when incursion communities have a bit of drama and pop the mom early.
Capsuleers on the whole do not care what the Nation forces are doing as long as CONCORD pays them, they are more than happy (and would prefer) the incursion to stay open as long as possible!
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And this is the reason the Nation loyalists can claim with a straight face that Sansha is winning.
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Oh, but the drama-bombing that occurs when they do that...
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I can see it swinging both ways. There's equal weight behind Sansha winning and CONCORD winning, that for the most part I think it's just a stalemate. Nothing is happening to the Empires, nothing is happening to Sansha. He loses as much material in ships as CONCORD loses in cashflow, likely more. It's a pretty ridiculous waste of resources, on par with regular rats dying by the tens of thousands of battleships every day. Sansha is losing entire stations and installations, along with supercapitals. Meanwhile CONCORD is spitting out enough ISK to cause serious game balance concerns in the metagame. Both sides are bleeding themselves in an unchanging game mechanic that provides no real substance to the story.
The argument can be made that Nation doesn't care about the material cost, which is comparable to "didn't want that titan anyways" as an excuse. But on the same note, the argument can be made that CONCORD's payouts are just a drop in the ocean that is their banking system. "Didn't want that ISK anyways". Both of them are assumptions made without much backing in order to excuse an aborted storyline.
Nobody is winning, nobody is losing, because nobody in CCP has touched Incursion story since the patch hit.
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I was more just interested in the "feel" of Kazon's description. Had never quite thought of it that way. The specific game mechanics and how realistic they are is of little concern to me.
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I can see it swinging both ways. There's equal weight behind Sansha winning and CONCORD winning, that for the most part I think it's just a stalemate. Nothing is happening to the Empires, nothing is happening to Sansha.
Nothing that we players can see is happening. But can you really say that its equal when 3/4 of incursions go completely uncontested? When capsuleers delay defeating an incursion so they can wring a bit more ISK for it from Concord? It would seem to me that the empire crowd has developed a very dangerous form of complacency in regards to incursions. People forget that Kuvakei still has Kyonoke, not to mention the weaponization potential of the wormholes themselves. It looks to me like a setup for a very nasty knockout punch by Sansha. People expect the Incursion runners to be successful, they're space-rockstars. What happens if one day Sansha said 'welp, enough of this' and dropped all of his incursion forces on one constellation and bounced the incursion fleet's face off the curb? Anyone remember that one live event where like, 100 of the new incursion battleships were dumped out of a wormhole?
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I can see it swinging both ways. There's equal weight behind Sansha winning and CONCORD winning, that for the most part I think it's just a stalemate. Nothing is happening to the Empires, nothing is happening to Sansha.
Nothing that we players can see is happening. But can you really say that its equal when 3/4 of incursions go completely uncontested? When capsuleers delay defeating an incursion so they can wring a bit more ISK for it from Concord? It would seem to me that the empire crowd has developed a very dangerous form of complacency in regards to incursions. People forget that Kuvakei still has Kyonoke, not to mention the weaponization potential of the wormholes themselves. It looks to me like a setup for a very nasty knockout punch by Sansha. People expect the Incursion runners to be successful, they're space-rockstars. What happens if one day Sansha said 'welp, enough of this' and dropped all of his incursion forces on one constellation and bounced the incursion fleet's face off the curb? Anyone remember that one live event where like, 100 of the new incursion battleships were dumped out of a wormhole?
Yes, this is the other half of the "riffing on Pacific Rim" thing.
I doubt CCP will do anything so dramatic, but it's a nice thought. Well, OOC it's a nice thought. IC it's downright... ominous.
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It's been established that whatever Nation is doing isn't involving anything planetside at this point, so the only ~things~ they're doing are in space. What those ~things~ are, nobody knows. Not even the Nation loyalists know IC - so however much they scream and stamp their feet, their assumptions and theories are just as pointless, unfounded and potentially irrelevant as those of anyone else.
Something we have to accept as players is that a storyline, once made into a game mechanic, cannot end without serious concerted effort on CCP's part to provide a replacement or seriously expand upon them. Faction Warfare will never end. Incursions will never end. Wormholes and Sleepers will never go away. Why? They're the flagship Jesus Features of expansions. And the odds of them being expanded upon in a way that changes the course of the storyline away from where it is are low, because it effectively requires an expansion's worth of effort - especially in the case of Incursions.
It's often argued that just because you don't see anything happening, it doesn't mean that nothing is happening. I'd caution others to consider the situation externally and point out that sometimes when you see nothing happening, it is precisely because nothing is happening.
Onwards to incursion community stuff.
The reason that nullsec incursions are typically left alone is because they simply do not cause enough of a hinderance to normal operations to be worth clearing. Whoop de fucking do, we can't use systems here as cyno waypoints for a week. We'll find another way around with our MASSIVE FUCKING JUMP BRIDGE NETWORK AMIRITE?
Lowsec incursions are left alone for those reasons, which also precipitate the usual excuse: other capsuleers. Incursions are such a minor nuisance that the stigma against PVE means that lowsec dwellers would rather use the incursions as bait to bring in killmails than they would to actually make money.
If incursions were mindblowingly crippling events for the constellations playing host to them that week, they would probably not be farmed for that long. As it stands, it's just a reduction in bounty payouts, resists and DPS. Not exactly too much a big deal, especially in highsec where the influence meter gets ground down to zero within the first day of the incursion spawning.
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If incursions were mindblowingly crippling events for the constellations playing host to them that week, they would probably not be farmed for that long. As it stands, it's just a reduction in bounty payouts, resists and DPS. Not exactly too much a big deal, especially in highsec where the influence meter gets ground down to zero within the first day of the incursion spawning.
I really think this should be the case, and it seemed at first like it would be the case before it got watered down to fuck. It could have been a cool thing, wherein if an incursion landed it was actually a threat to operations in that constellation, not 'lolnope, let me fly my retriever 4 jumps to the left'
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Game mechanics.
If NPCs are able to do anything to inconvenience players to anything other than a trivial degree, then a large fuss is made, and people unsubscribe.
The cyno-jamming aspects of Incursions were one such thing. People were annoyed and influence was used.
You can't make people pay to not enjoy a game. Any kind of serious NPC threat to people's activities, and they lose interest in logging in and in continuing to subscribe.
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I think a stalemate is really the best way to describe it. CONCORD can't actually get Nation to go away (or even go away quickly, thanks to the whims of capsuleers) but on the other hand Nation's efforts at interdicting capsuleers have been a stupendous failure at the basic issue of making the capsuleers care, and he can't actually make any major new steps (i.e., actored live events) without the capsuleers waking up and coming down on him like a ton of bricks.
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I'd be hard pressed to call it a stalemate unless he were unable to take people from the incursion systems - granted, I don't do incursions, so I'm not sure how often that aspect of them is cut short. If an incursion that lasts until the Sansha mom pulls out takes a few million people, then he's steadily building up his army with each one.
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I'd be hard pressed to call it a stalemate unless he were unable to take people from the incursion systems - granted, I don't do incursions, so I'm not sure how often that aspect of them is cut short. If an incursion that lasts until the Sansha mom pulls out takes a few million people, then he's steadily building up his army with each one.
It's been established that whatever Nation is doing isn't involving anything planetside at this point, so the only ~things~ they're doing are in space.
There might be minor deadspace pockets they're yoinking folks out of, but as I said earlier, that stage of things is over. The 'upliftings' were entirely within the domain of the live events leading up to the expansion. They never had any representation ingame beyond :words: in local from event actors, and they never will, either.
Besides, when you can just keep pooping out clones of the people you took already, why would you need to take more people? Nation deploys rebirthing/cloning facilities into every incursion - they're one of the HQ-level sites, in fact. They have the people already. They don't need more.
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Then why do the DED bulletins in Incursion systems say they're fighting off planetary abductions and that's why capsuleers have to do all the front-line work? Honest question.
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No, they say they are on standby in the event they occur.
Attention all capsuleers: Sansha's Nation forces have staged an incursion of the %(constellationName)s constellation. Local empire navies are standing by to protect against planetary abductions. Reinforcements are required to actively remove the threat.
All pilots who offer assistance will be rewarded.
Authorized by Operation Ishaeka Commander Vieve Creston
DED Special Operations
CONCORD cannot guarantee the operational security of this channel. Attendants are advised to use caution when sharing intelligence.
Also, it's stated that Nation has shifted to other things, in one of the site descriptions itself, for the Override Transfer Array. (Highlighted in yellow.)
Override Transfer Array
Forces Required:
• 5 - 10 pilots
Military Intelligence:
Your objective is to destroy the Sansha’s Nation fleet amassing here. They will be making use of logistics arrays, so disabling them may be advisable.
Rewards:
• 15,000,000 ISK × ratio
• 2,000 CONCORD LP × ratio
Background Intelligence:
One of the most significant evolutions in the Nation’s strategy has been the move away from abducting planetary populations. Their new tactical doctrine, which relies in part upon system-wide capsule interference, is clearly focused on limiting the power and influence of the capsuleer class.
The technology underlying the system-wide capsule overrides is not dissimilar to CONCORD’s own Tracking and Response System (TRS). Where it veers into new territory is in the application of new technologies designed to override local resources in ways previously thought impossible. Intelligence gathered by DED operatives strongly suggests that this facility is chiefly responsible for establishing these overrides.
Synopsis from ISHAEKA-0095. DED Special Operations.
Authorized for Capsuleer dissemination.
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Gotcha. So it really is more of a stalemate. Not because of the effectiveness of the capsuleers, but because of the effectiveness of the various empire's navies in resisting planetary abductions.
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It's implied by the incursion channel that it's a stalemate until the capsuleers get involved - the local navies are on standby to defend against abductions, not other actions.
We're supposed to be those 'reinforcements' that are being referred to. Capsuleers should be acting as an immune system w/r/t incursions, kicking the things out as fast as possible.
Instead, we're doing something more akin to kicking someone out of our house when they're already in the process of leaving, because we've been too busy playing video games with them until then.
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Gotcha. So it really is more of a stalemate. Not because of the effectiveness of the capsuleers, but because of the effectiveness of the various empire's navies in resisting planetary abductions.
No, reread this, bolding mine:
Attention all capsuleers: Sansha's Nation forces have staged an incursion of the %(constellationName)s constellation. Local empire navies are standing by to protect against planetary abductions. Reinforcements are required to actively remove the threat.
All pilots who offer assistance will be rewarded.
Authorized by Operation Ishaeka Commander Vieve Creston
DED Special Operations
CONCORD cannot guarantee the operational security of this channel. Attendants are advised to use caution when sharing intelligence.
Standing by. They're in place to try and stop abductions, that doesn't mean abductions are still happening, as Morwen stated, they already have people, they don't need more people. Their actions are centred around 'limiting the power of capsuleers' this is done...somehow...by letting the capsuleers farm their forces. It really looks to me like Sansha's forces are almost studying capsuleers, watching their responses and how they react to the incursions. Planning...plotting...waiting.
Again, Nation still have like 4-5 superweapons up their sleeve that they aren't using.
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... Or, alternatively, they don't have any more superweapons we don't know about, and every toaster left in New Eden right now, player and NPC alike, is actually nothing more than reusable cannon fodder keeping people entertained so they don't get bored and start looking for where the so-called "promised land" is, where Kuvakei is sitting around drinking mojitos and stroking his bald.
Remember, player capsuleers are fickle by nature and are not actually bound to any loyalty or employment choice they make. Even Kuvakei recognizes this (effectively) meta-aspect of the 'unbound' capsuleers. Basically, he 'knows' we're all playing a game and going to do things that support our enjoyment of that game. :P
Besides the fact of not wanting to give away the secrets of the storyline, this would be why not even the Sansha loyalists have any actual idea about what's going on.
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This is why static, unchanging content is always a terrible idea.
I prefer to give the game feature a bit of 'wiggle room' and assume incursions are still dangerous, doing ebil things to all sorts of people, and plenty of New Eden is fighting the good fight to keep them at bay.
This is again why Eve needs dynamic security status for every single system. Events, features, and things happening should have real effects on the status quo.
Give people 24 hours notice, give them plenty of traffic warnings, but the only way to encourage people to create dynamic content is to provide more building blocks.
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It's implied by the incursion channel that it's a stalemate until the capsuleers get involved - the local navies are on standby to defend against abductions, not other actions.
We're supposed to be those 'reinforcements' that are being referred to. Capsuleers should be acting as an immune system w/r/t incursions, kicking the things out as fast as possible.
Instead, we're doing something more akin to kicking someone out of our house when they're already in the process of leaving, because we've been too busy playing video games with them until then.
As a caveat: I'm talking a bit out of my ass, since I haven't participated in repelling an incursion since the month they were new. That said...
It would be interesting if, instead of the current "staged" incursion reward system, there was a single payout for repelling the incursion. Perhaps a time-sensitive payout - the sooner the incursion is repelled, the more of a reward there is. It could be allocated in a similar manner to current incursion rewards. This might provide more of an impetus for players to actually act as the cavalry, zipping in and trying to shut the thing down as soon as possible.
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This is again why Eve needs dynamic security status for every single system. Events, features, and things happening should have real effects on the status quo.
This is a very sexy idea, in my opinion.
Balancing it would be difficult, but I can imagine something where each system has a baseline security status that it always "wants" to return to - i.e.: in the absence of other effects, it will gradually return to this status. Events and the like could change this baseline, but players should be able to do the same thing (within reason). Pirates might decide to hit a 0.5 system pretty hard, and attack CONCORD and the navy there. They'd get standings hits, but if they keep up the pressure they should be able to drop the security status of that system to 0.4 or lower. To keep it there they'd have to keep up the pressure - if they let up, reinforcements would arrive and local industry would work to replace the lost forces, all bringing the security status of the system back up. On the flip side, the white hat crowd should be able to actively do something to raise the security status of a system. Of course, once they stop doing whatever it is they're doing, the security status would start to drop back down... :yar:
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This is why static, unchanging content is always a terrible idea.
I prefer to give the game feature a bit of 'wiggle room' and assume incursions are still dangerous, doing ebil things to all sorts of people, and plenty of New Eden is fighting the good fight to keep them at bay.
This is again why Eve needs dynamic security status for every single system. Events, features, and things happening should have real effects on the status quo.
Give people 24 hours notice, give them plenty of traffic warnings, but the only way to encourage people to create dynamic content is to provide more building blocks.
I agree completely, but as Louella said very well:
Game mechanics.
If NPCs are able to do anything to inconvenience players to anything other than a trivial degree, then a large fuss is made, and people unsubscribe.
The cyno-jamming aspects of Incursions were one such thing. People were annoyed and influence was used.
You can't make people pay to not enjoy a game. Any kind of serious NPC threat to people's activities, and they lose interest in logging in and in continuing to subscribe.
CCP will never do anything that has the potential to hurt their bottom line. Especially not after Incarna.
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Incursions still abduct a few groups of people here and there in space colonies though (cf the rescue incursion sites).
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I can see it swinging both ways. There's equal weight behind Sansha winning and CONCORD winning, that for the most part I think it's just a stalemate. Nothing is happening to the Empires, nothing is happening to Sansha. He loses as much material in ships as CONCORD loses in cashflow, likely more. It's a pretty ridiculous waste of resources, on par with regular rats dying by the tens of thousands of battleships every day. Sansha is losing entire stations and installations, along with supercapitals. Meanwhile CONCORD is spitting out enough ISK to cause serious game balance concerns in the metagame. Both sides are bleeding themselves in an unchanging game mechanic that provides no real substance to the story.
The argument can be made that Nation doesn't care about the material cost, which is comparable to "didn't want that titan anyways" as an excuse. But on the same note, the argument can be made that CONCORD's payouts are just a drop in the ocean that is their banking system. "Didn't want that ISK anyways". Both of them are assumptions made without much backing in order to excuse an aborted storyline.
Nobody is winning, nobody is losing, because nobody in CCP has touched Incursion story since the patch hit.
In short, as with all farmable mechanics in all games, just like missions, incursions are a huge no-no regarding IC. While it's perfectly possible to touch on the subject and/or make some mention of it, going into any detail will break immersion hard, and fast.
We have been over this regarding missioning in the past, incursions are basically the same thing.
Guess this is my +1 to Kat's post then.
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I'd also like to posit - how is Sansha's repeated presence despite being farmed any closer to 'winning' than Sleepers respawning, or pirate Anomalies, or DED plexes, or any other respawning PvE content? Does that mean every NPC faction is winning since they keep coming back? If several Guristas 10/10 in Deklien sit there and don't get done, is Goonswarm 'losing the war' against Guristas? If a backwater system in Black Rise isn't getting ratted, does that mean the State is 'losing the war' with the Guristas?
Why is that argument good for incursions but not for other PvE?
Similarly, the numbers have already been pulled in the past (http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/9115), showing that while incursions pay out ridiculous sums of cash per individual, the total Incursions payout is far lesser than total mission and anomaly bounty payout for a given period. That means that CONCORD has for the last ten years been paying us more ISK than they've ever paid on Incursions. Again, the argument that CONCORD is being bled dry by incursions is baseless.
I appreciate and completely empathize that Nation loyalists have had their RP stomped on with Incursion, and they're doing an admirable job of trying to make the best of a spoiled meal... but I think it seriously stretches suspension of disbelief to suggest Nation is winning.
And of course, anybody claiming CONCORD is winning with a straight face is somehow completely missing the fact that the Empires are on the defensive. We don't know where Nation is living (it certainly isn't Stain anymore). We don't know how they use those wormholes, and they've demonstrated the tactical capability to strike wherever and whenever they want (or so it seems). CONCORD is not winning anything.
The concept that Nation is simply waiting for some reason, or toying with the Capsuleers just to screw with us, is entirely more plausible and reasonable. In such a case: I encourage Empire loyalists to respond to this claim with saying, "The longer Kuvakei toys with us, the more time we have to find out where he lives."
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I'd just like to say that I never said Nation was winning anything, merely stated that a good portion of the Incursions that pop up aren't completed and the ones that are are farmed until it starts withdrawing and only then the Mom gets dropped.
I'd also like to posit - how is Sansha's repeated presence despite being farmed any closer to 'winning' than Sleepers respawning, or pirate Anomalies, or DED plexes, or any other respawning PvE content? Does that mean every NPC faction is winning since they keep coming back? If several Guristas 10/10 in Deklien sit there and don't get done, is Goonswarm 'losing the war' against Guristas? If a backwater system in Black Rise isn't getting ratted, does that mean the State is 'losing the war' with the Guristas?
Are Goons losing the war? No. But it does show that Guristas life does go on and aren't being overly hindered by Goons stay in Venal. Hell, they probably don't mind too much if a small fraction of the pilots out there do a couple missions for their agents and help kill a few CONCORD patrols they send up!
Similarly, the numbers have already been pulled in the past (http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/9115), showing that while incursions pay out ridiculous sums of cash per individual, the total Incursions payout is far lesser than total mission and anomaly bounty payout for a given period. That means that CONCORD has for the last ten years been paying us more ISK than they've ever paid on Incursions. Again, the argument that CONCORD is being bled dry by incursions is baseless.
They aren't paying us more for bounties, they are paying out more because more people kill belt/mission rats. It's two different things really, also that shows that incursions are about ~27% of the bounty pay outs. And that is from players doing 1/4 of the incursions that are typically up. I think CONCORD are thankful that players only do it one incursion at a time :D
That doesn't include LP either. Which, if you do HQ sites, is where most a lot of your isk is. On the other hand, it doesn't include LP from Level5 missions either, which is hilariously high isk income but only it's literally all LP. And not as many people do them.
So yeah, I agree that as it stands now, CONCORD aren't really being strained with regards to payouts.
As to the purpose of the incursions, I don't have a clue since they stopped taking people from planets. For all I know, it could be Kuvakei's way of organising a Mining Op (No one goes to belts during an incursion because of nasty rats!). Distract the capsuleers by kidnapping a few deadspace colonies and dropping a few rebirth stations and let the True Creations guys drain the belts :D
I'm not overly butthurt over incursions because I haven't had to deal with it IC for the past so many years. When they were introduced with the Live Events I was vaguely Nation loyal at that point, but was in Veto and ordered not to participate in said Events. Then I was Anti-Nation/Nation-Neutral for a good 2 years when I went Cartel with Vincent. I've only recently rejoined via TSF.
Again I'd like to stress that I don't think either side is winning. I'm just playing off others responses with some things I had floating around in my head. I try and avoid the subject IC (along with all other PvE interactions) for previously mentioned immersion breaking. Though I find the topic somewhat interesting OOC.
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The concept that Nation is simply waiting for some reason, or toying with the Capsuleers just to screw with us, is entirely more plausible and reasonable. In such a case: I encourage Empire loyalists to respond to this claim with saying, "The longer Kuvakei toys with us, the more time we have to find out where he lives."
+1 Like
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Deadie, I don't think anyone was saying that you were suggesting Nation is 'winning'.
It is, however, obnoxiously common (and completely impossible to prove as accurate) rhetoric that is spewed out of the Nation loyalists IC on a regular basis.
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I think its important to remember that most of the player population is comprised of non-RPers who really don't give a damn one way or the other about the storylines that CCP introduces to the game. So it's impossible for CCP to make an expansion feature that severely changes gameplay and threatens the daily activities of the player base majority.
Sure, those of us who really appreciate storytelling and engaging fiction, we'd love to see an Incursion really threaten a system and force cooperation. But to 90% of the population, it's just another group of rats and a way to farm ISK. If the system was denied station access due to Sansha attackers, or PI was denied until the attackers were repelled, the PvE-oriented players would lose their shit. Same reason FW is so full of farmers: they don't actually care if an imaginary nation wins an imaginary war, they just want their LPs.
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It is, however, obnoxiously common (and completely impossible to prove as accurate) rhetoric that is spewed out of the Nation loyalists IC on a regular basis.
Eh, if so that is hardly limited to Nation Loyalists. There are plenty of things that Characters spout IC that are impossible to prove and stretch my suspension of disbelief.
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...So it's impossible for CCP to make an expansion feature that severely changes gameplay and threatens the daily activities of the player base majority.
It's totally possible, and easy. A brave CCP would do it.
It's all about what they think a sandbox is. Does it have a life of it's own, that you must fucking cope with or ignore at your peril, or is every grain of sand only meant to be apart of player's-only special sandcastles?
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Eve has half been founded on such principles to me, at best. The tedious farming side of it has always been designed to be more or less safe in high sec, and stable.
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Eve has half been founded on such principles to me, at best. The tedious farming side of it has always been designed to be more or less safe in high sec, and stable.
Yes, but it is poor game design when the risk/reward ratio is so horrible that you can make such huge sums of money for no risk.
If you are making lots of money, it should be dangerous and competitive and something you have to fight for.
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Eve has half been founded on such principles to me, at best. The tedious farming side of it has always been designed to be more or less safe in high sec, and stable.
Yes, but it is poor game design when the risk/reward ratio is so horrible that you can make such huge sums of money for no risk.
If you are making lots of money, it should be dangerous and competitive and something you have to fight for.
I'll assume you don't know people lose ships to NPCs in Incursion fleets fairly often. I'll also assume you simply don't know we have to compete for the payout. I'll also assume that you think Level 4s, PI, Manufacturing, and exploration in highsec is also poor game design because you don't have to fight for that either.
People still think that Incursions are SO MUCH MORE profitable than missions, and the reality is that unless you're flying a 5 billion ISK pirate BS in an equally fit vanguard fleet, they are not that much better.
The average HQ fleet does one or two sites per hour, at 31,000,000 ISK paid our per pilot per site before taxes. These are slow fleets that take a long wait just to refill between sites, and take equally long just to shoot the tower. They are rarely optimized for profitability.
HQ Incursions: 62,000,000 /hr
Assault incursions are rarely done, but they pay about 18,000,000 per site per pilot. Finding a fleet that does these is like pulling teeth, last I checked. I have never found a consistent Assault fleet, so I can't comment on the payrate.
Assault Incursions: ???
Vanguard fleets pay 10,000,000 per pilot per site. However, with a high DPS, high tracking pirate BS fleet they can finish a site every 5-7 minutes. That's where the imbalance comes in. Now you're finishing 12-8 sites per hour. If you have an issue with Incursions, look here - not at the entire concept. Changing the NPCs that spawn here to ruin the shiny blap fleets is what would fix this. This has already done once, and the avg payout has gone down because of it.
Factoid: Vanguards had their NPC spawns and their payout nerfed at one point, ruining the site completely. Devs then reversed one of the changes, bringing back some of the profitability afterwards.
Vanguard Incursion: 120,000,000 /hr BEFORE RECENT VG NERF.
Level 4 missions, by the way, yield an average 25,000,000 per site in salvage, loot, and bounties. If you have a good L4 ship and a Noctis, you can finish 2-3 sites an hour. Many more if you have a salvage & loot alt, which many do.
Level 4: 50,000,000 - 75,000,000 /hr
It's also well known that LP is where the money is really at, and if you are willing to screw your faction standings, the tags pay out even more. I'm not an LP guru, so I won't get into the profitability increases between the two. CONCORD LP used to be extremely worthwhile. It's not so much anymore.
Onto the Risk vs. Reward: I will point out that you can and many do make far more in nullsec than they would in highsec. There are I-RED pilots that run 9/10 and 10/10 anoms, and for their risk they earn far more than they would in Incursions. It's more luck based than grind, but they still do make a whole lot. Highsec does not make more money, but highsec does require less effort.
Incursion fleets do lose ships. They lose them a lot. Unless you fly Incursion fleets regularly, you might not realize this. Flying one or two fleets and not seeing anyone die doesn't mean it does not happen. It does, and often.
People are late to call for reps, Logis are busy tying their shoes IRL, somebody popped the trigger, drone-guy didn't kill the jamming frigate... plenty of reasons. Unless you fly a shitfit Tech 1 battleship, losing your ship in any Incursion fleet negates that much income from your grinding. It's a huge loss, and it DOES count towards Risk vs Reward.
Players are not the only ones that can introduce risk. Just because you are not the one who comes in and pops that Vindicator does not mean it doesn't ever die.
Again, Vanguards are really an exception. These smaller fleets are often making enough money to pay for their ships many times over by the time they lose them - which is rare. They pay attention, they know what they are doing, and they have invested enough time and money into their ships to make sure they are operating at maximum efficiency. Isn't this knowledgability and attention and effort worthy of some respect? They aren't AFK while doing these sites. Isn't that what you demand of low/nullsec moneymaking? Or is the problem that YOU are not the one who gets to blow up their ship?
I know that it's popular to say "INCURSIONS ARE OP, NO RISK, ALL REWARD", but I disagree. There is risk and the reward is (except Vanguards) negligible compared to existing gameplay.
Pimpfitting a carebear ship is not something new. Making crazy cash in highsec is not something new. It's not something Incursions popularized either. They are a scapegoat, in my opinion, for the ganking crowd who can't effectively gank them. Incursions ships require a buffer tank, which is the bane of gankers everywhere. People don't complain about L4 pimpfit carebears because they run active tanks which are easily ganked and looted. Instead, they complain with salivating jowls about Incursion fleets, clusters of faction/deadspace/officer fit battleships that aren't so easily popped.
The problem isn't that Incursions as a whole are imbalanced. The problem is that gankers can't gank.
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The problem isn't that Incursions as a whole are imbalanced. The problem is that gankers can't gank.
Then they need to get better at scanning down link ships and popping those, then watching fleets die as their tanking ability drops by 25-50%
I've actually pondered how much fun it would be to run a corp that focused on wardecs against incursion-based corps.
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...So it's impossible for CCP to make an expansion feature that severely changes gameplay and threatens the daily activities of the player base majority.
It's totally possible, and easy. A brave CCP would do it.
It's all about what they think a sandbox is. Does it have a life of it's own, that you must fucking cope with or ignore at your peril, or is every grain of sand only meant to be apart of player's-only special sandcastles?
Well dude, I mean... I hate to say it, but, it's the latter one, when profits are concerned.
CCP is a business, and they need to keep their player population as high as possible. I understand that EVE is inherently supposed to be high-risk and perilous, but even there, there are limits to what the average player would take.
Even if we want Incursions and other game features to provide story-driven, serious threats that we can rally around, if CCP delivered, they'd lose some of their players. Considering the cluster never has more than like 40k people, bringing that number down would hurt. Most players, like I mentioned before (LP farmers, Incursion farmers, etc) don't want a struggle. They want to be comfortable and assured of victory from the beginning, because they consider anything else to be a waste of time. Why fight a difficult, imposing foe, when you can make a couple hundred mil farming the same plex?
EDIT: I'm not saying it's right, or good for the game environment, or even fun. I'm just saying, it's the state of the average MMO player.
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The problem isn't that Incursions as a whole are imbalanced. The problem is that gankers can't gank.
Then they need to get better at scanning down link ships and popping those, then watching fleets die as their tanking ability drops by 25-50%
I've actually pondered how much fun it would be to run a corp that focused on wardecs against incursion-based corps.
Gankers are perfectly capable of ganking incursion ships. They just don't want to put together the extra ships to get the necessary alpha because it cuts into their bottom line. Of course, once in a site, ganking incursion runners becomes a two-fold job. Not only must you gank the ships with between 3-15 logi cruisers repping them, you also have to clear the site afterward to even get at the loot, because Incursion sites only despawn when they are completed or the mothership is destroyed.
Also, deccing incursion corps is a complete waste of money and time if you're looking for kills. Because of flagging mechanics, you're not allowed in an incursion fleet if you have a wardec. Period. They'll just dock up and wait for you to get bored.
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Eve has half been founded on such principles to me, at best. The tedious farming side of it has always been designed to be more or less safe in high sec, and stable.
Yes, but it is poor game design when the risk/reward ratio is so horrible that you can make such huge sums of money for no risk.
If you are making lots of money, it should be dangerous and competitive and something you have to fight for.
I didn't intend it as poor or good game design, just that CCP has never gone fully in a direction and assuming it to the very last bit. A lot of half assed measures for a game that is, granted, still an UFO.
Anyway that kind of mechanics is borked in the first place.
Either you grind to hell in safety to make money but it takes you aaaaages to make a decent amount that will get blown up in 5 sec of pvp. Boring and unsatisfying, better to leave the game.
Or either you go grind in dangerous space for good amounts of money, with the possibility to get blown up at the first gank, so eventually all your gains go into the trashbin regularly.
EDIT : though like you I would sometimes like to see a game where you don't have to go for pimp every time in pve. Where pve could be done in lowsec with actual pvp ships that can reply in force if they are attacked by hostiles. It would mean loss from time to time, but measured loss on a more profitable gain overall (except when you are in a bad day...). I would enjoy the game ten times more if it was not so much centered around money and farm. I'm sick of spending hours of farm to see it vanish in 5 sec every time. It's like paying infamous sums of money to get into a themepark lasting 5 min.
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I wasn't talking about Incursions specifically, just the general concept that the less risky something is, the less ISK should be farmed from it.
It's a fundamental thing about the entire direction of the game: CCP tells us for years how 'badly' they want to push people out of highsec into the more conflict oriented elements of low and null, and then refuse to adjust any game design to make this happen.
The carrots aren't big enough to cajole people out of highsec, and the sticks are too painful for many highsec residents to bother leaving their chosen gameplay for places they can be shot.
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EDIT : though like you I would sometimes like to see a game where you don't have to go for pimp every time in pve. Where pve could be done in lowsec with actual pvp ships that can reply in force if they are attacked by hostiles. It would mean loss from time to time, but measured loss on a more profitable gain overall (except when you are in a bad day...). I would enjoy the game ten times more if it was not so much centered around money and farm. I'm sick of spending hours of farm to see it vanish in 5 sec every time. It's like paying infamous sums of money to get into a themepark lasting 5 min.
confirming that I run sleeper sites in pvp fits.
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I do kind of wish there was a way in which there wasn't such a huge gap between a pvp-fit ship and a pve-fit ship...reminds me too much of WoW where people would literally be carrying around two to three suits of gear: one for questing, one for dungeon raiding, and one for pvp. I sort of hoped that given combat between ships was just that, combat between ships, there would be less of a break, but quickly learned that there's how to fit a ship for doing pve missions and how to fit the same ship to handle pvp, and you cannot do a decent hybrid.
Getting jumped doing a mission that took me into lowsec was kind of a wake up for me...I was always used to a pvp flagging mechanism in the other games I played and I had assumed that this would be the case in EVE; that if I was doing missions and not opening fire upon another player, I'd have no worries except for perhaps null-sec and w-space. So, now I have to refuse missions that send me into lowsec because a mission fit is going to get ripped to pieces by pvp ships and I won't have much to say in the matter. And given that there is no fast switch between mods fitted and mods in the cargo, it's even harder justifying taking missions that go into lowsec.
That said, the other thing I have an issue, getting back to Incursions, is the fact that it is something that doesn't allow for new players to experience. When I first heard about the Incursions and saw them happening, I thought this would be something neat to get into...then found out that unless one can drop several billion isk on a ship, there's no place for you in an Incursion fleet. I don't know how Incursion was brought into the game, but to me, introducing something that, on a story-level, is extremely devastating and could impact the entire system, not being able to do anything about it because I happened on the scene after kind of sucks.
It would be neat to see something that is dynamic, but again, how do you bring in new blood if all the 'easy' things have been dealt with? MMOs have that unfortunate issue where they need to be able to allow players to accomplish things and progress, but at the same time still be able to bring in new players well after the fact in order to maintain a profit. Trying to impose ship limits in missions (or going further, SP limits) seems to be somewhat immersion breaking (oh, there's a new nest of pirates out in that there asteroid belt? Let me just hop into 'insert massive battleship here' and blast them out...wait, what, I can only go in there with a frigate? Why? Cause you said so? Look son, I can get this here nest cleared out in five minutes with Bessy the Battleship...or an hour with Fido the Frigate...). There are probably ways to make certain aspects more dynamic than others, but as someone else pointed out, if a vast number of paying players bitch about something, the company is now in a position where it has to way the odds of sticking to what might be a cool immersion tool/gimmick or catering to the masses to keep people entertained, playing, and most importantly, paying.
Overall, I have little to complain about as it does seem that I've come in after a lot of the mistakes and from what I've heard, CCP is fixing some of the story mess ups. Anyway, that was my ten cents on the topic.
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Katrina's Last Post.
My experiences with Incursions seems to be rather different than your's.
HiSec incursions and Level 4s are extremely safe way to make isk and I'm all for a nerf to them or a buff to try and attract people into Low/Null but either option I can't see CCP doing.
With manufacturing there just isn't any reason to not do it in HiSec. ABC ores recently got a buff but I'm not sure how that has affected anything.
Steff's Post
The reason why you can't (usually) do PvE in PvP ships is that you need to be relatively cap stable in PvE. This is because there are too many rats per mission. People have been harping on to CCP for a long time to reduce the amount of NPCs in the sites and increase their difficulty, make those 20 NPC BS into 5. I don't know why they insist of keeping it like it is and it doesn't look like it is going to change.
With PvP, if your fit lasts 5 minutes tops. You are good to go 90% of the time.
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Also to note, CCP knows about and doesn't like the discrepancy between PvP and PvE fits, and is working on changing NPC AI and NPC ship stats to make them closer to what players do. I've heard rumours of making it so that NPC's will warp away if you dont have them tackled, so that they hit harder but are fewer of them, etc.
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HiSec incursions and Level 4s are extremely safe way to make isk and I'm all for a nerf to them or a buff to try and attract people into Low/Null but either option I can't see CCP doing.
Why would I go into lowsec even with a drastic nerf to highsec ? To painfully grind lowsec L4s like I used to in highsec ? .___.
Buffing or nerfing is not the answer, it's barely an empty gesture that will change nothing and only make things worse. What they need is a complete overall of the game if we want to go that road.
Edit : to clarify a bit my thought on the matter, is that we are into dead end. I too would like to see everything of value taking place in dangerous places of space where you have to fight your way to the valuable commodities. That way only fruitful missions and pve could take place in low sec, same for mining, etc, thus creating conflict everywhere for the ressources. Yeah that's pretty nice and attractive said like that, but people claiming that are often people that actually tend to think that their ay of having fun in the game is the only and true way and that Eve has always been thought to be that and nothing else. Somehow, it's close to a YDIW mentality.
Sorry to disappoint but tons of people seem to enjoy safe pve. Nerf it, and you get rid of them properly. And that's probably not going to be a huge uproar like monoclegate, but a quiet drain of subscribers leaving. If CCP really wanted to make the game the way you want to make it, they would have done that since the beginning. Now, they are stuck with a huge variety of differing gameplays and niches - and mission running is definitely not a niche considering the amount of "carebears" in the game that almost only play for that. Changing the game orientation - because that's what you ultimately call for - is like telling fuck you to all of these people.
Don't get me wrong, I am mostly a pvper (or was...), so I quite like the idea of everything of value happening in dangerous space and creating conflict and pvp. I also understand that people are not all pvpers and just don't want to deal with that part of the game. And they are also not industrials. If CCP wanted to make combat pvp oriented only, then they have been fucking doing it wrong since the beginning, and are fucking doing it wrong right now.
Eventually I think that asking for CCP to go that way is rather selfish.
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Eve has half been founded on such principles to me, at best. The tedious farming side of it has always been designed to be more or less safe in high sec, and stable.
Yes, but it is poor game design when the risk/reward ratio is so horrible that you can make such huge sums of money for no risk.
If you are making lots of money, it should be dangerous and competitive and something you have to fight for.
Fit Stabs -> Head to FW space -> Make 100m an hour on a day old freebie account alt.
I think we have worse offenders than incursions, but wholly agree, yes.
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Eve has half been founded on such principles to me, at best. The tedious farming side of it has always been designed to be more or less safe in high sec, and stable.
Yes, but it is poor game design when the risk/reward ratio is so horrible that you can make such huge sums of money for no risk.
If you are making lots of money, it should be dangerous and competitive and something you have to fight for.
Fit Stabs -> Head to FW space -> Make 100m an hour on a day old freebie account alt.
I think we have worse offenders than incursions, but wholly agree, yes.
If Level 4s and Incursions were moved to lowsec and grinders found a way to run them without getting killed - say with warp stabbed fits and heavy tanks - then many people would be complaining about those tanks and warp stab fits and how "imbalanced" they are with poor game design, etc.
Any game mechanic in EVE that doesn't allow PvP'ers to kill PvE'ers will always be met with derision.
That's the part of this debate I don't agree with. That's the part I can't respect. PvP'ers are demanding easy food on a silver platter by forcing PvE into lowsec. It's the PvP equivalent of carebears wanting highsec to be completely safe without ganks. If you want to kill them, there are already wardecs and suicide squads. Bumping too for miners. These are valid game mechanics already in place for people to release their frustrations on 'carebears'.
I get that lowsec is lacking in decent content outside of FW. I empathize and do think something should be done, but not at the cost of content in other parts of the game.
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Those're, at large, my thoughts as well.
What do I care whether a carebear who never leaves hisec makes 5, 50, or 500M an hour? If their fat wallets make them a little more confident about dipping their toes into the shark pool, so much the better. If not, well. No amount of ISK was going to make them, probably. What bother are they of mine, then? I'd say it's them missing out, not me.
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The problem is that you assume that a bigger carrot and a sharper stick would prod extremely conflict-averse/carebear-y people into lowsec.
It's just as likely that they'd, you know, leave. The best way to get more gank targets is to grow the playerbase. This increases competition for high-value high-sec resources, and results in statistically more people willing to take risks and throw down.
Nothing forces hard-core carebears to keep playing if CCP makes it easier for you to farm their tears. They'll go forum warrior for a bit, and then when they're ignored, they'll go play something else.
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Yes. Being a niche game with only 500k subs maximum is hipster cool and all, but having millions is much better. More subs means more revenue for CCP (which means more employees and more content being produced), more activity ingame, bigger fights in null, more competition in high, and more targets to shoot in low.
You can't hit those kinds of numbers without providing more casual PvE content (among other badly needed improvements). Casual PvE/Grind subs are the bread and butter of MMOs. If you could hit 5 million subs off lowsec/nullsec PvP alone it would have happened already. It hasn't, and it's not going to.
Some people need to accept the fact that EVE cannot thrive as an MMO without a strong and enjoyable highsec. Right now, that means L4s, Incursions, Manufacturing, Exploration, and Mining. CCP recognizes the necessity of keeping the high-sec versions of those game mechanics right where they are - safe in High-sec so casual gamers stay subscribed. It's a shame more players can't wrap their heads around it too.
Nerfing high-sec means nerfing the growth of our game.
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Yes. Being a niche game with only 500k subs maximum is hipster cool and all, but having millions is much better. More subs means more revenue for CCP (which means more employees and more content being produced), more activity ingame, bigger fights in null, more competition in high, and more targets to shoot in low.
You can't hit those kinds of numbers without providing more casual PvE content (among other badly needed improvements). Casual PvE/Grind subs are the bread and butter of MMOs. If you could hit 5 million subs off lowsec/nullsec PvP alone it would have happened already. It hasn't, and it's not going to.
Some people need to accept the fact that EVE cannot thrive as an MMO without a strong and enjoyable highsec. Right now, that means L4s, Incursions, Manufacturing, Exploration, and Mining. CCP recognizes the necessity of keeping the high-sec versions of those game mechanics right where they are - safe in High-sec so casual gamers stay subscribed. It's a shame more players can't wrap their heads around it too.
Nerfing high-sec means nerfing the growth of our game.
I think you've basically hit the nail on the head there, so won't add or detract from it.
Going back to the OP:
[Extremely mild spoilers for Pacific Rim below]
[... thread preview defeater space...]
So, I'm just riffing off the bit in the prologue where the narrator talks about how "we got really, really good at winning" and how Jaeger pilots were more like rock stars than soldiers, and it reminded me of Incursions.
High-sec Incursions get farmed into the ground by people with very, very, very expensive ships. These are battleships that are turned out like sports cars; fighting vehicles that at the same time are anything but grim, pared-down machinery of warfare. You could easily imagine luxurious interior appointments, on-staff massage so the gunnery crew don't get RSI... [Joker@ME2]real leather seats, Commander[/Joker].
Low/null-sec Incursions? Uh... yeah, hrm. I'd love to come defend you against harvesting and enslavement, but someone might hurt my Machariel...
So, combined with the natural fame-generating potential of capsuleers... you have a blinged-out, hyper-televised 100% victorious war starring people's favourite athlete/captain/heroes, side by side with Nation freely pillaging and kidnapping in the unglamorous, dangerous systems next door, where film crews certainly aren't going to travel, let alone Incursion fleets.
:D
I actually really like this. :cube: It works both from an RP perspective (for me) and I love the imagary it evokes. If this forum had likes, you would have mine. Instead all I can give you is this:
[spoiler](http://cdni.wired.co.uk/620x413/k_n/Like_1.jpg)[/spoiler]
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YES LOVE AND ATTENTION GIVE IT TO ME GOOD
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NERF ALL THE THINGS!
I think all forms of gameplay in our little sandbox are valid, but I'm not a fan of how separated and high the walls are between different parts of the sandbox in some areas, and not in others.
The deep end of the EVE pool is incredibly deep, and not inviting for much of the player base. There should be more gradual ways to introduce new players to combat gameplay and losing the risk-averse nature of having your bits and bytes temporarily removed.
I'd love it if Incursions and Missions were 'adaptable' to the size and power of the fleet participating. Auto-balance if you will. The game should take the damage and tanking stats from the fleet taking on the challenge and spit out NPC's and rewards accordingly. Got a small gang of 5 people in frigates? Super ok, we'll throw you a mission to have fun with it. Got 30 people in pimp mobiles? We'll hand you something awful challenging and rewarding if you can survive. This would lead to more 'ad-hoc' missioning and incursion groups, and less 'too cool for school' incursion fleets maybe?
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Scouts and Vanguards are the playground for newer pilots. HQ sites have a lot of rats, a lot of incoming DPS, and a much less forgiving environment even in highsec for cockups. I don't have a problem with "too cool for school" groups being king of the hill in HQ sites in the slightest. If I'm going to be putting time in in the larger, more difficult sites, I want to be running with people who know exactly what the fuck they are doing.
The reason Assault sites tend to get left alone, by the way, is because they require weird comps that no other sites do: the Nation Consolidation Network site -requires- that the fleet split up into two groups based on size (BS+Logi in one, BC/T3+Logi in the other, which is FORCED by the accel gates, you do not have a choice), then clear through several pockets to meet up at the end together. And, oh by the way, if you take too long to get to the last pocket, all the rats in the last pocket have already spawned by the time you get there, and ~lol~ at the alpha in there.
You can't do those sites without people in T3s or BCs of some sort, and finding people who have T3s handy isn't always easy. Most people want to fly battleships or logi, and a lot of people don't have alts handy to haul more than one ship from incursion to incursion.
Kat nailed the problem earlier, both with this (http://backstage.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?topic=5196.msg84087#msg84087) post as well as this quote which I never fail to see proven true whether it's here, ingame or on eve-o:
Any game mechanic in EVE that doesn't allow PvP'ers to kill PvE'ers will always be met with derision.
That's the part of this debate I don't agree with. That's the part I can't respect. PvP'ers are demanding easy food on a silver platter by forcing PvE into lowsec. It's the PvP equivalent of carebears wanting highsec to be completely safe without ganks. If you want to kill them, there are already wardecs and suicide squads. Bumping too for miners. These are valid game mechanics already in place for people to release their frustrations on 'carebears'.
I get that lowsec is lacking in decent content outside of FW. I empathize and do think something should be done, but not at the cost of content in other parts of the game.
Lowsec needs content that cannot be found elsewhere that drags people in. There are basically two or three things you can do in lowsec that you can't do elsewhere:
- Incursions that might drop the Revenant BPC. If you're just in it for the ISK/LP, you could get the same amount by doing it in null if you were part of a group that was near or in one of the incursed constellations. Aside from the potential BPC drop in lowsec and the 30% increase on payouts, Incursion content is completely identical in low/null to what it is in highsec.
- L5 missions. I don't know of any of these agents being in nullsec. So here's something.
- FW. We know my stance on FW, so I won't go into detail.
- Exploration? Yeah, there's some combat sites that are unique to lowsec, namely the 5/10 and 6/10 + equivalent unrated sites, which can drop the A-type and B-type invulns/EANMs. (4/10s can be found in both lowsec and highsec, though they are reasonably rare in high.) Beyond those combat sites, however, the content in low and null is not that different from highsec. You have harder hacking sites, but you're still getting the same loot, more or less - just a bit more of it.
I guess there's some ores that are more widespread in lowsec, and now we have those clone trooper tag things for sec, but really.
The issue boils down to this: there's not enough "OMG LOWSEC ONLY CONTENT" to make it worth poking your head into from highsec. And most of the things that might, are available to people in nullsec too, which can arguably more reward for -less- risk than lowsec (and in some cases lower risk than highsec, given wardecs), if you are doing it with an alliance that has sov.
The solution is definitely -not- fucking with highsec.
Another thing nobody's mentioned yet - ships are almost twice as expensive as they were several years ago in many cases. How the hell do you expect people to afford things if you take away the ways to actually make a reasonable amount of ISK? I've been playing around with a new alt for about a year on and off, keeping their wallet and other shit entirely separate from my known characters as an experiment - they STILL can't afford a battleship, let alone replace one (and even a battlecruiser is a stretch in many ways), even if they have the standings to run L4s with a couple corps.
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Nerfing hi-sec will never herd the cattle into low-sec. They will simply quit and go elsewhere to other games where they can play their PvE grind.
Low sec missioning as it stands is completely and utterly pointless, the pay increase is bare minimal, and you aren't going to take your super shiny fit in there, nor fly with the speed and reckless abandonment you do in high.
Personally I'd remove lowsec missioning entirely and make ratting anomalies, essentially small pockets of 15-20 top bounty tier rats with a % chance of spawning an overseer that drops faction items (not deadspace) These sites would be 4-5 a system with a relatively decent respawn, and you only need a probe out to locate, like the basic anomalies in w-space.
Considering you'll be running these in a lowsec combat fit (Well sure you can take that pimp mission fit in if you want..) your isk is limited in how fast you clear, but at the same time the bounty values and site frequency means you'll outpace mission isk. The % chance faction loot outpacing missioning LP gains.
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I guess the thing is that if we are putting up walls between 'safe' and 'unsafe' areas then the divisions need to be just as strong with regards to rewards and the benefits of those activities.
I've got no problem with people PVE'ing to their heart's content, day in and day out, and never ever once shooting a laser at another player. Super good for them, enjoy your time.
I think being able to generate the sort of rewards that people can with 0 risk 'cheapens' the game play of people who are doing things a bit more risk-intensive.
IMO The balance is just off right now is all. Why bother doing exploration, or mining, or missioning in bad neighborhoods when you can do just as well for your wallet 100% safely? The fact that you can do it safely doesn't bother me, it's that the rewards for doing it safely currently make doing it unsafely a complete joke. And since all the markets, and trade items, and manufacturing, etc are all linked, the actions of people not risking their butts still effects the rest of the player base.
I just don't like all the easy money faucets in highsec that effect prices, demand, etc for ships and items. If you want to run missions and never ever shoot at people that's super fine, maybe we can make a special set of modules that only work in highsec that missioners will want to use so you stop effecting the supply and demand and prices of 'x' items or whatever.
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There should be more gradual ways to introduce new players to combat gameplay and losing the risk-averse nature of having your bits and bytes temporarily removed.
As long as it takes time and tedious grind to make money and afford pvp ships, I don't see why I would lose my risk averse mentality. Except if I only start to fly in frigates or something... And even these cost money with a regular T2/rigs/faction ammo pvp fit.
That's the price you pay for your daily adrenaline.
How do you make money yourself to afford your pvp fix, btw ?
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How do you make money yourself to afford your pvp fix, btw ?
It's less about earning money and more about not dying :P (Although dying in a ball of glorious fire is highly underrated sometimes)
I'm 261/5 so far this year
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The thing is that comes with years of experience.
If you're a newer person to PvP your K/D ratio is going to be firmly in the reverse position, thus income is needed.
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No I can do not dying pretty easily if in a good fleet. I rarely died and had an "incredible" ratio in FW when I still got from time to time in fleets... Especially when I changed the armageddon for an Abaddon (that never died btw, that thing never fucking died because I never got primary) :roll:
In solo or very small groups it's another matter. You just die here and there, period, and it costs money.
Edit : killboard ratios and stats mean nothing anyway. I'm a little annoyed when I get them pointed out as facts or somehow relevant info when they never were in the first place.
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This brings up a good point though, I'd be -all- for revamping the rewards for dying.
Seriously, say your first month as a new capsuleer you are given a replacement ship up to say, cruiser, for free, when you die. Some sort of slightly shitty basic cruiser (like 4/4/4) with stats lower than the regular ones, that you get replaced free of charge when you die. Maybe even special weapon set for it.
Non-transferable, non scrappable, etc.
Idea is you are a new player in this game? HERE HAVE FUN for one month. All your losses are covered, go learn how to die. See? Not so bad!
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risk reward does not work in the way that people think.
high-reward things in low/null sec, what happens is, the income thing is monopolised by a group that can repel/deter interference, allowing them to make large sums, which means they can afford to repel/deter interference.
This is done more easily during times of low server population.
Blobs and farmers. vOv
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How do you make money yourself to afford your pvp fix, btw ?
Easy. Don't pvp in ships you can't afford to lose.
Which sounds quite flip, but it's accurate, too. If you can't afford to lose capital ships, don't pvp in capital ships. If you can't afford to lose T2, don't pvp in T2. With FW, especially, it's very feasible to pvp in T1 frigates. While a nicely appointed T2-fitted frigate might set you back 10-15 mil, it's also perfectly simple to fit one out with meta T1 gear for about 1-2 million.
Which means that running a single L4 mission could easily fund a baker's dozen of pvp frigates. If you're not up to soloing L4s, learn to salvage and fly as salvager for a friend's L4 missions. You'll be able to fit at least a few of those 1-2 million isk pvp frigates from the sale of one missions worth of salvage.
I pvped exclusively through the Great Northern War, flying T1 and T2 frigates with less than 20 million isk in my wallet. While I did start ratting towards the end to make money for larger ships, that was still at least 6 months of solid, daily pvp using only the sale of loot and Jericho Fraction's ship replacement program to fund my losses.
And squad-level pvp wing needs tacklers, and a tackling frigate can easily be fitted out for under a million. Start bringing those and your fleet-mates will happily help you fund your losses while thanking you profusely for helping them get kills.
Nerfing hi-sec will never herd the cattle into low-sec. They will simply quit and go elsewhere to other games where they can play their PvE grind.
This, ultimately, is a big part of the problem (and I'm not accusing you of holding the view, Caellach. I'm just using your quote as an example). There's a certain subset of pvpers who are looking for ganks, not fights. Which, in my opinion, isn't too far off from PVE. Just with real humans playing the part of red crosses.
I'd argue that we don't want to force PVEers to go get ganked in low sec. We want them to want to come experience the dangers and excitement of low sec. We want them to be like that miner who started posting recently talking about the thrill of going into low sec and 0.0 looking for rewarding ore. They're having a blast finding it, evading enemies, and the like. And someday they'll get ganked, and they'll learn from it, and they'll set up another ship and go at it again. Because they enjoy it, and because they want to.
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While a nicely appointed T2-fitted frigate might set you back 10-15 mil, it's also perfectly simple to fit one out with meta T1 gear for about 1-2 million.
Make that more like 30-40m for a T2 frig.
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I'd argue that we don't want to force PVEers to go get ganked in low sec. We want them to want to come experience the dangers and excitement of low sec. We want them to be like that miner who started posting recently talking about the thrill of going into low sec and 0.0 looking for rewarding ore. They're having a blast finding it, evading enemies, and the like. And someday they'll get ganked, and they'll learn from it, and they'll set up another ship and go at it again. Because they enjoy it, and because they want to.
So then what is the real issue with people not doing so now? How can we fix the issue as players without waiting for CCP to do it for us? Clearly waiting for them to nerf highsec or buff lowsec isn't going to happen tomorrow, so what can we start doing tomorrow?
Is it our attitude out there? Is it the way we publicize (or don't publicize) PvP opportunities for newbies? Is it the money issue?
Would it be feasible to change our attitude to a more sporting (and less smacking) one, encouraging a sort of 'casual PvP' culture? Would it be feasible to help educate newbies and carebears towards the fun of PvP like that aforementioned post? Would it be feasible to help fund them by dumping ISK in their wallets to help them lose it, a financial mentor program?
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If someone looks low-sp, reimbursing them for ganks is a thing that is possible.
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How do you make money yourself to afford your pvp fix, btw ?
It's less about earning money and more about not dying :P (Although dying in a ball of glorious fire is highly underrated sometimes)
I'm 261/5 so far this year
I'm glad to hear you are doing well, but the 'carebears' of high-sec are not the only risk-averse people in EVE. It's pretty epidemic with the current mentality among players, the current meta and the kill-board worshiping that goes on everywhere.
As long as the whole playerbase revolves around winning at all costs and define winning differently we will have this issue - the high-sec'ers will keep mining, missioning, incursion running and so on with the aim of limiting or eliminating the risk they take for the sake of earning money. To some that is the end goal, to some it's a means to an end - getting more stuff to blow up other stuff with.
And those will do their damn best to avoid losing their ships while blowing up the ships of others. Getting tackled is an issue? Kite. Enemy numbers an issue? Blob harder. Enemy cohesion and teamwork to hard to beat? Meta-it-up and infiltrate their organization, steal their stuff, leech their members, break their morale, pop their towers and take their space while they are, preferably, offline or seriously outnumbered so that it's better to cut losses and leave then even try to fight back.
And so on, and so forth.
I do believe we have been over this before so I will not continue, but would like to point out that while you see an issue with high-sec being to profitable for to little risk (if I understood you right, that is) I see this as one symptom of a much wider and more entrenched issue. I have no idea how to get people's goals to change from "win at all costs" to "have fun no matter what happens" but I think a needed first step would be to remove killboards completely, to remove the aversion to getting worse 'stats'. Obviously, this will never ever happen.
Do or die style brawling will never come back to the game's PVP-meta, and high-sec ISK grinders will not be leaving their safe(ish) farming environment for any reason, unless some major changes are done.
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While a nicely appointed T2-fitted frigate might set you back 10-15 mil, it's also perfectly simple to fit one out with meta T1 gear for about 1-2 million.
Make that more like 30-40m for a T2 frig.
Na, I'm talking about a T1 frigate fitted with appropriate T2 modules, not a fully T2-kitted T2 frigate. Those are certainly more expensive.
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How do you make money yourself to afford your pvp fix, btw ?
Easy. Don't pvp in ships you can't afford to lose.
Which sounds quite flip, but it's accurate, too. If you can't afford to lose capital ships, don't pvp in capital ships. If you can't afford to lose T2, don't pvp in T2. With FW, especially, it's very feasible to pvp in T1 frigates. While a nicely appointed T2-fitted frigate might set you back 10-15 mil, it's also perfectly simple to fit one out with meta T1 gear for about 1-2 million.
Which means that running a single L4 mission could easily fund a baker's dozen of pvp frigates. If you're not up to soloing L4s, learn to salvage and fly as salvager for a friend's L4 missions. You'll be able to fit at least a few of those 1-2 million isk pvp frigates from the sale of one missions worth of salvage.
I pvped exclusively through the Great Northern War, flying T1 and T2 frigates with less than 20 million isk in my wallet. While I did start ratting towards the end to make money for larger ships, that was still at least 6 months of solid, daily pvp using only the sale of loot and Jericho Fraction's ship replacement program to fund my losses.
And squad-level pvp wing needs tacklers, and a tackling frigate can easily be fitted out for under a million. Start bringing those and your fleet-mates will happily help you fund your losses while thanking you profusely for helping them get kills.
Oh please, I have done years of pvp, i know how it works. I may have had the patience to farm things to afford my pvp ships, but that was still a big hassle. And yes, even for frigates. When you tend to lose those by 3 or 4, it's already more than 75M isk.
I have 115M SP, what are they for if that's for me to only fly in cheap T1 fitted T1 frigates ? What are they for since in solo pvp you mostly need your T2, rigged, faction ammo, nanite pasted (and maybe boosters too) ship to perform decently ? I perfectly understand that it's possible to win by being cunning with a cheap fit, engaging the right things, and all. But when facing people that know what they are doing, and that have skills, you need the slightest bit of advantage you can get, or it seriously limits your targets. Unless you want to spend your time to die, which is maybe fine for a newbie that is discovering pvp the hard way, but not for a vet.
Tbh I envy noobs starting pvp early, their ships are cheap/expendable, even if they do not earn much, and they have costless clones and so on. Now that I look back, finding the funds for the next class of ship (a BC, a BS) was maybe a tantalizing experience at first, but financing the cheap T1 frig I was using was a piece of cake. I should have started pvp that early...
So yes, at the end of my pvp life it started to look like the beginning of my pvp life. You start with cheap shit because that's only what you can fly and afford, and then you begin to use expensive stuff, cruisers, BCs, BSes, T2 cruisers, etc. And when you eventually start to be so bored of farming that you barely make 200M a month through utter disgust, you stop using all of these ships and get back to the cheap shit you used as a noob. Feels a bit like playing an incontinent old man at the end of his life.
So no, that's not easy. The financing part of that game is partially borked. A game is meant to be fun to play. Farming is not, except for the hardcore carebears that run them all the day (and usually do not even pvp).
I have had great fun and my best adrenaline filled moments in expensive ships too. I have banzai-ed in a dread that I barely used once of twice in combat, but what a thrill. I couldn't "afford" to lose it, but what the hell, I went for it with Eran and it payed off. Well technically I could afford it have I had the courage to farm it back for days. That's the problem.
You know what ? People may think what they want of Akhesanpathemka-something (can't remember the spelling of her name) when she ran for the CSM, and she may have had fucked up in many ways, but her main motivator was "I don't want Eve to be like a second job", and well, I agree wholeheartedly.
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So you're saying "I want to pvp in what are the most expensive ships in the game, but I don't want to have to afford them?"
Ignore everything I said, then. I personally love frigate and interceptor pvp. It's my favorite. Despite having a 10 year old character with the skills and wallet to fly anything (well, no capital ship skills, but that's because I simply don't care about flying cap ships). I'll pvp in cruisers if it's needed, or BC or BS, HACS or Recons, but I really don't care for the combat as much. Trundle in, fire up my mods, wait to see if my ship will pop before the other person's ship. The higher price of the ships maybe gives the combat a little wallet-risking frisson, but it's nothing compared to (in my mind) the thrill of screaming into combat in something like a T2-fitted Breacher and having it all come down to split-second tactical decisions. But that's just me.
I honestly don't know how to answer your question, then. It sounds like our mutual experience of combat, what we enjoy the most about it, is simply too alien from one another. I could suggest "just fight on Sisi", but I suspect you want your fights to mean something. I guess all I can say to you, and I say it without an ounce of snark or ill-will, is "Good luck, I'd hate to be in your position."
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I have been looking at getting into pvp and have gotten some pointers and such from some veterans, but at the end of the day, the whole "don't fly what you can't afford to lose" attitude, while understandable, is very frustrating for me. To put it another way, I absolutely loathe frigates. I understand their value and purpose, but I prefer and have focused more time and effort in cruiser and battlecruiser piloting and such that relearning how to fly a frigate bothers me.
The other issue is, given the timing of when I'm on, I end up doing a whole lot of solo missioning and this gets boring. Yes, I can chat with people in various channels as I go about doing missions, but I've been stuck on l3 missions for two months now because I cannot afford to lose a Megathron or other BS. I've just finished putting together the fittings on the 'thron that was given as a gift; trying to insure it, will drop my wallet by 50% meaning that I wouldn't be able to even afford to fly my Brutix.
I understand that part of the game is to hurt the other person's wallet, but this in turn gives rise to many people who aren't willing to risk their shiny new ships. I've been playing MMOs now for just over 10 years, and the one thing that I've noticed, regardless of the setting/system/mechanics, I always seem to have a hard time making money in the games I play. I play to have fun, do the quests, and socialize. I typically will have enough money to get by and stuff, but even in the three months I've been playing EVE, I have never had enough money to both buy, fit, and afford to lose a battleship; this could suddenly change if and when I get around to doing l4.
As for the high sec/low sec...in the early days, I had thought that the missioning progression would eventually make players go down into low sec; and there are some missions in high sec that have a destination in low sec, but there is no actual 'natural' progression to move players from high to low in that regard. Also, given the one experience I've had (take mission, go low sec, finish mission, get ganked), right now, I'm less inclined now more than before of even going to low sec.
I know this might sound a little immersion breaking and not be in the spirit of EVE, but if CCP really wanted people to do more stuff in low sec, I would seriously recommend the following: take a feature from the pve/rp servers from WoW. Treat low sec as contested territory, but if a person isn't flagged for pvp (in this case, their safety is green) then they cannot be engaged and nor can they engage other players. Let players decide if they want to actually do pvp in low sec instead of using the whole 'CONCORD will stomp your ass if you do' protection of high sec. And one thing, as I look back at my pvp'ing in WoW...I flagged for pvp more readily in contested areas when I had the choice; if I came into an area that was being attacked by the Horde (yes, I was and forever will be an Alliance player) and I wasn't on a low level toon, I'd flag myself and help out the other Alliance players out. So, that would be my suggestion about how to transition people from high to low sec.
I guess it would also help if there were more unique or better rewards for doing things in low sec than high or null...from what I'm understanding, I can in theory stay in high sec and more or less get similar rewards from missions as I would from low sec...might be faster in low sec, but I don't risk getting jumped while salvaging after the fact. And from what it sounds like, null sec is almost safer to fly than low sec? Again, I would like to think that the ability to choose to do pvp in low sec might help move some players from high to low and potentially increase the pvp action there as people have the option and aren't stressing out all the time worrying that the gate they're heading to isn't being camped. Null sec, to me sounds like a place where if you go, you'd be flagged for pvp whether you like it or not, but then you can increase the rewards to make the risk worth the effort.
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So you're saying "I want to pvp in what are the most expensive ships in the game, but I don't want to have to afford them?"
Ignore everything I said, then. I personally love frigate and interceptor pvp. It's my favorite. Despite having a 10 year old character with the skills and wallet to fly anything (well, no capital ship skills, but that's because I simply don't care about flying cap ships). I'll pvp in cruisers if it's needed, or BC or BS, HACS or Recons, but I really don't care for the combat as much. Trundle in, fire up my mods, wait to see if my ship will pop before the other person's ship. The higher price of the ships maybe gives the combat a little wallet-risking frisson, but it's nothing compared to (in my mind) the thrill of screaming into combat in something like a T2-fitted Breacher and having it all come down to split-second tactical decisions. But that's just me.
I honestly don't know how to answer your question, then. It sounds like our mutual experience of combat, what we enjoy the most about it, is simply too alien from one another. I could suggest "just fight on Sisi", but I suspect you want your fights to mean something. I guess all I can say to you, and I say it without an ounce of snark or ill-will, is "Good luck, I'd hate to be in your position."
I'm mostly a solo pvper, or small gang warfare player. I have never liked fleet fights above 5v5 or 10v10 since it's mostly an overview exercise as long as you are not FC or scout. So what I prefer is frigate or cruiser pvp. The rest, I just coped with it when it was needed. I had a blast with dangerous capital warfare at times but that's it (it's just the mixture of power and vulnerability you feel when flying those).
But no, I am not saying that I want to fly expensive stuff and not afford it, I am saying that the farming mechanics are borked and not fun for most pvpers. It's like a chore everytime you have to make money to buy your next ships. It makes one reluctant to go pvp since at every moment you think "if I lose that ship, it's x more hours of stupid farm". And if I lose the pod, it's drama (30+ M bare min, and if with implants, it's more than 100M, or even more than half a million if low grade slave set).
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I typically will have enough money to get by and stuff, but even in the three months I've been playing EVE, I have never had enough money to both buy, fit, and afford to lose a battleship; this could suddenly change if and when I get around to doing l4.
It's pretty rough for many people to learn the game, develop a PvP habit, and fund it in your first few months. Getting to L4s will actually help a lot. While the money isn't stellar, it's reliable cash and a lazy evening spent grinding will fund a nice little pile of ships.
Can you put your finger on why you dislike flying frigate hulls?
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Not sure really why I dislike the frigate so much...I think partly I like batteries of guns and therefore prefer the firepower of the cruiser and battlecruiser to the frigate; they aren't as fast, but they're still fast ships; that and at the end of the day, I like having range and thus prefer medium rails.
Also, I think I don't quite have the reaction time (at least not at the moment) to react to the speed that frigate combat seems to take place at.
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Frigates are the best way to learn pvp, because they are precisely one of the ships the hardest to pilot. They are fast and agile, and everything takes 10 times less to do in a frigate and asks for 10 times quicker actions than everything else, especially fast frigates and interceptors.
They ask for a lot of care when orbiting, keeping at range, or whatever. And the slightest mistake can be deadly.
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Oh, I plan on using frigates when I start looking at pvp more seriously...mainly because the expense is not nearly as bad as any other hull. But it is still an expense that is far more expensive in this game than any other MMO I've played; in others your wallet got hurt repairing gear after pvp battles, but you never really had to go out and completely replace weapon, armor, and other gear if you lost a fight, nor did you have to pay for the resurrection.
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The up side is that while your losses will feel crippling, it'll make victory all the sweeter, and your heart beat faster when you risk a ship.
The most important thing early on is finding some people to fly with, who can kick you across your initial worries, provide you with practical advice, and help you get your first few victories. Once you get your first taste of pod juice, chances are you won't want to go back.
This is turning into a rather long digression - should maybe be split off the main thread?
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But no, I am not saying that I want to fly expensive stuff and not afford it, I am saying that the farming mechanics are borked and not fun for most pvpers. It's like a chore everytime you have to make money to buy your next ships. It makes one reluctant to go pvp since at every moment you think "if I lose that ship, it's x more hours of stupid farm". And if I lose the pod, it's drama (30+ M bare min, and if with implants, it's more than 100M, or even more than half a million if low grade slave set).
Why is it (and I'm asking in all seriousness here) that you can't just get your pvp fix on SiSi, then?
In my own opinion, the fact that our ships/implants/clones do have a real cost (in isk and time and effort) is a big part of what makes the game fun for me. I'm not a gambler, in the sense that I'm not the sort of person that likes to go to Vegas and play craps, but the fact that both I and my opponent are staking something on the fight we're about to get into is a part of why I like pvp.
There's a philosophy you see in other MMOs around pvp, where everyone fits out with absolutely the best gear they can. This is reasonable, since you never lose this gear if you lose a fight. Some MMOs will have the gear degrade, but it's always cheap and easy to get it repaired. I like the aspect of Eve where you lose your ship/mods if you lose the fight. It turns things, for me, into more of a complex set of trade-offs: What are my objectives? What am I trying to accomplish this month? Will I gain more of a psychological edge if I risk higher-isk ships to gain higher-value kills, or will it be more cost-effective for me to fly lower value ships and go after my enemy's low-hanging fruit?
Again, this is just me. I have no idea why you choose to pvp, and what makes pvp fun for you.
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Pyre have encouraged me to make the absolute most out of a T1 frigate that I possibly can. My Kestrel fit is around 9mil isk - how much can I get done in 9mil worth of hull and modules and ammo?
As my skills got better I could fit more demanding modules, upgrade to T2 modules and so on. The small shield extender became a medium. The launchers become T2. Now I can fit an MWD or an AB, changing my engagement envelope.
I think that area is maxxed out now, though. So where do the additional % points come from? Flying in wolfpacks. Maximising cooperation and efficiency. It's more about how I play. That's where the fun comes from, for me.
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Why is it (and I'm asking in all seriousness here) that you can't just get your pvp fix on SiSi, then?
Why people can't get their pvp on SiSi, then ? Why would it be different for me ?
In my own opinion, the fact that our ships/implants/clones do have a real cost (in isk and time and effort) is a big part of what makes the game fun for me. I'm not a gambler, in the sense that I'm not the sort of person that likes to go to Vegas and play craps, but the fact that both I and my opponent are staking something on the fight we're about to get into is a part of why I like pvp.
There's a philosophy you see in other MMOs around pvp, where everyone fits out with absolutely the best gear they can. This is reasonable, since you never lose this gear if you lose a fight. Some MMOs will have the gear degrade, but it's always cheap and easy to get it repaired. I like the aspect of Eve where you lose your ship/mods if you lose the fight. It turns things, for me, into more of a complex set of trade-offs: What are my objectives? What am I trying to accomplish this month? Will I gain more of a psychological edge if I risk higher-isk ships to gain higher-value kills, or will it be more cost-effective for me to fly lower value ships and go after my enemy's low-hanging fruit?
Again, this is just me. I have no idea why you choose to pvp, and what makes pvp fun for you.
Don't make me say what I never said...
Eve chooses to make combat adrenaline filled and offers consequences for everything that you lose. That's one of the big selling points of the game. Fine.
With that in mind, it also comes at a cost : since your ships and stuff involves a certain amount of resources invested in them, it involves time spent gathering those resources. Don't make me believe that you enjoy your daily farm ? Well, if so, good for you, but you have to admit that not a lot of pvpers really enjoy farming their L4s, FW button orbiting, incursions, or whatever else they do to make money.
So, as I said, their direct farming mechanisms (aka mission running, mining, etc) are boring as hell. It's a bit sad for a so called pvp game no ? Especially when you need to farm and farm and farm to... pvp. More, having to do pve to make pvp is silly.
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I have been looking at getting into pvp and have gotten some pointers and such from some veterans...
One thing you can do is find a corp that has a full or partial ship replacement program. It's a huge advantage to be in a corp that offers one of these on corporate operations.
Of course, this means you're going to be using and losing those ships for the corp, but that's not a bad thing.
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I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, Lyn, I'm trying to understand what you're saying.
I agree with you that grinding isk to pay for pvp is boring. I get around that by choosing to pvp in cheap ships - I can say that I'm fortunate in that I prefer to pvp in cheap ships, but I'm certainly guided by the awareness that I can maximize the pvp I get for my isk grinding that way.
Here's what I mean: I run L4 missions for isk. I'm currently doing so in a MJD/T2 sentry drone Dominix. This lets me blitz through a L4 in 5-15 minutes (most of the time is travel time to acceleration gates). Ignoring loot and salvage (if I'm blitzing, I'll leave everything), I make a few million in bounties plus a few million for the mission, plus about 10 million in convertable LP. Say it adds up to 14 million. That's a well-appointed Breacher right there (including all the appropriate consumables, faction and T2 ammo, rigs, etc). If I spend an hour doing those missions, that's 6 Breachers. Or 4 nicely fit Stabbers (my pvp cruiser of choice). Or about 84 suicide tackler frigates.
If I spend a 4 hour game session looking for solo pvp in FW low sec, I may find enough fights to lose two of those well-appointed Breachers. Ditto for the Stabbers. If I'm flying suicide tackler for a small gang (not a role I normally fly, but I'm throwing it out there because it's an easy one for a new pvper to jump into) that's finding a lot of fights, I may lose half a dozen in that session. That means that my one hour of L4 grinding has funded three days of solo Breacher pvp (assuming I find the fights - finding solo fights is pretty hit or miss for me), two days of solo Stabber pvp, or two solid weeks of daily small gang pvp in suicide tacklers. Not including the value of any loot I get during that combat.
I hear what you're saying when you say you prefer to fight in high-value ships. Where I'm not understanding you is why you want to pvp in them. Are you just looking for "Wheeee! Solo BS fights!"? I've gotten far more solo BS fights on SiSi than I have on TQ. Are you interested in pvp in Eve because of the stakes? If that's the case, then I definitely don't understand your complaint. Are you just saying that you want the cost of everything to be lower in the game?
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I said above that what I usually favored as a solo pvper were frigates or cruisers, either T1 or T2...