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[purple]

I'm more concerned with 'power creep' that we have in the game and how this relates to the PF.

50 dudes in t1 frigates flip enough FW systems in Black Rise and placid to bring the Caldari State's economy  to it's knees and nobody bats an eye.

CCP starts giving slight nods to the nullbears throwing around hundreds of Titans, creating cartels that manipulate the price of everything in game and stopping nearly all capsuleer mining ops in Empire for no other reason than boredom  and everybody loses their minds.

[Lyn Farel]

It is terribly, terribly important to realize that prime fiction consistency is very low on the list of CCP priorities, right down there with pleasing the arcane tastes of what I've come to think of as the Summit-Backstage Axis of roleplayers.

[Arista Shahni]

It is terribly, terribly important to realize that prime fiction consistency is very low on the list of CCP priorities, right down there with pleasing the arcane tastes of what I've come to think of as the Summit-Backstage Axis of roleplayers.

LOL

[Shiori]

"This mass obsession is the new evil in our world today. It is perpetrated by fanatics who are utterly indifferent to the enjoyment of daily life in the cluster and we, the last remaining sane people of this world, are going to have to come together to fight it together and eradicate this evil completely from our world."

[Shiori]

Also, stay in school. OR ELSE

[Vic Van Meter]

not many people live in nullsec but highsec is packed.

 It isn't like pirates are also constantly attacking capsuleer corps instead of being small cash cows, or that supplies are hard to come by once you put together one of those corps.  The game isn't challenging the corps and forcing them to put their ships on the line, daily, just to "pay the rent" in terms of PVE.

I think CCP could make things more fun by making it harder to exist out there in nullsec.  Force capsuleer corporations to either get supplies to operate from the empires, get them from linking up with a pirate faction, or make running an outpost station in nullsec so damn expensive that you WANT people to feel safe and secure trading there just so you can collect the tax money.  And make sure that, whoever you side with, that you can have packs of roaming NPCs looking to ruin your day.  Hell, to recognize the work that big alliances do, throw whole hordes of NPCs at them specifically, coordinating massive, custom attacks once every few months so that no one ever gets too comfortable.

Whatever happens, that ought to reduce fleet sizes a bit.  At least there will be a proper drain on resources to justify all the building and logistics that goes into a nullsec corp.

Eh?

There's a reason a lot of people have pointed out "null is like a job".  It is.  It may be a fun job for many, so they'll say "it's easy" -- but its not.  It's work.  and the work of hundred and thousands of players working together, as opposed to NPC's and game mechanics 'doing things'.

The supply chains are run by players.  Eyes and ears on gates, players.  System security, players.  Even in the heart of a "stronghold" there can be issues, and players need to be willing to do those things.  It runs like a tiny communistic society with a splash of capitalism for those going above and beyond their null jobs. 

If it's become rote for those living out there its because they've had years and years of experience doing it that no one notices the "npc rent" for their space anymore - its already allocated in the budgets of what people do out there.  You get to know as many people as you can in positions of logistics, etc, to get what you need done, the wheels are greased with ISK, yes even to your own alliance members (especially so in peacetime), etc. 

I mean, imagine someone who's only 'game time' in EVE is moving a specific group of people's sit around.  That's their whole day.  That's all they do. 

Imagine another person who their whole day is log in and send intel reports for a single gate in a single system.  Thats all they do.

That's why people point out that "null is a job". You could be one of those people flying around by the seat of your pants doing wtf you feel like and just drawing on the alliance resources, or yo could be an alliance resource, that doesn't exist as some NPC thing or through the milieu or a "normal" trade hub in space like Jita which is fed by the whole of the playerbase.


Null has been at war for months, I managed to join a null corp like 2 weeks before our corps CTA.  I've made no ISK since then and it didn't require some Incursionlike NPC mechanics to cause billions of ISK in just day to day damage - not just the big battles, to tick away over the months for everyone on all sides.  The players actually do kick each other's asses well enough to not require another NPC cow in the field to milk.  Only ops get "reinbursed" and reimbursements are only hulls and only if you were fit the right way - which in null means you likely bought the fits from null manufacturers.  The whole thing is nearly self encapsulating.


Anyway I'd hope the goons could at least find a good enough writer for the PF part.  Though penis cults were popular in Rome I don't think they go over well in New Eden.

I think we have a different idea of the concept of "hard".  I'm not saying it isn't time consuming and requires a lot of work, but I wouldn't necessarily consider that hard.  Some of the specific jobs might be hard, but I've never thought of 'time consuming and requiring patience' as really hard gameplay.  Ikaruga was hard.  Learning to avoid radar in F19SF was pretty hard.  The hard part of EVE is centered around the PVP learning curve and the fact that another player can ruin your day.  Which is fine for some people, but I've always seen it as a cop out.

I think a good way to describe it is with the "western town" analogy people like to use.  The whole idea is that Empire space is the relatively safe downtown, lowsec is the lawless backwater of the wild west, and nullsec is supposed to be complete lawlessness.  But one of the reasons that the wilderness was so difficult to live in back in those days wasn't that another trapper would kill you for your furs, it was because the wilderness itself was harsh.  To even survive so far from civilization was a personal trial of endurance, forethought, and planning.

Having a large corp in nullsec isn't the only thing that makes the game's outer reaches relatively easier to survive in, it's that space itself isn't exceptionally hostile.  Other players might be, but the game is relatively benign.  I'm not worried about running out of gas and starving to death or having to repair my hull with scraps from other ships.  Pirates don't send NPC groups to assassinate you in highsec and nobody is in danger of CONCORD simply pulling the plug on their clones if they're discovered to be criminals, forcing them to operate carefully to avoid detection.

PVP is hard in the way PVP in any game will always be hard; it's all got a learning curve.  But the game itself isn't the challenge, it's just the setting.  Which is fine, I suppose, it's just disappointing because I'm starting to think that PVP is becoming a way for developers to develop less actual game.  It's certainly become a huge part of pretty much everything that's come out lately, so as the PVE experiences have gotten easier, shorter, and more casual, the PVP side has been played up hard over the last decade.

It's just disappointing because MMORPGs should be one of those kinds of genres tailor made to provide punishing gameplay.  The manpower to overcome insane obstacles is literally logged in all around.  I suppose I feel like modern developers aren't doing enough to try to kill us in their games and are just outsourcing that job to us to kill each other.

[Louella Dougans]

It's a supervillain generator.

Capsuleer training programmes. While a few turn into superheroes, a lot turn into supervillains.

Why do people continue training more?

Mutual Assured Destruction, possibly.

Also, supervillains tend not to be co-operative people. With a bit of luck, they'll just trip each other up and interfere with each others plans.

/o\

[Silas Vitalia]

To add to Vic's point, current game mechanics mean that supplying distant regions is a complete joke.  With jump freighters and jump bridges getting incredible amounts of supplies across multiple regions is an exercise in patience and not difficulty, and not that much patience, either.   Null territories aren't like the strongholds of old where if the army left to go crusade for a year there was no one left to defend the border, it's like a castle with a fenced-off superhighway running through it, where the army can leave, attack something on the other side of the globe, and be home for dinner.


One of the main reasons for the current state of things in null is because of the ease of moving equipment and troops.  If moving your troops meant something and exposed a weakness, if getting supplies to and from was a difficult prospect, then things would have an entirely different flavor.

[Gaven Lok ri]

Just to put my two cents in: Jump freighters are one of the worst decisions CCP ever made.

And CCP pretty clearly only cares about PF as a marketing tool now. Its up to us to make decent content from now on.

[Louella Dougans]

supposedly, capsuleers designed most of the Tech 3 subsystems, possibly even the ships themselves.

because, you know, a couple of years of connecting a spaceship to your brain means you know instinctively more about naval architecture than someone who spent decades designing spaceships.

[Akrasjel Lanate]

There are two things here:
- lore
- game mechanics/developement

CCP main thing is(and most people care about) game mechanics/developement and CCP  "FORCES" the lore to fit that game development this making it inconsistent. 

[Esna Pitoojee]

I'm more concerned with 'power creep' that we have in the game and how this relates to the PF.

50 dudes in t1 frigates flip enough FW systems in Black Rise and placid to bring the Caldari State's economy  to it's knees and nobody bats an eye.

CCP starts giving slight nods to the nullbears throwing around hundreds of Titans, creating cartels that manipulate the price of everything in game and stopping nearly all capsuleer mining ops in Empire for no other reason than boredom  and everybody loses their minds.

I'll address this first, because it's realistically quite simple: FW is a complete and total joke. Nobody looses their minds over it because at this point it's become so obviously disjointed that everyone realizes it's not going to fit, no matter how much we twist it. We've essentially thrown up our hands and walked away.


Now, about nullsec and stuff. Obviously, nullsec fleets have been getting quite large for some years now, and in theory those fleets could pose a significant hazard to empire fleets.

Except for one thing.

Unlike the Elder Fleet, which was an unknown, a wild card, we are a known value for CONCORD and the Big 4. Specifically, they maintain a massive monitoring and control network over us, straight up to what weapons we can use. Capsuleers still overwhelmingly use empire research and manufacturing lines, we buy our BPOs, BPCs, and some unique items from empire sources, and we happily pay billions in taxes to them because we have no other choice.

This is my gripe with 'the empires are loosing control' - no, they aren't. Capsuleers may wield extraordinarily powerful weapons on a colossal scale, but they're the equivalent of a gun that jams if we point it in the wrong direction.


Which brings me to the economic end of things. One of the few ways we do have power is that we are incredibly, incredibly rich; we can each of us employ hundreds of thousands (incidentally, this is one of the reasons I find most valid for why the empires would even train us in the first place). One of the recent news articles pointed out that capsuleers are now forming a significant fraction of production capacity in the cluster. I have my own gripes with this, but I find it rather more believable than "oh noes, capsuleers could invade any second now!"

[Louella Dougans]

In the Empyrean Age novel, Maleatu Shakor states right out, that the state of disarray that the Republic Fleet was in, does not matter, because "the capsuleers will guard the stargates from now on".

Implying that the relative handful of TLF are enough to hold back the Entire Imperial Navy.

[Silas Vitalia]

In the Empyrean Age novel, Maleatu Shakor states right out, that the state of disarray that the Republic Fleet was in, does not matter, because "the capsuleers will guard the stargates from now on".

Implying that the relative handful of TLF are enough to hold back the Entire Imperial Navy.

Shakor was smoking that Tony G stuff, I wouldn't listen to anything that was said, that shit will get you hiiiigh.

[V. Gesakaarin]

I think this whole project might fall on its face the same way FW did lore-wise and in-game to represent what was expected for one reason: most players need high-sec.

FW was meant to be this major conflict but because people needed high-sec for mission running, manufacturing, trade etc., that CCP probably looked at any disruption causing drop in subs.

This whole nullsec power to the capsuleers will mean somehow, the Empires will still control high-sec enough that it's business as usual.

So it's just going to end up in this silly scenario where the lore is saying something like: Oh, we're entering a dark age of strife where CONCORD and the powers-that-be are collapsing and capsuleers are going to fill the power vacuum.

That won't be represented in-game because those very capsuleers and null alliances will still need high-sec areas to survive in regards to supplies, sales, and ISK generation. So yeah, it will just be a lot of PF histrionics but business as usual will continue even if it is contradictory.