Features and Ideas - the posters' psychology

Bold Pilot Log, Entry #18

This week ends with an interesting discussion in the EVE forums. A new dev blog came out that stated the main generic objectives CCP set themselves to evolce null security space. Now, a lot of people praised them for this step, and I can't say I disagree. This is something long overdue. What I really want to look at now though is the patterns people seem to post in.

As it turns out, there are a few types to how some would like to see it go. The first is the type of player who assumes it is at a great risk that someone lives out there, therefore they shall make a ridiculous amount of money. These people are  what we could call the carebeary types.

Then there are those that whine aboout how supercapitals mean everything, and how small alliances don't really have a chance against monstrous coalitions, and how blobs can do anything better. This bunch is rather mixed, you can see people from all over the map and from many kinds of organization. Whether this is a sign that the statements hold some truth or that parrots are everywhere, remains to be discovered. Let's dub them the small gang people.

And finally you can find the hardcore alliance dudes, the ones that do not really care about supercapitals online as long as they can have their legions of blues shooting legions of reds. Their highlights are usually going towards the direction about stations, POS and generally feel offended at the thought that jump mechanics may get tedious.

First of all, let's address the profit concerns. I want to say one thing: been there, done that. It's pretty much like a solo effort with very few people who you can actually trust beyond the alliance rules. The risk is almost negligibile IF you know how to minimze it. That is of course watching intel and local, staying aligned, bubbles on gate, etc. And the profits that can be made? They ARE ridiculous, though I don't really have any base to complain because that means with sufficient carebearing I could keep two accounts going in EVE. Yeah, I ratted out two PLEXes each month... Can we move on please? So, after confirming that living in 0.0 is (was?) indeed profitable, you have to look at it from different angles. Some people go and live there exclusively because of the profits. They are the infamous 0.0 carebears, with some teeth and a grain of salt included. But what about the others? Well, ships and guns cost ISK, so it's rather obvious they need to find some way to make isk with minimal effort, using the exact same skillset they developed for PVP. That means anomalies. That means team effort. That means, when you run a top-level anomaly with a few friends, you should be able to pay for your next BS / BC / logi ship, whatever. The current state is rather awkward because many people use other characters that reside and mission in high sec just for this purpose.

The second concern is how home defense works. It is again a two sided coin. Right now, the most effective wa of defending your home is to blob up, camp choke points, hunt people that show up on intel. This sometimes becomes a small gang fight, sometimes escalates to a real battle, and most of the time - guess what? The hunted just slip away or get blobbed. So there's the source of whineage. Very few people enjoy running into gatecamps of 30+ drakes or whatever. The small gang bunch is right in this. Now, the problem here is that how else could you organize an effective home defense fleet? The incursing gang will always feel the fight was unfair if the defense gang is efficient!

The next thing, stations and POS. So, you live in a system without a station, you need some place to store your ships, modules, do ammo manufacture, etc. Compared to the station, living off a POS is so much different. Done that too. The real problem under POSes are the differences in boarding a ship in a station and boarding it inside the POS shield. The second means you don't get the shield bonuses from your skills. On a shield taked Hurricane, that means you have like one third of your EHP on you. When undocking from the station, your capacitor and shields are at their maximum capacity. Then there is the matter of modules. Not only do you lose the aforementioned benefits but you are unable to activate any module that would help your comrades repair their shields, nor can you release drones... In short, it s-u-c-k-s.

So, mandatory prediction coming up. CCP will try to wrestle with the POS code and break something else in the process. While at it, they'll think hard and discover that some things are too convenient for the big alliances, modify them, only to induce more cooperation, thus more robust cooperations. They'll probably mess with the resources so that each region would have its own technetium. You get the picture... Regardless of all good ideas, crappy otr excellent implementation the mighty people will come up with something entirely different that they expect.

Sessym out.