¶ First, I would like to say that after correspondence with Smakalicious of IAC, I will be writing for EVE-Mag.com, an eZine focusing on Eve-Online which has carved out a nice little place for itself in the EVE-O community, even becoming an officially recognized Community Site.  I expect to submit my first article before the end of this week after some questions I have are answered.

¶ As I was familiarizing myself with EVE-Mag’s current body of work, I came across an article by ShadowRhino titled “Why EVE is Not Going the Way of the Carebear…“  In it, he says*:

I’ll start with what is likely to be the least controversial change coming up, the high sec ganking nerf. Some people are wondering why Concord would respond faster then in the past. Why would there be a bigger sec hit when attacking someone in 1.0 as opposed to .5? It’s rather simple. Ganking someone in highsec is an “illegal” act as far as concord is concerned, that would cause them to respond. The patch will cause concord to respond realistically, if you were to stop and think about it. I being from the U.S., in California, I have been to various areas where the police presence varied greatly. That difference in presence corresponded with the “value” of the area to the city I was in.

(*Please see the original article for the complete context – Havo)


¶ While he says “I’ll start with…” the article stays on the topic of the latest CONCORD buff and doesn’t get into any of the other things that the forum goers like myself are protesting.  I’ll start with the topic of the suicide ganking nerf, and then I will touch on the other subjects because I do believe CCP is catering more and more to the carebears and to the inexperienced players who are frankly too lazy and/or too stupid to learn to play the game the way I had to (lazy and stupid are neither joined at the hip nor mutually exclusive).

The CONCORD Buff of ‘08

¶ In the Dev Blog titled “Serious Security” by CCP Fear, it is explained that CONCORD’s response time and spawn composition is being changed.  In the past, there would be a period of time from the onset of aggression ranging from 0 to 30 seconds and then a great big grey blob of CONCORD ships would show up and instantly omgwtfbbqpwn the evildoer(s).  The number of CONCORD ships, if I understand it correctly, was dependant upon how many agressing ships were present and how long it took to kill them – if the offender(s) weren’t dead within a certain interval of time, more CONCORD ships would spawn.  Fair enough.  CCP Fear says:

CONCORD has some issues, mostly that pilots are killed long before CONCORD arrives. We have decreased the response time, meaning they will arrive quicker, and we should see a more helpful CONCORD aiding those in need.

We also changed the functionality and reduced the spawn. CONCORD now spawns in groups of 3 ships: 2 frigate sized vessels, which will lock the aggressor down in place, and a heavy hitting battleship to reduce his or her ship to metal scraps. The frigates will lock almost instantly while the battleship takes longer to lock, and the aggressor is made more aware of his or her impending doom.

¶ It is this writer’s opinion that CONCORD did not need a response time buff.  It is also my opinion that changing the spawn composition to include less ships doesn’t really matter when the CONCORD NPCs wield ECM that jams you instantly no matter what your sensor strength is.  They didn’t need so many ships to begin with.  Given that fact, the idea that by decreasing the size of the spawn you balance the fact that you’ve made the spawn faster is a joke.  To CCP’s credit, they’re not the ones who tried to use that ridiculous argument; the players who benefit from this change had used it and other similarly ineffective justifications to defend a whole series of changes leading to a kinder, gentler EVE.

¶ Many of the players celebrating the latest CONCORD buff were not around for m0o.  Predating BoB, this corporation would camp highsec gates killing anything that came by, using remote-repping battleship gangs   So CONCORD was buffed in DPS and given all manner of infinitely powerful ECM to put a stop to this sort of disregard of the rules.  The damage output of sentry guns was increased because it was too easy for heavy ships like battleships and battlecruisers to endure their damage while camping lowsec gates.  These changes were already made!  They did not need to be made again.

¶ Along with the CONCORD buff comes a change to the way player security status works.  In the past, if you did something ‘bad,’ you would take a hit to your security status.  If you allowed your security status to get too low, you would lose access to areas of high security space.  If you let it get below -5.0 you would be considered an outlaw and anyone can shoot at you without fear of drawing the ire of sentry guns in lowsec (which, since an outlaw cannot enter highsec space, is the only place they would be worried about fighting you) or taking security status hits themselves.  The highsec restriction is as follows:

Players with -2.0 or worse cannot enter 1.0 systems

Players with -2.5 or worse cannot enter 0.9 systems

Players with -3.0 or worse cannot enter 0.8 systems

Players with -3.5 or worse cannot enter 0.7 systems

Players with -4.0 or worse cannot enter 0.6 systems

Players with -4.5 or worse cannot enter 0.5 systems

¶ As you can see, at -4.5 you cannot enter any high security space without being attacked by NPC police, but you are not officially a ‘blinky red’ outlaw until you drop below -5.0.  You can still travel through high security space in your pod, but if you’re -5.0 or lower, you can be podded without CONCORD interference so you must still be careful – AFK travel is not advised (nor should it be)!

¶ These things still work the same.  What has changed is the way security status changes are calculated.  In the past, it was a flat rate.  You lost .5% for aggression, 2.0% for killing a ship and 12.5% for killing a pod that was not an outlaw or involved in a wardec.  CCP Fear says:

We are increasing the security penalties throughout high-security space. It will be a gradual change, from 1.0 down to 0.1, where the security level of the system will dictate how much penalty you receive for illegal actions against a fellow capsuleer. This means that 1.0 will now be the safest of places, where aggressions and kills will be severely penalized and can quickly outlaw the aggressor from higher security levels. Conversely, 0.1, 0.2, and 0.3 will see a decrease in penalty, but not a big step down. This should move most ganking to the lower security areas where it belongs.

¶ The security penalties throughout highsec have been increased.  You’ll lose less sec status for attacking someone in 0.5 space, but it will still be more than you would have lost before this change was implemented.  And attacking someone in higher security systems will be even more severe a change.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I agree that most ganking belongs in low security/zero security space.  By definition, these areas should certainly be more dangerous than high security space – and they are.  They always have been.  However, I don’t agree with the way they’re trying to make that happen.

¶ I am an outlaw.  I don’t mind not being able to enter high security space – that’s why there are three character slots on an account, so that you can train an alt to fly a hauler (only takes a few days) and be done with it.  These changes do not directly effect me, I’ve never been a suicide ganker and probably never will.  But as a player who prefers PvP combat over any other aspect of the game, I’m here to tell you the PvE content of EVE-Online is incredibly painful in its repetitiveness.  I have run Level 4 missions, and I have seen some entertaining story lines there.  I like to read and even participate in the Intergalactic Summit, the role-playing area of the EVE-O forums.  But I’m not keep on running the same missions over and over, or shooting the same rats in the same asteroid belts for days on end and neither are people who use suicide ganking as their ISK making profession in the game.

¶ The loss of security status was already painful for these players, and it forced them to choose their targets.  They will only attack a ship that is carrying enough ISK worth of materials to be worth quite a bit more than the ship they are sacrificing to destroy it.  All of the means for protecting one’s investment have been at our disposal since the game began – don’t travel AFK, do not fly a ship with no ‘tank’ fitted, use a scout if you know you’re travelling through a dangerous area like Caldari highsec in the vicinity of Jita.  Don’t carry your life’s savings in one hauler, don’t undock in anything or carrying anything you can’t afford to lose or replace.  These are all unwritten rules of the ‘cold, harsh’ EVE-Online which we all had to learn and adapt to; those who could not simply left for less difficult games.

¶ As to the idea of CONCORD responding more ‘realistically,’ I find that patently ridiculous.  First off, no ‘real’ police are Johnny on the Spot, 24 hours a day.  For CONCORD forces to not only mobilize but arrive on scene within the space of 30 seconds is about as unrealistic as you can get.  Unless you assume that CONCORD has numerous cloaked ships everywhere – every gate, every station, every planet, moon, belt and inside of every deadspace area – just waiting to lash out against ebil piwates… but is that realistic?  I don’t care if you live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan or the heart of South Central Los Angeles, the cops aren’t there instantly.  Yes, they do respond faster on the Upper East Side, but the area in which a crime is committed does not influence the penalty for the crime.  If you want to talk realism, then allow criminals to mitigate their penalty with ISK – after all, the murderer who can afford expensive lawyers (O.J. Simpson) doesn’t get punished as harshly as the murderer who cannot.

¶ Now I know and you know that making CONCORD respond faster will not save those untanked Badger II’s AFK hauling to and from Jita and other trade hubs – those torp Ravens and gank Brutixes don’t need a lot of time to eat through one of those ships.  This change does go a long way toward protecting the AFK freighter pilot in that it will now take quite a few more torp ravens to put a freighter down before CONCORD permajams them all.  Other than that, all it serves to do is make the situation even worse for the suicide ganker who needs to recover his security status while doing nothing to benefit the average AFK hauler pilot.  I can’t wait to see the whines from people who think the change makes them 100% safe and still get ganked by a single battlecruiser, but I’m getting off-topic now.

¶ The new CONCORD buff and the changes to how security status work are only one of a series of changes that has us on edge.

This Is an Exploit, But That Isn’t?

EXPLOIT NOTIFICATION
Reported by GM Grimmi | 2008.08.26 15:38:53

The practice of insta-joining/leaving warring corporations for the purpose of surprising war targets, or getting them in trouble with CONCORD, is considered an exploit from here on. Reports of this will be investigated on a case by case basis and warnings will be issued at the discretion of the GM. Repeated incidents may result in bans on accounts involved.

¶ For a LONG time, now, mercenary corporations and Empire pirate corporations who make a living wardec’ing other corporations to ransom them for their highsec POS towers or just ransom them in general have been troubled by the fact that their targets can hop from corporation to corporation, effectively ignoring the declaration of war.  This is true even in the case of legitimate wars where one party declares war on another for a legitimate grievance.  At first, you might say ’so they joined another corporation, so what?’ but it isn’t that simple.

¶ You see, a corporation has a limited number of ‘wardec slots’ with which to declare war; this is due to the Alliance P nerf in which CCP implemented a limitation to stop Privateers alliance from wardec’ing all of EVE-Online as they had been doing (this turned empire space into a 0.0 hunting ground, giving them thousands of targets with no CONCORD intervention… the forum whines about this were heard as far away as the World of Warcraft forums).  The Alliance P nerf was itself a carebear buff, but to be honest, I don’t disagree with it – it was never intended for one group to declare war on everybody, wars are supposed to have some kind of motive behind them.  This change brought with it a scaling cost system, where the cost of declaring war depends on a number of factors including:

Whether group declaring war is a corporation or alliance

Whether target is a corporation or alliance

How many active war declarations aggressing group is involved in

How many active war declarations target group is involved in

¶ A single corporation has three ’slots’ to declare war.  So let’s say I’m CEO of a corporation and one of my people tells me that someone in your corporation ran his mouth on local, namecalled, smacked and generally conducted himself like a jerk.  I contact you and ask for a formal apology – reasonable, right?  You respond like a jerk, so I declare war.  Time to teach you and yours some e-Manners, in my opinion.  In response, you and your corporation talk more smack as you use an alt to create another corporation and all of your people jump to it, thus escaping from the wardec against your original corp.

¶ Okay, fine.  I’m still pretty offended, so I’ll declare war on Corp #2 as well.  In response, you talk more smack, create a third corporation and hop over.  Grrrr, you’re getting annoying but I’m persistant and now I want to blow up your pixels even more.  I wardec Corp #3.

¶ What happens next?  You guessed it!  You create Corp #4 and hop your people to it.  Now I’m out of wardec slots.  In order to pursue, I have to drop one of the previous wardecs, so I do.  Now I dec Corp #4, which only leads you to hop to the corporation that is no longer at war.

¶ So, effectively, by manipulating the system you can say and do whatever you want to whomever you want without fear of any action being taken against you aside from suicide ganking.  One of the points of wardecs is to not have to suicide someone in order to get satisfaction, so I shouldn’t be forced to take that as my only recourse.

¶ The GM staff has historically responded that they can’t dictate what corporation a player joins any more than they can dictate when a player logs on or off (re: the logoffski and log on trap issues).  Alright, fair enough on the surface.  But dig a little deeper and it’s not hard to tell the difference between somebody who is exploiting the limited number of wardec slots to avoid PvP entirely and somebody who does not want to PvP at all and so they leave to join an NPC corporation or they leave to join a different player corporation because they honestly wanted to go to a different corp.  If CCP can make a judgement call about what is or isn’t an alt corporation made just to post on CAOD, then I’m sure they’re smart enough to tell the difference in this case as well, but they’ve chosen not to.

¶ Another problem that corporations who survive on wardecs have is targets who refuse to undock at all.  These players don’t corp hop or leave for NPC corporations or disband, they just don’t undock.  The logic here is that ‘if we ignore them, they will go away.’  And this is true in most cases.  It’s also perfectly legitimate.  After all, while it may not be fun to camp you into a station, it’s not fun spinning your ship around inside of that station and you’re not making any more profit than I am so we’re even.

¶ However, some players have decided to use the same corp hopping tactic that people use to escape against them, using it to catch them unawares.  An alt corp will be set up to wardec the target corporation.  The target corp naturally gets cautious but after a few days of not seeing war targets in their area, they get back to business as usual.  At this point, the player(s) hunting them will dock, join the corporation and undock, warping to the belt the target is mining or the mission that has already been probed out, catching their target before he has a chance to react in much the same way corp hoppers escape from wardecs with their alt shell corporations before attackers have a chance to react.  These players will then drop out of the warring corporation so that they can repeat the process later.  This has the side effect of making them no longer a legal target for their ‘victim’ corporation.  Somebody lost an officer-fitted Caldari Navy Raven to this tactic, ran to the forums to whine about it, and within days GM Grimmi posted the exploit notification.

¶ I feel the need to clarify my position on this: I do not approve or condone this method.  I think it is just as screwed up as corp hopping to avoid a fight.  I agree that it is an exploit and I am glad that CCP declared it so.  Hurrah!  The thing I take issue with is that it’s an exploit to corp hop and kill people but it’s not an exploit to corp hop and avoid being killed.  You manipulate the same flawed game mechanic in both instances, but only one is ‘wrong.’  God forbid you blow up somebody’s ship in an internet spaceship game!

¶ Then there’s IVY League alliance, better known as EVE University corporation.  This corporation came under attack by the already nerfed Privateers alliance after parading through lowsec in a roaming PvP gang literally 100 players strong.  When accused of blobbing and lagging out systems, they defended themselves by saying “it’s not a blob, it’s a fleet.  If you don’t like it, dock up – you don’t have to fight us.”  In response to this bravado and forum smack talk, PRVTR declared war.

¶ Despite maintaining a positive efficiency against PRVTR during this time, the leaders of IVY eventually decided to spend a couple hundred million ISK, created 20 or so one-man alt corporations, wardec’d them against each other and then joined one or more of them into the alliance.  This transferred the a bunch of inexpensive corp-to-corp wardecs to the alliance.  Remember above where I explained how the number of wardecs a target organization is involved in will drive up the cost of declaring war on them?  This ‘tactic’ by IVY drove the price of a wardec up over 2 billion ISK per week.  While a GM response was promised by CCP Mitnal, it did not come via the forum.  However, it came out later that the GMs had ruled this is not an exploit of the wardec system.  Given the understanding that an exploit is achieving a result that benefits one player while disadvanging another through unintended game mechanics, I don’t understand how this is NOT an exploit, but so says CCP.

¶ It doesn’t help when a new Dev named CCP Greyscale who just came onto the staff in 2007 considers the entire wardec mechanic nothing more than a “pay to grief” system and is being allowed to work on ways to “fix” it.  Pay to grief???  That isn’t what the knowledgebase says:

One of the main purposes of corporations and alliances is to allow formal wars to be fought over resources, trade routes, strategic systems or simple pride.

¶ I agree that the system needs some work, particularly to stop corp hopping of both types, but it’s not a pay to grief system at all, even if a few people use it that way.  When your war targets don’t undock, drop to an NPC corporation or simply corp hop their way out of the wardec altogether, you can’t kill anybody so there is no fun to be had for griefers to begin with.  People who use wardecs JUST to grief other people don’t do so for long because it’s boring.

Faction Warfare and Speed

¶ On the face of it, Faction Warfare might seem to be a buff to PvP.  After all, it gets carebears who would otherwise do nothing but run L4 missions solo in highsec space all day into lowsec to PvP in their Drakes and Caracals and Ravens.  It also encourages new players to get their feet wet and learn how to not be antisocial in a game where refusing to join a player corporation limits you from a very large part of the content, most of which is uniquely player-driven.  Nothing wrong with that, right?

¶ Well, we’re all familiar with nano ships – at least, if we PvP we are.  Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they’re effective.  They’ll either kill you or run away from you.  They’re difficult but not impossible to kill.  With the exception of the Sacrilege, Cerberus and the Ishtar, these ships must slow down in order to hit with their shipboard weapons, otherwise their only DPS is in the forum of drones.  For the Sacrilege and Cerberus, missiles can remain effective as they’re not effected by transversal velocity, and for the Ishtar which relies on drones as its primary damage output transversal is also not an issue.  This isn’t the case for ships like the Vagabond, Huginn, Deimos, etc.

¶ With the exception of the Vagabond, which receives a bonus to ship velocity, most nano ships max out in the area of 3-4km/sec.  The Vagabond can break 6k easily.  With very expensive implants, rigs, deadspace and faction fittings incredible speeds can be achieved.  I have seen a Vagabond move faster than 10km/sec, rigged, overheating his microwarpdrive and probably using implants or boosters.  It was disappointing not being able to catch him, but you know what?  Moving at 10km/sec, he couldn’t kill me either.

¶ Unfortunately, once a ship starts moving faster than 2km/sec, it begins to take a lot less damage from missiles and turret weapons start having a hard time tracking it.  So when experienced PvPers joined Faction Warfare and started countering the Caldari militia’s drake blob with nano-fitted HACs, the whines caused a disturbance in the force.  It was as if a thousand Achura Caldari cried out at once and were suddenly ganked.  Instead of doing like 0.0 residents had done months beforehand and learning how to counter the nano tactic, these players took to the forums and whined, moaned, complained and just raised a general ruckus until CCP Nozh made a dev blog saying that:

If one then takes a look at the max velocity on missiles and drones, it is readily apparent that our combat system was never designed for such speeds. Even when we did some basic tests on our internal servers, with special high-speed missiles, we quickly noticed Destiny (our physics engine) behaving very strangely.

¶ I respectfully submit that CCP Nozh is a liar.  To support this suggestion, I offer the following logic:  CCP tests things before they implement them on the live server (Tranquility, or TQ for short).  Before something goes to TQ, it goes through internal testing, then it goes to the test server for play testing and bug reporting, then maybe it goes live or maybe it gets held back for adjustment and further testing.  If ship speeds made Destiny ‘behave very strangely,’ as CCP Nozh claims, then these implants, boosters, rigs and modules (faction/deadspace/officer MWDs, overdrives, nanofibers, etc) would not have been implemented.  The only other alternative is to say that CCP’s developers don’t know how to play their own game and are incapable of fitting ships the way their players will, and despite CCP Dionysus seeming not to know how a Vagabond should be fitted, I’d rather not believe that all of the developers are clueless.

¶ The only thing broken about nano-fitted ships is that the Drake blob’s heavy missiles can’t hit an Ishtar moving at full speed but that a few nano ships worth of drones can (slowly) overcome a Drake’s powerful passive shield tank, which discourages the noob PvPer and the carebear looking for PvP Lite and we just can’t have that, now can we?  So, in response to this problem manufactured by nanowhiners in daily 50-page forum threads, CCP proposes a change to MWDs, webbers, rigs, boosters, implants and modules to make it so no ship larger than a frigate can travel faster than 2500m/sec without spending billions of ISK on Tech 2 rigs, high grade Snake implants and faction/deadspace/officer fittings.

¶ Don’t misunderstand me – I don’t have anything against Faction Warfare.  I don’t have anything against carebears (as long as they’re not whining about the same things I had to deal with when I was a noob but which I’ve learned how to avoid or survive).  I don’t have anything against noobs (as long as they’re not whining about the ‘cold, harsh’ parts of EVE – I understand it’s a culture shock from run of the mill MMOs like World of Warcraft, I came from WoW myself… just go back to the easier game if you’re not up to EVE).  In fact, I’ve gone out of my way to help a new player understand things more times than I can remember – every time I log on my hauler alt, I wind up conducting a Q&A on the rookie corp channel!

¶ What I take issue with is CCP outright lying to its playerbase about a ridiculously heavy handed nerf that was brought on by nothing other than the whining of inexperienced players.  I respect the fact that CCP is a for-profit corporation and that they need to consider retension of subscribers.  I understand that they feel pressure when they see posts every day reaching 50 pages, all arguing about the same thing.  I also understand this:



¶ While the Assembly Hall isn’t intended as a direct interface for the playerbase to vote yes or no to anything that CCP intends to do with their game, it is intended to be an interface for the players to express their opinions on the direction of the game to the CSM, which IS intended to be a direct interface between the playerbase and CCP.  Not in the capacity of saying yes or no to anything CCP intends to do with their game, mind you, but in the capacity of saying things like, “Can we please have this problem looked at or changed?” or “Do not want!  Please reconsider this!”

¶ One player made two threads, one for players to support the nano nerf and another for players to oppose it.  You can see that the thread opposing the nano nerf got twice as much support (literally) as the thread in favor of the nano nerf.  The EVE-Online forum is frequented by only a fraction of the playerbase, a vocal minority if you will, but when over 2200 people post to support or oppose something, I think that’s a fairly accurate cross-section.

¶ Empyrean Age 1.1 has gone live and the speed nerf was not a part of it.  It was stated that those changes were moved from SiSi to Multiplicity for ‘further testing.’  I sincerely hope that bad idea stays on Multiplicity, forgotten like the insane carrier nerf that was talked about but never came to be.  CCP Nozh’s “Speed Rebalanced” was a blatent case of pandering to noobs (both in the sense of new subscribers and players who have been playing for months but are still wet behind the ears in all things PvP) and frankly crapping all over the existing loyal playerbase out of a fear that they might lose the dollar (or Euro or Pound) of those subscribers while not worrying that the loyal playerbase would leave… after all, we’re loyal, right?

Adapt or Die

¶ This is the funniest part of the whole thing.  While the people were whining about how they couldn’t kill nano ships, nano pilots said “adapt or die, stop asking CCP to change things to make it easier for you.”  Throughout the backlash that came when CCP Nozh published the Speed Rebalanced dev blog, the players who would benefit from this series of changes (yay my Drake will be uber!!!!!) turned this into their own battlecry.

¶ What nobody seems to realize is that we’re not the ones who have whined for changes and nerfs.  We didn’t ask for ships to be faster.  We didn’t ask for the wardec system.  We didn’t ask for it to be easier to suicide gank untanked haulers.  We’re not asking for any changes to be made at all – we’re asking for CCP to stop making poorly thought out changes to please new subscribers who are used to softcore MMOs where dying doesn’t really lose you anything and who haven’t yet learned how to adapt.

¶ We’re saying “STOP changing things – it’s worked fine this long, it doesn’t need to be fixed!”

¶ They’re saying “I DEMAND you change this!!! It’s not FAIR!”

¶ Who needs to adapt or die, again?

¶ Over the last few months, I’ve seen whines about changes that never would’ve been considered in 2006 result in dev blogs along the lines of “x game feature is broken, we are going to nerf y.”  I sincerely hope this trend ends, and soon.  It’s becoming very clear that the developers of EVE-Online are more willing to listen to the whines of carebears and new players than the arguments of PvPers and long-standing subscribers and water down the ‘cold, harsh’ parts to make it easier for people to avoid any manner of risk in high security space which, up until recently, has always emphasized “safer, not safe.”  There is more to the trend than a CONCORD buff, but when a developer like Greyscale posts about maintaining “in-principle risk” and “perceived risk” while lowering real risk, I can’t think of anything else to say besides, “I, for one, welcome our new Carebear overlords.”

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