Eve Was Hard

Eve is hard.

If it started life as a smart marketing slogan, this simple phrase, however brief, however cold, has turned into an emblem. It’s a crest of honor that we the players of Eve wear proudly, and routinely like to shove in the face of those of our friends who instead choose to play the road more traveled in “safe” games like WoW. It’s a badge that, whether we’re aware of it or not, binds us all together; a purple heart that says “yeah, this game is fuckin harsh, and yeah, we love it all the more for it.” The infamous and oft-linked learning curve graph is one of the first things your new NPC corp-mates link to you when you mention anything to do with the difficulty of the game after starting your trial account, and that image stays with you.

What sets Eve apart from other MMOs, besides its sheer breadth of content and backstory, is this motto. Unlike other games, there are no real designated “safe” areas, no dedicated “pvp-only” zones, and no “no-PK” rules. Your actions have consequences, but what those actions are and where and how you choose to do them are entirely in your hands.

At times, we try and fit areas of Eve to these ideals, but the beauty of it is that they never quite fit these preconceived notions. We try and declare lowsec the “pvp” zone, or we try and declare highsec the “safe zone”, but the best part of this game is that ultimately those labels are square pegs in round holes.

This, however, is in danger of changing, and the danger is more real than you know. Eve is about to get a whole lot more safe, easy, and bluntly, dumbed-down, and when that happens, your “Eve is Hard” badge will be a relic of the past.

CCP stands at an interesting crossroads right now. In spite of their stumbling last year, they have one of the most well-regarded, accolade-laden, and buzzed about MMO on the market. Exciting partnerships with both Nvidia and Playstation are about to put them even higher up the totem pole, and the original vision of the “all-encompassing space simulator” is on the cusp of being realized.

That all said, CCP needs numbers. Subscriptions might be healthy right now, but CCP, rightfully so, has their eye on growth. Now, their challenge is “how do you attract new players to a notoriously cut-throat, unforgiving, and gigantic learning curve of a game?”, and here’s where the danger is.

Enter: Crimewatch

Crimewatch is the general in-game mechanic that govern aggressions; who can shoot who, who repped who and can now be shot, etc. and the proposed changes to this mechanic, for those who didn’t stream or weren’t present for the Fanfest presentation, are essentially CCP’s answer to new player trepidation of “Eve is Hard”. A video of the presentation can be found here, and I highly recommend going to watch it (yes, its long, but worth watching). The changes are at their core, a massive buff to high-sec security, and un-coincidentally, a fairly substantial nerf to high-sec griefing, baiting, and suicide ganking.

Its not all doom and gloom, and it should be mentioned that CCP Greyscale did begin his portion of the presentation with “before I start though I want to make it clear…we have not started coding on this, its not finalized, we’re going to change our mind about some of it regardless“. He goes on to mention a few things I’m actually all in favor of; among them, a set fix for the 15-minute aggro timer. When it gets fixed, the timer will be a set 15 minutes, after which your ship will e-warp. The ambiguity as it stands now of this sort of working half the time is simply a broken mechanic, and any fix is better than how it currently works.

Another pro of the presentation is that neutral repping will now give you a docking or jumping timer the same as if you’d used your guns on someone. This is a win across the board, because as Greyscale so aptly put it, “God hates station games”.

But now for the cons: Eve is about to get very, very easy.

In Grayscale’s words: “You should be making decisions in-game and going ‘I know what the outcomes are going to be and I can make a smart decision cause I’m a smart player, or dumb decisions if I’m a dumb player’.”

This is incorrect. In the above, you will be making informed and instructed decisions because you will be a forewarned and advised player; your decisions will be made based off warnings and guidelines that CCP will write out for you, it has nothing to do with smarts. A smart player knows the rules of aggression and all of their complex ins and outs and uses that to their advantage over those who have not bothered or are too new to have done so. Does this give the “smart” player an unfair advantage? Absolutely not. To be sure, it’s an advantage to be smart, but that applies to a huge cross-section of the game (and life I might add) across the board.

An older, wiser player though, will know how to group their guns and use overheating and heat buffers correctly in a way that gives them an edge over someone who either is clueless about thermodynamics, or hasn’t actually trained it yet. A player with T2 medium autocannons and gyrostabs will invariably out-damage a player using meta 1 medium AC’s and gyrostabs. Whether this is by cause of the first player being an older toon, or just having made the smart decision to upgrade and train to T2 gear, it still gives him an advantage over the second player.

Eve really has two different types of skills: those you buy as skillbooks in-game, inject, and then click “train”, and those you pick up along the way, simply by playing the game. These are things like transversal and tracking mechanics, how to avoid de-cloaking fleetmates, or even how to fit a ship. There are no in-game skillbooks to train for “directional scanner level 4” or “advanced gate-camping mechanics lvl 5”; you as the player, as opposed the character, simply learn them. Aggro mechanics are no different.

Taking a Stand:

At the end of the day, most players, myself included, can probably agree that highsec should be “safer” or even “the safest” zone in Eve. However, that doesn’t mean it should ever be “Safe”. Eve is all about risk; whether that be in a PvP engagement, market wars, or even PvE, the risk vs reward system is the very foundation of the game. You might bring your minerals to a low-sec system to build due to cheaper build costs at a station, but now you run the risk of getting popped by that gate camp. Level 4 highsec missions are a breeze with a deadspace fitted Tengu or Rattlesnake, but those expensive modules make you a target for those who would capitalize on blowing up your ship for them.

My fellow alliance-mate Buck Futz has taken it upon himself to start a thread on the Eve-O forums looking for positive and constructive feedback and ideas for a better way to go about making changes to highsec aggro mechanics and the way the proposed changes will effect the game. Regardless of your opinion, I encourage you to read and/or comment on it here if you have something constructive to input (or if you’re as clueless about the game as Professor Alphane and his response, by all means, post your ridiculous and uninformed knowledge of Eve for the rest of us to giggle at).

In addition, a few days ago, a consortium of a few of my fellow griefers, gankers, and highsec war-deccers, held an open table discussion on the proposed yet completely uniterated changes to the war dec mechanics. Eve-O thread can be found here.

The panel had Darius III officiating, and included the likes of Psychotic Monk (CEO, Skunkworks), Alekseyev Karrde, Cannibal Kane, Lithalnas (director, Privateers), Iam Widderhins (PRONS), ToxicOz (CEO, Double Tap), Ts5P (director, The 0rphanage), and my friend Istyn, CEO of Tactical Knightmare (butt-buddies to Suddenly Ninjas). Additional commentary is contributed by Zedrik Cayne, Kai86, and Istvaan Shogaatsu. A recording of the discussion is here.

The above reads like a who’s who of “bad guys of Eve”; the gankers, griefers, and some-have-said destroyers of Eve. Yet ironically enough, these are the individuals fighting to make sure this game stays at the level it’s been held up to.

As opposed to many heated arguments otherwise on both the above threads, the idea and desire to keep Eve hard isn’t some “griefer agenda”. This is not a slanted “cheaters” idea on the game, or a way for those who pray on others in this game to legitimize their own playstyle. As griefers, we are extremely flexible to change, because we see it all the time. Our play-style is constantly in flux and in a state of uncertainty, because thats the way we choose to play the game: in the gray areas.

It is entirely understandable for someone who’s been suicide ganked, or been tricked into aggro in their mission to harbor a resentment towards the group of players who make that their playstyle, and I can even sort of understand the attraction to rallying to the idea of banning it entirely from “their” game. But Eve without the risk would be an entirely different game. It would turn boring and monotonous, and in the long run, I promise you, you’d lose interest in it entirely. These changes affect the game itself, and to alter that basic risk vs reward principal of the game undermines the entire foundation of Eve and that very cold, very basic motto. Eve is hard; lets keep it that way.

o7

-Aiden

 

 

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Edit notes:

1.) I’ve reiterated with some minor editing that Crimewatch itself is the general mechanic(s) in-game that govern the laws of aggression. What I am mostly referring to in the above are changes to Crimewatch proposed  by CCP.

2.) Due to a clerical oversight, I somehow neglected to add Iam Widdershins to the list of roundtable discussion participants; particularly neglectful of me due to to Iam’s huge contributions to the discussion. No Iam, I don’t have any sort of personal grudge against you, simply an editing oversight, and the offending interns have been rounded up and fired out of a cannon; kisses.

~ by Aiden Mourn on March 25, 2012.