Sad to see Jester's Trek stopping. It was an interesting perspective on many things EVE, and I think it contributed to the idea that blogging about EVE is a thing, and hence the start of this blog. Not that I write much here, but still. So I will try something other than a list of things that I did recently, since that wasn't much. It will probably sound much less coherent than it does in my head, but here goes.
Some of the, lets say, discussion around griefing and ganking and such made me think about how the mechanics actually balance that. And I realized that one thing about EVE in this respect is that for all the talk that it is primarily a PvP game all the risk versus reward balancing present takes into account what I really want to call tangible reward. Except ISK is of course not tangible even in universe. I mean ISK, minerals and loot of all kinds, as opposed to killmails, "tears" and the like.
Most anything that gives in-game rewards requires risk. Which is fine, but the problem is, the older the thing is, the more it shows the early timesink design reminiscent of most other MMOs. And that is the worst kind of risk, since there is relatively little a player can to do deal with it, and even if one can effectively survive, the reward is usually lost even if an attempt to attack failed.
Mining and missions being the worst offenders, since they require hanging in space in mostly defenseless and slowly warping ships for long stretches of time. Hauling requiting moving in a defenseless ship through easily camped chokepoints.
Exploration, since it was added later, at least shrinks the window of vulnerability by allowing the explorer to be cloaked most of the time. On the other hand since Odyssey the minigame exists to distract from local and dscan, making the window narrower, but increasing the scope of the vulnerability. Of the most recent, both security tags and I'm assuming similar newly added in Kronos Mordu's Legion belt rats are small, simple encounter that can be completed in a reasonably fast combat ship in a few minutes.
This clearly shows that CCP is aware that the timesink design is a problem and is moving away from it. But unfortunately it seems that can't and/or won't actually remove the already present elements of that. Which is understandable since the reaction would likely be loud and negative, and rebalancing all that content around non-timesink design would require effort CCP probably wants to spend on new things.
What the timesink design does, other that creating an obvious, but boring, path for new players, is empower the gankers, since around any popular mission or mining hub they can find at basically any time a large number of targets just sitting in space. The same goes for highsec wardec corps, if the dec a PvE/mining corp, their targets either have to hang in space vulnerable or effectively stop playing the game the way they want to.
The gankers or wardec corps are vulnerable only for the few minutes, if that, it takes to undock, land on grid and destroy the ships of the targeted players. There is no effective way to retaliate, or even stop them, since if they see a prepositioned defense force that could actually do anything, they can simply choose to attack elsewhere. And their window of vulnerability is so small than no force can arrive in time to do anything. Certainly in the case of suicide gankers, where even the infinite DPS of Concord showing in thirty seconds or less is too late.
And it is largely the same in lowsec and nullsec, certainly below capital level or timer fights. As evidenced by the many stories of roams that roamed for hours without finding anyone to fight, there is nothing pinning a PvPer in place to make a fight possible. Even the most stationary of gatecamps can just scatter or log off with fifteen seconds of warning and the reform immediately once the threat leaves.
What I feel the fighting system in EVE could really use is some slowing down. The level of DPS and repair per second compared to typical buffers barely makes sense in typical fantasy MMO, with humanlike beings and healing magic, but with giant piles of advanced composites that form spaceships it just feels silly. What I would like is greatly reducing DPS while making a ship ineligible for any kind of local or remote repair for a time after receiving damage, combined with some sort of stacking penalty for damage. This would make smaller groups punching up more viable, move logistics to their place outside the direct battlefield and decrease the importance of alpha and absolute focus fire. It would also extend the vulnerability window for small engagements.
Unfortunately this is not ever going to happen even if most everyone agreed this is a good idea, since it would require rebalancing every ship, most modules, basically all PvE… and it took six months each for CCP to balance a class of ships. And people hate change in general. Which is another reason why CCP prefers to pile on new things rather than to fix existing ones unless they are severely broken. Unfortunately, that can only continue for so long.
