Windows of vulnerability

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.

Odyssey

My first EVE expansion arrived. Although expansion seems to be overstating it, but if CCP wants to call their biannual major patches that, then why not. It's good that EVE is still changing after ten years running. It is kind of a pity I didn't start playing earlier, when I had more time. But less money. Such is life. Anyway, onwards to Odyssey.

Shiny!

Cosmetic things first. I like the new radial menu. The old one I immediately moved to the middle mouse button and then forgot about it, since it was a set of small, I think either unlabelled or labelled with a twitchy tooltips small icons, which only got in the way of navigating in space. The new one I still keep under the middle button, but with zero delay, which allows issuing commands with quick gestures. And it both looks nice and is labelled. And you can fluidly adjust navigation command ranges by dragging from the center, which is neat, if not extremely useful.

Jump animations are also nice. And the UI seems to working the whole time, rather than freezing for a moment during loading. Or disappearing completely, which I read was what happened on the test server when the feature was introduced. The undock button makes more sense where it is now, even if I still habitually move the mouse to the corner of the screen. I imagine that must be much worse for players who are playing EVE for years.

Scanning

Apparently the scanning effect annoys some people, but I barely even notice it. Even when it glitches and the arc just kind of jumps back repeatedly. I also barely notice of pay attention to brackets in space, because why would you. The list is infinitely more convenient. Especially since why would anyone care where in space the anomalies or signatures actually are? You just jump to them, and the only thing their position affects is the few seconds of warp time more or less. I guess it could matter for aggressive d-scanning. Also the exploration brackets and their window popup look completely different than everything else in space. But who needs consistency. Maybe they will change everything else to big colorful icons. What could possibly go wrong?

The scanning is streamlined, which I on the balance of things is a good thing. It means more competition, but after a few days most people appear to have gotten bored, and I like the saved time on initial scan, both for anomalies, and initial position of signatures. Automatic probe formation and scaling is also fine, since it only saves the tedium. And in some cases for very faint signatures I still had to adjust the position of individual probes manually, which is good.

Removing NPCs from Relic/Data sites was great in that it makes it possible to explore low/null in a T1 frigate that anyone can afford to lose, rather that a Tengu or some sort of multiboxed setup.

The hacking minigame is, at best, serviceable. Restoration nodes seem extremely unbalanced. Why do they increase coherence of defenses beyond initial values? I think someone doesn't quite grasp the definition of the word "restoration". Otherwise the minigame requires a minimal amount of pattern recognition, and with that the only remaining factor is luck and character skills/ship loadout. I guess that's fine. The loot appears to be a bit better from both relic and data sites, although I didn't do that much exploration before Odyssey to have a good comparison base.

The can spew is less annoying than expected. Apparently it was adjusted late during the testing to reduce the speed and number of cans. This makes it possible to most of the time capture all cans of a given type. And after cargo scanning the container before you can know which type of cans actually contains the valuable loot. I think I miss what I want about one in five times, which is tolerable. I guess this changes in nullsec, where there can be multiple types of good loot in a single container, and probably they spawn more of them moving faster.

Will Tag For Sec

I don't really plan to do anything that would drop my security status, so this doesn't affect me outright. But it is still a thing, especially since I recently tried to do things in lowsec. One issue I have is that it makes security statuses below zero essentially equivalent, since the only things it means now is how much someone cares about not having low negative sec status. Before, it was at least a vague indication of how much time someone is spending attacking other players to shooting NPC. On the other hand, it is a nice lowsec belt ratting loot.

Other stuff

I am not playing long enough to be affected by ship balance changes, so I nothing much to say about those. I can now fly Iteron V, which is nice. Although Iterons makes even less sense now than before. I only dabbled in mining, so I have no idea how mining sites being moved to anomalies will change anything. Probably increase the amount of nominally lowsec minerals coming from highsec, because the anoms will be now mined out quicker, and so respawn faster. No clue about ice changes. Even less about moon changes, although I guess a null-sec war is something to read about.

So, in general the expansion didn't seem to break anything that affects me, it improved a bunch of things that do. That, I suppose, is a success.

On missions and PvE in general

The general opinion appears to be that PvE in EVE is somewhere between not very good and bad. After my six weeks of playing I can see there are definitely issues, both in PvE combat itself and mission structure and rewards. I don't think they are particularly terrible, though. Of course any change would have consequences which might make things worse. Also I have only done L3 missions and below and some exploration, so I have no experience with more advanced forms of PvE.

One issue that is somewhat subjective, but become apparent to me early, is that individual enemies are typically much weaker than a player ship of an equivalent class. This means that typically in a mission the player would be significantly outnumbered. Rather than give an impression of being powerful this mostly knocks me out of any immersion because I have to wonder, why are even the NPC navy ships so bad? More practically this gives combat somewhat 'whack-a-mole' feel. And makes looting tedious, especially since the wrecks tend to be spread out in an area dozens of kilometres wide. Salvage drones really help with salvaging, but even with a tractor beam looting stuff takes a relatively long time.

Of course, looting is optional. The irritating thing about loot is that it is very random, and as far as I can tell there is no way to know what the value of the wreck is without opening it. Or I suppose filling a mid slot with a cargo scanner, assuming that it can look into wrecks and/or containers. I really wish there was some indication of high value loot, or at least a stronger correlation between a type of enemy and possible loot, other that faction commanders.

Which wouldn't help with navy tags. I stopped doing missions against major faction navies partially due to wanting to avoid standing drop, but the other reason was that every single enemy ship wreck was marked as not empty. And almost always it was just a tag. And they gave no bounty, so to get anything for destroying them you had to loot every single wreck. Which is annoying and I suppose a reason why tags are relatively scarce on the market.

Another issue is that most NPC enemies are tank heavy and low on DPS. Especially effective DPS, because they seem to have no concept of group cohesion and are easily kited into separate, easy to destroy groups. This also makes missile based NPC groups disproportionately powerful. Of course, they have to be if they are to seriously outnumber the player.

Unfortunately, the effect is that once your tank gets good enough there is essentially no risk when running missions. I read that before NPC started to sometimes target drones, it was possible to just leave a good enough ship inside a mission and leave, and drone would eventually kill everything without the risk of your tank getting breached. Once you have sufficient tank the only factor that remains is how fast can you destroy enemies. Or at all. I remember I got a single battleship in one L3 mission, which couldn't even hit my battlecruiser reliably, but I couldn't get through its shields (Myrmidon without Drones V being perhaps a sub-optimal idea). Eventually I just left, refitted with five blasters and finished it, but it was still tedious.

I think missions would be better if they were more of a DPS race. Which would be more similar to how I understand, from what I have read, PVP usually goes. It would certainly be more exciting and require closer attention. On the other hand, the problem with low, but significant risk, is that the expected payout value necessary for profit varies wildly with small changes to risk, which makes it very difficult to balance without getting serious advantage to people who overpower the difficulty rating.

The lack of granularity in mission difficulty is a bit strange, too. There are five levels of missions, and the missions themselves appear to mostly scripted, as far as enemy strength goes. They seem to vaguely correspond to ship classes. But the power level of players is much more granular. Especially if you are not focusing on getting to next class of spaceships, there can be long period where the missions become trivial, and the only progress is that they get completed slightly faster, while next tier missions are still impossible or glacially slow.

I have seen an opinion that mission do not encourage playing them with multiple people, but that seems false. Due to the healing based tanks in EVE double DPS means being able to finish them more than twice as fast. Even with split rewards, this should be worth it, at least for groups of two-three people. Unless I am missing something, I have yet to try running a mission cooperatively.

Most LP store rewards appear to be wildly imbalanced. Especially modules. Even apart from the tag issue exacerbated by the tediousness of looting them one by one, the static base prices seem to be very high when compared to modules T2 counterparts. Especially considering that most of the faction modules are only marginally better. Or, in the case of Federation EANM and suchlike, no at all, attribute-wise. The only way it is better is a slight fitting advantage and lower skill level required. The former is situational at best, and the latter is useless to anyone except characters that can't really afford faction modules. It is just easier to train a bunch of levels required for a T2 module, which is around five to ten times cheaper.

I am not sure what the balance is with guns… they are weaker than T2 variants since they cannot fire T2 ammo, but requirement for T2 weapons seem to be much higher than other T2 modules, so maybe they have a niche.

Generally the situation with missions in EVE is not that terrible. I can see how they can become boring after being ground excessively, but then they were somewhat clearly, if I may try to divine the design intent here, designed to be an introduction to EVE, rather than main gameplay. Although if they do require a fit that different from effective PVP one as the internet seems to imply, then perhaps something should be fixed.

Ships in Space

Sometime tomorrow the first month of my subscription for EVE Online will run out. Which means I have played one month and fourteen days. Since trial counts fully as game time. Do you only get a month if you buy a subscription outright? That would seem unfair. And why does on Steam EVE costs five euros more than a first month subscription? No matter.

In any case, I decided to keep playing. I also decided to start this blog. At the very least it will be an exercise in writing English, since I somehow doubt that anyone would care about newbie ramblings. It will be mostly composed of describing what I am doing in EVE and what I am trying to achieve, and aforementioned ramblings on game mechanics and balance. Perhaps the former will result in some form of loosely defined narrative. The latter I suppose I could have written on the forum, but since no one would care and the game ater ten years has way too much inertia to change anyway, I am putting those in words more to get them out of my head rather than for anyone to read.

So, why did I start playing EVE now, rather than anytime in the last decade? I have always liked science-fiction, and space-opera, or at least some subsets thereof, and indeed, spaceships. And computer games. I spent way too many hours playing X3. And before that… I actually don't remember anything spaceship related between that and Privateer and Frontier: First Encounters. That seems strange. I was aware of previous X games and Freelancer, but never bothered to play them. Maybe my liking of spaceship games comes in waves? Now that I think of it, it is a good few years since I gave up on X3. Mostly due to collision damage. Why would you put collision damage, high-inertia spacecraft and dogfighting weapon composition in a single game? Anyway.

What I didn't really play until fairly recently were MMO of various description. Or any multiplayer games at all, really. Some combination of being relatively bad at video games and self-conscious about it. And not being very social at all. Or whatever. And I don't really like pure skill-based games, with no persistent systems. Which eliminated FPSes and RTSes. And back then MMOs were almost all subscription based and I didn't make my own money, and didn't want to make time extended commitments. I did play Discworld MUD for a bit. I think my character still exists there, even. Somehow I failed to talk to anyone. Part being asocial, part being overloaded with English text I guess… In principle I read English fluently, but that does not necessarily mean fluidly.

Then the era of free-to-play MMOs started, and eventually I picked up some of those. And then gave up eventually. I played Star Trek Online for some time, and even joined a random fleet. But after hitting the level cap I realized that the primary game loop in that is not really satisfying, because even if you could get marginally better stuff, there is nothing to use it on. And I really like Star Trek space aesthetics (I don't care how silly beam weapons which feel heavy are, but I just like them), but there are limits.

And then I finally finished my not-so-slightly overdue master's thesis and got an actual job. So, when next wave of liking spaceship games hit me, I realized that I now have enough money to actually pay a subscription without it relatively mattering and remembered that EVE still exists. And is apparently doing fine subscription-wise. And, I don't actually like spreadsheets, since I think for most applications they are applied to a proper programming language would be better, but spreadsheets-in-space, as I often heard it called, actually did have some appeal. And since there was a free trial, I trialed it, and here I am, still not bored. Despite the fact than I didn't really talk to anyone once again. But who knows.

In the next few days I will write some posts about thoughts accumulated after forty-something days of playing EVE. After that I guess the pace will slow down. Especially if I spend time writing about EVE rather than playing it. I wonder now how long will I actually keep at both EVE and this blog. Well, only the future can tell.