Day 95 : Back to Bear Basics

Today I really only log in to slot the next skill queue item up. I log in too early and so I move some stuff to a test market on autopilot while I wait for the last 40 minutes to tick down. I chat with our resident corp WoW player who I hadn’t expected to see today. Apparently the pre expansion event in WoW was a little lack luster...

Earlier in the day I read this

http://themittani.com/features/why-risk-free-highsec-would-kill-eve-online

It’s very long and very bias. If you are pure bear then it is probably best not read at all since the author pretty much gets busy undermining his central point by repeatedly displaying his bias, that of hating care bear style players. The article twists away from his reasonable points towards his need for easy kills. It reads just shy of a disguised rant about having his toys taken away. If hisec is too safe and people can play EVE there without care then where will all his easy kills come from?

The shocking thing for me is that on some points I agree with him. Not to the extent of doing anything (more than is already happening) about it, not to the extent of wanting anything to change quite so radically. When I first read the authors own blog (http://www.minerbumping.com) about his pursuit of hisec miners I was horrified. It was too early in my EVE career to understand. Lately I’ve come to regard it as a guilty pleasure, it’s cruel example of emergent gameplay but a lot of the miners he reports on are walking into the trap and digging themselves deeper when they are in there.

Hisec feels almost too safe half the time but I wouldn’t change it. People play their own game there and who am I to take it away? Sure, EVE is a PVP game and should stay that way. As long as there is no real threat of non consensual PVP being removed entirely then who cares? I too though would buff lowsec, agreeing with the article. I’d buff it so that there was a reason, a temptation, for hisec miners to go there and risk their ships in the pursuit of reward.  I’d at least put +20% rocks in low sec and rare spawns of rocks usually found in null. I think there are other things I’d do but I don’t know enough about the game to comment.

The problem with nerfing hisec instead is that people take it personally when they are the victim of a nerf. You’ve done it, I’ve done it. We leap up and shout “not fair!” or usually something more whiney. CCP have recently dodged some bullets just by labelling "nerfs and buffs" as “rebalancing”. It didn’t work completely as far as I could see but it was one of the ways to do a stealth nerf. A buff outside hisec could be a stealth nerf, the value of hisec decreasing over time as more players make the move to profit from more dangerous areas of space. This has been going on for some time anyway. It ain’t stealth if you see it happening. It isn't a nerf that's needed anyway.

In the end, in the sandbox you have to take the rough with the smooth. It’s cool to play in the sandbox but eventually someone will, now and again, kick your castles over. It’s an excuse to build something different, have some kind of reasonable response, not an excuse to use the same tactics in reverse. The author of the above article is looking for that. He’s pointing out that the holes in the current hisec rules that allow him to escape any kind of response. He’s may come across as cruel or evil to some but he is intelligent (and god help me, very amusing) when he does so.

Do I have my own bias? Of course I do, at the core I am mostly bear. I like games with things like industry themed elements, building stuff, trading. It’s probably mainly the legacy of playing Civilisation all the way through university. I did tend to play the game with the hope of starting global thermonuclear war when playing, rather than to get a high score. I can’t play a game without destruction of some form.

So what was the whole point of this? An opinion piece? No, this is me just trying to figure out “what” I am in EVE using the article as a kind of mirror. Am I a carebear? Am I a carebear that's rabid and occasionally goes on the rampage? Am I just a bear that has realised that there is good free eating on the trash heap with lots of new tastes to savour ( and if someone gets unlucky - human flesh). Currently in low sec I am a bit a tasty garbage for other roamers of the trash heap of space. 

I think my opinion on the article is tainted by the fact that I'm not the kind of bear the author hates. My mining is done to pay for ships and equipment I can then go and risk at the weekend. I'm that kind of person. Nerfing hisec to the ground, and in doing so the playstyle of AFK mining bears, will just get rid of those other bears, leaving exactly the same amount of PVP players as before. The number of these players would get less over time too, since you'd have less new players making it through the earlier, harder, now with less ability to afford ships, period of the game.

Give people a reason to move out of hisec, don't force them. Encourage and coax new players into the PVP arena. Force them and they quit. Less money for CCP, less money for EVE. Encourage new players to take chances and enjoy all EVE has to offer while at the same time leaving hi sec alone means more money for CCP, more for EVE, more players overall. It will be a slow process. I've seen it underway in just the short amount of time I've been playing. Buffed mining barges is part of it.

Anyway. That was a load of incoherent rubbish. That's what you get for me trying to keep up with blogging during lunchtimes. Somewhere along the line I lost the thread of my argument. It's been a long time since I wrote something where I had to construct a reasonable response rather than a rant. "make a point, prove it, repeat" as one of my old history teachers told me about the steps towards conclusion. He didn't say "make a point, talk about something else, dither for a bit, change direction, sweep some shit under the carpet, and then get the hell out before anyone realises what you are on about".

Back to EVE the game. I start gearing up for the Mission Impossible at the weekend. I’m wondering what to fit and am looking at ECM when I have a freaky ECM and Elite based deja vu moment provoked by writing day 92. I can’t stand deja vu. It's like feeling some horrible neurological insult is about to be delivered. I switch off space and go to bed.

Reason to get a second account #2

Foisting off mining onto a second account and open up the possibility of trying small scale joint mining operations. I’ve been invited to some before, larger scale ops that it would be nice to take part in and observe. See ? Still a ‘bear.