Eve Online - Northern War?


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I'm not an Eve expert, so forgive me if there are mistakes.

Around 2 years ago, Eve Online made major headlines as a Major war broke out and a massive battle resulted in HUGE Real World losses regarding money and financials which actually had a slight impact overall regarding other economies.

That was where the Goons which are part of the CFC all took on the HBC (Honey Badger Coalition). HBC lost and the Goons moved into that space (with a few others).

That War is known now by some as the Fountain War.

Currently, CFC is now known as the Imperium. I think they have around 40K members. They've been making inroads to other space and expanding, which has been upsetting many others.

There is a new Coalition being formed called the Money Badger Coalition (in respect or regards to the Honey Badger Coalition). They are allied not because they like each other, but in a common dislike of the Imperium.

I think it was around 4 days ago, the MBC made a move on a Infrastructure Hub. It wasn't as massive a battle as the Fountain War had (yet) but as they moved in, around 4000 ships were involved, with about 3500 at the peak of the battle. The Imperium were outgunned and outnumbered, and defeated.

More startling was that the Circle of 2, who were part of the Imperium, defected, taking all their regions with them.

This seems to be forming up to a new war (as war has been declared) that is currently under the Moniker of the Northern War.

Who knows what will happen next. Another large Faction, the Drones, still haven't made who, if anyone, they'll support.

Have to say, there are times when things really seem pretty interesting in Eve. If it breaks into really huge things like two years ago, could get real interesting real quick.

Anyone on the frontlines of this? (I'm not, but it could be interesting to see someone from the Shadow Cartel or others who have a frontline experience to the current events).

A little rundown (warning - a little language as some of the factions have unique names)

Eve Rundown from last week

The Northern War thus far by Talladar


Yet another Northern War. *chuckling*

Good to see that a bunch of the "old farts" have either left or reinvented themselves. After 10 years, I couldn't bring myself to play anymore.


I don't play anymore, but have been somewhat following the war as it gets posted. Here are my semi-rambling thoughts.

Currently, it sounds like the Imperium are still getting pushed back, having to cede a ton of territory that they couldn't defend and getting heavily outnumbered (which has pretty much been the story since around the betrayal of Circle of Two from what I can tell). According to reports, the Imperium is heavily outnumbered - 40,000 pilots, including alts and economic characters, vs 50,000 pilots in the Money Badgers, which would be mostly combat pilots.

Also, unlike previous wars, this hasn't seemed to have gotten widespread coverage, though it looks like Massively finally has a story about it. I have seen a lot of discussion on whether this war will boost EvE like some of the past wars have.

I hadn't heard it called the Northern War until I read this, though I have seen it mentioned that since - I have heard it called the Casino War and World War Bee. CCP was calling it the Easter War but since then have decided to call it World War Bee. There is some debate over whether this references World War Z or World War Three. Meanwhile, the Goons for some reason want to style this as the War of Sovless Aggression, apparently poking fun at how the Money Badgers hold very little sov and to style themselves as the Confederacy fighting against the Union (Northern United States of America in the American Civil War)...

The Money part of the Money Badger coalition comes from it being financed by an ISK-gambling site (IWantISK.com) that got into a dispute with members of the Space Monkeys Alliance over a financial dispute (it apparently is more complicated than I had thought if you believe the story. Full disclosure - that is a story on the Goon-run news site.

One of the bankers for for IWantISK.com, IronBank (the twitch streamer 1ronBank), is notable for buying and training up every skill in the game on a three-day old character, costing 1.8 trillion ISK (roughly $25,000 in US dollars if you bought in PLEX).

What I'm currently wondering about is if the Imperium is defeated and lose their sov, what happens? How much membership does the Imperium maintain? What does the Imperium decide to do - I've heard the idea of a great migration through null sec, destroying sov as they go but not trying to hold a fixed homeland. Or of migrating to low-sec or high-sec, affecting others in the game - with the conspiracy theory of holding CCP hostage with threats of such an action.

I've also heard that the fix is in - key members of the coalition have been paid off to make sure that the Imperium survives. In this view, Pandemic Legion are the true winners - coming to dominate null sec without being hated by everyone, while keeping the Imperium around in a weakened state to keep everyone focused on as the bad guy. And then in a month, Pandemic Legion creates the mega Citadel as close to Jita as possible, forging a new player-run market hub and earning profits that make them unassailable.


Ol' Shamus is still around, eh? I might be remembering the name wrong, but he's one of Pandemic Legion's founding fathers. Earliest corp on his record should be Foundation circa 2003-2004. Let's just say that his departure from Foundation was ... messy.

Thanks for the update, Wyntr.

The reason I commented on "another Northern war" is that there have been several major conflicts across that region of null-sec. Often times the big players (G00N, PL, and the new names) happily feed smaller player corps into the meat grinder.

I do miss G00N's ambassador though, he was a character. The Rat remains missed. *sniffs*


Thanks! Though I'm probably as poorly informed as anyone directly involved and high up in an alliance. The downside of EvE is how everything is part of war propaganda and/or secret, important information. It makes it cool but also hard to keep up in real time.

For people who want more general EvE information, I've heard that the Empires of EVE book by Andrew Groen is available on Amazon thru that site (also a video with some EvE info, plus reviews), for people who missed the hugely successful Kickstarter campaign. I don't have a copy yet, but I've heard that it is a great resource of information about the history of the game.

Also, the unexpected success of the Kickstarter for that book led to The Mittani launching his disastrous Kickstarter for a book on The Fountain War in November/December 2015, which led to further ill-will against the Imperium. Seriously - a bunch of the pledge goals had to be changed due to violating RMT prohibitions in the EULA (including a reward of flying thru space in-game with The Mittani). So - this whole thing is on topic :)

Another book on the motivations of people who play EvE and what the game is about is Internet Spaceships are Serious Business. I haven't heard as much about this, but I've heard that it is good.


I was right, Shamus of Sniggerdly, early personage involved in Pandemic Legion, backstabber of FND, all around belligerent fellow in-game. It was interesting times to be sure. :)


It is.


I wish I was more aware of the history of the people, groups, and regions involved. I started paying attention to EvE about four years ago.

There's a new Scope video (CCP) about the war, though the news is basically the outlying regions of the Imperium are being overrun. The Imperium is concentrating their staging area in Saranen, but they are still outnumbered and looking at too many fights to cover, so high-value targets and anything nearby is getting prioritized for defense. It sounds like they are having either no success or extremely limited success at defending anything the MBC goes after. Deklein is being cut off for an eventual multi-pronged invasion by the MBC.

There is a World War Bee timer board - I'm not that familiar with the whole system of sovereignty and the layout of the space involved to tell much :(

I haven't been able to figure out from all the arguments and propaganda if any real fighting has happened in Deklein or if the MBC is still focused on getting the non-Goon alliances to leave the Imperium. There apparently was a Pandemic Horde group that tried to capture the trade hub YAO but were driven off.

I highly doubt that the Mittani's defiant words and predictions of the coalition falling apart are going to matter - MBC is having a lot of success, so it doesn't seem like they'll get bored of the fighting, and while the coalition doesn't appear to be totally united, the divisions don't seem to be affecting the current operations and the arguments seem to be on what to do after kicking the Imperium/Goons out of null sec.


Looked at the skill extractors they've implemented. If it were possible to reverse the game money certs into real world cash, my main character would be worth as much as an inexpensive new car.

Crazy. :)


And SpaceMonkey's Alliance has announced they are leaving the Imperium on good terms. They are hoping to regroup in the Outer Ring region (NPC null sec). It'll be interesting to see if the Money Badgers go after them (either as a whole or in part).


The focus seems to be shifting to Deklein, though the other regions are still being mopped up. Apparently, the Goons can still make people angry enough to get them focused.

The Mittani has decided that all defensive timers should be set to the AU time zone, pushing down participation on all sides. Deklein is being camped hard, which is killing the ratting needed to keep the ADMs up, making defense of the systems harder. Another attack on the station at YA0 is planned for tomorrow morning; if successful, the final timer will be set for Friday morning and the richest trade hub in null sec might be taken by the weekend.

On the Russian side, the Drone Walkers have started attacking the Imperium and the Legion of xXDeathXx has broken away from the Drone Walkers and declared war on them, having a great deal of success. It remains to be seen if this conflict spreads beyond the Russian groups - so far it does not appear to have done so.

Liberty's Edge

Out of morbid curiosity, I know EVE is the main attraction, but how do Dust and Valkyrie fit into this?


Krensky wrote:
Out of morbid curiosity, I know EVE is the main attraction, but how do Dust and Valkyrie fit into this?

I probably don't follow this close enough to address the business/financial side. CCP did recently change EvE to add the Skill Extractors Turin the Mad mentioned above, which allow skill points to be removed from a character and sold in game for ISK but requiring real money purchases of the extractors. These are valued much more highly than the game time equivalent for PLEX - though some is probably novelty, the diminishing returns of skill points, and the abundance of characters for sale that are being purchased and stripped down by vulture investors.

Another move being discussed is adding incentives in EvE for daily activity - the first proposal was 10,000 skill points a day for the first NPC pirate kill by a character.

The last I heard, Dust was shutting down on May 30, 2016. I don't know if they ever got Dust tied into Eve - I don't believe so. They did say that there is a Shanghai team working on a first-person shooter that is an evolution of the vision of Dust, using the Unreal Tournament engine and the experience of working on Dust. There should be more info at Fanfest on April 21st.

For Valkyrie, I haven't heard much other than some moderately positive reviews, but I haven't really tried to follow it. Same with Gunjack, their other VR offering. I believe those are both just set in the New Eden universe but don't try to tie in to the live world like they had planned with Dust.


The grand vision of EvE as I recall way back when was for players to eventually be able to all of things in all of the places with the same character. FPS, trade, internet spaceships and everything in between.

DUST 514 was IIRC envisioned as a way for console players to play in the same universe as mercs hired to conquer planets for sovereignty and other stuff benefiting the serious businessmen in orbit. Coded for the PS3 with no foresight for "upgrading" to the PS4 nor for cross-platform play combined with a ridiculous degree of microtransaction infestation topped with a decisive lack of marketing ... well, bye.

Valkyrie is a limited scope project the last I saw anything on it: piloting the fighter drones carried by EvE players' carriers and supercarriers. Pretty to look at, but how much replay value can be derived?

Gunjack is news to me.


Gunjack is a VR shooter (I think it is on-rails with the user just aiming and shooting, but I'm not totally sure - here is the gameplay reveal trailer), described as:

Quote:

Set in the EVE Universe we all know and love, the player takes on the role of a turret operator aboard a mining rig out in the nullsec region of Outer Ring. As part of the defense team, it’s up to the player to protect the rig from pirates, opportunists and anyone else looking to take what rightfully belongs to the company.

It was for the Samsung VR but got ported to Oculus as well.


Um ... ok, so 2 things not to waste money and time on. *le sigh*

I guess they're staggering and stumbling towards the concept of playing regular EvE in VR, but jeez.


For war news, the region of Deklein, the home of the Goons, has finally come under attack from four different entrances. It is expected to fall sooner rather than later, as the staging area of Saranen used by the Imperium is too far away to easily defend the region. The Mittani seems to believe that the Imperium/Goons can still launch a hellwar against the Money Badgers. The negative PR campaign of the Mittani has recently caused the owner of IWantIsk.com to declare that he will fund the war against the Imperium/Goons in response to a Goon piece on themittani.com that claimed that the gambling site was breaking Florida law.

The Drone Walkers continue to take territory from Legion of xXDeathXx.

And I saw a non-CCP blogger post on CCP's 2015 financials. His summary was:
- Revenues declined
- Profit was up (mostly from cleaning up old projects - World of Darkness, Dust I believe)

EDIT: Fidelas Constans (FCON) left the Imperium in good standing yesterday.


I am confused... an MMO war? Is there some tangible benefit to claiming areas?


The value of holding Sov is, I believe, one of the narratives of the war - there are non-Imperium observers arguing that the Imperium is making the right choice by not fully fighting this war and withdrawing to low-sec. The method by which these wars are fought was changed in summer of 2015, which is one of the points of contention in a lot of discussion of the war. Here's my understanding:

Disclaimer: This is really outside of what I know about the game, and there are currently a lot of arguments over the Sovereignty system and the value of holding Sovereignty.

For the broad overview, it seems to be that there are benefits but they aren't really essential:
* Allows building supercapital construction arrays to build the largest ships in the game
* Allows building jump bridges to facilitate travel for non-jump drive ships and cyno jammers to protect against enemy jump drive ships
* Being able to upgrade the space to have more NPC events and ore belts, making the space more profitable or able to support more characters
* Control of stations allows control of who can dock there - which controls people changing ships, refitting ships, trading, and other activities
* Reduction in certain costs of production, greatly increasing income

None of these are really needed to live in null sec - there are NPC regions where anyone can dock at the stations, though it is usually viewed as being much easier to be camped into a station (having enemies sitting on the undock with bubbles to force a fight if you undock). And some groups make deals with sov-holding alliances to use their stations - though they are then at the mercy of that alliance to stay friendly.

My understanding is that supercapitals used to be much more important - they were better able to kill Sov structures under the Dominion sovereignty structure that used to be in place. But the new sovereignty doesn't encourage their use, so I believe they are currently being held in reserve to keep the threat of escalating fights viable, but the Imperium does not seem to want to use them for fear of them being destroyed. This was the Imperiums claim of success when Circle of Two betrayed them - that the Imperium did not fall into a supercapital trap.

Upgrading the space and the reduction in costs of production are just enhancing activities that can already be done, not providing new options. Groups run NPC sites, mine, and perform production without them.

Jump bridges are mostly for being able to get to a region of space quickly without having to traverse the intervening space. These are arguably part of building an empire in null sec, but wouldn't be needed by a group holding a small region or who is just looking for content that would be near to them.

Holding a large territory also allows the owner to rent space out to other groups, who might want to live in null sec space but don't want to worry (as much) about security and holding space. This practice has fallen somewhat out of favor, though to some groups have invited these renters have been invited into the space of their protectors since their ratting/mining activities directly help with system defense by making the system harder for attackers to take. I'm not sure how many or which groups still rent space, but I had heard the Legion of xXDeathXx does and their rental empire is getting attacked).


Not sure if this is the coverage CCP wants: EVE Online: The Battle for Control of the Most Boring Video Game in the World by the International Business Times.

I thought the article was fairly good (other than the title - though I put it down to click-bait and probably also suggested by an EVE player), though I'm not sure if they revised it after the leak about how the Mittani said the press would print anything he said. They did credit the Mittani as an arch manipulator and didn't cover the progress of the war. Almost all of the commenters blasted it as a pro-Mittani piece; they might have a point.

The only other glaring issue I saw was the part about having to mine as a starting player - there's a lot of effort in showing new players that you don't have to do that if you don't want to (sometimes going too far in the "the game isn't about mining at all" for my tastes).

I did think it was interesting as it covered the meta-conflict more than the in-game conflict, and the history of some of the events leading up to it.


Aranna wrote:
I am confused... an MMO war? Is there some tangible benefit to claiming areas?

Presumably the same benefit for any successful war of conquest...economic gain by control of resources. Go to any war in Human history, and you'll find economics as the root driver once you get past the propaganda.


Edited to add: Polygon article on the war: Meet the Gambling Kingpin Funding EVE Online's Biggest War (I haven't gotten to read it yet) /EDIT

Non-war EVE news:

At Fanfest, CCP showed off an extremely early playable demo of Project Nova, their follow-on to Dust. The article says it will be free-to-play, though no date is given. They still want to have a tie-in to the world of EVE beyond just using lore, but they are focusing on getting the shooting mechanics to feel good first. It sounded like it was class-based but also provided equipment selections per class.

The 11th Council of Stellar Management has been elected (the CSM is a group of players who are elected to interact with CCP on development plans for EVE and bring concerns/feedback from the player base to the company). Due to low voter turnout, the results were tilted even more heavily than normal to null sec candidates; the candidate from Circle-of-Two was on the Goonswarm ballot from before the betrayal.

The two permanant candidates for summits with CCP:
Mr Hyde113 of ElitistOps, in Pandemic Legion
Aryth of GoonWaffe, in Goonswarm Federation

Steve Ronuken of Fuzzworks, in Vote Steve Ronuken for CSM
Sullen Decimus of Polaris Rising, in The Bastion
The Judge of Balkan Mafia, in Circle-of-Two
Fafer of Tr0pa de elite., in Northern Coalition.
NoobMan of Hard Knocks Inc., in Hard Knocks Citizens
Jin'taan of Pentag Blade, in Curatores Veritates Alliance
Kyle Aparthos of Apotheosis, in TheDivision
Innominate of GoonWaffe, in Goonswarm Federation
Bobmon of Habitual Euthanasia, in Pandemic Legion,
Nashh Kadavr of Sniggerdly, in Pandemic Legion
Xenuria of KarmaFleet, in Goonswarm Federation
Gorski Car of Sniggerdly, in Pandemic Legion


The Imperium lost all of their sovereignty in Deklein sometime this morning. Fighting continues in the Fade, Pure Blind, and Vale of the Silent regions. The Imperium seems to be roaming into Fade, fighting Pandemic Horde (a group focused on newbie pilots partnered with Pandemic Legion).

Darius JOHNSON, one of the founders of Goonfleet, has posted to the world that he has come back to the game and started Ten Dollar Bond, a home for all "true goons" who want to escape the Imperium.


Drahliana Moonrunner wrote:
Aranna wrote:
I am confused... an MMO war? Is there some tangible benefit to claiming areas?
Presumably the same benefit for any successful war of conquest...economic gain by control of resources. Go to any war in Human history, and you'll find economics as the root driver once you get past the propaganda.

Sorry if I confused anyone. I didn't know there were in game benefits economic or not to controlling an area. Other MMOs typically just have bragging rights only to controlling an area.


Wyntr wrote:
Due to low voter turnout, the results were tilted even more heavily than normal to null sec candidates ...

Not particularly surprising. As IRL, EvE is something of a microcosm reflecting regular world tendencies and trends.

For most of CSM's history there'd been a precarious balance between the PvE and PvP rosters. Over time, this has almost entirely shifted to PvP CSM candidates.

In short, PvE fans have become underrepresented or entirely unrepresented within the CSM.

A sizeable percentage of the player base remains PvE or mixed PvE/PvP. Probably ~80% or so, of which half probably leave fairly quickly (within 1-3 months).

37k voters out of 250k eligible (give or take 50k) is ... well, paltry.

EvE seems rather in danger of whittling down to a nub from the combined efforts of CSM and CCP.

Saw a dev diary from 2015 where they were talking about NPC patrols, caravans et al - this is stuff that was in the game in the earlier years. If you were willing to deal with the sec status hits, you could gack said caravans for the swag (some of which was pretty nice!), farm up your sec status to "tolerable" and so on.

For a PvP game to succeed, it has to be broadly appealing. Right now, it isn't, not to the degree that CCP aspires to.

This means that PvE needs to be appealing and not the slaughterfest that the "good stuff" is for newer characters.

EvE's learning cliff remains very much in place. E-Uni (EvE University) and similar groups certainly aid in softening that cliff.

Too funny.


I knew that the politics were skewed towards the organized, mostly null-sec groups, but I hadn't realized it was this bad. Apparently there was an effort to boycott the election (not sure how widespread it was known) by some high-sec players to reveal the lack of legitimacy they feel the CSM has.

Darius JOHNSON won a petition to be given control of a new Goonfleet corporation - apparently, the old corporation was locked in under BoB when that disbanded, which led to the creation of Goonswarm due to CCP policies at the time (not sure if CCP denied a petition back then or if it was just the policy of the time). When CCP went to make this change, the way they did it changed the corporation history of everyone who had been in the original Goonfleet to show up as having been in oldgoonfleet. CCP apologized and fixed it and are going to try another way to address the issue.

And CCP just deployed the Citadel expansion, allowing some of the structures that have caused a lot of drama to finally be built. Also - a lot of changes to capital ships.


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Goes to show how skewed things have become towards the PvP side of the game despite the game population numbers glaringly showing otherwise in the latter third of the game's current lifespan.

CCP's repeated attempts to generate pure-PvP interest have yet to bear real fruit, even after ~13 years. DUST514 failed rather miserably. The titles coming out seem likely to meet the same grim fate. My guess is in relatively short order, while stubborn determination/pride keeping CCP committed to a given project far longer than they really should.

While the vocal minority continues to receive steady outlay of in-game toys to play with, I don't believe that the silent majority gets goodies anywhere near as often. Best guesstimate from memory is 4:1 PvP:PvE. So far the big PvE expansions have been grand in scope, sorry in execution.

Militia warfare was briefly amusing, but it left PvE players ridiculously vulnerable to PvP in hi-sec. I doubt that has changed, but it's been a few years to be fair.

rant begins, apologies in advance:

Some things are necessary if they are adhering to a player-driven story. Which is nice and all ... except that "player driven story" is neither complex nor deep compared to good PvE scripting and design. The only thing that makes it feel deep/complex is the sheer scale of null-sec operations, especially once you break into the realm of capitol ship construction.

Asides from the primary 'player driven story' (own/control star systems), there's not much else asides from infiltration and "market warfare". These can be elaborate and lengthy affairs, and at least the latter is possible to perform from the relative safety of hi-sec space.

At some point the inevitable hi-sec DoW hits, you're forced into a few stances, mostly revolving around turtling. The other option if your pockets are very deep is to hire mercs. Many mercs are just that - and they can/could often be bought out, giving you a mere 24 hours' real time to adjust to the circumstances.

If the enemy is willing to weather the storm, you won't even get that much notice. In as little as 1 or 2 minutes the enemy can and will pounce you the moment you undock.

Oft times bounties are paid for the frozen corpses of war targets. A small corp caught ill-prepared for a war will often be forced to stay out of the game in toto for as little as a week, and fairly often longer (much longer, month or more) depending on how amusing the enemy finds the idea of picking you off at their discretion. If they're caught very off-guard, they WILL lose every asset they have anchored in space. This is not exactly cheap for a small corp, potentially representing as much as ~80% of their combined characters' "net worth" in destructible assets. Granted, almost everything a character owns is such.

Plenty have quit the game from 'griefing' of this nature, being viewed as "getting ganked in a game subscribers are paying to play". A viewpoint I cannot dispute.

Last I was involved in capitol ship construction, the undertaking was substantial. A small corp of 5-6 very highly skilled characters could potentially build 1 or 2 of the smallest capitol ships or freighters per month. They'd be very squishy as they're oft treated as armed tenant farmers in null-sec space.

Paying money to play an MMO where I'm a gorram tenant farmer subject to combat service with near-to-no notice, often at severely abnormal hours of the day .. why?!

If you're unavailable, the Overlords get grumpy. If they're nice, they give you an eviction notice. If they're not, they take your stuff and gank your corpses. Best hope you were using jump clones and disposable assets out there...

When one examines the number of players involved and the "Internet Spaceships is Serious Business" attitude that generally holds sway among the vocal minority/PvP crowd - the mindset that EvE is a players' "second full-time job" ... is a complete turn-off to the silent majority of the playerbase, based on the evidence at hand.

Small wonder that they shed players almost as fast as they gain them.

As an aside:

Now, were they to take a page from Stellaris' ship design concepts (q.v.), they'd have a much more interesting game for many.

When (hull x) is always (powergrid a, cpu b, low slots c, mid slots d, high slots e, turret slots f, launcher slots g, base hull hp h, base armor hp i, base shield hp j, shield regen rate k, sublight speed L km/sec, cargo bay m cubic meters, drone bay capacity n, etc etc) then modified by skills and applicable implants, after so long it has long become almost laughably predictable. There are some that can gauge at a glance by character "date of birth" what they're liable to be capable of, before the introduction of microtransaction "skill transfer" mechanisms that let you siphon of skill points to sell to the highest bidder.

BoB was disbanded IIRC due to explicit EULA violations involving CCP employee cooperation, getting rare original blueprints and other toys that were deep in the WTFBOOSHIZNIT category.

Don't even get me started on the BPO lottery system back when...

At least MoO kept their hijinks to in-game exploits, although they too provided the proverbial back-breaking straw in a Concord system that was THE highway system of the time. Think present-day Jita, only with no significant competition anywhere else in-game. As a bonus at the time, agents would warn you about the depredations of MoO, which was an amusing touch.


Derp, re: CSM.

PvE have been poorly represented by the CSM for some years now. The attitude of developers and CSM alike these days is "PvE, meh".

Granted, the old-school devs were very much 'this is a PvP game, deal with it'.

Problem is that PvP doesn't pay the bills, PvE does, even in null-sec. PvE and industry, the latter of which is dependent upon the hi-sec market hubs to function.

You have to make ISK to spend ISK. Unless you want to pay atop a subscription fee to buy a PLEX or two to get started. It's surprising to new players just how fast a half billion ISK will disappear for PvP characters. That gets pricey PDQ for a new player, although not out of line for the starting "package" required for most MMOs, well, the last I checked those costs at any rate.

Carebears:

Most "industrialist" characters are derisively labeled Carebears. Many of the PvP / vocal minority despise "carebears".

Yet these same Carebears are the characters that drive the economy of the game. They're rarely well suited for combat beyond basic rat management because of the significant investment of training time that is required to become skilled enough to viably compete in the marketplace.

They're the ones that spend countless hours mining more than half of the m3 volume of minerals in the game. They're the ones that painstakingly oversee planetary harvesting operations. They're the ones that churn out hulls, modules and ammunition. They're the ones that run the alliances' market hub operations.

You're simply unable to compete on the marketplace and actually make a profit without maximum possible efficiencies in a large suite of skills that takes several months to attain in only one facet of the several involved in 'market warfare'. Mining skills aren't just about gathering the ore, you have to refine them, and there are a LOT of ore specific refining skills. Then there's the production skills suite. THEN there are a gaggle of skills required to get the assorted NPC market taxes down, the order placement commissions reduced to a manageable cut and provide a sufficient number of order placing 'slots'. None of which share common attributes, so neural remapping and extensive skill train planning are required.

Carebears are generally ill-suited and ill-disposed temperamentally to PvP. They generally aren't operating ships configured as such, since they're useless for mining and transporting of most market goods in noteworthy quantities.

Carebears HAVE to "rat" and run missions extensively to attain the necessary standings to access certain NPC stations and/or to have a shot at getting in queue for those valuable unassailable production et al slots. Queues on these can be as long as several months, in some locations the better part of a YEAR.

PvE ship configurations are a completely different beast from PvP configurations. To attain the best standings you have to acquire decent abilities with fighting ships as large as battleships.

Corpmates/alliance members aren't always going to be available to carry their 'carebears' through the often tedious 'mission grind' to attain those important standings. A task that can take several months per each desired NPC corp, especially for the 'best' ones that have stations with all of the necessary services in one location.

PvE/hi-sec economical musings:

If the PvE crowd diminishes significantly, the entire game's economy collapses like a house of cards. I doubt that even now the null-sec economy is robust enough to flourish if completely divorced from low-and-hi-sec.

It's simply too cost-effective to source certain things from Empires' space. All of the 'market hubs' are to be found in hi-sec space.

Chribba IIRC had managed to establish a Neutral Zone/Trading Post somewhere in null-sec. Or someone of Chribba's caliber, I'm not sure at this point. The endeavor in question was barely six months old when I finally pulled the plug,

Presuming that specific edifice is still intact and thriving, null-sec may finally have established a reasonably viable economy. However, it is one that in all likelihood is strongly dependant upon exports and imports from the PvE players.

It'd be VERY interesting to see just how fragile the game economy is were the PvE/hi-sec players to finally decide that they've simply had enough and move on.

I suspect that the mercantile hubs of null-sec can survive for 15-30 days on their integral production capabilities. After that, only the lingering market orders would keep things going for a time.


Unfortunately, it seems like EVE is still heavily in favor of PVP. I'm not aware enough of CCP's development changes to be able to comment on that.

A number of players seem to still have the "if you aren't playing my way, you're doing it wrong" - I just watched part of a review video that had trashed every PVE career it had gotten to before I stopped watching it. The "don't do mining" meme is still alive and flourishing. EVE seems to take the "if you aren't playing the game like I do, you're doing it wrong" instinct of many players and increases it to the max (except for those who want easy prey - they are happy to find players "doing it wrong" to kill them, even assuming they don't want the tears of their victims). A sociologist would probably have a field day breaking down the in-game conversations.

And the carebear meme is still going on in a fair amount of the current war discussions. The assumption that any PVE player in the Imperium would be able to contribute anything in a PVP fight beyond getting destroyed. It looks to me that the Imperium is fielding very low numbers relative to their size in part because they have a lot of PVE pilots and in part because a lot of their PVP pilots aren't interested in the war, either due to disinterest in EVE, the current war mechanics, or the lack of experienced, skilled Fleet Commanders in the Imperium.


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I am usually a PvE or team versus E player. I dislike (ok ok. DETEST!!!) the way most PVP is handled. My three year old niece is more mature than most PvP players. My loathing of most PvP has gone through several MMOs that I have played and it is the reason why I do not play Eve Online or Pathfinder Online.


Wyntr wrote:

Unfortunately, it seems like EVE is still heavily in favor of PVP. I'm not aware enough of CCP's development changes to be able to comment on that.

A number of players seem to still have the "if you aren't playing my way, you're doing it wrong" - I just watched part of a review video that had trashed every PVE career it had gotten to before I stopped watching it. The "don't do mining" meme is still alive and flourishing. EVE seems to take the "if you aren't playing the game like I do, you're doing it wrong" instinct of many players and increases it to the max (except for those who want easy prey - they are happy to find players "doing it wrong" to kill them, even assuming they don't want the tears of their victims). A sociologist would probably have a field day breaking down the in-game conversations.

And the carebear meme is still going on in a fair amount of the current war discussions. The assumption that any PVE player in the Imperium would be able to contribute anything in a PVP fight beyond getting destroyed. It looks to me that the Imperium is fielding very low numbers relative to their size in part because they have a lot of PVE pilots and in part because a lot of their PVP pilots aren't interested in the war, either due to disinterest in EVE, the current war mechanics, or the lack of experienced, skilled Fleet Commanders in the Imperium.

Bluntly (in my experience), most PvP players in EvE have a poor or no grasp of what it takes to maintain the logistics of a large corp, let alone an alliance. It takes work to keep those essential elements operating efficiently and smoothly. They want to have their space castles and keg parties without having to pay for the kegs and the hall rent.

Few PvP players want to do the "boring stuff". This is why many Alliances, when presented with a determined and organized military threat, fold like the house of cards that they are. Primary war targets in such things are usually the industrial 'spinal cord' of the alliance.

Peel off the propaganda and rhetoric and what you'll usually find are whiny fangbears that have no ability to sustain themselves outside of PvP and "ratting", often scattering like roaches in unexpected light when they start suffering noteworthy losses.

If they had to quietly tuck off into an insignificant corner of space and rebuild, they'd go through the EvE equivalent of starving to death.

stuff about self-sufficiency:
In null-sec, you don't need top-end efficiency industrial skills to function since you're not doing so for profit, you're doing so for function which lowers those threshold by an order of magnitude in training time. A functional set of industrial skills (mining, processing, production efficiency and capacity, transportation capabilities) should be doable in a month or less, adding 4-6 weeks to be able to pilot a half-decent mining barge. Worst case, 10-12 weeks' training (throwing a couple of weeks' worth for the planetary resources required to operate POSs - what changes Citadels make to this is unkown to me) and an entire alliance can function more than adequately without recourse to hi-sec supply runs.

"But that's as much as 3 months I'm not training my l33t combat skilz, rawr!". Guess what, you have no cap. The people that play for a few years have mastered at least one race's 'suite' of combat skills and the basic support skills that go with them. Being self-sufficient may not be glorious, but it is effective.

Nothing builds a sense of ownership of a region of space better than mining in it. Mining ops, especially ice mining ops, build basic familiarity with fleet operations protocols and esprit de corps by way of chat blather and rat popping via drone swarms. In low-and-null-sec mining ops you can't go to sleep at the helm or your frozen corpse will be tractor beamed in short order. Players learn the basics of watching their local chat and scanners, keeping eyes peeled for anyone with certain markers on their pilot's license pictures. They learn to check character sheets to see how old a character is, giving them some idea of how dangerous potential enemies could be.

The losing side of this latest war has apparently skedaddled off to low-sec, which is the modus operandi of more than one, but especially the core dudes running Imperium. There they pay a little overhead to the NPC corps and will "rat" (hunt PvE pirates for bounty checks) their wallets back to decent shape while benefiting from the sentry guns of said NPCs (although sentry guns don't work if one is being pew-pew'd by those one is at war with).

I'm amazed that 'Mittens' is still running his show given that, by his own admission, he's not logged into EvE in several years. An absent leader that has lost touch with what it is to be pod-deep in enemies is the most dangerous to his own. I'm flabbergasted that the rest of the alliance et al have kept him in power. Only his long notoriety keeps him there. The more pragmatic approach would be to jettison out of that power structure and forge a new one under leadership that is actually playing, cleaning out the old like a vacuum cleaner the day the DoW expires. Let subs lapse for the summer, enjoy the vacation, and resurface in a place of choice.

CCP's Developments for PvE are once every few years, the most recent one I could find is from last year and all it is doing is reinstituting the exact same things that were in the game in 2004, only shinier. What's worse is that they consistently either half-ass it or make it overpoweringly difficult for the more typical PvE crowd. At a quick glance, the last PvE content they did was swiftly hogged up by a few blobs, resulting in 99% of the PvE player base being unable to meaningfully participate in that content. I don't even know if the Sansha Incursions are still ongoing.

There's some hints that the devs have buried some stuff all about the map that players are supposedly able to piece together - that when they have done so and CCP has determined that they have enough of a clue the next "dooflichie of doom" will unlock. That was hinted at in a recent-ish trailer, but that's the most recent (~2014) I've been able to uncover about it.

Their PvE QA has typically been worse than Bethesda's, and they're usually much slower to fix it, if they even bother. To wit their handling of Incarna where they effectively ignored the players that were interested in doing the potentially cool PvE content that had been introduced a year or two before that CCP had yet to fix several years later.

Derpa ... derpa ...

In a way I hope that the PvP'ers succeed in pushing out the PvE players for about six months. Within 60-90 days the fangbears will find themselves ... bored, out of ammo, modules and ships, with no easy tears or frozen corpses to collect.

I doubt CCP wants that as their subscription income would drop faster than a barrel rider over Niagara Falls (~80% loss).


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After chitchatting with Sharoth, I realized this:

Were CCP to fire up a PvE-only server, I'd be back in there in a proverbial New York minute. I liked (most) of the PvE content.


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Turin the Mad wrote:

After chitchatting with Sharoth, I realized this:

Were CCP to fire up a PvE-only server, I'd be back in there in a proverbial New York minute. I liked (most) of the PvE content.

They would have to do a lot more than that. At this point I feel that they would have to add new features and "missions" for the "Care Bears". Another thing is that they would have to start respecting PvE players. They don't. There are a LOT of other things in my life that are worthy of my time and money. EVE Online is right now at the bottom of the heap and as a "new" player they would have to work REAL hard to get me to join and stay there. To me it appears from their adds and everything else that they only cater to the PvPers. I would hate to see all my hard work ruined by some jerk who has the maturity level of an amoeba.

Edit - Ignoring over half your player base for a vocal minority is bad business. It also makes recruiting new players very hard. The developers need to realize that those players matter and MUST be catered to, even if only a little bit. Honestly, it should be more than a little bit, especially if the non-PvPers are where the money comes from. For a game that values real world economy, they sure are rather ignorant of it.


My tuppence:

I played EVE Online way back when it first came out and greatly enjoyed the sedate pace of it. I was not interested in the PvP at all, but really disliked the forced "you have to spend time waiting for skills to improve because we make money by making you stay registered for as long as possible" design.

I never really got into WoW, but that had a lot more offered on a regular basis to keep players interested and to justify (basically) buying the same game year after year.

I couldn't justify spending $132/year on the same game over and over again. Others don't seem to have that same issue.

Personally, I'm looking at Elite: Dangerous (& maybe Horizons) because: I can play it on my XBox One; and I only need to purchase the game once, for half the cost of a yearly subscription to EVE.

Anyway, I'm in that PvE majority that simply didn't find the game offered enough to continue subscribing.


I would suggest looking at X3 - Terran Conflict if you want an "EVE Online Lite". It has a very steep learning curve, but if you can learn EVE Online, then you can learn X3.


Otherwhere wrote:

My tuppence:

I played EVE Online way back when it first came out and greatly enjoyed the sedate pace of it. I was not interested in the PvP at all, but really disliked the forced "you have to spend time waiting for skills to improve because we make money by making you stay registered for as long as possible" design.

I never really got into WoW, but that had a lot more offered on a regular basis to keep players interested and to justify (basically) buying the same game year after year.

I couldn't justify spending $132/year on the same game over and over again. Others don't seem to have that same issue.

Personally, I'm looking at Elite: Dangerous (& maybe Horizons) because: I can play it on my XBox One; and I only need to purchase the game once, for half the cost of a yearly subscription to EVE.

Anyway, I'm in that PvE majority that simply didn't find the game offered enough to continue subscribing.

Here's the logic behind EvE's skill training: Players have lives. You don't have to constantly play to improve your character which is what every other MMO does to my knowledge.

There's no levels, no limit. If you can muster the ISK and have sufficient patience, you can learn how to do everything in the game, at least in theory (skill level). Doing requires playing which goes without saying.

With EvE, you can have a life without your characters' skills training suffering. Want to take a vacation, go on a long cruise? No problem, fire up a sufficient length skill training and go on your merry way. Having a heck of a time at work and all you're doing for a while is eat/work/sleep? Again, fire up a lengthy skill train and you're character is still improving.

Rather ironic given the "EvE is your 2nd job" mentality that is prevalent amongst far too much of the playerbase. ^_____^


Turin the Mad wrote:
Otherwhere wrote:

My tuppence:

I played EVE Online way back when it first came out and greatly enjoyed the sedate pace of it. I was not interested in the PvP at all, but really disliked the forced "you have to spend time waiting for skills to improve because we make money by making you stay registered for as long as possible" design.

I never really got into WoW, but that had a lot more offered on a regular basis to keep players interested and to justify (basically) buying the same game year after year.

I couldn't justify spending $132/year on the same game over and over again. Others don't seem to have that same issue.

Personally, I'm looking at Elite: Dangerous (& maybe Horizons) because: I can play it on my XBox One; and I only need to purchase the game once, for half the cost of a yearly subscription to EVE.

Anyway, I'm in that PvE majority that simply didn't find the game offered enough to continue subscribing.

Here's the logic behind EvE's skill training: Players have lives. You don't have to constantly play to improve your character which is what every other MMO does to my knowledge.

There's no levels, no limit. If you can muster the ISK and have sufficient patience, you can learn how to do everything in the game, at least in theory (skill level). Doing requires playing which goes without saying.

With EvE, you can have a life without your characters' skills training suffering. Want to take a vacation, go on a long cruise? No problem, fire up a sufficient length skill training and go on your merry way. Having a heck of a time at work and all you're doing for a while is eat/work/sleep? Again, fire up a lengthy skill train and you're character is still improving.

Rather ironic given the "EvE is your 2nd job" mentality that is prevalent amongst far too much of the playerbase. ^_____^

I seriously doubt they were being that altruistic in their design. It really came across as: "If you want to level up, you have to stay registered and let the clock tick away on your monthly subscription." I saw that as a needless waste of my precious time, which I am paying for. Why not simply let me spend time in the game, and when I've earned enough XP level up a skill? You've made your money from the subscription already. Forcing me to hang around waiting to get that perk was needlessly manipulative and seedy.


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:) Diff'rent strokes.

I'd rather they did the hybrid system which they used in DUST514 - you could both passive *and* active train up your skills.

Which was the primary redeeming feature of DUST514 ... may it rest in peace.


Turin the Mad wrote:

:) Diff'rent strokes.

I'd rather they did the hybrid system which they used in DUST514 - you could both passive *and* active train up your skills.

Which was the primary redeeming feature of DUST514 ... may it rest in peace.

Neverwinter Nights has a system where you can level your professions offline by sending your minions to do things via the gateway. You can also level up your cohorts by sending them on adventures.

The Foundry system lets players create PVE adventures that offer level appropriate rewards and challenges.


Turin the Mad wrote:

After chitchatting with Sharoth, I realized this:

Were CCP to fire up a PvE-only server, I'd be back in there in a proverbial New York minute. I liked (most) of the PvE content.

And add more lore-revealing missions, that would be sweet. The universe has so much exploration and lore research potential that is handled poorly (at least in the content that I was able to reach).

EDIT: Though the most I would like a single purchase EVE Offline, with the procedural economy generation.


Always cool to hear stories from people with more experience playing EVE than I have, even if it had a less than fortunate ending. I still enjoy hearing about EVE, but life is too short to play something you don't want to.

I'm pretty sure the Sansha incursions are still ongoing, though they have been broken down into a list of what everyone in a fleet should bring to succeed. I think they are considered pretty much risk free if an experienced group is organizing and teaching it in game - but they fits recommended are around 1.2 billion ISK from my understanding. Supposedly, a developer said incursions don't make sense at the just completed Fan Fest, so no idea what will happen to them.

Sleepers were added in late 2014 or early 2015 - these were NPCs designed to have better AI that could evolve their tactics to better react to players. I am not sure how effective the new AI for them was though, or if this was bringing the AI that other MMOs had for over a decade to EVE. Looks like they are only in wormhole-space though.

Citadels are slowly being rolled out and blown up. Debates still rage on if anyone will really use them in a big way and if so, what areas of space will be most impacted.

For war news, there was a Crossing Zebra article on a new player joining Pandemic Horde for the war. Apparently, Pandemic Horde is not doing the best right now. They are right near the staging area of Saranen so they are getting attacked by the Imperium, and are somewhat loosely organized (and rife with spies) due to focusing on newbies, training new fleet commanders, and heavy recruiting for the war. Depending on who you talk to, this is to get them fights and experience while keeping the Imperium from holding sov while the other groups solidify their sov behind this screen, and they are still mostly winning.


Drejk wrote:
Turin the Mad wrote:

After chitchatting with Sharoth, I realized this:

Were CCP to fire up a PvE-only server, I'd be back in there in a proverbial New York minute. I liked (most) of the PvE content.

And add more lore-revealing missions, that would be sweet. The universe has so much exploration and lore research potential that is handled poorly (at least in the content that I was able to reach).

EDIT: Though the most I would like a single purchase EVE Offline, with the procedural economy generation.

For the economy - would it be totally offline as well? I do wonder if EVE Offline with an online economy would work.


Well, back in Ye Olde Days, the majority of the economy was NPC-based that slowly backed off of production items as that capability was integrated into the players' capabilities.

It would work fine - if anything, it would work better as it takes a long time to play through the PvE content that I recall.

Sleepers were primarily wormhole hostiles IIRC. They always sounded cool, but being wormhole-only was a deciding factor in departing.

Given the above information about the incursions, one of the best things they could do with it is have the devs FC'ing a massive Sansha Incursion in its final push against the Empires. Hell, if they wanted to give Carebears a risk-free vengeance upon those that have griefed them, let them "sign up" under Sansha nomenclature for a week, two or three and massacre the PvPers without repercussions.


Turin the Mad wrote:

Well, back in Ye Olde Days, the majority of the economy was NPC-based that slowly backed off of production items as that capability was integrated into the players' capabilities.

It would work fine - if anything, it would work better as it takes a long time to play through the PvE content that I recall.

I never knew that about the economy - I started paying a little attention in 2008, but most of the people I heard from then were interested in the political machinations and boasting about hardcore they were for playing it, so they didn't really cover the economy. I had no idea they had handled all of that with NPCs.


No news on the war, but with the initial hike in sales taxes that came out with the start of Citadels, someone took advantage of extreme leverage from margin trading to make a (future) fortune. Apparently, this person used margin trading and techniques to reduce escrow so they could amplify the amount of buy orders for PLEX they could post to the market. Keeping the prices low (though having to adjust them for the downturn in PLEX prices that came with Citadel), he is able to undercut the margin of other sellers to make a profit. It is also possible that someone realized what was happening and tried to wipe his position out; if so, the effort failed.

I wonder what is going to happen in the future - CCP was planning further tax hikes as more features of Citadel became available.


And Crossing Zebra's has posted an interview with the man funding the war. I haven't listened to it all, so no idea on the quality of it.


RE: economics, CCP has been desperately attempting to trim the amount of ISK that flows through the game for going on a decade now, primarily through NPC-imposed taxes and fees.

Naturally, this has failed. Edit: The simplest solution would be to cut ISK across the board by 90%. Market orders, wallets, rental fees, contract fees, PLEX ... everything. Doubt they'd do that though.

Not a fan of AV interviews/articles, so I'd wait to see a transcription.


I was listening to a podcast breaking down some of the changes from Citadel and the general state of the game. With the rebalancing of capitals and supercapitals in Citadel, apparently the fits for the existing ships changed dramatically. The end result is that the previous fits for the ships were terrible, so the Imperium's supercapital fleet would need to escape from null sec to be refit, often with what are now extremely fragile fits. So it doesn't look like the Imperium will be bring supercapitals for this war.


Still going to be big battles (though no supercaps). The Imperium deployed a Citadel in Saranen, and came out to defend it. Over two thousand players involved and 88 billion ISK in losses. The citadel apparently onlined, so there should be another push when it becomes vulnerable. I'm not sure when it will be vulnerable.


The Imperium has lost all sovereignty. A week ago, they changed their strategy by setting their vulnerability window to European time, so they could field more pilots against Entosis ships and the defense fleets that came out, effectively increasing the number of pilots for both sides. Still outnumbered, the Imperium was forced out of null sec. They are still staging in Saranen, having two Astrahus (large) citadels up; the third that they tried to deploy in that system was destroyed.

With the war winding down, Shadow Cartel was moving supercapitals back to their low sec systems using the POS (Player Owned Starbase) of Snuff Box (who was set to friendly with them - they were rivals in low security space, but had both joined the Moneybadger Coalition) - the Supercapitals were using jump drives to teleport across systems and the safe area inside the POS force field to wait out the cooldown before they could jump again, but this required Snuff Box to set up a password for the Shadow Cartel pilots to use. While supposedly setting this up, Snuff Box gathered a fleet, dropped the force field, jumped in and killed at least one of the supercapitals.

After this, Snuff Box left the MBC. There was an internal argument with several corporations leaving Snuff Box. Shadow Cartel then set up a trap for Snuff Box, which was sniffed out until the Psychotic Tendencies forces that were held in reserve for the trap left to kill an Imperium citadel. The fight was begun, with Snuff Box getting the worse of it and needed to escalate with supercapitals. These supercapitals were caught by Escalating Entropy (a group formed of the corporations that had left Snuff Box after the original betrayal), and reinforcements from Psychotic Tendencies, Circle of Two, Pandemic Legion, Northern Coalition, Mercenary Coalition, and The OSS joined in, resulting in over 300 billion ISK in losses for Snuff Box.

EDIT: And today, the first daily comes to EVE.

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