@Decius
Blue is for friends and allies. If everyone is blue how do you tell a friend from a neutral?
Much better to have a three tier system than a two which is what everyone set blue except for the reds amounts to
Goblin Squad Member
|
I know this is jumping ahead, but it specifically applies to Kingdoms / Nations. I can see a Kingdom of two settlement or more setting one of those up as a port of entry. This settlement would be open to all but "Red" enemies. Once someone can prove themselves trustworthy and useful, they may then be granted access to the more secure and developed NBSI settlements of that Kingdom.
During the first few months of EE, there won't even be settlement warfare. This will give those EE settlements ample time to build up and prepare for when settlement warfare is enabled.
It will be interesting to see if those first 15 settlement hexes remain in 15 separate hands, I expect that they probably will, but it would also be nice to see a kingdom or two come out of EE, for the OE crowd to see. Who will be the first Kingdom? There will be a lot if prestige attached to that title and hopefully that will be incentive enough for someone to try to achieve it before OE.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
|
@Decius
Blue is for friends and allies. If everyone is blue how do you tell a friend from a neutral?
Much better to have a three tier system than a two which is what everyone set blue except for the reds amounts to
Friends and allies are blue, and neutrals are grey.
What's wrong with most characters being friends or allies, or granting blue status to all members of certain CCs or settlements?
When the punishment for misbehavior is getting kicked out of your CC and losing access to most trade hubs, how much misbehavior do you expect there to be?
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I never saw that post.Ryan-posts:
A lawful evil Settlements is likely to be the strongest opposition for the forces of good. The challenge for them will be remaining lawful while maximizing evil.I keep saying, and people keep not hearing, that LAWFUL EVIL will be the place for players who want to be really powerful bad dudes. CHAOTIC EVIL will be the place for a+**%#@s.The natural opposition to Lawful Good Settlements will be Lawful Evil Settlements.I think the strongest opposition that Lawful Good Settlements will face will come from Lawful Evil Settlements.[A Lawful Evil settlement] will (potentially) have less valuable buildings than a Lawful Good Settlement - less valuable to a degree not yet determined. It will not have buildings as crappy as Chaotic Evil.
Exactly! All of that is NOT the same as "everyone will be Lawful Evil, because it's the only alignment that is viable for security reasons". Every quote there suggests that Lawful Evil will be viable and will be in opposition to and in equal power to good and neutral.
@Decius
Blue is for friends and allies. If everyone is blue how do you tell a friend from a neutral?
Much better to have a three tier system than a two which is what everyone set blue except for the reds amounts to
Friends and allies are blue, and neutrals are grey.
What's wrong with most characters being friends or allies, or granting blue status to all members of certain CCs or settlements?
When the punishment for misbehavior is getting kicked out of your CC and losing access to most trade hubs, how much misbehavior do you expect there to be?
Because I was responding to your statement
"Here's a thought: most settlements will be NBSI, but most characters will be blue to many settlements?"
Most characters will be grey to most settlements.
As to losing access to trade hubs...if everyone is NBSI all the trade hubs by the very nature of that system will, just as they are in Eve, be in the NPC settlements.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Every quote there suggests that Lawful Evil will be viable and will be in opposition to and in equal power to good and neutral.
I think it's slightly more subtle than that, as Ryan's said Lawful Good and Lawful Evil may each have challenges to face in trying to maintain that first word of their alignment; Neutral may not be quite so challenged, or they may have yet a third set of challenges. I did want to make sure you had some ammo for on-going discussion.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
@Decius
Blue is for friends and allies. If everyone is blue how do you tell a friend from a neutral?
Much better to have a three tier system than a two which is what everyone set blue except for the reds amounts to
Friends and allies are blue, and neutrals are grey.
What's wrong with most characters being friends or allies, or granting blue status to all members of certain CCs or settlements?
When the punishment for misbehavior is getting kicked out of your CC and losing access to most trade hubs, how much misbehavior do you expect there to be?
Well if anybody is already set up for that approach, it's definitely the 7th Veil. We already have the infrastructure set up for admitting allies quickly.
But it will be safe to say that most guilds will not put in that volume of effort to distinguish who is who and will be on default NBSI with most of the server not blue. What most nations do is what the game will be.
I dunno, I've never been one to believe the "RD is just pulling our strings" conspiracies, but maybe on this one he is poking us to band together and be ready for the onslaught of EVE goons that will be at our gates when the doors open.
Maybe. I hope so.
|
Goblinworks Executive Founder
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
There are better ways to discourage Goonswarm. For example, I am aware of several former members of the BoB alliance who remain bitter about certain events in EvE. They are spending lots of time developing deep-cover identities in SA, where they will take initiative in discussion about PFO and Goonswarms presence here.
They intend to be selected or self-selected as the de jure leaders of Goonswarm in PFO, so that they can break Goon morale by being arbitrary in their choices for status and equipment distribution, forcing players into menial work for little visible reward, and managing to lose high-profile battles and other engagements with other large groups.
As a final coup, they might even disband the entire group at a key moment, allowing their confederates in the rest of the world to lay claim to the title symbolically.
Or maybe I'm using a combination of misdirection and psychology to convince potential future Goons who see this that their leaders are betraying them, fostering doubt at every setback as to whether those leaders are deep-cover agents.
Or maybe I've set this entire line up so that those deep-cover agents can deflect speculation about their loyalty by denouncing it as a psychological warfare trick, and pointing to the evidence that there are published plans about doing so.
Or maybe I've just called that out so that when the legitimate leaders try to point out propaganda tricks that are being used against them, they will pattern-match into the 'deep cover agent' reference class that I created and thereby increase suspicion....
Turtles, I say, Turtles all the way down.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
There are better ways to discourage Goonswarm. For example, I am aware of several former members of the BoB alliance who remain bitter about certain events in EvE. They are spending lots of time developing deep-cover identities in SA, where they will take initiative in discussion about PFO and Goonswarms presence here.
They intend to be selected or self-selected as the de jure leaders of Goonswarm in PFO, so that they can break Goon morale by being arbitrary in their choices for status and equipment distribution, forcing players into menial work for little visible reward, and managing to lose high-profile battles and other engagements with other large groups.
As a final coup, they might even disband the entire group at a key moment, allowing their confederates in the rest of the world to lay claim to the title symbolically.
Or maybe I'm using a combination of misdirection and psychology to convince potential future Goons who see this that their leaders are betraying them, fostering doubt at every setback as to whether those leaders are deep-cover agents.
Or maybe I've set this entire line up so that those deep-cover agents can deflect speculation about their loyalty by denouncing it as a psychological warfare trick, and pointing to the evidence that there are published plans about doing so.
Or maybe I've just called that out so that when the legitimate leaders try to point out propaganda tricks that are being used against them, they will pattern-match into the 'deep cover agent' reference class that I created and thereby increase suspicion....
Turtles, I say, Turtles all the way down.
Yeah that. That's the game I don't want.
As to losing access to trade hubs...if everyone is NBSI all the trade hubs by the very nature of that system will, just as they are in Eve, be in the NPC settlements.What if the NPC settlements don't have markets?
Then everyone will be reduced to selling their goods to only their alliance. This is the very core of NBSI....your alliance is blue everyone else dies
|
Goblinworks Executive Founder
|
If the only place that can serve as a central market hub is also the only NRDS settlement, then whatever advantages come from being a market hub fall to the first centrally located NRDS settlement.
Simply pointing out that anyone who attacks the settlement might make it NBSI or raise the market fees should ensure that there is a large alliance against anyone who wishes to take control of such a settlement.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Eventually you have to stop following the turtles down, and start taking action.
In EVE, corporations have chat channels that are open to visitors from other corporations. Discussing anything sensitive in these channels is, of course, discouraged.
The next tier of channel is the corporation channel. Everyone in there is on your team, so you can speak freely, right? Wrong. There are spies everywhere, so keep the sensitive stuff quiet.
The next tier is the leadership channel, open by invitation only. Unfortunately, infiltration at the leadership level is a prime target for dedicated spies. Loose words here may be even worse than the lower levels.
(At the semi-mythical, insane level of security, you may need to order your commanders to take their computers to randomly-selected Internet cafes. Wires can be cut, if the enemy ferrets out a few key physical addresses.)
Winning a war, though, requires sending fleets into battle. In order to fight, the members of those fleets have to be told where to go. A spy in the fleet can wreck all the secrecy in the previous levels.
Dole out the flight plan one step at a time. Send a couple of decoy fleets, whose commanders think they're going to the real target. On the other hand, you may need every fighter you have in the real battle. Decisions, decisions.
The fleet has reached enemy territory. Now it's time to stop following the turtles down, stop chasing spies, and tell them to start shooting.
Eventually, after all the spy-craft, the battle begins. At that point, everyone knows where it is, including the EVE press. If it's a big enough battle, they may even dispatch someone to stream it live to the Internet.
Secret, secret, secret, "Fire!", no more secret.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I hope I never have to take my computer to an Internet cafe in EVE or PFO. I also hope PFO can keep the Spy vs. Spy side of the game several levels less severe than EVE.
No chance of that. There have already been several instances of meta game spying in PFO. You would be better off hoping the spying in PFO won't be worse than EvE.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I hope I never have to take my computer to an Internet cafe in EVE or PFO. I also hope PFO can keep the Spy vs. Spy side of the game several levels less severe than EVE.No chance of that. There have already been several instances of meta game spying in PFO. You would be better off hoping the spying in PFO won't be worse than EvE.
the best way to beat meta game spying is to make in game spying viable. The settlement that attacks travellers who are not on red list should be punished.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Eventually you have to stop following the turtles down, and start taking action.
In EVE, corporations have chat channels that are open to visitors from other corporations. Discussing anything sensitive in these channels is, of course, discouraged.
The next tier of channel is the corporation channel. Everyone in there is on your team, so you can speak freely, right? Wrong. There are spies everywhere, so keep the sensitive stuff quiet.
The next tier is the leadership channel, open by invitation only. Unfortunately, infiltration at the leadership level is a prime target for dedicated spies. Loose words here may be even worse than the lower levels.
(At the semi-mythical, insane level of security, you may need to order your commanders to take their computers to randomly-selected Internet cafes. Wires can be cut, if the enemy ferrets out a few key physical addresses.)
Winning a war, though, requires sending fleets into battle. In order to fight, the members of those fleets have to be told where to go. A spy in the fleet can wreck all the secrecy in the previous levels.
Dole out the flight plan one step at a time. Send a couple of decoy fleets, whose commanders think they're going to the real target. On the other hand, you may need every fighter you have in the real battle. Decisions, decisions.
The fleet has reached enemy territory. Now it's time to stop following the turtles down, stop chasing spies, and tell them to start shooting.
Eventually, after all the spy-craft, the battle begins. At that point, everyone knows where it is, including the EVE press. If it's a big enough battle, they may even dispatch someone to stream it live to the Internet.
Secret, secret, secret, "Fire!", no more secret.
"Yeah that. That's the game I don't want."
This sounds as if PFO might start to feel like a job instead of a game, an accusation that's been thrown at EVE more than once. I have a career, and I don't want a job; I want occasional escape from my career :-).
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
We want a game people care enough about winning to engage in robust espionage and sabotage. That's a sign we're succeeding, not failing.
I almost spit my soda out of my nose when I read this!
Ryan Dancey wants EvE style spying..... Check!
And there are still people thinking Ryan wants PFO not to be like EvE in many ways?
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
The game should be in the game not outside it.Too late.
The trick is to ignore the game-outside-the-game if it doesn't interest you.
I'm not being naive to meta gaming. I'm doing it right now;)
I'm saying that you will have a much better game the more you make it advantageous to do things in game instead of out. Spying is a major issue here. If spying in game is viable, then spying in meta form is less valuable.
Everybody is gonna end up with everybody's info anyways, right? Would you rather root out spies from the guild forums or in game with a sheriff and sword?
If the alignment system forces the nations to open thier doors that's what you get. I thought it was a brilliant plan but I guess they didn't mean it:(
@Avari
You could still choose to be open
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Don't want to play Spy vs.Spy? You have some options:
1) Don't take a leadership role in a settlement/nation. If you're a member of the rank and file, you'll still have to exercise reasonable caution in "public" discussions, but you won't even know about the really secret stuff until it happens.
2) Be a citizen/resident of an NPC settlement. You might have trouble finding trainers for advanced stuff, but there's not much need to spy on a settlement that can't play the conquest game (unless they're providing mercenaries to one side or the other. In that case, see Option 1).
3) Affiliate with a player settlement, but hang out in the wilderness as much as possible. Avoid conversation with anyone who seems more interested in your home town than the next monster.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
If the alignment system forces the nations to open thier doors that's what you get. I thought it was a brilliant plan but I guess they didn't mean it:(
Tork Shaw came in some time last week and explained that the 1 step alignment restriction for settlements was not going to work out well because it would have left out certain aligned characters from access to settlements of their alignment.
I have a feeling that the concept of a settlement having a core alignment for the purposes the level of structures will also be removed from the 1 step rule, or I hope it will.
For instance, if a settlement allows all three evils, LE, NE and CE will be treated equally no matter what the average turns out to be. Obviously if there are more LEs, they will demand that their dependent structures get built first. But the others can eventually be built to the same level, and not be limited due to being even a slight majority.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
@Avari
You could still choose to be open
The issue at hand is that RD (still my man bud and I man love ya) expects closed nations to dominate. That clearly means that the penalties to killing everything on sight in your kingdom are either miniscule or non existent.
That goes against everything we have debated for the last 8 months. Nations were going to be forced to be open because killing on sight is inherently evil, and evil carried a penalty. That was the premise. No more "wolves eating wolves" yadda yadda...
This was going to be a game where "sensible" PvP was the law of the land and backed by coded systems. Now sensible PvP prevails if we can hold off the goons despite being at a DISADVANTAGE mechanically.
But hey we get a head start right?
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
In EVE, lots of players never go to sovereign null security space. They stay in NPC space and build stuff, trade, engage in piracy, explore, and do dozens of other things. It sounds like PFO will give people more incentive to join PC settlements (advanced training being a big one), but I'm sure some people will be perfectly happy to keep their residency with the Hellknights, the Knights of Iomedae and Thornkeep.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
We want a game people care enough about winning to engage in robust espionage and sabotage. That's a sign we're succeeding, not failing.
I think the fact that people are expressing their unhappiness with the latest statements of direction is ample demonstration that they care about the game. Caring about a zero sum win condition may be A sign of success, but not one I would like to see (unless it's strictly in-game espionage as Avari3 suggests).
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I want to play a CHARACTER in GAME that does spy v.s. spy. I don't want to play spy as Avari3, the dude from Puerto Rico.Don't want to play Spy vs.Spy? You have some options:
As long as you aren't spying, ferreting out spies, or being pumped for information by a spy in chat, you won't have to.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
In EVE, lots of players never go to sovereign null security space. They stay in NPC space and build stuff, trade, engage in piracy, explore, and do dozens of other things. It sounds like PFO will give people more incentive to join PC settlements (advanced training being a big one), but I'm sure some people will be perfectly happy to keep their residency with the Hellknights, the Knights of Iomedae and Thornkeep.
There are lots of those people for whom NO incentive is large enough to partake in the 0.0 space game. With NPC settlements being far smaller and less capable than EVE high-sec, I don't see many of those players playing PFO.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
There are lots of those people for whom NO incentive is large enough to partake in the 0.0 space game. With NPC settlements being far smaller and less capable than EVE high-sec, I don't see many of those players playing PFO.
The hi sec, NPC corp C... B.... of Eve might not be the target player base that Ryan is trying to lure here. I'm not suggesting he wants the hi sec suicide ganker / griefers either. But he early would like to have the more pvp focused, large corp belonging players.
Everyone if his recent lists seems to indicate a move In that direction.
|
CEO, Goblinworks
|
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
What advice would you give to those of us who want to run a successful Player Nation but have never experienced any of the espionage and sabotage that EVE players are familiar with?
I think that that the first thing you should do is stop making assumptions. If I were you, my whole approach now would be to create a community not to set policies. Gather together a large number of people who share common objectives and create a shared sense of purpose.
Worrying about alignments, reputation, and security policies is not going to have much effect on your long term success at this juncture. Those are things that are still going to undergo a tremendous amount of crowdforging and will almost certainly change many times in Early Enrollment as we all seek good compromises.
You should be worried about having robust leaders. You need people with experience in large MMO guilds to be a part of your leadership structure. If you don't have any, recruit them. You should be seeking to engage with people with stated long-term interests that you will need: people interested in logistics, crafting, diplomacy, market-manipulation, and military order. These people should have a demonstrated ability to function at a high level in competitive MMO environments - EVE, WoW, maybe EQ, maybe Ultima Online (hard to check bona fides on that one, but if you can, likely very valuable), GuildWars 2, RIFT, maybe Warhammer Online, maybe Aion.
You should be thinking about geographical distribution. You need to be operating around the clock. You need to be operating on weekdays and holidays. To do that you need to recruit people who can and will be logged in and active when your US-based contingent isn't. So you should be thinking about talking to Europeans, Russians, and Australians. If you're very lucky you'll get some Koreans and Chinese too although the hurdles for the Chinese are quite high.
You should be worried about internal security. In my experience, the best large-scale MMO organizations rely on face-to-face connections and family/friend relationships that pre-date the MMO. Your core leadership team, which is probably not going to be more than a half-dozen people if you want to be realistic, should meet biannually or more often. Everyone on that team should have out-of-game relationships they'll seriously jeopardize if they are the proximate cause of a major organizational security failure. You should be thinking about how this group will communicate in ways that are resistant to evesdropping. There's almost no forum software, for example, that I would consider sufficiently secure. Email, if transmitted and received without SSL, is insecure. (This becomes very dangerous when there is a targetable gathering like GenCon or PaizoCon, where evesdroppers can gamble that people they want to target will be in a geographically localized area and may be using phones & tablets to communicate, risking insecure email or forum traffic over public WiFi).
You should have a plan to create secure passwords for various organizational containers, and to change them regularly, and to have a list of who has access to which passwords, and to have a procedure to change them as fast as possible in an emergency. Along with those policies you should have a plan to recover if someone screws up and changes passwords and then fails to correctly record the new passwords.
You should have policies about never letting one person have sole authority over anything meaningful, but also not letting authority become so disbursed that you lose control of the security of your stuff. Having 3 people share an authority, and requiring 2 of the 3 to approve a change to something meaningful strikes me as the best procedure. (As a side note, this is one of the reasons the design document includes references to fairly robust systems for access control lists on things like bank accounts and storage lockers, and the ability to set up requirements for votes to change various aspects of a shared resource - it's one of the big mistakes (in my opinion) with the way EVE is structured that such things are not well handled or easily managed, and its an area we're determined to do better).
Some tougher news to hear:
You're probably going to build up some awesome stuff in Early Enrollment, and lose it in Open Enrollment. The first couple of years of this game are going to be like learning to ride a bicycle with training wheels. You may feel like you've mastered things and are operating effectively, but then one day the Big Guilds From Other Games will show up and you'll learn all the things you're doing wrong. The hard way.
Groups that have a strong sense of purpose, and are resilient and able to admit mistakes and move forward without tearing themselves apart at the seams can recover from losses. Some of the largest Alliances in EVE have lost EVERYTHING, and have been able to boostrap with whatever individual members were able to salvage, and return to be a force fairly quickly because they had that kind of resilience.
You're going to get your asses kicked. Your stuff is going to get torn down. People are going to say mean things about you. Even some of your characters may become unplayable. If your group has the ability to pick itself up, dust itself off, and get back in the fight, you'll be stronger for overcoming your setbacks. But if you think you can engineer perfect safety today, and you become brittle behind the belief that you have, you'll risk catastrophic disintegration when you face major setbacks.
So you should be talking about those setbacks in the context of "when", not "if".
RyanD
|
CEO, Goblinworks
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Caring about a zero sum win condition may be A sign of success, but not one I would like to see (unless it's strictly in-game espionage as Avari3 suggests).
One of the most interesting lessons I learned at Wizards of the Coast was that the DCI - the group that runs Magic: The Gathering organized play and the Pro Tour, expects people to cheat.
In fact, they once had the saying that if people were not willing to cheat, the prize money wasn't good enough. They knew they'd found the right level of prizes when cheating became a problem at the highest levels of play.
They didn't like cheaters. They didn't want cheaters in the game per se. They didn't want potential cheating to affect a Pro Tour event. But they knew that cheating was an indicator that people had decided to take matters so seriously that they risked serious pubic censure and potentially devastating consequences if they cheated and got caught - and did it anyway because the stakes had become so meaningful that some people would accept those risks in the quest to win. That's what the DCI wanted - they wanted people to become as serious about playing Magic as they are about other sports played at the highest levels (where cheating is always present). No cheating was an indicator to the DCI that they weren't succeeding.
It's not a zero sum win condition for people to care enough about Pathfinder Online to engage in espionage and sabotage. Those are patterns that are inherited from many other games (not just EVE - the same kinds of things go on in WoW, where there's virtually NOTHING at stake except "Server Firsts"). The fact that some people will spend immense amounts of time and effort to attempt to achieve victory in Pathfinder Online via social engineering and out of game activities is a sign that we're succeeding in one of our core objectives: making a virtual world that is more meaningful than real life.
These things arise not because of game designs or mechanics or anything built into the game. Espionage and sabotage arise because human beings are capable of vesting a game like Pathfinder Online with such passion, and import, that they'll do almost anything to win. So I'll say again, that is a sign that we're succeeding, not failing.
|
CEO, Goblinworks
|
What advice would you give to those of us who want to run a successful Player Nation but have never experienced any of the espionage and sabotage that EVE players are familiar with?I think that that the first thing you should do is stop making assumptions....
I'll add to my own advice:
You should be playing EVE Online as a group. If you are organized enough to be talking about running a Settlement in Pathfinder Online a year before we even begin Early Enrollment, you should be organized enough to get your people into a functioning game and start experiencing some of this stuff right now for realz.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I don't think anybody here is debating that we want a competitive MMO where the possibility of losing everything to more experienced cross game guilds is downright likely.
Straight up I not only try to keep out of long debates about specifics I preach others to do the same. Yes we know everything will be crowdforged and is a long way off.
But this is an EXTREMELY broad concept debate. We are worried about PFO being a game where KOS is the default action v.s. the intention that PFO was going to be a game where PvP followed a more sensible and realistic PvP style.
You personally called EVE a game "designed by wolves for wolves" and are pretty much now telling us to go be wolves if we want to be good at PFO. I don't think anybody is expecting a game that is cheat proof, but we are expecting a game with mechanics that favor the non-evil KOS play styles, even if those styles are viable.
P.S. If I could tolerate more than a month playing a space ship, I'd be playing EVE for a long time now.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Ryan's advice seems pretty sound, but I played EVE, and just didn't have fun. I have lots of stuff to accomplish, and had "productive" sessions, but never got out of my chair saying, "Damn! That was a blast!" Because I never had fun in EVE. Too many of the mechanics allowed for total asshats to ruin what might have been fun or interesting, and CCP never took griefing or griefers as a serious problem, since they were paying their monthly fees. (That's how I saw it at least.)
If that's how PFO is gonna play out, I will be very disappointed. I spent most of my military career in Military Intel and I am tired of having to live that way. This whole discussion bums me out, and makes doing something else much more interesting.
Saw your post Ryan. Still editing. My point is, why keep the same mechanics that cause EVE to fail (in many former players' minds). Yeah, it might grow every year, but it sucked. It was not fun. How many not fun games can there be? Why not put in some mechanics that give settlements the chance to survive without having to live an alternate reality 24/7? That is not fun.
|
CEO, Goblinworks
|
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
There are things that CCP permits in EVE that I have no intention of permitting in Pathfinder Online.
Scams are a great example. I'm just not interested in a game where if you trick someone into clicking the wrong button, or trick them into a deal that no rational person would take, or if you exploit UI problems (like decimal numbers that are easy to confuse), the policy is "caveat emptor". I'd rather have a policy that says "if we catch you scamming others, we'll ban your ass". I'd rather have a small number of people b$%*# at me at how unfair we are for not letting them screw people than have a large number of people afraid to engage interactively for fear that they're a mouseclick away from a scam.
Alliance dissolution is another. There is zero chance I'd tolerate the kind of shenanigans that allowed one person to disband Band of Brothers and Goonswarm's Alliances; partly those happened because the tools provided to players to manage those Alliances are incredibly hard to use, partly because there's no check or balance system in place to ensure that one person can't screw thousands, and mostly because CCP as a policy wouldn't step in and fix the damage done by one rogue individual. Hopefully we can fix the first and second problems by better design and never have to deal with the third, but if we did, I would not sit back and say "should've been more careful, yo!"
Suicide ganking is a marginal case. There's a legit tactic there (you can make a lot of money suicide ganking if your crew is configured to loot the wreckage), but it's wrapped in an envelope of griefing (ganking just to piss off other players). The biggest problem I see is that it's possible to suicide gank a meaningful portion of experienced players without committing any real money to the effort. If it cost something to make a ganker, there'd be a lot less ganking for grief. Again, that's a policy of CCP's not a game mechanic per se.
I don't want a group of people to name their characters incredibly offensive things, and deluge the chat channels with abusive language, poking at people until they snap from anger or frustration.
I don't want a character or group of characters who have not brought the problem down on their own heads via in game activities to have to fear that they'll be harassed by larger, more experienced teams of players "just for the lulz" wherever they go in the game.
A big part of the reason EVE's experience is toxic for many players is that CCP thinks that allowing the toxicity is what sustains the meaningful nature of the virtual world. I think they're wrong - they've thrown the baby out with the bathwater. I think we can have a much stronger, more friendly social experience where being a jerk is simply not tolerated without breaking the things that make people care so passionately about the game and the game world and their characters that it becomes more meaningful than real life.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Ryan, if Goblinworks and the community can separate competitive large group play from toxic behavior, that will be a success all in itself.
Getting organized in EVE as practice for PFO is probably a great idea. You don't really have to like flying a spaceship to be a corp director. I doubt most large corporation leaders spend much time in game, and I'll bet they hardly ever un-dock. I suspect they spend their time on forums, on very private voice chat channels, and poring over the famous spreadsheets of EVE. Keeping hundreds or thousands of people organized is a challenge.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
@Ryan, if anyone still thinks the devs don't pay attention in the threads, your barrage of strong information and analysis should change that. My take-away from all this is that focusing on the "how do we do it" rather than the "why are we doing it" will lead to disastrous preconceptions as we work our way through EE into OE.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I spent most of my military career in Military Intel and I am tired of having to live that way. This whole discussion bums me out, and makes doing something else much more interesting.
Thank you for all your input for us, Ryan, but sorta this. I've spent the last 25 years in Risk Management at major banks; I've long said I've been trained and paid my whole career to think like a bad guy.
My colleagues and I are constantly aware of how much damage we can do if we turn to the Dark Side, but damned few of us have, for a variety of reasons. My reason: it's too damned much work.
I spend all day planning for the bad, preventing the bad, and catching the bad. My days never truly "end", but when I get up and walk away, the bad's got no interest remaining, and I'm just ready for it to stop.
I'd hoped this would be a game where I might find some relaxation, fun, and escape from the real world, since I can't find a tabletop group I can relate to any more. I don't want a game to be more meaningful than--or even as meaningful as--my real life, since I like my real life just fine and already don't get enough of the good parts and a bit too much of the hard parts.
I'll wait and see where we go from here in crowd-forging and such, but it's beginning to sound as if I might end up happiest as a peripheral hanger-on in PFO. I'd already planned to risk little, materially, in-game, but there are so very many ways this can go badly, and such a terrific lot of work needed on our parts to even attempt to prevent those.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I don't mind putting in some work and running the risk of in-game items and such being lost to the enemy. However, the issue I have is that this is a game and I intend to enjoy it as such. I have 3 kids, and a wife that says I play too much as it is, not to mention work and friends. I just don't have it in me any more to put the hours required that I am hearing in Ryan's post. Granted, I have 0 intention of running or managing a settlement, or anything more than a smallish band of assassins, but I am not sure if that will be possible with my available gaming time. I am a little disappointed that all this is coming out now, after most of the kickstarter stuff is done. (yes I know there is another one coming but still) It almost feels like at least a few of us were mislead. I wonder if this just happened with this timing, or if there was planning to this.......