Nitro Zeus wrote:
Drudge Dreadnought wrote:
BaconCatBug wrote:I miss EvE because Hilmar killed the soul of the game on the Altar of Microtransactions and Popular Appeal, sanding off the rough edges until nothing remained (The final straw that broke the camels back was the Instanced
PvE Dungeons, something entirely antithetical to the ethos of EvE as a whole). It was a fun 14 years x2 accounts but at the end of the day I just couldn't support the company in good faith after selling out to a Korean MMO company.
Anyway,
TTS is great, especially if you live in the middle of nowhere like myself.
Personally, I think Interdictors killed it. They destroyed the possibility of flying solo or small groups in 0 sec space. Up until that point, you always had some amount of choice on if you fought or not. If you were in a fast enough ship, you could basically always avoid combat, even in the worst case scenario of jumping into a blockade. It meant that a big alliance couldn't stop an interceptor with just
raw numbers of inexperienced pilots. You could always blockade out cruisers and larger, but you had to deal with frigs on their terms. They had to actually have their own decent interceptor pilots who could go dogfight an intruder. But Interdictors killed that element. With them, skill doesn't matter, preparation doesn't matter, the ship you're in barely matters. All that matters is if you jumped into an interdictor sphere or not. It added an instant death element to the game that never existed before, and it ruined piracy and skirmishing. I had been planning to quit EvE when I did anyway due to school, but Interdictors made it an easier thing to do.
Being able to be completely safe in EvE is not a good thing. Interdictors were a great addition. Let's not pretend any amount of "skilled interceptor pilots!" is actually enough to catch someone who knows what they are doing. Regardless, they changed it back now anyway, Sceptors warp straight through bubbles so yeah your fast ships for complete safety are fine, oh and look every second +1 is a solo Ceptor and the game is in the worst shape it's ever been.
Interceptors being able to move about freely was never a problem at the point I was playing. You couldn't catch them, but they also couldn't do much to you unless you were a solo hauler or something. It was the only thing keeping the game from turning into war of the blobs (which it still frequently did.) I don't know what the situation is now, but I'll wager there are other factors too. If the only variable was ceptors being able to blockade run, then it would have been a problem in the past. But it wasn't.
The old dynamic for alliances was that if you wanted your industry (miners, rat hunters, haulers) to be safe, you needed to defend them. If you were in a part of space with choke point(s), then you could blockade that gate. Whatever blob you have on the gate generally will have the advantage over even a superior attacker due to better range setup, etc. So to beat a blob, you need a bigger blob. That's fine because the advantage should go to the defender a bit. But it shouldn't be so much so that they are impervious to outside threats. If assaulting enemy space is too much at a disadvantage, then everyone just sits around doing nothing because its too costly or difficult. So the defender advantage can't be too great or the game stagnates. Having ways around the blockade was another good method to prevent stagnation and get people to actually go out and fight each other.
Frigates could run blockades and get into unprotected space, which means that your industry was at risk. But not from a huge threat because frigates are weak. So having frigs be able to run blockades adds the element that you need some security inside the protected zone too. That security could be your own frigates who will dogfight, or you could put anti-frig loadouts on bigger ships, which can wreck large numbers of them with the right setup, but can't give chase. This creates an ecosystem of skirmishes inside protected zones. Without this, skirmish warfare basically didn't exist in EvE, especially since they'd killed most low sec fighting by 2006 or whenever they added
lvl 4 missions in safe space.
My corp did a lot of frigate action behind enemy lines. It was some of the most interesting combat because you'd end up with small gangs hunting and testing each other before a full engagement. The defenders are constantly trying to bait the invaders into committing, and then tackling them while bringing in a bigger ship. So there was tons of edge of your seat duels between frigates where the invader was betting he could kill off the defender before their allies arrived. And of course, if the invaders had snuck in a bigger ship before the blockade went up (or in the middle of the night), then it got really interesting because then you could threaten harder targets, but of course were at constant risk of getting pinned in your slower ship. This ecosystem of duels, skirmishes, and small group fights were what really stood out about EvE's
PvP. That was all the best action.
Then Interdictors came out and ended it. Because with them, you can just blob the gates. And with the player base continually growing but space staying the same size, player density increased to the point that you could blob gates 24/7 too. So you couldn't even slip through during off hours. This reduced the game to essentially just big blob battles where whoever brings more people wins. Way less tactical depth, and boring.
So yeah, I can't speak to the state of the meta now. But it was absolutely the wrong move back then.
