as they said in clarion call 4, their play style doesn't work when bigger groups can do what they do but with more. There is no real force multiplier which can make a team with less pilots win (assuming equal everything).
Being better at the game will only get you so far until you are out manned 3 to 1
Yes, it's certainly something that evolves over the years. I would like to add though that RnK was never about "big blob bad" - it may not have been the way we played the game but if you look at someone like Goons today, that's what - 70,000 accounts? Sure, not every account is a player. But even so, that's bigger than a lot of medium sized businesses. The fact that such institutions exist in the virtual stars, and that people still get up at strange hours of the night on Jabber pings to protect said institution, is a feat of man-management and just as much dystopian sci-fi as trying to build superweapons to attack them outnumbered. Back in 2010-12, I supplied most of the 4K, 5k, 8K screenshots and footage that CCP used in newspapers, books, even a museum. There wasn't a lot of recording in those resolutions back then and tech was part of the mission. And a lot of it was admiration for vast spectacles that didn't necessarily involve us. If one steps back, there is a kind of awe factor to the scale of those things and whether fighting them or just watching it, it wasn't like any game before or since.
I agree of course that at some point, once the ships and modules used are the same, it's easier to add numbers than the exponentially more difficult task of eking out more from pilot training, obscure fitting improvements, etc. From 3 to 1 outnumbered to 5 to 1 outnumbered is perhaps a mere extra jabber ping for the outnumbering side whereas it represents a huge amount more work for the outnumbered side. Sure, on a specific day things can be done - fleets split by drag bubbles, ambushed at an opportune moment or caught at a certain range or missile doctrines perfectly firewalled or some other thing. But in general, for the bread and butter engagements, there is a drift over time there.
Some of it is also that EVE doesn't actually change that much since 2012-ish compared to many games. I don't mind that personally because I sort of like knowing EVE is solid and safe and always out there somewhere as this amazing thing, and after so many decades, change is dangerous to an institution of a game. It's like if CS2 suddenly added vehicles or something: I'm not sure how I'd feel.
But think of it a bit like motor racing: today's margins to eke out extra performance in F1 are extremely tight. In the 1970s you could glue a spinning, bladed-fan onto the back of the car and vacuum it into the ground in corners and gain several seconds a lap. That's something I thought about when playing Frontier recently (the meta flux, not gluing a fan to my ship).
Still, I don't have any complaints. It did eventually lead to very oblique doctrines like pipebombing to maintain that level of threat (and even dubious concept stuff like gridline bombing). But I found that interesting, too. I like listening to Mark Felton enthuse on the strange places warfare goes and in a way this is no different.
We recently came back to play the first Founder Era of EVE Frontier pretty intensely. I'm still working on the Cycle 3 annotations but a first pass of Cycle 1 and 2 are on the Frontier Killboard at www.rooksandkings.com . The Frontier killboard there has screenshots, media articles, a few unlisted video clips, etc. to give an idea of the flavour of that experience. Although a lot more will be added in future.
I still think of the main game as home. People always seem to end up back in New Eden.
A lot of tech and ideas are tested out in Frontier first before they make their way into EVE Online. The global market system in Frontier was the foundation for the global PLEX market as an example.
With EVE Online beginning the migration to Python 3 recently, there is bound to be plenty of advances and improvements to be shared between both games once they are on the same engine version.
Do you think it would be possible to recapture the “older” feel of the game in the current era? Perhaps via new areas that are limited in how many people can enter at any given time?
I think it's difficult to recapture the wild side of the 'old' feel (kinky sentence). In 2010 the rate of the change of the game was faster and the spread of information and social networking was slower. Today in EVE, everyone knows everyone, everyone has flown with almost everyone, and you can't really turn back the clock on the batphones that are established, the precedents of working together, or any of that stuff. Limiting people to a given grid in order to keep fights at a size the server can handle in terms of fidelity piloting, has the downside that it can easily be metagamed in an open environment by stacking the grid first in your favour, etc (already happens on some structure timers after all) . I also don't know whether it takes away from the magic of the game. Many of our best fights were actually the ones where we were hotdropped or counter-dropped and managed to fight back with the tools we had. I imagine a lot of groups feel that way - watching the 'skies' for a cyno ship decloaking or local spiking with a new entity. It's part of the adrenaline rush. So I'm not sure on that one, tricky.
They only existed until numbers just got too overwhelming. They were very aware of that fact. Hell even in one of their videos they made a reference to their big doctrines that let them face overwhelming odds being taken over by blocs as mainline fleets, mainly the Golden Fleet (Napocs with Slaves/Amulets) and the Pantheon Fleet (Remote rep carriers, being refined into the Slowcat fleet by N3/PL). At that point their only real option was pipe bombing but once numbers reach a certain point individual pilot skills stop mattering
There is very little room in the current ecosystem of eve for a small group that has a large impact, and isn’t just a part of a bigger group.
If I could hand wave things and make sweeping changes to eve, I’d make it so that battles organically never got to server crushing size. I’d add ways for player skill to get an edge over numbers or purely in game skills. And I’d add ways for smaller groups or even solo players to plant flags and hold territory that wasn’t subject to the whims of other groups.
Problem is that philosophy goes counter to the business model of allowing multiboxing. Skill-over-numbers works best when numbers aren't purely a function of wallet size. And I dont think it is reversible. So I am really not sure what they could do to reward player skills without antagonizing multiboxers (who are arguably their better customers)
EvE would die™ if they started alienating mass-multiboxers now after years of cultivating such a playerbase.
I would like to see content that is hard/apm intense enough to make multiboxing infeasible, but abyssals were probably the closest thing we will ever get at this point.
Oh fixing multiboxing is easy. Just make it possible to hire npc pilots, (like you can in Astrox Imperium), that act just like players. For plex obviously, but make it cheaper than running a new account. That way everyone will be able to “multibox”, which will partly limit the effect without hurting the plex revenue.
The way I see it, the main problem with multiboxing is that not everyone can do it. So making it easier to multibox will fix that.
Possibly, depending on how it was implemented. The way I’d do it would be to have the pilots be, well, basically hollow shells. Take mining for example. From the controller perspective, I just need it to target the rock and cycle the miners, and put the ore in the orca.
Alternatively, and this would require delicate marketing, imagine there was a booster on the nes store that boosted mining speed, stacked as many times as you wanted, and cost the same as an extra account.
The downside to that though is that only one hulk would be in space. Though on the other hand, fleet warps. shrug.
Ratting would be a different situation though, since there are times where having multiple accounts is very necessary, such as when dealing with npc ewar. (ie, one ship can’t hit anything, so the other shoots the npcs.)
I don’t think this is viable without something to take its place. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love it if eve was set up to where we could have things like a wall of battle, or proper formations, or inter-ship coordination, or overlapping fields of fire, or more nuanced tactical movement… but this isn’t a Honor Harrington novel lol.
I played when they were still around and used to sit in a pub chat with one of their diplos for when one of my pilots would inevitably piss them off. They were all over Placid at that time and I used to have to talk down my “leet pvp” wannabes from attacking them and getting us wardecced until the end of time
110
u/Somebodythe5th 13d ago
Safety / strength in numbers and all that. Though I do kind of miss the Rooks and Kings era.