Tuesday, October 25, 2011

The Fine Art of Not Making ISK (How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the HiSec Missionrunner)

Today in Twitter I was affronted by a post by @EVE_Rhavas. I'm easily affronted, but moving beyond that, here's the post:
@redrickstar Fantastic post. I strongly support a "senate" approach. +1 follower. Cc @HilmarVeigar #nerfnullsec #eveonline #tweetfleet
Now to be fair, I have no idea what Rhavas was supporting. Because all I saw was #nerfnullsec. My reply:
@EVE_Rhavas @redrickstar @HilmarVeigar in case you hadn't noticed, nullsec has been nerfed about 10 ways to Sunday. #nerfhisec
For those of you just joining this game, welcome. EVE Online is a harsh mistress, moreso than the Moon of Heinlein's imagining. The follow-up discussion (if one can have a discussion in 140 characters or less) was even more entertaining, from @redrickstar:
@swearte @EVE_Rhavas @HilmarVeigar Crying about your milk being spilled and your answer is to piss in everyone else's is a poor solution
Now I get it. I won't even go find a blog, or an original link, and even if there were an original idea with merit, it doesn't matter. Because @redrickstar is angry about Goonswarm. Maybe he's an ice miner, who likes to sit and watch torrented films while multiboxing a fleet of dangerous Mackinaws. Maybe he's an unlucky Gallente Cap pilot (like me) who can't undock the big girl because the fuel cost is too high. Maybe he's running a Gallente POS farm reacting Technetium, and he's not swimming in ISK anymore. It doesn't really matter, because whatever he's doing in EVE, he's angry.

The basic argument I'm finding from the cesspool we know and love called the EVE Online official forums, is that Mittani should not be encouraging Goonswarm to do dastardly things, and he should not participate himself in these alliance activities, because he is the chairman of the CSM. Of course it doesn't help when he posts things like this in his twitter stream:
Ssh. The Tornado is for ~fleet warfare~. Pay no attention to the hisec ganking possibilities! #tweetfleet
Of course, the problem isn't The Mittani. Or Goonswarm. Or their current game, Gallente Ice Interdiction. The problem is that too many people in EVE are risk averse and feel entitled.

People are angry, yes angry about the Goonswarm Ice Interdiction. After all, you can't mine Gallente ice and make mindless isk right now, and the price of oxygen isotopes makes that so tempting that even the wisest of carebears is probably considering the risk to reward ratio. But the simple thing is, EVE is a sandbox game, and in the nullsec section of the sandbox, CCP has a lot of work to do. Looking at the hints, allegations, and things said about the winter expansion (and beyond), CCP realizes that. But in the meantime, one of the largest groups of players in the game are bored. And bored players will do crazy things. Last time, shortly after the fall of BOB, Karttoon led them on a rampage against hisec towers. It's a lot harder to make that fun, but Goonswarm made it memorable, and (hopefully) had fun in doing so - even if most of that fun was bad forum posting.

I made a comment in the EVE forums that perhaps what people should be doing since they can't mine ice, is anything else. EVE has so many avenues of experience, you don't have to simply mine or PvP. You can cut your hands off at your wrists doing missions. You can have some enjoyment doing Incursions. You can explore, and do it in LoSec where space is really a no-mans land. You could, oh, I don't know, learn to lose ships and not care.

What Mittani is doing (and by extension Goonswarm) is playing EVE. There is a vocal minority who believes that his version of EVE is wrong, and he shouldn't play it, because he's on the CSM. Others claim he should resign from the CSM, because his playstyle doesn't match their own. EVE is a game. A very involved, very time consuming, sometimes very frustrating, game. It has many facets, and one of the most important is that CCP does not interfere with the sandbox. We all share one universe, one game world, and if you don't like the way someone is playing in one section of the world, move.

Pack up your Orcas full of barges, and move to a different space. Or don't. But don't complain about someone playing the game. Find a way to enjoy the game on your own terms. Because the rage you spew, in the forums on Twitter, on your blogs, feeds their enjoyment of the game they are playing.

Now about the title of this blog. Nullsec is broken in many ways, and that's changing soon, from the looks of it. In the meantime, people who like to play this game against other players are finding other avenues to do so, and when the only way they can afford ships is the intermittent Incursion fleet or the mindless Level 4 mission, I'm not at all surprised that the unwashed masses of Goonswarm (and their finely manicured leadership) are turning against those players who think HiSec is risk-free riches. It's quite possible that even fixing Nullsec won't change this, because a side effect of the Gallente Interdiction is that every Nyx and Technetium-chewing tower costs a lot more to use right now. Which actually makes the game fun for more than just the Goons.

13 comments:

  1. Well said....

    At the end of the day, eve is PvP, in every facet. If you don't accept that, then this is not the game for you.

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  2. I think you misunderstood me, which is easy to do thanks to 140 characters.

    I'm not angry at all. I don't mine ice. I don't care about Goons and what they do.

    What I'm concerned about is the tone of the fix null sec campaign. Because right now it's a lot less "make this better" and a lot more "nerf the shit out of everything else".

    Thus what I meant to say in less words was "When crying over your milk being spilled, the best answer is not pissing in everyone else's milk to make what you have taste better."

    It was a general comment about the situation at hand and how it's being handled. You took it WAY the wrong way.

    I play in wormholes, I PVP, I'm not a carebear, I could give a shit what goonswarm is and how they play their game. It's their game. They can play it the way they want to. I'm not opposed to it at all. What I am opposed to, is people who know nothing about space outside their borders calling for nerfs on stuff just so their stuff is better.

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  3. Here Here! Good writing and thinking. keep it up, swearte.

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  4. Finally someone who understands. Wise words and good insight!

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  5. To Shadai:
    Sadly, I think the general tone of this post still applies. OK, so it's not about Ice Mining and Goons ganking in HiSec. It's about risk-free ABCs in Wormholes? Because, if I remember correctly, the only "nerf" to Wormholes propsed by the CSM (and not even an issue The Mittani has paid a lot of attention to that I've seen) is that because wormholes are considered the same as -1.0 true sec status systems, ABCs spawn there. So in your wormholes, where you already have huge income opportunities with the best PI production volume, exclusive access to T3 materials, AND fairly low-risk high-end mining options, you are upset that the nullsec crowd wants to change one of those three high-profit options because the wormhole crowd has cornered the market on two of the most profitable trade markets in EVE when perhaps they shouldn't?

    Don't tell me about the high-risk of mining either - because unless something drastic has changed, it's still much easier to be left alone in a wormhole for hours if not days on end, which means very low-risk high-income play. Perhaps you should take a poll of the average shiptype and wallet balance of your corp/alliance mates and those you know in wormholes, and compare that to the average nullsec resident. I wouldn't be surprised to find a difference that favors the WH dweller, which means it's easier to make ISK in a wormhole than in nullsec.

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  6. Come live in wormholes mate, and find out how safe and "risk free" it is. Just like every other null sec resident who's never lived in WH space, you have no idea what goes on in there. It's actually easier to mine in null sec, especially with local and your alliance network.

    And since you also clearly do not live in a wormhole or never have, the majority of wormhole corporations actually use that ore for production. We don't ship it out to sell in large quantities that would make the market shudder like Mittens seems to think we can and do. Wormholes haven't "cornered" the ABC ore market. We simply do not have enough of the stuff or the logistics with changing exits. You want to know who has "cornered" the market? Look in your own backyard to the bots that mine ABC 24-7. The reason the price has bottomed out on ABC is from null sec bots, not wormhole corps.

    So no, your tone of the post doesn't apply; and if you'd taken five minutes to find the link to the original post that was being commented on, you'd understand it was about some comments Hilmar made about the CSM. It has nothing to do with whatever you decided to come up with.

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  7. Ok, we've sort of wandered down a rathole, so I'm going to try and get back on track. It doesn't matter what the original idea or blog post was. By claiming a #nerfnullsec hash tag @redrickstar has shown a blatant lack of understanding of the game that about 1/3 of EVE participates in. It doesn't matter if it's because of ice, or ABCs, or the fact that The Mittani is arrogant. The Mittani isn't the only person on the CSM, and he doesn't hold a gun to the heads of members who disagree with him. Nullsec was already nerfed, it's badly broken, and the CSM (as a group) recognize that it is low-hanging fruit for fixing things. If, along the way, wormholes lose ABCs, gee, well, they still have 2 very high-profit activities that might be less mind-numbing. And since most ships don't use tens of thousands of Zydrine or Megacyte, it shouldn't matter if they have to get imported, just like in losec or hisec production.

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  8. This guy is a nutcase; the CSM has never claimed that wormholes are 'cornering the market' on ABCs, nor do we even give a shit about the ABC situation. There's a bunch of crap broken with the game that needs fixing, instead. Of course, the actual wormhole rep on the CSM - the one who lives in a wormhole 23/7, Two Step - thinks that ABCS should be removed from low-class wormholes. But no, it's all about ~the mittani~, 'removing all ABCs' and how nullsec should be nerfed. Or something.

    While his points are irrelevant, he's an excellent example of an aspie with an anime avatar, a whole pile of shitty image macros on his blog, and retarded ideas.

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  9. Actually I never claimed the #nurfnullsec hash tag. That was done by someone else. Check your facts.

    And way to give the predictable "I don't like what someone said about me, so I must insult him" response Mittani. Way to be professional.

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  10. Shadai, I must apologize about one important aspect. You did not use the #nerfnullsec tag. That was @EVE_Rhavas.

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  11. Good thing I'm playing a computer game and don't give a shit about being 'professional' when dealing with a pathetic animu.

    abloobloobloo my dumb ideas weren't shown 'respect' and 'professionalism' let me write a blog about it

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  12. LOL ... the Mittani and the Goons can gargle my sack.

    I shouldn't be so surprised at the amount of fanboy worship there is towards this band of idiots. Players could nip this little ice problem in the butt pretty easily but they won't. I believe that it's because the Goons have gathered just about anyone who could do anything to them into a false sense of alliance and the rest are either too dumb, Russian or care bears who can't or won't do anything about them.

    The game is broken. The goons and their mindless followers broke it. How the hell did a goon get elected CSM anyway? That alone should tell you the game is fucked.

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  13. @dotnotfeather
    Sounds like you're one of the bitter dudes who tried to join Goons and got scammed.

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