The influx of competitive players

There is a common fear that removing the ability to farm huge amount of ISK without risk or skill would remove large amount of subscribers. I've already mentioned that the highsec-only players don't pay for the game anyway and the others could move to farm in competitive areas. But it's indeed true that the game needs players to feel like a World and also there is a chance that the solo player will turn a content creator or a paying customer some day. So it's without doubt that losing players is a bad thing for an MMO.

However let's look at the other side: while any change alienate some, it is beneficial for others and these others can find the game worthy of playing. What kind of player could be lured to EVE if ISK could only be gained in competitive zones? Captain Obvious says: competitive players.

Let's face it, EVE isn't a competitive game. You can amass wealth and top the killboards without facing anyone who could fight back. EVE has a dark marketing that can lure competitive players who had enough of the WoW-clones where even AFK-autofollowing "players" are entitled to every reward and content is nerfed to the level of the braindead. I remember when I was hesitating about trying EVE out. I was afraid that maybe I'm not hardcore or have good enough reaction time to survive in this "cut-throat world". Then I gave a try and in half year I could afford a titan. In the first month I started shooting other players I got more kills than hundreds of "nullsec PvPers". I was disappointed and stayed only in lack of options. However those who don't just look for MMOs have options! There are several competitive e-sport-like games where they could - and probably did - move.

Now imagine if EVE would be just like it is marketed: a dark, unforgiving world where players fight for resources and power in an anything goes setting instead of "go to belt, target asteroid, go AFK, receive reward". EVE could be the competitive MMO where the players who want to test their skills against opponents could play.

EVE is in a perilous position: its marketing keeps the true "carebears" away, while those who are lured to try it leave disappointed. Practically the only way to get more players is word-of-mouth, the real life friends of current players can join. But seriously: how many real life friends does an average EVE player have?

EVE could have a unique selling point: the competitive MMO, where the skilled wins and the weak fails. Many-many players seek that game. Less than WoW sure, but more than the current EVE playerbase (which is likely around 150K humans). Instead of trying to keep those who'd fit WoW better anyway, let's keep those who fit nowhere else. I'm sure that making EVE competitive would increase subscriber count.

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An example of players who is not competitive and the EVE community is probably better off replacing him with someone who is:

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Business Thursday: no competition!

The dream of every trader is having no competition. Surprisingly it's not a rare thing (unless you are trading veldspar in Jita). If you work in nullsec, it's rather the norm than an exception. But even in highsec hubs you can check the market and find it empty: And at this point most traders do a serious mistake, letting this opportunity pass by: they price their wares too high thinking that buyers will have no choice but to buy it. It is wrong for two reasons: at first no one has to buy anything ever. They could live without it till now, they can keep living without it. They can also take some jumps and get it. Secondly your monopoly will end sooner or later. If you don't sell by then, your window closes.

So how to price an item in such cases? At first check the history: This case the sales happened in the 130-140 range. You shouldn't go too far from it.

Secondly, just type in your first guess into the sell price field and watch the % next to it: 145M is almost 10% over the regional average. The buyer will see the same number, except in ugly red. He is informed that this is expensive, he could be getting the same item cheaper by waiting or going another region. I'd strongly suggest not to try selling over +20% and preferably over 10%. Of course if the number is 1212156%, you can ignore it.

That's it. Don't get too greedy and don't for a second think that you control the market or anything. You are just a seller trying to get some profit. Be humble with your demands and you'll sell well.

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Non-paying players must create content

There is a common misconception among those who pay their account via buying PLEX in Jita for ISK. It's best summarized by Jester. The idea is mostly "I'm a useful customer of CCP because someone else bought the PLEX for $15". It's completely wrong.

At first let's step aside from pixels and look at the real world. In the real world you are a player who plays a game provided by the developer. You should be paying for this service some way, it's obvious. You either do so by subscribing the game, paying the developer directly. The other is helping him creating content for other, paying players, increasing their likelihood of remaining subscribers. If you do neither, you are leeching and are a useless waste of server capacity for the developer.

CCP made a mistake, no doubt. They designed the game with the same assumption as the developers of World of Tanks: if you are a free player, you are cannonfodder for the paying players. In World of Tanks if you don't pay for the game, your tank upgrades very slowly, making you easy target. In EVE you must rat/mine/mission in a ship that is totally unfit for combat to get resources. If you don't pay for the game, you must rat/mine/mission about 10 hours/month extra to generate the ISK needed for your PLEX. During this 10 hours you are easy target for roaming gangs. If you die to them you have to re-farm your lost ship, providing them further hours of fun. In the original design "playing free = time spent as target".

The design failed when they made highsec way too profitable. The highsec player is neither playing in group, providing content to his groupmates, nor he is a target for anyone (assuming he is not an idiot and fly something that can be reasonably ganked). He is playing alone for free, wasting server capacity. Have you seen the TiDi and the "can't jump in because of traffic jam" in Jita? I'd guess 50% of the players who caused this annoyance haven't paid a single $ for CCP or provided any content for anyone. Due to imbalanced highsec "playing free = time spent playing alone".

OK, OK, but he still generates ISK, LP and minerals that paying players are ready to buy for $ via PLEX. Isn't it makes him useful to CCP? No, because CCP can generate ISK, LP and minerals from thin air. If a highsec miner would be replaced by an NPC who sells the same amount of minerals in Jita and buys PLEX from the ISK, no one would notice or care. Since the paying player would get the same thing for the same $, he would have no reason to stop paying.

The bottom line is that CCP could replace non-paying highsec PvE players by an item shop with no effect on anyone else besides less lag and keep the same $ for less server and tech support costs.

I'm not saying that highsec PvE players must be purged. I'm saying they must pay for the game they play with $ as they provide no content to anyone. Technically this can be implemented by stopping them being able to farm the cost of PLEX with normal play. Highsec income must be nerfed to the range of 5M/hour. Out with L4s, incursions and all ores besides veldspar!

Update: just found out the most trivial way to explain it: every in-game item is worthy only in comparison to the amount in the hands of other people. If you double the ISK in the hand of everyone, you just caused inflation. If highsec farmers would disappear, there would be less tritanium for sure, so less ships. But the amount of ships vs the amount of ships in the hand of your enemy won't change. Similarly if you pay $15 to buy a PLEX, from this PLEX you can buy less ships, that's true. But the amount of benefit you gain from the PLEX (compared to your enemy or the average gamer) will be the same, so you become no weaker nor stronger by the increase of ship prices.

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Buffing low/null won't be enough

"Money is in highsec" is widely accepted in EVE, practically every null/low player has highsec alt(s) to make ISK. My recent results proved that even the "get fights" value of null/low is way below highsec leaving it no selling point. Those who are there are either mistaken or just want to fool around.

Still many resist the necessity of serious nerfing of highsec income, based on the idea of "buff null/low" instead, providing rewards to players for moving instead of punishing staying. This won't work. It's not an opinion, as it was tested recently and failed.

8 months ago CCP made a serious design error and provided insane income for FW lowsec in the form of LP print in complexes that could be completed in a one week old frigate while AFK. The LP could be cashed out at insane rates during level 5 zone control. Players participating in it got over hundred billion ISK a month running several of the AFK orbiting frigates. Even a single account could reach 2-300M/hour which was way out of reach for any other PvE activities. The result was devastating inflation, increasing the price of PLEX (practically the amount of ISK in the hands of players) by 20% over 3 months (185%/year inflation). The price of titan BPCs and slave implants doubled. Lot of people got very rich until CCP finally fixed it.

So CCP created the ultimate lowsec income buff. Yet only a few adventurous players responded. Most of the highsec dwellers remained in highsec. Missioning/AFK-mining alts were not replaced by FW orbiter alts in significant numbers, despite the huge income imbalance. Why?

Because highsec income is enough. If you do PvE in highsec, you gain enough money to PLEX your account and pay for your PvP costs. You don't need more income. Sure you could waste billions on never-logged-in titans and solo roaming Machariels and other forms of luxury but you don't need this money. So most people couldn't be bothered to learn how to operate in FW lowsec.

If the totally unbalanced FW rewards couldn't lure people out of their comfort zone, how could any form of balanced null/low income buff have any effect?

To have an effect, highsec PVE income must be nerfed to the point where no form of low/null life can be financed from it, nor PLEXing an account. The second is imperative: since the highsec PvE player provide no content for anyone, there is absolutely no reason for him to play for free. If he quits because he can't PLEX an account, CCP loses nothing. He didn't pay and he kept no one else playing. If his ore or LP is missing from the economy, NPCs selling them could replace it. No, they don't provide content for suicide gankers, since only small portion of highsec PvE players are gankable: the morons. However the first part is also necessary: no null PvP-er should be able to finance himself from highsec PvE, he must PvE in low/null or PLEX.

The above nerf could be done by removing L4s, incursions, complexes over L3 difficulty/reward and every ore but veldspar from highsec. While most fear a highsec exodus, it is neither relevant (they didn't pay for their account anyway) nor likely. Don't forget that highsec play will still remain an ever-increasing wealth. Even if slower, every highsec player would keep on eternally progressing. The fact that they will be blitzing L3s for 10M/hour instead of L4s for 100M/hour is completely irrelevant. And don't forget that a fixed competitive nullsec would gain new players.

The crucial point here is that a fixed nullsec is very newbie friendly while current highsec is not. Why? Because in nullsec blob warfare every pilot is valuable. The current newbie-unfriendliness comes from "we didn't want that space anyway". Many alliances prefer losing their space than giving up their "elite" status, because they really don't need that space as they make money in highsec by AFK retrievers and Vargur bots. If losing their space would mean losing income, they wouldn't treat new pilots like crap.

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12B/week solo

No, it's not another business report, my income is 1.2B/day (8B/week) and no one cares about that. It's a report on solo ganking. On Jan 27, 4 weeks ago I started solo ganking Code-violating, AFK-ing, untanked mining barges. I've been busy since then, and in the last 4 weeks I did not fleet up with anyone, so all my kills are solo. Look at the butchers bill:

• Jan 27: 20 kills, 4890M
• Jan 28: 11 kills, 1137M
• Jan 29: 22 kills, 1457M
• Feb 1: 9 kills, 352M
• Feb 2: 19 kills, 738M
• Feb 3: 24 kills, 2268M
• Feb 5: 14 kills, 2907M
• Feb 6: 16 kills, 1706M
• Feb 7: 26 kills, 1692M
• Feb 8: 7 kills, 477M
• Feb 9: 42 kills, 2770M
• Feb 10: 27 kills, 1415M
• Feb 11: 15 kills, 1288M
• Feb 12: 18 kills, 960M
• Feb 13: 36 kills, 3960M
• Feb 14: 26 kills, 1538M
• Feb 15: 19 kills, 1720M
• Feb 16: 29 kills, 1926M
• Feb 17: 54 kills, 3755M
• Feb 18: 23 kills, 2254M
• Feb 19: 34 kills, 1944M
• Feb 20: 25 kills, 1803M
• Feb 21: 15 kills, 759M
• Feb 22: 37 kills, 2706M
• Feb 23: 39 kills, 1663M

Since weekends provide more kills, it's best to evaluate the results on a weekly basis:

1. 81 kills, 8.57B
2. 129 kills, 11.82B
3. 170 kills, 12.81B
4. 227 kills, 14.88B

As you can see it's increasing week by week as I'm improving. Calculating from the first four weeks, my weekly average is 152 solo kills and 12B ISK damage. (659 and 52.2B/month)

It's not easy to put this number into context because everyone and his mother has 1000+/month kills, 50B+ ISK damage done and 99.99% efficiency due to the way the killboard calculates these: you get full value for every kill you took part in. If you were in a noobship in Asakai you could easily get 700B kills. However this error is smaller for corporations and even smaller (though non-zero) for alliances. If 10 corpies kill a ship, each of them get the full value, but the corp gets only one value, not 10x. Of course if members of two corps kill something, both corps get the kill, so even corp kills are overestimated. However as we move to larger and larger entities, the error decreases. So let's compare this 12B/week solo kills to the largest sov-holder alliance: TEST. Their killboard has weekly results:

• Week 7: 3334 Ships killed (242.18B ISK)
• Week 6: 3543 Ships killed (229.4B ISK)
• Week 5: 3628 Ships killed (283.49B ISK)
• Week 4: 3968 Ships killed (647.6B ISK) Asakai week
• Week 3: 3360 Ships killed (316.44B ISK)
• Week 2: 3780 Ships killed (220.96B ISK)
• Week 1: 3434 Ships killed (278.94B ISK)
• Week 52: 3157 Ships killed (176.82B ISK) 2012 week 52 of course
• Week 51: 2604 Ships killed (180.56B ISK)
• Week 50: 3041 Ships killed (233.7B ISK)
• Week 49: 2274 Ships killed (240.64B ISK)
• Week 48: 1468 Ships killed (101.94B ISK)
• Week 47: 1673 Ships killed (123.79B ISK)
• Week 46: 2558 Ships killed (137.34B ISK)
• Week 45: 2751 Ships killed (187.82B ISK)

The last 15 weeks of TEST had lulls and deployments, Christmas and Asakai. The average is: 2972 kills and 240B ISK damage done. I'd remind you that this data is still not perfect as many of these kills had participating people from out of TEST (like every living body on those Asakai titans) but let's be generous and accept all of these as TEST kills and with that we get the result: I killed 1/20 as many ships and 1/20 as much ISK as the 13000 member TEST alliance. Does this "1/20 of TEST" gives anyone deja vu? If you care to divide 13000 by 20, you get that I destroyed 650x more ISK than an average TEST member. Ouch!

OK, TEST is known to be bad at EVE, let's look at the oh-so-elite NCdot:

• Feb (on 20th): 3928 Ships killed (535.02B ISK)
• Jan: 9004 Ships killed (1444.49B ISK)
• Dec: 6326 Ships killed (544.55B ISK)
• Nov: 5059 Ships killed (676.51B ISK)

This covers 111 days, so on an average week they kill 1533 ships and 202B ISK, 10x more ships and 17x more ISK than me. Considering they have 1650 members, I outperformed the average NC. pilot 163x in kills and 98x in value. Oh, so elite, I wish I could be there.

The Pandemic Legion killboard is weird enough to stop me from getting ISK destroyed data, but their stats show about 1.5x more kills for the various corps than EVE-Kill.net (some kills are not uploaded to the public board). So I went to EVE-Kill and found:

• Feb (on 20th): 4310 Ships killed (476.13B ISK)
• Jan: 8446 Ships killed (1697.61B ISK)
• Dec: 5186 Ships killed (800.19B ISK)
• Nov: 2891 Ships killed (454.22B ISK)

Multiplying by 1.5 we get 1971 kills and 324B ISK for a week. With 1736 members, it's 134x more kills and 64x more ISK destroyed for me than the average PL member. I tried to write something witty here, but failed.

Let's look at small-gang elite alliances, like Rote Kapelle (where Jester plays):

• Week 7: 227 Ships killed (12.44B ISK)
• Week 6: 275 Ships killed (18.83B ISK)
• Week 5: 180 Ships killed (19.27B ISK)
• Week 4: 318 Ships killed (22.41B ISK)
• Week 3: 222 Ships killed (33.34B ISK)
• Week 2: 208 Ships killed (9.23B ISK)
• Week 1: 452 Ships killed (22.06B ISK)
• Week 52: 196 Ships killed (14.96B ISK)
• Week 51: 320 Ships killed (35.8B ISK)
• Week 50: 309 Ships killed (37.08B ISK)
• Week 49: 405 Ships killed (50.48B ISK)
• Week 48: 243 Ships killed (20.5B ISK)
• Week 47: 188 Ships killed (22.47B ISK)
• Week 46: 198 Ships killed (16.43B ISK)
• Week 45: 189 Ships killed (21.5B ISK)

The average is 262 kills, 23.8B ISK, so I alone did half as much ISK damage as the whole Rote Kapelle, 122x more than an average member. I earned money with ganking, more than my catalysts cost. An average ret gank provides 5-6M net income, despite I didn't pick them after fitting, but rather pilot age.

No, the purpose of these hilarious numbers are not to make these alliances look like clowns. I made it to expose the huge inbalance between highsec and nullsec. A small corp of me and 19 of my clones could outperform the largest sov-holder alliance both in ISK generation and kills. How? Because I'm in highsec, where the money is. Money means "farms and fields": the "peasants" who generate the income to nullsec are not in nullsec but in highsec. Nullsec alliance members can't compete with me because the farmers of their enemies are not in nullsec. A TEST roam can't kill FA miners, highsec gankers can. Since the miners, ratters and missioners are barely present in nullsec, null is nearly empty, PvP-ers find no one one to kill.

On the top of the huge income potential, highsec also provides anonymity. Some people might be tempted to say "the members of these alliances with joke stats could defeat me 1v1 and could end my highsec massacre with a few seboed Tornados", but they are wrong. They could only camp Botslayer Goblin, my 2 months old pilot into a station while I can easily continue somewhere else on an unnamed alt. You can't do the same in nullsec because your friends would shoot your unnamed alt, not knowing it's you. Losing ships to friends is bad enough, but imagine the consequences if you shoot a wrong neutral Falcon!

Without huge nerfs to highsec income to force at least the nullsec people to live in nullsec instead of farming in AFK Retrievers on the other screen, nullsec remains the wasteland it is today, lacking both decent income and targets to kill. If you want something bigger in nullsec than idiotic frig/T1 cruiser roams, vote for highsec nerfing candidates for the next CSM. Until CCP fixes this, leave that empty wasteland and come where the money and the targets are: highsec. There are enough untanked barges and 10+B, zero buffer missioning battleships for everyone!

Beside voting, the nulseccers could do more: hold a "strike" when they refuse to kill each other in nullsec, instead they come and gank in highsec. Not in the wasteful "Burn Jita" style, but smartly, with solo-duo catalysts farming miners in 0.5-0.7 and dropping Taloses on scanned down missioners. This can be done profitably and can be upheld eternally, until CCP finally fixes the nullsec economy and makes it profitable to live there. Alternatively they could hold a capital mining op where the capitals and supers of various alliances are peacefully mining as a protest against the messed up EVE economy. The end goal is to have significantly higher ISK/hour in nullsec, therefore creating targets there. As long as a highsec ganker has higher ISK destroyed than an average Pandemic Legion member, the high-null balancing is not acceptable.

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Moron of the week: he mad

AFK Miners react differently if their 220M untanked Hulk and 150M pod are suicide ganked. Most of them just fill one or more fields of the miner bingo.

But not Ray Rayary. He responded as a true warrior, fighting fire with fire. You might know that I use a Procurer alt to scout targets. So came Ray and attempted to suicide gank it. His choice of ship was maybe not optimal and also he attacked in a belt where Concord was already present, but my 8% lost shields remind me never to mess with Ray again:

Defeat could not take the fighting spirit of Ray. Neither GCC. He valiantly undocked again:

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What's wrong with RMT?

Important message: Don't miss the post on Monday! Just don't! Here is a preview:

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Tobold pointed out that developers have lame excuses against real money trading (RMT) of in-game items. Spamming, account theft and credit card issues are all linked to third party RMT that can be easily removed by sanctioned RMT. The game developer has so much control over the game and has so much more credibility than third party sites that it could take decent cut from RMT between players, just like Blizzard does with Diablo III.

Their claims don't answer the fundamental question: what's wrong with RMT?

I can pretty easily answer it, because I'm one of those who would benefit greatly from legal RMT. Both in WoW and EVE I could make significant real life sum selling in-game currency. In EVE, even with calculating with the current PLEX prices ($30/B) and my current income 40B/month, I could earn more money than the median income of my country. What would I do if RMT would be legalized in EVE? Quit my real time job and do EVE-trading instead. My income is limited by my trading time. Even with a very modest 330B/hour income approximation, I could make $10/hour in a country where the minimal hourly wage is $2. So hell with me trading in Jita, I'd hire some unemployed nerds to do the trading for me, according to my instructions and under supervision of course, pay them $6/hour and keep the other $4. With 10 employees working 8 hours per day, 20 days per month, I'd earn $77K/year without actually doing anything but check on my employees.

What effect would it have on the game? Every market fully covered, leaving no trading income to casual/newbie players, only similar professional traders could compete. The simpler income sources, like doing PvE would be covered by real world corporations using minimal wage labor (after all, ratting can be done by half-illiterates), leaving absolutely no in-game income source to the real players. The only way for real players to earn in-game currency would be RMT itself. However if the player can only obtain items by buying from someone, why should the developer give a share to me? They are better off removing farming completely and sell the items in the item shop, keeping the whole money.

The above happened exactly in Diablo III. The real players obtain 99.9% of their gear from the AH and don't farm themselves. It's not a tragedy in a one-time play box-sold game, but obviously a death sentence to any MMO.

To let real players progress, professionals cannot exist, so RMT cannot exist. Of course where is demand, there is supply, so if there is no official RMT, third party RMT emerges. To handle this, EVE is using a pretty good middle way: a limited official RMT. I can and do sell in-game currency for real money in EVE by buying PLEX and consuming it to fund my play. As I wrote on my birthday post, I fund 5 accounts for myself, 3 of it are training capital/supercapital pilots who may never be used. Add one more account for my girlfriend and that's it (supercapital pilots training for the Bazaar don't count, they are income source). 6 accounts, 3B/month ISK RMT-ed. I could sell much more ISK, but I'm limited by the utility of PLEX. What could I do with more PLEX? More accounts that I won't use?

Since I can't use more PLEX, I can't use more ISK, so I cut back on my trading, giving more space to other players to play in Jita. On the other hand that 3B/month I RMT away keeps several players in cheap ships for their $15, therefore stopping them being so broke that they'd turn to illicit RMT sellers.

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