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What Type of Love Does Low Sec Need?

Broken - Seether and Amy Lee

The title of my post is a true question. I don't have an answer. I'm not proposing an answer. I originally had it attached to my "Why I Live in Low Sec" post but the two are separate and really, it was getting obnoxiously long and rambling.

Low Sec Needs Love

It seems that it has been on others minds. It is a reoccurring subject. It cannot help but be considering the type of space that it is. What I do not agree with is the concept that low sec is for faction warfare and all of low sec should be faction warfare.

It was raining today and I had time to do some reading. I read this article on Eve News 24 and was mostly grabbed by the idea that all of low sec should be FW and/or the pirate factions should have PW in low sec.

All of it.

No.

That is not the cookie to fix low sec. That makes an assumption that the entire Low Sec population has been writhing around longing to get into faction warfare. I understand that the people in faction warfare enjoy faction warfare for whatever reason they enjoy it. I have zero desire for it.

The other half of the idea was that low sec should be a stepping stone for null sec.

No.

People who live in low sec live in low sec because they want to live in low sec. It is not this step to null sec and this step to sov warfare because that is what everyone wants to do. A large chunk of the game wants to do that. That is why they live in those areas. The people who want to play faction warfare have faction warfare to play in. I don't live in a faction warfare system for a reason.

I don't want that.

No more do I want to be a member of pirate warfare then I expect everyone in high sec to want to PvP. I don't expect the members of null to want to pirate. Just because I do those two things does not mean everyone else does. I have corpmates who have no interest in running missions for the various reasons I may do them. My corpmates don't enjoy salvaging. I do. I don't assume that because I vastly enjoy my gameplay that everyone else does.

Sigh.

Forcing Eve Players to play style through content would be an irritating and intrusive method to diversify the systems. Creating gameplay from the void is a trait of Eve. Players make their own niches and define them. Not all of the game has to be defined by the game mechanics.

Not everything has to be Sov Warfare.

Not everything has to be a subset of it.

Not everyone wants the game to make the play for them.

While low sec needs to be buffed I do not have the technical experience to know what would be true increase. I do know that leaning on my own tastes will skew any idea towards my own play style. There must be a mesh and balance. My taste matters but so do the wants of the FW warfare people. While I ask FWless low sec not to be taken from me I also don't demand that they go back to empire for their battles.

The game defines in terms of risk and reward. Simply put, low sec is a dangerous place where people kill you. But without the pull of Sov Ownership it's hard to see why one would stay here. Those of us that enjoy that thrill and thrive on it want it and stay here.

We'd stay here if it stayed the same.

I like my neutrality. My neutral position to the empires is something that I have kept. FW destroys some of that. It's a nasty hit and it's a grind to get back into the positive. I already suffer a grind for my sec status. Now I will suffer a grind to return to empire whenever I want to.

Also, does that mean I can no longer fight other pirates? We already have groups that we are aligned with. Those groups are called our corporations and our alliances.

Being an 'outlaw' may be bad to some but it is a way of life to others. Just as I take GCC for repping my corpmates the game. Why? I am a pirate. They are a pirate. Why is concord randomly judging me for interacting with my corpmate?

I truly love the low sec that I live in and do not wish to lose it. If a buff would be a destruction of it I'd fight against it. It is not that there is nothing here it is that there should be better things here.

Comments

  1. Make lowsec profitable... care bears love isk making efficiency and crowds = targets and unlike highsec, these targets know (or damn well should) what they are getting into.

    Now then... how do you make lowesec profitable without destroying everything else? =P

    PS. scord, pyro, and plag all being worth more isk/minute mined than everything else above arkonor is just crazy, I'll never understand it. risk vs. reward just isn't balanced here.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I like your statement that it is YOUR play style and does not have to apply to anyone else. There are so whom you call friends which share the interest in (parts of) your play style.
    And there are others, living somewhere else enjoying the sandbox with there own play style. All this talk about how to change any other play style to get more people into another play style are simply wrong. ccp and the players must learn that there is nothing everyone enjoys (except eve as a whole).

    Any person complaining about not having enough population in there play style should stop immediately and recruiting players for there style of play! There are new and old players alike out there looking for new stuff. Get them in your game and your enemy will do the same. problem solved no one needs to be forced to go anywhere. everyone can do what he wants to do.

    @CCP: You don't need to nerf any mechanic, improve as much as you can and provide more different activities. There are millions out there who don't enjoy eve yet. Get those to fill the space.

    @Kyle: keep your attitude of everyone for his own play style. I won't enjoy yours but it is a valid one and shouldn't get beaten to death. No style should suffer that end.

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  3. Can lowsec be changed at all without destroying what it is?
    You have a very good point that "We'd stay here if it stayed the same.". I'd guess that everyone who would like it are already there.

    Who would come if lowsec would be buffed? People who DON'T like it that way. If enough rewards would appear, maybe PvE players would come. But they wouldn't be pirates, they wouldn't play with you, they would dock up if the dreaded pirate queen entered the system.

    There are few people in low sec because few people like this life. You can't change that by changing mechanics.

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  4. Hypothetically, what if you abandoned the concept of lowsec as a middleground between highsec and nullsec in terms of rewards?

    Right now, only the low and middle tiers of ore, complexes and sites spawn in lowsec, with the idea that because it's got less risks (gate guns, station guns, sec loss, no bubbles) the reward should be lower. On the other hand, none of that reduced risk (except for bubbles, I guess) apply to being in mission sites, complexes or asteroid belts. Start spawning the ABC ores in the lower-end lowsec systems, ditto the higher complexes and exploration sites.

    Rather than correlate "risk" to "security level" in the risk/reward equation, acknowledge that the reduced intel, smaller player organisations and lack of bubbles for security actually make lowsec riskier than nullsec for PvE and increase the current reward; rather than nullsec offering the best rewards in the game it can be tied with lowsec by default with the reduced risk and the ability to upgrade systems as its 'reward' rather than a direct ISK increase.

    The overall gameplay design would be that hisec is where you go for low risk mostly-solo gameplay (counting multiboxing as 'solo'), low is where you go for high risk solo/small group gameplay and nullsec is where you go for mid-risk large group gameplay.

    Does that sound at all practical, or is it likely to fail?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It sounds practical to me. The question is what would the null bloc say?

      Wormholes, no one denies are risky. But what I also often hear from the null bloc is that with our lack of bubbles low sec is safe.

      So, is there enough convincing or truth that the lack of bubbles creates enough risk in low sec to merit the increased abilities of the environment? I just had someone try to flush me out of a site I ran into a trap because they know where my home system is and expected me to head for it. But home is not safe in low sec.

      It would bring easier access to the high sec resident who is willing to dip in a toe but to worried to run through low and null to do so. In a way it would create a larger rift between empire and 0.0 as well.

      I think this could be good. Null Sec, as you said, is upgradable. Even FW systems are upgradable and perhaps those upgrades will become more useful. It would leave barren low sec raw.

      Or, to bring in the FW aspect of low sec, could this be something that would NOT be in the FW side of low sec. Make it the noncontested or barren low sec area. FW is empire fighting for empire and having a handful more control over the area considering there people are fighting there.

      I personally don't mind the series of cliffs instead of stepping stones that Eve has for you to fall off of or climb up.

      Delete
  5. At the risk of giving the EN24 writer too much credit (alternatively: deflect blame he didn't deserve), I think the confusion comes in because the EN24 writer is talking about Pirates with a capital P, ie. Sansha, Guristas, Angels, etc, but not about pirates with a lowercase p like you and (according to my killboard) not me.

    The idea that players via game mechanic could join up with a Pirate faction is not a new one - while I can't provide links, I have read it before, and most recently there have been players fighting for the Sansha cause in the Incursions.

    Allowing players to formally join up with the Pirate factions could give an additional boost to losec, without diminishing the playstyle of the Social Loners because it would still be an optional thing (like FW). (I'm happily ignoring details here like whether all of non-FW lo-sec should be under the control of one Pirate faction or the other, or not. Personally I tend to the latter.)

    But a definite No! to a permanent cyno jammer - while the temporary cyno jammer envisioned for FW could work, permanent cyno jams as well as bubbles would just make lo-sec into 0.0-with-secstatus.

    There also have been other ideas, like a mechanic to acknowledge an alliance's control of a system or constellation. It could be as simple as the controlling alliance not getting sec-status hits for kills within 'their' territory. I know from experience that there are carebears in hi-sec who would give lo-sec a try if only they could keep their sec-status penalties within limits. There aren't many of those folks, but they do exist.

    Personally I don't have The Idea of what kind of love lo-sec needs, nor am I convinced that it would be just one thing. But I think @Hivemind has the right idea in that lo-sec needs to have its own unique playstyle offerings, instead of just being a transition area.

    @Gevlon You're mostly right. But as I alluded above, there are a few non-pirate people who wouldn't mind tussling with pirates (losing ships would just be a Cost of Business and rolled into the selling price calculations) if only they could feel more empowered than just being sitting ducks.

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  6. Just to post a counter-opinion to myself (and referencing SK's previous post): one of the allures of current lo-sec is that it is what you make of it. In a way, it's the ultimate role-playing area of EVE, and adding mechanics to it could destroy that quality.

    ReplyDelete

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