Jester wrote how complicated EVE is and how easy you can have losses on mechanics you didn't understand and had little chance to learn it due to no documentation. He is wrong. You can avoid all hurting losses by keeping one simple rule: "don't mess with anything that you'd hate to lose". This is a slight rephrasing of "don't fly anything you can't afford to lose", a rule told to every newbie many times.
Yesterday I misclicked and instead of "create contract", I clicked "plug in", so my station trader alt has now 5% more firepower with large hybrid turrets and 5% more armor HP. Bye-bye 0.28B. Was it a honest mistake? Yes it was. Was it due to some obscure mechanic? Yes, since I couldn't plug in these implants earlier, their requirements were stealth-nerfed to cybernetics 4 from 5. Did I immediately filled the implant slots of all my alts with random 1% implants? Of course I did.
But did it hurt? No. I have more than 100B in implants that aren't even listed on the market. The loss can't even make a visible bump on my chart. If it was on my first week, I'd lost everything I had. But in my first week I did not run around with 100+M implants. I was selling skillbooks I bought from newbies in Uitra and Akianavas.
The point is that you shouldn't mess with things that consist large amount of your assets. One day or the other you'll lose it. This is why people should have insurance on their homes, despite on the long run they lose money on it: to not suffer a crippling loss. Having a supercarrier with 200M in the wallet is a disaster waiting to happen. If your total assets are 30B, then even dreadnoughts are risky for you, stick to T2 fit, full insured carriers, that's only 600M to lose, you'll manage.
People push things too hard and suffer for it. They shouldn't live on the edge. People keeping the one rule can safely learn on their own experience. This is why I didn't buy a titan pilot, despite people told me. I could afford a titan when I was 5 months old. But I think I'd lost that titan already, and losing 90B when all you have is 150 is dumb. In other words, I could afford to have a titan when I was 5 months old, but I couldn't afford to lose it. So I would have been like the ordinary titan pilots who never log in or even quit the game. I'm sure that I will lose my first titan in a few months due to my own mistake, and I wanted to wait to the point when I can honestly say that "this was dumb, now let's do it again without the stupid part" instead of shouting obscenities to my keyboard.
Now I have a humble suggestion to CCP that would greatly increase its customer retention: since most losses are connected to ships blowing up, the hurting losses could be removed from the game by demanding players to have 2x more liquid cash than their ship's worth (hull+fit+cargo). If you have a 100M ship, you must have 200M cash in your wallet to undock. If you are already outside but don't have the money, you can't use offensive modules on it, so you can move it, but can't use it.
With this, CCP could enforce people to keep the only one rule needed to have a pleasant gaming experience instead of a ragequit over losing everything to a misclick: don't mess with things you'd hate to lose.
Yesterday I misclicked and instead of "create contract", I clicked "plug in", so my station trader alt has now 5% more firepower with large hybrid turrets and 5% more armor HP. Bye-bye 0.28B. Was it a honest mistake? Yes it was. Was it due to some obscure mechanic? Yes, since I couldn't plug in these implants earlier, their requirements were stealth-nerfed to cybernetics 4 from 5. Did I immediately filled the implant slots of all my alts with random 1% implants? Of course I did.
But did it hurt? No. I have more than 100B in implants that aren't even listed on the market. The loss can't even make a visible bump on my chart. If it was on my first week, I'd lost everything I had. But in my first week I did not run around with 100+M implants. I was selling skillbooks I bought from newbies in Uitra and Akianavas.
The point is that you shouldn't mess with things that consist large amount of your assets. One day or the other you'll lose it. This is why people should have insurance on their homes, despite on the long run they lose money on it: to not suffer a crippling loss. Having a supercarrier with 200M in the wallet is a disaster waiting to happen. If your total assets are 30B, then even dreadnoughts are risky for you, stick to T2 fit, full insured carriers, that's only 600M to lose, you'll manage.
People push things too hard and suffer for it. They shouldn't live on the edge. People keeping the one rule can safely learn on their own experience. This is why I didn't buy a titan pilot, despite people told me. I could afford a titan when I was 5 months old. But I think I'd lost that titan already, and losing 90B when all you have is 150 is dumb. In other words, I could afford to have a titan when I was 5 months old, but I couldn't afford to lose it. So I would have been like the ordinary titan pilots who never log in or even quit the game. I'm sure that I will lose my first titan in a few months due to my own mistake, and I wanted to wait to the point when I can honestly say that "this was dumb, now let's do it again without the stupid part" instead of shouting obscenities to my keyboard.
Now I have a humble suggestion to CCP that would greatly increase its customer retention: since most losses are connected to ships blowing up, the hurting losses could be removed from the game by demanding players to have 2x more liquid cash than their ship's worth (hull+fit+cargo). If you have a 100M ship, you must have 200M cash in your wallet to undock. If you are already outside but don't have the money, you can't use offensive modules on it, so you can move it, but can't use it.
With this, CCP could enforce people to keep the only one rule needed to have a pleasant gaming experience instead of a ragequit over losing everything to a misclick: don't mess with things you'd hate to lose.
13 comments:
People shouldn't be shielded from making mistakes.
Are you sure that people ragequitting over large mistakes is a significant reason, compared to other factors that cause people to leave EVE? Your wallet-undock idea seems very contrary to the main design of the game. To introduce something like this, we should be completely sure that it would fix a real problem. My instinct is that such ragequits are a vocal minority, who will find something to rage about sooner or later regardless.
There is a pop-up confirmation window for plugging implants (even for emply slots). If you've got it disabled, re-enable it from options.
CCP isn't your babysitter. This is a sandbox game. If you want to undock your shiny PLEX-bought officer-fit Tengu and take it to lowsec looking to "pwn", you can feel free to do so. Sandbox means players must be allowed to make wrong choices.
Otherwise this game would be like WoW, where the developer tells you which path you need to follow in order to get through all the theme park's rides safely.
Oh no, you're turning socialist. What you just wrote is "Government (CCP) must protect people from themselves".
The change wouldn't shield them from mistakes. Only from fatal mistakes. He can still lose 1/3 of his wallet, which is pretty big. Just not all of it.
Also, this restriction would hurt older players. I know lots and lots of ISK poor people that are happy that way. They may easily have assets they cannot replace at this exact moment.
earning isk is easy (your blog proves that).
if one loses his shiny shit, what's the big deal??? nothing that can't be earned back within a little time.
you don't have the time to earn a few b? just buy a plex or two (or three or four or 5 hundred). Unless you are some dirt poor 3rd world guy, buying a plex won't kill you.
in general, ccp and most of eve's community are perfectly fine with ppl too dumb for the game quiting. those that make mistakes provide content to other players.
this is not wow. the game doesn't need mechanics protecting stupid players - because it doesn't want them to join in the first place.
this is the first (and i assume the last) mmo i ever started to play, and i came here cause i don't wanna be in a game where idiots are pampered.
i want to be able to think for myself, chose what's right and wrong, want to make mistakes, learn from them and do better next time. ***
speaking of thinking for myself (sorry, a little ot), i don't want to play a game where i am censored - u know, about yesterdays post about pr0n.links and shit. no, i don't post such links, neither do i watch it much, but the very feeling of being watched and censored and told what to do and think just turns me off.
and to you and ali there is a very very easy way to get around such links. join another corp. i mean, in the corp that i am playing with, there are no such things. ppl are kind, are smart, are gentle. do you know why? because i looked for a corp with likeminded ppl - it's so super easy.
and i really wonder about your change of mind. not that long ago you were raging over the retriever/mackinaw buff - dumbing up the game and such. now u turned into a defender of the idiots. why?
gevlon, many ppl ask you that: do you understand eve's sandbox character?
you never answer that.
on a sidenote, imagine i really f'ed up, wasted all my isk, and the only thing left is my hulk. i can't undock and farm isk, cause your proposed change won't let me. neither can i fly my hulk to the next tradehub to sell it.
*** don't think of me as an eve.elite.veteran. i got scammed for a few b, i lost my solotanked nullsec mack due to not paying too much attention to local, i undocked under wardec (jep, got popped, yep, was broke afterwards), and back in the old days i got highsec.mining.canflipped more often than i can remember. not to mention running into several gatecamps and such. yet i love this game for exactly these possibilities.
i mean, it's just game.money - can't buy food with it, can't pay my rent.
even the minimarket around the corner won't trade isk for beer.
p.s.: if you really want to help stupid players, assuming u understand the sandbox thing, why don't you just give back the 16b for the implant from a few days ago. it's a sandbox, it's totally within your power to have the game the way you want it.
If you lose a Titan that you were in-game-silly to buy and can't replace it, so what. You had fun owning a Titan for a bit and maybe even had fun watching it get blown to bits the first time you undocked.
Being worried about doing cool things in games because it might go wrong makes things no fun. Being conservative in real life is a valid (but not the only) choice. Being conservative in a game is a strange choice. Obviously there are long-term-aim and short-term-aim nuances to this.
If you have a 100M ship, you must have 200M cash in your wallet to undock. If you are already outside but don't have the money, you can't use offensive modules on it, so you can move it, but can't use it.
I think this is a bad idea. As an example why, this weekend I needed to finish a storyline mission (which was going to expire on Monday). Everyone who offered to help, well, they didn't log in over the weekend. So I liquidated a bunch of stuff to purchased and fit a battleship to do the storyline. That character's combat skills are lame, so the Raven ended up having the same EHP as my Drake and only about 500 dps. I went from having a couple hundred million isk to about 40M in the process of getting the Raven and fitting it out. Should I have been prevented from risking my non-blinged torpedo raven because I didn't have the cash to replace it? At 40M, I wouldn't have been able to replace the Drake either. Should I have been blocked from undocking? The only combat storyline missions I ever accept with that character are Shipyard Theft and only when the implant offered is a mindlink. Some folks in the missioning channel were kind enough to help me when they saw how bad that raven was.
I knew exactly what I was doing. Should I have been prevented from doing it because the nanny controls were on?
People shouldn't be shielded from making mistakes.
Sometimes the user interface is so complicated or messed up that if you aren't making mistakes, then it is a miracle. Sample:
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Enter_The_Matrix.aspx
I think this doesn't make sense.
If you have one billion and a one billion ship then you can fly it.
If you lose it you can rebuy it. But you are still missing one billion to be able to fly it again.
So clearly you can't afford to lose that ship.
Whilst covering 2-6 month old pilots in safety foam sounds like a good idea you are only protecting them from the truth, eve is a harsh game. Its built around the principle of everyone being a complete dick until proven otherwise.
And enforcing rules like this on older pilots would decimate CCP to customer relations as no user would want it.
Making use of the safety system and hints as a whole right now, its hard for a noob to get involved in accidental PvP.
There is no need for change
Wow... You strike me in some ways as being similar to myself: You are very cerebral, and analytical, you are very confident in your opinion/analysis (to the point of narrowing your own vision), and finally you go to great lengths to advance proofs related to whatever subject you are discussing. With that said, I am perplexed why/how you developed this idea of loss prevention through coersive or restrictive mechanics. Risk is strongly correlated with gain/profit/loss. It is a necessity to allow players to do as they see fit. What if a player is dying from cancer and in his remaining game time he wants to 'fly dangerous' or even stupid... or better yet: Fun. The game is for fun in the beginning and through to the end. Not Nannystate Online with Spaceships. And to further apply this concept of preventing loss, what about market losses and accidental clicks? Surely you would desire this principle of preventing loss to apply equally? That's all. BTW, I do enjoy reading your articles, and the jewels that that one finds on occasion, keep writing.
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