Wednesday, April 4, 2012

We don't go into hisec anyways..

I remember a time when nullsec alliances said they didn't care at all about hisec war decs because they're all in hisec.  Most recently a fellow alliance member got yelled at by some grunt in -A- during the War Dec Roundtable at fanfest who proudly proclaimed, "YOU GUYS DON'T MATTER TO US, WE DONT GO INTO HISEC ANYWAYS!!"  A few weeks later, we caused them as many hisec losses as they had in nullsec.  Large alliances used to claim they didn't care.  Now they can't but help post their support of built in dec shields.  They reply with comments about how if hisec war deccers want to shoot at large null alliances they should have to come to nullsec to force the issue.  That sounds like someone who is scared, someone who doesn't know how to fight without an FC feeding them every single command, someone who requires an intel channel to stay safe and find out about incoming gangs.  In contrast, most of our fleets rarely have a formal FC, even in the rare but large fleet fights we have the FC is really just a target caller since we all know what to do beforehand.  We have an intel channel, but we don't rely on someone elses intel before jumping through a gate.  If someone reports a target in intel we all immediately go after it and scout ourselves individually the way there, versus nullsec alliances who take the time to form a gang up and usually end up disbanding the fleet because the target is "too far away" by the time they get organized.  The point i'm trying to make is, the groups that actually know how to PVP generally don't spend the time bitching on forums about the only way to deal with war decs is to nerf the mechanics because they spend their time doing something about it, like when draketrain came to hisec and punched our shit in...with fucking Drakes.

I find it funny how many nullsec guys claim that hisec guys don't know how to PVP, when most of them don't undock unless an FC calls for a fleet to form up and its the FC who gets you killed.  I'm sorry, but if you have to wait for a fleet to form up before you do anything then you have no right to criticize someone else's ability to PVP.  The second a ship comes down a pipe, every hisec guy at least in MT instantly knows how their ship will match up against it, where to position themselves, and how to properly fly that ship against the incoming target.

My second complaint is all these large nullsec alliances complaining that war decs are pointless and they're just a game mechanic that just encourages "griefing" (killing someone who doesn't want to be killed) for no reason.  Since when did a game mechanic become pointless because the main way that its used is the enabling of pixels to be exploded.  Since when did you need a reason to kill anyone?  Space-bushido shit is one thing, but this is just ridiculous.  To the people arguing that violence like that is pointless, ok then, see how much you enjoy an EVE where everyone has all the ships they want and several billions tucked away in their wallet.  The point is the true endgame of EVE is PVP and the blowing up of pixels.

I'm confident that the new war dec changes bring something new and interesting for us, but I don't think that the kind of small scale conflict and making mercs particularly viable will happen.  I'm glad they have a formal method of allowing mercs to join on a war now, but the issue is the high barrier of entry into the merc trade.  As it stands now there's an extremly big divide between level of quality between merc groups and its instantly apparently who you're going up against.  For example, when a quality merc/hisec dec unit goes against a mediocre or just starting one, the new group usually gets their face punched in.  On the other hand when groups that use the same tactics go up against each other, it usually ends up in a stalemate. For example, back in the day when MT would get dec'd by Snatch the war usually went like the following: One side would get a kill against someone who hadn't quite switched themselves out of "fly casual/look for traps" mode, after that first kill, both sides usually avoid each other until the end of the war when someone on the other side gets overconfident and loses an equally expensive ship and the war ends up at 50% efficiency with maybe 1-2 kills on each side.  Boring.  And its not something that can really be changed we know all their alts to scout, we have everyone watchlisted, they have the same for us, its boring.

Theres been a common belief that hisec players have no skill.  We might not be able to kite like other people, we might not use advanced blob tactics, but what sets us apart is our ability to scout and position ourselves effectively.  In nullsec you have the drag bubble, in hisec you have nothing like that.  For anyone that says that using RSB alts is easy mode, but in nullsec you can literally sit on a drag bubble and the targets warp to you.  Even if they're stabbed you still have ample time for your entire gang to get tackle.  What about cloaky targets jumping into you?  Well just throw a bubble up and let your ceptor have all the time in the world to get a decloak.  In hisec, with client/server lag even if you get a perfect decloak if the target can align under 5 seconds he'll probably get away, DESPITE having an instalocking ship with RSB.   But I digress, going back to scouting, In MT everyone flies with a scout, everyone knows what they're jumping into, we have all the in gates covered, many times two jumps out.  You guys may say that this is playing EVE on easymode and doesn't take skill, but the nullsec guys have intel channels, and most nullsec guys couldn't scout a gang like we could if their life depended on it.  We have to be self-sufficient and saying that 5 guys each scouting themselves with alts and knowing everything within a 1-2 jump sphere that is happening while killing stuff is definitely not easy mode.  We don't have a large alliance to rely on, we don't have this massive intel network where we see blobs coming miles away and the only way you can really get ambushed is via wormhole.  While lots of the kills we get are the results of stupidity, lots of the kills we get are the results of weeks of patience finally coming together, weeks of having someone watchlisted and waiting for the moment they screw up, weeks of marking their neutral scouting alts, and weeks of watching their behavior.  I can't count how many war targets i've killed that i've waited 3-4 wars and months to finally kill.  Many times if we're out of position to get a kill, we'll just let them them go and get them later, instead of blowing local and making them paranoid.

I think the reason why hisec deccers have gotten such a bad wrap and saying that they're too easy is that we've gotten too good for our own good.  This sounds egotistical and cocky, but I hardly mean it in that context.  My point is that when hisec decs first started out people flew carelessly and most groups were 85-90 efficiency at best.  The core founding member corps of MT were the two 95% efficiency groups in the 0rphanage.  Now that we've refined our tactics and everyone has gotten used to each other, we're at 98% efficiency.  People take a quick glance and their first thought is that something is broken with that system, they don't realize that its the result of groups of people who are all high SP and have flown with each other for years.  As a result, they look and see that they can't kill us and they think that something is wrong with the system.  They're absolutely mad, they're mad because they can't kill us, and we've gotten so good at what we do, that it has the illusion of looking easy and something that doesn't require any skill.  They're mad because the only thing  in their repertoire they have to kill us is the Titan bridge and that's something they can't use in hisec.  They're mad because they don't have the discipline to shut the fuck up and listen to the FC while we have the patience and discipline to not only scout a target for days, but to also to let small ships go through in order to create the illusion that the target is safe.

My biggest complaint about when I was in nullsec is that people had no patience or discipline.  People were unwilling to let a Rupture go and as a result would cause our gang to be made in the enemy intel channel and causing that faction battleship to decide to make his trip down the pipe later that day. Their only response is that somehow the kills we get are too easy and this needs to be nerfed.  Even if you make our kills harder to get, its not going to make us any easier to kill, and I think thats what people forget.

8 comments:

  1. "The point is the true endgame of EVE is PVP and the blowing up of pixels."
    ^ Honestly, anymore, I'm really starting to question that, as far as CCP's mindset and intentions. :-/

    We really do have to "wait and see" what comes from the Jita hellcamp, and what the actual "new wardec changes" ARE before you can definitively say that "PvP is the end-game" anymore. :-/ That's a sad realization, but a true one I think.

    As for the rest... I stopped reading after para 2.
    NOT because "tl;dr", but because you're falling into the exact same fucking mental trap that the Bears who bitch about "non-consentual PvP", etc, do: "Us and Them".
    Just like a Bear would lump "anyone who doesn't ask politely before shooting someone," in the same general group of "pirates and griefers", you're pretty much doing the same thing with "nullsec dwellers".

    Truth is, you're absolutely right that a lot of nullsec people are "FC drones" and push the buttons they're told to, and are pretty fail solo, but that's their individual fault for either 1) not being willing to go out solo and learn to run by themselves or in small gangs, or 2) joining an alliance that has a stupid policy like "no going out without an FC", or is so fucking worried about their KB efficiency that any loss is immediately freaked out about.
    I disagree that KB efficiency is "working as intended", but whatever. It's just a game.

    Either way, comparing what you do to being in null isn't even apples and oranges. Comparing you guys to say, the Tuskers, might be apples and oranges. Comparing your PvP to null PvP is more like comparing apples and radishes.

    Also, if you ever wanna see some truly PRO gatecampers, Brushie Brushie Brushie are nothing short of bad-ass in that respect. If you run into one of their camps, scout or not, you're going to DIAF. Period.

    I honestly get the feeling though that your hisec PvP is going to be going away sooner rather than later, and then we'll see ya in null maybe, and the tears can be on the other end. ;-)

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    1. Yeah, I do admit that I generalize at times, but it has more to do with my writing style than any sort of conscious decision to group all nullsec player types together. To clarify, when I use the term 'nullsec guys' i'm specifically referring to the ones that whine and bitch and lump us together as "pirates and griefers" since the ones that can actually PVP are too busy doing just that to care. A lot of times when I post, its directly in response to something I read, for example, this post was in response to the majority of the comments I read on an EN24 article.

      Since you said you skimmed over the article I kinda feel like you missed the point completely on the nullsec/hisec comparison, since I brought up the comparisons in order to contrast our playing styles.

      A lot of people see hisec as a pointless griefing tool, but for many of us its a paradise for small gangs where you don't have to worry about blobs, supercapital proliferation, spaceship politics, and all the other problems that nullsec players are always complaining about.

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    2. Yeah, true... I've found lowsec to be pretty good for that too. I mean sure, you get some guys who'll drop a Vindi fleet on a lolT1cruiser roam "cause [they] can"... but at least they're doing it with faction BSes instead of a carrier/SC/Titan drop.

      All in all I wish EVE wasn't so "risk-averse" overall, and people were more willing to take fights that weren't a "sure thing". :-/

      I guess I really should've started in EVE back in like, 05, and quit a year or so ago. ;-) lol

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  2. I saw that article the leader of the privateers posted. Too bad the contracts are for defenders, not aggressors. Killed his business strategy in less than 5 seconds.

    Dec corps will have to become far more selective in their choice of targets. They will be looking more carefully about who provides the most lucrative kills for them.

    This benefits both parties. You get muppet kills from the idiots, and save money not deccing an alliance like mine that just blue-balls you. I get more freedom of mobility as a reward for being a paranoid bastard.

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    1. Yeah, I read that article as well and since the info in it was kind of bad, I found it a bit confusing and didn't try to decipher it any further since bits seemed off and most of that stuff I already knew.

      I think we all know that the Privateer model for war dec alliances will be dead, with that being said, as it stands now, we all think that the new changes will actually be more griefey against smaller groups than the current price scheming. Highsec asset denial against large nullsec alliances becomes completely unfeasible due to the cost. I can tell you for a fact, if you wardecced a single 6000 man alliance, took all the loot drops and donated the 100% to the alliance, you would probably end up anywhere from 1-2.5b in the hole. Also, the traffic wouldn't be enough to keep the attention span of most hisec dec alliance members. Even with a lot of the dec shield/dec scraping holes fixed, the large null alliances never really abused those tactics anyways due to sov mechanics so the number or targets in hisec probably won't change much, at least not immediately.

      War dec alliances pay for decs with decs and if under the new model you end up losing money even against the most lucrative and active of targets, they just won't even bother, period. In fact, under the new pricing scheme, we'll pay more for a dec against a single 500 man alliance than we would against your alliance and two others. The truth is, many of our groups have gotten a lot more careful on who we select and even with the best of research, you can never really know who will blueball and who won't, though it usually ends up at around half.

      A lot of people are fine with these changes because it removes what they call the "pointless griefing" component of hisec decs, but it will either kill the dec system as a whole or create more consequences and focus on the smaller groups who are too unorganized to survive more than a week of being dec'd. Regarding the changes to merc mechanics, I think you'll see most of the decent merc groups end up on one side or the other, which will probably all be the defender side since it will be free wars for them.

      On the aggressor side, I feel like it will turn more into bullying the other group into paying protection money or people shooting POSes to hopefully get good loot and/or escalate fights if you even want to have a shot at being profitable. Though I think this wlll get hedged significantly, because who wants to end up fighting 0rphanage, Pendiulum of Doom, Double Tap. God Squad, Moar Tears, and whoever else at the same time. If this becomes too big of a deterrant for people to want to be the agressor, then you'll run into situations where very few decs are put in and most decs that are put in too boring or too small to be interesting. The biggest problem is most of the people who seem to be weighing in on the war dec issue are nullsec guys or people whose only experience is being on the receiving end of a few fail decs. The problem with that is most of these guys have far too limited of a view on the realities of hisec war decs to provide any useful input and think that all hisec war decs go similarly to the ones they've experienced. Likewise, I hate drag bubbles and it wouldn't bother me one bit to see them removed from the game, but seeing as I don't regularly fly in nullsec and that change wouldn't really affect me, i'm not going to go post up on the forums whining about them.

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    2. "Though I think this wlll get hedged significantly, because who wants to end up fighting 0rphanage, Pendiulum of Doom, Double Tap. God Squad, Moar Tears, and whoever else at the same time."

      I think at one point we had that whole list on us, minus maybe Pendulum of Doom, was about a month-2 months ago, when the RA shenanigans was at its height. lol. Sorry, we were too busy kicking RED's ass to worry bout you guys then. ;-)

      "The biggest problem is most of the people who seem to be weighing in on the war dec issue are nullsec guys or people whose only experience is being on the receiving end of a few fail decs."
      I used to be in a carebear alliance on the receiving end of a number of fail decs, and a couple where we got pwned at every turn. Does that validate my input a lil more? ;-)

      "Likewise, I hate drag bubbles and it wouldn't bother me one bit to see them removed from the game..."

      I don't like _drag_ bubbles as a mechanic. Catch bubbles sure, I can wrap my head around that ... but I just don't get how a drag bubble can continue your warp and "drag" you past the point where the drive should have shut down. :-/ Makes no sense to me.

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    3. 1) I'm talking about hisec war dec groups as aggressors, not nullsec alliances as defenders. Those scenarios are completely different.

      2) The point I was trying to make about people weighing in on war dec mechanics is that they're not the ones that do it, so they really don't understand the effort that goes into a lot of kills. They seem to think that everything is just sitting on a gate with an alt on the other side or sitting on a station with max sebos, and while this is one aspect of hisec PVP, its a gross minimization of the actual amount of effort that goes into finding and getting kills. For example, people see our freighter kills and think they're just easy ganks that require no effort, when in reality some of them are the result of weeks of intel and more patience than the majority of people in this game have.

      3) Ya, drag bubbles are dumb.

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  3. I actually wrote about this kind of shit just earlier today. I think maybe you will agree with my assessment of why hisec PVP has turned out to be the way it is, why people are whiny bitches for not adapting and HingTFU, and why it isn't necessarily a bad thing that it's being changed.

    http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=15906834#comment_870318

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