I will also never forget my first venture into lowsec, with a brother recently, to do a little mining. He carefully taught me the things I needed to know to have a chance at survival, and he played the game for real. As a result, Lowsec rather an exhilarating and blood-pumping experience. It was the real-est emotion I have ever had in a video game. I'm hooked.

I will also say that I have no sympathy for a miner that goes out with no tank, low or hisec, simply to maximize yield, loses his ship, and cries about it. As far as I am concerned that is sort of a built in exploit, and the consequence for using it is your ***. I have no sympathy for miners who mine in lowsec alone and get ganked, or who mine in lowsec withou taking precautions or planning for the excursion, and get ganked. It's as real as it's gonna get from your armchair, folks. Play real or GTFO.

Hisec, on the other hand . . . As has been said many times, CCP wants more PvP, and events like Hulkageddon are great PR for the game - it emphasizes the cutthroat nature of low and nullsec, and it's great advertising. Along with this there has - again pointed out many times - always been suicide ganks. It has reached a point on a few occasions where CCP has tweaked this or that to rebalance hisec space - the insurance thing for instance.

However, what Mittani is now proposing threatens the sandbox architecture that so many Goonies say they are in fact defending, and here is why:

CCP created the game with 3 areas: Nullsec: total lawlessness with no game-mechanic imposed consequences, lowsec, where your status might take a hit and whomever you kill might lawfully come after you, and hisec, where death is imminent. Empire Space, where new players must start, is Hisec, and ruled by one of the npc sovereignties. Hisec is, at worst, a necessary evil to the game. There must be a place where new players can get their feet wet, train a little bit, run missions, mine, whatever - without prematurely exposing them to dangers they still know nothing about, or have no skills or tools to defend against. Lowsec was the buffer between the two, so that a player may in time venture out into more dangerous territory, do more PvP, control more wealth, etc, but still have that sort of half-step to the harsh lawless galaxy that is hisec.

While player can create a corporation in Hisec space, they can never claim sovereignty over it's space. It is owned wholly without recourse by the npc, and by fiat, CCP. This is the trade-off to living in hisec: You are safer, but you will have to work much harder or smarter to be powerful or wealthy. As a result, their war-waging ability, and in fact their defensive ability, on a system scale, is hobbled by the inability to control industry or markets within the space, as many nullsec Corps necessarily do. Instead, as CCP has set up the game, in Empire Space the npc are unconquerable and non-negotiable. If you want a piece of the galaxy, you have to go somewhere else and take it.

These npc sovereignties are charged by the programming of the game with enforcement of the peace. But in fact, they are little more than janitors, sweeping up the riffraff after the fact. The npc are really very dumb programs, incapable of planning a defense, patrolling areas and altering tactics to react to needs as they arrive. There are no campaigns waged by npc navies to rid their space of pirates, no interdictions, no patrols. The only time I've ever seen CONCORD in an asteroid field was after a gank. The military arm tasked with defending this space is neutered by it's inherent programmed idiocy. Were this a real sovereignty run by humans, a concerted, planned, and most of all intelligent, defense could be mounted against ForeverGeddon. As it is, such a thing doesn't exist, and Human Corporations in hisec, for reasons set out above, are impaired by game mechanics from rising to the level of military power needed to fend off, or defeat, a Goonswarm like alliance.

As a result, the duty falls on CCP. Perhaps a human Police Corporation, run by CCP, employing CCP employees, could take over the policing duties, as simply the military arm of the npc sovereignty. Then strategy could replace tactics and nullify the impact of ForeverGeddon. Perhaps CONCORD could and would attempt to pod-kill anyone caught disturbing the peace; at least that would level the playing field in terms of risk ` As it stands now that is the one thing that gankers do not risk, but the miners do. Whatever the case may be, the game mechanics dictate that CCP is responsible for hisec security, not players. If ForeverGeddon is allowed to continue, the implied Sovereignty of Empire Space will become increasingly meaningless, and CCP will have effectively further narrowed what is already a very niche game to only hardcore gamers willing to play with total ruthlessness, and only those who join one or another Pirate faction, will have any chance of surviving. Even as it stands now many, many people try the game and choose something else, something less hard, or less frustrating, or less time consuming.

While subscriptions are up, and daily logins are up from say, two years ago, the real measurement of EVEGÇÖs financial success will be in how many of those players are still around in a year, or two or five. How many started two or five yrs ago and are still playing? It is in building up a customer base that companies grow, not just cycling new customers through those slots abandoned by ex-customers.