The Offerer
Republic University
Minmatar Republic
49
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Posted - 2011.11.16 19:22:00 -
[1] - Quote
Sadly, I think that this change came a bit too late. A lot of political and demographic changes happened in the game since the nerf that simply nullified this fix.
- Many players left to highsec because of the nerf. DED complexes were too infrequent and often bugged so they mainly got done shortly after downtime and didn't re-spawn until the next downtime. If you are working well after the downtime and have time to log on a couple of hours after it, you won't have a chance to find a valuable complex to do (speaking from personal and experience of all my corp mates). The only thing that provided some sort of income were removed, not nerfed.
Result: many of those players are in highsec doing missions. I don't have to be a market expert to see that ISK per LP ratio has dropped considerably after the nerf. It would require much more than a fix to anomalies to get those players back, because one by one they are leaving the game (taking a "break" never to be heard from again) after being bored in highsec. There are other things that influence this unwillingness to get back to 0.0 and those things must be fixed if we want to kep the players in the game.
- Many players (a half of my crew back before the nerf) simply disappeared from the game never to come back. I haven't been able to talk them into re-subbing again. They are simply disappointed for instantly losing everything that we invested in. It's too late to get those players back.
- Since 0.0 industry is still non-existent on a personal level and you still don't have a chance to do anything industry related whatsoever without messing with the corporate bureaucracy, the single most viable ISK income for a 0.0 player were anomalies. We needed that ISK in order to PvP. It's a 0.0 space... a free-for-all PvP zone... and we got kicked out of the game by not having enough ISK to play.
In the mean time, one block of players formed a single fleet of overpowered and unbalanced ships and took multiple regions of space. Any attempt to attack their systems will result in the same response as we've seen before. I used to roam through those regions before the conquest - lots of players, lots of activity, lots of targets. Now? Those systems were taken because of a single (also unbalanced) moon resource and left empty. Whole regions of space became ghost towns.
And who is willing to fight them? Well, no one at this moment. There's no reason why should anyone want to dedicate their time, resources and morale to try to fight that monster for a pitty increase in anomaly values.
- Not when you can't even pick up a fight against 200-strong supercarriers + titans
- Not when server behavior is still unpredictable since we don't yet have time dilation on TQ
- Not when industry in 0.0 space is still neglected and practically don't exist outside of corporate bureaucracy (and judging by the Customs office devblog, that isn't going to change any time soon)
There is still hope, however, and this should be only the first step of getting players back into the most interesting part of the game and the game itself:
- Supercapital nerf must actually work. Without that nerf, there is no fight.
- Time dilation must actually work. Without it, there's no fun or possibility of winning because of something that your fleet did.
- Industry must be redone to be available to the masses in 0.0 space. This idea, for example, tacles that problem quite effectively: http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1560795&page=9#258
Without those things and without player's will or possibility to fight for 0.0 space, this anomaly buff will only serve those who are already established in 0.0 space:
- invulnerable blobs with strong supercapital core
- bots that are still very active in all regions of space including 0.0
and we all know that both of those things not good for player morale.
TL;DR
It's a step forward that is made a little too late to be effective and productive by itself. Many things have happened in the game because of the nerf that drastically changed the landscape of the whole game. Many players left right away and many are still leaving nullsec and the game because of the lack of achievable goals, because the balance of the game got heavily broken. In order to have hope and goals again and keep players in the game, anomalies had to be fixed, supercapitals must be nerfed properly, time dilation and server load balancing better work, and corporate monopoly over industry in nullsec must be minimized. Only then you will completely fix what got broken with the nerf. Without all those elements, the impact on the playerbase might be completely opposite of what you are expecting.
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