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Maybe I’m just being dense.

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While I’ve not reached the same stage of frustration as Janek, I am somewhat disillusioned (see above) and I do think Eve is hugely in favour of defensive play. It really is too easy to hide, and that’s something driven by the unforgiving cost of the game.

I think Heartless is being a little overzealous, however, as there’s still a great deal of interesting combat in Eve. And combat *is* at the forefront of the game I play. The hundreds (okay, thousands) of kills I’ve participated in attest to that.

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Then parties form to take these guys out.

Thats the most common PvP I’m seeing

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As for disillusionment with fleet operations, that’s very understandable. Taking part in massive 100 vs. 100 pitched battles sounds nothing sort of epic. What you get, due to the technical side of things (local or remote), is a very choppy, uncomfortable (and sometimes painful) mess that’s over too quickly and quite often regrettable.

My main problem with large engagements isn’t the lag or near certainty of death, but the “primary calling”, whereby the fleet commander designates the target for the entire gang to shoot at. That’s fine for a small engagement of a few people where the “primary” ship may take some minutes to succumb to focused fire, but in large scale battles this ship will always die within seconds (even the sturdiest battleships), with no chance of retaliation or survival. Poof. 200m ISK turns to spacedust.

Hit point buff, maybe? DPS nerf, maybe? Siege mode for battleships?

Maybe I’m just being silly here, but in my mind Star Wars-esque epic space fights are a series of small skirmishes on the battlefield between squads of similarly-classed ships (the potential, maybe, for making different classed ships vastly ineffective against each other, making for diverse fleet makeups and squad-based combat?) duking it out over a fairly long period of time, with victory being decided by superior tactics and willpower rather than sheer numbers.

Having said all that (and hopefully not scaring away potential new players), none of these problems are present in small-gang warfare. In engagements like these, a pilot’s skill and ship are much more important than luck in determining survival and success. The problem is that this type of warfare is in decline due to people moving up the social food-chain into 0.0 space and alliances, and hence into 100 man fleets. I think it’s natural to wish to raise your social status, and EVE wouldn’t be the game it is without the hundreds of thousands of friendly and unfriendly pilots floating in nearby systems, but the death of small-gang warfare is a high price to pay for populated player space in 0.0.

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Totally agree on the major fleet stuff though, and I turned away from major alliance warfare for just that reason, amongst others. Rather than a hard cap on local, you really need to shape game mechanics such that stategic confrontations don’t require you to just shovel as many grunts as you can into one system.

Don’t really see how that can happen without a radical restructuring of how territory is controlled, and I can’t see that happening because everything is so strongly entrenched now.

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Even when fights get going, it is warp in, warp out, warp in, warp out, warp in, warp out. It is stupid combat for the most part. They could do so much better.

And part of it is the playerbase being reserved, but I don’t blame them. Who wants to flush potentially MONTHS of time down the drain because they got caught unaligned to the nearest star gate?

I’ve always advocated for gang sizes to be capped and for zones to have a hard cap of about 64 players, limiting how large attacking/defending forces could be. That way the action would spread out and a lot more fun could be had.

This 200 vs 200 stuff is garbage and the Internet is years away from making it work.

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While you do get folks who are happy to just go “fuck it, let’s go” and jump into an enemy fleet or whatever, you’re increasingly seeing people not willing to engage unless heavily outnumbering the opposition, or having capital ship backup ready to jump in. It’s just bait and gank, bait and gank. Some people are just too afraid to lose anything (hence logoffski, omg spies, docksies, etc).

Coupled with personal frustration over certain game mechanics, it’s meant that the ratio of satisfaction from a good fight to sheer desk-headbutting frustration is too low to make it worth my while any more. And that’s a real shame.

Having said that, I don’t regret my time in Eve, I was in a fantastic corp, and have had fantastic allies and enemies over the years.

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And I’m not sure what you mean by that, either. Are you talking about sniper battles? Because those are relatively rare now.

I was referring to the situation that occurs in regards to almost any fight in EVE. They are on that side of the gate and we are on this side. Until one side moves through, there is no fight and chances are the fight will just be over stragglers that lagged out as everyone jumps to another gate. EVE PvP concept is great, but it’s action is highly overrated and as boring as watching paint dry. They have done nothing to bring the combat to the forefront, too much still relies on exploiting and spying.

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