The EVE Online Council of Stellar Management, the CSM, had their summit with CCP in Iceland a couple of weeks back. This was the first live, in person summit since Covid and saw all but one of the CSM 17 members make it there live.
The CSM17 Winners
Reports back from the CSM have been positive (Brisc has a write up) and the one member who could not make it, Kazanir, was able to attend virtually, so everybody was present in one form or another.
One thing that came out in post summit was a version of a presentation that Angry Mustache gave to CCP about PvE content in the game.
Angry Mustache has posted an NDA allowed version of the presentation to Reddit, where it kicked off quite a bit of discussion, and he did a brief presentation of it on the Meta Show this past Saturday.
The title of the presentation is:
PvE Design Driving PvP engagement
More Krills = More Kills
It comes back to a common ecosystem theme that has been a part of the discussion of the game since its early days, where PvE players are a foundational part of the game that are the fundamental targets of PvP players. The through message is that better designed PvE will lead to a better PvP environment.
I really like the presentation and the metaphor chosen to represent the options that PvE players have in the PvP environment that is EVE Online. The “survivability onion” breaks out the different layers of responses PvE players have when faced with PvP intruders.
The Layers of the Survivability Onion
The layers of the onion:
- Avoid Detection – Be where the hunters are not
- Deny Access – Be difficult to get at
- Evade Tackle – Be able to escape if caught
- Fight Back – Be able to blow up an attacker
- Wait for Help – Be some place where friends can respond
- Dead – Be sad if you forgot to insure
The operating theory is that the further down the list an encounter occurs, the more interesting it is, peaking at the “Fight Back” stage, before decaying with the final two, the ideal being to have an actual fight on terms that does not drastically favor one side.
As an example of where this is working well there is a slide about Pochven Flashpoints, which are limited in number and have a dedicated set of player groups looking to run them.
Pochven Flashpoints Onion
This ends up with fleets clashing and makes Pochven a lively, if some what removed location where fights happen and the rewards are worth the risk.
This gets compared to null sec sub cap ratting, where the interactions often end at the evade layer.
Null sec sub cap ratting
Ships used to run null sec anomalies, if they are fit with any PvP encounters in mind, are usually focused on how to get away and dock up. That might get you fits like Myrmidons with MJDs and EC-3000 drones in the drone bay. But mostly you get people watching the intel channel and warping for a structure the moment anybody not blue shows up in the system.
The examples given on the slides, which include faction warfare and wormhole space, lead to a slide with general recommendations on how CCP might approach looking to make better PvE.
Recommendations at different layers of the onion
Some of them are long standing problems, the key one in my mind being that fitting ships for and running PvE content teaches you nothing about PvP. In that environment, fits are created to solve the PvE objective and the only response when presented with PvP is to escape.
Standing and fighting in your PvE fit ship is generally a futile effort and any thought given to PvP is likely related to escape.
This is not a problem exclusive to EVE Online. Rare is the online game where PvE prepares you for PvP. Real people won’t sit there and attack your tank, ignoring your healer and DPS. PvP players know the openings and will shred you unless you are prepared.
If CCP could create PvE that didn’t penalize you for flying a PvP fit, that would be something.
The problems will come with the PvE players. Here we get into opinions I have formed over the last 30 years of playing online multiplayer titles, starting with games on CompuServe and GEnie, through MUDs, and into the MMORPG era. I’m a grumpy old man in part because I’ve lived through these arguments many times.
The first thing that comes to mind is “more interesting for who?” The assumption I see is that both PvP and PvE players want more interesting PvE content, both for the sake of fun.
But my experience and observations over the years are that fun has a pretty limited shelf life for PvE. A mission or event that is fun once is rarely fun a dozen runs down the road. PvE players, and especially those in EVE Online, tend to gravitate towards PvE with predictable outcomes.
We have had this discussion in my comments over and over and it always tends to end up with PvE players favoring consistency over chaos, especially when it comes to rewards. Too much variability in rewards can be as bad as too low a reward.
I also feel, in my gut, that no amount of alignment with PvP fittings or combat styles are going to turn the sheep into wolves. PvE players are going to get owned every time no matter what fit you give them. My own personal record in New Eden is about a 99.9% ship loss rate when I am alone and activate any weapon system against another player. I have zero legitimate solo kills and the one I nearly had saw somebody swoop in and finish my foe off. I am bad at EVE, and my getting older has made me worse not better.
As such, I am always going to choose evasion, because even in exactly equal ships I am still going to lose because my reaction times are slow and I am not going to be able to optimize my positioning or movement in any way comparable to somebody who plays the game just to PvP. The PvP player has honed skills in a way I will never manage.
So if evasion removes my reward, that content is going to be much less appealing to me.
Now, there are levels of reward that could make it worth the effort. Every bit of content has a price point that will get people to run it. And we have seen in the past that CCP messing with rewards can quickly get people to stop running content.
Most recently the dynamic bounty system, which at one point would let a system drop as low as 30% of baseline bounty levels, ended up being a huge disincentive to people being in space.
Likewise, the blackout back in 2019 was a failure because it raised the risk of running anomalies substantially without any commensurate increase in reward. The PvP players were salivating, seeing null sec as a happy hunting ground while PvE players just docked up, logged off, and went to do something else, leading to a huge dip in players in game.
The big Blackout Dip of 2019
Chart courtesy of Jester and his archive of charts for illustrating the impact of bad ideas.
If CCP seizes upon this idea and plans to make PvE more interesting and only focuses on the PvP side of the equation, things will turn out badly. CCP has already proven above that they will happily turn the dial to increase the danger to PvE players without any thought towards modifying the rewards for facing that greater danger.
The industry is full of examples where the attitude towards PvE players is that they simply need to “Git Gud” or get out… followed by PvE players doing the latter.
The classic case at this point is probably Ultima Online, where open world PvP was killing off the game. Origin saw the light in time and introduced the Trammel shards without non-consensual PvP. Trammel is practically a curse word in the mouths of PvP players from that time, but it revived the game and kept it alive to this day rather than having it go the way of Darkfall or Shadowbane or other hardcore PvP titles.
I am not suggesting anything like Trammel for EVE Online. I am a true believer in the single shard plan for New Eden and there being risk every time you undock. But people have to acknowledge that PvP is a limiting factor for MMOs. I have said before that EVE Online is probably the most successful western PvP MMORPG so far, but it rides a fine balance. CCP has tinkered with the rules over the years, but it remains a fact that nobody is perfectly safe once they undock and that a large amount of PvE activity is required to sustain the ecosystem.
CCP needs to make sure it is worth the effort for PvE players to undock. There is a correct price point that will get people out and running any site. Sometimes that price is difficult to achieve, as we have seen with the isogen shortage. Even at record high prices, the likelihood of being caught and blown up in low sec is too high to be worth the effort.
Anyway, it looked like a good presentation, and I like the concepts. But, as always, I worry that the focus will be entirely on the PvP side of the equation and when PvE players don’t magically adapt and become good at PvP it will just lead to PvE players docking up and logging off.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 