Putdownability

Hi All,

 

Yeah… again? Three posts in a week. Which is what can happen if you’re covering a weeks worth of nightshifts and have not much to do in the wee small hours…

Anyways, Seismic Stan posted over here about a bit of bittervetness that seems to be creeping in to his views on EvE and I wanted to flag a couple of things about my own and some concerns for the future.

Righto. Probably best to give a snapshot and then expand a bit. At this moment in my life I’m juggling a number of things. I have a wonderful partner, two stepsons and we have a baby on the way.

I run my own company. When I’m covering shifts for staff who are away sick on leave etc, I’m usually doing 12 hours at a client site. This week is a 72 hour one and has a daily travel of 90 minutes on top of that.

Put blunty – RL means I currently have little in the way of disposable time. I log on when I have the chance to do so. EvE-wise I’m predominantly a high sec dweller. I’ve lived in both Great Wildlands and Stain (NPC null sec). The only alliance I’ve been a part of made one very abortive attempt to grab SOV and that’s been about it. The sums quoted for a rental system you’d share with other renters was ridiculous to say the least when I did look into it.

My corpmates, while they don’t have quite the same time pressures, are in a similar boat. Professionals and/or with families.Not alot of disposable time, but with a certain amount of disposable income. Admittedly, we are probably not CCPs key demographic, but to take the nerf bat to the limited time we do have would be something akin to taking the nerf bat to the player group we are most like – the casuals.

We don’t have the time to grind for the iskies to buy plexes, so we’re subscribers in other words. As far as gameplay goes, not logging on after a week to find you’re trapped in a station that has changed hands isn’t the best. We don’t have a ton of time to sacrifice to the CTA gods either. While I really appreciate the skill queue, logging on to load up more skills isn’t actually playing.

EvE is a game that rewards time spent in it. It’s not a game that, in what is usually considered high or end game terms, you can put down or pick up easily. Go offline for two weeks in a WH? Your POS and all assets are exploderised. Go offline in NPC null sec for two weeks and find out your alliance has been rolled entirely out of the region.

This is why casual players tend to live in high sec. Not because of the gameplay, which if we’re being honest is pretty repetitive after a certain point, but because we have a degree of certainty that all our efforts to date have not either been destroyed or are otherwise unreachable if we have to go afk for weeks at a time.

Those that argue that high sec dwellers have it too easy are ignoring the fact that we casuals have already had our loot tables squashified. I don’t think I’ve flown my noctis since tbh. The new mining barge changes can almost be seen as a retrograde step due to the drop in prices devaluing the time and effort we can put in, and now we’re facing more nerfing (the shape of which is still to be seen – but may include higher pricing and/or changes to refining) in an effort to try and push people to low sec and null.

Again, we casuals may not be CCPs core demograph. But we pay. Consistently. And we put comparatively little loading on the servers. I’m not going to say that it is easy finding the balance so that the casual players get some value without letting the grinders go utterly berserk and skew the market (FW anyone..?).

But there comes a point where the casual player will look at the fun and value for time spent in a game and decide that consistent payment might be best suited to another game all together…. something worth having a wee think about methinks…

 

FS

 

H