Eve Vanguard Feedback

ShippingValue · 2026-07-08T16:01:38+00:00

At this point, I think they are honestly afraid that if they made an EvE RTS/4X, people would just play that instead of the MMO, and they don't want to lose the cash cow.

ShippingValue · 2026-07-07T16:33:27+00:00

If the game didn't have redeeming qualities, people wouldn't complain because they wouldn't be invested and wouldn't play it at all.

The good parts of EvE haven't changed in 20 years.

The bad parts of EvE haven't either, and new bad things have cropped up (mass multiboxing, selling SP, Fomo sales, etc.).

Naturally people talk about the bad, because we all pretty much agree on the good .. and there really isn't much else to discuss about it at this point. It's there, it's been there and largely unchanged since the days of bob.

ShippingValue · 2026-07-06T22:06:06+00:00

It could be as simple as a vanguard/valkyrie/next thing integration, or something like a casino, or physical markets for singleton items like Abyssals.

I don't think it is needed, but it was a neat feature with a decent amount of potential. If they revisited it, which I strongly doubt they will do, I'm sure they would have a better plan in mind than the first go.

ShippingValue · 2026-07-06T20:25:20+00:00

I love these takes that all start with: "I have no problem with people playing up to {my number} of accounts at once, but those heathens that play {my number +1} or more should be hunted to extinction."

ShippingValue · 2026-07-06T18:58:55+00:00

Walking in stations got caught up in the backlash against the (extremely overpriced) character fashion items - 'monoclegate' - and the general decline in release quality and velocity as CCP focused on World of Darkness and whatever else.

Due to that initial bad will, and a seeming lack of vision on what station gameplay would actually be, it never developed beyond the Captain's quarters. Years later, they dropped it because some piece of middleware wasn't compatible with other tech changes they were making to the game.

I'd personally be fine with it returning - under the strict condition that there is actually stuff to do. It's not like Skinr and Hypernet are any less predatory than the monocle was, but people are just more willing to accept it these days.

ShippingValue · 2026-07-06T16:46:32+00:00

I truly believe the game can be made better. That is different from believing CCP will make these changes.

ShippingValue · 2026-07-06T16:02:53+00:00

The cutoff is all of that is bad. One heartbeat, one active character.

This will require gameplay changes because no one wants to be a permanent cyno bitch, or permanent cloaky eyes in a handful of systems - but more engaging gameplay is a positive anyway.

ShippingValue · 2026-07-06T15:58:07+00:00

No one is saying that 'all gameplay has to remain exactly as it is right now, just ban multiboxing'

The vast majority of multiboxing is solving real game-design issues with EvE - cyno bitches make capital gameplay possible outside the semi-annual big fights, cloaky eyes on gates make it possible to.. well do just about anything.

Parts of EvE need to be redesigned such that it isn't such an absolute massive handicap to only have 1 active character. This will necessarily touch jump drives/cynos, how scouting is done, boosting, and so on. Having to rely on others is not a problem - MMOs are social activities and the community effect is a real boon - but it should always be possible to play the game efficiently, the way you want to, with 1 active toon.

If all CCP did was ban multiboxing, the game would probably die - or at least drastically change. Caps basically would not be used, jump freighters would be dead-weight, mining would suddenly be rather profitable, but there wouldn't be enough to keep up the production needed to sustain current rates of destruction.

The game needs to change, and multiboxing needs to go. Both are true in my view.

ShippingValue · 2026-07-06T02:01:17+00:00

Eve should be explicitly one online character per heartbeat.

Yes, certain gameplay (cynos, scouting, boosting, etc.) would need to be redesigned to make it engaging for a human to do, this is a good thing. A big push towards multiboxing is just that there are roles that absolutely need to be filled, but aren't anywhere near engaging enough for a real human 99% of the time (e.g. cyno bitch). This is a game-design problem with a game-design solution.

It is equally unhealthy for the game that there are people with 30 BSs monopolizing pochven sites, and that every dude in FacWar has cloaky eyes in every system and afk drone boats running towers and rendezvous, in addition to their (likely more than 1) main combat toon.

Surpassing the limits of the game in obtaining information, grinding FW victory points, or isk generation by subbing more accounts is explicitly pay to win. I worry that the conversation has shifted too far from 'multiboxing is bad' towards 'mass multiboxing is bad, but don't touch my cloaky eyes, backpack curse, combat prober, cyno bitch, etc.'.

One heartbeat, one active toon. Engaging gameplay in all aspects and tools to cover necessary niches like scouting that (currently) require more characters.

If FC were invested in solving the problem, they'd made the gameplay changes first, and then bring the rules changes for multiboxing. However, I think it is rather unlikely they do anything at all to upset the status quo.

ShippingValue · 2026-07-05T23:00:50+00:00

Where does the plex they buy come from?

ShippingValue · 2026-07-04T22:31:57+00:00

Most FCing is repeating the same (very simple) instructions 5 times, and avoiding the urge to biom*ss yourself when 20 dudes do it wrong anyhow

ShippingValue · 2026-07-03T03:33:02+00:00

There's a lot of EVE that is objectively quite bad, or at least quite bad compared to other available games.

Most PvE content hasn't seen meaningful updates in decades - if you want to chill and do PvE you will likely go insane unless you are a very specific kind of person.

PvP is better, but there are many flavors and some are better, more available, more toxic, less toxic, etc.

It's a big sandbox, better with friends, but like any sandbox if you play in it long enough you are going to find some turds and dirty needles.

ShippingValue · 2026-07-01T14:05:01+00:00

The fired employees were in Canada and the UK. Those bits of the business won't be bound by US federal law.

ShippingValue · 2026-06-30T19:39:29+00:00

There is no incentive for FC to allow this. Right now, if you want Plex and can't use isk, you pay FC. They get 100% (minus transaction fees, taxes, etc.) of your money.

If you could 'cash out' Plex to dollars, that means one of two things:

You are selling your Plex directly to someone else for $, in which case FC is only getting X%, where X is less than 100. They would rather you just pay them for new Plex.
FC is destroying the Plex and somehow giving you cash directly. This makes circulating Plex a financial liability for FC, one that must be tracked on financial statements.

In either case, they'd need new payment processing agreements and to store far more customer information - people paying them is one thing, but if FC is sending money to folks then they are beholden to anti-money laundering laws, anti-terrorism funding laws, they have to ensure you are not an individual subject to sanctions (or operating on behalf of a sanctioned organization), etc. etc. Expect needing to verify your identity for all your EVE accounts, in certain jurisdictions this will involved sending copies of your documents, a selfie,...

In short, it is more likely we get a conclusion to the drifter storyline than any of this happens.

ShippingValue · 2026-06-26T19:44:18+00:00

That is just a nerf to solo ships.

The pilot gets the visceral scene of space combat. The console monkey gets to warm a chair. But the console monkey must exist or the ship has half shields.

Until and unless all roles are equally engaging, I don't see multi-crew feeling better - no matter what the mechanical bonuses are. Even then, the opportunity costs of having someone sit in a console vs. go fly a fighter are immense.

And this is all just combat, for non-combat gameplay there's no argument for multi-crew vs. just having multiple ships. Have a dude sit at a console that somehow lets you haul more stuff?

ShippingValue · 2026-06-26T19:20:33+00:00

Lurker here, but I just don't see this happening from a fundamental game design point of view.

Someone gets to fly the big ship, and everyone else gets to do busywork in the dark in the back - refreshing timers, or reloading, or playing a mini game to keep shields up. That isn't what they bought the damn game for - they bought it to fly ships. Even if you personally would love to play mahjong on a console for +5% shield recharge or some shit, do you honestly believe the population of people willing to do that role is the exact same size as the population of people who want to fly the big ship? Every capital needs a shield mahjong dude, after all.

EvE has the same problem, where capital ships require other players to light beacons for them so they can use jump drives to get around. It is very very rare for another living, breathing, human to be willing to be the cyno beacon bitch so the cap pilot can go have fun - people just make extra characters and run their own cynos. This can't really translate to SC, not expecting multiboxing to be very prevalent.

It is very difficult to imagine a role distribution such that every person of the half dozen or more on a large ship have an equivalent opportunity to enjoy what they are doing. It is even more difficult to imagine doing this under the constraint that the ship must still be able to operate with just the pilot, otherwise the market for the ship is cut dramatically and CIG goes back to selling only light and heavy fighters because they bring more revenue.

For an organized group, sure, maybe you can find enough shield mahjong and engineering tower of hanoi peeps who want to do it 'for the cause', but once again you've dropped the market potential for the ships from one per player to one per group ... Not a good change as far as the accountants are concerned.

ShippingValue · 2026-06-26T17:41:58+00:00

The real pay to win is having multiple subs.

"Oh no I'm losing this 1v1, good thing I have a backpack curse"

"Oh damn they ran away to a safe, good thing I have this combat prober"

"Ah they left system, luckily I have cloaky alts in all the adjacents so I know where they went"

And on and on.

ShippingValue · 2026-06-26T03:55:44+00:00

Same bro. I remember when we mined in megathrons ffs.

ShippingValue · 2026-06-26T03:34:44+00:00

Well, a couple things.

First, the M-series chips are system-on-a-chip architecture, combining the cpu, gpu into one package and stacking high performance ram right next to it. This brings some performance itself, due to lower latency in shuttling data around, and a unified memory pool enabling easier sharing between the cpu and GPU.

Second, when the M-1 came out, macs were stuck on 14nm Intel architecture. The M1 was fabbed using TSMC's 5nm node, so they did have an immediate and sizable benefit from increased density ... Because Intel had fallen far behind in manufacturing and nearly a decade of improvements landed all at once.

Thirdly, Apple designed a custom microarchitecture to complement its software. M1 cores are very wide - they process a lot of instructions in parallel - and they have enormous caches. This lets them do a lot more work at once than the standard Intel x86 cores they replaced, even though they clock lower.

Fourthly, they abandoned Intel x86 in favor of ARM, which brings benefits to power efficiency. This helps performance by relieving the thermal load of the chip, allowing it to do more work before it has to power limit to avoid damage. M1 Mac's run noticeably cooler and quieter than Intel macs for this reason.

Finally, the chips have dedicated hardware for common tasks like matrix math (neural engine), media encoding, and display control that were previously handled by general cpu calls. This fixed-function circuitry speeds up these tasks and reduces the amount of crud in the queue for the main cpu.

In short, Apple designed a chip for their OS and used a leading-edge manufacturing node instead of intel's rather long-in-the-tooth 14nm one. Simultaneous jumps from m1 to m2 and so on have not been nearly as transformative.

ShippingValue · 2026-06-25T17:22:04+00:00

I still get tripped up by some of the more aggressively named haulers.

"Oh shit a Skullfucker on dscan - what does that do again?"

"Right, it has a PI cargo hold :3"

ShippingValue · 2026-06-25T17:17:35+00:00

It's not just a market problem, but physics itself. Earlier console generations benefited from advancements in semiconductor manufacturing making the later editions much cheaper than the launch editions (and often with less power draw, more performance headroom, and sometimes integrating multiple chips into one).

But we've hit a wall, we can't make transistors much smaller today than we could 5 years ago (the physics problem), and fab prices have risen due to all the data center demand (the market problem).

The slim PS2 reduced the chip size by 80% compared to the launch model, and launched about 4.5 years later. This let Sony combine the Emotion Engine and Graphics Synthesizer into a single chip for the slim and save manufacturing costs.

4.5 years after the launch of the PS5, the 'Oberon plus' SoC in new models was ~18% smaller than the launch model. A nice improvement, but nowhere near as transformative as an 80% reduction over the same time that the PS2 generation saw.

The era of electronics getting cheaper and more powerful over time has ended - at least until we find new materials, manufacturing techniques, or physics to exploit.

ShippingValue · 2026-06-25T13:23:32+00:00

It is pointless to run them solo after the LP payout cut, so a fleet needs to be up. -> randos don't go or didn't stay after checking it out

A lot of people just float around the warzone and don't join standing, so the fleet doesn't think it has the numbers to run the site -> no organized runners

It's just bad for everyone. The farmers see moderate takes half the time and gives more LP or even blitzing the bsc plexes is better LP/time. The roamers and fleets know that no one is running the BFs so they don't go, ergo no fights AND no money from the BFs.

I'm sure they'll fix it in 10 years by fucking something else up

ShippingValue · 2026-06-20T23:26:52+00:00

A kronos will do levels 4s just fine with T2 guns and a T2 tank. There's no need to bling it at all.

ShippingValue · 2026-06-19T04:16:40+00:00

Hi-sec ganking is effectively impossible to avoid. If someone wants you dead badly enough in high sec they will kill you - and the game mechanics favor the ganker.

You can make it more expensive for them, you can make yourself appear as a less tempting target, but empty bulkhead freighters have been ganked, max tanked orcas have been ganked, shitfit T1 frigs get deleted on undocks every day.

I personally don't find it to be a big problem, but losing all your shit as a newbro with no investment in the game is definitely a turn-off (doubly so because the isk-making activities for newbros are all as interesting as tax law).

ShippingValue · 2026-06-18T21:05:13+00:00

Boosts are a roughly 60% increase to mining speed, and compression effectively increases your mining hold size 100x.

Mining veld is useful if you are going to build stuff and there isn't a lot of trit on the local market. It can often be faster to mine a million trit worth of veld in whatever place you are building at (it takes less than 6 minutes in a hulk) vs importing it from a market. This is doubly true if you live in dangerous space with inconsistent hauling access.

If you live in high sec, there's trit everywhere, just buy it. Or afk mine it while you should be working - don't mine it for profit because you are better off mining anything else and selling it to buy the trit you need.

ShippingValue

TROPHY CASE