The Dantelion Plan - The Failing of High-Sec and the Failing of its Purpose
In this part of the Plan, I will address High-Sec, a zone that is both central (literally) and yet far removed from the rest of the game. It is a zone that exemplifies the several mistakes EVE has done over time, mistakes that permeate the game.
It is a zone that is the introduction to the game and yet contains some of its most complicated and arcane systems, while at the same providing nothing of the introduction you would expect to what makes EVE actually interesting, Conflicts and Risks. It is an introductory zone that teaches you nothing of the fundamentals of the game, such as D-Scan or Fleet Roles, it is a new player zone that offers nothing exciting to tie them to the game, on the opposite boring them up with mechanics such as mining and missioning that have as much chances to destroy a new player as they have of giving him a distorted image of what EVE really is.
High-Sec is a gangrene that is slowly but surely eating up EVE from its very insides.
The damage it does is subtle, invisible, but unfortunately no less deadly than the most visible, bleeding, open wound.
To better illustrate this, I will talk about my first few weeks in the game.
Like everyone else, I started in High-Sec, oblivious to the many systems that existed both in the zone and the game itself. To me, Planets were something pretty but clearly useless, same for Moons, and I thought Missions were mostly tutorial-material instead of an actual career.
What saved me from this zone was discovering Faction Warfare while I was in a station.
I was looking to get blown-up! I was looking for content, to interact with people, I was looking for PvP. I somewhat found it by venturing (literally) into low-sec thanks to the good ol' greater-risk-greater-reward thing that convinced me to give low-sec a try for valuable ores. After a dozen of minutes I found myself getting shot at by a rando frigate that hoped in my belt. This was the first loss of many, but this loss showed me that "Yes! There are people out there, and they are looking for fights too!". And this saved me from the utter boredom that was the first few days after the career agents.
After that, I searched for an opportunity to PvP, any! There was no Arena in this game, no instanced battlegrounds, there was only low-sec so far, and just randomly going there lacked purpose (and rewards).
So for a moment I looked at High-Sec for options on what I could do to get some PvP.
I spent a couple days flying around and reading everything I could find about the zone. I realized that unless I had the funds to declare a war, there was nothing much I could do there in terms of PvP. This frustrated me greatly, to the point that I actually started wondering if the game was actually worth the time and work to make it enjoyable. Either in funds for wars or skills (both in-game and out-game) to get in the arcane activities of the likes of suicide-ganking.
Then I joined Faction Warfare on the spot when I understood that it was finally the thing I was looking for, a way to start fighting, a way to start from simple means and naturally grow into PvP. To the point that right after I joined, I undocked and locked the first purple I saw and shot....
The rationale from this little story?
High-Sec played no significant role in making me learn about Conflicts and Risks. At no point in those few weeks was it High-Sec's Purpose to engage me in the game.
This is only my experience but I think it is echoed through the community by the ever-present advice given to new players to leave High-Sec as soon as they can.
Starting from that, shouldn't the primordial question we ask ourselves about be:
Should High-Sec be -Entirely- designed around and focusing on teaching Newbies?
There are some of us that would say 'No', of course. And from the time I spent in the zone, and the discussions and debates I had with some of the actors in it, I would say those would majorly be among the two most influential forces in the zone, Mercenaries and Suicide-Gankers.
I will talk about one of those groups in particular later.
But assuming most of us would say 'Yes' (and I am more than willing to be proven wrong on this one), what would it take for High-Sec to fulfill its purpose of teaching new players and preparing them to become a part of the ebb and flow of the game?
One thing that could be debated is if High-Sec actually needs mechanics of Conflicts and Aggression.
I can already hear some people exclaiming "Carebear!!! I knew it!! The Carebears are coming for our pew!! This is ridiculous!! No PvP game can succeed without aggression"
This, however, is a very serious question and one that is not as black and white.
Several games have safety zones for newcomers that forbid PvP, and many of those games are PvP games.
The best example that comes to my mind is Albion Online. It is a very interesting game to bring into the discussion as it is by far the closest EVE-like in the market right now.
Albion Online, like EVE, is divided into zones that permit different levels of Conflicts and Aggression.
In Blue zones, ALL manners of PvP is stricly disabled, even if you flag yourself for PvP, you can NOT attack another player. This is the zone where players start the game in. Those zones, however only have the lowest tiers of materials that can be harvested, sounds familiar?
In Yellow zones, PvP is finally allowed, but if you lose there, you only get knocked out, which means you do not actually die and lose your gears. You merely drop a small amount of money for the winner to collect. The materials are of course of higher tier than in Blue zones, nothing surprising here.
Red zones is where the fun begins. In those zones, you have what is called "full-loot PvP", to us better known as "the entirety of EVE, since... ever". If you lose, you can be executed and have all your gears and items drop from you (and yes, even there the loot fairy can screw you). Red zones, of course, contain among the highest and rarest tiers of materials.
Albion Online follows the EVE formula to a T. This is very much the "Risk vs. Reward" tenet EVE is based upon being applied there.
Except for a very obvious exception:
Their newbies zone totally disallows PvP.
In EVE, nothing makes PvP actually impossible. CONCORD *punishes* PvP but doesn't make it impossible. This is one of the first odd lessons newbies come across when starting the game. This is a core part of what makes people say "Nowhere in EVE is Safe".
Albion Online chose to protect its newbies from Conflicts and Aggression. The dreaded Carebears are free to harvest forever in peace for hours on end without fearing a single gank in Blue zones. However they can never contest a farm or territory that allows one to plant herbs, grow regular or monstrous mounts. They trade safety and the ability to forever harvest for the impossibility to contest territories.
It will be interesting to see the evolution of Albion Online in the coming months, as it would help gauge the popularity of EVE-likes and the overall health of the genre. Is it that the amount of players interested in PvP-sandbox games is naturally dwindling or is it that EVE is failing in attracting those players?
But if Albion Online manages to grow, and in the very worst-case scenario for EVE manages to surpass it in activity, it will prove that their systems might do a better job at attracting and keeping new players.
In any cases, Albion Online shows that it *is* a viable option, and that even for EVE. They still have gigantic battles, they still have gankers, they are still a PvP sandbox despite having an entire space catering to Carebears. It finally puts the debate of Carebears being the bane of a PvP game to a rest.
High-Sec *could* be the Pacifist zone where we give time and space for our newbies to learn the game and grow in peace until they are fat enough to go out there and make a spot for themselves.
I'm not 100% sold on this option. I think there is a real case in saying High-Sec should be catered toward Newbies, but also it is as much valid to say that Newbies need to be introduced to Conflicts and Aggression as it is such an integral part of EVE.
Now that we have explored the idea of High-Sec being a space entirely catered to Carebears, we can explore an even crazier idea: The Social Corps. Before being diving into this idea we have to discuss a phenomenon and culture that is very much related to it and High-Sec.
A way to start the game for many people is as a bunch of friends looking for a way to bind themselves together by playing a game.
I have not been in that situation personally, but I can imagine many people started the game this way, and if you are among those feel free to share your experience.
As enticing it might be to start a tight-knit corporation of friends or colleagues playing together, we all know how such an endeavor would end in EVE:
Chomped, Chewed, Spitted Out, and Smashed by the closest Mercenary around.
Mercenaries are among the biggest movers of High-Sec, they define the zone, they define the way you will live in, how you will do it, and for how long you will do so. Ignoring them is a recipe for disaster, as much is just not knowing about them.
The stories of how they move the zone are significant, a notable one that has been presented to me during my time in the WarDec Project was this one:
https://forums.eveonline.com/t/sotiyo-heist-an-escalating-series-of-bluffs/58572
The TL;DR is: A corp that is progressing slowly but surely, an open atmosphere, a vet in search of some thrills, through many Wardecs and Alts a Sotiyo gets stolen.
A classic story of manipulation, espionage, and trickery in EVE, a quite exceptional one too!
Anyway, stories like those show how Mercenaries are central to what High-Sec is right now, and thus also central to its culture and its problems. To better understand that culture and its problems, one just need to look at how that playstyle was created.
Mercenaries are born from the War Declaration system, a pretty straightforward system that allows you to stop the intervention of CONCORD (as always in High-Sec, it starts and it ends with CONCORD). You start a War, a conflict CONCORD will not intervene in and that will last for a certain time for a fee. The fee is seen as a way to both create Risk for the attacker and be a self-regulating mechanism, since a wardeccer that starts too many unprofitable wars will supposedly run out of ISKs and no longer generate wars.
The War Declaration system is the premier and sole avenue for Conflict and Risk in High-Sec due to it being the only one that can interact with the omnipotent and omnipresent power of CONCORD. Unfortunately, both on the Conflict part and the Risk part, the system is failing, and failing hard.
The active use of War Decs in the heist example I showed above shows the kind of influence they and those who use them have over the zone, and that at the scale of a single player. The War Declaration has the single and overpowered use of disabling CONCORD, by far the greatest defining force in High-Sec. Mercenaries are riding along the biggest defining force of the zone.
So you have in a zone whose particularity is to house the newbies of the game, whether they'd be friends or family members, or colleagues, them the biggest reason for the zone-defining CONCORD existing, a way to disable said CONCORD and easily denying to the people who need it the most.
So from the moment they start existing as an entity, a corp, that bunch of friends or colleagues become a legit target for the absolute entirety of EVE, including its most battle-hardened and driven players. When those new players get to know about Conflicts and Risks, it's already too late for them.
Remember about that part on High-Sec being Schizophrenic?
So on the Conflict part, the system already has the glaring fault of putting Conflict in the ends of the opposite of its intended population. The Attacker will tend to be someone who has the financial means to maintain a war ISK-wise. The Attacker has most of the control on the duration of that war, as long as they can pay the fee they can keep the war going, regardless of absolutely any factor.
To better illustrate it, imagine someone coming to your door and putting a paper saying "I will come", even if that person never comes, the damage is already done. Now imagine you just moved in the neighborhood, you now have even less reasons to stay as you know nobody there enough to know if that threat is serious or not. Again, that Attacker is more like to not be a Newbie, the group the zone is supposed to cater to.
The War Declaration system is currently the most affecting system asking for the least amount of Effort and, more importantly, for the least Risk. Once the War is declared, the Attacker has complete control on when to come and whether to come, and that while still affecting the Defender. If we were trying to model the situation of the Attacker, it would be a brigand waiting in ambush along the road, a lord can deal with another lord as they know where their holds are, a brigand is like the air, you have no idea where the brigand is, when he will attack, and how to get a hold it.
EVE tries to sell the fantasy to friends and family who join it of space battles between empires and space moguls. Where Corporations vie for resources and territories, and that while fueling the fires of "War".Their current premier system, in the very first zone of their game, the very first that players will encounter, tries to model frontline wars, but actually models highway robbery.
And it does so at the expense of its youngest, most vulnerable players, at the hand of its oldest, aging but most powerful ones.
One cannot measure success without a metric, and one both High-Sec and EVE should very much care about is the amount of players graduating into EVE players out of High-Sec.
This is kind of a secret metric as numbers have never been provided by CCP, the only one being that Players who got ganked/shot were more likely to stay, easily the most misrepresented stats out there as we have no way of knowing what kind of attack made one more likely to stay. Myself, I was "encouraged" by that guy who blew me up when I went to mine into low-sec for the first time, but a battle is a very different experience than being suicide-ganked.
So I do not have numbers to say it, but still from my experience interacting with them, from seeing their effects on my corps, from seeing what people say about them, I can say this with plenty of confidence.
The current WarDec system in the hand of Mercenaries is among the biggest bleeder of new players, it is the worst enemy for that group of friends or colleagues that tries to get a foothold in EVE, and participates in making High-Sec the trap for new players it is.
So from that observation from people who share that thinking, came the idea of the Social Corps.
The Social Corps would be the starting point in the creation of a Corporation. It would have the tightest rules concerning corporation assets and would strictly forbid the deployment of depots and their likes, and any kind of structures. It would have a tax that would not deposit the money into the corporation wallet and it would forbid corp ads and any such services.
However the Social Corps could not be attacked by anyone inside High-Sec.
That bunch of friends and colleagues could have a window of time where they'd get to make their first steps into the game unfettered, accumulating resources and skills. They would be very limited in wealth generation and organizational skills, but they would be compensated by getting to play together as much as they want without fear of interference.
I can already hear some people yelling that this is not EVE, that no one should ever be safe in EVE, that this could not work in such a game. But as I have said, multiple games out there do so and actually prosper from it, Albion Online included, so this is certainly not an alien or unreasonable idea. More importantly, it opens up the game to plenty more people that will finally get the chance to prepare long enough to be worthy of the game.
Plus, this is the perfect avenue to create a way to introduce new players to Conflicts and Risks at their own pace.
Corps could open up securities, features, and permissions to deploy and manage assets as they open themselves up to more Risk.
Want to only deploy a M-structure? You open yourself up to only being a legal target to corporation of Rank X or plus, of size no less than Y. Want to be able to deploy a XL structure? Now you open yourself to any kind of Wars. Same deal with Mission Levels, corp features and such.
We could have Novice Corps, Established Corps, or Mega Corps, each with their own kinds of Risks, Rewards, and possible Conflicts.
That bunch of friends or colleagues could ascend to becoming a capable group, ready to deploy and defend Assets in space and ready to participate in the overall game of EVE.
Plus it would bring a semblance of balance to the power Mercenaries currently hold over High-Sec. One of the repeated points I heard, while on the WarDec project, was that, somehow, the playstyle of 1 single, lone WarDeccer being able to wardec thousands of players was to be protected at all costs and was not in any way detrimental to the game.
As much as one has to make his content, a single pilot being able to send a "I will come" letter to thousands of players and hundreds of corps is too much of a power. I think it is time to ask if this is something that actually deserves to be promoted and protected, especially in a zone supposedly housing our new players. It's maybe time to end the Schizophrenia.
High-Sec is clearly lacking in purpose. It is a zone that tries to cater to the most experimented of pilots and yet is the primordial ground for the newest of our players.
What is its purpose? I would say it is to be a breeding ground for new players to discover the game in peace, in order to prepare themselves and get themselves ready for the coming world of Conflicts and Risks awaiting them.
For that to happen, we have to rethink the place from the ground-up.
Maybe make it a zone where conflict is forbidden?
Maybe introduce corps that allow social groups to float around together as a school until they are ready to take on the sharks?
The ideas might be crazy, or simply make sense, but they must all go into the direction of giving High-Sec a purpose that is healthy to the game.
Although, even if the zone manages to be a place where newbies can engage the game in peace, it still has to be able to lead them into Conflicts and encourage them to fly and fight together!
One of the reasons Mercenaries are so prevalent is that, outside of mass-wars, is that not much in High-Sec is worth fighting for. The zone clearly lacks in Conflict Drivers especially if you are that corp of friends and colleagues we talked about.
In the next post, I will introduce my deeper thoughts on Conflict Drivers in High-Sec and their link with the WarDec Project.
Until then, Stay Golden!
High-Sec is a schizophrenic zone.
It is a zone that is the introduction to the game and yet contains some of its most complicated and arcane systems, while at the same providing nothing of the introduction you would expect to what makes EVE actually interesting, Conflicts and Risks. It is an introductory zone that teaches you nothing of the fundamentals of the game, such as D-Scan or Fleet Roles, it is a new player zone that offers nothing exciting to tie them to the game, on the opposite boring them up with mechanics such as mining and missioning that have as much chances to destroy a new player as they have of giving him a distorted image of what EVE really is.
High-Sec is a gangrene that is slowly but surely eating up EVE from its very insides.
The damage it does is subtle, invisible, but unfortunately no less deadly than the most visible, bleeding, open wound.
To better illustrate this, I will talk about my first few weeks in the game.
Like everyone else, I started in High-Sec, oblivious to the many systems that existed both in the zone and the game itself. To me, Planets were something pretty but clearly useless, same for Moons, and I thought Missions were mostly tutorial-material instead of an actual career.
What saved me from this zone was discovering Faction Warfare while I was in a station.
I was looking to get blown-up! I was looking for content, to interact with people, I was looking for PvP. I somewhat found it by venturing (literally) into low-sec thanks to the good ol' greater-risk-greater-reward thing that convinced me to give low-sec a try for valuable ores. After a dozen of minutes I found myself getting shot at by a rando frigate that hoped in my belt. This was the first loss of many, but this loss showed me that "Yes! There are people out there, and they are looking for fights too!". And this saved me from the utter boredom that was the first few days after the career agents.
After that, I searched for an opportunity to PvP, any! There was no Arena in this game, no instanced battlegrounds, there was only low-sec so far, and just randomly going there lacked purpose (and rewards).
So for a moment I looked at High-Sec for options on what I could do to get some PvP.
I spent a couple days flying around and reading everything I could find about the zone. I realized that unless I had the funds to declare a war, there was nothing much I could do there in terms of PvP. This frustrated me greatly, to the point that I actually started wondering if the game was actually worth the time and work to make it enjoyable. Either in funds for wars or skills (both in-game and out-game) to get in the arcane activities of the likes of suicide-ganking.
Then I joined Faction Warfare on the spot when I understood that it was finally the thing I was looking for, a way to start fighting, a way to start from simple means and naturally grow into PvP. To the point that right after I joined, I undocked and locked the first purple I saw and shot....
The rationale from this little story?
High-Sec played no significant role in making me learn about Conflicts and Risks. At no point in those few weeks was it High-Sec's Purpose to engage me in the game.
This is only my experience but I think it is echoed through the community by the ever-present advice given to new players to leave High-Sec as soon as they can.
Starting from that, shouldn't the primordial question we ask ourselves about be:
Should High-Sec be -Entirely- designed around and focusing on teaching Newbies?
There are some of us that would say 'No', of course. And from the time I spent in the zone, and the discussions and debates I had with some of the actors in it, I would say those would majorly be among the two most influential forces in the zone, Mercenaries and Suicide-Gankers.
I will talk about one of those groups in particular later.
But assuming most of us would say 'Yes' (and I am more than willing to be proven wrong on this one), what would it take for High-Sec to fulfill its purpose of teaching new players and preparing them to become a part of the ebb and flow of the game?
A Pacific High-Sec
I can already hear some people exclaiming "Carebear!!! I knew it!! The Carebears are coming for our pew!! This is ridiculous!! No PvP game can succeed without aggression"
This, however, is a very serious question and one that is not as black and white.
Several games have safety zones for newcomers that forbid PvP, and many of those games are PvP games.
The best example that comes to my mind is Albion Online. It is a very interesting game to bring into the discussion as it is by far the closest EVE-like in the market right now.
Understanding Albion Online
In Blue zones, ALL manners of PvP is stricly disabled, even if you flag yourself for PvP, you can NOT attack another player. This is the zone where players start the game in. Those zones, however only have the lowest tiers of materials that can be harvested, sounds familiar?
In Yellow zones, PvP is finally allowed, but if you lose there, you only get knocked out, which means you do not actually die and lose your gears. You merely drop a small amount of money for the winner to collect. The materials are of course of higher tier than in Blue zones, nothing surprising here.
Red zones is where the fun begins. In those zones, you have what is called "full-loot PvP", to us better known as "the entirety of EVE, since... ever". If you lose, you can be executed and have all your gears and items drop from you (and yes, even there the loot fairy can screw you). Red zones, of course, contain among the highest and rarest tiers of materials.
Albion Online follows the EVE formula to a T. This is very much the "Risk vs. Reward" tenet EVE is based upon being applied there.
Except for a very obvious exception:
Their newbies zone totally disallows PvP.
In EVE, nothing makes PvP actually impossible. CONCORD *punishes* PvP but doesn't make it impossible. This is one of the first odd lessons newbies come across when starting the game. This is a core part of what makes people say "Nowhere in EVE is Safe".
Albion Online chose to protect its newbies from Conflicts and Aggression. The dreaded Carebears are free to harvest forever in peace for hours on end without fearing a single gank in Blue zones. However they can never contest a farm or territory that allows one to plant herbs, grow regular or monstrous mounts. They trade safety and the ability to forever harvest for the impossibility to contest territories.
So, who is in the right here?
But if Albion Online manages to grow, and in the very worst-case scenario for EVE manages to surpass it in activity, it will prove that their systems might do a better job at attracting and keeping new players.
In any cases, Albion Online shows that it *is* a viable option, and that even for EVE. They still have gigantic battles, they still have gankers, they are still a PvP sandbox despite having an entire space catering to Carebears. It finally puts the debate of Carebears being the bane of a PvP game to a rest.
High-Sec *could* be the Pacifist zone where we give time and space for our newbies to learn the game and grow in peace until they are fat enough to go out there and make a spot for themselves.
I'm not 100% sold on this option. I think there is a real case in saying High-Sec should be catered toward Newbies, but also it is as much valid to say that Newbies need to be introduced to Conflicts and Aggression as it is such an integral part of EVE.
Now that we have explored the idea of High-Sec being a space entirely catered to Carebears, we can explore an even crazier idea: The Social Corps. Before being diving into this idea we have to discuss a phenomenon and culture that is very much related to it and High-Sec.
The Mercenaries and High-Sec
I have not been in that situation personally, but I can imagine many people started the game this way, and if you are among those feel free to share your experience.
As enticing it might be to start a tight-knit corporation of friends or colleagues playing together, we all know how such an endeavor would end in EVE:
Chomped, Chewed, Spitted Out, and Smashed by the closest Mercenary around.
Mercenaries are among the biggest movers of High-Sec, they define the zone, they define the way you will live in, how you will do it, and for how long you will do so. Ignoring them is a recipe for disaster, as much is just not knowing about them.
The stories of how they move the zone are significant, a notable one that has been presented to me during my time in the WarDec Project was this one:
https://forums.eveonline.com/t/sotiyo-heist-an-escalating-series-of-bluffs/58572
The TL;DR is: A corp that is progressing slowly but surely, an open atmosphere, a vet in search of some thrills, through many Wardecs and Alts a Sotiyo gets stolen.
A classic story of manipulation, espionage, and trickery in EVE, a quite exceptional one too!
Anyway, stories like those show how Mercenaries are central to what High-Sec is right now, and thus also central to its culture and its problems. To better understand that culture and its problems, one just need to look at how that playstyle was created.
The War Declaration System
Mercenaries are born from the War Declaration system, a pretty straightforward system that allows you to stop the intervention of CONCORD (as always in High-Sec, it starts and it ends with CONCORD). You start a War, a conflict CONCORD will not intervene in and that will last for a certain time for a fee. The fee is seen as a way to both create Risk for the attacker and be a self-regulating mechanism, since a wardeccer that starts too many unprofitable wars will supposedly run out of ISKs and no longer generate wars.
The War Declaration system is the premier and sole avenue for Conflict and Risk in High-Sec due to it being the only one that can interact with the omnipotent and omnipresent power of CONCORD. Unfortunately, both on the Conflict part and the Risk part, the system is failing, and failing hard.
The active use of War Decs in the heist example I showed above shows the kind of influence they and those who use them have over the zone, and that at the scale of a single player. The War Declaration has the single and overpowered use of disabling CONCORD, by far the greatest defining force in High-Sec. Mercenaries are riding along the biggest defining force of the zone.
So you have in a zone whose particularity is to house the newbies of the game, whether they'd be friends or family members, or colleagues, them the biggest reason for the zone-defining CONCORD existing, a way to disable said CONCORD and easily denying to the people who need it the most.
So from the moment they start existing as an entity, a corp, that bunch of friends or colleagues become a legit target for the absolute entirety of EVE, including its most battle-hardened and driven players. When those new players get to know about Conflicts and Risks, it's already too late for them.
Remember about that part on High-Sec being Schizophrenic?
So on the Conflict part, the system already has the glaring fault of putting Conflict in the ends of the opposite of its intended population. The Attacker will tend to be someone who has the financial means to maintain a war ISK-wise. The Attacker has most of the control on the duration of that war, as long as they can pay the fee they can keep the war going, regardless of absolutely any factor.
To better illustrate it, imagine someone coming to your door and putting a paper saying "I will come", even if that person never comes, the damage is already done. Now imagine you just moved in the neighborhood, you now have even less reasons to stay as you know nobody there enough to know if that threat is serious or not. Again, that Attacker is more like to not be a Newbie, the group the zone is supposed to cater to.
The War Declaration system is currently the most affecting system asking for the least amount of Effort and, more importantly, for the least Risk. Once the War is declared, the Attacker has complete control on when to come and whether to come, and that while still affecting the Defender. If we were trying to model the situation of the Attacker, it would be a brigand waiting in ambush along the road, a lord can deal with another lord as they know where their holds are, a brigand is like the air, you have no idea where the brigand is, when he will attack, and how to get a hold it.
EVE tries to sell the fantasy to friends and family who join it of space battles between empires and space moguls. Where Corporations vie for resources and territories, and that while fueling the fires of "War".Their current premier system, in the very first zone of their game, the very first that players will encounter, tries to model frontline wars, but actually models highway robbery.
And it does so at the expense of its youngest, most vulnerable players, at the hand of its oldest, aging but most powerful ones.
The War System and Those Newbies
One cannot measure success without a metric, and one both High-Sec and EVE should very much care about is the amount of players graduating into EVE players out of High-Sec.
This is kind of a secret metric as numbers have never been provided by CCP, the only one being that Players who got ganked/shot were more likely to stay, easily the most misrepresented stats out there as we have no way of knowing what kind of attack made one more likely to stay. Myself, I was "encouraged" by that guy who blew me up when I went to mine into low-sec for the first time, but a battle is a very different experience than being suicide-ganked.
So I do not have numbers to say it, but still from my experience interacting with them, from seeing their effects on my corps, from seeing what people say about them, I can say this with plenty of confidence.
The current WarDec system in the hand of Mercenaries is among the biggest bleeder of new players, it is the worst enemy for that group of friends or colleagues that tries to get a foothold in EVE, and participates in making High-Sec the trap for new players it is.
So from that observation from people who share that thinking, came the idea of the Social Corps.
The Social Corps
The Social Corps would be the starting point in the creation of a Corporation. It would have the tightest rules concerning corporation assets and would strictly forbid the deployment of depots and their likes, and any kind of structures. It would have a tax that would not deposit the money into the corporation wallet and it would forbid corp ads and any such services.
However the Social Corps could not be attacked by anyone inside High-Sec.
That bunch of friends and colleagues could have a window of time where they'd get to make their first steps into the game unfettered, accumulating resources and skills. They would be very limited in wealth generation and organizational skills, but they would be compensated by getting to play together as much as they want without fear of interference.
I can already hear some people yelling that this is not EVE, that no one should ever be safe in EVE, that this could not work in such a game. But as I have said, multiple games out there do so and actually prosper from it, Albion Online included, so this is certainly not an alien or unreasonable idea. More importantly, it opens up the game to plenty more people that will finally get the chance to prepare long enough to be worthy of the game.
Plus, this is the perfect avenue to create a way to introduce new players to Conflicts and Risks at their own pace.
Corps could open up securities, features, and permissions to deploy and manage assets as they open themselves up to more Risk.
Want to only deploy a M-structure? You open yourself up to only being a legal target to corporation of Rank X or plus, of size no less than Y. Want to be able to deploy a XL structure? Now you open yourself to any kind of Wars. Same deal with Mission Levels, corp features and such.
We could have Novice Corps, Established Corps, or Mega Corps, each with their own kinds of Risks, Rewards, and possible Conflicts.
That bunch of friends or colleagues could ascend to becoming a capable group, ready to deploy and defend Assets in space and ready to participate in the overall game of EVE.
Plus it would bring a semblance of balance to the power Mercenaries currently hold over High-Sec. One of the repeated points I heard, while on the WarDec project, was that, somehow, the playstyle of 1 single, lone WarDeccer being able to wardec thousands of players was to be protected at all costs and was not in any way detrimental to the game.
As much as one has to make his content, a single pilot being able to send a "I will come" letter to thousands of players and hundreds of corps is too much of a power. I think it is time to ask if this is something that actually deserves to be promoted and protected, especially in a zone supposedly housing our new players. It's maybe time to end the Schizophrenia.
Conclusion
High-Sec is clearly lacking in purpose. It is a zone that tries to cater to the most experimented of pilots and yet is the primordial ground for the newest of our players.
What is its purpose? I would say it is to be a breeding ground for new players to discover the game in peace, in order to prepare themselves and get themselves ready for the coming world of Conflicts and Risks awaiting them.
For that to happen, we have to rethink the place from the ground-up.
Maybe make it a zone where conflict is forbidden?
Maybe introduce corps that allow social groups to float around together as a school until they are ready to take on the sharks?
The ideas might be crazy, or simply make sense, but they must all go into the direction of giving High-Sec a purpose that is healthy to the game.
Although, even if the zone manages to be a place where newbies can engage the game in peace, it still has to be able to lead them into Conflicts and encourage them to fly and fight together!
One of the reasons Mercenaries are so prevalent is that, outside of mass-wars, is that not much in High-Sec is worth fighting for. The zone clearly lacks in Conflict Drivers especially if you are that corp of friends and colleagues we talked about.
In the next post, I will introduce my deeper thoughts on Conflict Drivers in High-Sec and their link with the WarDec Project.
Until then, Stay Golden!
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