I wrote a series of posts (1, 2, 3) about null being unprofitable and fundamentally an altruistic endeavour. However I did not go far enough. I went to the official forum recruitment thread to advertise the supercap-billion project of mine and found more than 100 threads less than 2 days old. Most of them are "we take any warm body" kind of recruitments. If sov-null is such a great place where everyone wants to get in but only the best is accepted, why is every living body who bother to go there are greeted with free skillbooks, ships and "friendly helpful atmosphere"?
The PR slogan is "EVE wasn't designed to look like a dark and unforgiving place, EVE was designed to be a dark and unforgiving place". This is an outright lie. You might call me inexperienced in null, but I know highsec and more or less won the highsec-EVE by gathering enough money to keep my 2 highsec accounts run free over a decade. Highsec is a nice, beautifully lighted (screenshots all over the internet), friendly and safe place where you can do various things at will. OK, if you do something obnoxiously stupid like autopiloting a Kestrel with PLEX-es or peaco*cking in a 30B ISK - 20K EHP Tengu around, you'll be robbed, but keeping the basic rules of sense will guarantee a totally loss-less life. Zero losses means whatever you make is pure profit. If you are a skilled trader like me, that can go to 50B/month. If you are a very casual mission runner like my girlfriend, you'll get 200M/month but as long as you keep logging in, your wealth keep growing. It's easier than World of Warcraft, as you don't even have to re-grind your gear after every expansion. Also your wealth doesn't diminish in the sense of "everyone else have it" because others get it blown up. So in highsec you just gather wealth and play as you wish until you get bored. There are no losses, no bills to pay, not even the inflation-threadmill like in other MMOs.
How could EVE upkeep the PR of being dark and dangerous while actually being more casual friendly than WoW? At first by the cries of idiots who did autopilot a Kestrel or lost a 30B Tengu. This group is tiny, exactly one Kestrel was destroyed with PLEXEs in the history of EVE and kill reports of 20B+ overpimped subcaps show up 2-5 times a year. But since the RMT value of that Tengu is over $1000, that warrants serious forum crying from the victim and spectators.
Secondly by focusing on sov-null, which is just as misleading as World of Warcraft marketed with Tol Barad and battleground videos. Sure, you can go there and blow up enemies but neither you have to nor most players ever do (numbers thrown around between 66 and 80%). Even those who don't belong to the highsec population can be in low/NPC null, not participating in large fleet warfare. "EVE is a cold unforgiving place" is just as true as "The Planet Earth is a dark and unforgiving place where people starve to death and kill each other over mad reasons." It is technically true as Somalia and Afghanistan are indeed such places and indeed part of the planet. However it's irrelevant if you live in the "highsec" of the civilized countries.
Now the question is why should anyone go sov-null/WH? To PvP? If that's your thing, RvB is waiting for you. If you want to "grief" people, take the fight to ones don't want it to, just press that "enlist me" button on the militia screen and off you go blowing up LP-farmers. If you want even more "elite" PvP, pirate corps of lowsec are waiting for you.
What can null/WH provide that highsec can't? Please don't say "high-end ore" as I can buy them in Jita. There are enough people mining them. Easier way to get riches? Maybe, but at the cost of losing it all due to corp theft, war or a well-placed hotdrop on your jump freighter. More PvP? You can PvP all day in RvB, FW or random lowsec systems.
Supercapital ships maybe? Sure, but why are they so interesting? The original design was interesting: titans could doomsday whole supbcap fleets, supercarriers could kill titans, dreads could kill both but were vulnerable to subcaps. But after devs got fed up with the forum cries of "OMG my 1 day old Rifter pilot was killed by someone who plays for years and put in thousands of hours, its unfair" and nerfed Titans, they disappeared and with them their natural enemies, the supercarriers and dreads. They all devalued into jump bridges and structure grinders. But if you have some strange perversion involving huge spaceships, the best course is trading in highsec, going to Chribba, buying one, cynoing it to some random lowsec system, sometimes log in with a scout alt and if you see no one in local, log in the titan and watch it.
Hanging out with "friends"? Why, you can't do the same doing highsec missions or mining? Or even better, by logging off a video game and meeting real people?
My purpose of going to nullsec is a weird out-of-game one: I want to prove the superiority of a-social thinking. However as long as highsec is perfectly safe (unless you really-really fail) and profitable, I see trouble figuring out why would a player without serious out-of-game motivation leave highsec (lowsec for PvP-ers). Please note that any kind of nerf to highsec income is irrelevant as it just slows down the progress but don't stop it being endlessly positive and safe.
Am I missing something? Is there something special in sov-null and WH that makes it a good choice? Does it provide something to a player that high/low can't? If you live there, please enlighten me! Why are you there? If you are a blogger, I'd be grateful (and throw links) if you'd explain it.
I have a nasty conspiracy theory here: null was never meant to be an endgame. Players were never meant to go there en masse. It's just a PR tool to make the awesome promotional videos and hype. The playground was always the purposefully overpowered, safe and very easy highsec. It is a genius design as it allows incompetent and asshole players to endlessly, safely and alone progress while keep on believing that they are doing so in a very competitive and dangerous environment. This way the player keep on playing rewarded by the false positive feeling that he belongs to the elite of the MMO gamers while actually he is so dumb that a mediocre WoW guild would kick him or such a terrible person that no one would play with him.
What about Hulkageddon and Burn Jita? I think these were unintended by devs, created by two "evil geniuses" beating the system. But they won't happen again. Mining barges are redesigned to be ungankable, and after looking to the TEST and Goon accounting, I'm sure that Tech nerf they will make them completely unable to do such actions ever again. They'll be happy if they can pay their sov bills. CCP couldn't stop Burn Jita and Hulkageddon without losing face but they are doing good job preventing either from repeating. By the way, is it a coincidence that the masterminds of both gank events were suspended from the game?
Wednesday morning report: 124.0B (2.5B spent on main accounts, 1.9 spent on Logi/Carrier, 1.5 on Ragnarok, 1.1 on Rorqual, 1.4 on Nyx, 1.3 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).
