A Gun Has A Safety And People Still Blow Off Their Own Foot

OK, listen up.

I'm sure a lot of people who take great pride in overcoming the infamous EVE learning cliff will be frothing at the mouth at today's Dev Blog:

SAFETY SYSTEM
The Safety System is sliiightly more complex. Masterplan explained in an earlier blog that, in Retribution, there will be two levels of illegal behavior: "suspect" and "criminal". The safety system ensures that you cannot commit illegal behavior without deliberately switching off your safeties first.
Your new safety system has three states: enabled, partially disabled and disabled.
While ENABLED, you cannot commit any kind of illegal act
While PARTIALLY DISABLED, you can commit acts that will get you a suspect flag, but not those that would get you a criminal flag
While DISABLED, you can do anything you like, up to and including criminal acts

"This is dumbing EVE down!"
"The will prevent people for paying for their own stupidity!"
"This is making EVE less real and more carebeary!"
"Go back to Hello Kitty Online!"

And so on and so forth. Its all rather predictable. Sigh.

Yes, this will be the death knell for can flipping in high sec, if its not already dead from Orcas. Yes it will prevent people from getting CONCORDDOKKEN'd accidently. And having done that to myself once I will miss that.

But the fact of the matter is that the people who most often end up suffering from self inflict mistakes are people who do not know better. People who have started the game and don't understand all the ins and out of aggression, and CONCORD, and criminal acts. The current game mechanics actively punishes the newbies without giving any reasonable amount of guidance and time that any normal human being needs to learn a complex system.

The safety is needed to allow people time to adjust to this very different and punishing game. If you can't see that then you are too far past the cliff and on the plateau and simply think that if you made it others will to. And some do but far more are turned away from this game forever because its too harsh in that first impression.

Personally, I want to see people getting killed that know the risks and the game and the insane interface and still manage to die. Besides, think of all the hilarity that will still ensue when those experienced players who should know better still go off and do absolutely retarded things. (Hat tip to Jester for the killmail)