EVE General Discussion

TL; DR: Why do you run small gangs when there's no point in it? Edit: Except for OOG reaons like fun - just ingame reasons like tactics or profit.

Ok - I love small gang 'warfare' in Eve - I think it's one of the strongest points in the game, gameplay-wise. Warfare where individual skills and knowledge about the game matter, rather than the mere capability to ctrl+click primary and hitting F1.

Having that said, I've never run any recently.

Partially, that may be contributed to me being bored with unchanged mechanics in years, partially to bittervet-syndrome, partially because they have become even more pointless the longer the game progresses.

There's hardly any profit to be made, there are no strategic goals to be achieved by running small gangs, except demoralising some scrubs.

Anything in 0.0 involves structure grind, which small gangs aren't particularily good at, followed by a timer, which will give the opposition plenty of time to form up the biggest blob possible.

Of course you may catch the occasional drunk ratter (heh - bots don't get drunk). And there may be others looking for fights just for e-peen (KMs), but otherwise, there's no single goal to run a small gang gameplay-wise (except for fun, but Eve is pretty bad at rewarding fun at all).

And no - I don't want instanced pvp in complexes or some terrible crap like that - just anything meaningful that can be achieved with a small gang - I don't talk about taking sov here - that should involve huge fleets all the way - but being able to deal any damage doing thousands of little stings and softening an alliance up with e.g. raiding their moon-mining arrays may get Eve's warfare out of its apathy.

I take a few weeks off an "win," EVE, come back and loose another bunch of frigate hulls.

It might not be the wulfpax (I run with 3-10 pilots on average) you're referring to, but we bounce from various stations in NPC null regions and do find fights between lop-sided ganks and getting stomped by a blob.

I do it because structure bashing is equally pointless for me (I don't have the free time to regularly grind sov anyhow), I don't have to put up with the politics, and it's more efficient and amusing to fly a frigate swam than a bog-standard BC gang which everyone and their cousin is accustomed to. Is it the best pvp avalible to me? I can't really say, I haven't bothered doing much else. When I get bored, I simply return to the top here (skill-training game for a few weeks). What I -can- say is that it does keep me coming back every few weeks, so it's currently better than the other games that could occupy my time.

Thanks for the confirmation - for fun only. Nothing wrong with doing that - kept me coming back and playing for 6 years now.

Concerning gameplay mechanics, it corroborates my view of small gangs being entirely pointless. No profits, no goals.

he isnt talking about frigate pvp where everybody flys with hg slaves and crystals so their puni and merlins are op. hes talkinga bout bc' t2 t1 cruiser small gang.

Great but I am not talking about that ether, I am talking about RvB.

Little bit, that's why I don't 1v1 anyone there.

If RvB pilots really are running with crystals and slaves in t1 frigs because of the no-podding rule, I would wait a bit until the implant killmail feature gets implemented, then join RvB and fc some gangs into an alt in a smarty phoon.

Well, I consider the goal to be the enjoyment of the roam and the engagements. If I needed really elaborate or structured objectives i'd probably be playing a more linear game than EVE, tbh (no offense implied). As far as profit goes, i've actually made out with black ink about as often as i've been podded for nothing but "lulz." My gang is a fairly equitable bunch so we tend to divvy up the spoils of a nice gank. One resonably fitted ship is all it takes to fund a small gang of frigates.

I mean, it's certainly not going to earn you a PLEX + spending money per month like say, camping a nice pipe, or some other low-risk pseudo-pvp venture. But, i'm more than willing to pay my sub the traditional way and do the VERY occasional grind session to live comfortably. The only things I miss about lowsec (my home for the first 2-3 years of my career) pvp are the implants which I can't really afford to get spendy with anymore and related costs of replacing my clone more often. I used to be peeved about the logistics of living far from a decent hub too, but the advent of wormholes took care of that for me.

Overall my playstyle lets me be relaxed, focus on pvp, and keep the truely tedious farming to a minimum. It's not the way everyone wants to play. It's probably not even the way most people want to play who enjoy pvp. But, it works for me and it works my crew. So long as we continue to have targets, I assume we'll be flying this way for many more years to come.

Well, I suppose i'm getting their crumbs. Most of the well fitted ships we snag are from sov holders, but I do get you mean something more lucrative than breaking-even on most roams.



This is not really relavent to me, living in npc space, but for new aspiring sov holders it's definitly a big issue. My chief concern is that the alliance players keep flying worthwhile ships to engage. I think we could make a lot of suggestions about how sov mechanics could be altered in order to make pesky wolfpacks more threatening to the sov holders, but I'm not really qualified to say what makes the most sense in that regard.



I'm a little ambivalent about it. On the one hand, having a subjective reason to go out and harass sov holders would be really great and add a whole new dimension to our gameplay style. On the other hand, if frigate roams became fotm they would loose some appeal to me. Not to mention, the anti-frigate ships and loadouts would be en force all the time. If they do manage to come up with small-gang incentives, more power to them, but i'm not really sweating it either way.

The mechanics are in place for small gangs, combat and recon patrols, and such.

The only things that need to go are gates that drop you off at a predictable location and local.


Make gates drop you random in a system and get rid of local and it's party time.

heh raid black op holes, take out some concept fleets and gank those pos bashing fleets.