Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hi all, I wanted to express some ideas on how to make pvp contact more viable, certainly for myself, and i speak for all folks in our small corp of real life friends.

PVP right now feels nonviable, just purely to the cost associated. To set the scene, we're principally a high sec corp who delights in PVE and various industrial activities. Most of us have clones of around 60 to 90m SP.

So the problem is this. PVP has many associated risks, which is all good. The problem is the LOSS associated with taking these risks. Risk is risk, but when the loss associated can be valued against your real life pocket, things start to taste a lot more sour for me.

Simply put, real life cost > fun.

I put together a small vba calc that effectively took Jita PLEX price vs CCP PLEX price, and calculated a real life ££ value of any unit within the game. In this case roughly £1 of real life cash for 32.3m isk.

What got me thinking was at one point, bringing my Ark back from a NULL system, I narrowly escaped losing it, luckily the attacking ship momentarily disabled their scrambler, gave me enough time to cyno back to the system I came from. Ark is worth about 6.1bn isk, so if that guy had succeeded in wiping me out, I would actually have been mugged of approx £190. That's a HUGE OUCH. 190 quid.

It got me thinking, I'm putting around £10 on the line every time I take the Damnation out and put it at risk. A couple of quid every time I take my Anathema out scanning in a wormhole, and on that note.. £25 to £30 value of a medium POS laying about for someone to shoot in a wormhole.

All this adds up.

I certainly would not be happy getting an Avatar destroyed, coming in at an impossible to believe £1,520. I have no idea how I'd cope with such a financial loss from a game.

ANYWAY, I do digress somewhat.

TLDR; getting robbed of any amount of cash is a beyatch.

So whilst we are NOT risk adverse, we are loss adverse, and I wholly admit that, who would play a game where a credit card is submitted, and every time you loose a ship, or a pod, a life, maybe crashed pixel cars in to a wall etc, you get charged 50p, £1.50, £10, £50, £200 or £1500 depending on its value? Certainly as hell not I. Yet in a way, we do it in eve, well at least that is exactly how I view it, as well as a growing amount of our corp members.

I have two proposals to try to mitigate the financial stress of experimenting in NULL or PvP in general.

Firstly, ignore PvE side of this, getting a concord gank or any NPC kill against you wouldn't count.

#1 PvP only insurance.
Just a basic like for like replacement, modules and cargo excluded. Still drop them officer / faction mods for attackers to be rewarded for the kill, but, give the victim or fight loser a loss mitigating option that will see him come back for more of the action. I cannot stress how much this would influence me / us to keep poking our heads in LOW / NULL looking for PvP. By all means cap the value at 2bn isk, so you cant just keep bouncing back in your caps, or titans.. but anything up to BS hulls should be able to be replaced like for like rather than insuring your new shiny and getting a fraction of what it's worth. I would love to send a fleet of battle-badgers into LOW / NULL for nothing more than giggles see how far we get. Which brings me neatly to suggestion number 2.

#2 Combat clones.
I for one just cannot keep paying out 14m isk every time I set foot into NULL for a new medical clone, bubbles are everywhere and are just an unavoidable part of SOV space. I propose a purposeful combat clone. A small fee sets you up with a dumb-unit combat clone, which for all intents and purposes is a temporary-life-span clone, that is connected to your medical-clone via remote control, you still get all your bonuses associated with your active med clone, but without the bite of losing them if you're snagged. Be it a similar idea to the robot clones from the film Surrogates. (link incase you're not familiar with the film - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrogates_(film) ) In this case a combat clone has a maximum of 24hrs life (or whatever), after this time expires it simply ceases to exist. You get a substantial warning system that clone expires in 1 hour etc, similar to down time. In which case you have to make your way back to a station to 'shutdown' said combat clone or renew the life of it again for another small fee, interesting twist that if your combat clone shuts down in the middle of combat, your ship simply floats, pilot-free in space for them pirate dowgs to snoop. The idea being that you do not have to re-sub to a medical clone if you're podded. This will ultimately help toons with a great deal of SP actually returning to active pvp without the heavy and unnecessarily punishing clone costs.

Just these two ideas alone will absolutely justify a return back to fun and games outside of HIGH SEC for me and I'm pretty sure for many others as well. I certainly would like to hear any thoughts, and possible counters for these ideas. I'm always up for healthy banter if it can influence me, and many others back in to the combat grounds without feeling like the punishment of loss overwhelms the need for excitement.

Cheers!

TLDR : getting robbed sucks, solution: PVP insurance, and combat clones.

Here is my take on isk and pvp losses.....its only game money. Especially at higher sp level this is a bad excuse to avoid pvp.


Billions of isk in the wallet and grinding pve is not what I call a worthwhile eve experience. I used to pvp, now stuck in empire since rl schedule sucks ass. I was tbh happier losing millions of isk in 0.0. I am actually eyeing quick and easy RvB at this point as it fits my like maybe 1 hour of game time or so I get a day here or there.

Or if you can't make your plex buys with pvp losses....its only $15. I paid for my sub in 0.0 many times. for me I wrote it off as a cheap thrill. For me to go out I can spend about 3000 yen (roughly $30 US) jsut in cabs since I don't drink and drive. So grand scheme of things...eve was a much cheaper activity to kill time when I opted to stay home back in the days I lived in 0.0.


Clone loss....eventually you get better at clearing pods. Even out of bubbles. One time in 0.0 ship go boom in a bubble in a larger scale fight. I go through the motions of clearing pod out of bubble and to my amazement...I cleared it. Pod was locked late and it got to hull damage but not tackled so off it went into warp. For 8 systems after there I was hauling ass in a smoking pod home. But....I made it home. Sidenote: unless changed pod repairs are free and no user intervention. i was auto repaired when this happened.

Tl:DR...its only isk. run t1 if cheap/almost broke. they fixed up t1 cruisers and frigs nice. hell you can argue the virtues of condor over some inties at this point as an example.

Losing stuff is part of the fun. It's just a game and not real life.

You should consider your assets lost, the moment you buy them. Write them off at the latest when you undock.

You should get away from converting in-game ISK into real life currency. You may be able to buy PLEX and sell it for ISK but there is no way to do the reverse without getting banned from the game.

Therefore ISK has no real-life monetary value even though real life money has a value in ISK (which fluctuates daily I might add)

If you can't afford to PvP then oh well, I'm sorry for that, but 14mil is about one level 4 mission's worth of ISK payout and that's just from bounties and mission reward. In Incursions it's 2 Vanguard sites with about 7 mil left over and that should only take you 10 minutes or so.

If you can't afford that you shouldn't be PvPing.

Essentially your entire train of logic is flawed. Nothing here says you are selling plex to finance your PvP. If you are not then there is not real-life money conversion to make since converting ISK to real money gets you banned. If you are making all your ISK with selling PLEX then... stop? Seems kinda simple here.