EVE General Discussion

I understand the point you are making, I truly do. I also agree with pretty much everything you have stated. However, I disagree with the implication that being a PVE-focused player on Eve is "doing it wrong". My feeling is that a player who is most interested in the PVE content is still "an Eve player". Such a player is entitled to express their opinion, even if that opinion can be paraphrased as, "I like to PVE. I wish people would just leave me alone to play the game as I like to play the game." I don't see anything wrong with that sentiment, and I understand where they are coming from. The reality is, of course, that these people will probably, at some point, be confronted with PVP of some kind. While the philosophy of Eve is to allow this to happen, CCP has taken quite a few steps to throttle this kind of activity to an exceptional level. Eve players who have no interest in PVP are likely to only experience PVP in a small doses, and I believe this policy does help with new player retention. Sure, these players will never be "100% safe" in Eve and demanding 100% safety in Eve is futile. Good. If that wish was granted, I imagine it would make Eve far more boring.

However, I think a case can be made for how "integral" PVE is to Eve as well. Pretty much every single Eve player was introduced to basic game mechanics through PVE. The tutorial missions, followed by mission running for NPC corps, are invaluable in their teaching role, at least for most players. It's where people learn the UI, fitting basics, ship movement, etc. Unless you are joining under the tutelage of other players, you will likely learn the basics of Eve in missions. People who rant and rave about "PVE Carebears", insult other Eve players for their choice of play-style, and demand that high sec and low sec be replaced with a 100% Nullsec environment have no more validity than a recently ganked miner demanding that high sec be made "100% safe" for them. Considering how many Eve players started with the PVE content, and the number of players who do nothing but PVE (consensually), I would bet that the number of players who have never experienced Eve PVP is larger than the number who have never experienced Eve PVE.

Also, yeah, I had to laugh when I first heard about Incursion rats camping gates in Null and "nonconsensual PVEing" nullbears to death. 10 points to CCP for the irony there.

Eve is a nice balance of PVE and PVP.

And just who said that?

I'll give you a quick hypothetical.

Fleet A gets stomped
Corp members need ships
Ships that are shipped in by haulers
Carrying ships purchased in a market hub
Which a market guru made a billion ISK on
Because he had a spy in the losing fleet
Ships he originally bought from an industrialist
Who had the blueprints researched by a buddy
Who almost lost the BPCs to a gate camp
While, at the same time, a mining group collected the ore needed
Which lost an Orca to The New Order
After which they had the ore refined by a missioner
Because he had perfect standings with an NPC corp
.....

We can go on like this through many levels. THAT is what changes in the Eve universe, the actions of thousands of players. We are the story of New Eden, not a script dictated from on-high by the devs.

In fact, every time the devs get into the storytelling thing, stuff ends up ending badly...

This is a good post, but it doesn't real address the point he was making, which is best captured in the last part of his post.

Again, though, a good post on its own anyway.

If you make PVP more rewarding you have to make PVE less rewarding, no?

If you make riskier pve (higher pvp influence and effects) more rewarding, then you have to make less risky pve less rewarding.

I'll reinforce that I'm speaking in generalities here, and there are numerous exceptions. You can get extremely rich at the top of the PvP food chain, but it doesn't scale well, and those at the bottom are better off not participating at all.

It changes who controls which resources. It creates a ton of demand for ships and ammo, sov structures. It breaks down and builds new supply lines.

It rewards winners and punishes losers.


More hollow than running repetitive scripted missions in hisec?


That is exactly what happens, but you need to leave hisec to see it.

Does WAR make players leave Eve? Yes, it does. So does the UI, the lack of direct control like a plane sim, the overall complexity, the first death when a 4 day old newb decides to explore lowsec and ignores the warning. War and PvP are the foundation of Eve, without them I couldn't sell ships and modules to suicide gankers and miners or in RvB locations etc. I profit from war, and so does every other player in the game, even the ones that mindlessly chew rocks all day and then sell them on the market.

Changing the way PvP and war works in highsec as suggested by some posters, to protect the newbies, is a ridiculous thing to ask. It's not perfect by any means, no system ever will be. CCP will certainly revisit it sometime, but I don't see the basic mechanics; especially the one where if you're logged in you are subject to the risk of PvP being inflicted upon you, changing at all.

Ways to avoid a wardec

• Anybody can remain in or drop back to an NPC corp to be immune from a war, that's poking a whole different beehive with a stick so I won't go into it.
• Close and reopen a corp: wardec drops. As far as I know this was introduced a while back when *carebears squealed loud enough, and is still considered a legitimate move. Instant wardec nullification, and hilariously used by James 315 to point out a weakness in the wardec system.
• Stay under the radar. Shitting up the forums is a sure fire way of grabbing the attention of the rogues who make life "interesting" for *carebears and like to see consequences for such things.

* I'm a carebear, a poor one . I shoot crosses and everything. Sharing that name with the likes of some of the posters in here makes me ashamed to be one. They need a new name, or the likes of me and Omar do.

I'll think you'll find the carebears you're talking about would be very vocally opposed to ANY increase, period. I for one would like to see it sit no higher than it's current level. We're considered carebears because we do a lot of PvE and basic industry, but make no mistake, many of us are well aware that PvP is what drives the game, and certainly don't believe in making highsec any safer.

People who play Eve and don't want to take part in war already have an option, stay in an NPC corp, pay your 11% tax for immunity from war, and suffer the very occasional suicide gank. You're not prevented from forming a specialist interest group within it to do things with like minded players, one of the NPC corps even has an unofficial PvP wing going on roams. Downside you don't get POS's and stuff.

For the rest of us there is player corps, our social scene is better than NPC chat, we get POS's and stuff to play with, we lose the immunity to war and the tax that pays for it.

Confirming that if you want PvP in an NPC corp, The Scope is the place to be.