Warfare & Tactics

Posting an idea you haven't thought through much on a throwaway NPC-corp alt. Yep, par for the course on the Eve forums.

I think this might be a troll though, wrapping your post up with "if it's good enough for WoW, it should be good enough for us" is a bit over the top.

I losing a ship is to scary for EVE players, then alternatives are possible.

The Incursion could "complete", Sansha's monsters successfully abduct the citizens and returns to Null-Sec happy little monsters. No rewards for you!

wow kids don't have to farm new epics when they die. just sayin'

No, just when the next tier of content comes out and their gear becomes outdated.

Then after doing this 4-5 times they release a new expansion and make EVERYTHING irrelevant and force them to start over again.


That said there is an isk sink in Incursions, it's called the CONCORD LP market.

True. But repair costs, feast costs, and potion costs are substantial. There is a real time/gold cost to wiping. While there is no/little time or gold cost to face-rolling Incursions.

Bots don't do semi-difficult task very well.

Take this care bear **** to the appropriated forum please.

As much as I hate to admit this, I partially agree with the OP. Before you stone me to death, hear me out.

I haven't been playing long, on and off for a couple of months (7mil SP). But I have yet to lose my ship in PvE in EVE. It's too...prescriptive, too predictable, too safe. Just bring a ship to a mission with proper tank, and you have absolutely nothing to worry about. If rats do X DPS and you have X+1 tank, it is mathematically impossible for you to die. Kinda wrecks the whole "risk vs reward" thing.

By comparison, I have died in PvE in just about every other MMO I ever played, including sandbox ones. Darkfall? Very easy to buy it in PvE if you're not careful, aggro is all over the place and spawns get pulled in huge groups and can swarm you. You can also turn a corner and end up face to face with a minotaur and get 1-shot. Same with Mortal. Even in Pirates of the Burning Sea, which I like to call "Baby EVE" you can all too easily die in a mission even with a well-prepared and appropriate ship, just because a lot more depends on actually controlling the ship there, compared to EVE.

In other words, I think I do agree that PvE in EVE, at least in my experience so far (L4s and some fooling around in Incursions) does not conform to the whole "risk vs reward" mantra. There's virtually zero risk, and quite decent rewards (if you can manage to squeeze 2k+ LP/ISK conversion at the store). Heck, some missions can be done literally AFK with a decent setup. Is this the risk game?

And yeah, I get that you can make more money is riskier places. But I'm just not sure if the rewards are worth the risk, compared to zero-risk-high(ish)-rewards of Incursions in high sec.

EDIT: And since I probably will be hunted down like a dog anyway, I might as well say this - even in WoW, first time I played, I died quite a few times. I vividly remember going into caves with spiders and bears and getting horribly slaughtered by respawns, runners bringing help, chain-healing mobs and other nastiness. In EVE, I've never even come close. Your average trash enemy doesn't chain-heal, don't run for help, doesn't drain your cap, doesn't use drones on you, etc., etc. It's just not challenging. Most missions simply toss wave after wave of ships at you.

Wouldn't EVE be much better if missions in PvE felt like you were actually fighting another player? Where you'd have to actually work for the kill? Rather than just blow up hundreds of hapless frigates MWDing straight at you?

Yeah, shouldn't really be in this section.

[quote=Shaen Vesuvius
pointing out some contradictions in your reasoning
[/quote

All true, but it doesn't change the fact that PvE exists in EVE (incursions, missions, plexing, ratting,etc.), and that it brings in a lot of cash (as per recent price index dev blog), and bulk of it happens in high sec (last time I checked, 60% of players were living in high sec). And PvE is very, very simple with almost no danger involved, aside from an odd wardec or suicide gank and is related to PvP and not PvE

That's why I said I agree with the OP, at least partially. Risk vs reward doesn't apply to bulk of PvE income in EVE, because risk is always near zero for most players. While in most other MMOs, even the "really easy" ones that I won't name, PvE even at its most basic level has a very hefty chance of failure

I'll give you a SWTOR example, it being the last MMO I tried before coming back to EVE. It's an incredibly easy game since every player gets an NPC sidekick to tank/heal/dps alongside them. In some cases it's even possible to go AFK in the middle of combat and still survive. However, starting at approximately level 6 (roughly 30 mins into the game) you start encountering group quests that require 2+ people working together. Really easy to wipe, doing those. The very first 4-man instance you get access to around level 8, very distinct possibility you'll wipe at least once if you are even slightly sloppy. Later on, late level 20s, you start to get group quests where you have to assign targets and maintain strict crowd control, or you WILL wipe almost guaranteed, even if you do everything aside from control perfectly and with a well-selected mix of classes. A few more levels in you even have to rely on line of sight to deal with some pulls. And class-specific quests are downright nasty, quite a few people would wipe quite a few times on a boss before they would work out exactly how to take him down

And this is trivial stuff, low-level PvE content. Even so, most people die at least a few times by the time they get there. Meanwhile it's entirely possible to find a player in EVE that's been doing PvE exclusively for months and months and who has never lost a ship (in PvE). I'll even go as far as to say that it is the norm. PvE just isn't dangerous since you know exactly what's coming, and what it can do, and what you can do to stop it. Zero risk, sizable reward

I totally get that the game isn't about PvE, but let's be honest here, with the addition of Incursions it's rather obvious that CCP means for PvE to be a rather large portion of the game. And PvE could be a lot more risky, a lot more challenging. If missions had fewer ships coming at you, but they fought smarter, I thing the game would benefit greatly

For one, missions and ratting and all that would not be nearly as boring. Also players would be forced to actually learn to fly the ships and use all the tools at their disposal rather than just go AFK while their Drake is crapping FOF missiles or Domi is sitting on a pile of drones doing all the work. We might actually end up with semi-competent PvP-capable pilots after newbies do a few months of PvE to make some money to work with, instead of barely-conscious couch potatoes like me.

It's all relative.

Back in vanilla WoW (early Spring 2005), I was doing some MC as a warrior. And the cost of a wipe was not trivial at all.

First, it was a 40-man raid. Tank/healers die, everyone else dies, guaranteed. You can't just warp out like in EVE. A wipe is a wipe, 40 people dead. When was the last time you saw 40 people dead in PvE in EVE?

Second, it happened more than once. Yes, with an excellent group of very well geared players who were totally 100% on the ball it was less risky. But even so, from time to time you'd have something weird happen that would wipe you. Good example being Lucifron, who came with two guards that cast rain of fire (AoE attack). People had to run to avoid it, including healers. Which was fine, if they kept you more or less topped off. But due to it being random, sometimes the second rain of fire from the other guard would come down on the place people ran to when escaping the first rain, forcing them to run again. Combine that with a possible knockback and line of sight issues, and it was possible to lose the main tank due to just bad luck. And then it's a wipe, 40 people pushing up daisies.

Third, repair costs weren't trivial. Yes, it's not as bad as 2-3 bil in EVE. Then again, what is 2-3 bil in EVE if you can make a few hundred mil an hour? But back in vanilla WoW days, sometimes you came out of the raid with totally broken armor, weapon and shield. Plate armor (heaviest, worn bu warriors and paladins) also had the most hitpoints, and repair cost was based on those hitpoints. Meaning cloth (lightest) cost less to fix because it had less points to begin with. As a result, it was not uncommon to end up with a 30+ gold repair bill. And in those days, 30 gold was not chump change. That was hours and hours and hours and hours worth of farming to make up for it. And that's not counting consummables, which were expensive as well. Fire resistance potions for Ragnaros? FOURTY people popping four of those over the course of the fight, for just one boss? That added up to a pretty penny. And then something would go wrong, a bad knockback or something, and it's a wipe, thank you, come again.

And lest we forget, armor and weapons - and especially the SHIELD - took damage even if you didn't die, just based on use. As in, you pop Shield Wall (100% block chance for a few seconds) while being hammered to a bunch of enemies, and your shield will take a minimum of 10% durability hit just from that. It was not uncommon for some people to have 2-3 shields in their inventory to make sure they can do a full run. And repair bills did add up.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that PvE even in WoW was a heck of a lot more dangerous, challenging and expensive than PvE is currently in EVE. In fact, there's absolutely no comparison. No matter how good your gear was, no matter how good the players you were with were, there was always this element of uncertainty which could easily lead to 20+ people dying. Like fighting Ossirian in AQ20, sometimes he'd just punt you in a totally unexpected direction, and a sandstorm will come down between you and the healers, and it's curtains. Too bad, so sad. In EVE it doesn't really work that way. People can be totally sloppy and someone dies, but even so the rest will escape, it's not a guaranteed death of the entire fleet.

And it's funny you mention 30 seconds to rebuff. Haven't played back in the day, have ya? Back when you could only cast PW:Fort on one target at a time, and it cost 18% of your mana? Yeah, try buffing 40 people in 30 seconds, I dare ya! :P

Bottom line, I have to disagree with you rather strongly there. High end raiding in WOW back in the day, significantly harder and more expensive (relatively speaking) than any EVE PvE, with considerably more risk.

EDIT: One last tidbit before I go - EVE is "risk vs reward"? Well, reward in EVE, when it comes to PvE, is very predictable. In WoW, there was risk, but reward was entirely luck-based. You could raid MC all summer and never see the item you need drop. Meaning months of work, months of risk, countless wipes and ZERO reward. Now, which is the "hard and unforgiving" game again? Oh, yeah, and no insurance payouts, not even for newbie armors.