EVE General Discussion

A fair fight in EVE generally means that someone screwed up.

Then again there is no such thing as a fair fight, as I used to try to explain to crybabies like the OP back in my RVB Director days, even if you have a perfectly "even" fight where both sides have the same number and class of ships one side of the other will have more skill or higher skill points or better leadership or better fits, or will simply be luckier.

EVE PVP has consequences, those consequences can be minor (a few minutes ratting to pay for a frigate) or massive (See Battle of Asakai) but there are consequences. Because of this players generally try to avoid loss. In general the trick to PVP in EVE isn't having the best ship or the highest number of skill points but rather how to get the other guy to stay around and die. That's the point of bubbles and points and scramblers

Gate camps happen because a gate is a natural choke point where people have to go through. This creates an opportunity to create a combat situation. Outside of SOV warfare there just aren't many other similar choke points.

The thing is that with everyone trying to avoid combat that they don't feel confident they can be victorious in, you have to have a way to force them to fight. Thus you gate camp, you hot drop you bait and counter bait.

Basically the goal in PVP is to either force someone into combat by giving them no choice (Gate camps and hot drops) or make them think they have the advantage when you in fact are the one who has the advantage so they will "force" you by giving you no choice (bait, counter drops logoffskies).

Remove gate camps and you will effectively remove the majority of small gang warfare from the game. Remove hot drops and you remove most of the risk to ratting in null as most of us have good enough intel channels that neutrals are seen coming from many jumps away. Hot drops provide a means for people to catch the inattentive null sec resident by allowing a decent sized force to enter into the system fast enough to actually engage a target rather than having to manually fly though a dozen hostile systems being reported in the intel channels the whole way there.


I propose that the OP's ship loss and thus all his rage was not a result of an imbalanced mechanic (hotdrops) nor to his inattentiveness but rather to his insistence in belonging to an alliance that uses rules of engagement that are not compatible with this game. There is a reason why NBSI is the dominant policy. Precisely because of the situations such as happened to the OP. He was caught because of the time it took him to look up and see if the "neutral" was in fact neutral, under NBSI this is not necessary as you can assume that anyone who is not friendly is in fact trying to kill you.

Great post. It's nice when someone puts in the time and effort, and saves you doing the same.