EVE General Discussion

I would say more than 99% won't engage without them believing they have a higher chance of success than the other person.
I would like to say I'm in the <1% but it's not really by choice. I just don't really know when I stand a chance or not.

But surely all those mid slot scan boosters are totally redundant?

I mean, I can see the use of the other stuff...

Though...

If you go and make that thing, why only put Core and not Expanded probe launcher on it?

Heh, I have same "problem" but my excuse is "frakk it" attitude all R1FTA share (although unlike them I honestly don't know what I'm doing).

agreed - definitely no arena required.

There just needs to be a way to discourage the current cowardly tactics of blobs and camping en mass and give people a reason to ship up and go out and fight either solo or in small gangs without breaking the bank or losing what has taken an incredible amount of boring grind to achieve.

That is generally my point.

Lots of solo and small gangers play eve too - why just benefit the game for the isboxers, donuters and plex buyers?

Yes yes we all know ccp needs to make money but its taking all the real fun* out of the game.


*fun you can have without a speadsheet or plex printing machines.

Spending more money only guarantees victory up to a point. A Formula 1 car will lose a race to a Prius if the Formula 1 has 3 wheels of different sizes and the fourth one is made of solid gold. Even if it uses all the appropriate parts, it will also lose a race to a Prius if the driver has no idea how to drive a Formula 1 car.

Another parallel is how dangerous IEDs are in situations like the current Middle Eastern conflict. That is because they are extremely cheap to make, yet they can destroy millions of dollars of top-of-the-line equipment, and lots of lives with it.

When there is any sort of "realistic" conflict (which Eve aspires to), spending more money on equipment runs into a point of diminishing returns, and eventually runs into a point of flying something so expensive everyone wants to have the "honor" to destroy it. Because of this, finding the right amount of ISK to spend on a PvP setup, and what that setup is, is integral to PvP. If you want to be reckless and charge at everything you have even a minuscule chance of defeating, it doesn't make sense to waste money on T2 or faction fittings, because you'd lose so much money. If, on the other hand, you plan to only take fights you are 99.99% sure of winning, and have fallback solutions like a standby Falcon, you can afford to blow billions on a single ship to squeeze every last bit of effectiveness out of it, knowing you are not going to lose it easily.

Consider the following questions: what is the least amount of ISK I need to spend to accomplish this particular task, be it PvP or PvE? What ship/modules are most appropriate for this? How easily can I get hunted down? Knowing that, is the price OK? Are the diminishing returns from spending more on the ship still acceptable in the context of how quickly I may blow up?

Yes, certain ships are going to be unfeasible to be flown in high-risk PvP. A blinged-out Bhaalgorn is a terrible solo ship, and only shines in fleets. Is that really a problem, though? If price translated into effectiveness and one 10 billion ISK battleship could take on thirty 300 million ISK battleships, does that mean it should take 300 people to take on 10 people in super-expensive battleships? Just some food for thought based on the OP.

tl;dr: Eve doesn't scale linearly in almost any aspect. Manpower and tactics trump ISK spending in most cases. Does that really need to change?

So, am I completely off base here, or is the TL;DR actually something like this?

"Waah, I can't use my purple epics because someone would kill me for them and I can't afford more of them"

Is that what anyone else got out of this? I can't manage to interpret it any other way.

86.42% of all stats are made up at the time they are written.

My faith is no longer lacking.
Thank you, sir.

Do you by any chance still actively participate in our prison yard shenanigans where shivs made of toothbrushes and few friends can do wonders? Or that is just a reminiscence from good old times when CCP rules didn't prevent you from messing up other people space pixels?

This entire thread is full of fail

Totally agree, there is no fair fights and should not be, and especialy in Eve it is very much about determining if your odds are reasonably better when deciding to engage... Intel in that sense is most often in favor of the defenders, which makes sense.

I think the OP point though is that the game mechanics are too much tilted toward numerical advantage, and once escalation happens the only outcome possible is loss, regardless of your fit/skill/.... There is no game mechanics, currently, to make piling up bodies more challenging.

All dangerous space in Eve is under a constant player created intel system. This is fine, but it is also the main cause why any shiny ships will immediately attract a lot of sharks coming for the kills, most of them simply to put their own ping on the killboard at nearly zero risk to them once the frenzy has started.
The game design mechanic should just make blood frenzy a little bit more difficult to coordinate to give the prey some kind of chances to escape once the frenzy has started.