Crime & Punishment

There are many players, myself included, who prefer to go for fights that result in the most win for me and the most loss for my enemy. I'd much prefer to hit my enemy in a way that presents as little risk for me as is possible.

This is due to playing a character who could care less about lofty and silly e-bushido and internet-spaceship honor and really only cares about winning.

Also, if you look at this from a RL standpoint - what military commander would really have a meeting with his generals that went something like this:

"Well, men - after our scouts and intel gathering units did their job, we see two possible ways to attack our enemy."

"The first is to take advantage of our enemy during a situation where they are mostly defenseless and will present little risk or loss of units to us, and has a nearly 100% chance to resulting in serious damage to the enemy."

"The second is to attack our enemy during a time that they are 100% combat ready, probably aware of our intentions, and will result in heavy losses on both sides. However, it will be a very honorable fight!"

I'd go with the first and also posit that any military force that really felt the second was the best move is really bad at what they do :)

It's funny how that never falls the other way, that the declaring party needs to put more on the line. A lot of wardecs you see in this game are just combat capable pilots paying a small sum of isk to be able to attack smaller, newer or non-combat oriented groups. A lot of the complaints are "make wardecs unavoidable! They must fight!" but what will that really do? All it will do is give a lot of people yet another reason to quit or to get pushed into big blue blocks in null, since staying in highsec would be suicide unless you were intending to get involved in empire PVP.

It's generally a good game design to have an area where people can start and can feel safe, so at the very worst they have a safe haven to fall back on. If NPC corps got nuked and wardecs became more severe and less avoidable (like most wardeccers seem to ask for), that safe haven would be gone, so if people lost most of their stuff they can look forward to going to a place they can lose the rest.

At the end of the day all it would create is EVE with less players. I'd rather have people floating around highsec shooting red crosses and occasionally getting involved in one thing or another than have the population cut down by an utter intolerance of people who want to just play in safety. It's not like a highsec PVE carebear affects my ability to play in any way, so why not just leave them be?

rofl!

A fast look at my killboard will show that I have no fear of losing a ship. It will also show you I could care less about my k/d ratio or killboards in general - but being in the top 100 players in terms of ISK destroyed on a character that is like 7 months old is kinda lulzy and a lot of fun :)

I simply try to pick battles that I will probably win, and prefer using good planning and effort to find fights that I will probably win. I use every aspect of game mechanics that I can possibly use to give myself the biggest advantage that I can possibly give myself.

And yes, I enjoy winning fights and have a lot of fun when doing it. I enjoy losing fights as well, but if you give me the choice? I would prefer to win rather then lose. :)

Without going into the philosopy of the new order, or what makes them tick, let's step back and look at a couple of broad generalities as postulates:

1. People like to win.
2. People hate to lose.

If I have the opportunity to maximize my winning and minimize my losing, I'm going to take it. If that means that I bring a 10 - 1 numerical advatage to a fight, then guess what - here comes the blob. Guess why we have blob warefare? Because it dovetails very neatly with postulates 1 and 2 above.

If we accept that 1 and 2 are true, then it becomes very clear why people dock up and "turtle" when they get wardecced. They have assessed the strategic landscape and decided that not losing is the best "win" they can get, especially if they know you're not having any fun hanging around outside waiting for them to log on and do something foolish.

Add to all of that, the simple fact that some people are very risk averse, which in turn means that they place a higher value on not losing than they do on trying to win. Smaller corporations in highsec also tend to be made up of one dude's alts, or real life friends who are, frankly, not in the sandbox to play with anyone but themselves (that may have come out wrong).

When you find a corp that will fight you it's because
A) They know they can stomp a mudhole in your ass due to out of corp alt support, pure numerical superiority, or some other advantage that's hard to counter,
B) they have more to lose by not fighting,
C) they are convinced they can win enough to make the outcome more or less equally painful, or
D) they are the rare breed that cares more about having fun in a game than "winning" it.

People are comparing picking easy targets for highsec war to attacking the enemy when they're unprepared. This would be true if the enemy was ever prepared.

A better comparison would be I'm angry and want to fight someone. I could punch this guy that's about my size but he might hit back... Wait there's a 7 year old girl... She should be an easy knock out!