Player Features and Ideas Discussion

TL;DR Having nearly every kill and loss perfectly catalogued in a publicly accessible database, while certainly a cool idea on paper, has had a subtle-yet-devastating effect on EVE's gameplay. Remove killmail APIs.

To be clear, I am proposing the removal of the killmail API, not killmails.

The gamification of gaming is one of the worst things that has happened to gaming in the last decade or so. Things were very different when I started playing EVE in 2003. One game I played alongside EVE was the original Call of Duty (long before it had become a yearly franchise). At the time, there was no mainstream persistence of stats beyond any given round. There were, of course, some exceptions to this, but nothing like today's Battlelog or eve-kill/zKillboard.

Players could choose whether they wanted to make a round a "personal best" or "knives only". In my opinion, the most interesting game content has always come from the metaphorical "knives only" round. Thanks to persistent stats, much of this gameplay has been replaced by stat padding (gameplay that prioritizes KDR over any and all other considerations).

Many kills in eve are hard-earned, and it's important both individually and as a group to have a record of these kills. We have in-game features for this. Having nearly every kill and loss perfectly catalogued in a publicly accessible database, while certainly a cool idea on paper, has had a subtle-yet-devastating effect on EVE's gameplay.

Removing killboard APIs will give players the freedom to generate content without having to worry about said content needlessly going on a permanent record that can then be held against them in the future. It's fairly well agreed upon that players are too risk averse in EVE, and killboard APIs are a big, if not biggest reason why this is the case.

* * * Story time with Carm - optional reading * * *

A few months ago I was in Waffles. For the most part, this is a really great group to fly with in EVE, and I would recommend them to anyone looking for good fights provided you can stomach the PL culture, which is not for everyone. When I wasn't logged on as Carm, I was logged into my incursion fleet (RIP btw) running Vanguard sites. Even after giving ISK away to many of my friends, there was still a surplus left over. I used this surplus to build hilariously expensive PvP boats.

My favorite of all of these was the aptly-named Purgemobile. (See, no killboard required!) I say aptly-named because I was kicked from the corp after dying in a fire with my waffles at my side. (And making 40 newbies of the brave variety very happy that day!) I liked my waffles, and I'm pretty sure most of them liked me back. So why did I get the boot? Because of the culture that exists as a side effect of sites like zKillboard. Without killboard APIs, players would feel more free to cut loose and ultimately generate more content for everyone, and corps wouldn't feel the need to cull players that don't emphasize killboard efficiency.

+1

It is indeed fun reading Gevlon's posted kill mails and statistical CFC analysis pointing out how stupid Goons are, I agree that KMs are horrible for the game from both an Intel and a gameplay perspective.

Pointless? Not at all. The idea is not to keep EVE happenings a secret, but rather to avoid a situation where a single mega-database deters players from flying what they want.

P.S. It was my pleasure to provide 40 BNI with content that day, and would do it all over again.

Full support from my end.

I think I'll put this in my sig at some point in the future

In response to you and Mario though, I agree that metagaming is unavoidable in many cases. But not in this one. All CCP has to do is flip a switch.

Like you said, we all like to win, so it's hard to fault people for using tools that are so readily available. Sometimes it's on players to be responsible for curating their own gamplay, but in this case, I think this is a matter of developers controlling what information is and is not available, hence the post here in F&I

So, just because people know what they can expect from certain other people and decide to or not to engage in a fight, which causes the certain other people to not get their easy gank, is now a problem as PVPers can't get their easy content any more and all the local smack it's in vain. EVE players used to accuse other players of being dumb and unintelligent when they die to obvious traps or just derp, now they are accused of being too informed and mindful of their opponents. Whatever one does, it's never satisfactory to those who want to have it easy.

But for the sake of the argument, let's remove the API. People are still so eager, exited and dead keen on posting their losses and victims that next to nothing is going to change. You will still see the drops from the seemingly vulnerable Proteus on your station or gate. You will still see the losses from the other side to find out their fittings. Other than that, if there's no kill mails, players will start using and/or develop tools to meticulously report and write down on people flying through their space and make these tools available either only to their kin or after some time to all of the informed player base. What then?

+1 this solely on the grounds that going knife-only in BF2 was one of the greatest terrible things I ever tried in that game

Next step would be removing wormhole mapping tools.

Edit: +1 op. I think this has been suggested but I want EVE to be less double click on him and find out if he is bait.

Pretty much this. I have lost ships that have literally made my CEO's weep on comms (which is amusing, by the way), but I've never been kicked from a corp over it. Maybe it's not killboards that are the problem, but the people you surround yourself with.

OP made me think about something that happened to me in the last couple of days. Specifically, after reading a post on Reddit I discovered Tripwire. For those unfamiliar, this web site and others like it available via in-game browser permit mapping of wormhole connections and storage of Cosmic Signatures already scanned, so if they're seen again they need not be re-scanned. Signatures repeat on a per-system basis, so if you see a sig that represented a relic site last time it will be a relic site again. Collect a big enough list of system connections and sites and you can zip around wormhole space cherry picking the locations that make the most ISK, or you can safely patrol a series of systems with Highsec links for newbros to gank.

As soon as I read what Tripwire and its competitor siggy were designed to do, New Eden wormhole space shrank from a vast collection of unknown and unmappable systems with great risk and reward to a slightly esoteric version of lowsec space with the same site farmers, gankers, ISK-crazy industrialists, etc. I actually don't want to use Tripwire myself, but not using it puts me at a huge disadvantage relative to other players. Not using it is why I've spent hours at a time scanning down systems to find only gas sites and more wormholes because the folks who have maps have cleaned them out.

So I'd like to support OP's statements here as well as make a request for some better handling of wormhole space signatures and the links between wormhole systems. Change them so they're not as easy to map and track.

Wormhole space should be wild and difficult, not a guided tour through a grocery store.
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I have been living in WHs since weak one and let me tell you even b4 all of these mapping sites we have been mapping wormholes with simple flow chart programs and Excel sheets API just made it easier for people testing the waters of J-space