Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I support this.

+1

I support your support

It's always faintly amusing to see people saying that other people's way of playing should be removed from the game.

Your whines are as unbased and as unlikely to happen as the constant whining of ganked miners.

I for one vote on "Purge everyone who wants to purge people who don't play the way they think the game should be played"

The current killboard API came about because players created player-run killboard records that allowed you to post your own kills, but these were easily spoofed since there was no API verification. The current API is the result of requests by players to have this sort of functionality. If you don't like being judged on your killboard record then don't hang around with people who pass those sorts of judgement.

I also think you're making an unfounded assumption when you say that killboards are a big part of the reason players are so risk averse. Most people don't care if you lose something small, and if you lose something really big most people hear about it well before they see the kill-mail. Every player has their own level of risk aversion and their own reasons for that risk aversion and I'm not seeing any hard evidence that Killboards or kill API's are a big part of the reason for this.

Plus if these are removed the option opens back up for people to spoof kills again, either to boost their own ego or to ruin someone else's reputation.

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 Thanks to persistent stats, much of this gameplay has been replaced by stat padding (gameplay that prioritizes KDR over any and all other considerations).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.