EVE General Discussion

So you have no proof, or are you saying loss is irrelevant?

In any case, if you have no proof of a loss, or believe losing is irrelevant, then where is the risk?

If there is no loss then there cannot be a loser and everyone must be a winner. Is this what you are saying?

You lost the sale and the profit.

Someone else got it, as a result of competetion with you in their interest against yours, and due to interacting accordingly.

You lost. They won.

All of this is supremely ironic when put up against your post sig.

Well if a declining in numbers thread turns into a what is PvP and what is PvE thread, I guess people don't think there's anything wrong with the numbers.

Any "EVE is dying" thread eventually settles into wonkery about how best to revive the game, which involves understanding the game first, which is apparently very hard for some people, and so here we are.



I understand the definitions, I just don't think they're useful abstractions for understanding a game like EVE.

Are missions PVE? Well, the game creates an environment for you, terrain to navigate and enemies to shoot, so yes. But you also get LP, which you can use to buy things from the loyalty point store. The smart money is on selling those things on the market, and whoops! Suddenly that's not PVE anymore.

That's why I think it's more useful to see environments as terrain in the game world, rather than insisting on applying a model that makes more sense in completely different games.

This is where I actually disagree and say that it is still competitive PvE.

You do give your items to a broker, and you do pay the broker and the station fees and taxes. This makes it an interaction with the environment. The item also disappears out of your hangar and is no longer in your possession, but in possession of the broker. Now the broker is giving you a guarantee for returning the item in case of an unsuccessful sale or to pay you the requested amount of ISK.

All your further interactions at this point are merely to instruct the broker on the price. Other players can not see you, they do not know who you are (until the after the sale) and you do not have to be present for the sale to occur, you do not have to be in the same system and not even logged in. One can actually unsubscribe from the game, but your orders will remain in the game. I just mention this here to point out how remote and disconnected a player can be in what some want to describe as "Player versus Player".

When then other players look at the market do they not see you. They see the broker who is holding the item for you. They are only looking at the environment in no other way as a miner who is looking at an asteroid. When you then fight over the price can you not target the other player. At best can you instruct your broker to change the price after you have seen the prices of all the other brokers.

In the end can no one cause you an actual loss and without it is there no actual risk, because it is the environment that protects you from losing items. Just like two miners who fight over the same asteroid. One of them will make the final mining cycle, while the other will have an empty cycle.

No matter how much one imagines to be fighting the other player in marketing do two miners, who are fighting over the same rock, not actually fight each other but engage in competitive PvE.

Where is the PvE?

No, it really doesn't. That is just a UI abstraction, not any kind of activity; much less any kind of interaction since the broker in question doesn't even exist.

At no point are you interacting with anything other that other players. There is no “E” to “v”.

…none of which matters since neither loss nor risk has anything to do with what defines PvP.

…except that there is no PvE, just two players directly competing over the same resource. You are effectively saying that a tug of war is not PvP; that they're really fighting the rope in their attempts to make it be on their side. This is, of course, complete nonsense. The rope is just a tool the players use to — very directly — compete.

When risks, losses and gains are irrelevant then what is the point of having a competition?

And that's actually another reason why I don't like "PVE" or "PVP". When you think of playing a PVE game, what's the first thing you think of? Honestly, when you think of playing a PVP game, what's the first thing you think of? Not EVE in either case, most of the time. The giant, world-eating PVP game is League of Legends, which is nothing like EVE. The other big names are mostly lobby shooters.

So on the one hand you get your people who want instanced content, but on the other hand you get people wanting 20v20s and fair fights--most PVP games have teams and matchmakers, after all. The terms are inherently counterproductive when applied to EVE, as can be demonstrated by the fact that every thread that uses them rapidly decomposes into incoherence.

True enough, but short of launching “EVE” as an interaction template on the same level as “PvE” and “PvP”, those two are still the ones that will be used. Of the two, PvP is the one that describes what EVE has to offer. It's just that it's a far more fundamental version than the conditional variants offered by your regular PvP fare.

But sure, that creates a similar set of problems too: we hear complaints about unfairness and unmatched engagements — stuff you might expect from conventional PvP — almost as often as we hear about the PvE confusion.

Are you being funny or you really think that ?