EVE General Discussion

how on earth did an EVE is dying thread make 50+ pages without being locked?

This kind of thinking seems sound and reasonable at 1st. It just 'makes sense'.

Until you put it in action. Back when faction warfare started, there was no 'reward' for it beyond some useless ranks and medals. We (FW participants, including myself) begged and berated CCP into giving us 'rewards' for pvping and better rewards for PVE so we didn't have to leave FW to isk up doing lvl 4 missions and later incursions. Wiser players said this would be a bad idea, and we ignored them.

And because of us and our shortsightedness, CCP ruined FW, stuff ti with rewards and watched those rewards skew EVERYTHING. People started having alts on all sides of FW to 'manage' conflict, FW missions turned into one of the historically most unbalanced things ever and destroyed several markets that other missions runners across New Eden relied on. The spirit of FW died a long time ago.

The reason for this is that PVP is it's own reward, and introducing 'rewards' introduces reasons to NOT PVP but rather to scheme and manipulate (and not in the good 'EVE way" either). Rewards changed the entire focus of FW. I've been back into FW 6 times over the last 5 years and it just makes me actually sad (as much as a video game can), because the 'metagaming' isn't about beating the other side and winning the field, it's about putting isk in your pockets so you can actually do non-fw things that are actually fun.



TL;DR, while your idea is a well meaning and even sensible one, history shows that following it would actually be a disaster where PVP is concerned. The rewards for PVP in EVE are the ability to stroke one's ego, and sometimes territory, and that's enough, pvp rewards just brings in non-PVPrs to game the system.

For PVE, CCP may be on the right track with Drifters, we can agree on that.

Reading your post, and the post it addressed, I was struck with a thought.

Ill try to articulate it.

EVE is a PvP game.
All player action has repercussions on all other players, whether near or far, immediate or delayed, big or small.
Having said that, ship destruction, in particular, constitutes only a small part of that entirety, of said PvP, and of interaction in EVE.

My thought, was that perhaps, as you point out, ship destruction in and of itself, as something which results in relatively little reward, has become overstated. Attempting to systemize its occurance, problematic.

Is it not reasonable, that PvP (as ship destruction), should be incentivised as a means to support other concurrent forms of PvP and interaction from which greater net benefits are gained? That the violence is a necessary (though itself unprofitable) as a means inorder to clear the way of opposition, so that other forms of PvP can generate the actual benefit?

I think this has always been the premise and underlying purpose, but maybe CCP and we, have forgotten that for what it entails and how it could direct design decisions.

Im trying to formulate that though combat PvP is and will remain a means to an end, its incidence of combat PvP simply for combat PvPs sake, is and should remain essentially unprofitable, unless it is attached to and commensurate to some other form of PvP from which greater benefit can be gained.

Am I making any sense?

This is happening right now, ofc, to a degree.
In HS with wardecs and CODE like entities (unfortunately with no recourse to trade hubs), LS with intense territorial aggression, WHs with various mechanics, Null through Sov, FW nominally through node control (Poorly, crap farm mechanic).

But perhaps more can be done to incentivize the other, non-combat forms of PvP, so that violent aggression becomes more of a means to an end, rather than a means onto itself. In terms of player retention, meaning providing more incentive for entitites to want to include players engaged in other non-combat forms of PvP, as the source that provide the profit/benefit to the actual combat PvP players, once those combat PvP players have cleared the way of the opposing violently aggressive players. Combat is its own reward for excitement and action, but the fiscal/opportunity payout comes from other forms of non-combat PvP therafter.

Something more akin to a real world model, where a military arm defends when necessary, and aggresses when expedient, so as to secure the opportunities of non-combat PvP arms to provide benefit to them, and themselves.

Yes, EVE is a PvP game, through and through.
But as is shown, violence in and of itself, as one facet of PvP, is essentially unprofitable.
So the motivation (aside from excitement, killboard and glory) has to come from some other resultant net benefit.
So that when you go to war, its not the war itself that pays you, you are paid when players move in and develop the space you have cleared, to commensurate benefit. This provides more motivation and impetus for ship violence, to the result of more fights. This provides more motivation and impetus for non-violent PvP, to the result of more player activity not only for these players to move in and capitalise, but the also combat capsuleers that cleared the territory.

I understand but remember, when it comes to quantum systems your intuition is cheating you. You have to throw out everything you think you know about reality. Delayed choice quantum eraser experiments are even more nuts.

Btw: Feynman was quite entertaining on `why' questions. But I don't think it's possible to understand 20th century physics without first reading Plato's Allegory of the Cave. His insight is deep for someone who lived 2,500 years ago.

please explain or detail what other forms of PvP you've been thinking of.


In FW we lose the ability to dock in stations that are not controlled by our faction ... is that something you'd see as a good example of what you propose ?



Isn't that what 0.0 was / used to be about ? You take space with rich moons and good ratting opportunities to fill the warchest. Then you spend your iskies on conquest or defense as appropriate.

Not sure I understand your post ...

...where is that vid of eve vs wow....

Some, although the punctuation arguably makes it less so.

There are two issues at hand with PvP profitability. One is what forms “profit” comes in; the other is what players will do for profit.

The second point is probably the easiest one to make: any system for profit will be pushed to its breaking point, and any system ostensibly revolving around PvP can be inherently abused by the removal of the “versus” part; i.e. if both parties in what is supposed to be a conflict between opposites instead becomes willing and cooperating participants. It's basic prisoner's dilemma game theory, but without the information gap that creates the dilemma. Such a system will most likely be set up on the premise that two players will want to fight over a prize, but the system breaks down if both players are aware of the rules and just game the system to share the prize instead. If you get reward of 1,000 points of X for spending 1,000 points of “effort” (in whatever form it comes) to kill the other guy, that's an awful lot to go through compared to if you and the other guy can just decide to alternate in getting 1,000 X while expending 1 “effort point”. No chasing, no outsmarting, no breaking the defences of the target; just a free “win” to cash in the rewards. And then you swap sides and do it again. Much of the FW manipulation that has happened after they fixed the loot pricing loopholes has followed this pattern.

The immediately obvious way of solving that is to make bypassing the competition not worth it, but that immediately runs the risk of making the whole thing worthless. The alternative is to ensure that there is some unavoidable connection between the “effort” and the reward, but such a system is an absolute ***** to design.

The first point, in a way, is a third answer to that problem: shift the rewards to a form that somehow penalises those wilful losses. The question then becomes what on earth such a reward would be, but more than that, it also becomes a question of for whom is it an actual reward. Different prizes are valued differently by different (potential) competitors. Killboard stats may be enough for one guy, but not the next; gross loot value — i.e. hitting “the big one” — may be the one true measure for one, but not the next; net ISK influx may be all that matters for one guy, but not the next. And that's just for combat. Now multiply it with all the kinds of PvP that can happen at the same time, and you've got a real headache. So how do you choose a reward that actually incentivises the type of conflict you want to see?

Maybe that's where the answer really needs to be found: with the question of what the preferred outcome is — only then can a suitable type of reward be picked, as well as the means of getting to that reward.

One way out is to make the gameplay itself the reward. To pick something out of Guild Wars 2, if you climb all the way to the top of a mountain, and then all the way out to the edge of some precipice, you might get... an achievement. Something with absolutely no in-game value. And yet, I know someone who was so obsessed with collecting them that she scoured the entire game world in search of them, stopping only when she had them all--and of course, by then ArenaNet had expanded the world and introduced more, so off she went, leveling her character as needed.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that one of the things that has made EVE so intractable as a design problem is the insistence that rewards have an in-game material value. Many of them necessarily must or the economy collapses, but there's no reason to be restricted to it.

One recent example: TCUs now do nothing but put your alliance on the map, in the most literal sense. Is that enough to get people to online TCUs? Of course.

"EVE is a PvP game"


Eve is a sandbox where players create the content. This can include pvp, pve, and anything else in-between.

For you it may only be a pvp game as that is what you choose to do in the sandbox. There are players who only do pve and some that do both. And that is what they choose to do.

Isn't large portions of delve empty?

Also, don't look down on pos fuel bonuses