EVE General Discussion

Balanced PvP in a structured environment is pretty much anathema to EVE.
Fights aren't supposed to be fair, they only end up that way either due to poor planning or purely on accident.

In truth the advantage almost always rests in the hands of those who take the initiative. The burden of survival rests on the shoulders of the defender. Constant vigilance and situational awareness enables defenders to AVOID the unwinnables more often than not. The imperceptive and the lazy suffer, as they should.

It's a cold and unforgiving place, and that's what keeps so many of us playing there. It's not supposed to be fair, it's supposed to be dangerous.

Red vs Blue has been popular, because?

Because people like battleground games, like LoL or chess.

PvP is never balanced, even chess is biased towards white. Because white gets the initiative.

The aim is be unbalanced, is to build asymmetry in your favour.

The easiest way to do that, in an unrestricted battlefield, is gank fests.

Yay.

What players seem to like though is an even start. Five a side seems popular, on a variety of maps.

The even start is a skill test. How good are you at tipping the odds in your favour from equal beginnings.

In the broader context of EVE that even start isn't as easy to get, because players could have over ten years of progression, on the character opposing you, if it's a one v one. And that's another aspect altogether not without its own appeal.

Instanced 'fair fights' would result in a veritable dreckstorm of shptoasts of butthurt players screaming like manatees that just discovered the outboard motor. 'I spent a thousand hours in the simulator and crunched my numbers on EFT to the tenth point behind the decimal. There's no way I should have lost! REIMBURSE ME NAO!'

All because it just doesn't work like that in the big black.

Neutral logi, off grid boosts, drugs, batphones, log off traps and simple superior PLAYER skill make many of the things one would experience in a controlled environment null and void.

Math is not enough. Fast reflexes are not enough. Having a cast iron strategy is not enough.

The controlled environment would actually do more harm than good by fostering the illusion that this is how it is, when it is not. And this is actually the bright side of the equation... the dark side is players that would otherwise be interacting with the rest of the greater world around them would instead be spending all their time in pointless simulations that only engender false notions of how things work once they finally exit. We're talking about willful indoctrination of wrong-mindedness over time, resulting in catastrophic inability to cope when confronted with how things actually work.

To boot, all that time spent doing this crap is time that said players could have spent figuring out how things really work.

TL:DR? No. Nope. NO.

Eh. We put new Devils in a T1 frigate. We show them some stuff. Then we send that T1 frigate after a battlecruiser and see if they were listening. If they were, they usually win. If they don't we encourage them to try again. The lesson isn't about numbers or firepower, it's about understanding how the game works. It's also a confidence boosting issue as well. Once you've jacked a battlecruiser in an incursus you open your eyes to the possibility that you can do even more, despite being new.

RvB also shows that there's no need to hardcode it.

There's no need to, RvB already satisfy the demand for it. Hard-coding it would depreciate the value and uniqueness of RvB.

You'd also get people joining just for that aspect of the game, and then rage quitting when they realise that it's not immune from the actions of other groups of players. If people want battlegrounds that are immune from interference then they should either play on SiSi or play a game that offers such a thing; it has no place on the TQ server.

You already can, join RvB. Log in, undock, explode or be exploded, reship and repeat.

I think the point Jonah has been driving at, which I happen to agree with, is that we create the content in the game while CCP simply provides us with the environment in which to do so.

The onus of teaching newbros how to survive in the sandbox lies on our collective shoulders, not CCP's. Hardcoding in an environment that exists ostensibly to teach will engender misconceptions as to how things are because of it's artificial nature. It's far better to take a more organic approach involving more experienced mentors who can take the time to show the inexperienced how things really work, including the exceptions to the rules.

Software simply cannot pull that off.

If only all newbies had 3+ years of in game knowledge when they started. Then they would be able to do just like you.

If anybody could make any number of alts for free the economy and everything else about the game would collapse overnight. What would limit you from making hundreds of mining alts, scouting alts, cyno alts, incursion alts, etc? to me this is the biggest issue aside from CCP's finances.