Crime & Punishment

Dare I ask what you agree with? This guy is nuts. Sometimes I think you argue for the sake of it.

I maintain that setting a starting cost of 50m for decing a huge mistake. All this really accomplished was raising the barrier to entry for small entities, particularly those with young players, to get involved in hs PVP, especially against other small entities. Instead, these players are forced to group up in order to lower the cost-burden for hs PVP, which results in (generally) worse wars for everyone. Rather than having players learn to cope with wars and get introduced to PVP by a small group they have a chance of handling (not to mention are encouraged to settle slights on their own), they end up growing in size until the larger PVP groups notice them. Then their first experience is against someone that probably has higher sp, experience, and in some cases numbers, that they rarely have a real chance against, which is generally detrimental to their attitude towards PVP. Beyond that, it's honestly pretty boring from a PVP perspective, which is why BAW pretty much only goes after mercs and other PVP entities these days (generally unless contracted).

Leto I don't think anyone who reads these forums would pigeonhole you as someone purely interested in farming rage out of mentally unbalanced people in highsec. The Thunderdome event is a glorious example opportunity for players to engage in honorable PvP of a sort rare in the game. You wear alot of hats in relation to this game I believe.

However, there has always been an undercurrent of behavior among certain elements of the highsec PvP/black hat population that I found unsettling. It's not limited to CODE, or even to EVE. It's this sort of childish, trollish glee that some people on the internet seem to take in seriously screwing with the guy on the other side of the keyboard, beyond an acceptable level, from behind the shield of virtual anonymity. They want to make people lose their **** and then whistle innocently while their target goes off like a bomb. The bonus room fiasco, and the fact that much of the rest of the minerbumping community seems to think those bans were unjustified and refused to call folks out for stepping over the line, speaks to what I think Lucas and Herzog are talking about. And I can't help but draw a distinction between a player like ParanoidLoyd who runs an extremely successful and extremely quiet ganking for profit operation, and those who view nonconsensual highsec PvP as first and foremost an avenue to elicit the most extreme possible reaction from the victim. Loyd may know that the idiot who just got his plex tanked iteron blapped by a thrasher is livid, but he doesn't seem to feel the need to go fishing for rage content. But there seem to be alot of players who tap into this larger digital trend of straddling the line of acceptable behavior in an effort to really **** with the guy on the other end. For them, winning EVE is finding the mentally/emotionally unstable players and winding them up and watching them go boom. I admit, as a frequent minerbumping reader, it can be highly amusing. But I also believe that sometimes lines are being crossed.

Obviously there's a huge difference between ingame griefing and out of game harassment tactics like doxxing and swatting at the most extreme end of the spectrum. Swatting is not a joke at all; here in the US it is very possible that such an act could result in death or serious injury. There's a number of stories about officers executing people's dogs and tossing stun grenades rather haphazardly in situations where such things are completely unwarranted. Swatting is something the law enforcement community is now sadly very aware of, and prosecutors will come down very hard on anyone caught engaging in this sort of "prank." You will see serious prison sentences as idiots convicted of this are made examples of. It is really a sociopathic use of emergency services as a deadly weapon. But as I said it represents the extreme edge of a popular internet subculture centered around pushing people's buttons from behind the shield of digital anonymity. There's far, far too much effort put into figuring out precisely where the line is beyond which such remote button-mashing will begin to result in tangible consequences, and carrying out shenanigans just barely on the safe side of said line. And from what I've seen, it looks like this game may attract a number of individuals who enjoy such pursuits and are offered ample opportunity for virtual fuckery via the potential for real loss in time and effort which is a hallmark of this game.

And the issue with wardecs is that they're utterly pointless. There's literally no upside to being part of a large PvE oriented corp in highsec, and anyone competent will use the tools at their disposal (neutral alts, corp rolling, avoidance of highsec) to render a wardec irrelevant. So you end up just culling the dumb and lazy.

My corp was just decc'ed by PoH and we never saw them. One of our guys lost his mission boat to a hub camper, aside from that there was no interaction whatsoever because most of us make income on alts or in lowsec and we have members with neutral frieghters.

I ******* wish they'd brought a fleet to Sujarento but I know better. If we didn't dunk them Snuff or SC would; hell the whole warzone would turn out to shoot highsec mercs in shiny T3's and you can be damn sure Mr. Santo would be waiting to collect some HG Slaves on the way home.

So having gone back and read that blog entry...the guy is a bit verbose and over the top at times but I don't necessarily disagree with him on wardecs. All the roleplay'ish nonsense about bribing being CONCORD aside - he's saying the same thing I've said repeatedly, albeit in many more words. The same thing I said in my last post here. Wardecs only affect people who want to fight, or who don't understand how the game works. There is no reason to run a highsec industrial corp other than vanity and to provide others with targets.

Well, not completely pointless. They provide a mechanism for dealing with structures in highsec. I know **** all about industry so I'm not sure what industry/structure related activities require one to be in a player corp but you could easily run a one man shell corp for structure purposes and not attract much attention - it's the big, dumb corps full of news and casuals which aspire to be communities for highsec PvE and some vague pretensions of learning PvP which catch the permanent wardecs. Because nobody actually enjoys bashing structures. Mercs will do that for ISK but it's boring as hell. It's the decs vs masses of mechanic/meta-game ignorant miners and mission runners and perpetual highsec dwellers which provide the content and the hilarious kills.

Wardecs provide an avenue for consensual PvP free from crimewatch/sec status consequences, a means for structure removal in highsec, and a means to engage in near-unlimited nonconsensual PvP with the dumbest and worst players in the game. They have zero effect on people that understand corp mechanics and have alts.

Is that statement incorrect?

The oft-maligned blue donut simply denotes the fact that much of the player base specifically the veteran player base rich in SP and assets have elected to form ever larger cooperative groups in order to reap the advantages conferred by that ever more concentrated power and wealth to provide themselves with an optimal gaming experience with respect to content and risk levels. These groups are hesitant to engage in all out wars against one another because doing so basically becomes a time and effort endurance test and runs the risk of incurring huge losses once again representative of great quantities of time and effort. So the majority of their content consists of engaging smaller entities which can't challenge them on a strategic level, can't compete at the cap/supercap level and thus can never pose an existential threat. The big groups don't want to fight each other and the smaller groups don't want to engage in fights where the outcome is guaranteed by the damocles' sword of supercapital escalation. This leads to stagnation.

What about that one?

Because we want the game to be easy right? Just herpdederp mission running and mining. Fun times.

This argument is fallacious because it is appealing to yourself as an authority but you are an unqualified authority. This isn't meant to be an attack but rather I'm trying to get you to see that you have spoken in a few situations on this forum where you made a generalization about your argumentative opponent that was not based off of personal experience.

I have been on both sides of wardeccing.

A while after joining the game my first alliance got wardecced by Brick Squad (Or however they liked to spell it) and camped us into station in hisec with a bunch of ships including Kronoses, T3s, HACs and Falcons. After being camped in for an extended period we more or less said to hell with it and undocked in a small fleet of mostly tech 1 ships and mopped the floor with them. Killed a proteus andsome other things(been a while) and even got a high grade pod. Keep in mind this was an alliance that was composed of mostly characters less than 6 months old. After that they stopped bothering us.

First thing I did after leaving nullsec was fall into the trap of thinking "oh hey hisec wardeccing should be easy" and came to hisec to for The Dickwad Squad and go fly around for pew. The first thing I noticed was that dec assists were free.... And when you send out wardecs you generally get some mercs piling on your decs (See: Marmite(<3)). This is also just one of the difficulties. As a deccer I have also had my enemies set up some pretty brilliant traps that resulted in me getting scrammed by an Orca (Never a good day).

Naturally the counter example to this would be to join a large hub camping group and do easy hub camping but you will find that there are a lot of very competent groups that will hunt you down and kill you. (See: Break-A-Wish). I was actually flying with Adriel Malakai and his scoundrel band of **** swaggling swashbucklers when we teamed up to kill Marmite. We tracked a target in Amarr before he saw one of us and JUMPCLONED to Hek to try and escape us. To which we then flew to and promptly killed his Hictor.

The ever present aspect about this game is that it is difficult. It doesn't matter where you are trying to look for trouble. Trouble will always come find you instead.

I would like to challenge you to make your own wardeccing corp and try to fly around a bit and get into some trouble. Or maybe even join another group of 5 or less pilots that already do wardeccing. You will find that hisec isn't always the theme park people proclaim it to be.

No, I argue where I have an opposing opinion, and you're not gonna bother because you have no interest in a reasonable discussion, you've made that clear. So with that in mind:

Wars block content where content previously existed. Enough said.

Please tell me what content wars block. Mining OP's?