EVE General Discussion

OP, you mentioned WoW

How many times did you LFG or LFR and want to kill the asshat hunter who would constantly lose you tanks by pulling too fast, or was just needing on every single thing in the dungeon?

How many times did you want to kill the annoying spambots and trolls?

Here, you can kill the whiners, the mostly afk miner bots, and the rude.

This is not my only reason for PvP, but it is certainly my favorite.

While I agree with a lot of this, there is another side to the coin as well. Making it easier to make ISK also theoretically gives people more time to PVP. In reality, people seem to spend the extra time grinding for PLEX or further pimping their PVE ships.

When I first came to 0.0 it took a lot of time and energy to earn enough ISK for PVP ships. This made losses more meaningful - each lost ship represented many hours of work destroyed. Destroying a ratting Battleship was a big deal - potentially you could really cripple a player for quite a while. Today, destroying a ratting Ishtar or Gila is nothing. Yet I am still happy when I catch one.

For me, Eve PVP has always been a lot like real hunting (one of my other hobbies). The hard part of hunting is not usually killing a deer - rifles and other modern weapons greatly simplify that and make it more humane - it's finding, tracking, and putting yourself in a position to take the shot. I enjoy Eve PVP because it is generally so easy to avoid a fight, so the real struggle is in surprising, baiting, or tricking your opponent into an fight. I rarely catch something I cannot kill, but I find a lot of things I cannot catch. Not all good PVP sessions end in a kill mail. The mental game of keeping track of the relative positions of friends and enemies in time and space, while hiding your strengths, and the maneuvering and fighting your own space ship, is the best PVP in any game I have played.

PvP in Eve, for me, is a mix of being hunter and fisherman at the same time, knowing that there is always a bigger fish than you. It is the thrill of the hunt and the patience required to do a successful catch that does it for me.

Check Zosius blog if you want an example of the kind of thrill I am talking about.

Incentives to PVP:
- to take someone else's stuff
- to defend your stuff
- to purge non-blues from your space
- to protect and defend the miners (without whom, you would have to get all your stuff from two people. They hate you!)

Reasons to PVP are completely different set of answers:
- because that's fun for you
- to make money from looting their wrecks
- huge ego, need to waggle it around on killboards (knobs reason)
- to stop others from making money you wanted

Other than that, you should be making money because if you don't have 5 trillion ISK, you're not keeping up.

PVP in Eve iss being ruined by EWAR and Logi. These two things along with inflation have made players risk averse. If the devs did any research into gamification they would realise they have made decision that go against all of the well documented and well researched theory papers.

Dude - I remember the days when people would engage because it was the need of the gamer to have fun. We would go toe to toe and it would be a battle of who more skill and awareness. Now these days as soon as logi and ewar are in intel the call is to stand down unless the opposing fleet can match them. Thats risk aversion right there caused by logi and ewar.

It says a lot for the state of PVP when the most fun i've had in eve for a long time involved no logi, limited EWAR, and was an organised good old battleship fight.

I think PvP changed when killmails were introduced.

Ended up with players looking for easy kills just to increase the amount of kills they had, bragging rights.

So KMs kind of killed any meaningful reason in MMOs (except for arena style PvP), beyond collecting points and for the fun. Although you soon get bored if kills are too easy all the time, well I know I would.

There's always going to be those that want a decent fight regardless of kilmails.

But as it's an MMO and a lot opted for easy kills because of killmails, it did have an impact on open world PvP.

ISK is definitely an issue. For me I make no isk from space. Well I do sometimes but it's totally insignificant compared to what I make through my station characters doing trading. I have no need for a 'better system' with better anoms or better ores or better signatures, because I don't make isk from those resources.

And when you lose billions and it actually makes you lol instead of sad or angry or depressed or heart pounding like it used to when losing a ship was a big deal financially, then it certainly loses its meaning somewhat. I often engage with less than 50% chance of me winning, knowing full well that it's more likely I lose the ship than I survive, knowing full well that if I lost my ship it would be heavier loss than if I killed the other guy (this usually happens when you are flying T2/T3 vs. multiple T1 ships).

I don't care about KB efficiency at all and isk flows well enough from market activities that I don't need to go back to any activity I don't enjoy in order to cover for loss.

So it's all about pure hedonistic pleasure. Always fly what I feel like flying, always try new fits, even if it's stupid or whacky, engage against the odds at the end of the night because seriously, I just want to at least shoot something before I log off for the night. :p

So yeah, it's all for fun.