EVE General Discussion

You can be more brash than wise... it's simply smarter to be a sniper rather than a gun slinger.

That all depends on who and what lit them, doesn't it?

.............because it's pretty much only done for lulz it seems.

Even when I stupidly mined during a war dec, it was REALLY BORING watching that Megathron chew through my Orca for FIVE minutes till it popped.

Of couse at that point I either eject or self destruct denying them Kill-Mail.

THAT is NOT boring and brings LOTS of tears and rage.

And they say mining is boring.................................

What is boring is subjective.

State what you mean exactly by boring. Then follow up with an explanation of how EvE pvp meats the necessary and sufficient conditions of what is boring for you.

If you want to hear thoughtful replies, make thoughtful comments.

I have recently dipped my toe (on an alt) into the wild waters of null sec pvp and it has been a mixture of exciting rushes and mind numbing boredom that made ice mining look like a day at the amusement park. When it's happening the group effort and pretty explosions of PVP are awesome but alot of the time the wandering, the chasing, the gate games, (thank the gods we have a fun FC), the inevitable hot drop, etc... add up to several hours of ISK free guard duty that taxes the system. I don't blame them but in my limited experience it seems that many pvp oriented pilots are only in it if they are sure they can win. Sooner or later the bait and mug tactics get really old.

It reminds me that Eve is greater in it's sum than in it's parts.

That said I'm not docking up anytime soon.

The problem with eve pvp is that for anyone smarter than a boiled egg, blobfights are boring.
Unfortunately, they're the only means to achieve anything in Eve - want to take over a moon or hold some sov? POS-grinding, timers, another bazillion HP to grind here, wait for the timer to finish and the enemy to assemble his blob, or not showing up at all if you have the bigger blob - rinse and repeat...

Small gang pvp is fun, but serves absolutely no purpose in Eve and hence it's an end in itself and there's nothing to gain except killmails and k/d ratios that are considered good. Since there's nothing else to gain but KMs and stats, people are usually extremely risk averse and only engage when they are sure to win.

If there was a purpose for small gang pvp, people would probably risk more (as in "look - my small pvp alliance may have lost more ships than 'Red Clusterswarmlegiondot.' achieving our goal, but we managed to hack their moon-mining arrays and haul of 4 billion worth of tech in doing so...").

Boring is to not do anything, check

boring is to wait around for hours in order to do something, check,

boring is to always have an unfair fight, check,

boring is to never have real risk, check,

boring is watching trans speeds and click f1, f2, f3, check,

boring is to have boring gameplay mechanics for actual ship fighting, check,

boring is to explore and fight in a big galaxy that all looks and acts the same way, check,

boring is to do always do the same thing in a fight, check,

as for 0.0, enter it, take it,fight and fight, mine, pvp, haul and do economics,politics,alliances and deceptions, "win", get bored, rinse repeat.

Both normal game and metagame is boring, metagame more so since it gets old and it is the same game as it was 5 years ago. Except now I can walk around in a studio apartement on any station in 3d and take screenshots...

Very insightful and good thought, wow, nice,one of the best posts here

I agree and you could be on to a big reason as to why a big part of eve online PVP is boring. In many ways you just hit the nail, dead on. I figured arena might be nice because KM's and KB's are meaningless and stupid and a ranked ladder systemwould be way more good than that. I have been in so many fights where a fleet will jump 10+ jumps in order to get on a Killmail even though they were not part of the fight, because the KM=results which in turn=gratification even though nothing was achieved and what was gained sucked, a dude killed another dude but you wanna get there to be a part of that guys KM...

I strongly oppose an Arena system and don't think killmails as such are a problem.

The problem is there is nothing else to gain but a killmail in small scale warfare.

I made a thread a few months ago where I asked people if they could come up with a single reason to go on a small scale roam other than fun and killmails - the thread ended up with 2 pages of replies and each one consisted of people who didn't even read the topics header and said 'because it's fun'.

Nobody could come up with a single ingame objective for small gangs. In a game that describes its setting as a dark, harsh universe filled with competing corporations it's kind of ridiculous that people shoot red crosses in highsec to mindlessly blow each other up in lowsec for no reason.

People always bring up some kind of payout for pvp kills, but that's a terrible idea as well. So we mindlessly shoot each other for no reason and magically, isk spawns in our wallets?

There need to be Objectives such as raidable moon-mining arrays which would also end the giant AFK-Empires that batphone each other once in a year to form a blob should their sov be threatened.

Maybe also why eve was fun more fun in the begining when few in small ships mattered.

I also think CCP has failed on gamedesign, perhaps arena moba style is not a solution but it would add a lot to the gamein my opinion. EvE is always about the wait it seems to me, wait for that magicalawesome payoff in entertainment, but it never delivers. Only time it delivered for me was when eve launched and people were clueless and I flew around in my rifter attacking someone or getting attacked in lowsec, at a BELT lol and we... good old m0o days etc.

Then we waited for that skill to finish or that ship that would change our experience or that war that in the end was more boring than a round of CS:S.

Wait for alliance tournament to watch? wait for ability to vote for your alliances candidate in the "great" election. WTF am I waiting for? a killboard that says we inflicted more ISK loss than we lost and write an RP essay on the forums claiming victory?? Is that what I got to look forward to in 2012? I had more exciting things to dream of while waiting for that skill to train or expansion/patch back in '04 or something. How does one win a war? you don't get bored and give up=can beat ANYONE in eve online if you just have patience and don't succumb to boredom.

And the way to get there is boring gameplay mechanics. With an arena I would at least be able to log on and fight with friends for a greater reward than a killmail, but you point out the fact it does not fix anything and I agree also the gameplay is STILL boring, so, what does one come upwith to make it more fun?

Hard thing to answer, indeed not easy at all. Perhaps one should first focus on the fact that waiting and less action=less fun and try and combat that and all the other things making PVP boring that islisted in this thread other than the reward of ISK.

So solving it would be to find a reason as to why fight in small gangs? we also need a reason as to why not always avoid a fight we know we wont win before it begins, we also need to make the actual mechanics of space ship combat more fun and action filled, even if one needs strategy,but CS:S has TONS of strategy so does sc2 etc and moba games yet gameplay mechanics are more fun and action filled than this so... thinking wait and trans speeds=strategy is stupid while pressing f1, f2 and f3, hmm use to be more buttons but now passive tanking rule so meh.

Ihave to come and fess up and say, capital ships suck and makes it more boring than fun in EVERY single way. Game was better when a battleship was "the ****" and balancing is just out of wack and gets worse by every ship they add to the game. Especially new ship classes. Cloaking also made things more boring. A game with frigate,cruiser and BS is 10 times easier to balance to and design for than 1million different things.

Still your question remains and I can only answer by saying that the answer is mostlikely made up of several different solutions and not by adding another 1 thing to fight over in the economic battle that is EVE which thanks to PLEX has infinite resources, aka, money does grow on trees.

Also because fights are so ****** and balance outof wack and everything else, KM/KB has less meaning and incentive than a CS:S clan match ever will. When I and many bought the game years ago we were under theimpression that it was the opposite, we wanted more meaning and emotional investment into a game than FPS games offered and for several reasons I have come to the conclusion that BoB's or mine (ascn) or goons or RA or whatever alliances accomplishments mattered less than my CS:S team and it costed more both in money and time investment than that I put into CS:S.

So what would think change by your gameplay mechanic on the scale of all of eve and how do you change the other stuff or deal with the implications? I would start by removing capital ships perhaps.