EVE General Discussion

Unfortunately, the subject of this thread is "Pay-to-Win: How is the EVE community so against 'paying to win' gameplay and yet alts are fine?", which hints at the situation of the alt-less player, as I've been addressing.

In a scenario where some options are not available, absolutely, they are not. Ingame help from other people is heavily tied to contingencies, or the fact that the player chooses to fly solo, and the fact remains that static scouting and offgrid boosting, for example, are dull, non-interactive garbage tasks you can only ask of an alt.



Alas, it proves that the playerbase invests in alts precisely to escape it, putting those who don't at a disadvantage, through metagaming, and not ingame means.




How can a solo alt-less player unable to get ingame help from friends, get, through ingame means, an even playfield vs a solo player funding alts? Are alts mandatory?

Which are the ingame options you refer to? versus, for example, a solo player with a falcon alt, an offgrid booster alt, and a remote rep alt?

Scenarios, choices, contingencies, and advantage-robbing circumstances are fairly irrelevant, because a matter of tough luck, when they're all contained ingame (even ingame help contigencies: it's an advantage or the lack thereof, that exists only in the ingame world). Discussing them is discussing gameplay balance, that's not what we're doing here. What you very conveniently brush off is the fact that alts are a purely metagaming issue (the advantage of being able to log multiple characters simultaneously exists in the RL world), and that's why your question is only a silly rhetorical trick. You're not addressing the problem I exposed, and are really red herring it through faulty logic gates paved with fallacies and whatever fancy words you have a slight grasp of.

I fail to see how alts, which are always paid for with real money (by you or someone else), are not paying cash for an advantage that can't be had via strictly in-game means.

Of course it is. You were given ample opportunity to provide examples, and you were unable to do so each time.

…and the answer is simple: because they are two separate issues, as you have amply demonstrated by illustrating the lack of unique pay-for advantages.

I have listed them on numerous occasions and you know them already. Stop playing dumb. Stop relying on fallacies as your only arguments. Stop treating platitudes and truism as if they were some shocking revelations about problems. Stop employing biased and prejudiced examples.

“Between options A, B, and C, we must reject C as an option because it is contingent on [list of factors], while keeping B that is contingent on [list of factors].”

Because ISK can be had in others ways and because ISK in and of itself is not an advantage. The advantage is out-of-game — a time shuffle; a convenience for players. It offers no special advantage to the in-game characters.

ISK is not an advantage? I don't follow. It's the primary resource that is used to get anything in the game, unless you want to mine up everything from scratch yourself, but even then you need ISK for the manufacturing fees and to purchase the blueprints from NPCs. ISK is a necessary element for just about any endeavor in EVE, and therefore having more of it is advantageous in the extreme, arguably even better than access to a special gold ammo as the gold ammo is very narrow in function (it's only a higher damage output, whereas ISK lets me do any number of things and the more of it I have the more things I can do, which serves to make me far more capable as an economic powerhouse than gold ammo by itself ever could.)

Time shuffling also has just as much an effect in-game as it does out of game.

I still don't follow what you're saying about options A, B, and C. What factors? What are those options?

Then maybe you should have been able to provide examples, and yet you couldn't. You were even given a set of answers, and you picked the “I don't know of any” option.

…except that alts don't provide any kind of special advantage that you can't get without paying for it. All the advantages are available through other means. Thus, no P2W. Thus, separate issue.

About what? Your precious linked post is just you doing what I told you not to do and I have already responded to it.

The advantage lies in what you get for your ISK and what you do with what you get. The entire game is set up along a system where you pay exponentially more for increasingly marginal returns. “Paying more” is commonly the worst strategy for improving your performance. Yes, ISK is needed for pretty much anything, but its usefulness quickly drops off and provides next to no help against some opposing forces (e.g. sheer numbers).

…so even if “more ISK” wasn't possible to generate without paying for it, the advantage you'd be buying would still be available through other means.

It's EFT's comparison between the solo character and the non-solo character, where there are three options available to you: stay solo, get alts, get friends (actually, there are more, but those are the three we've focused on). He rejects the last one because circumstances can make it difficult to use that option. He refuses to reject the second one even though circumstances can make it difficult to use that option. Thus he has biased the entire comparison and manages to show absolutely nothing about alts except that having an advantage is an advantage over not having an advantage… which is such a trivial a conclusion as to not even be worth mentioning.

Simple: because any advantage you could conceivably pay to get can also be had without paying for it, so paying doesn't generate any more “win” than not paying.

There are no ingame means for the alt-less solo player to have the same convenience as the alt-funding solo player. This is a lack of ingame options relating to a metagaming problem, that you very conveniently ignore.

And the list of examples is still there




As luck would have it, those advantages aren't available through other means other than alts, for the solo player. Since alts are linked to RL money, this is really a P2W issue.




But you haven't. All the examples you've asked for a hundred times, and which I've already linked to a hundred times, you haven't been able to respond to, i.e. give a list of options for the alt-less solo player to get on the same level as the alt-funding solo player

It's not really precious, but it's a good way for newcomers to see my point in a precise manner, since you only muddle the conversation with stylistic drivel and do not address anything.




If I reject the second one, there's no problem, it's altless player vs. altless player, what is there to discuss? In your argumentation, if there's nothing to say about gameplay when it is balanced, there should be nothing to say about gameplay when it is imbalanced (altless solo player vs. alt-funding solo player)? how is that logic?

How are ingame and metagame issues comparable, moreover?

Except by making friends, a fact that you explain away by saying that it's not convenient.

Well, there are people who really enjoy to solo, and interact from afar, loners, if you will. They'd rather do stuff on their own.
Then there are those with friends, but varying playtimes on one part of the other, which makes it sometimes iffy to gang up.
And there are tasks that are just too mundane to ask of people, such as being a static scout, and yet it's very mandatory to have one available.

So yes, there are quite a few cases when it's not convenient, or even not available at all. Why should the player who flies solo be at a severe disadvantage vs the player who flies with alts? Passive, non-interactive yet highly effective ship setups allow players to use alts to such an extend that it really throws everything off-balance. And l'm not even mentioning the unability to hunt down a player's assets, since alts are unflagged.

Alts are therefore seen as mandatory for the semi-serious and above EvE player, while putting the casual one at a disadvantage. And since they stem from RL money, they are linked to P2W.