EVE General Discussion

We beat the crap out of some people and then our blues took over the space and the moons, yes. But there was sure some crying when we were hurting the owners.

P.S. I'm not saying formulas are useless but rather that they are limited. I think CCP would do well to run well-designed surveys that answer this (risk vs. reward) and other questions. And then take this feedback into consideration for future game development. This rather then relying on the squeakiest wheels for feedback.

The Big Mac index Is an article written by the economist. I have extracted 2 paragraph which I believe is an essential for anyone game developers/policy makers.


Listen but don't believe everything your consumer tells you. Sometimes they are telling what they really believe but others they are simply paying lip service. Your survey won't collect any meaningful data.

BTW here's a risk v reward model for EvE
Let say I'm non-profit insurance dealer for Hulk pilot in high sec, and every hour there 1 is X Hulk destroyed., thus I would be charging 1/X* Current Hulk price/hour. The same calculation would apply to low and null. The reward is straight froward: total amount of ore mine in an hour. Only problem is 'X Hulk destroyed', 'Current Hulk price' and 'mineral price' are player determine, thus the out of sync 'Risk vs Reward' which low and null players love to talk about is meaningless because it's dynamic. Furthermore 'Risk vs Reward' can be control via market operation i.e. when price of high-sec mineral crash, reward of high-sec miner would reduce while they are undertaking the same amount of risk( assuming gankers continue to blew up as many Hulk in high-sec; while price of Hulk might reduce because of a drop in mineral price, but high-sec mineral isn't 100% of Hulk BPC.)

How question is phase affect the answers, for a demo watch the first 10 mins of this video. Like it or not we are all bias in our own way, whoever design the survey can affect the out come of the survey!

Even that don't render your data meaningless, players own self interest will. Human are interesting, instead of directly admitting it is for their self-interest, they are going to reason righteously about balance, risk vs reward and so on. If you did a survey on world of Warcraft before PvP rating system was implement, PvPers would all agree they love such a system. What they didn't tell you is why did the support such a system, simply because their own self-serving bias is telling them they are totally going to win this. Now instead lying to themselves how 1337 they are, hard facts of they suck is being thrown at them.

There is just too many point of failure built into a survey, I doubt you can weed it, and yield meaningful data.

I'd kind of given up on this for the moment, but you are bringing some good thoughts to the table so I'll try some more.


I agree that a well-designed survey would be good for CCP to do. In fact, Market Research is my job and creating models like the one I'm talking about in this thread is something I do on a daily basis.

I don't think that there is a single model that can work, and I certainly wouldn't try this out on a message board. A survey or poll here would be as pointless as was suggested above. But message boards are valuable as qualitative research that can direct the development of a good quant study.

My point with this thread was to find out if there is any agreement within the community on even an extremely low level.

Again, the reason for my original post was that I've read a ton of people saying that EVE is all about risk vs. reward and that that relationship is off re: high sec/null sec.

My assumption is that if people think that relationship is off, there must somewhere be at least a vague notion of what the right relationship is.

There are all kinds of problems with a simple equation, and the problems only grow when you try to complicate the formula to account for those problems.

Bump Truck's attempt was a good example of that. Already, in his approach, he is trying to account for the fact that Reward doesn't mean the same thing to everyone. So he's trying to quantify value. In an exhaustive attempt to reduce the EVE experience to a formula, those kinds of permutations would be necessary.

But this is not an attempt to exhaustively quantify EVE. It's an attempt to find out if there is any fundamental starting place that a large number of people agree is correct, even if severely lacking in granular, descriptive detail.

Perhaps I should've tried this as a True/False exercise:

Reward = Time * Activity * Risk

For now, let alone the fact that everyone has their own definition of Reward, Activity, and Risk. Is that statement in general True or is it False? The point of a thought experiment like this is to take subjective stuff out of the argument and find out what people really disagree about. Because right now, everyone seems to disagree about everything. And I just don't think that's the case.

For example, I think we can agree that Time is not really all that subjective and that how much of it you put into the game should play a factor in how much Reward you get out of it. But I could be wrong about that. There could be strong disagreement there. One could argue that Time is really relative to the amount of Real Life time that you have to spend on the game, and therefore absolute numbers of hours shouldn't have anything to do with reward.

There are lots of interpretations of even this very simple relationship, which is why I'm not trying to come up with one ring of numbers to rule them all. Just a general rule of thumb that we can go back to in the discussion about balance.

That's all I am looking for here.

RvR is a myth whiners tell themselves when they cry themselves to sleep

there is only

easy way to make isk
fastest way to make isk
most afkable way to make is
most convient way to make isk
lazyest way to make is

every now and again you get some nutter pull some random numbers out they @ss but i just take at face value

EvE is game i play for lulz i couldnt give two f##ks about anyone els tbh when i make isk i want the fastest way less time drunk grinding = more time drunk killing

so thats my RvR
drunk grinding time Vs drunk killing time