EVE General Discussion

You forgot to add "crossposted from fanfiction.net" at the top.

Well 'RandomFlame', It seems unlikely to me that anyone will read this far down into this thread. Both 'wall of text' and micro posts (o7) serve as a kind of qualifying mechanism. I will answer your two line post with a 'wall of text.'

1- it is unclear to me how anyone could construe my tone or intent as 'whining'. Possible with some work I suppose. I recognize that such posts as this are not compassionate to the non-reader or ESL reader. Sometimes in the author's learning process they are even worse for native speakers who enjoy reading and writing as a way of interacting with other life forms. I am not a particularly good writer. I also suck at the game itself thus far. I still like to play.

2- people consistently complain about long posts as if they were somehow forced to confront them and that length, in and of itself, were a qualitative criteria. The post does not constitute non-consensual 'PvP'. It is entirely consensual and there is no 'back button scrambler' that keeps the reader from leaving at any moment. This attitude confuses me, which is of course my predicament and not yours. If you complain about a thread while adding nothing of substance or seeking in anyway to interact with other people in thread I will congratulate myself on my incredible Oz like powers by which I forced you at a distance, knowing nothing about you, to read the post.

3- in the spirit of full disclosure consider the above post as an extremely cheap frigate in the meta game. I am not afraid to 'lose' it and in fact fully expect to be 'podded' upon writing it. Anytime anyone presses the 'post/reply' they should expect to encounter other human beings. This post is not very 'leveraged' in terms of effect or medium. It does things on many different levels that are satisfying to me. It's not even a frigate. It is slow, ugly, large, clumsy and poorly constructed. It's more like a battle badger. People learn in all sorts of different ways. I will say that such a post has multiple and redundant purposes for me. It has served many of those already if not necessarily the ostensible rhetorical purpose.

4- one of the consistent memes I have encountered is "it's a sandbox! Do not ask what you should do! Do what you wish! Do what is fun!" At the same time when that actually occurs people often seem to have the opposite response, seeking benevolently and critically to tell people what to do, not to do and what would be fun. You can take it as given that if I post anything it is an expression of something I find 'fun' and part of the extended play for me, whether or not I have any skill in the matter or not. The request being made by many of these sorts of posts and in game actions seems to me to be 'hey! Come out and play! Wanna play! Hey!" I could be mistaken in my interpretation and it is equally possible that some people are saying on both sides of any 'debate'... 'Ergh... Playing with you sucks! Go home.' What is true for me is that there is no 'not playing' only different ways people are drawing the boundaries of the game to define play. The nature of that and what is 'in' or 'out', what people have agreed to, can in turn be both debated and in extreme cases demonstrated by such actions as as bans.

5- the request is consistently being made is that the miners 'kick someone's shiny butt' in some way. The above strategy is a way to do that without having to abandon some forms of their preferred game style, while entering into the participatory nature of play that people are requesting. I also hope they kick my shiny butt. I have purchased a tin of butt polish for the occasion. (Come out and play?).

6- It could be construed as 'griefing' if the 'miners' enact the Heresy full on. However James 315 has created a mechanism in which his actions all take place in the context of a business venture and thus cannot be construed as griefing, but only as transactions and profit seeking. The miners actions are thereby also participating in that model, whether they have overtly entered into a contract or are trying to compromise the effectiveness of the competition through available means. They could come up with things that are fully 'out of bounds', but they would really have to work at it. Bots are already out of bounds, i.e. cheating- this contextualizes the actions 'against' miners. Currently the first response is that people cry 'foul' and file petitions or don't file petitions, but still feel that some form of participation is out of bounds. This is probably worth testing, but when the answer from the developer is 'play on!' you then have a choice of leaving the game, probably with a sense of resentment and victimization or creatively finding a way to play, should you actually enjoy something about the game. Conflict drivers require this existential dilemma be faced when they are good. I am not pretending my attempt to contribute does this in any way, but if you look in this game you can see where that has happened. Personally I feel CCP should vertically integrate bots, regulate them and destroy the profitability of the 3rd party vendors. I have never seen anything else work, but this has been proven to work in many analogous situations.

7- I have a complex relationship to boredom which I will feel free to articulate. On the one hand I feel boredom is simply a lack of inner resources. It is fundamentally a lack of creativity or a lack of access to one's already present and abundant creativity, without some modicum of which any of us would cease to be on the planet very rapidly. On the other hand I celebrate boredom. I aspire to be fully boring and utterly useless in all ways. This is much, much harder than you might imagine.

Battle badger post fully exploded.

I feel I understand the goals pretty clearly. Of course I could be mistaken. I probably do not understand in the way that you and other True Believers might. One way to get clear about goals in an endeavor is to ask: under what conditions would the endeavor no longer exist? Based on this question I understand the goals at least as well as the Knights and participants posting on the public portion of the board. Interestingly to me I don't think it is actually necessary to understand the goals that this question implies in order to participate and feel, as a True Believer, that you do understand the goals. Faith is the evidence of things unseen... Opiate of the masses and all. That is actually a cool aspect of it for me at least.

I have almost certainly been in systems such as you suggest, but... I am not a miner. True I like the Venture hull, but I was able to endure mining for about the time it took to get those free hulls. I also have no pressing need to gank miners and I do not actually enjoy high sec, though as a new player without affiliation or the strong desire for affiliation, discovering the rest of the universe (and range of play) is somewhat more difficult than I might have imagined. I have accepted that as a consequence of my narrative choices for the moment. I am in no hurry. Where would I be hurrying to? Why on earth would you assume I have any interest in expedience or anything remotely having to do with your personal model of such? Really the last thing on my mind. Oddly you sound like the projected stereotype of 'miner.'

"For the oppressors, there exists only one right: their right to live in peace, over against the right, not always even recognized, but simply conceded, of the oppressed to survival" Pedagogy of the Oppressed p.58, Paulo Freire

Out of curiosity then, do you feel the rather detailed and elaborate account represented on minerbump and to which you seem to consistently refer many people, in some way misrepresents what is actually going on? That would be good to know. Though I do understand and appreciate the sentiment of your proposal.

Good point. A protection racket only works if you actually provide protection (this is how governments are formed, after all). Start ganking everyone you see advertising that they paid up to the Bumptards and turn that "permit" into a "bullseye" - how long before people stop paying out of fear?

A change in mental model is the first step to doing something, as we see from the NO conversion process.

Actually the strategy, such as it is, details actions you can take that have nothing to do with ganking or compromising sec status or anything. In addition to devaluing the contract you must consider ways to escalate their transaction costs, which is not hard to do. 'They' are considering exactly your play style and targeting that. You must essentially do the same. Ganking to devalue the contract won't do that since it is 'their' play style. Think through logging on as them and what you would enjoy and why. Destroy that. That is the war you are in, not an exchange of fire. No shots fired. It will require a bit of creativity in your part. Just saying.

The NO is not a protection racket. Protection rackets charge more like 10-30% of profits. 10m is like 0.01% of profits, it's a nominal fee by which the miner shows sincerity.

The permit holders are not a "profitable group of targets." As believers in the code, permit holding miners believe in tanking one's barge/exhumer, and mining ATK. This makes them the worst possible group of targets. I invite you to prove otherwise by ganking me. I look forward to laughing at your wreck(s).

At the risk of being repetitive, while doing this may outrage the miners you gank, it won't have the intended effect on the New Order. If you could find enough players willing to sacrifice their time, ISK, and security status (unlikely, as has been proven each time this plan has been suggested) to gank enough permit holders to make themselves known to the largely aloof mining community, and if it somehow resulted in no additional mining permits ever being sold (even more unlikely), you would not only fail to hurt the New Order, you would actually be helping it.

Actually, it is exactly part of what I proposed, just not the actions for the miners to take.

Non-miners: destroy the value of the oath.
Miners: create a transactional burden.

NO proponents are arguing about the 'actual' nature of the contract and their espoused models, which simply do not matter and are not the basis for miner decisions... Except in the cases where the miners have stopped mining altogether and joined gank squads themselves. In terms of targeting miners having sworn the oath, these converted miners are probably most likely to really do that, I would guess.

Edit: My OP does a mediocre job of taking seriously the 'theological' context of the NO as emergent play making it hard to parse I think. The thing about the course of action suggested for the miners is that it constitutes simply amplifying and recontexualizing what they are already doing. If done well, it does not 'attack' the NO as such, but potentially alters the play experience of the Knight. It is a process of drowning them in the tears and lamentations they have requested, through all available means. It also gives converted miners something to occupy their time while being forced to stay at the keyboard with nothing else to do. It is consistent with the underlying strucuture of the NO logic in that it is an increased form of participation and interaction. It is essentially role playing the miner they have been told they are in ways that are as grandiose and florid as the NO itself and could be quite fun.

I suppose an interested miner could start an Alliance called the Whining Miners, or Miner Whine or some such using a permanent docked character and sponsor wardecs based on kill mails of the Knights and non-affiliates who are also not in one of the NPC corps. Since they are perma docked they then also accept anyone wanting a greater diversity of high sec targets into the Alliance. This creates a non CONCORD preemptive level of play with respect to high sec PvP, which ostensibly should also be welcomed by the NO. Heck, all parties aligned with the aims of the NO should wardec themselves and compete in this preemptive way for ganks. Currently they are using the relative pre-gank safety of high sec to their own advantage, which is also a Heresy.

The sponsor of Miner Whine could actually make a business of it by charging a fee to join the alliance for people who wanted a target rich high sec. If priced right I am sure their would be people willing join such an alliance since ganker or non-ganker a PvP target is a PvP target.