Warfare & Tactics

Yeah, that part is true. But honestly, the inability of the Calmil corps to work together rockets this stuff over the top. For example, nothing my corp can do about a qcat blob. They like to 15v2 whenever they can. Im not saying I wouldnt do it if the tables were turned, but my corp cant fight that. We may have 6 ppl online at average. The surrounding Calmil'ers are mostly farmers ( didnt lift a finger to help defend Fliet, Deven, or Heyd) or "uneasy blues" that shoot you for "stealing" their LP.

But yeah, that raw data is a decent indicator. Is there a killboard that just does that and not the inflated stuff?

Holy ****!!! When did we have 15 people on?

afaik, these are fairly accurate

Caldari - https://zkillboard.com/faction/500001/
Gallente - https://zkillboard.com/faction/500004/
Last 90 days (scroll to bottom for faction stats) - https://zkillboard.com/ranks/recent/killers
All-time (ditto, fw stats at the bottom) - https://zkillboard.com/ranks/alltime/killers/


I'll give it a try. You see - Sov can be taken, ISK via lp can be won and lost, but you can never take our freedo[killboard stats]!!!!

Innia has been taken and lost multiple times. Even if we had recently taken it, probably no one from Galmil would have moved in. It would have been farmed back and retaken by Calmil in less than a week. But the sweet memory of the heart-pounding plex fights can always come back when one peruses one's killboard stats for the month. Killboard stats are simply a convenient reminder and measure of the fun had.

Well, XG is kind of the GalMil Yoda, so will probably do a lot better job answering than I will, but here goes. I figure a serious non-trolly question deserves a well thought out response.

1. Warzone control in FW is pretty fluid, and as you've seen isn't really determined by PvP. In fact, the best way to flip a bunch of systems is to stick stabbed farming alts in backwater systems for a few days, then bash the hubs. Deplexing has such a low reward that it's difficult to find people who are willing to deplex anything other than core systems.

2. Most GalMil player corps are there for the pew pew. If you look at corps / alliances like Genstar, JUSTK, Black Fox Marauders, and QCats, you'll see that they have incredibly high PvP participation and focus. Our boys are out there pretty much constantly pewing stuff in frigates, running offensive plexes mostly to troll for fights. We fight solo, small gang, and sometimes in larger crews. We do everything from derp T1 frigates to HAC / faction cruiser roams to battleship fights at POSes and POCOs.

3. Killboards, with all their flaws, are a pretty decent way of measuring PvP ability. Sure, if all you look at is the top line isk efficiency or something it's easy to walk away stroking your ePeen. But if you take a closer look, see how many solo kills someone has, or how many pilots on average on are on the KMs he gets, you get a better feel. Take a look at what he loses to who, and how - that shows you more about how good a pilot he is and what fights he's willing to take. There's a huge difference between the guy flying a linked, boosted, drugged up kitey Hookbill with 40km point moving 7km/sec who has 100 solo kills, and the guy who gets 5-10 kills solo against a 20 man gang before going down - without links or faction gear. The latter pilot is better, even if his KB efficiency isn't as good.

4. There are times when kills and efficiency don't matter a bit, and that's when you're defending a home system. Our assault on Innia is a good example of that. So long as you held the field and ran the button, we weren't accomplishing our goal of taking the system, no matter how many kills we were able to farm. FW mechanics being what they are, assaulting a heavily defended system requires significant effort over several days and across all time zones. It's not like nullsec where one fight on one timer decides the whole thing - you have to constantly be winning more plexes than the defenders, or the assault will falter and grind to a halt.

5. From a corporate / alliance perspective, KBs can again tell a very interesting tale. Isk efficiency is easy to game - get a couple folks to opportunistically whore on a couple capital KMs, and you're generally set for the month. But overall, for smaller corps who are actually fairly focused, it can be a good guideline on performance. JUSTK tends to average 75%+ efficiency in most months, and about 3-1 K:D ratio. We'll get our teeth kicked in from time to time, and I have basically given up flying solo in anything bigger than a cruiser (lost several boats to camps when heading to fleet form up locations), but that kind of thing averages out across the member base and across time.

6. Different killboards handle things differently in terms of points / isk / etc. zKillboard for example handles things differently than eve-kill. For October, ZKB and EK both show that JUSTK had 5233 kills and about 1510 losses, killing between 141-144 billion and losing roughly 31 billion, for about a 3.5:1 K:D ratio and 82% isk efficiency. ZKB though says that JUSTK earned 112614 points in kills and took 31627 in losses, for about a 78% point efficiency. Dreddit had about 2400 kills and 5600 losses, and about a 74% isk efficiency - but only earned 48481 points while taking 83466 in losses. Your point efficiency then was closer to 37%. This shows that your high isk efficiency was due more to a few expensive kills that someone in your corp managed to be a part of, and that for the most part your corp was on the losing end of the fights they got into.

So. Since a lot of GalMil player corps are in it for the pew, KBs are the only real way to measure that over time and across populations. If you look under the surface of the headline stats, you get a lot better feel for how a corp or a particular pilot flies and fights. That's how GalMil players in general will measure themselves, when we're not after a particular objective - such as defending or assaulting a system. WZ control for the most part means little, outside of core systems, and primarily swings based on stabbed cloaky farmer hordes.

Make sense?

I'm confused, I was unaware their was any other reason to play Eve besides blowing peoples stuff up?

Eve is a terrible game. It's the people you play it with.

Oh, and local. Local is always primary.

I will say that Caldari get more kills than Gallente when our Tier level is higher than theirs. Killing farmers is a past time that both "pvp-centric" sides do when they get the chance.

The other thing is that "somebody has to lose". The goal of sov control give players a purpose to go out and pew. If your side cannot control systems, then the next best thing to do is pick some figure of merit or goal that you can be successful at and go for it.

Closer.

Of course it doesn't, it matters much more who orbits the beacon faster and more hardcore!
EVE is entertainment, one faction finds PVP entertaining and rewarding, the other finds orbiting even more entertainning and rewarding (with exeptions on both sides). I'm glad that both factions have so much fun doing what they love. You both win as far as I'm concerned (I'm not btw).

Answering the Zheo quesotion, kills do not matter unless you want them to, unless you find them entertaining, just like orbiting.

Props Gallente for PVP and Caldari for orbiting.



Not in FW for some time but I just couldn't resist.

FROGS for life!!!

The responses to this answered your question pretty well. Nothing matters in Eve, it is a sandbox game with no way to "win" the game. Things only matter because that is what players decide matters to them. Gal Mil decided kills matter. It is the same thing in 0.0. AAA chose to value kills over territory, "Killboard is green". Others value the sov map. Solar Fleet also appears to value some thing else, as they lost all their space but lost hardly no members.

The historical nature of this decision of placing value on kills dates back to FW circa 2008. Back then, sov didn't have any implications at all other than a color on the map. It didn't impact docking rights or impact the only way to make LP at the time, missions. At that point in time, plexes spawned at downtime and when a plex closed, it attempted to respawn in the same constellation it was closed. However, if a Gallente plex tried to spawn in a Caldari occupied system, it became "stuck" and didn't respawn. This meant as the day went on, less and less plexes were available to the point as you got close to downtime there were almost no plexes left. This meant that whomever had superiority closest to downtime was in the best shape. It just so happened that the caldari had a very formable pvp/plexing groups in the Pervs, who dominated after downtime. It was literally impossible to undo the plex damage the Pervs did right after downtime unless the Gallente also had a after downtime group that could go head to head with them. The Gallente didn't have such a group and gave up on the Sov war as it was useless to fight the sov war in EU and US timezones.

Hence, Gallente redefined winning as "Killboard is green" because they could achieve it and were good at it. Caldari adopted defining winning as sov because they could achieve it (they were the first faction to 100% conquer the warzone) and were good at it.