EVE General Discussion

First of all, this is most certainly not a whine thread -- this is something I've been thinking about for years now, and I'd love to have an actual discussion about the following: too much of Eve's PVP is "meaningless", which is driven by two things -- the existence of killmails/killboards, and the lack of consequences of criminal acts.

By meaningless, I mean that there are no in-game motivations for it. Oh, sure, often there are, don't get me wrong, but so much of it is just killboard stats padding. I think that judging things in such a manner warps the reality of the game world.

Running into some random piratey-type-of-guy in lowsec should be about him wanting the isk value of your stuff, not about more points on the killboard (and it seems to me these CODE guys that are ganking shuttles in hi-sec are the perfect example of killboard stat whoring).

Wars should be judged by the outcomes of movements and strategy, not about who has done more isk-damage.

I think back to Ultima Online, when being a "PK" (player-killer, for those of you who aren't old) was a fairly rare thing, the average player was not going to attack another player on sight, and then once in a while, if you were too aggressive at killing people outside of town, they would round up a band of "anti-PKs" and chase us down.

And don't get me wrong, Eve's PVP is fantastic. I would just somehow love to see one step towards in-game motivations.

Now, what I find very interesting about all this is that once I started thinking about this sort of thing, the more I see it in everything... once there were WoW mods like recount, raids became much less fun, or even in business with executives overly-focusing on monthly incomes and causing the rest of the business to get dragged down chasing that single goal.

So, of course I have NO idea how to fix this aside from removing all pvp stats from the game, but of course that is ridiculous, and there is certainly something to be said for having the ability to measure things as such. I'm not fundamentally against that, but things just... feel off, in this department.

Am I a crazy person, or does anyone else get what what I mean?

I hear you as I too enjoyed the freedom in UO before they split the shards into pvp and non pvp.

However it only worked because of the playerbase...The mechanics of it were very simple but the players set out how your were going to play.

Another way of thinking is comparing High sec to towns where there were guards and players that would hunt down PK's and low/null is out in the wilderness where pretty much anything was game. Eve was very much like this in the beginning but slowly over the course of time it moved to more theme parky sandbox.

Eve now is way better balanced than before however I think they should start dropping some of the control out and let the players fight over it again. (Having said that though there is a much larger portion of idiots and morons in eve nowadays)

Au contraire.

I think that would be a fine idea, personally.

Mr Epeen

A long time ago, in a conference room far, far away (in Vegas), mittens said sov is the one absolute victory in EVE.

Your sense that PVP is meaningless is more or less correct. What matters is Sov.

This is correct and can be applied in real life applications.

You know when your targets' three bars go from white to red? You see that creeping and then.... finally... he flashes and disappears?

I dont care what anybody has to say about my motivation to get there; I love it!

Read up to "lack of consequences of criminal acts" and stopped.

Making the resources more limited would create more incentives to fight for those resources. People fight for killmails when ISK making potential is essentially unlimited and does not need to be competed over.

The problem with PvP in eve is the lack of conflicts of interest in many areas.

Who would hate the suicide ganker, if he selectively killed your competition and gave you a bigger share of the scarce asteroids?

It wouldn't make sense for someone who felt that way to play EVE and expect to enjoy themselves. Wouldn't that be like going to a restaurant that specializes in food that you're allergic to?

Let me put things in perspective for you:

I recently started playing H1Z1, which is a zombie survival MMO, as you're probably aware. There are pvp servers, and pve servers available, which are pretty self-explanatory.

The biggest complaint on the forums is by people getting the game, going on the pvp servers, getting killed, and then making hate-filled threads on the forums about how "sociopath griefer kids" are going around "KOSing everybody," and the most prominent community demand is that some kind of "pvp-flagging" or "insanity meter" system be added to pvp servers.