EVE General Discussion

I will loosely quote Hobbes (?) on humanity as it relates to "WAR".

Mankind engages in conflict for several reasons; among them are Glory, Self Defense, and Greed. Self defense may include requiring materials that another nation has in order to maintain your own quality of life. It also includes the usual reason as kill them before they kill us.

In EVE online, the game's players are constantly in a state of WAR, which by design is encouraged for several real business reasons I'll not go into here. Is conflict pointless? Is mindless conflict an act akin to rolling a stone up a hill only to have it fall back down again? Ultimately, yes. Some people still find personal meaning in rolling that stone by engaging in aformentioned conflict. By that mental disturbance, they are fulfilled and find meaning in their own way.

To talk about meaning, an individual builds a home in the countryside so he can live in it. He or She does not think too much about what the condition of the house will be in two thousand years. He or she thinks about the long winters they are spending, in the now, under reletively good shelter.

Are the people who hang out in lowsec and shooting at random people engaging in meaningless conflict? In the larger perspective, yes, it is an act of futility. In the individual perspective, they take great meaning in each ship they destroy.

If you are looking for meaningful combat, I believe that there are groups who do in fact hunt pirates and nerdowells. They are around. As I do not want to get involved in Nul Sec politics, I can suggest looking into a few NRDS organizations who will remain unnamed for now. Maybe among likeminded indivdiuals you will find meaning.

While some make the claim that a little destruction will feed the glasier, I have never baught into this. I have never believed that warfare or needless destruction is a good.

If you wish, here is some reading on the Broken Window Parable.

http://mises.org/library/which-seen-and-which-not-seen

https://robertnielsen21.wordpress.com/2013/10/01/debunking-the-broken-window-fallacy/

This is like, 100% impossible in a sandbox, dude.

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?

'Cause not all of us are witless.

Watch this, it'll be weird....

I agree with Destiny on this one. In order to satisfy the no/consensual PVP group, you'd have to remove non-consensual PVP, and only have PVP between willing parties (which is what most games do). This would make the people who like non-consensual PVP unhappy, because they could no longer attack defenseless targets. So, in this case, you'd have a happy group (no/consensual PVP) and an un-happy group (non-consensual PVP).
Do it the other way - non-consensual PVP all the time everywhere, and you'll still have one happy group and one unhappy group. So, there is no way to make both groups happy. If you create areas where non-consensual PVP isn't allowed, even though other areas allow it, this will still not make the non- folks happy, because you've impacted their play style by having places where they can be avoided.
So, back to Destiny's point, you can't please everyone.

There is no good answer, and that is why CCP has so much trouble trying to balance it.

I've been ranting about this for years. People respond like it's a crying carebear who got ganked. Fact is, I'm a rabid competitor who lives for the kill - against someone I could quite easily lose against if I don't watch myself and do it right. This CODE group (for instance) has a philosophical reason why they won't pick a fair fight with a worthy opponent - it's the basis of the CODE - "we have a good excuse for ganking." Ganking IS attacking helpless players with overwhelming force for yucks. It's a term devised in WOW, and (unfortunately for us) has found its way HERE. *shudders in disgust*

The game mechanics have a lot to do with this, and the price to be paid for being an outlaw has a lot to do with that. The mechanics are close, don't get me wrong. They just aren't severe. Pirates were hung summarily on capture. They were never allowed to just walk into town. The navys involved wouldn't see a pirate in a bar, let him get on his ship with a head start to the open sea, then call the alarm. So, this highly infantile, (romanticized) idea of being a pirate is wildly inaccurate.

Races with so-called "sovereignty" in a so-called "advanced society" with pure unpunished lawlessness cannot happen. You can't rollerskate in a buffalo herd. You can't have spaceships in a world with no law and order - severe enforcement of sovereign authority. It's RIDICULOUS. But, CCP doesn't mind being the object of ridicule, and have no intention of doing anything about this, so I ridicule them with regularity and don't take them seriously - like men. I see them as children who shave.

Thanks for bringing this up once more. Don't worry about the children and their responses.
They have to write on a wall with their crayons. Let it be this one.

Thus you can't go on with your usual PVP religious dogma without admitting to ONE thing. And it's this: You cannot justify "kill everything that moves for no reason" as a means of pushing your sense of moral superiority over the matter of PVP on a server that does not have permadeath.

Were it up to me this would be normal in all PVP games. You want to run around being all "hurr durrrr PVP game kill kill kill" fine then, permadeath would also be in play. So when you finally to get offed and have to role anew, eventually you'll be the one with nothing but a can opener and everybody else is driving tanks. Your only target will be noobs with can openers.


Would be admittedly leet if you can still get kills though and if you had a tank and got killed by someone with a can opener well that's a new dimension of butthurt right there.