EVE General Discussion

We Are The Crendravens
Your not alone Im a Miner,
with My Family Of alts
now has taken up arms against our Foes
However we Industrialists
must unite and Fight to gain our Freedoms . Liberty is not given but taken.

"Griefing"

No. There is no such thing as griefing in EVE, or rather, the term applies only to a very small number of edge cases, as defined by CCP. Blowing up ships is a perfectly natural thing to want to do in the game, as is going after the easy targets. When I play Battlefield, and I run into someone who is new and bad at the game, I kill them. That is not 'griefing', that is playing the game. Shooting people is fun. The same holds true of EVE. Blowing up ships is fun (so I'm told).

"Noob Stomping"

You might say, "noob stomping is just dumb and is bad for the game" and I would agree, but it's not an issue, since actual noobs are in NPC corps, and thus can only be suicide ganked. To be wardecced, you must start or join a player corp, voluntarily opening yourself to the possibility of a wardec. By joining a player corp, you are declaring that you are stepping out of the kiddy pool. In this way, all wardecs are in fact consensual; nobody can wardec unless you choose to be in a player corp, just as they cannot kill you unless you choose to undock, or scam you unless you choose to chase free lunches.

"It's a sandbox"

But then, some bright spark in the back pipes up, EVE is a sandbox, so I should be able to do whatever I want. EVE is indeed a sandbox, however it is a Multiplayer Sandbox. The definition of a sandbox is not "I can do whatever I want", it is that rather than providing a specific experience, the game provides an environment and tools with which to craft your own experience. For single-player games, these definitions are functionally the same. The problem with a multiplayer sandbox is that not only can you do whatever you want, so can everyone else. You want to mine in highsec in complete peace? The game lets you. It's the other players that are the problem.

The hypocrisy of demanding the freedom to do what you like, while simultaneously demanding or celebrating the curtailment of other people's playstyles should be self-evident, but apparently it's not.

"EVE isn't a PvP game"

Yes, it really is. Being, as it is, a multiplayer sandbox, it is a shared environment which we all inhabit together and all affect. For any of it to be non-PvP, all of it would have to be non-PvP. Even if CCP made it so it was impossible to blow up spaceships in highsec, highsec would still affect the rest of the game just by being there. As long as we are all playing the same game, the guy in the corner mining endlessly has an effect on the guys fighting a war in the other corner. And so, requests to be able to act with impunity will be not be received well by those who actually understand the game.

"But people want PvE"

If people really want PvE, they are in the wrong game. End of story. But there is a positive feedback loop here. Carebears join a harsh PvP game. Carebears whine en masse (in the way that only carebears can whine) that there is harshness and PvP in this harsh PvP game. CCP tone down the harshness, and reduce the PvP opportunities. Being a more 'accessible' game, more carebears join. The whining gets louder. More nerfs. It goes on and on in a never ending cycle, eventually leading to PvP being marginalised in the areas carebears inhabit.

In this way they not only impact other people's playstyles, but also change the fundamental nature of the game, all the while whining about how everyone should be able to play however they want. And the worst part is that game like EVE are in the minority, and yet carebears insist on coming here and trying to convert it into one of their massively singleplayer games.

And this is what irks me (since the rule 'change' doesn't affect me). Carebears are the most catered to group in the game. Sure it was originally designed to be harsh, but basically ever since launch, it has steadily been getting less and less so. People play a game which doesn't cater to them, and whine and whine until it is changed to cater to them, with their call to arms being "everyone should be able to play as they want". Hypocrisy or just stupidity? You decide.

You may argue that carebears should have a place to live in the game. Carebears in the sense of miners, traders and industrialists (such as myself) can find a home anywhere in the game. You think there is no industry in 0.0? Carebears in the sense of people who don't want meaningful player interaction have a place to live: WoW.

>tfw getting reposted

It is a thing of beauty.

Cool post. None of that really disagrees with my original post. So. Thanks?

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?

Killing people for isk (theirs, or mercenary work) is totally meaningful and legit -- if anyone thinks I implied otherwise, my point was missed.

Also, this is not my main, which is years older than that character you posted with :P

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.