EVE General Discussion

Had a big long winded response to this but found myself correcting the errors in reading what I wrote so none of that actually aligns with what I said or actually inferred. Too much spin off of a wrong tangent.

Here's a tip to tell the difference since yours has no actual bearing on what everyone's concept of PvP is:

The entire game is PvP. So technically, what you are doing is PvP, so is mining. However, us EVE'ers have a slang concept of PvE in the game to somehow demean other players play styles. It's doing something that is somehow game generated. It's a bad definition because it's somehow looked down upon as an insult and being 'easy'. I think many forms of slang PVE are higher risk than some accepted PvP forms, namely shooting at defenseless ships. I've lost a lot of ships battling Sleepers, and a few almost losses to Pirates, I know how deadly they can be. I can go out to a .5 or .6 system and take out miners too, it would be easier than dealing with a 4 out of 10 DED HiSec site with a cruiser. So, if the latter is 'easy' PVE, the former MUST be, that is if PVP play styles vs. PVE play styles are something to brag about. If not, then it's all irrelevant and the terms should be meaningless to everyone because the whole freaking game is PVP!

Now, we can keep arguing over an invented concept such as PVE in EVE, or you might want to consider the idea that all play styles are legitimate, that no play style is better than another, that's its a sandbox and just because you like a lot of propaganda filigree on your organizations sand castle doesn't make it a better sandcastle than the guy with the sand mound and the leaf flying from the top of it thinking it looks like the Taj Mahal. I give them both thumbs up and call it cool. What I dislike is all the self-inflating chest thumping that goes on in the game because it always ends up sad for the game because when it gets over inflated, or deflated, someone whines and game changes that shouldn't have been made, get made.

CODE can probably be pointed to as doing as much if not more harm to HiSec as and perceived 'good'. Almost every nerf to HiSec play styles has fallen against the CODE concept of playing so you guys are shooting yourselves in the foot and calling it a win. I call it OUCH.

Sure, Eve is a full-time, PvP sandbox experience where players compete and collaborate for power and resources. In that sense, since you always are in competition with other players, everything is PvP, but that doesn't mean that PvE doesn't have a specific and precise meaning. You are free to denigrate other players with the term of course, but both CCP, and more generally the gaming community use that term to refer to activities where the player is interacting with the game environment, be it asteroids, flowers or NPCs, not when their opponent in the game universe is controlled by another player.

Here's another tip for you: if an activity in Eve provides the player with with resources spawned into the game universe as a reward, it is PvE. With the sole exception I can think of of insurance payouts (which have their own special controls to prevent abuse), no PvP activity provides direct resources for PvPing for the obvious problem of collusion.

I know you are just trying to insult your fellow players of this video game for some reason, but I just want to set the record crystal clear so some poor player stumbling into this thread doesn't believe your nonsense and start parroting it as fact.

Where to you get that idea? CCP is constantly buffing, nerfing and rebalancing things in all sectors of space. Usually they do this when players get too adept at the mechanics that the basic game is no longer working as they intend it to or is impacting on other game systems. Witness the recent changes to nullsec which broke up the large coalitions, or the very recent changes to wormhole escalations that nerfed/changed the farmability of the escalations. The fact that CCP has to respond is a compliment to those players who had mastered those parts of the game to the point changes were necessary to bring things back to the intended game play.

CCP intends for criminals to exist in highsec. Highsec carebears (as well as other complacent/lazy players) still die every day. The fact highsec safety is seemingly always buffed is a direct result of the fact that highsec ne'er-do-wells adapt to the changes, while carebears generally don't and prefer to whine on the forums to get CCP to adapt the game for them. CCP spent a whole lot of effort a few years ago with CrimeWatch 2.0 and the wardec revamp to ensure the "CODE concept of playing" is possible and continues in this game.

CCP intends for carebears to die. They want groups like CODE. and the various wardeccers to serve as risk for highsec residents. The have specifically enabled this gameplay. It is not an exploit or an oversight, but intentional and deliberate gameplay coded into the game by the developer. Just like any game system they will need to tweak it so that things are somewhat balanced which means buffs to safety are needed on occasion if too many sheep are being harvested, but if ever the carebears become too safe in highsec, I fully expect CCP to buff ganking and put them more at risk like they have multiple times for the carebears in nullsec and in wormhole space in recent years.

So yes, every nerf to ganking while perhaps not a 'win' for the New Order, it is certainly a compliment to our PvP prowess which has forced the developer to step in and change things as the other side is losing too much. Fair enough, it is just a game after all and it wouldn't be a very good one if the gankers could always explode everything that moved, or if it was impossible to play as a predator at all, and this requires CCP to tune the balance from time-to-time.

The great thing about Eve though is serving up those highsec carebears as my content is part of the fundamental game design. Unless CCP throws in the towel and completely gives up on the basic game design (which would essentially kill Eve and result in another game entirely), that will always be the case no matter how hard carebears whine or beg for CCP to make the bad people go away. I will always be able to non-consensually harvest them like the inert resources you accuse them of being in some manner or another. In other words, the Code always wins because that is what Eve is at its core.

You gotta love this game. :)

One of the problems inherent in discussions such as this is that the back and forth here in the forums isn't actually something taking place outside of the game environment. It's not like, say, two football fans discussing the rules of football in an abstract way. The Code people can't say "oh yeah I 'cry salty tears' sometimes too when a gank fails or when a ret pilot shrugs in local and doesn't engage in my New Order rp" because that would be 'losing'. The forum arguments are pvp for Code etc and pve for 'carebears'.

I think it's mildly interesting, but more interesting to me is how we rarely see gankers who don't espouse either rp James315-worship or dress their actions up as somehow being a positive for the game in terms of providing 'content'. Maybe a ganker's come out and simply said 'I like making other people unhappy and it's easy and not against the rules so eff you', sometimes, Nd I just missed it, I don't know.

But it's illuminating to see this assymetrical meta forum pvp going on.

Normally I enjoy your posts but this one blatantly misinterprets what I said and how I said it. I am against denigration of players and play styles. I have never used 'PVE' as a derogatory term. I'm against the term entirely because it's slang and poorly defined. CODE defines it in a certain way and I don't really care about it. CODE members constantly denigrates miners and their play style. You can keep spouting their propaganda line all you like but that doesn't make it true or real. It's just a certain perception from a certain group. Other groups have their perceptions. I just care that they don't end up hurting the game.



This concept is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. None of what you say here actually addresses any point I made. Moving a conversation about HiSec changes to LoSec and Null sec without a finishing point that is accurate just looks foolish. CCP doesn't have an 'intended game play' and this has been said over and over. They do like turn, churn and burn but this isn't about game play, it's about dealing with ISK growth and static situations that lead to it. In order for the economy to work, there has to be both input, creation, and destruction. If those aren't kept in balance, the economy dies and all gameplay dies. That's their only 'intent'. Game play is actually up to the players and CCP doesn't seem to like to interfere in it much. The "Intended Game Play" you cite is your bias read on what it is. Each of the security zones and their rules is what seems to me to be as far as 'intended' game play conecpts go. What CODE does in HiSec is perfectly fine with me, I have no issue with it. I take issue with CODE utterly ignoring the damage they do to the game itself with their methodology and not figuring out ways to mitigate it.



I highlighted all the insults that were tossed here to demonstrate clearly that I'm not the one denigrating other players and play styles. Just in case anyone is actually reading this stuff.

Now, to your points. I am not going to disagree with much of what you say because while I may disagree on perception, I don't disagree with the point that HiSec needs to have it's own level of risk and is just fine as it is. As to your ideological slant, believe whatever you want sir, it has no impact on me.

(continued)

From my extensive field research on the topic it is absolutely clear that miners are already pretty unhappy and we are not really needed for that part. If you kill a miner in the state of complete bot-aspirancy he will obviously vent all the bottled-up unhappiness against you.

I really enjoy miner tears, but not because the miner is unhappy, because it is a first sign of life, a first emotion from a bot-aspirant machine-like creature which made his first step in becoming human again. You see, you are mistaken if you think we just want to hurt people, we want to help them and to make them better again.

I know you are probably used to players which just grief and harass you and it's just natural that you expect the same from us. But we are New Order Agents and not your common ganker without purpose. If you would actually read the Code and embrace the words of our Saviour James 315 you would see that I am right and that it is our content creation which is the last chance Highsec has.

Praise James!

Which you almost never do. I've mined much in the past and recently started back up my multibox fleet, stripping ice belts in under an hour while playing PS4, and am yet to feel the wrath of CODE members. The players you target are generally solo miners with limited experience. The reason some of your targets get angry isn't because they are miners, it's because they've been caught out by a mechanic they don't understand. If you gank missioners or travelling frigates you can often get the same response.

Agreed, which is why low risk PvP that CODE is involved in also needs to be balanced. You seem to think that other people in highsec have out of whack risk/reward while you guys are fine. That's simply not the case, especially when compared with any other form of PvP. Mining is one of the lowest income activities when performed solo and yet your group targets solo miners. If anything all you do is push out the competition so that larger multiboxers who have no worries about CODE even remotely affecting them make even more.

And when they released the details of those studies, the methods of analysis they used were highly dubious. They used extremely limited timeframes that would exclude most new players who are in mining barges (as most newbies don't know how to efficiently get into a barge in a week) and they made no attempt to split out newbies who joined to play with other players (and thus would be more likely to join a corp and get into fights) vs fresh newbies joining of their own volition. What we do know (thanks in part to your groups documentation) is that ganking player tends to infuriate a good portion of the newer and lower skilled players and that players have indeed ragequit over it.

I'm sure that's true, but if a player is bored by EVEs mechanics, it's highly unlikely that ganking them relieves that boredom. Encouraging them to join other players in corps and interact has been proved to help but oh, that's right, corporations that exist in highsec that don't exist purely as a shell for NPC alts (see red frog for example) or PvP don't generally succeed in growing because of constant wardecs from merc group looking for their own form of easy, low-risk PvP.

Throwing away rookie ships is difficult/impossible? They've even made it so you can have dedicated alts for this that pay for themselves through SP trading now.

Nope, I just find it amusing that your own website shows why your target selection and methodology does nothing to accomplish the goals you claim to have and simply make rookies mad. At the end of the day, I wouldn't claim either way, I think you have zero additional effect on player retention in compared with any other player. Players who don't like or don't understand the game will at some point be enraged by someone and quit or get bored of the game and quit. Pedro likes to claim code are here fixing the game, but the reality is you're all just playing it like any other player, and no different from any other highsec player seeking low risk activities. Again, that's not a bad thing, the sandbox is the sandbox and seeking minimal risk is an acceptable part of that.

Maybe you should try actually playing the game instead of being a glorified bot. It's not like it's the slightest bit hard to avoid suicide gankers.

You have really hit on the main complaint of people like yourself and Lucas. No matter how many times we tell you we really DO believe that highsec miners are ruining the game with their expectations of safety and constand demands for the nerfing of highsec aggression when their "safe space" gets invaded you persist in insisting that we are run of the mill griefers who just want to upset the noobs.

With the easy acceptance of players from all over Eve into the New Order you may be correct on some accounts. But I can tell you from extensive time in the New Order and hours of conversation with the main long time Agents that the battle against bot aspirancy is a real motivation and that the ranks of the New Order are filled with former can flippers, ninja salvagers, corp awoxers and many of the other forms of highsec pvp that were destroyed by CCP in response to the whining and complaining of the low engagement players of highsec. As each of these other forms of emergent gameplay were ruined we were forced into the only remaining outlet, ganking. We know who ruined the Eve we loved to play.

That being said, we are not out for revenge. We are determined, instead, to show players, old and new, the evils of bot aspirancy and transform highsec from a place where players have the expectation that they can safely undock in whatever they choose, go whereever they want and sit around gathering ISK without any interaction much less interference from other players into somewhere a person thinks twice before hitting the undock button. Because on the other side, is us.

Waiting to take away whatever you have. Or, alternatively, to sell you a permit and get your support of our efforts.

I do find your suggestion of us self-limiting to be laughable. In null sec do people release their tackled opponents if they haven't destroyed them in a set amount of time? Do alliances drop their invasions if the system hasn't fallen in some arbitrarily set time? Do you slap your opponents across the face with a leather glove or make sure both sides have equal forces before engaging? No, you don't as it would be rediculous to set aside your goals for some arbitrary "rules of engagement". Well, when you are determined to save all of highsec in eight years, the stated goal of the New Order, there is no room for self-imposed limitations. Or mercy for that matter.