I literally linked you proof of an alpha clone, (even if you don’t accept it was an alpha look at the guns used). It’s not speculation. A ■■■■-fit destroyer with ■■■■ SP, can kill a top-end cruiser which necessitates more skills than an alpha could even have.
You’re very right that pushing a button is easy. Pushing it at the right time, and pushing a bunch of different buttons in the optimal sequence to adapt to your opponent, far less easy. At no point did I say skills were worthless. I can see why you’re interested in trying to disengage, you clearly have absolutely no way to base your argument on fact.
I on the other hand, have produced fact. You answer those facts by trying to run away. So go ahead, coward, run away.
If I hit a hole-in-one with a baseball bat, does that mean that golf clubs don’t matter?
If I beat a Ferrari in a drag race with a stock mini-van (because he kills his car on line), does that mean the car doesn’t matter?
If I win the lottery, does that mean that hard work doesn’t matter (in general)?
You have cherry-picked an example and extrapolated it to mean something it doesn’t. When analysing uncertain outcomes, individual examples only highlight what is possible… not what is probable.
I produced an example of exactly what I claimed. That high SP, and blingy ships do not equate to victory. That player skill can and does produce victory against this, even in the face of overwhelming odds. It wasn’t just one kill that I linked, that dude’s entire kb is filled with examples.
More to the point of the topic, however, I have consistently said that the playerbase as a whole is who you compete against. Naari argues that because two players who start at the same time are not going to be on even footing if one injects, it is pay to win. I argue that because the player who injected is competing against the entire playerbase (the exact opposite of cherry-picking) there is absolutely no imparted advantage to the player who injects.
I never said more isk was ever bad. I said it wasn’t always going to help.
As the saying goes, a fool and his money are easily parted. Just as I know smart players, I know stupid ones too. I know a guy who lost his ratting carrier to roamers, and then decided it would be smart to try and loot his wreck with his fax before they did (literally warped his fax into them). Without any shocking surprise, he lost his carrier and his fax.
Completely relevant to this discussion. Bad players and those who end up making stupid mistakes are the same thing; easily beaten, regardless of how much they spend on their ships.
You read my example already. I linked a 700+m proteus getting killed by a <10m thrasher. Want more, go look. We both know examples of such exist, one such already linked.
So the thrasher pilot wouldn’t benefit from more ISK? (still irrelevant…)
Hint: I’m not talking about who wins a particular fight. Provide an example of when a player would not benefit going forward from having more ISK (please). My claim is, all else equal, that it’s always beneficial to have more ISK than you did yesterday. ALWAYS.
A valid example of such would prove me wrong. Simple.
No, he wouldn’t have, because he won the fight. They don’t get any more dead than that proteus. And ironically, last screenshot I saw of his plex vault, he had almost 300k plex.
I don’t claim they won’t benefit. I’ll say it slower for you: it doesn’t always help
Sometimes the bling is enough to turn a match between two even pilots where they ■■■■■■ up and ended up in a fair fight. That’s about the only time it makes any difference at all.
How much did the isk the proteus pilot spent help him win against the thrasher? Simple. It didn’t. “I didn’t lose as badly as I could have” is still “I lost”.
But fine, another example. Show me any powerbloc dread bomb fit, and all of its bling. Spoiler: It doesn’t have any. The cheaper it is, the better. Surely, powerblocs that have literal fountains of isk could bling their dreads if they wanted to (I know we could). Yet… they don’t. Because it doesn’t help enough to bother. IE it won’t actually influence the fight in any meaningful way in the vast majority of bomb drops.
It’s not a contradiction. The bling does make your ship more effective. It just doesn’t lead to a sufficient impact to change the outcome. If the outcome is the same, it did not help.
Stop being intentionally dense. It just makes you look retarded. ISK can be spent much more efficiently on volume rather than bling. 2 dreads instead of 1, to oversimplify. And as we’ve already pointed out, that’s a whole different set of circumstances.
Honest question. How does using “all else being equal” types of arguments help to clarify the pros and cons of this discussion?
I can see the appeal of simplifying something, and reducing confusion by isolating an issue or variable. But how does it remain relevant when there are likely confounding factors?
Because this discussion seems to alternate between an approach of isolating issues, and complicating it with other factors. This is an interesting topic, but it’s becoming challenging to appreciate all sides.
An excellent point, and one I was hoping either of these people would bring up. By and large more ships die in nullsov fleets. Hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of players involved. So, statistically relevant.
Bling is only used when it isn’t expensive. It generally only gets used when you need just that extra little bit of fitting space.
On the original topic of SP, the individual injecting becomes more or less irrelevant in any fleet with more than probably about 10 dudes in it. Their contribution on equal footing is generally going to be about 10% in that particular scenario. Injecting makes very little difference when you start adding realistic scale into it.
Say you do have the isk. You’re running geckos on your faction fit rattlesnake. That’s a 100% realistic scenario, I’ve killed a few roaming with the corp over the years (less common with the carrier/fighter rebalance obviously). It didn’t help them, they still died.
Humans successfully analyse the impacts of changes to single factors in complicated systems all over the place. This is simply how it is done.
It’s a fundamental principle in troubleshooting. Let’s say I am trying to tune a car engine to get the maximum horsepower, and I have 20 different factors that I can tweak. It’s a horrible idea to tweak 10 of them between each test. If I want to analyse the impact of tweaking a single factor, I can only identify said impact by holding all other factors constant. Of course, the exact value of this impact may only be the case when those other 19 factors are held at those exact levels seen in the test. But if I tweak 10 at once I have no clue what caused what. I could see no change in horsepower, despite having tweaked the most important factor to the most optimal value.
edit: It just dawned on me that this troubleshooting/tuning approach is basically just the coordinate descent optimization algorithm. Link below for mathematical justification and limitations (optimal final configuration not guaranteed, but that’s obvious I think and I more or less addressed that)
“All else being equal” is also very important in analysis of uncertain outcomes. For example, the faster you drive on roads covered in snow and ice, the more likely you are to have an accident. This is a very complicated situation, with many potential factors… yet I am able to make that claim with confidence. Maybe the road is straight. Maybe it has lots of curves. Maybe a deer will jump out in the road. Maybe the car will just run out of gas before a crash… If we don’t hold all factors other than the one we are examining to constant and *(usually) average levels then we are completely paralysed in our analysis. *(We can hold factors to abnormal levels if that is the specific case we want to examine, rather than “on average”)
Of course this type of analysis can miss the outliers… but that’s not the goal in the first place.
Your core argument is anchored on the fact that SP as such do not help in combat.
SP is a gating factor for ships, modules, and capabilities. Together with someone carelessly formlating an opinion or question, this makes it easy to manipulate a discussion via redirection. Spiced up with some classic EVE “Straw Men” it’s quite effective … at avoiding the argument.
Here’s an alternative approach. Compare these two cases:
Two players in identical T1/T1 frigates. One has played for many years, and is a PvP specialist who’s been in hundreds of one-on-one frigate fights. The second player has played for 3 weeks, has been in 12 one-on-one PvP frigate fights, and lost most of them due to a lack of game knowledge
Two identical players in frigates with the same T1 hull as above, but different fits. One has one of the ships from case 1 above. The other is that players twin, with similar EVE interests and experience. “Player one”'s twin (player three) has the most capable T1/T2 frigate his deep pockets and high SP allow
Statistically speaking (% change of winning, rounded for convenience) what results do we expect for the two fights?
I’d go with:
First battle (identical ships, different players): PvP specialist > 95%, new player < 5%
Second battle (identical players, different ships): more capable ship > 95%, T1/T1 ship < 5%
I wouldn’t conclude that SP make you better at combat of course. That formulation is a result of carelessness in specifying the assertion.
But having a ship that’s better suited to the specific combat scenario definitely provides an edge.
“Better ship for the combat scenario” doesn’t imply bigger ship of course. That just more “EVE forum legerdemain”.
Wrong.
My core argument is that SP is not something linked to a pilot’s age, and that injection or no injection, when that pilot is randomly inserted into PVP in Eve (be it of the shooting variety or otherwise), they’re on average going to be “in the middle”, and at very best (with a huge credit card) “on par with the best”. They’ll never be stronger (edit: I’m of course speaking of the bonuses that SP imparts, not player skill)
The initial impression your posts gave me is that you’re trying to persuade readers that it’s more effective for PvP to have fewer SP. I don’t think you actually mean that, but it’s what you seem to be saying.
I should have worded the first line in my earlier post differently, and I should have included a third scenario:
“Identical ships / Ihe twins (identical EVE player skill/experience) / One in a high-SP character and the other in a low-SP character”.
The equipment-efficiency benefits of skills like Gunnery mean the results will strongly favor the high-SP twin.
Whichever way you look at it:
Higher SP confers a significant combat an advantage
Better equipment (for the particular fight) confers a significant combat advantage
More EVE PvP skill and experience confers a significant combat advantage
The first two can be bought, and buying them will significantly reduce the advantage a vet has over a relative beginner.
The third requires practice. A rich beginner (e.g. less than a month of play) will lose much of the value of buying SP and equipment due to lack of playing skill. On the other hand it doesn’t take years of practice to get moderately skilled at PvP.
After a while, there’s certainly a period when there’s a “buy to win” element in EVE. After a certain level this seems to trail off again, but it’s there for a while.
