Been playing the game on and off for quite a few years. Also a student
of history and of people. Also enjoy the genius and idiocies of the forums.
EVE is enjoyable, frustrating and intriguing. The fact that real world
mechanisms can be used in the game are part of what makes it so intriguing.
I’ve been watching the interminable Yaarrrr versus Carebear goings on
for a good while. A few days ago the thought struck me that while EVE
does a wonderful job of implementing PvP via users of force it has
almost completely ignored economic warfare. Looking outside of EVE
at the real world I would challenge just about anyone to cite an example
of a war that was fought between combatants using only force and nothing
else.
Economic warfare is a vital component of human warfare. Heck, the West
won the Cold War mostly using economic warfare (force (or, rather, the
threat of it) played only a part that was used to prevent us indulging
in the well-anticipated World War Three.) It was inability to continue to
compete economically with the West’s spending on armament that caused
the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR. They simply ran
out of money and resources, this, in turn, sapped their will to continue
and caused the reforms of the80’s.
EVE contains almost nothing of true economic warfare.
Everyone has access to the basic EVE NPC markets.
Everyone has access to the player driven market/contracts for
manufactured goods and services irrespective of their behavior.
So, tell me, why can the force users attack the wealth and goods
producers with impunity and the wealth and goods producers have no
weapon to counter this other than becoming users of force themselves?
Why should they have to continue to sell to the people who (from the
Carebear viewpoint) are nothing but arrogant vandals? This gives force
users a free pass to do as they please, gives EVE a ‘violence is King’
gloss and completely ignores true economic warfare as part of in-game warfare.
There should be more than one way to skin this particular cat.
My suggestion is simple to state (can’t speak for the coding to
implement it) -
Give all individuals and corporations the ability to respond to attacks
or to implement attacks by preventing targets, systems and/or regions
from purchasing goods from them or using any services they may offer.
Example - Corporation Y has been attacking and damaging Corporation B
for the last nine months. Corporation B also happens to be a major
manufacturer of goods and services in the region. Corporation B then
responds by blacklisting Corporation Y so that Y cannot purchase
anything on the market produced by B.
Crank it up further - B goes on to campaign with their allies and asks
them to blacklist Y. Y all of a sudden finds it has to resort to all
kinds of tricks to maintain the flow of services and materiel. Gasp!
There’s actually a /price/ to pay for blowing peaceful people up that
/doesn’t/ involve who has the strongest fleet?
And, of course, think of the fun we’d all have with trying to figure whose alts
are buyers for blacklisted entities and the potential for illegal materiel trading.
All of a sudden Carebears have teeth. The force users may even have
to enhance their own Carebear capabilities to survive. The force PvPer
may even develop a little respect for the Carebear as a result.
And it’d have the needed effect of making the Carebear community feel
less like the third class citizen that the present implementation of EVE
makes them.
More importantly, it’d add a real world mechanism to EVE (where just about
everything else already exists) that’ sorely lacking.
Manufacturers and miners have a powerful weapon - if CCP chooses to
let them have it.
