I have noticed that a lot of the people losing their ships and complaining about the experience are relatively new to the game. At first, I kind of wrote the dynamic off. New players are obviously going to die at a higher rate than more experienced players with more skillpoints and better equipment. Then I realized that this is also a problem in the real world. New drivers, for instance, are more prone to accidents than older drivers. You can’t join the army until you’re 18. You can’t go work in a coal mine as a child. There are rules put in place by society to protect newbies.
Maybe EVE needs an age of consent for PVP, maybe 15 or 30 days.
Players are being tricked and/or forced into interactions that they don’t seem to be ready for. The experience might be scarring them and affecting the overall game detrimentally. And, I even think there may be some players who understand this to be true that gain a certain perverse satisfaction of stripping newbies of their innocence.
Wouldn’t it be worth considering a minimum age for such interactions? That way young characters could be guaranteed a minimum opportunity to gain experience and develop the maturity to accept and respond to other players wanting to enter their space and aggressively force play upon them that they don’t enjoy?
This is already a thing actually. People are not allowed to shoot new characters who stay in the starter systems. The solution is pretty easy, just don’t leave the starter system.
You can’t leave the house alone while you’re 15-30 days old right?
I guess I can see where you are coming from, but the consequences of undocking when you are so young are far less severe than driving on the highway before you are ready. Might be better to learn the ways of Eve–and if it is really the game for you–early on.
Better might be if we as a community do something like …I cannot remember the full name of the Corp, but it was something Torpedo Delivery Service. They were the first to make one of my PvE ships (on another character many years ago) explode, long before I really understood the game. After the kill they sent me a mail that was a receipt for the delivery of their torpedoes to my hull, which was good for a laugh, not written to harvest tears, and more importantly a link to information on how to do what they did. Stealth bombers have become my favorite ship, and the loss combined with losing it to good parts of the community actually helped cement my interest.
Brand new players are still learning the game interface and game mechanics, not to mention how to properly fit and fly ships. Plus most are first concentrating on how to make ISK so they can buy all the skills and equipment needed to get established in the game.
But hey, if they want to strap on guns to their Corvette’s and jump into conflict with other players, more power to them.
That’s what the career agents are for. You’d be surprised (or might not be) how many players in Rookie Help completely skipped the tutorial and career agents and ask a billion questions in rookie help. You can’t help those who refuse to help themselves…
There are already a bunch of protections for newbies. Including some blanket clauses for anywhere for people who deliberately abuse newbies rather than incidentally hitting a newbie in the middle of their other targets.
Why PvP, exactly? Why not trading, for instance? People that are too young cannot still properly use their money, after all, so they should be forbidden from creating orders before growing up enough.
Or mining. Child labor is illegal in most countries, you know.
I think it’s good for noobs to killed (not greifed) early. Helps them learn about ship loss early, and shows them that Eve is more than just mining roids and running missions. And if they can’t handle losing a ship they spent 30 minutes (or whatever) grinding for, they probably won’t like Eve.
We’ve given acceptance of the circumstance. We agree to enter into a realm in which acts may be done to our ships against our will. We do not consent to those actions just because we undock. That’s not consent.
Further, the question is whether or not someone even has the wherewithall or should have the ability to give any sort of consent to PVP until they are of a certain age/maturity in game. If they don’t understand the game yet, how can they consent to “play” it at all?
I get that you want to take advantage of them for your own sick gratification, but maybe the game would be better off if you had to wait 15 days or 20 or 30 days before you could use one of the poor newbies’ to get your rocks off.
Lmao, wow.
You are so far gone up your own behind, there’s no saving you.
Hope you enjoy what little time you’ll be spending in EVE until you find something that’s worthwhile to waste your time on.
CCP doesn’t believe so and that’s all that matters
Carebear appeals to “think of the children” always fall short of actually showing anything beyond “might” and “maybe”.
So I think the answer to your question of whether it’s worth considering an age of consent fits into an overall broader category of “does conflict impact new player retention”, and CCP have looked at that and are satisfied with the situation.
Alright, there are some people who like to specifically target newbies. But don’t think that just because someone is against your idea, that they like blapping noobs.
This has nothing to do with better equipment or more skillpoints, and everything to do with experience.
This is a problem in the real world, because we realize that Children have not matured enough in order to make informed decisions. In other words, they are idiots, and we try not to get them to make life-impacting decisions that impact their, and people around them.
Except that we have players with year-old characters still crying and whining. There doesnt seem to be a minimum amount of time that passes without an example of someone beyond that point in time that starts crying and whining about a huge loss and threatens to quit the game.
The thing with Humans in reality is, we have a good enough understanding of the human brain in order to determine when the age of consent should be. Thats why the age may vary, but no first world country with a sane leadership is saying that the age of consent should be 4. How do we determine what age should apply with characters? There are people who get it from the first day, as to what type of game EVE is, and there are people who cry and whine after years of play. Infact, the maturity of the character seems to be tied to the maturity of the Player in question. And this is something that we cannot put a restriction on.
