But those are the kill records?
My entire argument is that I think that the game would be better off without them, and that their lack wouldn’t prevent me from playing exactly as I already do.
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That’s easy enough to say now that you are well known precisely because people can see your scary killboard and that you are a skilled player. I very much doubt your reputation ( or that of Aiko ) would be so well know if there had never been any kill mails. You would be just a series of hit and run kills and most people would forget that you were the same character that killed them a month or so ago.
And let’s face it…people aren’t exactly reluctant to display their kills on the ganker channel. And I don’t blame them and am all for that. But clearly that would not be possible if there were no killmails…and indeed I suspect there’d even be fewer gankers without the ‘bragging rights’ and all that.
Oh no, my reputaiton doesn’t come from zkill.
Send me a billion isk and I’ll show you a neat trick.
No, that’s not it at all.
Let me elaborate further:
If this were the case, the kill board record would in fact exemplify me being a nobody who just does hit and run attacks that everyone forgets shortly afterward. Players would take one look and say “oh, it’s just some nobody loser who farms easy kills.”
If my kill board is scary (your words), then it has to reflect accomplishments of note and value.
I am not a reflection of my kill board; my kill board is a reflection of me.
When one of my enemies comes across me sitting still 20km off the gate in a hauler, they don’t instantly hightail it away from there because they look up my record and make a calculated decision that they won’t be able to kill me in their battlecruiser. They run away because they say “hey I see [links my name] in a hauler lol this is gonna be easy” in alliance chat and one of their directors starts yelling “no you idiot gtfo NOW!”
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I really don’t think so. With no killmails there’d be no way of linking your kills. Unless Capsuleer X happens to write down that he was killed by you, he’ll have forgotten who it was within half an hour…if he even noticed and got the name right in the first place.
You say your killboard is a reflection of ‘you’…but without a record of kills there IS no continuous ‘you’ that anyone other than yourself is aware of. There’s just ‘someone blapped me at the Amarr gate’. Whilst I can understand the fun of you knowing it is you…it is surely a lot MORE fun for everyone else to know too !
You keep making the error of thinking EVE is “a PvP game”. You also keep making the error of thinking that people who don’t play it the way you do are somehow irrelevant. And then you keep misleading yourself by swallowing your own propaganda that “if there’s no killboard, there’s no evidence you even play”.
Here’s what CCP says EVE is:
"EVE Online is a community-driven spaceship MMORPG where players can play free, choosing their own path from countless options.
Experience space exploration, immense PvP and PvE battles and a thriving player economy in an ever-expanding sandbox.
Participate in many in-game professions and activities, including war, politics, piracy, trading, and exploration, across 7,000 star systems with hundreds of thousands of other players."
It would honestly be more accurate to call EVE a “space economy/trading MMO” than “a PvP game”, since there is and always has been far more industry/trade than PvP. EVE is a Space MMO Sandbox which happens to feature a dash of PvP to keep things slightly more interesting.
I’m guessing the issue with the Killmail is that one person in your fleet got it, and didn’t upload it, and the Fort owner didn’t, so hey no zKill. Maybe they like to collect private killmails. Maybe they’re griefing the fleet. That’s all part of the sandbox. Trying to get CCP to spit full killmails out to everyone in a fleet action sounds like a good way to crash major fleet battles.
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When you’re good enough, when you’re dangerous enough, people will remember your name. If no one remembers your name right now, and you need a physical record to remind them of who you are, it simply means that you aren’t yet good and dangerous enough for people to care.
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Topic convinced me that zKill should be shut down. Along with all those other API/ESI tools. Back to the roots, just log in and having fun. Go Go Go! 
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@Altara_Zemara what’s your motivation or goal in collecting killmails anyway?
Let me know when you’ve removed authorization from it.
What’s anyone’s motivation for being on a channel where the entire day consists of nothing but people posting their killmails ? I’ve seen you on there too. Do I detect the distinct whiff of hypocrisy ?
It was a genuine question, that no one had bother to ask. Dunno why you’re so defensive about it.
So I’ll ask again: what’s your motivation or goal in collecting killmails?
He answered that already : it’s to build his history.
Because his fictional character in a fictional universe needs some tangible proof of exist essence to keep fictioning.
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It’s more than that. Altara has been using zKillboard as an objective measure of the value of other pilots. If you’re not on zKill, then you’re beneath contempt.
It’s not much different to me than a miner and their isk. They both are some external representation of value. A quantifiable number that can be raised ad-Nauseum to feel good about one’s self, that can be held over others who have a lesser value to confirm your superior self worth. That kind of thing.
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I recognize that. The follow up question is „build a history for what purpose“. Simply existing is what people do in 9-to-5 day jobs; surely people don’t want to „simply exist“ in their leisure times. I think Altara is deeper than that. But maybe I’ll be surprised.
Hence the genuine question. Some people I meet are trillionaires motivated by wealth and riches. Some want to make funny killmails. Some have revenge they are seeking. Some want fame or notoriety. It’s not a loaded question and it isn’t a barbed one. I’m offering them the chance to weave their story.
Yes it was irony in my post.
I’m afraid to say I don’t disagree with you on that point … yet.
That’s what you do your whole life.
Embrace being yourself, because that’s all you are.
Pretend that a PVP game is not one unless it accounts for all the kills made in a game, for all eternity.
I call them delusional.
I remember Tipa Riot would pop into the lowsec systems my corporation memembers hung out in and pick them off. I have no idea what Tipa’s killboard looks like, and I don’t really need to know. I know that I needed to warn people that she’d be coming for their head. She affected my game and forced me to change to account for her presence. To me, this is the record or history that matters.
I don’t object to giant blobs getting killmails if that’s what they want, but if you need a computer record to verify it then I don’t expect that the person was pivotal or particularly significant to the outcome and the event wasn’t particularly noteworthy. Ideally they’d always be generated and accurate since the game decided it was a thing they wanted to do, but as for it being fundamental to pvp or recording history? I don’t think so, either.
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The kill board in its current implementation doesn’t really provide an accurate representation of player stats anyway. For example, someone with 1,000 kills, but with all of those kills having 200 involved parties on them, can’t truly be said to have 1,000 kills, but rather 1,000 assists.
CCP’s cardinal sin was making a system that awards the kill to the player who performs the final blow, when they should’ve awarded kills to those who contribute the most toward securing them. Contemporary games are moving in this direction by using systems that award kills to those who contribute the most damage during the final X number of seconds of the target’s life, with games like Planetside 2 and BF4 starting this trend about ten years ago.
Squizz is putting lots of effort into improving the kill board, though. I begged him to implement some kind of contribution ratio to the main stats, and recently he finally added it to the group/solo bar (along with a fix that no longer counts all pod kills as “group kills” by default). Now you can tell at a glance if someone is a dirty little blobbing stat whore without having to manually browse through pages of records.
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I am not authed there, imhi never was. Corp CEO decided to auth the corp, so my kills/losses are included, nothing I prefer but it is how it is. For all my alts, none of them uses zKill.