Evolving EVE: A Universal Income

I feel you are pushing. Learn the difference and stop the stupid insults.

You are claiming your opinion of what is taste is universal. That is pushing. Your insults won’t change that.

Thank you for your opinion, although the level of prejudice in your opinion is both surprising and misplaced.

Really ?

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Well, that’s not what I said. You can’t have creation without the balancing factor, the destruction. That is the true nature of the sandbox, again, my opinion. Making risk-less creation (pve) too attractive would lead to more problems. The alternative (where we are now) is to make it less rewarding in ISK value or via resource reduction - not a pretty concept either.

Anyway, it’s my opinion, nothing more. We’d have to interview the original ccp crew from back in 2002-3 to know what they really had in mind as the game’s concept. Best guess is to try to deduce their intentions from what they created then. Judging from Hillmar’s fireside talk (see other thread) destruction and danger of significant loss was very heavily on their minds at the very least.

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Currently it does, unless you count abandoned upwell structures and asset loss ? What do you see as alternatives to destruction by PvP ?

Totally agree. My evil solution would be to not tinker with resource distribution but find ways to draw those super rich into the Holy Bonfire of War, lol. If anything, the resource tinkering has led to pvp pilots being a bit more concerned about their isk, at least from what is said on certain “news streams” pertaining to the war down in the southwest.

I saw an interesting (but nightmarish) idea on the forums where someone talked about an entropy factor on all assets stored in a station (maybe the thread on Hilmar’s fireside talk, too lazy to look for it). Personally I’d rather have shortage of minerals and lower bounties than having to pay maintenance costs on all assets all the time :stuck_out_tongue:

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PVP and PVE in eve online are intertwined. You can’t separate the two. Try to mine in Lonetreak or do some exploration in Sivala for you to see what I meant.

You are indeed wrong. EVE is not a PvP game, was not designed as a PvP game, was never marketed as a PvP game. It is a Space MMO that features open-world PvP, not revolves around it. CCP advertising for it has always been along the lines of what they still use today:

" EVE Online is an immersive, community-driven experience filled with adventure, riches, danger and glory. Set tens of thousands of years in the future, EVE Online ’s universe of New Eden is governed by a hyper-capitalistic economy where space flight is the path to all commerce, communication and conflict. Players are challenged with establishing themselves as major competitors, trusted by their friends and feared by their enemies. To accomplish this, the principal tools available to players - apart from an extensive array of sophisticated equipment, customizable spaceships and in-game corporations - are their natural business acumen, social skills, Machiavellian thinking and cunning combat strategies."

It’s only the PvP crowd that thinks EVE revolves around them.

Aaand… wrong again. Anything you repeat often enough becomes a grind. I know (or knew, rather) quite a few players who like mission running or exploration or even building a bunch of modules and shipping them to market. It becomes a ‘grind’ only when for whatever reason the current needs of your gameplay require you to do the same thing 500 times to achieve your current goal.

And if you think sitting around a gatecamp waiting for some easy gank, or cloaking and scanning for prey for an hour, or roaming low-sec for 2 hours looking for a fight is “always surprising and new and fun!” then you’ve been drinking the Kool-aid for a little too long.

It’s the exaggerated BS like this by the PvP fanbois really, that makes them seem so out of touch with the actual whole picture of EVE.

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Okay, I’ll bite, for once. PvP is the dominant feature that colors the entire game, that is how significant and pervasive the PvP aspect is, one that a few good people on these forums have problems accepting.

I can imagine this game populated with only players who share their time between isk creation (pve) and wealth destruction (pvp), being neither purely pvp nor pve.
I cannot imagine an EvE with only players of either pve or pvp, as it would nuke the economical element itself into pointlessness. It could be a different game, but not EvE. PvE needs PvP and vice versa for this game to exist.

Can you ? Now go blow stuff up, it will help the economy :rofl:

Competing against whom?

Evil trigs and drifters of course :wink:
It’s clear from the next snippet:

A lot goes into defeating those nasty npc’s

Which would be fair if NPCs were working towards a goal that is detrimental to the players, but I dont really see such agency in any NPCs.

Edit: I suppose NPC mining fleets count.

No actually, blowing stuff up doesn’t ‘help’ the economy, nor is the economy even broken. That’s just a fantasy CCP is trying convince players of because they prefer saying “Players bent the game out of shape by farming” as opposed to “We designed a game badly from the start, then we made it worse while trying to fix it, and now we have no clue what to do.”

PvP is a minority activity in EVE, it always has been. Less than 15% of players engage in it. The MERs have always shown that EVE is, by and large, an economy and trade simulator.

PvP players just tend to be so egocentric that they can’t wrap their heads around the fact that they’re not the most important feature of EVE. Plenty of games run just fine without needing massive destruction to balance the economy. You don’t even need PvP to have destruction. CCP already proved the NPCs are better at it than you are anyway.

All that may be true (except that “blowing stuff up doesn’t ‘help’ the economy”, a point on which even Lucas and myself reached an agreement), but it would not be EvE Online. It would be an entirely different game.

On your numbers, even if they are accurate that doesn’t make PvP less important, significant and necessary. Their importance lies in the balancing factor in EvE Online - I’m sorry but I will keep repeating that. No economy without consumption, which in EvE means loss of assets.

As to alleged egocentrism, that’s individual, not the group as a whole. Same is true for some die hard pve’ers, no ?

However, the subject of the thread was a proposal for Univeral Basic Income, not a philosophical discussion on what EvE is (there is no definitive answer, thank Bob).

Here’s another element: if that UBI could be geared towards introducing people to PvP I’m all for it, especially if it could be combined with flying in fleets. That would help retention (comes from a dev, not me). Anything else, nah. Just read up on the interwebz and any rookie can make plenty of cash in no time.

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You are wrong to a considerable extent. EVE isn’t a death match game. In EVE, PvP is a tool that can be used by players to achieve their goals. PvP is a means to an end, and not an end in itself. If you want to fight other players with no specific purpose in mind, there are thousands of games out there that do PvP combat much better than EVE does.

All EVE PvP is done with purpose, which can be many things, such as direct financial profit, bragging rights, practice in order to get better at it, etc. But there’s always a purpose. The few people you meet who claim that they just like to “roam” and “pew pew” or whatever aren’t consciously aware of their own motivations.

That kind of insider ■■■■■■■■ is absolutely reprehensible.

And then on top of that, they restructure the war system in a manner that gives a categorical, uncontested advantage to those who can field bigger numbers, meaning that you can’t even use guerrilla tactics to your advantage. Wars are decided by whoever blows up their enemies’ station, so the bigger party is always going to win, and the biggest party will always consist of TTT backers.

You can take the destruction out of the “egocentric” PvPers’ hands and kick them to the curb, but the carebears will whine about destruction regardless of where it comes from, as is evident from all the Triglavian whine threads.

It’s almost like you’re ignoring the need for things to be destroyed in order for them to have any actual value in the game. You’re entitled to have a chip on your shoulder about PvP, but your inability to see what would happen to the economy if things don’t get destroyed is concerning.

Or do you think that you can balance it out with a perpetual growth of the game’s community, pyramid scheme-style, in order to foster demand for economic output? Surely you understand that that’s not a sustainable solution, right?

Or are you fine with everything in EVE devolving into test server prices?

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It’s wrong to couple those words to what you quoted. Literally no one in this thread has said anything about EvE being a death match, and certainly not in what you quoted. In any case, the references to fun and satisfaction/reward were directly related to what Sol was writing earlier - and I’m sure he could explain it more if he felt like it would serve a purpose.

Of course PvP can be a tool in EvE, and it is much more besides it. PvP can even be its own purpose for many players. Ask any American male and he will tell you, in no particular order, the things he likes most in life: bacon, sex and pvp (/irony off).

But the BIG thing with PvP is, if one chooses to join a an open PvP game, or indeed create one, PvP becomes the dominant feature because of its confrontational nature. Anyone who has played a game with open PvP has experienced it. Once that path is chosen the rest kind of follows.

A pity that you ignored an iteration of your idea, two posts ago. That was the real subject of your thread, wasn’t it ?

Well, It’s not like I think you’re an idiot or anything. I agree with a lot of the thing you’ve said, just not that particular one.

Barring some very minor outliers on which I won’t judge an entire system, PvP is always a tool in EVE. In other games, it can be an end in itself, but not here. There’s always an underlying reason for attacking/fighting someone in this game that’s more than “I want to make shoot with gun.”

One of the things that I hope the idea of UBI would accomplish would be to enable newer/poorer players to attempt to achieve their goals more often. My understanding of UBI as it applies to EVE isn’t for the sake of enabling players to “pew pew” more often without any particular reason behind it.

The word “tool”, as I understand it, would indicate a specific, hard goal in the game, like profit, or sov, or eliminating competition of any nature. And that does occur. However, there’s also plenty of PvP just for the heck of it, because it is fun. Would you categorize the roams of e.g., Bombers Bar as a tool ? Sure, if you see organizing public fleets as an end, I guess you could label it as a tool. However, it’s just the other way around. Those fleets are organized to have fun, to have the opportunity to engage in PvP as such with a particular doctrine that is not that widely used (and whatever drops is used to fund the next fleets, which is a secondary goal). And what about 1-on-1 fights ? Duels ? Competition between rivaling FC’s, and by extension, rivaling alliance leaders ? See who’s top dog ? Healthy competition … Nah, I’d call it a means, not a tool, but it’s not terribly important what we call it, as long as we have fun :wink:

The things you’ve listed have underlying goals and agendas:

Not sure what that thing is specifically, but “roams” in general have a few motivations behind them, such as loot, asserting authority, kill board stats, PvP practice for participants, etc.

Honor, bragging rights, asserting authority.

Often competition for space and resources, and political power.

So yes, there are almost always reasons behind PvP that aren’t just to “pew pew” and such. Economic competition is so integrated into the core and spirit of EVE that going out to fight without any reason at all is an outlier situation. I think most players will agree that if they’re not getting something out of it, or even just a chance to, they wouldn’t go out and risk a ship for no particular reason.

Does it happen? Yes, it does, but usually as an effect of someone being conditioned by other people that the way you “play EVE” is by “grinding PvE in order to fund PvP,” an attitude I mostly attribute to null-sec line members. It’s a lie that’s been sold to them by intelligent and manipulative leaders, similar to how certain lies get sold to people in real life, e.g. the generic consumerist mentality of developed western countries. It’s a tool of social control that the wealthy and connected use to keep people in line, and EVE isn’t much different in that regard.

do you write articles for the Onion?

I will neither confirm nor deny that inquiry.