Meh, saw another “nerf my enemies” thread. Was going to post there, but decided to turn my response into something worthy of it’s own thread.
Don’t fly what you can’t afford to lose.
Don’t be afraid to lose ships.
Bigger/more expensive/more skill intensive is not necessarily better.
Never be the victim.
Don’t expect (or demand) the unearned.
Always be growing –even if it’s slow growth. It is the still water that stagnates.
Punching down is great for making money, and can be fun. However, if all you do is punch down, you will lock yourself into your current level of competency.
The biggest tragedy of any loss is failing to learn anything from it.
Intelligence is learning from your own mistakes. Wisdom is learning from other people’s.
Do not let your ego inhibit your growth. Blaming enemies, allies, mechanics, and/or CCP will protect your ego, but it also blinds to your own mistakes and shortcomings, which prevents you from addressing them.
Angrily persisting in using deprecated strats is not adaptation -it’s being an evolutionary holdout.
Community wisdom is great for casuals and helping newbros to find their footing. However, you can’t pull ahead of the pack by doing what everyone else is doing.
If you can’t beat them in a fair fight, don’t fight fair (note that I am not advocating for cheating, or breaking the EULA. I’m talking about not following a bushido code).
Think outside of the box. And, do note, that I’m not just talking about things like ships, fits, or tactics. It’s a sandbox. Do not artificially constrain yourself to a limited set of tools.
If someone presents you with two unappealing options, look for the options that they aren’t presenting to you.
If you think your enemies have an insurmountable advantage, adopt their tactics and strategies. You’ll either gain an insurmountable advantage yourself, or discover their strengths and weaknesses so that you can better fight them.
Change is opportunity. Nerfs, buffs, redesigns –it doesn’t matter. It is change itself that is the opportunity. And if you cannot figure out how to benefit from a change right now, look for players that have figured it out. You may be able to follow their lead for this change, and it will help give you ideas for how you might exploit similar opportunities in the future.
Improve your execution. Learn your hotkeys. Rearrange your hud to maximize readability and minimize eye and mouse movement. Look for other ways to improve reaction times, reduce execution times, and reduce mistakes. Practice, practice, practice.
Videos and guides are great, but there is no substitute for experience.
Try to apply lessons learned from other games to Eve.
Let people underestimate you. Fly ships with a reputation for sucking. Appear like prey. Try to hide strengths. (On a side note, I’ve heard it argued that people will only underestimate you once, but you’d be surprised how many players fail to learn from their mistakes –or, maybe not because you already know.)
Never forget that you are playing human opponents.
Even optimal strats can become suboptimal if it makes you too predictable.
Don’t underestimate your opponents. Strong players like to act like prey, or pretend that they are weaker than they actually are.
Don’t overestimate your opponents. Just because they have the superior ship/fleet comp and/or are acting aggressively, that doesn’t mean that they have the skills to back it up.
Fun is for casuals.
I guess that’s enough. Have anything else to add?
Oh, so I really like this channel about fighting games because he often teaches lessons that can be applied to Eve. Thus, I wanted to share, but I was also wondering if anyone else had any other recommendations for similar channels.
Sadly you are right. I was playing Apex with some younger bros and a dude I was fighting simply outplayed us. He was better at rope games than we were and had crazy aim
And I said in chat damn that guy is smooth and my teammates trashed the guy and were making excuses.
And I was like no bros, we just got owned LOL.
I don’t get why peeps just can’t keep it real with themselves.
Some people have trouble accepting it when they make mistakes or get outplayed.
My last lost ship was caused by my own greed and lack of a proper escape plan. Luckily it was a cheap ship, but it was completely avoidable if I had played better. The guy who caught me knew what he was doing (and was messing with our fleets in the next half hour, killing a few more of us without dying), so props to him.
(Edit: I see he did get caught later. Nice, justice.)
Overall good list but I don’t agree with this. This sounds negative. But fun is the award for being knowledgeable and confident in what you are doing. Everybody should strive for maximum fun in a game.
I really like this point. Rather than aim for bigger ships to fly, I instead look at my core skill sets and max them to IV if possible: power, CPU, gunnery, navigation, and so on.
Guilty as charged, but at least I’m having fun with my personal fault.
Well, there is nothing wrong with maximizing your fun per hour -whether that be some of the time, or all of the time. However, playing to maximize FPH can often be at odds with trying to get really good at a game. For example, whooping up on your friends is probably more fun than consistently getting your ass handed to you by tournament level players, or practicing the same move over and over again in the Street Fighter training room. But if your goal is to be able to reach the highest levels of play, you need to challenge yourself against better players, and be able to consistently parry supers or execute complex moves.
It’s not unlike trying to get really good at a sport or playing an instrument. You can certainly play casually, and get decent by mucking about, but if you want to get really good, you’re going to have to put in some hard work, and do things that some people would consider to be unfun.
So when I say, “fun is for casuals,” it’s a tongue in cheek way of saying that getting really good will require effort and work.
EvE is not one of those repetitive arena games, or battle royale games. Here you can beat the one-trick pony arena player outside of the arena or avoid competing at all. Hard work will only help so much, the smart move is to skip it. Competence and experience come with time and number of tries at your chosen pace.
Seeing the title, I was originally expecting some worthless, snarky thread. However, I then noticed who wrote it and, after reading it, felt it was very well written and well meant advice. Blunt, factual, and dealing with an overwhelming and long term problem in EVE; I agree that a version of this should be added to the new pilot section of the forums. The only issue I have has already been raised: having fun itself can be exactly what a person seeks regardless of skill. Whether golf, fishing, music, or art, while I wouldn’t mind being better, the act itself and how it makes me feel regardless of skill is the incentive, rather than creating more work or stress. Course, I’m old…
Driving your opponent into a rage can cause them to make mistakes.
A friend of mine living in Stain collected the corpses of someone she didn’t like much untill she had a good number of them. Then one fine day there he was with his corporation sitting in a gate camp just waiting to be driven over the edge. She was flying a stiletto prior to their being nerfed and bad a stack of his corpses in her hold. The first thing she did was violate the gate camp to get back in the system they were in and then began warping to this guy, ejecting one of his corpses right on top of him and warping off again. Over and over till he was screaming and yelling in local and his corp mates were mocking him relentlessly. Suddenly the gate camp was engaged by some other random group and he was the first to die as a result of being in full tantrum mode. As soon as his pod blew she warped in and scooped up that corpse, told the rest of his corp “good fight!” and took off for home.
Driving your enemy insane is a very sound tactic that weakens them, if you have no chance in hell of beating them in any traditional way this can be a great help, it’s also funny as hell.
