And you are right. That’s why I said it’s more of a topic to reflect on, not a call for ideas or postures to agree on.
Maybe that’s because, as a noob, I occupy a position similar to that of the little boy in the Emperor’s new clothes story…and have not had years of persuading myself the Emperor is in his shiny new gold clothes. I’m the awkward kid shouting out ’ but he’s got nothing on ! ’
Nah you’re just clowning.
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Whoa there! Are you saying mission runners wouldn’t be buying rigs and defence modules if there was no threat of ganking?
No, they are saying that Gankers keep Industrialists in business.
Is the Pope a Catholic ?
More than they can fathom, apparently.
Which makes the case for more ganking to occur, yes?
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It’s a false premise, that ganking is required for the economy. Technically, “some form of removing produced assets” is required, in order to keep inventories from piling up endlessly and causing deflation, which would reduce the value of production.
“Removing produced assets” can happen many ways. Items can decay. NPCs can kill more. (NPCs already destroy more assets in high sec than gankers do, for instance.) Wars can happen. Players can fight each other in actual combat ships rather than wolf/sheep ganking style encounters.
Having a large emphasis on the ganking topic is just one sign that EVE offers very little in other types of PvP and destruction. If the only way you can get a “meaningful interaction” with someone in your game is to blow up a month’s worth of their work when they’re in a non-combat ship, then your game (and quite possibly you) has problems.
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I have news for you: most of the players who join EVE do not join for “genuine combat ship vs. combat ship PvP.” In fact, most of the players who join EVE would prefer it if EVE had no PvP whatsoever. As in, literally, zero ability to attack other players in any shape or form.
And that, in itself, is why a “solution” based on creating “meaningful” conflict between players (as opposed to piracy) will never actually work. Because most players will simply choose to opt out of that conflict, and if they can’t, well, then that’s not any different from ganking, is it?
EVE has a hybrid system in which both meaningful conflict and non-consensual piracy acts are possible (though I would also call piracy meaningful content, in its own way). This is so because meaningful conflict alone can’t be the sole economic driver for the game. Once again, if players can opt out, they will. That’s where piracy steps in; it fills the gaps.
The real issue isn’t EVE’s “focus” on piracy (which is entirely imagined); it’s that most of the game’s players join the game because they seek a purely passive PvE experience, which was never intended as evident by the game’s early design. Ganking is so prevalent today not because the “griefers” are out of control, but because most of the player base only wants to grind PvE content, so it’s the highest-grossing PvP act by default.
As an aside from this, anyone advocating for some kind of “asset degradation” mechanic fundamentally misunderstands player psychology when it comes to MMOs. Having asset degradation would be catastrophic for player retention, because progress is the primary driver for activity. I sure as hell wouldn’t come back to this game if I took a break for a year, and then logged in to an empty hangar. At least players who get ganked might “try again” after some time. But zeroing out my trillion-ISK inventory would be an effective permanent removal of me as a player.
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Keep in mind peeps don’t “choose” to bring ganking to the topic.
There is little else to mention.
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Not only that…but I am simply tired of the sheer smugness with which some declare that they are the lions whilst everyone else is the wildebeast.
It’s quite funny watching the latest 50 minute video from a solo ganker…who gets annoyed that a ‘loot thief’ is butting in and taking ‘his’ swag. Never mind that the ganker is himself a loot thief…the whole incident very nicely shows a comical level of hypocrisy.
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This forum is a veritable gold mine of totally unsubstantiated anecdotes about ‘most players’.
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It’s only hypocrisy if they follow it up with a big forum rant and beg CCP to make it so that no one can steal “their” loot. If they just get angsty in-game and provide an emotional reaction, that’s content.
Don’t reach for straws with the “gankurz be mad LOL” stuff.
Play the game for two decades, and you’ll understand.
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No, I think after two decades it is far more likely that I’d have fixed ideas whether they were actually true or not. No different to real life. I have endless arguments on other forums with chemtrail people, flat earthers, etc…who all have the one thing in common that they’ve invested so much time in an idea that they simply can’t imagine being wrong !
Often it takes an outsider, or someone totally new to a situation, to come in and have that ‘what the $%&*…’ moment and see the wood for the trees.
I wouldn’t go as far as stating the premise being false. It’s a fact that one could arguably disagree with.
The current state of affairs shows that it’s one of the few paths between players leading to destruction. It is also a fact that it affects the economy in more ways than most people admit but it’s undeniable anyway.
But that psychology is derived from an assertion of the landscape. Being overprotective is not by choice but a consequence of the landscape proposition, not a player’s prerogative as it falls under common sense.
Asset degradation is a form of depletion already hardwired in the game in the form of “random events” implemented IMO in order to achieve the objective of destruction disguised as expansions or whatever it’s called by a possible “gain” if one deals with it the right way.
Of course it would affect player retention if implementation is not carefully deployed. Has it not? Trigs, for example… how many players it retained?
I’m not even going to try to convince you, because I know that if you stick around long enough and get into all aspects of the game, including and especially the PvP aspects, you’ll end up seeing it the same way I do. Everyone who goes through the process does. It’s just a natural conclusion players come to. Sure, if you spend your entire time mining or grinding rats, you might not (I’ve met players like that too, just did nothing but PvE for 15 years).
You’ll remember this conversation in a few years if you stick around.
Trigs didn’t destroy any hangar contents.
People are not ‘just’ miners or PvE-ers or PvP-ers.
I made the comment the other day…WHY do people mine when for a mere £4.50 they can bring in 320m ISK or so ? And the answer I have come to ( and one that also explains why I mine half the time ) is people like to have a sense of having ‘earned’ their in-game money. Why mine for a month, at great cost in time and ganker evasion, when for the cost of a few beers I can have 1bn ISK ?
Somehow, bringing in money from outside feels like cheating. It doesn’t feel quite the same replacing a Proc with 70p worth of money from outside…as it does replacing it with the fruit of 5 hours of mining labour in Eve.
And that is where so many miss the psychology whereby mining is a part of PvE and PvP. There isn’t mining, PvE, and PvP…they are all interelated, not simply in that ore pays for stuff but that ( just like rl ) there is an element of ‘work’ paying for play.
The despised miner is ‘playing the game’ as much as anyone else.
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Brilliant! 
Plenty of players fall into distinct categories. Many will do nothing but mine. Some will do nothing but PvP in some form. For example, the only time I ever do PvE is when CCP releases new content, and I want to try it out just to see what they added. At all other times, I exclusively PvP (or use the game as a chat box to hang out with friends).
For two reasons:
- Many people are unable to perform this cost/benefit analysis. Considering that most of the population can’t even mentally add/subtract simple numbers, it’s not hard to conceive that most won’t be able to arrive at this rational conclusion.
- A big chunk of the player base comes from countries where the financial calculus has a completely different shape, and the equivalent of £4.50 can feed them for a week, as opposed to buy them half a pour at a bar/pub. Where I live, for example, $4.50 can’t even buy me a coffee. Cheapest rent for a studio apartment starts at close to $2,000 per month. Here, I have to earn so much just to live that $15 a month for a single EVE account for example is de minimis.
It’s not. If you buy PLEX, you provide people who can’t afford to pay for subs out of pocket (e.g. third-worlders, college/school kids) the opportunity to play with a full-featured account without paying. You’re helping those people if you bring in outside money.
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And yet…you are quite happy for the entire contents of someone’s hangar to be ganked in a Providence passing through Jita, as was illustrated earlier.