The other sheer irony of Aiko’s ‘free ISK’ comment is that if mining provides ‘free ISK’ then so does robbing miners.
It seems to matter an awful lot to Gix. Can’t think why…as the assertion that someone is not new is actually quite complimentary if you think about it.
You seem to be dancing around the issue by making it seem like getting killed is what Gix wants, so you’re “winning” by not giving it to him. That’s a very carebear thing to do, since it excuses you from taking initiative regardless of your decisions and circumstances. It’s like saying you “didn’t need that ship anyway” when someone blows you up.
Like I said, the opportunity to shut someone up by embarrassing them doesn’t present itself often, since most people use alts to shitpost on the forums. I’m sure many players here would help you if you organize some kind of effort.
I would welcome the opportunity 
I doubt they’d come and find me tho. That’d take actually playing the game.
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If you’re not occasionally losing ships (and getting podded too) then you’re doing something wrong in the game. Maybe just playing it too safe.
This game is a GREAT analogy to life: Risk/reward balancing.
Ok, here’s where we stand AFAIK,
Last week I fired up a bit of semantics “discussion” in a futile attempt to deplete the constant off topic trolling in regards of what PVP is not. Did not go well.
I guess it prolonged in excess as we can still see today.
Little advance, I must say… and if it keeps on going, I’ll have to give it up and let it die.
On the other hand, I tried to dig out some opinions about what could be considered as PVP drivers. Specifically, I tried to see what you guys think about giving some hulls a sort of buff that would twist the plot from what most call “sitting duck”.
There was little advance on that too. Some would say that it’s enough with what’s given under the void argument that something can be done prior to an encounter in order to completely avoid it --for example–. It’s ok I guess, on the current scheme but it’s not generating destruction between players, not enough.
Let’s please try and leave semantics aside and focus a bit. We’re on the 650’s vicinity and I’m running out of time for holidays. Thx
It’s not really a question of some hulls being a sitting duck, since that mostly only applies to the ganking style of destruction.
If you make gankable hulls stronger and/or more able to defend themselves, you will end up with less destruction because fewer people will try to gank them in high sec. In other space it shouldn’t matter since anyone PvPing there can usually call in enough force to kill anything, or they will ignore it altogether if it’s currently unkillable.
If you make some hulls weaker/more gankable, you will simply reduce the math for the gankers so they can succeed with less expensive ships, and/or players using those hulls will either quit playing, shift to different activities, or switch to a hull that isn’t weakened.
PvP in EVE is mostly about: math for profit, e-peen waving, or grudges. With a very small percentage of players who engage “for the fun of it”.
The e-peen waving and gank-for-profit style of play are doing fine for the small portion that plays that way, we don’t need to do much there. Grudges are hard to stir up externally.
That leaves “math for profit” as the primary thing CCP has control of. Currently, only a small percentage of EVE players find PvP to be interesting, rewarding, or productive. It’s an inherently lossy mechanic, meaning more is lost than gained in every encounter (when counting both sides).
MMO players won’t generally engage in a mechanic where they will, on average, lose progress in the game. So to make more PvP, CCP would have to adjust the entire PvP scenario and it’s supporting mechanisms so that a significant number of players can at least convince themselves they have a chance of “gaining something” by doing PvP.
Note they don’t actually have to gain, they just need to believe they can.
So FW, Resource Wars, Low Sec would be the primary areas of focus for changing mechanics to be more rewarding in some manner (not necessarily ISK) for doing PvP. And in high sec, making a bounty hunter profession that can gain by hunting criminals/suspects could also help, although again this would be a smaller activity since gankers are only a small portion of the player base, and the odds are all tilted in their favor if they’re doing it right.
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No, that is perfectly clear… a ganker would never move against an unforeseen outcome.
What I think would be better than the actual conditions is for players being the ones doing the job and not Concord for the specific case.
If a ship’s ability to respond is the gauge for PVP, there wouldn’t be any.
If some of Concord’s burden is removed and somehow moved to the players, more peeps would participate. The current gankers could be extinct but perhaps a new way of ganking would arise. One intelligenter to the eyes of a victim and perhaps less “unfair” or “unworthy”.
I get your point and as diagnostic is undeniable but the effect of such encounters would bring more action to the field and collateral confrontations would populate a bit more. Players would be more into PVP if they experience it more often, especially if they also witness that chances of survival can only derive when an effective button is pushed, not as contestotary of a guaranteed outcome.
You’re right. Under the current circumstances, it would not bring more destruction and deter a gaming style. We all could fit for a change tho.
To me this is the single biggest issue in Eve…‘what am I actually doing here ?’
The fact that Eve doesn’t actually have any defined ‘end goal’…its not like there some big boss to kill or something…makes it even harder to define.
So far, what I am doing is ‘losing ships’. The actual ISK loss is tiny. I think I’ve lost about 8 ships with a total value of about 15m ISK…tiny compared with the 2.3bn ISK that I have.
But here’s the thing…those losses get recorded, but my well over 2000 PvE kills of Guristas, Serpentis., etc dont. I have nothing to show for all those glorious PvE fights…some where I only just scraped through. And to add insult to injury, NPCs are recorded as among the killers when I’ve been ganked.
So I have 8 ship losses meticulously recorded…yet nothing that shows how much PvE I have done, or how many tons of ore I have mined. etc. ALL that CCP seem to care about is that I’ve been killed 8 times.
My suggestion is that Eve needs to record and display a whole bunch more things people can be ‘proud’ of, and not just PvP kills and losses. Eve needs some way of enabling every Eve lifestyle to have a sense of having done something. Even down to having a record of how many tons of ore have been mined.
When a miner is ganked, for example, all that is recorded is a kill, and value of ship. There is nothing anywhere that says ’ oh…by the way…before this ship got ganked it mined 1.2bn ISK worth of ore '. And heck, let the gankers know that too. Otherwise you have a totally unbalanced system in which ALL that matters is the ‘kill’…and its hardly surprising that gankers love this and miners don’t, as it totally mis-represents the true situation in which overall the miner is winning !
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Yes, this is one of the “reward mechanisms” a game structure can offer, besides ISK or material payout.
The gankers (and I refer to them specifically because they are vocal and always yelling about something on the forums, not because they’re a significant portion of the game) will tell you “EVE is the one true PvP because all those other games have no loss”.
Except they do. In real PvP games (not EVE’s cloaky camper ganker-wanker style) you lose equipment, currency, and most importantly, stats when you get killed. And it’s the stats comparison most of those games thrive on.
Add stats tracking, hierarchy ranking, achievement rewards to EVE and you’ve got a whole new axis of rewards added to EVE that doesn’t upset the economy at all. Tie it in to the game lore and things you can do with various corps/factions and you double the motivation.
Even in PvP, you can track things like battle ranking, as in, how powerful is the ship you fought/lost against vs. your own ship. Killing Ventures in a Catalyst in that case, could actually lower your ranking to “Pathetic bottom-feeder”. Attacking BCs in a Rifter, depending on damage dealt etc., could raise your standing/stats even if you lose.
That’s the sort of mechanic that encourages people to engage even if they might well lose. At the moment, EVE is much too profit/certain-win biased, and the battlefields are extremely uneven, so nobody engages unless they’re 85% certain to win.
Which leads to boring, infrequent, one-sided PvP. Which is exactly why it’s a minority active in this “hardcore PvP” game.
No, they wouldn’t, and no, they wouldn’t be.
I don’t think you realize how much of a bloodbath removing CONCORD would be. Do you think without CONCORD, Aisha and I for example would start bashing each other over the head repeatedly? No. We’d group up or NAP and put the tear farm on lockdown. I would probably go on leave from my job for a couple of months and spend like 18 hours a day just killing everything in sight until my hands are raw, and there isn’t a damn thing anyone would be able to do about it outside of trying to pay me off for protection or hiring someone to go after me, but the latter isn’t wholly viable since there would always be a bigger fish they’d have to watch out for.
Your expectation is predicated on the group of players who are protected by CONCORD from players like me having access to both the skills/ability and the willingness to put up a fight against predators, but if that were the case, these people wouldn’t be where they’re at today: dying in-game and crying on the forums. They’re not going to magically turn into soldiers if you remove the one game mechanic that prevents them from being harvested like cattle.
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I think every kill of a combat ship should log how many other ships that killed ship itself killed. I mean, something like ’ 1789 NPC Kills…12 Capsuleer kills’. The killed person then has a displayable record that effectively says ’ ok…this guy got killed but he also took out all those other ships over time '. It would be a FAR better and more accurate representation. Of course you ‘can’ find that capsuleer PvP information if you look a bit deeper, but on a system like zkillboard that meticulously displays every last jar of coffee on board…why not display it up front along with that ? Wouldn’t anyone want to know if they’ve just shot down Eve’s equivalent of the Red Baron ?
Likewise for miners. My Proc has mined 1bn ISK worth of ore…20 times its value. It has more than made up for its cost, 20 times over. Isn’t that something one ought to be able to wave in the face of anyone who ganks it ? As it is, the gankers can just toodle off with a ‘nanananana…we got you’ and a ‘kill’. Shouldn’t the gankers immediately have shoved in their face some message stating the true fact that in the long run the Proc was the winner ?
The real imbalance in Eve is not the play styles or the existence of ganking or whatever, but the imbalance of emphasis. People are led to feel that only PvP kills constitute ‘winning’ in any sense. But in my Eve, every load of ore delivered is a win. Every time I sneak 50m worth of stuff past gankers at Dodixie ( I have a method of doing so ) is a win. Every PvE combat I survive is a win. Heck…there are days when even being bothered to log in is a win.
Not that anything in the system gives one even the remotest hint of such winning…when all it cares about is the albatross of ‘kills’ one has permanently around one’s neck. This is what CCP should notice if they want capsuleer numbers to go into orbit.
Part of the reason of course is that everything you track has to be data that’s added to, updated, and fast-retrievable at any time. That doesn’t come free, especially for a donation-supported site like Zkill.
CCP could do it, but then it’s that much more data that’s being saved and tracked and accessible along with everything else. Which has a server impact. (Although CCP is making moves to shift some types of data off the server processing list and onto other types of processing.)
So for a volunteer site, not really worth it. For CCP, not worth it if it adds to server load. Possibly worth it if it can be done on non-gameplay server processing, and then likely only if they tie it into other forms of reward. Activity Tracker is obviously already doing some of this tracking but it’s not tied into any sort of reward process.
Now, if you said “you need 50 PvP kills of ships stronger than yours in order to unlock access to the Gila”, you’d have a different story. Not saying that would be a wise move, just that’s the sort of thing that gets stuff happening.
I dunno about ‘removing’…but the current absurd dynamic is that Concord effectively protect gankers even when every actual capsuleer in the system can see that a gank is being readied. And you know as well as I do that gankers rely on this protection…on the fact that any AG who attacks them first is gonna get clobbered by a not very intelligent Concord ‘police’ force that’s not going to see the matter as ‘proactive defence’.
Far better than removing Concord is some sort of method in which people who have ganked more than a certain number of times in a certain period have that protection removed. I mean, this is already the case if a person’s security status falls below -5 or something…but all gankers do is go off to a Concord station and buy some tags and they are squeaky clean again. How about making them shoot 2,000 npc ships to get just .5 security update…you know…like everyone else does.
The solution is not to remove Concord…it is to have them stop protecting persistent gankers and for those gankers to have to actually earn the right to come back again, rather than a 5 minute trip to the nearest Concord station.
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There is nothing stopping some player from setting up something like that. That’s what zkill is, CCP doesn’t do that. If you are that concerned, why don’t you set it up?
Most gankers are already outlaws, and the majority of those who aren’t are in war-eligible corporations and/or have kill rights available on them. Only a very small percentage of gankers aren’t covered by some kind of ability to attack them at any given point in time. The means are already there; you’re just making excuses to not use them.
Only a very small proportion of gankers relies on tags, which, by the way, come from people doing PvE, so when gankers use tags, they are subsidizing PvE players. Tags were introduced around 2012 or 2014, I forget, for the purposes of offsetting ganking income into the wallets of PvE players, and to get more people to go to low-sec.
You can see PvP kill marks on ships already.
What did the gankee win, exactly? The ganker doesn’t care how much their target mined, they just care about the kill and the loot. The only thing that PvE stats would convey to other players is letting them know that you’re a good target with plenty to lose.
There’s no extra server load involved at all. All the relevant information is already recorded. That’s the beauty of relational databases. And its not something people would be looking at every 5 minutes like their transaction history or local prices. The impact would be negligible. Heck, it requires a lot more server load to bring in half a dozen Guristas to destroy a Venture than it does to simply record ’ this Venture mined 150m ISK worth of ore’…information that is effectively already on the system anyway.
I hate all this ‘subsidising’ nonsense. Aiko goes on about miners getting ‘free ISK’. Given that a large portion of that ‘free ISK’ ends up in her hands…I can only assume she must be making huge contributions to the Fund For Emperor Penguins On The Planet Zargos, or something. Oh no…she’s not spending those ‘free ISK’ is she.
I mine barely a half of my Omega substription…so nobody’s giving me ‘free ISK’.
And sure, I have absolutely loads of the said tags, from PvE that I have effectively paid for via Omega and via PLEX converted into ships. Unlike gankers, I haven’t gone out and robbed anyone to get stuff.
Miner ganks on average result in a net loss for the gankers.
Also, you might be confusing the type of tags we’re talking about. The tags that restore sec status come only from low-sec, from relatively rare NPC ships that are fairly difficult to kill. So I doubt you have “loads” of those tags, unless this is indeed an alt and you’re not actually a new player.