Meh, next.
Just imagine playing a PvP game and actually feeling like there is any kind of ethical or moral quandry about engaging in PvP. Sounds like you need to head back to your safespace Solitaire game. EVE is just too intense for someone of your sensitivity.
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Thanks for stepping back and taking some additional perspective on a phase of game play.
I know some people who are almost compulsively ‘good’ in RL, who still enjoy gaming because it allows them to be “the bad guy”. In some ways this is an at least not-too-unhealthy way to let people blow off some steam and maybe work out some frustrations they feel a need to suppress in RL.
People are always on a spectrum. No matter what activity you look at there’ll be a range of people who do it for a range of reasons. Even each individual won’t do it for one reason, within the individual there will be a number of reasons/motivations.
That said, I have personal experience developing, coding and publishing several online, multiplayer games. I have personal experience dealing directly with the userbase because my particular setup occurred in a situation where we had user meets and RL activities. I got the chance to match many of my players up with their RL persona and behaviours.
One personal experience is an anecdote. Further personal experiences that have occurred over decades of gaming are still anecdotes. However I can state clearly from personal experience that a good many of the people who engage in griefing, in in-game bullying, in “salt mining” and “tear collection” are people who are using the game as an extension of their real life issues.
They either need that feeling of power over someone else, or that feeling of “I won!” over a weaker target, or that feeling of “I got someone else upset”, or that feeling of “I broke the rules and got away with it”. It may be to deal with bullying in their own life, or because they are perennially ignored and dismissed, or because their life-role forces them to be endlessly polite to people who should have been strangled at birth.
Personal experience tells me that people who feel a need to consistently gank, grief, bully and salt-mine in-game are not people who, by and large, encourage social interaction, player retention or good PR for the game. (I will say something unpleasant here so please note this is not personal, this is an observation based on years of experience:)
Griefers, bullies and gankers in a game are the termites that gnaw at the foundation of the game. You might be able to work around them, you might be able to build strong enough to ignore them, you might be able to constantly shore up the foundation so they don’t bring the whole thing down… but they are not and never will be good for the game. The best you can hope for is that they aren’t too terminal.
One of my problems with EVE game design is that I feel they were misguided right from the start in offering EVE as a place to let “your inner bad guy roam free”. There may be room for pirates, there may be room for gankers, there may be room for bullies, but for heaven’s sake don’t roll out the bloody red carpet for them!
And if you do invite them and say “EVE is the place for you”, then give the 70% of players who really don’t want to deal with in-game jerks tools to effectively deal with them. CCP has a bad history of promising open license to the bad guys, and ‘retribution’ for the good guys - and then ripping off both sides by enabling neither and nerfing both.
A game that allows even limited license for ‘the bad guys to be bad’ needs to be designed twice as carefully as a game that restricts them. CCP has never acknowledged that, instead preferring to believe that when things don’t go well for the game, it’s because “players are playing it wrong”, not because “CCP designed it wrong from the start”.
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I understand your point, but for me I also don’t understand why someone like you has difficulty linking the fact that there is a real person behind those pixels, to show a bit of courtesy won’t cramp someone who wants to truly PVP as there are countless targets looking for other’s to engage with yet those who avoid a 2 way and look for a one way engagement to avoid losing seems to be more “risk adverse” then any carebear could be, that risk being continued losing to PVP players who are ready to fight back, so yeah the point of morality was meant to be for those whom can actually do an activity and use manners towards others, there are those who lack control and that’s just life.
I’m sorry, but we show our targets the utmost courtesy. If your ship gets ganked in lowsec, they aren’t going to invite you to their channel and offer to sell you an access pass. They aren’t going to sit and teach you what you did wrong, and help you get into a better ship that actually has a chance of survival. The CODE. is here to help every miner get ready for that big day when they finally decide to grow up and leave highsec.
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Whole different ballgame, and timelines are entirely someone’s decision, but will not say it is totally wrong to gank, it’s only a matter of my opinion on why I believe someone continually does only one activity while never giving a thought to how other’s feel about being their unwilling object of amusement with salt added to further the “charge” the ganker gets, kinda hard for me to process this joy they get, I just don’t feel anything over the prospect of ganking.
Why do you think anybody cares about your opinion on highsec ganking? Let me know when you are done reading the CODE, and then we can chat about how to get you a mining permit.
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Nobody does, I’m fine with that as I have no delusions about human nature (self interest), so someone will either accept or not, but mostly to accept that self importance overrides most people’s needs, well let’s just say that planning ahead for the inevitable keeps one stoic in the face of absurdity.
I think you pretty much nailed it with the highlighted text.
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When Dracvlad agrees with you, it’s time to admit you are wrong. 
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Try to write sentences next time.
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Kezrai, while I can agree with the first half of your post, the second half is where I must respectfully disagree. EvE is a place where anyone can be anything, even a pirate. Hell, just look at the description for Veto Corp:
Veto Corp has remained a persistant thorn in the side of all four major sovereign powers, as well as every law enforcement agency in the cluster since its formation as an anti DED and CONCORD opposed corporation in late YC107.
Today the organisation takes the form of a Gurista Mercenary Cell, partially owned by its affiliates in Venal. Veto Corp spends its time providing security services for high ranking Guristas, and seeking a healthy supply of combat operations in which to test its prototype modifications to weaponry and ship systems.
Rumoured to be heavily involved with the black market arms trade, Veto Corp has also been linked to tens of thousands of cases of border region piracy, as well as countless cases of ransoming, kidnapping, extortion, hijacking, smuggling, electronic infiltration, unlicensed arms production and distribution, and a number of savage stationside murders.
After its involvement in the Kassigainen incident, the corporation was initially linked in numerous instances to the Guristas Pirates, before openly declaring its ties and loyalties to the Venal based pirate megacorporation several years ago. With its sphere of operation now firmly rooted in Venal, the corporation also appears to have taken on board many Gurista operational and structuring policies.
Veto Corp has enjoyed massive success in all its endeavours since its formation, mainly due to its cutthroat diplomacy and business practices, for which it remains renowned.
Like their Gurista partners, Veto Corp pilots are considered more honorable than many of their pirate counterparts, however they still remain regarded by the DED as extremely dangerous and not to be toyed with.
In case any of you were unaware, Veto’s founder - Verone - was CCP_Falcon’s character before he joined the company. The same CCP_Falcon who posted this on Reddit:
I’ll be super blunt with this one:
Anyone who uses charity as an excuse in any way shape or form to scam someone in EVE can say goodbye to every account, character and item they own, along with any chance they have of ever playing EVE again in future.
It’s pretty simple.
In-game, the guy’s a pirate, a murderer, and a gangster. IRL he’s a downright awesome bloke who won’t hesitate to bring the hammer down on people who screw with charity events.
Ganking and IRL douchebaggery might have some connections, but one does not always equal the other.
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I would go further, and suggest that even if it is true that gankers are compensating for emotional difficulties in their own life, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing - or anything they should be ashamed about.
Would that could we all be as happy and innocent as a high sec miner! It is my hope that the mighty CODE. alliance can continue its outreach to all the disaffected and disadvantaged members of society, encouraging them to gank the miners and thereby improve their own sense of personal enpowerment.
Praise James for saving us all! \o/
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You are more than welcome to disagree. However when doing so, you should at least pay attention to the actual points made:
You’ve read/replied to enough of my posts to become aware that I’m not making moral judgements about what constitutes ‘good play’ or ‘bad play’, or whether playing a certain way makes someone a ‘bad person’. Those things are fairly irrelevant.
EVE is a game and a business. A game needs to be entertaining and engaging, a business needs enough paying customers that their income exceeds their expenses by a reasonable margin.
Putting a role-playing text blurb in your corp bio is one thing. Actually killing other players, destroying their assets, looting their corpses is another. Again, this is not a moral judgement. This is simple math.
Any player who adopts and supports their playstyle based on harming another player has a multiplier effect. If your playstyle is based on killing and looting other players, how many players per week must you kill and loot in order to feel ‘satisfied’? Multiply that by 52 weeks in a year. By the years active in the game.
Every player who adopts that sort of play style directly results in dozens, hundreds, thousands of unhappy other players. Those players then talk far more about their unhappy experiences in the general game-o-sphere than “satisfied gankers” talk about their happy ganking experiences. After years of this, EVE gets a reputation that is more based on unhappy players who have left it than happy players who stayed.
That is where the ‘termites’ analogy comes from. It is subtle but persistent damage to the game over time. You can integrate such things into a game but if you do, you need to design the counters and responses and options available to those unhappy players with far greater care than you normally would.
You can’t just throw some half-assed efforts like flags that go away in 15 minutes, bounties that are useless, standings they can just buy off and a Concord that blows up their cheap gank ship then lets them go right back to ganking; and say “Yep there we go, good guys and bad guys, all balanced out! Yay for EVE!”.
Sheer nonsense and goofusery. This is like saying everytime someone wins at Monopoly, everyone else is miserable, and nobody will ever want to play Monopoly again.
Pay me 10 million isk or go to jail.
Do not pass Go. Do not collect any minerals.
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All that tells you is that Lizzie Magie and Charles Darrow were much better game designers than CCP.
There is a serious difference of opinion here. I am of the opinion that Eve is fundamentally boring and that is its main issue. From my point of view, ganking is a positive.
I really try to empathize with the predominant viewpoint that mining in highsec is Eve and interfering with casual highsec mining is bad for Eve. It is very hard for me to relate to this point of view.
Imagine if chess were a game where we just looked at the board for a couple of hours, while chatting with buddies. Or worse, if we set up all the pieces and then watched Netflix…
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Bollocks
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If you want to be academic about this, there has been a trend in modern internet gaming to encourage AFK ‘farming’ - with Farmville being the classic example. Developers are desperate to simply get players to login (as we can see with the skillpoint events), and they have lost sight of the fact that the game is supposed to be about gameplay.
When I first joined EVE, I was disgusted to realize how common this was. Most people in highsec are simply NOT there. There’s nobody to talk to, no culture, no gameplay, just endless grinding. The CODE is an emergent gameplay response, by the active players, to discourage this non ‘playstyle’. This is more than an ingame alliance, but an overt real-world rebellion against the idea that anybody should play a game without actually playing it. CODE is not an alliance of griefers and bullies, its an alliance of people who are sick of watching bots and bot aspirants grind for cheap easy sweatshop isk.
THIS ISN’T RUNESCAPE!
If you aren’t going to try and take the game more seriously, then expect to be brought before the justice of King James, and yes… you will be mocked.
TLDR: If you want to play Monopoly, you need to get off your cellphone and pay attention. Roll the dice, move your piece, and stop going in the other room. If you don’t want to actually play the game, then just STOP. You aren’t wanted here.
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Dog’s Bollocks.
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