Eve Online needs more intentional PVP. Sure, the game has PVP content already. The intentional combat aspect is missing. By intentional, I mean both sides enter combat expecting to engage opposing players. Faction warfare attempts this goal, but does not exactly accomplish this. Sure, I have seen PVP in faction warfare zones. Have not seen it in the FW complexes yet. Last ship lost was a hauler to a gate camp.
What barriers reduce player interest in PVP combat?
The number one issue I see is space travel. Have to fit the ship and take it to the combat location. Gate camps with instant lock and warp scram make this difficult. Sure, it is possible with a fleet scout. For a single player with one account, much less likely. Before the player considers the gate camps, they will select the destination and check the route. How many jumps? Not how many AU, that only works in real life flight paths. Eve’s sandbox requires jump gates and a dozen jumps to go 1 constellation over. If my play time today is 30 minutes, anything over 2 jumps must wait for another day.
Ok, so lets assume I have the pilot and fitted ship docked in the correct system for combat. Undock and enter combat. How long will I have that ship? How long before I can afford another one? Was the reward for loosing that ship worth bringing another ship into combat?
How much PVP will my corporation support? Will anyone else fleet with me for PVP? This really depends. For small corps, the answer is probably no. For larger PVP corporations, especially those part of a major alliance; players may expect full support. Some player groups require combat fleet participation of all members. Not enough participation? Bye.
For Eve PVP, there exists two main PVP strategies: join a major null sovereign group or join a gate camp. Solo pilots cannot last long. Eventually, they will tire of losing ships. Do they make a major coalition larger? Or do they reduce the Eve player base by one? I am tired of people choosing the latter choice.
EVE needs more opportunities to play the good and bad guys.
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You’re missing a few more options.
A big one is to go roaming space for kills or fights.
Either solo or in a group. In small fast ships, a covert fleet or as one streamer likes to do, in a dreadnought.
Fleets pass by in null sec all the time of other players roaming for kills.
Filaments teleport you to there, or youcan take wormhole shortcuts.
Or you could live in a wormhole group, and have the game open new random connections to fights regularly.
Pochven also has quite some PvP from what I hear, you can probably find some there too.
So in other words, joining FW or a null sec group aren’t the only ways to find PvP, you just have to go looking for it and not stay in the relative safety of HS space.
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Players avoid PvP like a plague even on my PVE server. For a simple reason. They hate and can’t withstand losing.
And in EVE there are additional reason why players avoid PvP mainly the full loot. Unlike PvP in classic MMORPGs if you die, you typically lose everything. Ship, its modules, its loot, sometimes even pod and its implants and time since you are now in pod or home station, so whatever you wanted to do, you have to start again.
There is no fix to this. Because of full loot players will always avoid PvP as much as possible and use all kinds of advantages to ensure winning as possible. That is how it is.
EVE had intentional PvP in past it was called Proving grounds an instanced arena, CCP probably removed it due to the lack of interest. There were players doing it, but all casual players quickly realized that they can’t compete, because they lack skill or lack of commitment to use and risk bling. So in the end it was just being done by small portion of player base as always. Still it was nice and the meta could have been broken by random modifiers like wh have. Another reason that CCP took it down was probably because it took too much effort to do that. They were trying to fight the revolving meta via hull type restrictions, which only reduced the number of participants as they kept increasing size (and thus cost) of the hull in the last iterations.
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You missed the point of my post: intentional PVP. Both sides intend to engage in the PVP combat.
You will find that intentional PvP if you roam in null and ring the doorbell. Or when you exit wormhole space to fight null sec players. Or in Pochven.
Sure, you may also find some miners and ratters to kill, but killing those only brings forth the response fleet so you can have your intentional PvP.
No. Those are examples of players engaging in PVE content disrupted by PVP players.
If you undock in this game (outside of Exordium), you consent. It’s just that PvP is usually so one-sided (gank, blob, etc.) that it’s mostly pointless.
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Oh… you are looking for fair arena like team versus team based gameplay?
Try a MOBA or shooter, they have fair matches like that. EVE is not that kind of game, engagements here are far more natural.
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Exactly this.
Undocking, regardless of intended purpose, consents to PVP. Want to run missions for rep? PVP consent. Mine? PVP consent. PI? Juicy PVP target, still consent.
What if a player wants to engage in PVP? Where do they find players with the same intention?
I am playing Eve Online and discussing Eve Online on the official Eve Online forum. This forum exists for game feedback to players, game developers, and Fenris Creations.
Do not tell me to go play a different game.
Then why not search for the thing you look in the part of the game that is made for that purpose?
Faction warfare is the place where you should find two sides in combat with each other over sites.
You say you haven’t found intentional PvP there. Then I think you should either look better, or ask for changes to the game so that the place that should have this kind of arena gameplay actually has this kind of gameplay.
To ask for ‘more of the same’ elsewhere in the game for what already should be available in FW feels a bit redundant to me.
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You mean like a Faction Warfare Complex?
I have Planetary Industry running in multiple FW systems. The zones are usually dead zones. Except for one system: it has a gate camp.
Have you tried destroying that gate camp?
They have PvP players, you could get a PvP fight out of it!
See you found it. The players that gatecamp intend to PvP with you!
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It feels like the thread title “Need more intentional PvP” is misleading us that in fact this thread is a complaint about “Need less unintentional PvP”, as the OP is whining about losing ships to gate camps.
How dare they attack a non-combat ship while you are doing PI, or attack your combat ship while you are trying to find a fair honorable duel!
Now if you want to find PvP you know you can find it at that gate camp. Bring a few friends, bait them into a combat timer, bust it.
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You must intentionally miss the point. Cannot even accurately paraphrase me. I mentioned the existence of a gate camp. Nothing about losing a ship to it. Knowing its location makes it easy to avoid or engage, my choice.
I do not consider Gate Camps as “intentional PVP”. Intentional does not require bait. Both sides being legal combat targets would be intentional.
Actually you do have a point. Gate campers do not want to fight either. They want easy kills with no risk. The moment they smell a drop or they see equal numbers of ships jumping in (they always have scout on the other side) they warp to citadel and wait it out.
About a month ago I was flying in Proteus through Rancer and when I jumped into Rancer the usual gatecampers were there (no surprise), but they had thousand drones around gate and I was near one and could no cloak. I held cloak for a while and suddenly they all warped off (15ppls in cruisers + instalock ceptor).
In the next moment a fleet of 10 jackdaws passed through 
. So I warped off safely too.
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So intentional PvP according to you is only when both sides see each other and want to engage each other?
Why would they want to do that? Surely one side is stronger?
But if this is what you wish, why not duel random people in high sec and ask them for a fair fight?