I’ve probably said this before, but I’ll say it again.
I heard about Eve from gaming news articles. They’d talk about epic battles, scandalous betrayals, massive scams, and it’s brutal and cutthroat nature -which I found intriguing. No other MMO had ever captured my attention the way Eve did. Then when I did finally pull the trigger, I was kind of disappointed. I was running the career agent missions and doing some mining, and thought “where’s all the scamming and gankers and all the good stuff I’ve been hearing about? This… this kind of sucks.” Then when I was ganked for the first time, it was confirmation for me that I was in the right place.
I would lose some more ships to stupid mistakes over the next couple of weeks before deciding, “enough was enough. Time to put an end to this nonsense.” I then proceeded to learn everything I could about ganking, ship fitting, risk management, and PvP avoidance… and I stopped losing ships. Didn’t need a bunch of skill points, a fat wallet, an army of alts, or a thousand of my closest friends. Just needed a little knowledge.
Not dying was kind of a matter of pride for me for a while. I was like, “yeah, I’m good. I’m getting it. I know what I’m doing.” But, over time, I began to realize that what I was doing really wasn’t that hard. Yeah, the deck was stacked alright, but stacked in my favor. In fact, I know longer look at the fact that my PvE’ers have now gone almost 7 years without dying to PvP as something to be proud of, but a sign of just how casualized Eve has become. The biggest threat to my PvE’ers aren’t other players, or even rats, but DC’s. And I think there’s something wrong with that.
- Opting out of PvP in HS is already trivially easy, even for two week old newbros. They do not need any mechanic changes. If you actually want to help them, offer advice and support, and try to instill in them a good attitude.
- UPvP is interesting and exciting to players who want to play a challenging UPvP game. And diminishing that might make the game “more interesting” to some, but it sure as hell doesn’t make the game more interesting or fun to the people who actually want to play Eve, and not some carebear-ized caricature of it.
- It doesn’t matter how much prey is out there, if hunting has been nuked into the ground and all the hunters are gone.