I was arguing in another thread, and wanted to put some of my points into one post here (and add a few more things).
- Eve is great because of it’s PvP elements, and minimizing or removing them would kill the game, not save it.
- If you don’t want to play a game with such a heavy focus on PvP, go play a game that either doesn’t have PvP, or that has severe PvP restrictions (i.e. designated PvP zones or an opt system).
- I am absolutely befuddled by the arguments that players shouldn’t have to adjust their play styles in order to compete in a PvP-centric game. I mean, no one makes this argument in PvE games or straight PvP games, yet somehow people make it in Eve.
- Speaking of which, gankers in particular have had to go all in on a glass cannon strat because of concord mechanics designed to suppress “non-consensual” PvP in highsec. This resulted in (most) prey having to go all in on a buffer tank strategy. It’s like an evolutionary arms race similar to that between the garter snake and the toxic newt. The newt keeps becoming more and more poisonous, while the garter snake responds with ever increasing levels of of toxin immunity. The difference with Eve, however, is not that they prey gets tougher to kill, but that they keep asking for nerfs to ganking, while gankers have to keep responding with more ships (and ganking becomes harder and less profitable to do).
- Ganking is asymmetric game play. It’s like the asymmetric PvP horror games that has one monster/killer and several human prey. The prey don’t need to be as strong as the monster for the game to be fair or fun. Regardless, many of the nerf ganking crowd advocate that ganking be balanced as if it were symmetric game play -which it is not. Now, if you want things to be balanced as if it were symmetric game play, then we would need to get rid of concord. But that will essentiall turn HS into LS sans capitals.
- PvE’ers have already received a ton of buffs, and ganking has already received a ton of nerfs (yes it also has received some buffs, such as with the surgical strike update). Yet, this has never resulted in the nerf-gankers being happy -why? Because they don’t actually want ganking to be balanced; they want to stop falling victim to it, without actually having get better. And they won’t be happy until it’s dead.
- It is befuddling how many people say that they don’t want to remove risk or ganking, and that they just want to make things more fair, before proceeding to suggest changes that would be overhelmingly oppressive to ganking (i.e. 30s ADC’s for mining ships, the ability to self destruct cargo, the inability for people with low sec status to dock in NPC stations or take gates in HS).
- Ganking is already so heavily balanced in favor of prey that profitable ganking is already contingent upon prey making one or more mistakes. Thus, further buffs to prey, or nerfs to ganking won’t make things more fair, but less fair. Of course, that won’t stop prey from asking for “one more nerf.”
- In fact, gankers are already fighting a unfair fight. I would be a bloodbath if gankers only had to fight a fair fight. And carebear tears would flow like a river.
- P.S. Nerf gankers exist in other games like Albion Online. And their threads have people making the same arguments that we’re making here. But for those that don’t want to read through threads like this one, you’ll see things like:
Same Arguments, Different Game
- Ganking is too easy.
- Ganking is too risk free
- Ganking doesn’t require any skill
- Ganking is not real PvP
- Ganking is ruining the game
- Ganking is pushing new players away from the game
- Ganking is important for the economy
- Nerfs to ganking just incentivize gankers to form larger groups
- Ganking takes a lot of skill and effort
- Ganking makes the game more exciting and rewarding
- Why are you playing a full loot PvP game if you don’t want to play a full loot PvP game?
- Nerf gankers would rather ask for ganking to be nerfed than do the bare minimum to protect themselves
- The people that die to ganking are the people that fail to protect themselves from the threat.
Oh, and Zhalyd linked to a video about what killed New World. Bugs apparently played a large role, but one of the major issues cited was a decision to shift away from PvP at the last second. This meant that the game had stand on the strength of it’s PvE content, which was both boring and short. Kind of sounds like Eve, only the devs made the mistake of catering too much to the care bears. Well, to be fair, the bugs were also much worse. But, I still maintain that Eve would suffer a similar fate if CCP tried to pivot away from PvP.