I’ve simply been watching two of the hottest nullsec small-gang PvP areas in the game and talking to the players that populate them and drive that content. I’ve observed operations from the perspectives of both attacker and defender and noticed almost identical strategies and tactics being employed by both sides despite numerous differences in the organizational schemes and capacities of the entities in play.
Goon space in the southwest is the most lived-in sov nullsec space anywhere in the game right now (look at the MER numbers if you don’t believe me), and it’s currently the darling ~content zone~ for the remaining fragments of about every “elite PvP” entity in the game. Looking at regional PvP activity as a “defender” (Or resident? I’m not particular about terminology) you see basically three types of PvP activity occurring:
- Lone-wolf players flying covert T3 cruisers and pursuing Excavator drones (and the occasional AFK VNI if they find one)
- Blackops / bomber / hunter gangs using Prospects, bombers, or very occasionally T3 cruisers to hunt ratters and cyno 20-35-man bomber gangs onto them (the bombers then either vaporize the target in 1-2 volleys for subcaps, or void-bomb capitals to nuke their capacitors and then evaporate them in 3-6 volleys)
- Dread-bombs deployed on individual high-value targets (RIP: your ratting Hel)
In the northwest-- the other area I spend a lot of time, this time as an attacker-- you see… wait for it… literally the exact same behavior. Why? because it’s the only rational way to play the game right now. There’s little to no benefit to engaging in any other forms of PvP. That’s because ratting and mining sites are literally the only time nullsec players are exposed to risk anymore (ship and module changes, as well as structure and sov changes have all contributed to risk-reduction in nullsec in the last six years or so), and the only reason that players even tolerate THAT risk is because those PvE activities are so tremendously, absurdly lucrative that it hardly matters if you die doing them, as long as you don’t die CONSTANTLY.
I’ve also learned (first hand) the hard way why other forms of small-gang PvP are obsolete: there’s simply no customers. Go try and run a gatecamp in nullsec right now. Go try and kill your average ratter without a bomber fleet to back you up. Everyone travels in ships that are covert-cloaked, nullified, or both. Inties and yachts are everywhere. And that’s just the poors who have to travel by gates: anybody with any money (read: most of nullsec) just cynos about in capitals. Need to move goods? Cyno in a capital. Need to mine? Cyno around in a capital. Need to kill rats? Cyno around in a capital. People just move from tethered undock to tethered undock directly. Half the ships used for money-making (JFs and Rorqs) realistically don’t even have jump fatigue mechanics working against them (you only need to stay in one place for a few minutes in a JF or Rorq to exempt yourself from fatigue accrual entirely). What’s more, even if you catch one in a site, capital ships are extremely difficult to kill without tons of DPS. The obvious solution is to do exactly what people have been doing-- stop trying to catch people on the move, let them go about their economic pursuits uninterrupted, then randomly appear in a puff of smoke wielding 17,000 dps-worth of frigate hulls to instantly blap one dude.
The downside to this, of course, is that as I was saying earlier, with ISK-generation so fabulously easy, even blapping people’s ratting carriers feels like a non-achievement. How can you honestly be excited about killing a Nidhoggur when you know from your own experience that a single player can easily mine enough minerals to build another carrier in a single afternoon? A Rorqual in a day? And on top of that, most people’s investment in those kills consists of: spend 50m isk on a bomber, watch Netflix while your frigate sits tethered on an undock somewhere next to a Redeemer, click two buttons when someone yells on comms, then re-set.
The whole exercise is absurd from every angle. This game used to have stakes. Killing people used to be hard. As your reward, replacing losses used to be hard for the victim. Now everything is trivial: dank frags are dime-a-dozen, while the victims don’t really suffer any meaningful repercussions for their misjudgements. PvPers collect their capital killmail, the victim calmly buys another carrier off the market and is back making ISK hand-over-fist the next day.
I don’t know. It just feels like this game has completely lost its edge. The Fozzie era (yes, I’m aware that Fozzie himself is not responsible for every specific gameplay change-- I’m just referring to a general time-period of EVE’s development) has seen so many overpowered ships and structures handed to players that it feels like every imaginable task has become trivial. Logistics? Trivial. Money making? Trivial. Ganking? Trivial. There’s no sense of accomplishment in the game anymore. Supercap frags are routine. Small gangs bag-and-tag ten ratting carriers in a single night, and the only people actually investing any time or effort in the kills are the two or three people that actually go out and light the cynos. If I’m on the receiving end, it’s easier to just replace the ship and do the same thing again than it is to even bother learning something about the game or putting more effort into my situational awareness. I just don’t get it. Maybe I’m just a bitter vet, but I could’ve sworn the game was substantially more consequential and interesting back before Dominion sov, when players needed to work to make money, had to keep their gates clear so their citizens could travel around to get any work done, and attackers actually had to risk something more expensive than a frigate to make an impact.