As anyone with experience can attest, New Eden is fairly cutthroat, especially in lower security systems. My question is, are players too paranoid regarding one another, and does that paranoia hinder cooperative gameplay and/or social interactions?
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I donât even trust my alts, let alone other players.
Mr Epeen 
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Loan me a billion isk, and find out!
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Yes and no.
The average player of the game is pretty chill. Just wants to play and is pretty trustworthy.
However, knowing who is an average player and who isnât, among strangers, definitely makes it harder to jump into cooperative play for some (this used to be a pretty common thread theme in the old forum before awoxing was nerfed).
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I wouldnât call it paranoia, you need to take care about yourself, nothing you can easily outsource to a âsocietyâ. Likeminded people easily flock together. This works the better the less trust is required. Lower sec space is IMO much more social than highsec, as people gain a benefit from grouping up.
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I donât think of it as paranoia, but I certainly donât trust anyone in EVE except a few by long-standing reputation or personal knowledge. And even there, the trust is, shall we say, monitored closely.
I donât think players in EVE are out to get me or have major plans to crimp my game. That said, in any encounter with another player, 15 years of scams, PvP-baiting, griefing, or even simple âwe started a deal and he logged off in the middleâ which could be anything.
So essentially I look at anything as a potential trap or scam, because EVE has a much much much higher proportion of those than anything else I play. In that case anything that canât pass a fairly high bar of âlooks legitâ gets ignored, because the potential result isnât worth the potential risk/timesink involved.
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I mean â â â â , iâve shot my own alts before
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If anything, the cutthroat gameplay, backstabs and scams result in more cooperative gameplay with more meaningful trusting relations.
Iâve played games where none of that scamming was allowed and where you would randomly be grouped with other players. Apart from being decent while with such a group, thereâs nothing that binds you to other players as you can just replace them with another random group.
In EVE however you will be much more encouraged to find your own group, fight together against others, build a history together and start trusting eachother more.
Thatâs not to say you should easily trust others, but I found I trust certain other players in EVE much more than in any other game Iâve played.
When youâre not allowed by game mechanics or game rules to backstab other players it means nothing that you donât backstab them. But in EVE, where you can do a lot of terrible things within the game rules to the people youâre flying with, ranging from accidentally decloaking the whole fleet at an unfortunate moment to lighting a cyno to drop a hostile fleet on a âblueâ player, it actually means something if you donât do those things.
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You can tell how trustworthy someone is by how greedy they are. If someone only chases money, theyâre unlikely to be there in your time of need, and are more likely to sell you out for personal gain.
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That is why I only trust suicide gankers.
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No as others have echoed, in games like this you actually build more stronger relationships than other types of MMOs.
I still talk with friends I made in UO amongst the blood and death over 20 years later.
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No reason to be paranoid. Nobody here can actually harm you. Itâs always better to assume the best of people. EVE is all about the story we write for ourselves. Being all paranoid and never taking chances always results in a boring story. Win or lose, you always lose when you play that way.
Not really. There isnât really any reason to be as paranoid as people were back in the day.
I have killed my alt by accident before.
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iâve shot mine on purpose.
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I think it also depends on where and how you choose to play the game. If Iâm in low sec with another neutral player, Iâm going to assume he wants to kill me and act accordingly, but thatâs not paranoia if âtheyâ really are out to get you.
At the same time, I have routinely accepted multi-billion isk contracts from other players in my alliance with hardly reading them. If they tell me in chat itâs a doctrine blops ship and they are in my alliance, then I assume it is. So far I have never been scammed. I donât know if that level of faith holds true in other groups or not, but it certainly can exist in eve if the right culture is there.
No, I would trust my fleet leader to warp me into a battle.
Donât trust one of my alts in-game, you may come to regret it.
It may hinder co-op but, I believe, no more than out of game and not over time.
This ^^
A true friend is someone who could hurt you but helps you instead. And for that reason the relationships you make in eve tend to be stronger than those in other games and players and devs talk about that quite frequently.
Not so much anymore though. Even though you still get it more than in other games, that whole hero/villain dynamic has been lessened somewhat. And more players stick to themselves these days.
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