ProvenGrounds bad luck or WTLF?

[Nujenif_Talvanen]

@Destiny_Corrupted

If you take a player who’s been doing EVE arenas for 100 hours, and a player who’s been doing them for 5,000 hours, there’s going to be very little variance in the way they play, what they use, how they act, et cetera.

Yes. That’s how logarithmic curves work. I typoed before, I meant logarithmic instead of logistic.

@Destiny_Corrupted

But if you make the same comparison between players in an environment that supports a high degree of freedom and emergent behavior (for example, open-world EVE PvP), there’s going to be a vast difference between two players with a 50:1 experience differential.

No, that’s not how logarithmic curves work. It will surely be a much larger difference than with the arena, but as long as you have enough constants in the experiment to make it statistically significant by eliminating confounding variables, the pattern will still be there. A 5000 hour Rifter pilot will still beat a 100 hour Rifter pilot pretty much every time, but when variability is introduced the playing field becomes a lot more even.

@Destiny_Corrupted

Obviously if you take a player who’s never done PvP before and drop them into an arena with the most optimal setup, they’ll still lose. But when a player is used to going through the motions, and is familiar with all of the related game mechanics, there’s little if any room for further growth in EVE arenas because the gameplay comes down to rock-paper-scissors counters to everything. The skill ceiling is very low.

@Destiny_Corrupted

But if you make the same comparison between players in an environment that supports a high degree of freedom and emergent behavior (for example, open-world EVE PvP), there’s going to be a vast difference between two players with a 50:1 experience differential.

You have just argued against yourself, leading me to much confusion. Maybe you are just trying to say that the arenas have low skill ceiling…
I see it as any other activity. A 100 and 300 hour player will be much closer in skill level to each other than a 50 hour and 100 hour player, even though their actual time differences are much greater. Such is the case with any activity. That doesn’t mean a low skill ceiling, it just means there is only so much room to improve physically. The ones who are better still outperform the rest, and it takes a lot of skill to do that, even if the investment generates diminishing returns.

a x^b logc(x + 1) is how you spell magic.

[Kylanti_Hendar]

Of course it is skill: “the ability to do something well”.

The Rock/Paper/Scissors aspect varies from arena to arena. Sometimes there is very little you can do about it if you end up in the wrong option . But in most events you may have a disadvantage but there are still chances to catch a kiter, escape from being tackled, decisions about preserving cap, defanging drones or not, when to overheat, when to close range, when to kite away. Everything makes a difference - simply saying fit A beats fit B is too simplistic.

The reality is that the skill floor is low: it doesn’t take too long to be competent, win some rounds and not get squashed all the time.
But the skill ceiling is high: there is always room for improvement and the best pilots win the most rounds.

ISK wise it depends, the cache holds about 30mill though the exact amount varies. There is a chance of a rare clothing drop, suits and now masks.

For the more expensive events there is a isk reward for doing a certain amount of damage - it is never more than about 70% of the cost of the hull. This takes the edge of losing and adds up nicely if you win. The best players can make billions an hour in events with fast rounds and an isk reward.

However, usually the bigger reward is for bigger ships that results in longer fights. This weekend there was 100mill isk for doing 10,000 damage. But it was hard to get more than 4 rounds per hour.

In the cheap events one win pays for multiple fits and you can end up richer than you started with a 50% win rate.

For T1 cruisers I would say a 66% win rate would break even. Bare in mind the cost of the ships on zkill doesn’t include boosters, which are fairly mandatory in most events. You can often save your pod as not everyone pod kills, but they add up, especially if you are rerolling bad side-effects. Also certain fits can be way more expensive than others - anything that uses T2 armour rigs especially.

Battlecruisers, Battleships, T2 Cruisers, T3Cs all need a good win rate or an ISK incentive to break even on. However these events are rarer - usually only every few months.

In short I don’t believe that many of the top players are buying plex. It would make way more sense to me that the wannabes are buying plex.

[Aisha_Katalen]

Doing well in a competitive setting relies on layers upon layers of understanding. Learning and knowing 1 thing is easy, being able to apply 100 easy things at the same time in an instant is not. It takes a lot of practice and active (brain) effort to pull that off. And yes at the top end there are diminishing returns but to GET to that point it’s a long and steep climb.

[Vizkomaru_Togashi]

I don’t know the numbers, but which are actually the chances you don’t get matched against someone in the top 20 of the ladder ? If its a 1v1 is because the low population due to PvP veterans vs casuals trying proving grounds for fun. If its a 2v2 or larger, you are really likely to get paired with x+2 pilots somewhere in the ladder.

To be honest proving grounds are not noob training arenas; you hit them when you are sure you can actually put up some fight.

[Iceacid_Frostpacker]

Proving grounds should be timed like how long does it take to extract a venture full of Veldspar.