Still catching up with the rest of the thread, but I’ve been noticing a common theme; the “fun, fair fight” argument.
All y’all geriatrics who play MMOs “in between the work and the missus,” and have never before experienced a single round of CS:GO, or PUBG, or WoW arenas: I have, and you have no idea what kinds of ludicrous levels min-maxing can reach. The notion of “having limited time to play so you just go and get a quick, fair match, lol!” exists in your heads only, and has no bearing on reality.
What will actually happen is that try-hard fuckbois like me are going to optimize our game to such an extent that you aren’t even going to be able to tell what happened after the fight is over. I majored in math, and do it for a living. Not bragging, just a matter of fact; I’d make a rather terrible mechanic, or a chef. But I am a good nerd. And there are others like me.
So when you take away EVE’s unpredictable nature, and sideline the asymmetry inherent in its warfare, what you’re left with is that I’ll be batting at you like a cat toy. And you won’t be able to stop me, because any options that would’ve made me pause in hesitation out of fear of some kind of trap, won’t be available to you. And when I start ranking so high that I’m only seeing players like me in my matches, I’ll switch to a different character and do it over again. I’m the kind of player who’s willing to not get laid to beat you at a video game. Good luck fighting against that.
Cue countless complaints about matchmaking, P2W, et cetera. So what next? Are they going to add gear scores to ship setups to force matches based on stats? Are they going to implement skill point brackets? Congratulations! Now we’re eliminating crucial aspects of EVE that make it, well, EVE. That is why full-featured arenas don’t belong here; not because they’re inherently a bad feature (on the contrary, they can be quite fun, especially for the competitive types), but because they don’t belong in an open-world, full-loot PvP game. At least the current version is somewhat unpredictable, and barely utilized by anyone, so it doesn’t get in the way.
But like I said before, it’s easy to see that CCP’s feature trend is toward the elimination of open-ended PvP, and toward a “consensual duel” system. That’s why they’ve been steadily nerfing wars and ganking over the years, eliminated such gameplay mechanics as neutral RR/boosting, and, more recently, started implementing arena-like features. The PvP flag can’t be more than 2-4 years away at this point.
