PVE... or PVP

Communications Center General Discussion
63

Some points:

  • The drone tracking links are entirely unnecessary, especially for small drones. It’s a module that’s sometimes useful for heavy and sentry drones, and fighters.
  • Hull repairers are something you use when you need to repair hull damage, but don’t want to pay station fees. During combat, that module is completely useless - just look at how little it repairs per second compared to armor repairers/shield boosters.
  • The tracking enhancer is a questionable choice for this ship.
  • No rigs, though that can be excused for now.
  • No resistance mods to bolster your tank. Choose shield or armor, and tank that, but devote more than a single module to it.

From a practical perspective, yes, but from a learning perspective, no. You were exposed to a valuable experience early on, while you still had very little to lose (in a few months, this amount of money won’t even register to you).

If you saw a play ship on d-scan suddenly appear, then yes, you should have disengaged, and tried to warp away, or at least been prepared to do so by aligning out.

He made all the proper moves, although catching you at the end of your fight, and not while it was in progress, was probably luck. The rat could have switched fire to him as a bigger threat, and with both of you shooting him, he might have lost.

Players can appear at any time, so you have to be ready for that.

For now, you probably won’t win a fight with a pirate/hunter, so your focus should be on avoidance. Show info on players who come into local. Sometimes, it will be very easy to tell that someone is a pirate (low security rating, a give-away corporation name, etc.), and sometimes you’ll have to make a judgement call. The second you’re not alone in local, you should be aligned out to some kind of celestial. Station, preferably, but if there isn’t one, a belt or a moon in a cluster will obfuscate your escape (the hunter won’t be able to tell which celestial you warped to in a cluster). At that point, you can start warping around, and making safe spots (or just leave the system if you can warp fast and can bypass any potential camps at gates).

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64

I have seen the kill on Zkillboard, first of all, the dual tank, drop that. Pick a tank, stick with that. So either hull (very small fraction of ships/fits can pull that off), armour OR shield, never any combination.
Instead of a hull repper, fit a prop mod on your ship, the faster you go, the harder it is to get hit.
Also rigs, they are quite useful :wink:

But doesn’t really matter that much, you were fitted for PvE, not PvP. Your attacker however was fitted for PvP, so even with the best PvE fit, you likely wouldn’t have stood a chance against him.

Ships (and how they are fitted) are tools, useful in the correct situation, not that useful outside of that situation. His tool matched his situation, yours didn’t.

As for situational tips:

  • If you get that low into your S/A/H HP, you should already have warped out well before it got that far. Set up a safe spot somewhere in system that you can warp to, repair your ship and warp back to continue.

  • Drag Local away from all your other chats and keep it open at all time and an eye on it. As soon as a neutral shows up, align to your safe spot and be ready to warp out.

  • Neutral in system: Spam D-scan and check for either incoming ships and/or combat probes that are trying to find you. If either happens, start making plans to get away and safe.

EDIT:

Also, your choice to rat in low-sec. Was it a mistake?

IMHO, not really. You took a gamble, this time you lost. It happens, what matters is that you learn from the mistakes and try not to repeat them (Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me).

Not many new players take the gamble to go into low or null-sec that quickly. Many are afraid of the stories they hear about it and stay in high-sec, so I really admire your willingness to at least try it.

Another tip:

When you die, check your loss mail in your character sheet, contact the person that killed you. If you explain that you are new to EVE and want to know what just happened and how you can improve, most likely he will be willing to help.

65

Just cause the fight starts with nobody in local, doens’t mean it stays this way.
You are playing with couple of thousands of other players, all on the same server.

66

Great advice here… thanks.

67

I really dont want to sound condescending, but getting used to how the Directional Scanner works sounds like it might salve half the worries here.

If its on Overview, its usually too late.

68

Aaaand to add to this magnificent post of yours:

@Vasalinda_Fingerbang

Always play zoomed out. The overview is only getting updated every tick. Relying on the overview alone means lagging one second behind observable reality.

Playing zoomed out gains you valuable seconds, because you’ll have a much easier time noticing someone warping in from outside the grid. It’s a symbol moving in on mostly blank canvas and can be easily noticed even in peripheral vision, compared to the relatively insane amount of work involved in locking your eyes on the overview with your brain reading the text, processing away the unimportant parts and sending through what’s left.

This significantly adds to the stress levels.

Grats on your win, btw.
You feel like it’s been tained, but I disagree.
You win some, you lose some.

You’ve probably just upset your Karma balance with that long fought for win of yours,
so “Instant Karma” hit you like a ton of feathers to balance itself out again.

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69

What? Does that mean you would blame him if he knew? As if he had done something wrong if he did? Are you pretending he shouldn’t have tried to kill you if he knew you were nearly dead already?

Ohhhh… unfair… It’s that you think PvP should be “fair”…

Look, you have a deep misunderstanding of what PvP is or should be in this game. There is a game mechanic called duels that you may use to get reasonably close to a fair fight in high sec, but fights don’t have to nor are supposed to be fair at all, and that’s actually one of the beauties of the game, not a reason to dislike it at all.

Much of the gameplay does actually revolve around trying to make the fight unfair in your favour and figuring when/how to avoid a fight if the odds are against you, rather than the fights themselves. The “fairness” is in the availability of tools to avoid fights that you cannot win, not in the fights themselves.

Nearly every PvP situation is expected to be “unfair”. If a PvPer thinks he may kill you, he WILL, and if you’re in a weak situation, that’ll make him more willing to do it, not less…

No, you may not and it makes no sense, LOL.

Talking about anyone killing your ship “unfairly” as if he was a jerk (willingly or unwillingly) is a great way to be known as a jerk yourself, which I’m not saying you are, but you better change your attitude in this regard if you want to keep playing and enjoying the game…

It’s not that we don’t “admit” that. It’s is that this is how things are supposed to be and there is nothing wrong with it. It’s a feature that makes the game more open, deep, and interesting, not less…

Your biggest mistake by far is pretending fights should be fair. Everything else is secondary to that. Get that right and everything will suddenly make a lot more sense and become more enjoyable.

You must consider the possibility that everyone you don’t know is out there to get you, the more unfairly the better, and act accordingly…

The moment someone appears in local, you should assume he may try to get you. That doesn’t mean you have to immediately warp away, but you need to at least consider the convenience of start aligning, so you may GTFO immediately if he appears on grid. Also, if he doesn’t fly a recon or a cloaky ship, you may reduce dscan range to see when he’s closing on you before he appears on grid.

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70

This is the best thing I’ve read this week.

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71

Depends on how many of these you have onboard:

:wink:

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72

OP
most people here gave you very good answers. They showed you that you are wrong, and i hope you will notice that as soon as you stopped whining and complaining about unfair pvp and whether you would suscribe or not, and you asked how to improve, you got very interesting and detailed answers.

No fair fight in eve. Open pvp and paper scissor stone design, it cannot be fair. The guy flying a brawling ship and killed at distance by a kiting fitted ship won’t find it fair. But the dangerous nature of eve is what makes tasty your usual activities. Because, honestly, the pve part of eve is not really challenging and developped, i am sorry. No epic quest to follow, with a strong scenario, and with videos etc. Shooting npcs ships, mining, etc. all these activities are interesting if they are done in a competitive environment (pvp, which means fighting and shooting, but also competing against other players for resources etc).

“Embrace the suck”, HTFU, learn and improve.

Just a small tip: select all names in local (ctrl A), it will highlight their names. If a new player enters your system, his name (not highlighted) will appear in local, and the change will be more easily caught by your eyes

73

There is a lot of great advice in this thread.

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74

I have my own issues re: PvE vs. PvP in EVE, but they are more about game design and risk/reward/availability balance than about “Someone PvP’d me when it was inconvenient for me”.

Being at risk for PvP is essentially what EVE is all about. Eve doesn’t really have much going for it against other games these days, besides “it’s complicated” and “there’s always some risk”. That’s been enough to keep it going for 17 years despite every effort on the part of CCP to kill off their own game, so we don’t really want to mess with that.

A couple thoughts re: your situation - it’s wishful thinking to suppose that if the guy who killed you had only known you were almost dead from a hard fight, he would have ‘chosen’ to be nice and let you heal. Fair fights aren’t what EVE is about. Not only would he have killed you anyway, but if it was possible to see from Dscan who was damaged, a whole crop of weakass PvPers (you know, the ones who normally hide in High Sec space for PvP while pretending they’re badass pirates) would evolve who specifically looked for weak targets to gank.

The ‘gf’ is meaningless, it’s just something PvPers toss out so they can pretend they had a meaningful fight and weren’t just cherry picking easy fights for sure wins.

In EVE, the onus is on you to adapt to the game. CCP is not going to adapt the game to you, even when they could significantly improve their game by doing so.

You chose to rat in low sec. That’s on you. You chose a tough fight that would leave you weakened. Kudos to you and all that, but that’s your choice: to end up weak and bleeding in a shark tank. You chose to not be aligned and warp away instantly when the fight was done and you were weak. That’s all you.

Most importantly of all, after doing all those things that shout “Come kill me I’m easy!”, you chose to expect some totally random player who sees an easy kill to not take that kill just because you were unprepared and weak.

This isn’t a problem with the game. It’s an issue with your choices and expectations.

Adapt and survive.

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75

Tskkk the Thorax is :wink:

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77

Interesting point. If the purpose of being there is PvE, but you have to fit for PvP, does that jeopardize your purpose for being there in the first place?

78

No it just means you have to keep it in mind instead of being blind and ignoring it alltogether.

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79

PvE fits make poor PvP fits

BUT

PvP fits only make unoptimised PvE fits

Most people choose to see these as the same thing.

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80

You seem to be saying that fitting for PvP works just as well for PvE as fitting for PvE, or at least well enough that you can do the PvE. I’m not so sure that’s true. OTOH…

Okay, Ramona’s post just popped up, and that confirms my thinking. So it would seem the optimum overall strategy is to fit for PvP even if your goal is PvE. What considerations does that impose on the PvE side of things? I get “given this fit and the intel I have on this upcoming PvE fight do I have a reasonable chance of success?” but that leaves a lot of room. Any hints what should fill up that space?

81

No it means you have to make choices. Also, lets be fcking honest here, most people fit for a lazy play style while lacking any actual understanding and it’s not like “I’m losing 5% of my potential dps this is terrible” actually means something because the vast majority of players lack the braincells to make that assumption.

As said so often: it’s not about skill points, ship or fit necessarily. It’s about knowledge, preparation and effort. EITHER be ready to run or be ready to fight: fighting requires a pvp ready fit, running does not.

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82

PvP fits usually focus on very high amounts of burst tanking (omni-resists) and cap immunity, while PvE fits focus around slow-burn tanking (for specific resist types) and cap stability. For example, a dual ancillary shield booster setup works well for PvP, but is useless for PvE.

However, you can still have a PvE setup that works well for escaping from PvP alive. Flights of light and ECM drones help, an energy neutralizer in a spare high slot, carrying precision ammo even if it’s useless for PvE, and plenty of damage mods to be able to simply scare off an enemy by doing massive DPS can help you escape with your ship.

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83

While true, the best way is to simply not get caught in the first place.