Reminder that suicide ganking is lore friendly

Communications Center Crime & Punishment
81

One of the things I wish I could make clear to all is how PvPing in a game like Eve is not abuse. I don’t like to PvP myself, but sometimes it finds me and I die a horrible death, give my ‘gf’ in local, and go home to buy a new ship. That’s not abuse, that’s just life in Eve.

I try to live as peaceful an existence as I can within the game world. I do that by a combination of empathy and diplomacy. I don’t expect the game to just hand me peace on a platter. Sometimes my efforts work out. Sometimes they do not. Peace itself is an objective, and for the most part it is attainable, with some effort.

When war looms, I usually have an ally or two who’ll join in. Usually for free. What is war for me is content for them. They like me enough to help me because I was respectful, kind, and helpful when I didn’t have to be.

The more you provide absolute safety to people, the more boldly they will abuse that safety. The Eve community is a good one, those willing to be held accountable for their own actions. We come together to help people, mourn players who’ve left the world, donate to charity, and for other good causes. I find it hard to square up these noble virtues with the assertions of sociopathy.

CONCORD isolates and protects people from society. The stronger CONCORD and the harsher the punishments, the more selfish people can be without fear of retribution. Capsuleers should respect and even fear what their fellows could try to enforce upon them with sufficient motivation.

Attempting to hoover up resources and make isk without being accountable is an act of aggression. Taking resources from a system can hurt people. Other folks may need that stuff, too, and should be able to fight for it if they deem it necessary to protect their interests.

Eliminate highsec PvP and I have little doubt we’d see a temporary increase in players, but in the long term, people will just be bored. They will realize that nothing they do makes a difference, and no one can do anything to them that would make a difference.

We should let people make their own choices. We should influence them with ours, for better or for worse (in game). Some balance in favor of new players is welcome and warranted, but outright immunity would be terribly unhealthy, and making it impossible for new players to pony up the cost and infrastructure to engage in PvP is also hurting more than it helps.

Suicide ganking is one of the few options to PvP in highsec still open to new players. Not all new players are industry focused. PvP newbies need options that have impact on their world (read: impact on other players), too.

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82

There is a difference between a capsuleer suicide and suicide ganking.
Capsuleer suicide is destroying your own capsule. With suicide ganking you don’t kill yoursef or the ganker doesn’t really commit a suicide - he only loses his ship, it has nothing to do with the immortality or cloning.

Now, lets view both of these scenarios.

  1. Suicide of a pilot (self-destructing a capsule).
    Yes, capsuleers are taught they are immortal. But other pilots may believe they’re not and it’s just a CONCORD propaganda. There’s no “space magic”, there is a cloning and it’s debatable if the clone is still you or just… your copy. Pick a side of that argument and you can get into quite interesting in-character debate.

  2. “Suicide” ganking itself.
    From lore point of view, it’s just any action that gives you global criminal tag in high-security space. So, in-character it is only committing a HIGHLY ILLEGAL act, that ensures your ship destruction, not a suicide. As for the lore consequence of doing that, knowing about certain destruction (even calling that “suicide” in-character) and committing this “illegal act” makes your character a demented psychopath - because it doesn’t guarantee your enemy destruction, but guarantees your own crewmember destruction and your own survival (CONCORD doesn’t destroy pods) - basically all ships sans Corvettes (noobships) have peoples inside. Suicide gankers kill their own crew.

Is it lore friendly? Absolutely. It just makes your character insane, but you’re really free to play whomever and whatever you want, provided you don’t violate EULA (like, ganking in noobie systems, etc) :wink: Of course, most likely your character will be treated by other roleplayers like you’re someone with brains fried into mush :rofl: There are always consequences of choosing one path or another.

83

Decent points. To begin, let me get my citation out of the way:

“as every cadet has hammered into his head from the moment he starts training – pod breach, without exception, spells doom for the person inside.”

“Aside from the mental and physical training, which can place the trainees under immense stress, the added component of catatonia is constant possibility. In effect, a capsuleer in training does not and will not know whether or not they are predisposed - through genetics and general constitution - to complete their training course until after the fact.”

http://wiki.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?title=Capsuleer

You’re right, and forgive me my lapse in realization, CONCORD only blows up the ship, not the pod. I fall back to my “out of the game for a while” excuse.

Anyways, a good argument can be made, I think, that it takes a psychopath to knowingly sacrifice human lives. But then, as the lore has made clear, canon Capsuleers don’t care about normal humans:

https://community.eveonline.com/backstory/chronicles/xenocracy/

"But I’m a capsuleer (player) by definition, and I care!’ you reply. And you’re right, some players do ask the question. But most don’t.

How many players actually seem to realize or think about the fact that there’s crew aboard? Most don’t.

Most just know the ship represents “them” (as is commonly accepted to be the capsuleer perception of ship control) in the game, and don’t care about anything further than that. Especially for those who willingly engage in PvP and/or jump cloning, their myriad bodies are just tools to be used. That’s their only conception of the physical world. You read it above, Capsuleers know, coming out of their training programs, that death is to be expected. And they still go on to “graduate” it.

So I would actually challenge the psychopathic label. Many of us just don’t think about the consequences of our actions beyond “my ship got blown up” or “this planet needs a new factory”. Sociopathic, sure, one could argue that. But psychopathy to me suggests a willful knowledge and intention of the consequences of one’s actions beyond the self, and most Capsuleers (players) just don’t care.

84

Literally all you’re doing is quoting the status quo. Great! You support the status quo! And the status quo supports piracy and ganking and every other nasty thing Eve allows, outside the starter systems.

So if you have no issues to solve nor solutions for those issues, I guess you’re done here.

85

Psychopathy is traditionally a personality disorder characterized by persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, and egotistical traits.
It is sometimes considered synonymous with sociopathy.

I would say someone who wilfully blows up ships for no other reason than fun would indeed be exhibiting psychopathic behavior tbvh

Someone who gets other people to do it id probably think of as a sociopath.

Though for obvious reasons the two terms are pretty intertwinned.

I think sociopaths would be more inclined to do it for reasons, like isk or power.

Where as some whackjob (like the joker for example) merely does it because he finds it amusing.

Neither would show signs of remorse.

But only a complete psycho would blow you up then try and charge you for it; and think this was normal behaviour.

This isnt of course relating those actions to real people just the way one would perceive the actions of the characters; i mean this is a game and has no real life consequences.

86

that was pointless, grats.

87

What ISK Power are you referring too? The gankers can’t transfer the ISK they gank out of the game into real world money or are they? Hence there is no ISK Power present at all from ganking, just a perception and nothing more.

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isk or power, clearly i wrote isk OR power as EXAMPLES of a reason why a sociopath may do something.
Also, i was clearly writing in terms of why a character would do something, like a character in a book; somewhat fictional…
I think you have misread that entirely. Sorry.

89

Suicide ganking lead to game suicide…

90

It’s been 10+ years and EVE Online is still doing fine.

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92

59,999,990 more years to go, guys!

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93

Great post, I actually met you in the AG channel and your view point is what the majority of AG players think at least from my experience.

94

“fine” this is not fine, this is pitty …

95

Perfect! :smiley:

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96

Noob.

The medical world has changed these several times. The term “sociopathy” has been replaced with “secondary psychopathy”, and the classic “psychopath” is “first grade”. The sole reason why this happened was because the term “sociopath” allowed someone to identify with it, while “anti-social personality disorder” and “grade” doesn’t. You can rest assured, btw, that not every sociopath is necessarily anti-social.

Let me help you out. The easiest way to differentiate socio- from psychopaths is that sociopaths actually can and do have fully functioning empathy (next to the other personality traits you’ve mentioned), but they can choose to ignore it. A psychopath does not know empathy etc. (anymore, because we’re all born highly empathic), which is completely different.

A sociopath can feel bad about what he does and can still do it anyway, because it doesn’t necessarily have to bother him. A psychopath, on the other hand, doesn’t. There’s actual Good Guy Sociopaths out there, who mean no actual harm to anyone and rather use their understanding and knowledge of social laws/norms and human behaviour to manipulate people for their own good, while there’s no such thing as a Good Guy Psychopath at all.

The best part about people who call gankers “sociopaths” is that they show hints that they’re actually psychopaths themselves. They all show signs that they’re suffering from powerlessness IRL and are forced to behave in a certain way. That’s pretty much the biggest reason why they hate gankers, because gankers just do what they want, showing a power their “victims” don’t have.

I could go on and on.

A really simple, understandable example which can show the difference between a socio- and a psychopath in a more relatable way can be found by watching the series “The Mentalist”. Patrick Jane is a sociopath, while “Red John” is a psychopath. “Jane’s” acting, btw, for someone who never actually learned acting professionally, is absolutely amazing.

3 Likes
97

So in real life someone who went round blowing people up with no remorse or indeed any* thought for himself would be a psychopath then?
Probably a bit more than i suppose?

98

Can you rewrite that? It doesn’t really compute. :smiley: I’m not sure how to respond to this. If you want to touch on “real life shootings” then I choose to decline responding.

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99

Psychopaths pretty much only have thoughts that center around themselves, though they can appear to be actually caring about others simply because it’s to their own advantage. “Empathy” can be emulated.

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100

The joker is indeed a psychopath and my use of the words are correct then in that sociopaths use people and psychopaths are… psycho :stuck_out_tongue:

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101

Well … yeah, though funnily enough did the Joker sometimes show signs of empathy and remorse. Can’t remember the episodes, though. Also, while we’re at it … ignore the real life movies in terms of trying to understand the characters. They’re so absolutely non-canon that I really hate them as Batman movies.

In any case … yeah, Joker is a psychopath. Socio- and psychopaths are able to manipulate people, but the latter are far worse than the former.

Trivia: Mark Hamill was the voice of Joker in the animated series. He’s considered to be the best Joker ever and his laugh has reached legendary status.

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