Risk Aversity

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
1

So in the recent not-fight in KZ9T-C between Tri & co, and DRF over the SOLAR keepstar has got me thinking.
(If you want sauce, https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/7hht7g/megathread_everything_about_the_upcoming_keepstar/)

Tri very smartly didn’t show up to a fight they had no hope in winning :musical_note: Brave Triumvirate ran away. Bravely ran away away :musical_note:.

3000 blues us showed up to defend the structure timer, and got blueballs for our trouble. This wouldn’t be an issue if not for the fact that we had to spend literally an entire weekend doing move ops.

Tri smugposts in reddit with that “made you form” grin. The strategy is plainly visible… they’re just going to keep reinforcing it every week until we can’t be bothered to spend all of our time jumping halfway across the universe.

And it’s a very solid strategy. With one problem:

It’s boring. Personally, I don’t care about their keep. If it dies, it dies. The fight is where the fun is. The fight isn’t happening.

It’s boring for Tri, it’s boring for SOLAR, it’s boring for DRF, it’s boring for all of the other blues. Nobody likes hitting structure timers over and over again, nobody likes traveling across the universe once a week. We will keep making the journey though, because we don’t abandon our allies.

Which begs the question, what can be done to give more fights? The underlying reason of course is loss. Losing your entire capital fleet isn’t something you can “just come back from”. Not any time soon at least.

Honestly, I expect (I’m not in a decision-making role) that if the blueballing continues, we’ll just keep moving our caps past KZ9T-C and start hitting their staging systems - they can’t (well… shouldn’t) blueball their own defensive timers. Eventually they’ll start being forced into fights they can’t win, and eventually they’ll sue for peace to maintain their infrastructure.

Just the same, that doesn’t feel like it should be the only option for getting a fight.

Am I alone in this opinion?

2 Likes
2

Fight? It would have been an idiotic mess for hours in tidi, lags and low fps, which prevents a lot of gameplay around fights. Why would you want to participate in this at all? IT is not fun, it is not engaging, it is tiresome, it is frustrating seeing yourself dying without being able to do anything or watch your modules cycle for an hour.

To have more fights again, remove capitals, super capitals and citadels and the game is fixed again.

2 Likes
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Which begs the question, what can be done to give more fights? The underlying reason of course is loss. Losing your entire capital fleet isn’t something you can “just come back from”. Not any time soon at least.

Not sure I get this. Loss is part of this game. Every PvP encounter committed to ends in a loss for someone. This hasn’t been a reason to stop… until now? This fight specifically? Doesn’t sound honest.
An entire capital fleet probably isn’t something that is resourced from one wallet. Individuals buy their own caps; dreads and carriers are kind of cheap these days. Surely the loss of some Titans is expected and replacements are probably planned before the fight actually starts…?

Obviously moving assets is a drag. It’s a logistical challenge deliberately, otherwise people would launch offenses on a whim.

A big part of getting a PvP encounter in EvE is bring something engageable. Sounds like you overformed and got blueballed.

If the enemy can casually walk away from a fight without a care, then you probably didn’t attack anything worth defending.

As you said - move deeper into their infrastructure and hurt them there.

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This was fun.

Neither M-O nor 2DW were fun and KZ9T would not have been fun either.

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So what… 3000 people show up in subcaps instead of caps, and tidi goes away?

Technical limitations are what they are - I agree Tidi sucks, but big fights are fun for me.

“Overforming” is subjective. If a 10 man corp decided to attack Goons, would it be overforming for them to bring a cap fleet to bear on them? We were also on the defensive, it was not a fight we picked.

Fingers crossed that leadership decides to start pushing into Tri space. The sooner they realize they can’t actually contend with the blue donut, the sooner we can go back to fighting a war on one front and not have to spend our weekends on move ops.

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I don’t get how this could be fun at all. You literally sit around and complain about how you cannot do anything or have to impotently watch your structure wither away slowly. Or your FC tries to give you an engagement but his combat probes don’t work properly because of Tidi and lag and warping on grid is not an option because your fleet is not meant to do it that way.

And please do not give me the crap about technical limitations. We have Tranquillity Tech 3 and BIAB, 2 things CCP touted as huge improvements over the old system that would help with these situations. And what happens? Yesterday, we moved closer to this fight and caused TC and tidi with just 100 people jumping gates. Big fights of this magnitude are anything but fun in my opinion.

Not to mention, think of the FCs. They get yelled at by peers if they do not enter the fight, they get yelled at if they do and it turns into a lag fest where people lose their ships although they already warped off grid, they get yelled at if people fall behind and die because Traffic Control killed them, they get yelled at if something on grid goes wrong, or if people need to wait too long and so on and so forth.

I would not say it’s risk-aversion alone, I would say that frustration plays a big role in these “missed” battles, too.

7

That might be what you do. It’s not what I do. Granted, I go take bathroom breaks during tidi without worrying about my ship because if it dies I wouldn’t have been able to save it anyways, and it’s probably not going to die anyways. But I don’t complain.

It’s fun for me because of the grand scale. Literally thousands of people working toward the same objective.

CCP’s servers have some pretty heavy beef in them. They’re quite something. That you got tidi and/or TC because 100 of you jumped into a system doesn’t mean anything… there could have been a 200v200 fight 10 jumps away that you knew nothing about, and the server chose to prioritize their fight over your travel into an empty system. I’m not saying that’s exactly what happened, I’m saying that nodes occasionally get overwhelmed and that you aren’t the only group of players on that node.

Yes, there’s always some self-entitled ■■■■ that thinks he deserves the world. Most of us just tell him to shut up. Most of us realize that those are all factors outside of their control.

That would have resulted in poorer turnout, not “we chose not to take the fight because they brought 3000 people to curb stomp us… oh and tidi sux bro”.

They literally decided not to fight at all.

8

Surely if moving is that much a problem, your space is too big. Is your donut over stretching itself?

1 Like
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You had to defend something, your hands were forced. Their hands weren’t really. And, having said my above lines, why would they fight you. Whelping a fleet or two in a lag fest is surely the most enjoyable thing there is.

I at least congratulated my FC yesterday for not bringing us into that system’s area, which saved us not only a tediously long trek back, but also the annoyance of lag and tidi. Our FCs did the right choice. But if you would have wanted to see that fight happening at all, maybe the approach of deceiving your enemies better should be employed more? Even if they had similar numbers, there were already 1500 people in system when I started watching the stream 30 minutes before the timer ended. Maybe deliberately underforming for the initial start of the battle would encourage people to fight more? And then logging in more people once the combat actually started.

You see, this is the same lame excuse I hear all the time when minuscule fleet movements cause tidi and tc. There could have been a fight a couple of systems away or you were on the same node. This is bovine waste. You cannot stay on the same node or “just close enough to a big fight but never really in it” if you move 10, 15, 20 jumps through a region/several regions. CCP just overhyped their tech, which may be powerful but still does not meet the needs of their CCP’s ambitions.

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Surely it has nothing to do with the donut being at war on multiple fronts? There isn’t a null coalition in the game that wouldn’t suffer from these circumstances.

Yea, the blue donut is huge. It’s a LOT of groups together. Break up the blue donut though, and the individual members will end up vastly outnumbered by the coalitions on their borders which did not break up. That’s one of the reasons the blue donut exists.

Not arguing their decision not to fight. Whelping a fleet isn’t so bad… whelping your capital fleet is huge. Hence the topic of this thread, risk aversion, and how to mitigate it so that whelping a fleet is within the realm of “well at least we had a good fight”.

Spais? They also had eyes in literally every staging system we were in, watching our movement. In concept great idea, in reality it’s pretty much impossible. It’s remarkably easy to get a spy into a corp - I did it once before. Once they get a spy into the corp, there’s really no way for a massive coalition to not communicate enough to keep the line members completely in the dark. My spy, when I was finished with it, simply got extracted and biomassed to free up the slot for something different.

Server loads are never pinned up at 100% during normal operation. When you pin the load, you’re producing an anomalous load. They’re built to handle spikes sure, but a full on load, no. When the PLAYERS spike the load, it can handle it with TC if it needs to. When the PLAYERS pin the load, the server responds with TiDi.

Reality needs to set in at some point that unless every system is on its own node (and even then 3k local will still kill the perf) you will occasionally see those spikes and pins. I don’t think CCP ever hyped that they can handle any load, so I fail to see where the overhype took place?

Go ahead and throw 3000 players into fight on the same node on pretty much any other MMO and you’ll see it struggle. Assuming it doesn’t fail outright. They get around this by instancing things out. CCP doesn’t do instances because they think big. That is their vision, that is their hype. And they meet that hype, within the confines of today’s tech.

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Yeah, so condense to make the fronts smaller.

Goons had to do it.
DRF had to do it.

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The kind of condensing needed for that to make any kind of notable effect would be dramatic. We’re crowded already in a lot of systems.

I can see the logic though, a lot of that space is renters - probably by SOLAR paid for mercs to come in… they’re likely rolling in more isk than I can count.

I’m a member of the DRF, and I do not recall any need for the DRF to abandon space? There has certainly been some sov taken from some of our blues, but nothing that would qualify as abandoning space to concentrate defense.

Goons had to do it because basically all of Eve was attacking them. It was a losing battle time and time again, and they simply didn’t fight. Looking at the state of Delve now, I must say I’m not happy with the result.

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The new nullsec meta is compact and flourish, extend and suffer.

You mention Delve, they have a lot of sheep in what isnt a particularly large space and judging by the monthly economic report their sheep are doing very well in what must surely be fairly cramped situation.

Also, the recent attempt by grrr goons to push clear across New Eden and enforce their will shows the problems of the new meta in projecting and protecting remote space.

Giving up space will feel unpleasant but you’d do a lot better condensing and reorganizing you and your allies then asking for the meta to be changed.

14

Is it though? NCPL own several regions, CFC also own several regions. GOTG own several regions. TEST also own several regions. DRF own a lot of regions. Null sec blocks do not need to condense as long as no one attacks them.
And when someone attacks, everyone in EVE flocks to the attack front because everyone craves fights so much, just not on their door steps. Quickly after, the fight turns into a mess and suffocates under its own weight and nothing substantial happens. That was the case when CFC invaded Fountain to give INIT more land, it was the case when GOTG fun-invaded Perrigen Falls. It also would have been the case if CFC had not aborted the war between CO2 and TEST. There are simply no entities in EVE any more who could attack someone else seriously and those big one in existence do not need to attack each other because they have enough space as it is. CCP made it so that no wannabe attacker from outside has a chance of success.

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Its the most savage form of war. War of attrition. Bore opponent to his death.

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take the fight to them, some jumps from me people are ratting all days in supers next to brave so whats the issue?

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Uhhhmmmm, nothing.

Even setting aside the issue of TiDi. You are complaining that they are not hurling themselves into your guns to die like the Charge of Light Brigade? You want a turkey shoot? Shooting fish in a barrel? You brought 3,000 dudes to the fight…I’m not seeing the problem here, you brought a huge force and that pretty much precluded a fight unless your opponent is going to field similar numbers or find some other way to even the odds.

Edit: Or you brought 1,900 dudes according to Reddit…anyways, why did you expect a fight with numbers like that?

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For the sake of accuracy, “I” brought a carrier. I didn’t bring 3000 dudes. I do know what you mean (effectively the “royal we”).

The Reddit thread fails to account for a lot of the fleets that were waiting to bridge in, it was closer to 3000 if we ended up getting a fight. 1900 in local when the timer opened, the rest ready to bridge in caps, bombers, and probably every other doctrine under the sun.

And like I said in the OP, the reds were smart for not trying to take the fight - I didn’t begrudge them this decision, even though I did lament it. The loss would have crippled them. And I think that is the problem. In a world where losing a fight of that magnitude utterly crushes you, you don’t take the fight.

If an option existed (and I hate to say it but I honestly have no idea how this could work) to take the fight and not get your ability to take future fights completely decimated, I expect they probably would have taken the fight.

2 Likes
19

In general… if you are wanting the fight rather than the strategic goal of protecting or destroying a citadel… you kind of have to tailor your fleet to something the other side will engage with.

In Providence the locals take a ton of fights and the people invading know that. But they also have a pretty good general idea of what Providence can do. So they bring fleets that Providence will engage.

Your side didn’t really want an engagement. You likely knew what they had the potential to bring. Instead of matching it you went overkill. When your side does that, they aren’t looking to have an engagement, they are looking to scare the other side off.

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Not so much caps, supers, and structures as the number of people participating. The greater the number, the more the TiDi, lag, and low fps. Removing reasons to provoke an attack (like structures) won’t increase conflict. Removing large DPS vessels also will not reduce TiDi - it will likely increase it as you have more people who can fly a BS or BC than a Cap or super cap.

To the OP: Since you moved so much to engage in a fight, maybe you should look at reinforcing a structure of theirs in the area. If they won’t bother to show up when you are defending, maybe they will if you are attacking instead.