The Awoken is still recruiting players of all experience to join us in LAWN alliance, but I’d also like to take an opportunity to talk about something of a sticking point for many new players.
If you’re new to EVE Online, you may have seen a cool space-themed MMO. You may have also expected PvP would be optional, but that’s not how New Eden works. The “undock” button is your consent to PvP here, even in highsec. This is not a game where you get to take your ease, mind your own business, and remain untouchable.
Territory is also important. If any corp or alliance (and by extension, coalition) wants to persist, they must hold sovereignty in a cluster of systems, establish infrastructure to gather and utilize resources, and defend their space from invaders. Because you can’t really trust anyone in New Eden, you can’t just let neutrals run uncontested in your territory, taking your resources for their own benefit and your loss.
This is why corps, alliances, and coalitions run fleets: to defend the space they hold, and acquire access to different resources. It’s also for the content and the bragging rights. Those fleets don’t work unless everyone’s pulling their weight, though, which is where paps come in. A “pap” is shorthand for “participation.” Pap links are a way of reporting a player’s participation in a fleet; there are different systems for recording paps, but the important thing is that fleet paps are often a requirement in corps.
The Awoken, for instance, currently requires 5 paps per month. We want you to fly in five “papped” fleets that meet certain criteria. Those criteria are designed to prevent you from fleeting up with a bunch of your alts by yourself, or from doing things the corp, alliance, or coalition doesn’t deem really beneficial to them. If you fleet up but then orbit each other at a safe for an hour, that doesn’t really help anyone.
You can sometimes get paps for mining, for stealing ISK from other corps in ESS robberies or Skyhook thefts, or for helping players move expensive stuff, but the most common paps are good ol’ fashioned PvP fights. You either go out and look for enemies to kill, or your fleet commander has a specific target in mind, like a structure. These fleets may not seem like they’re doing much to help defend your space, but they give you the experience and confidence to engage those targets of opportunity you do find in your space.
When I first started playing EVE, I thought of it as a mining sim, and I did’t understand how things really worked, so I balked at the pap requirements. I get why you’d think, “I pay for this game. Why are they telling me I have to play it a certain way?” It’s not something you’ll be used to if you’ve only played games like World of Warcraft, where holding territory doesn’t matter and you can toggle PvP.
PvP really needs to be something you want to do if you expect to have fun in New Eden. When I started I abhorred the idea of PvP, because I’ve never been good at it. Take a look at my zKill, and you’ll see I’m still not good at it. The difference is, now I’ve taken an interest in PvP because I understand how it helps my corp. Lately, I’ve also started to pick up things about ships and fittings that tells me what sort of targets I can and can’t engage when I see them.
In short, PvP helps your corp, maintains the health of the alliance, gives you experience that will help you improve in other aspects of the game, and provides content for the real heart of the game. You may have thought this was a mining sim with combat aspects, and it can be that if all you want to do is stay in highsec. But if you prefer to get rough and rowdy and you see mining and the other activities as something to support your PvP, then drop by The Awoken’s public Discord server and see if we’d be the right fit for you.
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