What's Holding This Game Back?

You have an irrational/pedestrian view of risk.

In EVE, it’s most often the case that increasing your risk will lead to disproportionately-larger income. For example, you can risk a 1-million-ISK Venture to make 1 million ISK per hour mining, or you can risk a 30-million-ISK mining barge to make 20 million ISK per hour. The level of risk (not the financial impact) for either is effectively the same, but the latter multiplies your profits by 20. Per these figures, if you lose 1 ship every 10 hours, then you make .9 million ISK per hour using the Venture, but would make 17 million ISK per hour using the mining barge, after the losses are taken into consideration. Even if you lost a barge every 2 hours, you’d still make over 5x as much money per hour as you would by using a Venture and losing 1 every 10 hours!

You could structure and improve your gameplay to the extent that minor losses wouldn’t even register for you mentally, but instead insist on getting caught in the mental trap of irrational loss aversion. Imagine someone offers for you to wager $1 for a chance to win $2,000, with the odds of winning being 1 in 100, but you choose to keep that dollar because you’re so terrified of losing even such an insignificant sum of money that you wouldn’t take this amazing opportunity to wager it in a transaction that’s massively stacked in your favor.

This is why “caebears” in EVE are so silly.

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