I’d like to thank the “Everything in EVE is PvP” crowd for showing up and doing exactly as predicted. It’s nice to have something work out just the way you expect.
We’ve seen “The market is PvP” , “Undocking is PvP” , “Mining is PvP” , even “Interaction between players is PvP”. I’m a bit surprised nobody came up with “Logging in is PvP”. Or maybe they did and I just missed it.
For most of the people arguing “it’s all PvP”, the OP or the game or the success of Eve aren’t the point. They simply want someone to argue against - probably because the game they signed up for to push their “I want conflict” buttons doesn’t actually feature enough conflict to keep them satisfied, so they come to the forums instead for their ‘PvP’.
The OPs’ point, lost in the debate and hairsplitting over how many ways you can define any interaction between two players to be ‘PvP’, seemed to be that EVE was more than just PvP; in fact PvP isn’t even it’s key feature, and that non-PvP playstyles are equally valid.
Funnily enough, the crowd that jumped in to disagree with that basically end up saying all other playstyles are PvP, so they’re all just as valid anyway. So much for having a clue about what you’re arguing against!
At any rate, the only (barely) meaningful discussion to be had about PvP is not whether .01 ISKing (or the 4-sig-digit version thereof) constitutes PvP. It’s about what needs to be changed or improved about Eve in order to ensure the future and at least moderate success for the game.
If you define trading, hauling, mining, industry, exploration, undocking and logging in to be ‘PvP’ then you’ve got nothing meaningful to say about the game. Everything in EVE becomes PvP, and since “EVE is a PvP game” then by definition, it’s all good. Every playstyle is completely valid and interesting (because PVP is supposedly the ‘most interesting’ part of EVE and it’s ALL PvP) and no changes need to be made.
In the thread In ONE sentence, what change would u like to see in eveonline? I referred to EVE as a “40% PVE, 30% economic simulator, 20% PVP and 10% exploration” game. Those numbers are fairly accurate, although of course I was being a bit generous with the PvP portion there. It’s more like 15%.
Personally I believe EVE would be a lot better off as a 30% PvE, 30% PvP, 25% Economic and 15% Exploration game. To make that happen, actual ship-to-ship combat needs to be made more interesting, more accessible, better rewarded and given more nuanced consequences than the actually quite minimal and lame combat environment we have now.
You can try to define marketing or mining as PvP all you want, but if you aren’t addressing actual ship combat, you’re probably not saying anything more useful than “I like to argue about word definitions”.
If that’s your cup of tea, check out Scrabble. It’s PvP!