Forgive me, Gor, but this one was too good to leave in e-mail.
Wait… so choosing be smart in Eve and only engage in fights that you can win or walk away from is a bad thing? Eve PVP is so much about the tears…. If all these Eve players want less risk adverse behavior, decrease the (ship) death penalty. Oh but then PVP wouldn’t be so much fun, cause I didn’t ruin the other guys day.
I don’t mind someone being careful, but when you get together to spend an evening shooting other people and the guy in charge won’t take a fight — ANY fight — because it doesn’t look like a sure win? That guy just wasted my night, because I want to shoot something — that’s what I set aside my night to do. I wouldn’t have undocked if I didn’t accept some risk, and if I didn’t want the risk, I’d play Wizard101.
The guys that piss me off in the war zone are the guys who are ostensibly part of faction warfare, but who fly around in frigates with no guns on and a ship optimized to make money and ignore the actual war. That bugs the crap out of me, and I make it a hobby to blow them up when I can.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I don’t do it for the tears — I very much doubt there are any, because that guy probably make 4 or 5 billion isk in the last week — I do it because these guys are crapping all over the area of the game I’m playing in, and I have the means to kick some sand in their face, which I want to do because this particular activity in Eve — for which I have sacrificed time, ISK, and the companionship of good friends who’d rather not join me — is being ruined by these greedy little stains.
Do I do this to miners in high-sec? Or industrialists? Or traders? Of course not! They’re doing what they do; they’re not subverting anything. That guy in the hookbill is turning an arena for a certain kind of play into a lame money-dispenser — paved the park and put up a Qwik-e-mart — and I look on it the same way I look on guys who can-flip and ninja-salvage in high-sec: I’ll kill ’em if I can.
This is tangential, but I don’t think they should decrease the death penalty to allay risk adverse behavior, because honestly the main thing that makes EvE fights exciting (they aren’t, normally) is the risk to your OWN ship). These guys that pussyfoot around, trying for a perfect 100-0 record… it just seems to me that they miss the point. The whole thing is more fun if you have some skin in the game.
No, I don’t care about causing tears, but I do care about caring about the fight. If four guys want to use some ECM so their four frigates can take on a Cynabal and have a chance of winning, fine. I can even stand to be one of those guys, because I don’t see that we’ve negated risk and made the whole fight pointless. If fourteen guys bring two Falcons on every roam and only take on groups of 8 or fewer pilots so they can guarantee none of their opponents can fight back… yeah. No. I get why they’re playing, but that’s no more “my” version of Eve than 1% margin trading in Jita.
I’m not going to suicide into a fight for no purpose — but (for example) I stayed in the fight a few nights ago because I thought we could pull out a win, or at least a draw, and that (plus the adrenaline) was worth it.
An hour after I killed that Hookbill pilot, this happened — and I was just as happy about it, because I actually found someone in a complex who wanted to fight.
These days, that’s like finding the only other guy at a gaming convention who actually came to play.
I just leave it here: http://aidenmourn.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/tier-5-tears/
It’s a funny post, but the thing is, it’s not the folks farming Plexes that cause me grief — they’re annoying, but I don’t even think they’re people.
Not that they’re sub-human; I think they’re bots, or at any rate there’s no one really there.
No, most of my stress is from the non-combatant friends who think I’m being mean to some other carebear who just wants to play their way, or my PvP friends who think I’m making too big a deal of it. (Though they might feel differently after trying to catch any of the plex farmers for two hours last night…)