So, I find that I pretty much agree with Isha on this subject. However, to touch upon a few points in my own words:
I do believe that IC actions need to be able to have consequences enforced. In Eve, this is very often accomplished by blowing things up. That's part of the nature of Eve, and RP in Eve has to include this. In principle, I think that people should follow what their characters would do as much as possible. And in some cases, one wouldn't be being true to one's character if one didn't try their hardest to destroy another group, or ruin the life of another individual. And, for that matter, in some cases one wouldn't be true to one's character if one ever gave in to or negotiated with such attempts. While I may suck at Eve PvP, my personal RP philosophy is that PvP is an entirely valid -- and even needed -- part of RP, and that one should never take personally another player's attempts to completely ruin or end your character or organization's life. It's just a game.
As a player, that works for me pretty well.
As a director of a corp in Eve, and as a community member and not simply an individual, I see the places it breaks down.
As a community member, I do still lean pretty heavily on the 'PvP is a good thing, it is fine to destroy the lives of other characters' side. There's just no real stakes to things otherwise. But I recognize that we also need to make sure we don't make it unfun for the other players when doing things. We need to make sure we don't drive people away from the community. It's harder in Eve, where you can't really accomplish the objectives of destroying organizations or killing characters very reliably without simply making things so unfun for people that they quit. We want to avoid making people quit. What can we do to keep people from OOC not having fun, while ruining the IC lives? That's much harder to say. OOC check ins with players, setting expectations, ect, are all possible steps, but the truth is, even though Eve is at its core a PvP game, everyone here has different expectations, and human beings are notoriously bad at staying objective and not losing their tempers when things aren't going their way.
As a director, I also have a responsibility to the members of my corp. I see how things affect them OOC as well as IC. I see their frustrations, I know that some of them want to only RP part time and just do missions or mine without worrying about a RP war the rest of the time. Such a playstyle may not appeal to me, others may prefer to consider oneself always IC no matter what they are doing in game, but as a director, I have to ensure the needs of both our more hardcore and our more causal players are being met. And they're not being met. I think this can mostly be traced to problems with the wardec system itself, but it's plain to me as a director that, ultimately, playing this way leads to people leaving the RP community, either via quitting altogether or via deciding that getting involved in the RP aspect of Eve means people will target them for that when they simply want to enjoy playing Eve.
Ultimately, I believe we do need to have PvP be a strong and integral part of Eve RP. It's frankly phony if we don't. But when it starts driving people away -- we better start looking to fix that damn quickly.
Author
Topic: Redux: Can you expect safety in Eve, as RPers? (Read 31202 times)