Backstage - OOC Forums
EVE-Online RP Discussion and Resources => EVE OOC Summit => Topic started by: Dame Death on 03 Apr 2012, 07:28
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Right got into quite a heated argument earlier, and to be honest I want to have it where I have time to read the replies and think about what I type. (not to mention spell check)
Ok here is the full c+p of a mission
Mission briefing
Very recently, we spotted a huge transport fleet carrying thousands upon thousands of Amarrians towards our borders. We let them enter, pretending as always that we had not noticed. This time however, we reinforced all of the likely exit points with additional patrols. As a result they have not yet been able to leave. They are sitting largely defenseless as they wait for an opportunity to pass back out into Empire borders. Do what must be done.
This mission expires at 2012.04.03 14:33
Shades of Grey Objectives
The following objectives must be completed to finish the mission:
Objective
Take out the Industrials that take care of re-supplying the Colony and if you have time inflict as much damages as possible on the civilian structures in the area. Location 0.4 Iesa (Low Sec Warning!)
This site contains special ship restrictions.
(The route generated by current autopilot settings contains low security systems!)
Rewards
The following rewards will be yours if you complete this mission:
1,870,000 ISK
33778 Loyalty Points.
Bonus Rewards
Bonus no longer available. The bonus time interval has passed.
2,590,000 ISK
Shades of grey
Despite the frequent death of civilians in a war, it is nonetheless exceptionally rare for large-scale casualties to happen without even a shred of reason. Engineers, mechanics, scientists, these and other professions – when used directly to aid combatant forces – can be said to have justifiably draw the wrath of their enemies. There just enough shades of grey to allow it.
No empire, however, is foolish enough to outright murder citizens without any involvement in a conflict. Or as some might argue, they are not so foolish as to get caught in the act. The rise of the capsuleer has spawned a dark new age where culpability is little more than an elusive dream.
This clearly states its a civi colony, and so peoples claims that they never hit civis are false if they do this mission.
This is the reason Dame does not ever do this mission or in fact any mission.
I have used and have seen used the argument that a Missioner kills more crew then your average pvper icly so surly this is the same boat.
So what I want your thoughts on is... If you do Shades of grey and hit civi targets do you do it icly? (If no ill start 3 boxing tlf missions again)
I will answer each post as I have time to think and spell check a answer, if its needed.
EDIT Spell checked :(
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I'd argue, as I attempted to before, that if we counted up all the times that missions like this have been done by all pilots since FW started, we'd be well on our way to depopulating the cluster. I see it like this: there are like, 10 at most, FW missions, and it seems very very strange to do the exact same mission over and over again. So I assume that mission was done once, at one time, by a single capsuleer, which in fact, seems to be the attitude CCP takes on it.
I can no more consider the content of Shades of Grey to be IC then I can the content of Damsel in Distress, which seems quite improbably after the second or third time running it in one day.
My corp considers missions thusly: when you're doing missions, you do them ICly, but specifically what you're doing in them is very purposely left undisclosed, because to do otherwise shatters the suspension of disbelief around missions in general.
Also, Dame, there's this thing called spellcheck.
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I know there is, I gave up on FF's and used open office instead.
And Kiki, I see where your coming from, but the basics will stay the same, in fact I think jokes have been made about the Damsel icly many a time. And as I said I know the kill count of missions gets used ICly so surely this should to?
EDIT; Also theres enough missions, that you dont have to do shades if you dont want to, at least most of the time.
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I'm in 0.0, and while ratting, killed 60 Battleships.
Did the Serpentis actually lose 60 battleships to my Abaddon? No. That's enough losses to send a hit team to bomb my clone lab.
Combined with everyone else out there, it's also enough to wipe out that Entire faction within a day.
I did, however, go on patrol. I hunted Serps. I even found a couple and we had a fight. CONCORD paid me a huge check for my help.
Handwaving a few mechanics so that the game is playable simply has to be done. It's a hole in the fabric of any MMO, and is dealt with the same way every MMO has.
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I'm in 0.0, and while ratting, killed 60 Battleships.
Did the Serpentis actually lose 60 battleships to my Abaddon? No. That's enough losses to send a hit team to bomb my clone lab.
Combined with everyone else out there, it's also enough to wipe out that Entire faction within a day.
I did, however, go on patrol. I hunted Serps. I even found a couple and we had a fight. CONCORD paid me a huge check for my help.
Handwaving a few mechanics so that the game is playable simply has to be done. It's a hole in the fabric of any MMO, and is dealt with the same way every MMO has.
But you still killed some serps, so everyone who has done shades of grey, has hit at least one civi coloney?
Also you rat in a bs? *Considers resubbing Dame*
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Here's a thing. Graelyn likely has the most reasonable idea. Numbers are not right, but he did do stuff to Serp ships. I would guess if pressed we could get an admission of a confrontation with a battleship class ship?
That is different from saying 'we never kill civilians because mission and numbers.' Which I think is a bit more iffy and takes a whole lot more of OOC handwawing.
Ofcourse there is little besides Eve stalking to actually prove someone has shot at civilian craft. Outside personal admissions.
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I do wish CCP would change ratting and missions in a way that they weren't so ridiculously unrealistic. Why not make the numbers we have to kill fewer, while keeping the difficulty and rewards the same? Seems an easy cosmetic fix, just cut down the number of rats by 7/8ths and make them uber.
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Right a little context.
This started when someone brought up Civi casualty’s and how they never hit civi targets.
Ja being Ja so heartless pointed out it was necessary, she got a bit of stick so brought up shades of grey.
I then got yelled at blocked and told to go kill myself in ooc because id used missions IC.
What I'm trying to work out is was I wrong or is the other person just bending rules to fit their RP?
Because Rping a butter wont melt person while killing civis for isk doesn't fly in my book.
And in my view the agent briefings are IC at least, so the basics would be “Go deny a civi colony of supply’s.”
There is nothing making them take that mission, but it clearly states its civi targets hell even the name does.
And doing that mission is proof at least what Ja'li was using.
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Game mechanics need to be handwaved to have them make sense as Graelyn has described it. Other MMOs are even worse about the unique nature of quests. If there's a quest in a region that needs you to kill Urblaz the orc chieftain in his camp, then odds are everyone who levelled through there has actually killed that orc chieftain named Urblaz at least once. So if you're trying to stay IC you have to bend the universe a bit. Oh sure, you've been in [Whateverland] too, hunting some orc war party. They're a real bother there.
In this particular case I'd take the essence of that mission and use that for IC purposes. So the mission is named 'shades of grey', and therefore any interpretation of what has happened in that site is morally questionable. Feel free to fill in your own justifications for doing so. It's a civilian transport that was smuggling war materials in may be one. Supposed terrorists another.
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Anyone running that mission, even once, has slaughtered innocent civilians.
This is not the age old argument about scope, it is about morality.
Morality of an individual.
To a jaded Minmatar Freedom Fighter that lives on the dark side of Terrorism they would not be civilians, they would be monsters, just because they are Amarrian.
To a happy go lucky miner chipping in on the war effort on the Minmatar side such action would be completely and utterly abhorrent, they would turn down the mission for moral reasons and perhaps consider leaving the service of a military force that slaughters innocents.
It is an individual choice, but EVE is a game of your character history, it is about the choices that you as a player make that define the character.
If you choose, as a player, to kill innocents with the character, the character has killed them and there is no denying it.
Unfortunately there is no rules for RPing in EVE.
Only way you can show that you disapprove is by letting people know that someone has a playstyle that you do not agree with and ostracize him/her and try to get other players to do the same until that player changes his/her playstyle or leaves the game.
Getting blocked by that individual will just make things easier for you.
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I don't think I ever said that Dame should go kill himself.
Now, as for the killing of civilians, we get into the fact that a lot of RPers seem to struggle with, which is that my character is by no means under any obligation to tell the truth, especially in the summit. Kiki lies. She lies quite a bit in fact.
However, calling her out by pointing out to a specific instance where 'you ran this mission specifically so you must have killed civilians' seems just sorta shitty to me. Yes, kiki may have done things that resulted in enemy civilians getting killed, but there should not be a way to quite so blatantly point out to everyone that she has. Like I said, there are only like 10 FW missions in a rotation. You do the same mission a lot of times, and using the mission flavour text to ICly call someone out on it just seems like poor form.
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I do wish CCP would change ratting and missions in a way that they weren't so ridiculously unrealistic. Why not make the numbers we have to kill fewer, while keeping the difficulty and rewards the same? Seems an easy cosmetic fix, just cut down the number of rats by 7/8ths and make them uber.
I think on the ship balancing panel it was said that the overall goal with NPCs is to remove their number, make them harder and make them require fits that are not so entirely unsuitable for pvp. So in the long term, we might see something like that.
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if Player A, does that mission, then, since it's a FW mission, a beacon will appear in system.
Player B can warp to that beacon, and observe things.
And if in that mission, Player A, is observably firing upon civilian ships and/or structures, and Player B sees this, then the situation is clear.
Player A was firing on civilians, and That is That.
doesn't matter if there's only a handful of missions in the mission pool, or if the scale of missions is a bit derpy, with hordes of puny ships vs the SUPERCAPSULEHERO.
normal missions can be handwaved a lot more than FW ones, simply because of the whole public beacon thing.
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Soloing L4s in a PvP-fit Drake is a bit slow, but you do it while doing or waiting for other things.
Most people lie about or gloss over some things. Some delude themselves in order to get through unpleasant realities, and the EVE world has plenty of unpleasant realities.
If you really don't want to have shot civilians, you turn down missions which would require you to shoot civilians. It's not unusual for roleplayers-who-mission to have some missions they won't do because those missions don't fit the character.
But calling someone out for something they've actually and provably done seems totally okay to me. (Not necessarily something Mata would do, but that's about the character, and about public vs behind-the-scenes approaches to things.)
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What Lou said, but:
That mission brief implies the colony itself is in Republic-controlled space. Not Amarr space, where the mission to shoot the industrials is taking place. That doesn't exactly make it a civilian colony. It's an invading entity, encroaching on someone else's territory. Nuking it from orbit would be perfectly legit in a state of war.
And there's no reason to set up a colony in your enemy's space during wartime outside of military applications. Which means that the idea that the people living there are civilians is questionable at best. And that anyone providing them supplies is aiding a military operation, which means they are not innocent, uninvolved civilians, assuming they can reasonably considered civilians in the first place.
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What Lou said, but:
That mission brief implies the colony itself is in Republic-controlled space. Not Amarr space, where the mission to shoot the industrials is taking place. That doesn't exactly make it a civilian colony. It's an invading entity, encroaching on someone else's territory. Nuking it from orbit would be perfectly legit in a state of war.
Hm, FW missions always send you to hostile space, i.e. an amarr agent will give you missions that take place in republic space. Therefore the 'civilian colony' would be in the warzone, but not in amarr controlled space.
-> Shades of Grey. ;)
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So I assume that mission was done once, at one time, by a single capsuleer, which in fact, seems to be the attitude CCP takes on it.
My take on it is that Zor did kidnap a executive's daughter and a some capsuleer did rescue her. However, when you do the Damsel mission you are rescuing some random damsel from some random thug and are not the hero of that specific Zor/Damsel story.
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What Lou said, but:
That mission brief implies the colony itself is in Republic-controlled space. Not Amarr space, where the mission to shoot the industrials is taking place. That doesn't exactly make it a civilian colony. It's an invading entity, encroaching on someone else's territory. Nuking it from orbit would be perfectly legit in a state of war.
Hm, FW missions always send you to hostile space, i.e. an amarr agent will give you missions that take place in republic space. Therefore the 'civilian colony' would be in the warzone, but not in amarr controlled space.
-> Shades of Grey. ;)
Just because the transports you are hitting are in Amarrian space, do not mean that the colony they are going to is as well.
Very recently, we spotted a huge transport fleet carrying thousands upon thousands of Amarrians towards our borders. We let them enter, pretending as always that we had not noticed.
Enter what? Their own (Amarrian) space? Why use the word "enter" in that case? That makes no sense logically.
This time however, we reinforced all of the likely exit points with additional patrols. As a result they have not yet been able to leave. They are sitting largely defenseless as they wait for an opportunity to pass back out into Empire borders.
In order to "pass back out" of something, you must have entered something. If they're passing back out into Empire border space, they therefore must have entered Republic space.
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They sound more like squatters than invaders.
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In an active state of war, can you afford to take the chance? Especially with an enemy like the Empire? :P
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It's quite simple. If your char shies away from killing civilians, don't kill the civilians. - There's the option to decline a mission. If the char does feel killing those civilians is somehow justified, kill them. If the char feel like lying about whether he did such a mission or no, he can do so - and probably will.
Anyway, that such a mission exists does by no means necessitate that every capsuleer involved in FW needs to do it.
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What Nicoletta said.
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Man, from Gottii's IC view, every time he pulls the trigger on an Amarrian vessel, he's killing family, i.e. the slaves that serve on the Amarrian ship.
Killing some Angel "support staff" doesnt bother him a bit after that. We're callous deathbringers for a reason...
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Just because the transports you are hitting are in Amarrian space, do not mean that the colony they are going to is as well.
In order to "pass back out" of something, you must have entered something. If they're passing back out into Empire border space, they therefore must have entered Republic space.
It was an observation that the hostile act on the capsuleers part consists of hitting a target outside 'their' empire's space. It's simply a fact by the game mechanic. Your mission will not be in "your" space, whatever the briefing says.
The logic is flawed there and I might simply chalk it down to the fact that the mission briefings might have been written before it was decided that FW missions always take you into hostile space.
So in a literal way, the mission briefing is not working at all. It claims that the amarrian fleet has entered republic space and is now detained there, waiting for a chance to get out again. However, the mission will send you to amarr space.
That's why I've said: Bend the story behind it so that it makes sense while retaining the gist of the matter, i.e. shades of grey, hitting civilians - or mostly civilians - it is.
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Missions are generally bull when taken literally. So you gotta do something with them
Civilians transports that don't warp out when not being scrambled? I don't believe it. Civilians getting caught in the same manner tens of thousands of times? Naah, not really.
Hell, for all you know I might have done the mission and destroyed the transports after having taken the time for the civilians to get off. Invisible tranport ships might have taken them to a safe place (or be enslaved). If invisible transport ships work for the Sansha, why not for me?
You just can't tell what actually happened and just taking the mission literally all the time ruins any suspension of disbelief.
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Also, I have Mina Darabi living in my quarters for two years now. We're practically married... :D
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I may be wrong... but in a state of war (which FW isn't, it is some sort of military action, but not real war. If it would be then the both empires would be completely mobilized) both participants claim that the contested territory is theirs and then they fight over it?
I'm not sure that is there such thing as the Geneva convention in New Eden.
It might be completely legitimate to kill civilians whenever you want, even without a proclamation of war.
Hell, it might be legal to kill a non-citizen everywhere in every empire where the non-citizens are not protected by CONCORD.
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I may be wrong... but in a state of war (which FW isn't, it is some sort of military action, but not real war. If it would be then the both empires would be completely mobilized) both participants claim that the contested territory is theirs and then they fight over it?
But they don't call someone entering space they want to claim as entering their borders. There's a system in place, occupation, and entering the occupied systems might be called crossing a border. Technicalities, I know, but even with your view the mission wouldn't make enough sense to be taken literally over and over and over again.
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I'd argue, as I attempted to before, that if we counted up all the times that missions like this have been done by all pilots since FW started, we'd be well on our way to depopulating the cluster. I see it like this: there are like, 10 at most, FW missions, and it seems very very strange to do the exact same mission over and over again. So I assume that mission was done once, at one time, by a single capsuleer, which in fact, seems to be the attitude CCP takes on it.
I can no more consider the content of Shades of Grey to be IC then I can the content of Damsel in Distress, which seems quite improbably after the second or third time running it in one day.
My corp considers missions thusly: when you're doing missions, you do them ICly, but specifically what you're doing in them is very purposely left undisclosed, because to do otherwise shatters the suspension of disbelief around missions in general.
This has been my experience as well. In all the IC - and most OOC cases where I've run missions in corps or whatever we don't consider the constant repeated missions as "fact". We never go into much detail IC "Just doing soem work for X in Y system" etc. and OOC we don't bother to consider the 'importance' of the missions or make much of it. We just move on and farm the missions for all their OOC positive rewards - standing, loot, salvage, ISK, etc.
So if asked what I'm doing in an IC manner while missioning it's just "working for my agent" and nothing more. Belt ratting? "Patrolling X system clearing out some Y pirates."
Going into any more detail would break the suspension of disbelief and so the topic of missioning and the scale of it never comes up IC.
It's quite simple. If your char shies away from killing civilians, don't kill the civilians. - There's the option to decline a mission. If the char does feel killing those civilians is somehow justified, kill them. If the char feel like lying about whether he did such a mission or no, he can do so - and probably will.
Anyway, that such a mission exists does by no means necessitate that every capsuleer involved in FW needs to do it.
Annnnnnd now that I've read the actual tread ( :bash:) ^THIS.
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I do wish CCP would change ratting and missions in a way that they weren't so ridiculously unrealistic. Why not make the numbers we have to kill fewer, while keeping the difficulty and rewards the same? Seems an easy cosmetic fix, just cut down the number of rats by 7/8ths and make them uber.
I think on the ship balancing panel it was said that the overall goal with NPCs is to remove their number, make them harder and make them require fits that are not so entirely unsuitable for pvp. So in the long term, we might see something like that.
Apparently, the sleeper/incursion AI was stage 1 of this (all NPCs are supposed to start acting intelligent). The problem is that every single mission and NPC encounter in the game has to be redone all at once for this, and CCP is gun shy about upsetting that 70% of the playerbase running missions in hisec. :s
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Running any more than a few NPC missions will quickly break all kinds of believability if you are trying to RP.
You can't talk about the missions with anyone (how many 1000's of damsels have been rescued?)
You can't possibly have killed that many ships and crews without single-handedly bringing these conflicts to a screeching halt from depopulation.
I'd take missions as a springboard for more interesting stories that you come up with yourself. Use the plots you are given as a kernel for a good idea maybe?
If you over-analyze any of the missions things fall apart extremely fast, and it's extremely problematic to get on anyone for the actions the do in a mission considering their limitations.
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So why do so many missions then?
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Some people enjoy them?
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So why do so many missions then?
Reputation grind, ISK rewards, loot, salvage, time-waster with friends? Just because people RP and like their consistent IC reality, don't mean they should stop running missions for whatever reason or benefit anyone else might run them for - it just means they are likely to avoid talking about them for reasons that are well-covered in this tread.
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Other shitty MMOs have lots of players because of the grind/reward mechanic that they offer. It appeals to some deep machination of the lizard brain. Missions in EVE appeal to those who come to EVE just for that.
Yes, it's a massive waste considering the depth available in the sandbox, but then, so are the millions playing WoW/ToR. It's what they want. *shrug*
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Well...then why do people not RP NRDS but actually act NBSI because it's more fun/rewarding?
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I could explain that to you for a low, low price.
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Well...then why do people not RP NRDS but actually act NBSI because it's more fun/rewarding?
I think it comes down to consistency and suspension of disbelief.
It would be very hard for my SOD to RP that I'm NRDS and yet shoot everything that moves, at least partially because I hold with the "things that happen in space really happen" school of RP. If I shoot at you in space, I can't just pretend that I didn't shoot at you in my RP once I've stopped flying my ship for the night.
On the other hand, if I run a mission and it's the 15th time the damsel has to be rescued it damages my SOD to talk about it. It's a limitation of the game, not the world, so my SOD suffers less to pretend that I didn't just run exactly the same mission as last week, than if I RP that I've rescued the damsel 15 times and I wish her legal guardians would put her in a secure facility or something. Ideally, missions would be infinitely varied so I never had to avoid talking about them, but I don't see that coming anytime soon.
And to be honest, I've done NBSI and I've done NRDS, and NRDS (at least the flavor of NRDS I do now) is not less enjoyable to me.
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This space contained a rant about how - suspension of disbelief issues aside - it would seem silly to, when claiming not to do certain things, to routinely do those things in space anyway and then bluntly deny they happened. It was removed because it could be interpreted as retroactively slamming someone who simply set out with a different idea of what's "real" in the game.
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Well...then why do people not RP NRDS but actually act NBSI because it's more fun/rewarding?
I'm NRDS and yet shoot everything that moves, at least partially because I hold with the "things that happen in space really happen" school of RP.
Missions happen in space.
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Missions happen in space.
Yep, which is why if I go missioning I'll say I'm missioning (unless in character I'm feeling a bit ashamed for missioning instead of shooting amarians, but that's IC lying, not pretending the world is different than it is) and I'll even go so far as to say I'm shooting Angels or rogue drones or whoever the target is, but I won't delve down to talk about specific details about the mission.
As far as the original post is concerned, if I do a mission that involves shooting civilians, or Gallente, or whoever, then my character really did a mission that involved shooting those people. To prove it, I don't think it's enough to say "you ran a bunch of missions, so you must have run that specific mission at some stage".
Warp to the mission site, see wreckage, see me warp away? Fair cop. Otherwise, not convinced.
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Missions happen in space.
Yep, which is why if I go missioning I'll say I'm missioning (unless in character I'm feeling a bit ashamed for missioning instead of shooting amarians, but that's IC lying, not pretending the world is different than it is) and I'll even go so far as to say I'm shooting Angels or rogue drones or whoever the target is, but I won't delve down to talk about specific details about the mission.
As far as the original post is concerned, if I do a mission that involves shooting civilians, or Gallente, or whoever, then my character really did a mission that involved shooting those people. To prove it, I don't think it's enough to say "you ran a bunch of missions, so you must have run that specific mission at some stage".
Warp to the mission site, see wreckage, see me warp away? Fair cop. Otherwise, not convinced.
That's pretty much my take on it as well.
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Well...then why do people not RP NRDS but actually act NBSI because it's more fun/rewarding?
For the exact same reasons. Some find pretty decent IC excuses while others do not care, and that is the limits of their RP RoEs, when you start to have a huge gap between your IC claims and what you do in space. Has been the case in 90% of the corps I have been until now, excluding my own and AM ofc.
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s far as the original post is concerned, if I do a mission that involves shooting civilians, or Gallente, or whoever, then my character really did a mission that involved shooting those people. To prove it, I don't think it's enough to say "you ran a bunch of missions, so you must have run that specific mission at some stage".
Warp to the mission site, see wreckage, see me warp away? Fair cop. Otherwise, not convinced.
Ja didnt say that, what she did was point out a certain mission and ask if they had ran it, whicch they admitted they had.
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Ja didnt say that, what she did was point out a certain mission and ask if they had ran it, whicch they admitted they had.
Which is where I think you went wrong. If we work from the assumption that there isn't really only 10 different missions in FW, you can't therefore list them all by name, nor can you assume that someone running a mission with the same code-name as one you've run, ran the same mission you did. Sure, OOC you can, but not IC, as far as I'm concerned.
Where Kikia went wrong is in answering in the affirmative, since I don't think the question made sense from an IC perspective.
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Rgr ulf, but fyi it wasnt kiki that did, and nowhere have I mentioned names.
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The way I approach it is this: CCP has stated that every player is a roleplayer; some "immersionists" just take the level of immersion deeper than others. That means that, kill for kill, all actions are in-character. This is justified through the notion of the populated solar system.
Caveat: the number of missions is finite. The scope of human experience (professional or otherwise) is not. I'll get to that.
Now, it is only believable that mission runners get the level of business, and the scale of conflict (read: body count), if, and only if, virtually every system in the game, from 1.0 to 0.0, is constantly in what we would regard as a state of high-level warfare, involving massive fleets of battleships and facilities. Don't think late-continuity "Star Trek: DS9" -style battles; think more along the lines of several-thousand-battleship fleets from essentially every faction operating out of numerous hidey-holes in essentially every system, essentially all at once.
The fiction seems to support this understanding. Consider that mid-sized battleship fleets will be referred to at times as scouting elements.
One way to justify this is to think of these fleets as spending most of their time in standoff mode. Pirate fleets conduct raids and scouting exercises in force. Navy elements conduct defensive maneuvers similarly, defending a large spacebourne population resident in mining habitats, supply depots, and similar stationary civilian structures that capsuleers rarely get to see. Most of the time, the overall status quo is a sort of a tense stalemate.
It's when and where that changes (and it does, constantly, all over) that capsuleers get tapped. They're troubleshooters for a populated solar system the size of, well, a solar system.
http://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/space_infographic (http://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/space_infographic)
New Eden's population has had centuries of interstellar development to spread out into that-- thousands of times that-- and has done so. Assembling a battleship is like putting up a fair-sized office building, but the facilities are busy, busy, busy and a fleet of a thousand office buildings isn't so much to ask when you've got a hundred thousand mid-to-large-size asteroid colonies out there in that one interplanetary asteroid belt (analogous to the one between Mars and Jupiter) all churning away-- and even more working out of the oort cloud. Remember also that these factory-stations are not building to capsuleer design specs.
That's in ONE system. For a major interstellar faction, in this scenario, losing a few battleships is like having a few skin cells flake off.
Does this make capsuleers statistical nonentities, trying to erode away the great mountain of humanity with a garden hose, a few atoms at a time? Not quite.
It is suggested in the fiction that, among the pirate-faction rank and file, the sheer lethality of a capsuleer is little-known. Their leadership knows better. See "Summer Breeze," for a commander's-eye view. Elsewhere, or perhaps just "later" in time, the "Empyreans" are known as "gods of destruction," and the death toll they claim is viewed with ever-growing horror.
Capsuleers are rare; most spacers have never seen one. As populous as they may be around Jita 4-4, they mostly stick to their own dedicated hubs and transit routes, or to designated mission sites (or pirate facilities that didn't stay quiet enough, through probing). Conventional craft steer clear.
(Don't ask me to justify the damned asteroid patrols. I'd need another week with that alone.)
Bottom line: as lethal as they are, capsuleers are less a cluster-depopulating plague and more a strategic tool. They're not cleansing the cluster of human life just yet, but could become demographically significant if there were, say, a hundred times as many of them.
Mind you, the murder rate of your city doesn't have to be actually driving your population downward before you notice it's become a significant problem.
OKAY! ... So, with all that setup, how I approach missions:
They're all real. Except ... they're not exactly as described. No, I haven't rescued that many damsels-- but I might well have been sent on retrieval missions for a variety of abducted personnel. No, I haven't killed The Thief that many times, and he hasn't had pet drones every time, but I've retrieved my share of stolen documents from various inventive persons. The plot provides a rough outline of the "reality" behind the mission, and I look on yet another run of When Worlds Collide in much the same way as I do, real-world, to being handed yet another typical case: ho-hum; another one of these.
The background differs. The faces differ. The specifics differ-- and differ enough to matter. But it's still the same "type" of job.
This absolutely means that if a mission calls for killing civilians, and you take it, you, IC, took a job that involved killing civilians.
/braindump
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Aria agrees with me? thats a first :P
btw in case u didnt notice eves a dame free zone at mo may resub in a few months i thyink we all need a little more time apart :P
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Perhaps it's just me, but something has always bothered me about the sheer amount of humans supposedly present in New Eden. I've heard figures like "30 trillion" being thrown around from time to time, and a lot of the fluff tends to support that - Such as the fact that capsuleers supposedly eliminate hundreds of thousands duing most level four missions - but it just makes my head spin as to how that could possibly be.
I mean, according to the lore, humanity has only been developing outside of a few fairly small bubbles of space for what - A bit over a hundred years? Prior to that, they were apparantly mostly contained within their home regions, and largely weren't even aware of eachother. I'm no expert, but I'm fairly sure (even considering essentially unlimited space for development and expansion, excessive resources and quality of life, etc) that the human population wouldn't be as, well, massive as the lore seems to imply. I mean, that's what, four, five generations? It just doesn't seem to add up.
Please feel free to correct me on this. :)
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(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/World-Population-1800-2100.png)
In 100 years, the human population went from around 1b to 6b on a single world.
I mean, according to the lore, humanity has only been developing outside of a few fairly small bubbles of space for what - A bit over a hundred years? Prior to that, they were apparantly mostly contained within their home regions, and largely weren't even aware of eachother. I'm no expert, but I'm fairly sure (even considering essentially unlimited space for development and expansion, excessive resources and quality of life, etc) that the human population wouldn't be as, well, massive as the lore seems to imply. I mean, that's what, four, five generations? It just doesn't seem to add up.
Timeline (http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Timeline#Age_of_Expansion_.28AD_16262_-_YC_100.29)
The Amarr have been expanding for thousands of years. We know that there were at a minimum 9 generations of Minmatar in the Empire, in all likelihood more. The Matari had expanded to the immediate surrounding systems prior to being enslaved. The Gallente and Caldari made contact 635 years prior to the establishment of CONCORD and thus are likely to have fewer generations to expand upon the worlds they terraformed.
By far the bulk of the population of New Eden should be the Empire in terms of territory, resources, and time to grow. The Caldari should be the smallest due to those same factors.
Time for some gross assumptions! The Federation & State example:
Assumptions:
Gallente Prime host ~10B people at first contact with the Caldari (approximately Earth 2040)
Caldari Prime host ~2B people at first contact with the Gallente (approximately Earth 1920)
Intaki, Mannar, and Achur each have ~3B people at first contact (approximately Earth 1960)
Every two generations after first contact, the population of each group doubles!
Note: 1E+9 is 1 Billion, 1E+12 is 1 Trillion
Based on these assumptions, the combined population of the Federation and State should be approaching 8 Trillion!
(http://ldis.caldari-made.net/images/sharing/FedStatePopChart.png)
The Amarr/Minmatar analysis requires a lot more work since it is over 3 times the length of the Fed/State analysis and will likely have hit an upper limit much earlier.
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Lovely work, orange!
Don't forget, btw, that the Caldari think their low population is a strategic disadvantage and have been taking steps, like tube children and an industrial-scale child-rearing program (however dysfunctional, in places), to correct it. Combined with what is probably substantial social pressure to have large families for the good of the State, that's likely to be greatly accelerating population growth.
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The Amarr/Minmatar analysis requires a lot more work since it is over 3 times the length of the Fed/State analysis and will likely have hit an upper limit much earlier.
The Minmatar have a fifth of their population in Federation space, and that makes up a third of the Federation.
(see http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Gallente
"Minmatar - Forming a third of the Federation's total population, the Minmatar are the largest immigrant bloc in the nation, taking up a large portion of labor occupations and frontline military units."
and http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Minmatar
"...a fifth resides within the Gallente Federation, creating a powerful political bloc which keeps relations between the Gallente and the Amarr in a constant state of tension.")
Which, if you can come up with some numbers for the Federation alone, might give you an idea of how many Matari there are out there, and how big the republic is. (25% of Matari in the republic, about a third in Amarr space, 20% in Federation space, and the rest wandering about causing trouble making ends meet.
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The Amarr/Minmatar analysis requires a lot more work since it is over 3 times the length of the Fed/State analysis and will likely have hit an upper limit much earlier.
The Minmatar have a fifth of their population in Federation space, and that makes up a third of the Federation.
(see http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Gallente
"Minmatar - Forming a third of the Federation's total population, the Minmatar are the largest immigrant bloc in the nation, taking up a large portion of labor occupations and frontline military units."
and http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Minmatar
"...a fifth resides within the Gallente Federation, creating a powerful political bloc which keeps relations between the Gallente and the Amarr in a constant state of tension.")
Which, if you can come up with some numbers for the Federation alone, might give you an idea of how many Matari there are out there, and how big the republic is. (25% of Matari in the republic, about a third in Amarr space, 20% in Federation space, and the rest wandering about causing trouble making ends meet.
Unless I am mistaken the analysis is for populations by geographic placement, rather than bloodline. Mind you the widely dispersed nature of the Minmatar population does make the problem more complex.
As for the "reality" of missions. I tend to the idea that they are generic representations of the sort of work that we are doing. The actual specifics would tend to change. The predictability of NPC response could be put down to the fleet doctrine of the particular NPC's you are fighting. It can be a tad annoying when a mission isn't properly localised though. I have had the SoE L4 security agent in Caldrai space offer me jobs to go and blow up Imperials "for the Republic."
That said I also feel that standings with an NPC group do count for something and speak to the attitude that the group in question has towards the character. I'm quite comfortable with the idea that high standings with intelligence organisations could be used to justify access to secret information for example.
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Unless I am mistaken the analysis is for populations by geographic placement, rather than bloodline. Mind you the widely dispersed nature of the Minmatar population does make the problem more complex.
The analysis (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiV3Vsxf7satdEVmODZPUEN1TkQwanpiNkxGU2lIQmc) I did assumes that the populations that are added are a single world that is at capacity for their technological level at the time. The population is able to double every two generations because there are additional worlds being added to off-load the population pressures.
Subtracting the population of the immigrant Minmatar from the Gallente population in my analysis for the Federation provides some interesting numbers.
It might be possible to adjust the later Federation numbers to take into account the Minmatar influx, but that will require a slightly different growth model. Another way to address it may be to look at total carrying capacity of the worlds in each Empire, make an assumption for the rate of colonization/terraformation, and arrive at it that way. Make another assumption that worlds are operating at half capacity within a century and that growth on any single world is asymptotic. A worlds based model will be very different from the rough growth model provided.
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The main complication here is we have no basis for comparison to judge the size of the spaceborne populace. The populations of temperate worlds we can make educated guesses at.
I, personally, feel that the view that the setting could not sustain the death rates depicted is mistaken. As has been touched on we are looking at multi-system, multi-world and multi-habitat polities with a much higher tech level than ours. Some deliberately use antiquated methods. The Amarr are shown as doing this in The Burning Life in order to provide tasks for the slave populace and to have "redeeming" labour for the unenlightened to carry out. But this is not, I feel, the normal state of affairs.
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Based on these assumptions, the combined population of the Federation and State should be approaching 8 Trillion!
This agrees well with the data (http://community.eveonline.com/news.asp?a=single&nid=1296&tid=4) from the election turnout news items (http://community.eveonline.com/news.asp?a=single&nid=586&tid=4), which say that the population of the Gallente Federation is likely to be somewhat below 9.3 trillion but much more than 2.8 trillion. Since the Federation is about three times as populous as the Caldari state, you would get about 8 trillion with 6 trillion froggies and 2 trillion squiddies.
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Hmm...
Capsuleers by their very nature are abominable creatures. They are created out of the cadavers of others and send legions of crewmembers (their own and others) to an early grave. I can't say I've ever met a pilot who never got his hands bloody in PVE or PVP at least once (unless they are fresh out of the academy).
There are no "good guys" in this game. The populations are huge, but power is held by only a handful of people, even in supposedly democratic societies. The Gallente Federation, Minmatar Republic, Caldari State and Amarr Empire all have deep flaws and horrific dark sides to them. The whole universe is very dark, which is exactly what makes it so appealing because I hate the "white knight versus fallen angel" cliche.
No matter how you slice it, capsuleers that run missions agree to do their employers dirty work. Period! Even when you are selective about which to accept or refuse.. do you really want to know what's inside those "large sealed containers" you are transporting from X to Y?
Anyone pretending to run missions for faction X, but only accepting the "good missions" will sound about as convincing IC to me as someone who walks up to me IRL saying: "I work for a drug cartel, but I don't do bad things for them, only good things!".... yeah, right! The job HAS to be DIRTY, or they wouldn't have gone through the trouble of offering it to a CAPSULEER. These agencies have billions of workers, they aren't going to hire YOU for anything but what's either too hot to handle for them or which they can't be seen doing themselves by the public.
When you agree to run missions in FW the missions get even dirtier... their employers even more bitterly opposed to the enemy. There are some pretty shady things and outright atrocities like raping POW's, killing civilians. Etc.
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Anyone pretending to run missions for faction X, but only accepting the "good missions" will sound about as convincing IC to me as someone who walks up to me IRL saying: "I work for a drug cartel, but I don't do bad things for them, only good things!".... yeah, right! The job HAS to be DIRTY, or they wouldn't have gone through the trouble of offering it to a CAPSULEER.
Well-- it could also just involve killing an awful, awful lot of people.
IC, Aria finds capsuleers who claim to be "good guys" at least moderately contemptible, for this very reason. OOC, my feelings are more nuanced: it's entirely understandable, perhaps even admirable, to try to be an idealist in a corrupt universe. These "principled" capsuleers can never truly be heroes, but that doesn't mean they can't whole-heartedly try.
And if that makes them hypocrites in addition to being killers, well, that just makes them all that little bit more human.
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I know TonyG isn't really flavour of the year here, but just to throw this out there...
In Templar one, about 60% of the way through it says of Jamyl
"At present she was the guardian of more than one trillion souls across thousands of worlds."
"More than" can of course mean "a lot more than" and given the time of night, I can't remember the relative population between the Empire and any of the other polities. Still, another thing to throw on the pyre.
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Off hand, as it's 4 in the morning, I recall the Gallente Federation having a population of about 3 trillion - that didn't come from any TonyG material to my knowledge.
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Well-- it could also just involve killing an awful, awful lot of people.
IC, Aria finds capsuleers who claim to be "good guys" at least moderately contemptible, for this very reason. OOC, my feelings are more nuanced: it's entirely understandable, perhaps even admirable, to try to be an idealist in a corrupt universe. These "principled" capsuleers can never truly be heroes, but that doesn't mean they can't whole-heartedly try.
Capsuleers live in a world with endless hordes of raving lunatic zombie killers. NPCs tend to open fire without asking questions, rarely if ever warp out, even if they are obviously losing. NPCs appear to have no regard for their own lives.
NPC acting like hordes of zombies is a major dehumanizing factor for capsuleers. The opponents are effectively mindless, robotic and in endless supply.
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I know TonyG isn't really flavour of the year here, but just to throw this out there...
In Templar one, about 60% of the way through it says of Jamyl
"At present she was the guardian of more than one trillion souls across thousands of worlds."
"More than" can of course mean "a lot more than" and given the time of night, I can't remember the relative population between the Empire and any of the other polities. Still, another thing to throw on the pyre.
To have "thousands" of worlds but only end up with “more than one trillion souls”, which I would assume to mean between one and two, would require planetary populations in the couple hundred million range, or lower. Planets with a billion people would have to be uncommon – not rare, but definitely not the norm.
Or, you know, it could just be indicative of an author who’s more concerned with writing prose that sounds nice and fluffy and epic, maths be damned.
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Planets with hundreds of millions make helluvalot more sense than billions, really. Our own planet is severely overpopulated, after all.
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If you've got the space to spread out.. spread out :D
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Planets with hundreds of millions make helluvalot more sense than billions, really. Our own planet is severely overpopulated, after all.
Our world is under developed and very poorly utilized when considering the resources that we have.
The world is about 71% water and 29% land. Roughly 10.6% of the world's land is considered arable.
And still we manage to survive...
The Minmatar home world is considered to be a paradise compared to Earth, all the others have not been really touched upon in that respect so they would probably be in the same category as Earth.
The home worlds of all the major factions would probably have capability to sustain a comparable population to Earth if not greater, high tech and all.
Seeing the Amarrian and Federal capital planets being something a kin to hiveworlds would probably be not that far fetched.
Centers of commerce and government for a star spanning empire for a thousand years or two would probably do that to you.
In the Empire it is common knowledge that the Ardishapur regions generate most of the food for the whole Empire and its Navy.
Which would suggest a quite specialized society where more arable planets would be used solely for creating food for planets that would not be so lucky.
Which would suggest that the population cap for an ecosphere would not exist.
(Of course refuse would have to be transported from the more populated planets to the more agricultural ones, I would like to see a chron about shit fleets carrying the refuse of a dozen planets to a compost planetoid before it is returned back to the grain planet.)
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Capsuleers live in a world with endless hordes of raving lunatic zombie killers. NPCs tend to open fire without asking questions, rarely if ever warp out, even if they are obviously losing. NPCs appear to have no regard for their own lives.
NPC acting like hordes of zombies is a major dehumanizing factor for capsuleers. The opponents are effectively mindless, robotic and in endless supply.
I've always found the suicidal zombie NPC "never retreat, never surrender, even in the face of inevitable and pointless death" world aspect wholly unbelievable. This is better explained by the technical limitations of having to fly Captain Kirk style than by some kind of policy of death before retreat maintained by everybody from the Guristas to the Minmatar Navy (whose specialty is supposed to be hit and run, isn't it?).
I imagine something like this:
"Captain, it's confirmed: no conventional craft can maintain that rate of fire. The attacker is a capsuleer!"
"Damn! ... Alright. Order the retreat."
"Understood, sir!... Um. Sir? Engineering reports that due to the suddenness of the attack, our FTL drive is still offline. Warp drive spool-up should be complete in 48 minutes."
"... Double damn. Also, fuck. Well, let's keep at it. Better get the escape pods prepped."
"Yes, sir."
In other words, the only people who succeed in running away are those whose ships are actually able to do so (scripted, or the occasional patrol of belt rats that manages to warp out).
As for their "shoot on sight" aggression, consider that, to a rat, (1) if it's not obvious that the ship is a capsuleer vessel, it looks like either easy prey (profitable) or a lone scout (extremely dangerous to let escape); (2) if it IS obvious that the ship is a capsuleer vessel, it's the craft of an infamously murderous demigod who probably has zero sense of mercy or compassion-- which you're stuck in deadspace with at least until you can manually fire up the old warp drive. In that case, time spent broadcasting a surrender or trying to flee is lost time that could be more productively spent fighting for your tiny life.
It's not a perfect explanation by any means, but it's the only one that makes a lick of sense to me.
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Dang, I like that point of view, Aria. Still requires some SODB but it's a pretty good set of justifications for mission rat behaviors.
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One could also throw in...
"Captain ... that pilot's on our Neg-9 list. Are you sure we..."
"Lieutenant, you remember what you were told happened to the last one of us who fled a Neg-9 pilot?"
"Since we're probably going to die anyway, permit me to comment that there are some sick bastards running this organization, sir."
"Comment noted. I won't file it."
"Thank you, sir."
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One could also throw in...
"Captain ... that pilot's on our Neg-9 list. Are you sure we..."
"Lieutenant, you remember what you were told happened to the last one of us who fled a Neg-9 pilot?"
"Since we're probably going to die anyway, permit me to comment that there are some sick bastards running this organization, sir."
"Comment noted. I won't file it."
"Thank you, sir."
That's the canonical explanation (see, for the umpteenth time, "Winds of Change" and "Summer Breeze"), but I've never bought it. It MIGHT make sense for some (but all? Seriously?) of the pirate factions, but it doesn't make any sense for the empires.
"Victory or death!" as a universal policy is the same as saying, "We don't actually care whether we still have a navy after suffering a losing streak."
I mean, seriously: I can see the Caldari (ala "For the State") or the Amarr (martyrdom, yay!) fighting to the death because their superiors tell them to. But while the Gallente rank and file might do that if they thought it was for a good enough cause, I'm not sure I can see their superiors ordering them to: the society's too egalitarian for that kind of "You should all be prepared to lay down your lives for me!" attitude. The same applies to the Minmatar, but for a different reason: every life lost is another sister or brother, gone. To waste your own people's blood on pointless "valor" doesn't strike me as a very Matari thing to do.
Not everybody in Eve, not even from the more ruthless factions, should have such a glory fixation as to insist that no combat-capable ship ever survive a lost battle. You don't get to build a semi-believable interstellar empire without having at least that much practicality.
Also, if all Eve's human societies were so nihilistically "brave," I would expect the capsuleers who arose from them to be far more averse to strategic withdrawal. After all, pod-captains can't even die....