Backstage - OOC Forums
EVE-Online RP Discussion and Resources => EVE OOC Summit => Topic started by: Seriphyn on 28 Jan 2013, 04:21
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I was thinking, and this is based on what I've been doing past couple weeks in-game. Isn't missioning far more consequential on the universe than PvP? You go into these various areas, deadspace colonies occupied by pirates, clear them out, liberate the area...maybe you can go further and (as I have done) claimed 'aid work' in helping these colonies get back on their feet.
Now, I'm not claiming the whole "killing hordes of bad guys erryday all da time" sort of thing, just the embellishment/fluffing up of PvE activities. Many LCOs are entire habitats and stations in missions.
By comparison, PvP does...what, exactly? You destroy the enemy vessel and nothing happens. Now, I don't doubt its effectiveness in terms of measuring it up in space, but if your character is more concerned with Important Things, why would they care about RP-PvP wardecs? That's especially true of my character atm; he hasn't been target of any wardecs, but if he was decced, he would go "I've got more important things to do than risk the lives of my crewfolk to prove a point".
IC, I suspect, I'd be called a pansy/pussy or whatever. Trouble is, so will I OOC too. I think it's a legit RP angle. I mean, in the past, I really liked RP wardecs, accepted it and sent them and all nice stuff. By this point, though, I nor my character see any 'point' behind PvP if your character is more concerned with 'helping out' baseliners.
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Probably depends on the perspective of a character and player and not as a general rule.
Some might think running missions is an important and vital investment of time and resources.
Others might think pvp and the acts of blowing other factional capsuleers provides a degree of consequence and emergent RP.
I guess it might be one thinks RP in Eve should be generated from game NPC and their missions or if it should derive from interactions spawned at the end of a barrel of a gun with other players.
Personally I prefer to merge PvP and RP in my own play style because it means one can have that form and function aspect where what you RP is conducted in space against other players and characters -- even if those players and characters do not consider themselves as RP'ers.
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My initial response was very much "Whut?!" but after reading the post fully (a tactic I strongly reccomend) I'm not convinced you're wrong, Seriphyn.
Unless an RP war is fought over specific materials/space or some diplomatic issue it really becomes nothing more than trying to count coup. There are certainly very good RP reasons for refusing to lose piles and piles of isk in some sort of twisted rendition of space-bushido just because your enemies would quite like it if you came out to play.
On the other hand, if you treat a War Dec as a statement of calamitous intent against your organisation by their organisation and accept that both of your ships just became targets of opportunity whilst you go about your business, then an RP Wardec becomes a tastier proposition, doesn't it?
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Besides FW which has a real impact, you may be right...
Though as you say, it depends if you consider your PR actions to "prove your point" important enough in ideological terms too.
What Pieter said, anyway.
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uh, and what about corporate griefing?
your corporation might be important as a hauler or trader entity, but given your actions you stomped into someone else's market. A Wardec is simply a deterrant to stop messing with turf already owned.
Most RP conflicts i've seen are more based on ideals rather than true corporate interests, something i wish we could explore more.
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Missions are only pseudocanon, right? I mean... You're not making as much of a difference as they're giving you the impression. At least, that was my understanding.
If not... Well... In my eyes, at least, the setting seems to kinda embrace the concept of a Capsuleer, and everything they do, being worth about 10 million times as much as a normal human being. So, like, when one does a mission, it might _seem_ like a much more important affair, since you're out saving and helping quantifiable amounts of people sitting right in front of you, and changing the world in a concrete, observable way.
However... When one blows up a Capsuleer ship, (as opposed to just a regular ship) it's probably about the same loss of relative wealth as blowing up a small city. We don't see it, but entire lives are probably made and lost around single Pilots. I mean, the ISK made to replace a single ship is supposed to be the entire lifetime wage for about 50,000 people, isn't it? Think about how much just replacing one impacts everyone involved in it's making. It probably leaves a much bigger dent in the overall cosmos then saving a few schmucks living on a backwater colony.
That's not to mention FW stuff, where the lives of probably billions of people living in space are being changed, and entire nations of trillions are feeling the ripples.
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Ah, yeah, I forgot about, say, mining disruptions and material griefing. I specifically wrote the first post in mind with the idea of Space Bushido.
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Show me your honeur.
Seriously, I imagine PVE events to have a huge impact. Ava (P) despises PVE because most of it is mindnumbingly boring. Ava (C) however, avoids it because she does not like knowing she is responsible for death on the scale of, say, an Angel Blockade mission, because she does not think scaring some pirates off a stargate, and preventing a few ransom demands, is worth a few hundred thousand lives.
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I mean, the ISK made to replace a single ship is supposed to be the entire lifetime wage for about 50,000 people, isn't it? Think about how much just replacing one impacts everyone involved in it's making. It probably leaves a much bigger dent in the overall cosmos then saving a few schmucks living on a backwater colony.
That depends entirely how you view the industrial mechanisms. The costs of manufacturing (~1000 ISK Install & ~500 ISK per hour) is a small percentage of the overall cost of production and can vary depending on location. Whether/how this sink feeds into the NPC economy is up for discussion. The cost of the materials largely goes to the capsuleers who mined it.
The same train of thought can be applied to PI.
CCP has done a decent job of reducing the amount of world content that is Players interacting with the NPC world outside of missions.
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A properly conducted wardec can stop all manor of PvE activity, and we could likely infer a lot of the baseliner aide as well.
I like to imagine in my pea-brain that when CONCORD authorizes warfare between capsuleer organizations their baseliner employees engage in all types of underhanded and awful (and unlawful) conflict.
I'm imagining Capulets and Montegue thugs shooting it out in stations and making a mockery of public order, corporate espionage, blackmails, murders, you name it.
In my head capsuleer warfar is not just ships exploding in space but thousands of rival baseliners being directed at each other in some very nasty ways.
This gives me some story ideas.
"There go of the House of Kador!"
"Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?!"
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You've definitely got something there, Seriphyn. When Esna was joining the militia, his reasoning was something related: "If they're shooting at me, they're not shooting at defenseless baseliners. I can handle them. Baseliner fleets cannot."
People will argue forever and ever about which of the two mechanics it -MORE- important, and I'm not even touching that; arguments can be made in both ways there. What you have excellently done, however, is layed out a very good reason for not completely disregarding PvE entirely.
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Problem with PVE is that it just happens over and over again. So it doesn't really affect the game universe in any way mechanically. RP wise, you can claim it has some effect on baseliners, but even that would be minor: most baseliners stay in their planets and never leave them in their lives. And even in missions in which there are such, you can save what 10-20 tourists (for example, making the number up)? The population on any planet is probably many millions, so the impact of saving those 10-20 is null. Not to mention recovering Damsels in Distress and other such things, that are unique.
I'm not saying your point is completely wrong, which it clearly is not, but I don't end up seeing it clearly.
As for the RP side of PVP, it depends on why you fight. You can kill 200 million rats of Blood Raiders, or go and wardec a blooder corp. Which would have a more serious effect on the possibilities of blooders? The second: in the universe because replacing those ships and hurting their pod pilots means damaging their elite unit; and in mechanics, the second as well, as they'll have it harder to support their faction in Live Events, which actually are the best way to influence baseliners.
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Problem with PVE is that it just happens over and over again.
The same could be said of FW. The problem with that argument is that it's not something specifically designed to impart futility. It's an unfortunate side-effect of not being able to procedurally generate missions. It's not that you're wrong, mind; they really don't do much to the wider universe. I just don't think one should dismiss the mechanic out of hand just because it has the same problem that -every- MMO PvE setup does.
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I'd say that it's a bit apples and oranges trying to give one a value over the other. They do different things.
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For me, PvE content is for game mechanical reasons bloated in numbers. You're not killing a battleship and its support fleet, you're killing fifty targets per mission easily.
When I use or have used PvE content for RP - not only in EVE - I tend to downplay it and talk about breaking a pirate blockade on a gate for the bounty, instead of going in detail how I've single-handedly killed 100.000 pirates that were all too bloody stupid to warp off. I keep it small enough that it doesn't affect another players RP.
For example, any other traditional *questing* MMO has the same problem.
"So you've killed the orc chief called Homunculus in that orc camp on the other side of the river? And all the orcs in it? Strange, because I was there yesterday and did exactly the same."
We had this topic in another thread, mathematically breaking down how many planets worth of population get annihilated by ratters each day. Everyone to his own devices.
As far as the importance goes - it all depends, no? It's difficult to put a value on that. However, you'll get more fame amongst capsuleers - and probably baseliners, too - if you're adept at hunting the most advanced predator that exists, the capsuleer itself. ;)
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Indeed.
Embracing PvE as an RPable dynamic is, in my opinion, more about stripping any PvE encounter down to its most basic fundamentals ("I engaged a pirate officer" or "I assaulted a pirate base") and then re-build it up from there than the kill counts.
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Another one of these? I mean not to bitch, but have we not gone over this topic in great detail before, several times?
*EDIT* Basically, how is this round of the topic different?
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"So you've killed the orc chief called Homunculus in that orc camp on the other side of the river? And all the orcs in it? Strange, because I was there yesterday and did exactly the same."
That is one fast growing fungus!
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I thought Seri was speaking primarily to highsec War Decs and their effects on PvE resource gathering.
If your Corp does a lot of highsec missioning then I would generally refer to it as anti-piracy and internal security patrolling. And not talk about slaughtering a million Guri's - if you want to be taken seriously, at least.
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All IC sources from the NPC world seem to indicate that PvE is more important than PvP. Factions/Concord will offer you billions to go on all kind of missions, and shower you in loyalty rewards and standings. No amount of PvP (except for a bit of FW PvP since recent times) motivates the NPCs to ever show you any reward. In fact, a lot of PvP (sec status loss) actually shows the NPCs don't want you fighting other capsuleers.
All OOC sources from the player world indicate that PvP is more important than PvE. Characters may get isk, but no amount of PvE changes the game world. Kill thousands of Sansha's in a system, or none over a period of weeks, there will be no observable difference in the universe. On the other hand, PvP does have a clearly observable effect on other capsuleers.
Thus we are left with NPCs that motivate us to do things that seem to have no effect (PvE), and we receive no motivations for things that we see have an effect (PvP) .
EVE is a pretty upside down world, RP-wise.
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The way I look on it is that PvE bears on capsuleers' place in the rest of New Eden. Capsuleers may war amongst themselves, but PvE (at least as long as "baseliner" vessels are the rule, not the exception) is what capsuleers are "for," at least if you ask faction agents (and probably the people at the various training organizations who help make more capsuleers).
From this angle, the nullsec alliances (strongly PvP organizations) are fringe entities exploiting loopholes in the system to set themselves up as frontier despots, etc.. The "core" of capsuleerdom is ... exactly where the population is: hangin' out in hisec, doing the empires' dirty work.
Does that mean that PvE is more RP meaningful? Sure, in the sense that it's what is most visible to outsiders.
In the sense of what grants status among capsuleers, however, PvP has the clear edge. Players spend most of their RP time dealing with their fellows, not outside forces.
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In the sense of what grants status among capsuleers, however, PvP has the clear edge. Players spend most of their RP time dealing with their fellows, not outside forces.
Doesn't mean that status is by necessity awarded by pvp-abilities. I value someone who's willing to help in PvE more than some lone-wolf pvp-crack. That's true in character as well, even to a greater degree. Nico certainly doesn't measure people by their pvp-achievements alone. In fact, some pvp-achievements negatively in that regard.
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Status is never awarded to those who probably actually deserve it.
Look at our society and how much attention, fawning, fame, and money we heap upon people for no other reason than being pretty, or being able to carry a ball across a painted line faster than most other people.
The people doing 'real good work' among the masses are never lauded or respected to the same level of someone flashy and popular.
Capsuleers are no different.
You might have saved a few thousand baseliners from that Gurista's internment camp, but you'll never get the respect and fame of a celebrity capsuleer doing celebrity things.
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That's all a question of status with whom awarded by whom. Anyway, it doesn't undermine my point, but rather underscores it: Some people get status with a decent chunk of the EVE player base by trolling away, others by being great PvPers, others by speaking up for the interest of the PvEer. Most by being good at representing themselves. PvP isn't the celebrity thing, neither in EVE in general, nor in the RP community or ICly. There are people doing 'real good pvp work' and no one ever takes notice.
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I'm not sure if this fits (after all, asteroids are such fierce foes) but I can put in my two cents on mining.
I've found again and again, with very rare exceptions (though they are getting more common), the view that miners, industrialists, and traders are the "low end" of the capsuleer crop. It used to bug me greatly that "if you can't shoot, you don't matter" seemed to come up about every day.
Silas' post however, got me thinking. Do we really thank the grocery store for stocking our food? Ever thanked a farmer for growing a crop? Minerals and what derives from them are the "food" of New Eden. We'll gladly complain when there's a shortage of tomatoes, but do we really think about the people who helped bring those tomatoes to that Wendy's?
It's an interesting social issue, I'll admit. As for is PVP greater than PVE RP-wise? Depends on your character's motivations.
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In regards to RP, everything is an important as your PC says it is, provided you can get other PCs to take you at your word.
I ran a complex, got blown up, reshipped, and then went back to finish my (less than 30 second) timer. Makkal says that she journeyed deep within enemy territory to do battle with enemies of the Caldari state in order to liberate the area.
Whether another PC accepts that she's gallantly struggling in a brutal, ongoing war, or whelping about low-sec playing a meaningless game the empires came up with to keep capsuleers busy is up to them.
Alternatively, when I was POS tending and making moon goo, Makkal just told people she was farming. Several PCs reacted with derision and disdain. My PvE battles in null were never more than 'routine sector sweep' or 'clearing the system of belligerents.'
I could have easily had her claim to be an industrialist in charge of an operation that employed tens of thousands, or said my PvEing was "Project Orpheus," a long-term campaign to bring stability and prosperity to the area.
The truth of any of these statements is simply a shared fiction players engage in.
It might be frustrating that there's no objective measurement of your PCs impact on the world, especially if your chosen activity is not appreciated by other PCs. (Or players.) But RP is all about the tenuous bubble where cooperative and competitive meets.