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[Korsavius]

I think this topic has been mentioned somewhere before, but I'll just rekindle it regardless.

So I'm just curious on how valid you guys consider PvE activities in the RP universe. Do you take the fact that thousands of NPC battleships die every day? How about all the people manning those vessels, do you believe the millions of people that die during the destruction of such ships? Personally, I don't like to talk about such things IC as I find it to be rubbish. If someone is out claiming to kill thousands of battleships every day then I just tend to ignore them. But, meh, I'm curious on your thoughts?

[Graelyn]

I don't think so.

[Lyn Farel]

I tend to stay rather vague or to minimize to more decent amounts. Make it sound more occasionnal. And make the combat part of the missions less central and important, like focusing on the things that are not really put into the spotlight in ingame missions, everything happening around, that kind of things.

I also like to derail the subject to what really matters usually : not the amount (50 battleships x 5000 crew members down) but the action in itself and what it implies (serpentis assets eliminated, people died, that was switf and decisive, or else).

[Silver Night]

I tend to regard that (and quite a few otehr things) as an abstraction - sort of what Lyn is talking about, I think. Even with as many people as there might be in Eve, the number of deaths and the resources destroyed daily don't seem like they'd be sustainable if taken at face value.

I know there are people at the other end of the scale, who take things exactly at face value, and consider whats on the screen to be what is happening exactly IC. It's a valid way to go too, but it would actually break immersion for me personally.

[Silas Vitalia]

You have to treat PvE with fair amounts of hand-wavium to not break the walls of immersion.

That damsel has been rescued 800,000 times (she just will not learn).

I think keeping it 'general' is always a good strategy. You work for x faction and have eliminated targets of y faction on a regular basis, that's usually enough to discuss.

[Desiderya]

Handwavium to not break immersion, really. While you have to keep game mechanics in mind when it comes to the possibilities we have (for example, you can not crash your ship into something, anything) for our capsuleer's action, the mission thing seems to run in the same league as the whole "sleep cycle" thing. "Sorry I couldn't make it to this vital assignment, it didn't align with my sleep cycles so I could not assist you." So, why not, you know, change your sleep cycles then, god damn it. Of course, our activity times as players are much, much harder to change than it would be for our characters.

[Esna Pitoojee]

I also tend to treat it as "it happens, but not in the ridiculous numbers that game mechanics tell us it does."

For instance, during the early Incursion events when the Dev actors still only had the old-style NPCs to work with, someone actually ran the numbers and calculated that with players chewing through multiple waves of 20-30 BS at each event, Kuvakei was sometimes loosing more crew than he was abducting.

That pretty much solidified it for me.

[Saede Riordan]

Do not stare too deeply into the canon, or the canon will also stare into you.

Eve's storyline and how they interact with the mechanics will just break down the more closely you examine them. Its easier to just kind of let it be blurry. Focusing on details I've found causes more problems then it solves. The game mechanics are just not designed to work within the canon. The canon is something else, outside of the mechanical game. So just kinda fudge it. "I rescued some kidnappees" not "damsel rescue number 8,971"

[Alizabeth]

To me, quoting the statistics was a rather blatant way of pointing out that for most people, including CCP it seems, null sec alliances seems to have no effect on this game.  Here's another question.  Aliza is rather wealthy, to the tune of several billions of ISK.  How is she supposed to explain her new shiny Thanatos?  Margin trading is not going to be the answer.  She got it from CONCORD bounties from killing Serps.

[Silver Night]

Well, if I needed to explains omething like that, I'd go with exactly that - bounties - but I would probably imply it was fewer ships with higher bounties. Or 'Hunting Serps for bounties' without specifying #s.

[Alizabeth]

And what is wrong with numbers?  Reasonably speaking, on a day where I sit down and seriously rat (running a tengu/blaster Naga dual box) I generally say that I will rat to half a billion isk.  This means that my little two man fleet, kills maybe 350 Serpentis battleships.  That's not an insane number.  I never claimed that I personally killed thousands of battleships a day, but that across Fade (a whole region where there are a ton of Serps) 42(ish) thousand ships were killed in a 48 hour period by all the capsuleers living there.  How many trillions of people are there in New Eden?  The current death rate of the world is roughly 153 thousand a day with a population of 6 billion.  That ratio with a population of 50 trillion yields 1.275 billion dead per day.  Sooooo, why is killing 5 million people every couple of days across a whole region of space breaking immersion?

[Lyn Farel]

Because not everyone dies due to :capsuleers:.

Because IRL not everyone dies to one SPECIFIC cause of death. Especially war casualties, which are extremely low compared to a lot of other natural or social factors.

[Alizabeth]

Roughly a billion and a quarter people dead per day and capuleers in Fade are only responsible for less than two percent.  Extend that out to all regions and you have capsuleers responsible for maybe half the deaths in New Eden.  With as :grimdark: as EVE is, that's not totally unreasonable.  Eve is worse than, say, Chicago in terms of violence.  Factor in that medical technology is highly effective, one is more likely to die in New Eden to violence than heart disease.

[Katrina Oniseki]

Try to remember the survival rate of escape pods. Not everyone dies.

[Lyn Farel]

Factor in that medical technology is highly effective, one is more likely to die in New Eden to violence than heart disease.

With a good chunk of the population, if not the majority, living poor as hell, where every luxury (including healthcare) is reserved to the elite ? We can play the grimdark card both ways.