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[Laria Raven]

Quick question:

Do we factor down the NPC ship kills that our characters have perpetrated for RP purposes? Or should I claim that Laria has destroyed literally thousands of ships?

This is related to the population problem, I think (if you multiply ship destructions by crew sizes, even applying a survival rate factor, it's still significantly greater than any feasible projection of the cluster population)

[Logan Fyreite]

I don't know what other people do but I take this approach...

When running missions or ratting in space, Logan is simply disrupting XX or YY (fill in factions here), and gets maybe one significant kill every once in a while. When ships are destroyed in my client, Logan thinks of that as more that they were forced off/away. Helps me not think too much about the implications of the Men and Material loss incurred on a day to day basis and not break my RP immersion in my own special snowflake way.

[Morwen Lagann]

For your own sanity's sake, it's probably best not to go for an exact count.

Missions are one of those really wibbly things in PF. They're established as existing in the game world more or less as they are presented (agents give capsuleers assignments to do shit, we do it and get paid), but when you rescue that stupid damsel for the 50th time it becomes immersion-breaking to take at face value. The only missions where this doesn't -really- apply are mining missions and some of the couriers, because there's at least some plausibility to the mission being PERFECTLY IDENTICAL TO THE ONE YOU JUST GOT LESS THAN AN HOUR AGO.

Best solution imo, is to handwave the numbers of ships downward a bit because of obvious population depletion issues, and the actual contents of the assignments to being similar but not identical.

[Vaun Erryk]

Carefully avoiding precision (for the most part) was my friend on Kyber. (My others were too industrialised to care.)

Underlining a point with an actual figure for isolated fights now and again, but I quickly found sense to fall apart on larger scales. "Intercepting Caldari smugglers" and "clearing a DED blockade" were common activities for him in Stain; anything more precise quickly lead to the population issues you mentioned. (Not to speak of "why are they doing the except same things every time").

edit: Morwen said it all first, the bastard. >:l

[Esna Pitoojee]

This thread from a while back covers this discussion as well.

I'd personally take the position that no, not every ship that is killed 'counts' ICly. One breaking point for me was when I realised that Esna's PvE alone was killing well over half a million people a day, while only counting battleship crews and giving a fairly generous escape-survival rate.

Considering that I was in a system where there were dozens of others doing the same thing - many faster and better than Esna - I concluded that using the above guesstimation parameters in one system alone we were at the very least killing over 25 million crew a day.

Nope.

[Silas Vitalia]

Handwave it as working 'against' the relevant faction.  Mission specifics don't hold up to PF.

"I work for x agent against y faction, and see a lot of combat"

not "I killed 50 Serpentis battleships today"

[Adreena Madeveda]

Between the loot that shows the poor souls obviously can't fit for shit
And their tragic inability to warp away of a lost fight
Adreena is just "Trying to convince [corporation X] that [she's] a nice girl." =)

[Vikarion]

I love the idea that my character is killing millions of people in missions, all for a little ISK, and that view is sorta upheld by The Burning Life. It's a big cluster, life is cheap. Really, really, really cheap.

OTOH, downgrading the amount of ships killed, or hand-waving them to possess fewer crew, doesn't bother me too much. I just think that one of the things missions tell us is that the Eve cluster is incredibly huge (and, from the amount of systems there are, it would be), and the populations of even the pirate factions are in the trillions upon trillions.

Of course, when it comes to this, CCP is notoriously schizophrenic.

[Sakura Nihil]

The rule of thumb I would use is this:

"Is the ship you're killing unique?  Ie, is this the hundredth Guristas Obliterator you've destroyed today?  Or did you fight and kill Sami Okuda of the Caldari Navy?"

Now, obviously, there's a grey area.  But essentially, was the event unique in some way?  For instance, I've been on tons of Friday night roams in my career, and while many of them were similar, no two roams were identical. The timing, the targets, the outcome, the fleet comp.

So, they were all unique, shooting and destroying target ships hurt the targets... they're not some faceless NPC, who spawned in said ship when you warped in from an acceleration gate.  A faceless NPC who will behave the same way the first time you fight then as they will the hundredth, barring expansions or changes by CCP.

[Sepherim]

Handwave it as working 'against' the relevant faction.  Mission specifics don't hold up to PF.

"I work for x agent against y faction, and see a lot of combat"

not "I killed 50 Serpentis battleships today"

This.

[Aria Jenneth]

I love the idea that my character is killing millions of people in missions, all for a little ISK, and that view is sorta upheld by The Burning Life. It's a big cluster, life is cheap. Really, really, really cheap.

OTOH, downgrading the amount of ships killed, or hand-waving them to possess fewer crew, doesn't bother me too much. I just think that one of the things missions tell us is that the Eve cluster is incredibly huge (and, from the amount of systems there are, it would be), and the populations of even the pirate factions are in the trillions upon trillions.

Of course, when it comes to this, CCP is notoriously schizophrenic.

That.

[Saikoyu]

I never went into specific numbers, but I always played that Saikoyu had an alter to all the people she had killed, one candle per death, or when no numbers were available to the ship those people were on, and it had gotten to the point where she was using stripped candles to count the number of ships, with each strip counting a ship.  Or maybe ten ships, its been a while. 

[Iwan Terpalen]

My newer and mostly nonviolent characters have officially killed 'a bunch' of people. The dedicated mission runner, 'a whole bloody bunch.' The dedicated PvPer, 'still a whole bunch, but at least not as much as those hypocritical mission runner types.'

[Merdaneth]

I find that taking the numbers at face value trivializes lots of other things.

Why worry when I kill a hundred slaves when I've I killed millions of Republic Fleet crew?

Why are we getting news messages about a hundred or so miners caught in an accident, when billions die daily in futile space battles.

Why worry about a station getting blown up, when each high-sec system has a hundred stations blown up daily?

[Natalcya Katla]

In the real world, why do we keep getting news messages about rather useless things like some people's ability to kick leathery spheres into nets, when a fuckton of people die from malaria every year? Or for that matter, why do we hear about it every time somebody fires a rocket into or out of Israel, but almost never when people get slaughtered in Congo?

News are like that.