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[Gwen Ikiryo]

Maybe I missed it while scanning the thread, but whatever happened to the notion that of course missions occur - just ignore the specific names in the missions. The same is true in other games - no, you did not kill Captain Shitpaints IV, you killed [insert name here] of the hodunk clan. You can have just as meaningful PvE content that way, you can do it ICly with people that way, you just don't use lore names.

I see this work very well in many MMOs, including EVE. Why has this method suddenly been called into question? As for the sheer amount, it is a big cluster in an IP obsessed with death. I do not see the problem.

Someone tried to crunch the numbers for the amount of people who would die based on the totality of the efforts of mission runners every year. It came to something in the trillions.

If every instance was objectively happening, everyone in the cluster would have to be 1) A ship crewman, and 2) Dead.

[Jace]

Maybe I missed it while scanning the thread, but whatever happened to the notion that of course missions occur - just ignore the specific names in the missions. The same is true in other games - no, you did not kill Captain Shitpaints IV, you killed [insert name here] of the hodunk clan. You can have just as meaningful PvE content that way, you can do it ICly with people that way, you just don't use lore names.

I see this work very well in many MMOs, including EVE. Why has this method suddenly been called into question? As for the sheer amount, it is a big cluster in an IP obsessed with death. I do not see the problem.

Someone tried to crunch the numbers for the amount of people who would die based on the totality of the efforts of mission runners every year. It came to something in the trillions.

If every instance was objectively happening, everyone in the cluster would have to be 1) A ship crewman, and 2) Dead.

Sure, but it's a game. CCP did not provide answers to that sort of concern in the universe they created. So your options are: tell PvE folks what they do does not happen or ignore the numbers. One of these is easy and not shafting the majority of players. I choose that one.

[Gwen Ikiryo]

Maybe I missed it while scanning the thread, but whatever happened to the notion that of course missions occur - just ignore the specific names in the missions. The same is true in other games - no, you did not kill Captain Shitpaints IV, you killed [insert name here] of the hodunk clan. You can have just as meaningful PvE content that way, you can do it ICly with people that way, you just don't use lore names.

I see this work very well in many MMOs, including EVE. Why has this method suddenly been called into question? As for the sheer amount, it is a big cluster in an IP obsessed with death. I do not see the problem.

Someone tried to crunch the numbers for the amount of people who would die based on the totality of the efforts of mission runners every year. It came to something in the trillions.

If every instance was objectively happening, everyone in the cluster would have to be 1) A ship crewman, and 2) Dead.

Sure, but it's a game. CCP did not provide answers to that sort of concern in the universe they created. So your options are: tell PvE folks what they do does not happen or ignore the numbers. One of these is easy and not shafting the majority of players. I choose that one.

I sorta agree with you, but I think it's better to keep that to individuals and specific occurances, but still suspend disbelief ICly when it comes to the idea in a more universal sense.

For instance, if someone says, "I shot down 30 battleships today", that's okay, and we should accept that.

But people probably shouldn't say stuff like, "Capsuleers kill hundreds of billions of people for the Empires every day", and individuals shouldn't say, "I've killed a total of 8000 battleships this month", because that breaks the setting, even though it might be true. We should dismiss impossible trends, but not individually anomalous experiences.

[Katrina Oniseki]

Lets keep in mind that people don't regularly cite missions in "slice of life" conversation. They use them as the crux or context of a point they are making in debate.

When somebody uses missioning stats against someone else in a debate, it necessitates either a counterpoint or a fold. You can't just ignore it when it's being shoved in your face as 'proof' of something.

[Jace]

I sorta agree with you, but I think it's better to keep that to individuals and specific occurances, but still suspend disbelief ICly when it comes to the idea in a more universal sense.

For instance, if someone says, "I shot down 30 battleships today", that's okay, and we should accept that.

But people probably shouldn't say stuff like, "Capsuleers kill hundreds of billions of people for the Empires every day", and individuals shouldn't say, "I've killed a total of 8000 battleships this month", because that breaks the setting, even though it might be true. We should dismiss impossible trends, but not individually anomalous experiences.

The only time I see those two things come up is either bragging or reminding someone that playing an altruistic/innocent capsuleer is nearly impossible to do if you enter combat. The former is as pathetic as any kind of bragging and easily ignored - either A) yes, they did kill that many but so did every other PvE character and it is not something to brag about, or B) no they did not and they are idiots. Both make the claim meaningless and idiotic.

The latter option is the most contentious, because braggart characters are as easy to ignore and laugh at ICly as braggart players are OOCly. For the innocent thing, well, given what we know about crew - if your character does combat you have killed at minimum thousands. The moral contextuality of that killing can be manipulated in any way your character wishes, same as any other morality.

The only other time I see this sort of issue come up is when people discuss the universe itself. Whether it is millions or billions killed by capsuleers on a regular basis, the EVE universe worships death and always has. There is nothing special about that. The specific number is meaningless from my perspective. Does that sort of detail promote a general meaninglessness to the IC universe itself? Of course, but only because that killing has no real impact on the universe. It will always be a relatively static universe where the killing on behalf of empires does not actually have an impact on the state of said universe. So, in my opinion, it is not the absurd number of deaths that is bothersome - it is that those deaths do not have and never will have an impact on the cluster that is bothersome.

There's a reason why so many characters and/or players end up with a weird EVE-form of ennui. All of these actions are taken without meaningful impact or relevancy. But as far as IC interactions go where you run into folks that discuss these details from the character perspective, it is very easy to ignore and avoid. When in doubt, walk away.

@Kat, of course you can ignore it. Either literally by avoiding them or ending the conversation (datapad beeps), or by having your character literally tell them are wrong. They start OOC linking to try to force you, you say you disregard those numbers for reasons X, Y, and Z. Either you move on or you get ridiculed. Either way, problem solved.

[Havohej]

Well, the way I look at it is that an incursion by a small part of, say, the US Pacific fleet into Cuban waters would be a big deal. The fact that the incursion was a single Aegis cruiser and a couple of destroyers in size in NO way detracts from the fact that the Pacific Fleet is ENORMOUS with multiple Carrier battlegroups.

You've got the wrong sense of scale for this comparison, I think.  I likened it to small teams of covert operators being a routine thing in today's world for this reason.  We're on one planet.  Eve takes place in a galaxy of thousands of star systems.  One L4 mission's battle group is proportionate to one special forces team - maybe even less than one special forces team.  I don't know if the entire Pacific Fleet is even as large as one set of L4 mission ships (in the common L4 with 2 or 3 pockets, each with its own fairly large fleet in it).

As for mission runners trying to epeen and compare kill stats...  lol @ comparing thousands of NPC kills vs. a thousand PC kills.   

[Alain Colcer]

I have to wonder, can "we" as a community who very much holds Lore and RP as its dearest content within eve, formulate some kind of essay to bring up to CSMs attentions about missions in general?

I mean, missions are a relic of the game, but its content about 80% of the player base use....wouldn't be nice to do a facelift to the whole thing and tackle the lore issue at the same time?.

[Jocca Quinn]

Is Abraxis still at CCP?

Summer 2013 CSM minutes have a great snapshot from him ..

Abraxis raised the possibility of having the missions themed based on what is going on
in the wider universe (ie: the political situation), and perhaps even using the statistics on
what players are doing to guide how the lore evolves -- so that there is a feedback
effect. He called this his personal "future vision".

The Holy Grail for missions in Eve I guess.

[Morwen Lagann]

Maybe I missed it while scanning the thread, but whatever happened to the notion that of course missions occur - just ignore the specific names in the missions. The same is true in other games - no, you did not kill Captain Shitpaints IV, you killed [insert name here] of the hodunk clan. You can have just as meaningful PvE content that way, you can do it ICly with people that way, you just don't use lore names.

I see this work very well in many MMOs, including EVE. Why has this method suddenly been called into question? As for the sheer amount, it is a big cluster in an IP obsessed with death. I do not see the problem.

Someone tried to crunch the numbers for the amount of people who would die based on the totality of the efforts of mission runners every year. It came to something in the trillions.

If every instance was objectively happening, everyone in the cluster would have to be 1) A ship crewman, and 2) Dead.

I just did the math out for four different well-known L4 missions. Three variations of The Blockade - Angel, Blooder and Serpentis - and Angel Extravaganza. The only assumptions I made in my calculations are:
- That pirate faction crew sizes are analogous to their empire counterpart with the exception of the Sansha, and
- That the person running the mission is not blitzing and is completely clearing the field.



Partial people in the survivor/loss columns are not rounded because not everyone survives completely intact. Also because I'm a little lazy and we are talking averages anyway.

Also, since we're talking about capsuleers vs. traditional crews here, odds are the actual average casualty counts will trend higher because capsuleers are very good at killing things quickly, and the faster something dies, the smaller the number of survivors, according to the crew guidelines page on the wiki.

Edit: The person who did the whole math out thing did so in late 2010 so his numbers are way out of date - and I don't know if he made an updated version after Source came out.

Edit 2: It might not be clear how I determined the average crew size. Basically I took the "maximum capacity" range and divided it into three equal sections, then used the center of those sections. So the "crew size" value is effectively the lower bound of the maximum capacity range, plus 1/6, 1/2 or 5/6 the size of the range itself.

[Arista Shahni]

http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html

herpaderp

Yes. Genocidal maniacs, even if we do round down, loves.  Even if we do round down.

[Louella Dougans]

doing some digging finds that

the three mission series that feature the amarr fleet apparently abducting people are "Human Cattle", a L2 mission chain, "Portal to War", a L3 mission chain, and "In the Midst of Deadspace", a L4 mission chain.

all of them predate the empyrean age, and were made in the time that Chamberlain Karsoth was in charge of the Empire.

so that may be important.

[Mizhara]

It is. It proves that the invasions were going on before the "treaties were broken".

[Pieter Tuulinen]

On the other hand, it really makes them less relevant in the post-Karsoth Empire, no?

[Mizhara]

Why? The invasions quite demonstrably happened. Nothing much has changed in that regard, particularly regarding the treaties that get trotted out all the time.

[Lyn Farel]

You might be seeing a bit too much into it. Post TEA missions often had the noticeable quality to have a little background description explaining the pros and cons, and the context around.

All the old ones, though, not so much. Those ones directly contradict PF, and even the PF that was already there before TEA, especially since before TEA it was full of treaties and a liberal on the throne with clear edicts against that kind of things. And they do not contradict it because there is a mere edict, as said above, nobody ever claimed that no slave raids happen. They contradict it by the simple facts, numbers and flags involved.

Occam's razor might point in the direction that Abraxas and the storyteam wrote PF at some point, and people busy creating missions (probably levelbuilders and leveldesigners) wrote things that went according to the basics of the lore (Amarr = slavers, etc), while completely ignoring the real intricacies that most people simply do not know, except lore aficionados like us. That added to the fact that even the storyteam and RPers at that time had probably never thought of it yet anyway.