Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Bacchanalian]

I think thats a pretty wild statement really. I mean who really does want to fight on an "even footing" anyway bach? Not you, not me, not anyone else really. Stimulus/veto in your own way stack the deck as significantly as anybody else does. You put together effective roaming fleets and you shoot what you think you can kill while avoiding things you can't (like everyone else really). Sure you have good pilots, you've been recruiting the cream of roving pvp from Scrapheap for the last few years so you ought to. But when the chips are down you still want to win and wanting to win precludes fighting outnumbered for most people (including stim). When we fought last year summer you certainly never failed to outnumber SF when you could (often by crazy proportions) but it surprised nobody because thats war in space. You ganked us, we ganked you. War never changes etc. In fact the only occasions I remember Stim fighting outnumbered at all in recent memory was when your pilots made up the minority of veto led cane gangs that happened into our ham drakes in placid etc. (and even then it was pretty damned equal giving away a ship or two at most).

We've taken to flying fleets with no logistics simply to get people to engage.  It's almost unheard of in Syndicate for fleets to fly without at least 2 logis unless they've got triage carriers on standby (which many do), and we still have trouble getting fleets that outnumber us to engage.  Last weekend we had a group invite us down to their space, outnumber us ~1.5 to one in their home system, and dock up and refuse to engage us.  This is not uncommon.  We certainly do not hesitate to engage a smaller gang when we find one, but as you say, no one does (I might add though that some of our FCs give a free pass to known solo PvPers when they jump into our gangs.  Ask Prom4CSM about the second time he jumped blindly into us solo in the same night, or the last time Ralara jumped into us solo--the FC forbade anyone to fire on them and let them go).  We also do not hesitate to shoot a gang that outnumbers us if we think we can take it or at least put a dent in it.  There are dozens of less memorable examples, but the first two that pop into my mind (a bit outdated, mind):  http://www.rotekapelle.com/killboard/?a=kill_related&kll_id=41502  In that one our caps didn't take the field until we had cleared every last subcap off of the field.  We didn't want to get counterdropped if we didn't have subcap superiority, so we didn't.  So that fight was us outnumbered by a fairly ridiculous margin and losing next to nothing.  A fair number of them got away without getting on any of our mails--we were outnumbered closer to 2:1.  And this one (Ituralde FCing, are you surprised we died in a flaming ball of glory?):  http://www.rotekapelle.com/killboard/?a=kill_related&kll_id=19139  We knew the local count was double our fleet count and said "fuck it, it'll be fun, we're insured" and jumped in.  We took a pretty significant number of BS with us, too.  18 BS killed to 24 lost.   

Still, I do think thats slightly aside from the point. SF (with stim inside) did have the alexander wept because there were no more worlds to conquer moment - prior to the 10 thoraxes against bob thing (realistically the only target left for us was CVA in providence) but while SF (without stim) went on to try that dance twice over (even building an outpost there only to lose it to ze germans) Stim didn't and was content to roam syndicate at home on your terms. Now I don't criticise this decision tactically, but I think you have to take responsibility for your own shortcomings in rp because what you wanted was other RP groups to come dance with your chosen methodology (nano group mayhem) with you guys risking nothing much in an npc station in return.

When we were not yet an alliance, we fought quite a few RP entities, and similarly to SF, we wiped them out.  AM has been a shadow of its former self since, though I hear rumblings that they've rebuilt in the last year or so I haven't paid attention.  Gallente RP hasn't been the same since we took on Acheron Federation and whatever those other guys were that died off around the same time.  After that we looked around, realized that all we could find left were EM, which at the time weren't much of a force that we could tell; SF, but we had a hot/cold on again off again relationship with you nevermind the timezone issues (SF has since our departure been much stronger EU than US, and vice versa with Rote Kapelle); and CVA, which as you and I both know simply formed voltron with proviblob anytime a fight seemed remotely possible.  And we rarely fly nano anymore, incidentally.  Quick formups are often nano, but actual gangs are only nano if we roll <10 people.  We typically roll closer to 20.

As I've learned over the years in SF - you can't really get people to fight an RP war unless you go all in and actually risk something yourself. Nobody is really interested in random skirmishing against more accomplished random skirmishers when the sensible option is usually just to ignore them.

And that's the issue I suppose.  We can't really go all in against many things.  We have a dumb capital/supercap fleet for the size of our organization and not being a sov holding entity with zero aspirations of ever being a sov holding entity.  The only real way we can risk more than some lossmails is to put that on the line, and there aren't too many entities that aren't megablobtastic groups that have the firepower to match that (no real complaints there, I don't like that sort of warfare outside of spanking people for being dumb with their carriers, and it's not because of the financial issues it would cause--it wouldn't).  Which is fine, but at the end of the day we could (and often do) derp BC/HAC/CS fleets all over the place and we'd be back in fleet with another ship looking to do it again an hour later because we find that the endgame of EVE, not running level 4 missions or running sanctums in nullsec or shooting structures somewhere endlessly.  Maybe again that's an issue with our way of playing EVE, but end of the day not many RP entities seem to exist in between the two types--those who play the sov game and those who play the highsec game.  The few who do either leave me with the impression that if we moved into their home system and fought them 24/7 we'd be bored a lot of the time, or our timezones are simply so off it'd be a waste of everyone's time.  SF falls into the latter, for instance.  EM falls into the former, though I'm speaking a bit out of my ass as I've not fought a legitimate fight against them maybe ever, and certainly not in years.  CVA fall into the blob/sov category.  IRED fit into the pew to pew category and in our timezone enough.  So maybe the bigger issue is that we're weak EU and bored in AU, and will bend over backwards to find ways to fight in the US timezone (we literally have split our fleet and sat people out to get a fight--our FCs will convo the hostile fleet that won't fight us and offer to sit out our recons, logis, command ships, whatever will get them to step up so we can do something other than run around 30 jumps and go home bored).

We killed them all in the SF days bach. Those that would evolve from the wreckage moved either to 0.0 and the protection of larger non rp allies or into the embrace of FW ultimately. SF ourselves have had the dilemma you speak of in who do we fight and how and we're frankly only a fraction of stim/veto's combat power at the moment. But the issue remains - why would somebody fight you on your own terms when you risk nothing? What SF had back in the day was the RP cache of throwing down the public gauntlet and taking on a larger rp outfit that had a better combat reputation (or at least allies that did) and doing the all-in massive stakes as the underdog game. And it worked because people cared about the rp. These days what would Stimulus stake in an extended RP war really?

True and addressed above.  There isn't much we could risk.  I could throw away subcaps at the rate of 1-2 a day for months and not stress my wallet, and generally speaking our membership could as well (and we have enough income/rich people to subsidize those that could not).  How do you wear that down?  You don't really.  We have no infrastructure to hit outside of a couple of supercapital parking garage.  Hit those, rapecage them, and we don't log on the supers again until it's safe.  Maybe we did it too well--we go out of our way to not have assets to hit.  Attack our customs offices maybe.  We'd show up to defend them because we like pew.  Kick us in the nose and we'd look at how to do it better next time and try again.  Eventually like any other entity I suppose we'd see CTAs for it get less and less turnout, so maybe there is that.  But that won't do much in terms of really harming us besides stressing the income of a few of our members and forcing them to do something like run incursions once in a while with their alts instead of doing PI for their income.  And you're right, we've grown ourselves out of the underdog game to an extent, though that's only really true for weekends/special events.  Generally speaking most entities can match a 20 man fleet these days.

Think about the question seriously please - what kind of war could you declare that actually had a significant chance of you failing and the enemy winning a great victory if you fucked it up? I pretty much worked propaganda overtime last summer to paint you as the protector's of Moira's HQ simply to give some kind of closure to the skirmishing but without that it would be nothing but a smack fest and endless taunts of "come to our npc system!!!" "no attack out pos!!!" "nooooo come to our npc system noob!" and no real rp of any kind.

Besides a PR failure, nothing really, you're entirely correct.  And unfortunately as I'm sure you saw, we had fleets when you did not due to TZ, and vice versa.  We lost some soloers to your fleets, and we ganked some of your members (though it was ridiculously difficult, and forced us to do utterly dumb things like titan bridge you or set up to have Moira tackle you and cyno in some carriers because we had no titan online and you had eyes in every direction for 2 jumps). 

See it rarely looks like that from the other side of the lines. Last summer I honestly expected you guys to blow the hell out of our towers in Ostingale and run a serious campaign to hand star fraction a significant defeat. You had an incredible numerical advantage and you know that our reponse to your tower challenges was going to be annihilate wings and economic warfare (as we did in kamela losing an incredible total of 270 odd cruisers over a couple of days) - but rather than take that challenge you backed off. What it looked like to us was that you were terribly sensitive to losing. We saw you troll entire corps out of your alliance because they lost ships to us and every time we assassinated some pimped mission runner there were 20+ comments of rage on your killboards. That sends a message to your own people bacc that reads "DO NOT ENGAGE THE ENEMY FOR FUN" - and I think sometimes you forget the impact that kind of approach has on the rank and file.

Ultimately, the POS bashes weren't something we were particularly excited to do.  We got the largest joint fleet in Rote Kapelle history by about 50% over the next one after it to reinforce your towers (timing it with the tourney was helpful because everyone is online watching the tourney, and the recent boiling over of the Veto/SF relationship helped turn them out in droves).  They came out of reinforced during a patch downtime as I recall, and frankly putting any sort of capital force on the field moments after a downtime is already risky enough without it being in Ostingele where Muppets, Rooks and Kings, and White Noise all frequented very scary fuckoff fleets that would have mopped up the sort of cap gang that we could turn out during the Australia/New Zealand timezone on a weekday.  We opted to skip it, and as I cba to CTA another such op and no one else was comfortable running a fleet of 100 with 40+ capitals, it never happened again.  As for the pew pew, I think the incident in question was someone deciding to engage 20 of you in a battleship solo.  Not the brightest decision.  Engaging 3v1, maybe.  4v1, 5v1, approaching dumb depending on fits/comp.  Engaging 20v1?  Brainless no matter how good you are.  Never going to end well.  You're simply not going to kill anything while you die, and that's exactly how it went down. 

Its a shame to be honest, back when we were somehow peers without all the hatred and angst of our respective supporters howling this and that I would see a roleplay challenge in arguing the case for enlightened anarchist individualism against the nihilistic brand of baseline-humN-hate bacc practises now. In some ways it is a roleplay dilemma that stim has found itself in - you are the alpha dogs of the roving nbsi pvp game but you don't really have a cause to fight for - you have evolved into something thats more akin to an environmental hazard than a political movement and the problem is that when you've transformed ideology to a rainstorm it becomes difficult to find poetic engagements thereafter. Most people simply put up and umbrella or step out of the rain when the downpour begins and stimulus is very much a summer shower because your patience runs out quickly.

In fairness, our patience ran out quickly because we were finding fights elsewhere.  Why turn away from a fight to sit in Ostingele and wait when a lone Abaddon with literally no support can camp in 6 of your members because they (rightfully, although they were wrong in that case) are afraid we'll have some sort of superior fleet hidden away somewhere to kill them?  As for the RP stuff, I kinda like the way you put that.  Unfortunately for the opportunities we might have for RP engagement, I seem to recall you banning myself/STIM members from La Maison at least twice, after which I think we collectively stopped bothering in going there, and we have no real other places to interact, so it's moot.

Ironically stimulus would probably be more interesting to engage with in a philosophical discussion than in space conflict - at least that way *something* is at stake even if its only igs plaudits and PR. But even there there are (i'll hope you'll agree) limits to where you can get in a discussion with somebody "who simply wants to see the world burn!" - "ummm yes okay thats nice."

Agreed, though I think you'd wind up arguing with Logan, myself, Gorion, and that's about it.  Atandros and Tats are the other two with the interest in that sort of thing to engage in it, and both are afk from the game.  Again, our RP has substantially died off as we focused more and more on the fun of pew over the fun of grinding targets to death.  We did not and never will have the patience for the sort of campaign you waged against Severance, and I don't think I ever want us to.  The brief time we spent with you shooting them was infuriating (I'm still a bit ragey about watching them build a station by warping neutral freighters through your gangs to do it while you did nothing because they were in NPC corps, but what can you do, you have an RoE and stick to it). 

TLDR: if you want rp conflicts you need to commit to sustained wars and risk taking of the kind you and I both accepted together when we were planning campaigns in star fraction circa 2006-2007.

In order to do that we'd need a group that liked to engage us regularly.  A group that logged in every day with the express interest of putting a fleet together and kicking our teeth in to shut our loud mouths.  At least at first.  And that's what I'm saying--that doesn't exist.  If it did I'd help them carrier jump into TXW myself.  And so would our alliance.  And I'd look forward to fighting a group that could go toe to toe with us and grind us down.  Personally I've wanted to trim the fat for a while from our alliance, and nothing does that quite like getting your shit pushed in regularly.  Does that sort of entity exist in EVE?  I'm not sure.  We've discussed a few times doing the reverse to people in Syndicate who sort of fight us or at least show willingness to fight other people to force them to fight us, but the general consensus is "if they won't fight us when we're 20j from reinforcements and they're in their home system, they certainly won't fight us when we have our entire alliance living in their HQ ready to escalate the fight". 

But answer me this--how many RP groups have you found that match the Cold Steel or Aegis Militias we used to fight?  Groups that come at you and go toe to toe with you and have Stalingrad-esque battles with you and come back again the next day?  In my experience, and watching yours via forums/kb, it seems that some of them come at you for a bit, then revert back to posting in the forums and simply ignoring you for weeks/months until you declare victory and move on, at which point they steadfastly reject your declaration of victory and go back to business as usual.  Hell, even Kimotoro Directive tried that shit and it took what, a year for them to finally give it up?  And that's what makes me sad.  I still admire Acheron Federation for the fight they gave us.  They'd throw the kitchen sink at us and I think probably bled themselves dry doing it, but they certainly didn't stop coming.  They brought in allies, hired mercenaries, and fought to the death.  Hats off to them still, and we reflected that at the time by sending their newer members advice on improved fittings OOC and the like instead of smack.  And I'm fairly certain we wound up recruiting a good dozen of them at some point or another over the years since, as with targets from various other entities we've fought.  Which in RP terms might be seen as them seeing the light of our anarchist platform (post-humans need to merely embrace their immortality and realize their own potential to become the best they can be) and wish to join us to learn more about how to embrace it and their own success.  Hell, a long-time member of CVA is in the process of applying to Sakura's corporation, and he's a guy I remember fighting dozens of times back in the SF vs CVA extended conflict while I was there.

Freespace forum posting radical here baby.

Hah.  I hate to say it, but I'd have to work harder to achieve Jade status.  The jadepost jokes still come up on the Rote boards when someone posts a wall of text.   

[Jade Constantine]

In order to do that we'd need a group that liked to engage us regularly.  A group that logged in every day with the express interest of putting a fleet together and kicking our teeth in to shut our loud mouths.  At least at first.  And that's what I'm saying--that doesn't exist.

The question is though why should they? Most alliances/corps love the "good fights" (when they are winning) but what kind of outfit exists that would see benefit in planning an extended campaign against Rote Kapelle/Veto in TXW? You are more or less asking people to come and fight you on your terms for your enertainment when you hold all the cards and at the end of it all you don't really risk any infrastructure beyond a tower or two. Sure such a thing doesn't exist and for a good reason - it makes no sense.

Our (SFs) last really good war where we got to gut an enemy alliance and drive them to extinction was ICE in the defence against the neo proviblob's attempt to steal our player-station in YW. An entire alliance of renters got moved into our freespace outspace system and told they could have it if they evicted us. It was a gift from heaven. They burned their boats behind them and stored their worldly goods in pos arrays and we butched them almost to a man and fought a lovely guerilla campaign before chasing the remnants to empire to terminate their alliance. In the end we enjoyed it so much we destroyed another 3 alliances who had merely turned up on on the killmaiils for our IHUB in brutal revenge.

But the point being we needed to put an outpost up that somebody *could* steal - in order to create such a climate where people have to fight and fight hard.

Vs. Rote Kapelle / Veto in TXW? There is one practical way of putting the squeeze on you guys there and Mittani is arguing for it right now in the CSM - allowing people to fuck with npc stations in a significant way. Its simply more practical for the large alliances who are now your natural enemies to try to change the rules rather than come after you in your own npc home.

I think your challenge is therefore to be the ones who are pressing. I have to admit if I was in charge of rote we'd probably have died in a fire by now though - because i would definitely have taken us to Providence

But answer me this--how many RP groups have you found that match the Cold Steel or Aegis Militias we used to fight?  Groups that come at you and go toe to toe with you and have Stalingrad-esque battles with you and come back again the next day?  In my experience, and watching yours via forums/kb, it seems that some of them come at you for a bit, then revert back to posting in the forums and simply ignoring you for weeks/months until you declare victory and move on, at which point they steadfastly reject your declaration of victory and go back to business as usual.

Like I said last really good war was ICE and the punishment vendetta on their allies and before that the space and freedom battles in kamela. Eve has become a cynical place these days in general with regard to war mechanics and non consensual fighting. You are right that the main difference between our rp opponents and the non rp opponents we fight is that the rp'ers never really admit defeat regardless whereas the ordinary players are very happy to agree ceasefires though

  Hell, even Kimotoro Directive tried that shit and it took what, a year for them to finally give it up?  And that's what makes me sad.  I still admire Acheron Federation for the fight they gave us.  They'd throw the kitchen sink at us and I think probably bled themselves dry doing it, but they certainly didn't stop coming.  They brought in allies, hired mercenaries, and fought to the death.  Hats off to them still, and we reflected that at the time by sending their newer members advice on improved fittings OOC and the like instead of smack.  And I'm fairly certain we wound up recruiting a good dozen of them at some point or another over the years since, as with targets from various other entities we've fought.  Which in RP terms might be seen as them seeing the light of our anarchist platform (post-humans need to merely embrace their immortality and realize their own potential to become the best they can be) and wish to join us to learn more about how to embrace it and their own success.  Hell, a long-time member of CVA is in the process of applying to Sakura's corporation, and he's a guy I remember fighting dozens of times back in the SF vs CVA extended conflict while I was there.

Thing is if you want those fights again you are going to have to work at it. That Kimotoro directive war was the two dozen active members of sf working their asses off with the pressure, the intel, the fleets, the solo'ing and the propaganda to keep the pressure on. These days i do wonder if we've all gotten too lazy really to do that again.

such conflicts need rp and creative propaganda as much as action in space because both feed off the other. people remember the kimotoro war not just because we annihilated a caldari roleplay alliance but because we were so damned effective in telling people exactly what we were doing right from day one when we nailed our colours to the mast and said we will do this thing or die. If SF had lost in kimotoro we'd have lost the alliance. Thats the kind of spice that makes it all worthwhile.

[Bacchanalian]

But the point being we needed to put an outpost up that somebody *could* steal - in order to create such a climate where people have to fight and fight hard.

And to do so you needed to grind structures.  If I want to shoot NPCs (and they actually fight back!), I'll go play WoW.  I want to shoot players, not spend all day fighting over structures.  The sov mechanics are fucking terrible and nothing CCP has done has shown willingness to change that.

Vs. Rote Kapelle / Veto in TXW? There is one practical way of putting the squeeze on you guys there and Mittani is arguing for it right now in the CSM - allowing people to fuck with npc stations in a significant way. Its simply more practical for the large alliances who are now your natural enemies to try to change the rules rather than come after you in your own npc home.

If all it takes is someone dropping eleventy billion supers on an NPC station to take it, or put more POS down in the system to flip it, etc, NPC 0.0 will simply fall to [insert random blob of the month alliance here] and the people who want to fight each other will move to lowsec.  Which might be healthy for lowsec, who knows.  We'd probably wind up moving somewhere like Providence at that point.  If we're going to fight a nullsec blob, might as well be one we like kicking in the teeth and have plenty experience of kicking in the teeth in an area with easy access to three major nullsec regions.

I think your challenge is therefore to be the ones who are pressing. I have to admit if I was in charge of rote we'd probably have died in a fire by now though - because i would definitely have taken us to Providence

We have a running joke in our alliance--we do a POS bash every 6 months to remind ourselves why we don't do POS bashes.  We have never gotten a fight from a POS bash, and the only ones we've ever RFed and not killed were yours due to the aforementioned patch downtime.  Starting at a glowing ball for an hour and then alarm clocking at some ridiculous time of night to come back and stare at it again for another hour just does nothing for us.  Nevermind that we have to bribe people to help fuel the one POS we do have even when we have multiple people doing JF runs from Jita daily.  When your main objective is to shoot other players and not inanimate objects and our alliance tends to be a last-ditch effort by ex-sovwar players to find a reason not to unsub their accounts permanently, going back into sovwar would probably by itself kill our alliance, regardless of whether or not anyone shot back.  I kinda have to take the :CCP: excuse on that one--if they implemented a system that encouraged something other than trying to stack so many people in a system that the node crashes before the defenders can get in to defend, or if supercaps weren't a dime a dozen with every alliance that has access to a couple of sanctums having more supers than we can muster battleships, I might could see it.  But that isn't the case and likely never will be, so we ignore that shit.  We do keep eyes on customs offices and have considered throwing some down to spawn fights, but are honestly so uninspired by the chances we'd have of getting those fights that no one has bothered to take the time.

Right now NPC 0.0, or at least Syndicate, is a small pond with small carnivorous fish in the grand scheme of EVE.  If you make it conquerable, it turns into a small pond with sharks moving in. 

Thing is if you want those fights again you are going to have to work at it. That Kimotoro directive war was the two dozen active members of sf working their asses off with the pressure, the intel, the fleets, the solo'ing and the propaganda to keep the pressure on. These days i do wonder if we've all gotten too lazy really to do that again.

I'd say that 30-40% of our larger fights come because we have intel of some sort and haul ass off to act on it, whether its seeing a large fleet on killboards and racing their direction, getting a tip from another Syndicate entity that they're being beaten to a pulp by someone somewhere, having alts parked all over the region, or simply having someone infiltrated and straight up FCing them into us for a fight, we work for them.  Even then though, it doesn't always work.  Hell, we run double agents to give some of them intel on us, or straight up let in spies and let them know good and well that they outnumber us and outgun us and we have no caps on standby or any such tricks up our sleeve and they often still don't engage.  I'm not sure what else we can do. 

such conflicts need rp and creative propaganda as much as action in space because both feed off the other. people remember the kimotoro war not just because we annihilated a caldari roleplay alliance but because we were so damned effective in telling people exactly what we were doing right from day one when we nailed our colours to the mast and said we will do this thing or die. If SF had lost in kimotoro we'd have lost the alliance. Thats the kind of spice that makes it all worthwhile.

Indeed.  Your battlereports did as much or more for keeping that war exciting than the fights did.  I always argued that RP wars were more interested because people had something invested in winning or losing, and as far as highsec wardecs go, I imagine that's mostly still true.

Maybe we've simply outgrown our style of PvP as it applies to the RP scene.  That said, we're so far off rails on this thread that I've lost track of it, so sorry to the OP.

It still rankles me when I see an entity turn tail and run from a good fight, regardless of whether it's from me or someone else.  I have a few alts spread around various organizations, and it happens on average less when we're not involved, but still happens.  I guess my question for the thread:  Why not fight "pirates"?  Is there anything more satisfying than kicking the shit out of the smacktards that think they're good because they managed to gank a hauler or blob a drake?  Even if they kicked your teeth in and think they can do it again?  Does it not make you want to cheer and pump your fist when you look back over an engagement and realize that you went in there and schooled them?  And if your answer is "yes, but..." stop with the but.  You answer is yes, all you need to do now is work on the how. 

[Matariki Rain]

A triolet
for those who speak fluent null and void
and paint their targets with barrages of terror and rage

We are the best that we might be:
We act and dare! -- not count the cost.
Immortal, godlike, wholly free:
We are the best that we might be.
We act and dare, not count the cost.
We pay the price--when others flee--
In grades, in loves, in chances lost.
We are the best that we might be;
We act... and dare not count the cost.

[BloodBird]

ECM in a 1v1.  =/

EDIT:  Didn't you bounce when burning back to a gate after jumping into a Rote Kapelle gang, get your shields stripped, and die to a lone Vagabond in your Vagabond on the other side?

Yes, I got jumped by a Rote Kappelle blob while scouting in GW.  And yes, as a noob I had a lolfit Intie die in Amamake too.  I really sucked it up the other 15 times I killed RK pilots though.

EDIT:  Changed some stuff.  Will try to make this less smacky.  Bacch, seriously, my main complaint is that for the most part almost every post you make on this forum can be boiled down to

"Im (or my alliance) a really, really good PVPer, I (we) can kill any RPer that we want, and you all need to bow down and recognize this". 

Seriously, we get it, you're proud of your PVP skills.  RK is a good PVP alliance, and youre proud of it.  Got it.  You dont think much of other roleplayers as PVPers.  We got that too.  You can stop now.

This is a forum thats built for a specific community.  Coming to this forum for the sole purpose of doing nothing but being dismissive and trying to say how much better you are than that community makes for a shitty experience.  I like this community.  For the most part, I like EVE RPers.  Theyre good people.  This is a good forum.  If you need to come here and belittle the community en masse, do it somewhere else.

Thanks Gotti. Now I won't have to burn a post informing Bacch of what I think of him and his alliance.

I am simply going to kindly request of the mods to split Jade's conversation with Bacch (and all related posts that involved this) to a new topic, where we can discuss things like elitism and it's ups and downs along with it's effect on EVE game-play along with the minds of it's users. I'd actually like that, but I'd also like ot have answers to my questions previously in this topic about WHY FIGHT PLAYER PIRATES.

Thanks.

[Sofia Roseburn]

I'd hardly say that it's elitism, but that's not really the point of this thread. It is however, an interesting discussion that I'm enjoying reading and I hope that it continues.

Relevant to the topic, there's not many reasons why you would want to fight player pirates unless you have experienced and/or are part of something that considers them to be a big deal; there really isn't anything that resembles a solid game mechanic that encourages it. No rewards, a bounty system that frankly is meaningless, not to mention the fact that you're not actually gaining anything from actually fighting them bar potential blue lights and a moral victory for showing them who's boss. Those things you can't change, that's up to CCP,

At the end of the day, capsuleers don't have to fight them; it's not their job to do so unless they choose it to be. That's the way it's going to be until something big and mechanical gets swapped out for a newer model.

[Matariki Rain]

I actually wrote :words:... about Alexander and Goldilocks and stretch goals; about making meaning and being good; about dominance and grooming targets; about how it takes artificial stimulants to give jaded pilots the rush that addicted them when they were new to it all.

But we've said it all before.

[lallara zhuul]

I think one of those silly quotes from the interwebs kind of sums up this other issue quite well.

'It is not the other people that are boring, you are.'

To change it a bit so that it applies to EVE (and any game.)

EVE is not boring, the way you play it is.

This is what every older EVE player have struggled with, in RP and outside of RP.

Some people have started RPing to get away from the tedium of their former playstyle, some RPers get infected with altitis, some fly just t1 to combat, some try to find the happiness of discovering new things in trying to be an industrialist, some try the market game, some desperately try to get enthusiastic from each new thing that CCP gives to the players, some do their old things in W-space... the list goes on and on.

One of the problems with EVE is that it is vast, but it is limited.

If the thing that tickled your fancy was learning new things, at some point there is nothing more to learn in EVE.
If the thing that made your heart beat faster was to be in combat, after a while no matter what happens to your pixels in space you won't get the same rush.
If you love the flame wars, after doing it for six years they start to be a bit repetitive.

The thing is... Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. When this mentality is joined at the hip with the modus operandi of an addictive personality (I need the rush, I must do the same thing again just faster/harder/bigger) then at some point you will get bored with EVE.

Don't blame EVE for it.

It is all in your head o.O

\o/ Brekkies!

[Matariki Rain]

For Bloodbird: Can you describe what you'd like to see? It sounds almost like it's "a player class for pirates".

As this discussion about anti-piracy continues I find more and more that our ideas diverge. For me that's interesting: CONCORD doesn't determine my ideas of right-behaviour, and there are things that make sense as a tribal Matari who believes in guilt by association that really wouldn't fit for people from the extreme individualist end of the Gallente spectrum.

[Alain Colcer]

@Jade + Bacch

Gotta give it to you guys, plenty of good arguments from both sides, quite interesting to read

@Lallara

Basically the only "issue" with Eve, at some point oneself can be bored to play with sand inside the box. How can one stay engaged forever?.


But to revisit the idea of "why" fight pirates?, well at this particular point there are plenty of options to actually fight them, entrap them, be annoying or just ignore them....but all of them require one particular thing that has nagged me since i started to play EvE, in order to fight effectively against flashys and not-so-flashys, one need to become one......

There is no actual bounty-hunting profession....if that was at some point revisited by CCP and integrated in a good and well designed expansion, i bet there would many anti-pies out there.


And trust me, being on fed militia all this time, it gets difficult to stay on positive sec rating

[Jev North]

It's very, very hard to come up with a bounty mechanic that both provides real incentives, but yet is not open to horrific abuse when you consider the bounty hunter and the pirate might be one and the same person.

[Jade Constantine]

And to do so you needed to grind structures.  If I want to shoot NPCs (and they actually fight back!), I'll go play WoW.  I want to shoot players, not spend all day fighting over structures.  The sov mechanics are fucking terrible and nothing CCP has done has shown willingness to change that.

They are terrible yes, but less terrible than they were (height of the CVA era providence when it was about controlling large pos to make system sov immune). And technically we didn't do much grinding of structures. Putting down an outpost is simply a matter of moving freighters worth of materials and protecting the outpost eggs. Its just like deploying a customs office on a grand scale. The only grinding we did really was messing with enemy SBUs and to be fair that did turn quite hilarious with our cloaked hauler stealing enemy sbus and onlining them ourselves just so we could mess with their timers. Point that I was making though it was a significant asset that enemies could take from us. And I think thats the kind of thing that Rote has been historically unwilling to commit too - hence no real surprise that people aren't that interested to just attacking you for the sake of it.

If all it takes is someone dropping eleventy billion supers on an NPC station to take it, or put more POS down in the system to flip it, etc, NPC 0.0 will simply fall to [insert random blob of the month alliance here] and the people who want to fight each other will move to lowsec.  Which might be healthy for lowsec, who knows.  We'd probably wind up moving somewhere like Providence at that point.  If we're going to fight a nullsec blob, might as well be one we like kicking in the teeth and have plenty experience of kicking in the teeth in an area with easy access to three major nullsec regions.

Right now NPC 0.0, or at least Syndicate, is a small pond with small carnivorous fish in the grand scheme of EVE.  If you make it conquerable, it turns into a small pond with sharks moving in.

Don't get me wrong btw - I think what Mittens/Seleene et al are arguing for is quite terrible. I'd much rather they fixed 0.0 sovereignty to de-emphasize current blob-grinding afk renter mechanics before they started messing with npc stations in null - but I do try to be open-minded on it. I can see why people are annoyed to have raiders in null they can't do anything really about (though in truth) "live there and grief them" is probably an option they should try first before trying to get CSM to change the rules.

We have a running joke in our alliance--we do a POS bash every 6 months to remind ourselves why we don't do POS bashes.  We have never gotten a fight from a POS bash, and the only ones we've ever RFed and not killed were yours due to the aforementioned patch downtime.  Starting at a glowing ball for an hour and then alarm clocking at some ridiculous time of night to come back and stare at it again for another hour just does nothing for us....

Well ultimately its your choice of course but if you don't really like triggering fights over structures and you prefer it when people come to you (ie syndicate) then again I do have to say that its not that surprising you haven't gotten any meaningful RP wars Bacc. I think you *could* achieve something like another Mito but for it to happen you'd have to be prepared to move lock stock and barrel from TXW and relocate into the enemy base of operations and think like we did in Mito - literally being prepared to siege and strangle a foe for the months it takes to get them to fight. Because nothing motivates an outfit to a death or glory attempt like becoming aware the enemy raiding their non-military traffic is simply not going away until you die.

We did inform Kimotoro Directive at the beginning of that war we were seeking to end their alliance and extinguish them. That was a huge boast Bacc - we staked ALL our reputation on that and the reason people remember it now is that it paid off.

So in this, Rote has become a bit of a victim of your reputation - everyone knows you are great fast pvp gang specialists and are the big fish in the pond in syndicate - but everyone also knows you won't consider leaving TXW and you have short attention spans. The latter means people don't need to take you that seriously as a long term war prospect.

Case in point. It won't surprise you to know that I did talk to quite a few people about *ahem* "setting you up the bomb" over the Ostingele tower attack. Lots of people were interested in joining forces to hand Rote Kapelle your ass but sadly the majority of discussions included the line "first you have to bait them out of TXW ... then ... x" So nothing really happened because the only way you guys come out of TXW is in a fast roving fleet a couple of times a night.

If you had been a capturable system with vulnerable infrastructure I'd have looked seriously at promoting a bomber based harrassment campaign as we did against Sev3rance and invited allies to stage in range for hotdrops etc and to keep mashing your stuff with cloaked terror etc etc. But against an NPC station as is ? there is no point. But as mentioned earlier I'm not in the Mittens camp of wanting to take your npc station immunity away - I just think you should realize that immunity comes at a price of people not being that interested in coming to attack you there. 

Serious question now. Do you believe that Rote Kapelle would ever be prepared to come out on IGS (or FHC) or (wherever) and make a serious statement declaring your intention to annihilate a target organization (ideally a RP one) or (die trying) in the current state of the game? For example could you nail your colours to the mast and say you were going to remove Electus Matati from Eve? Then do everything neccessary to make that happen including leaving your base in TXW and relocate everything for as long as it takes including likely pressing and extending the war to the Matari Militia if a beleagred EM should take shelter there?

This would be 100% serious/nonironic and if you fail it'd probably kill your alliance style bid. Is it the kind of thing you could do? Or do you prefer (organizationally speaking) the non-challenging humdrum of random nbsi pvp because it doesn't involve this kind of stake?

Indeed.  Your battlereports did as much or more for keeping that war exciting than the fights did.  I always argued that RP wars were more interested because people had something invested in winning or losing, and as far as highsec wardecs go, I imagine that's mostly still true. Maybe we've simply outgrown our style of PvP as it applies to the RP scene.  That said, we're so far off rails on this thread that I've lost track of it, so sorry to the OP.

I still think its been a useful discussion and helped focus the mind on what is responsible for your lack of potential fights from rp corps rather than "rp pvpers suck" etc. Understanding how one gets a particular enemy to fight is quite an important discipline as well.

It still rankles me when I see an entity turn tail and run from a good fight, regardless of whether it's from me or someone else.  I have a few alts spread around various organizations, and it happens on average less when we're not involved, but still happens.  I guess my question for the thread:  Why not fight "pirates"?  Is there anything more satisfying than kicking the shit out of the smacktards that think they're good because they managed to gank a hauler or blob a drake?  Even if they kicked your teeth in and think they can do it again?  Does it not make you want to cheer and pump your fist when you look back over an engagement and realize that you went in there and schooled them?  And if your answer is "yes, but..." stop with the but.  You answer is yes, all you need to do now is work on the how.

Thats why we like fighting pirates

But it is worth being realistic about it. Pirates on the whole are amongst the most risk-avoiding pvpers in eve (second only to 0.0 nullbears) and in this case I mean it as a grudging compliment to their powers of sidestepping any fight they think will cause them to lose significant assets. The pirate playstyle is about preserving their assets and making a profit over removing the assets of others. To this end they will have scouts all around their location and will immediately flee the gates etc when they see a potential threat moving in. Sometimes they get lazy, greedy, etc, and you can catch them mid-gank or otherwise engaged but thats rare for a roving gang to achieve. Mostly it takes cloaked intel, alt scouts of your own and some kind of regional intel channel where random neutrals report acts of pirate depravity for common knowledge.

Then it usually takes some kind of an ambush, black ops drop, titan bridge, hisec rush to relieve a super tanked bait etc. What happens if you do this well isn't really pvp either - its a counter gank if anything. The pirates will produce some amusing bleating in space most likely and you might score a nice kill - but it would be wrong to see it as the summit of pvp experience in eve online.

Still you learn a lot of tricks watching pirates operate that much I won't deny. And it is funny, I've had random neutrals offer me money to log on my titan just to clear rancer of the smartbombing rokh for half an hour (who has clearly addy booked one of my titan pilots and flees the moment they login). "Wouldn't it be cheaper to go round (i say)? " "Hell no then we don't get to listen to them whining about people abusing jump portals in lowsec while we haul."

***

So ultimately you are right to miss a good ideological roleplay war Bacc - the kind of thing where both sides line up all their fighters and clash in space because they both want to kill the enemy and give no quarter. That kind of thing is extremely rare and getting rarer and it will take a lot of work from propagandsts and corp leaders behind the scenes to produce the situations where it can happen again (and thats assuming ccp throw us a bone somehow with updated wardec mechanics and conflict model.)

[Jade Constantine]

I am simply going to kindly request of the mods to split Jade's conversation with Bacch (and all related posts that involved this) to a new topic, where we can discuss things like elitism and it's ups and downs along with it's effect on EVE game-play along with the minds of it's users. I'd actually like that, but I'd also like ot have answers to my questions previously in this topic about WHY FIGHT PLAYER PIRATES.
Thanks.

Please don't. I think its a useful discussion in context and it is relevant to the op.

[Jade Constantine]

It's very, very hard to come up with a bounty mechanic that both provides real incentives, but yet is not open to horrific abuse when you consider the bounty hunter and the pirate might be one and the same person.

So you need to start your theorycrafting on the assumption that the Pirate in question has a bounty hunter alt that will be abusing the system as much as humanly possible - the trick is to ensure that scenario does not produce a net positive for the pair.

ie ... Say we put an automatic 5m concord bounty on ships flown by people with -5 sec level that was paid out to anyone with positive sec status (along with a positive sec tick ... say .5.

Abuse in question would be the bounty hunter alt could kill a frigate of the pirate alt each 15 mins and get 5m isk + sec boost.

Obviously that would be horrible.

So you need to ensure the pirate loses more than 5m isk each time the vessel is killed.
And you need to prevent the serial exploitation of the sec gain mechanic.

So perhaps you remove insurance to people who are -5 gcc. I can see the argument from gameplay angle. And you maybe adopt a sliding scale of bounties depending on ship. 1m for a cruiser, 3m for a battlecruiser, 5m for a battleship 50m for a carrier etc etc.

And you aren't allowed to claim the sec bonus from a given pirate character more than once a week. (to encourage hunting a range of targets)

So far so good. You have a system where you provide incentive to positive sec people hunting -5 gccs. Every ship flown by a -5 gives a cash reward split between the hunting gang and sec bonuses to go with it. The net loss of the -5 people is higher than the net gain of the hunters. Its not exploitable because jonny pirate and his hunter alt would lose money doing it.

So what do the pirates get out of the deal ? They've lost insurance. But they get more targets eager to engage them. That may not be enough. Lets give them a highslot module called (non lethal targeting computer) that when its turned on turns structure hits into disabling hits (say 1000 points of damage for a minute of all ship systems and movement disabled). This means they can pirate properly. Turning on this module means that people jumping into systems can be caught and pinned and ransomed with impunity. Might help the golden age of ransom pirates to return. They lost insurance, they gained a ransom income.

What about self destruct? Sure, but lets have it create killmails and void insurance and have a variable timer on ship class.

See?

Its not that difficult to incentivise both sides of the equation you just have to ensure that jonny pirate and his alt cannot exploit the situation meaning the engagement between two characters must always be a less than zero sum encounter (in destruction mechanics). And the payoff to make things nicer for pirates is generally in providing ways for them to actually pirate rather than being simple combat mechanic advantages.

[BloodBird]

I am simply going to kindly request of the mods to split Jade's conversation with Bacch (and all related posts that involved this) to a new topic, where we can discuss things like elitism and it's ups and downs along with it's effect on EVE game-play along with the minds of it's users. I'd actually like that, but I'd also like ot have answers to my questions previously in this topic about WHY FIGHT PLAYER PIRATES.
Thanks.

Please don't. I think its a useful discussion in context and it is relevant to the op.

I'm not sure I see how it is so relevant to the OP but if it don't get split that simply means the GM's agree it's on topic, right? I'll trust their call on this in the end.

My general 'issue' or 'thing' with people like RK and Bacch (That is, people who are *elitist) stems from entities like BoB and to some degree SA, even when I was part of them. I'll try and keep this short.

[spoiler]STAIN- Alliance was my first alliance ever and the first foray into null-space and it's mechanics. I was poor, low-skilled, inexperienced, but eager and willing. This pretty much defined our small corp too.

The general members in SA hated us. We were the new, lowbie noobs who, thanks to little isk and no help in getting to Stain from high-sec had nearly nothing and were offered about no help or encouragement and most arrangements in SA was generally not in our favor. To begin with we were situated in the ass-end of Stain over-looking a hot pipe with 10+ jumps to the SA home-constellation. Shit-hole with shitty rats. By the time the actual leadership who had wanted us in the alliance got back from hiatus we were moved to viable living areas, so to say. Membership still did not approve. Our designated home-system was next to the worst corp among them and we got no end of crap. Example among many; each corp's 'home' system had exclusive ratting rights to that corp. Our overlord neighbor generally didn't give a shit, we were not up to their 'standard'.

Ofc this made the fact leadership loved us for our willingness to constantly fight and help out and be part of the alliance's efforts regardless of what he had or didn't  have, and the ability to DO just that on a constant basis, so much sweeter. Like flipping a finger to their superiority-complex egos. We slowly won the respect of the few folks and corps in SA that was worth anything.

BoB initially had my respect due their reputation at the time; capable, willing, constant fighters. Fighting them would be a blast, I had hoped. For the short while in SA when I could, it was. IRL military drafted me, by the time I got back SA was disbanded and corp had fractured. Few months later BoB-ASCN war took place, I was in the latter. IIRC the events to follow has been detailed somewhat elsewhere. In short, the "best PVP'ers in EVE" who above all craved "a good fight" proved they didn't give a toss about the fight - they wanted to win. They HAD to win. And by using every single underhanded tactic in existence, they did. Forum-smack was horrible too.

Leaving ASCN I ended up in one of the 3 alliances created by the fracturing SA, living in the drone regions. This time, not only was I 'that noob' still but I was now an ex-ASCN pilot as well. Needless to say, respect was a rare commodity, again with a small exception. While it had other reasons as well, I left a few months later and returned to high-sec space.[/spoiler]

* I'm not sure if I'm using the term properly but an elitist to me is, a person that treats another poorly due to a perceived superiority to that person or group.

SA 'old-guard' folks treated me and my corp with disdain because we had little assets let alone any T2, had fewer skills in general, fewer members, had not been in 0.0 for years, had not fought in the stain civil war for months and months, had not killed dozens if not hundreds of ships, let alone even seen 0.0 at the time we joined. In their mind they were, in short, our universal superiors.

BoB seemed to treat anyone who were not in BoB like garbage. You were in BoB, if not, your best bet for non-aggressive diplomacy was to be a pet alliance. Not allies; pets. Gods help their inferior enemies who had no chance to reach to their standards. The vast majority of their members talked as if they were gods speaking to insects with no hope to reach their level of 'skills'. They were BoB. Everyone else where not.

And this brings me back to RK and Bacch. Rotte Kapelle(sp?) is RK, everyone else is not. Your very, very good at what you do, and you know that. Your problem is, by design of flaw of allegiance, you keep letting us know too. And it's god damn tiresome and annoying to keep hearing that underlying message. You remind me of a bobbit, or some know-it-all SA veteran who joined EVE a year or two before me. That's not a good thing in general.

Another thing entirely... Now that I've had some time to read the tread so far.

Bacch, you lament that there are no able or willing opponents left. You have already fought and killed those few there were (like Acheron Federation. Thank you so much for destroying them, btw. Fed-RP really needed that... ) and freely admit there is no real gain in attacking you at this point, you have little to nothing to lose. That reminds me of what Jade said and how your behavior affects your opponents, and to some extent, it reminds me of piracy.

In short, for those opponents that could attack you, why should they? You have nothing they want. No space of significance. No assets to destroy or steal. No underlying goal of gaining anything like this. And a few looks on your killboards likely tell them all they need know about you. I've not checked myself, but my fair bet says the killboards state you to be good pvpers who win the majority of all your fights, even many where you are entirely outnumbered. This means fighting you leaves a statistically high chance of simply losing many assets. No-one wants to lose, least of all you and your opponents. And fighting you leaves little to nothing to gain, other than killboard stats, stats that are likely to get worse before they get better. Your reputation precedes you and warn people to stay the fuck away.

For those who know about RK at all they have to ask themselves "Do we need to fight them for any reason?" and "What will we gain?" The answers appear to be "No" and "Nothing". To get more fights, I don't know what you can do, besides trying to add limitations to yourself like you have tried to do since sov-destruction to provoke fights seem to be out. I can't blame you for that choice, but until you get the answers to those questions to become "yes" and "much" odds are you will have to keep thinking back to the Kimoto directive and Acheron Federation wars with dreamy eyes.

Much like I keep thinking of ways to get to pirates, and arriving at "There is hardly a point" yet followed by "But I really really want to". Another slight subject-change...

Jade mentioned that pirates are very hard to press into a fight. Universally speaking this is what I found to be true as well. I have not fought entities like Veto in any recent times or any Angel-cartel loyal RP pirate corps at all, so I don't know if anyone of you are more eager for 'risky' fights. Regardless, while my main toons have remained mostly inactive for the last 2 years, I've run around allot in FW and on one dedicated RP toon in between, on-off.

And it all seems much like I recall. Most pirates are 'effective' pirates. This kind of demands the behavior Jade described; kill what you can, when you can, escape any reprisal when it shows up. I've been out of the loop for a long time, but eventually if I should return fully to EVE I know one thing; I want to hunt down and kill the proud, self-proclaimed alpha-predators of low-sec, and I would like to do that while maintaining my access to ALL of high-sec for any activities and wars, be they RP related or anything else. Bar joining EM or I-RED (no guarantee they want me or I want to do the RP to join them) I'd likely have to make my own corp. So again my question; Assuming I have willing members, what tactics, methods or means should a willing and dedicated anti-pie corp employ to effectively hunt their chosen foes and kill them, in order to aim for maximum effect?