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[Aria Jenneth]

So, word is, RP in Eve has been pretty dead, lately. The dev/storytellers are busy with sumpin' else, FW goes nowhere in particular (mostly on account of its spectacular lack of consequences, bless CCP for finally noticing), and the old conflicts are seeming sort of ... old hat.

Well, then, how to get things perked up?

A necessary part of any good story is conflict. This can be internal, external, direct, indirect, civil, uncivil, whatever-- doesn't much matter. It's entirely possible to get some good internal and/or interpersonal conflicts going here, of course, but this is, at its root, a spaceship game, which means that the most engaging conflicts will probably not be tracking the plot of "A Few Good Men."

If we want things in New Eden to heat up and dislodge folks from their cozy bars and private convos, the obvious approach is to warm it with weapons-grade plasma bolts.

This, of course, is easier said than done, but there's no shortage of reason for conflict, and capsuleers are infamous for callous disregard for human life.  I'd like to see your thoughts and ideas for how to stir the pot, RP-wise, and get people a little more invested in the world again.

A few opening thoughts:

* Aside from, perhaps, rare "plot points," conflicts should be genuine, rather than staged. This gets people invested in the conflict and its outcome.

* There are reasons to fight that have nothing to do with politics (well-- unless you count cultural values). "You dishonored my sister! DIE!"

* "Frienemies" are good fun.

* The major challenge here is built into the very nature of Eve: war in Eve is play for high stakes. Losses are not meaningless. This makes maintaining a cheerful OOC attitude in the face of being on the losing side really damn hard.

* Possibly the easiest method for stirring more conflict would be to de-liberalize our gameplay-- dilute our characters' sense of fairness and compassion for fellow capsuleers and their causes with a dose of loyalty and respect for the authority of some entity (take your pick, really) whose sanctity is to be protected even at the cost of spilled blood.

There are various ways of justifying this IC; it's been said that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested. It's not too difficult to engineer such a "formative" event. It could even be done on a large scale. Anybody for some sort of atrocity at an event for families of [insert faction here] capsuleers, followed by reprisals that stir passions in the other side, as well?

Our characters have largely been interacting in the massive melting pot that is the interstellar capsuleer corps. Perhaps it's time for a conservative backlash, followed by rising tensions escalating to merry violence?

* Certain goals short of total victory should be achievable. These can be short term goals, and can be agreed upon in advance, something like: "If you manage to kill X million ISK of ships this month, our CEO will order a full review of the function of all shipboard crews (since they're obviously underperforming).  So-- for the next four weeks, all of our pilots will be required to carry a [designated market-purchaseable NPC type] in their cargo holds, which can be captured and put on IGS show trials."

Other "forfeitures" might include the capture and brainwashing of pilots (see also my abortive attempt to get a Sansha's Nation "capture game" started), revealing useful intel ("You captured a journal entry by our CEO, reading as follows...."), and so on. There might, incidentally, be ways for the CHARACTERS to behave dishonorably, going back on agreements and so on, without the PLAYERS doing so. "As agreed, my character will refuse to pay her bet, but your character has recorded proof and is free to shame her publicly."

... This would probably be easier if the most obvious "goal short of victory" weren't economic harm to the other side, which tends to get people in a lather. Strong wills likely called for.


This is just me rattling on in near-train-of-thought. Anybody got other ideas?

[Mathra Hiede]

So, Aria pretty much beat me to the punch with a typically well thought out and written idea (better than I head in mind )

I'd be interested to see if we could test some of the standing ideals, like Caldari and Amarr friendship - eg the Khanid Kingdom Capsuleers seeking to push the Empire futher away and give larger and powerful benefits to the Mega-Corps for research which antagonises the Imperialists, and due to certain members being potentially shady the Matari or Gallente can help to funda  destablisation of the Khanid region, thereby diverting resources from their fronts to gain an advantage?

Just my 0.5isk

[Aria Jenneth]

Hmm ... well, the existing politics do lay a solid groundwork for sparking all kinds of conflicts.

The most, ah, motivational ones, though, should certainly have a "personal" element (this, I think, is why the Amarr/Matari war has always inspired more passion than the Caldari/Gallente war-- when somebody's enslaved your grandmother, the resulting conflict is, inevitably, personal).


A further thought:

* If it's left to the characters, a great many of the best stories coming out of the war will remain little-known, if not entirely untold. There should therefore be an OOC "War Stories" sticky-topic, perhaps here on Backstage. This would serve the same purpose as the "Pirate Stories" in C&P, plus some: it would be a place to tell of particularly spectacular successes and failures, to give kudos to others that could never be given IC, and to tell tales at one's own expense. It would be an opportunity to point up particularly good bits of RP, and to confess one's own failings. It would need to be moderated judiciously, but would be WELL worth the trouble in terms of building a sense of community around the whole business.

[Milo Caman]

I would definitely be up for some organized, RP driven pew. I get moderate amounts of PvP in with OOC friends, but the RP scene seems to have shrunk away from my preferred venues and playstyles.

* The major challenge here is built into the very nature of Eve: war in Eve is play for high stakes. Losses are not meaningless. This makes maintaining a cheerful OOC attitude in the face of being on the losing side really damn hard.

This can be mitigated somewhat by setting terms of engagement OOC beforehand (IE only engage in x set of systems with y range of ship classes.)

If you have OOC communication and agreement between the two sides (which is often not the case) you should, in theory avoid a lot of the hard feelings that tend to fly around with conflict in EVE.

[Lyn Farel]

Keep in mind that the following statements are my opinion, and does not involves any generalities.

- We need more intra faction and subfactions conflicts, like in the old days before TEA. The war has erased most of them : everyone has to remain united and all because we now have a common enemy, blablabla, but people are just lazy to find reasons and moreover, take risks to cause conflict inside their own faction. Maybe I am weird but I loved doing that one year ago in KotMC. Also, stop thinking OOCly when taking IC decisions : it does not always fit to a character and also prevents that kind of things.

- All the public RP takes place in the Summit these days. And 90% of that RP is boring day to day cheesy relationships. The remaining 10% is either quickly moderated due to people starting to insult each other when disagreeing, or more generaly, shunning all the people that have strong political views and that do not fit to the usual "everyone is all lovey dovey". I am exagerating the point on purpose, of course, but it often sounds like that to m, cf Seriphyn's case (best example that comes to mind).

- Besides the Summit, everyone RP in their own corner. How they are able to always find new things to discuss and new things to do is beyond me, but I am not here to tell them what is best to do or that they are doing it wrong. I did it at least partially in KotMC too after all. But it is a great impediment to a global RP synergy because that very RP is scattered and not shared. This is not me saying that we should do otherwise. It is just me pointing out a fact. My point is not to make it change, but to find ways to make it less relevant. Also, it would be good to revive the NEA or things like that where actual leaders of a lot of RP corps could be there (because they often have no reasons to come to the Summit, which is for the masses).

[Mathra Hiede]

So Lyn, from your experiences - what your saying is that the problem is that everyone is in their own little corner when they RP and all the public RP is boring summit chat.

So, Am I wrong in saying this is what we are trying to remedy by trying to brainstorm and create co-operation so there is a conflict to be had that can attract people into it? Give the limelight back to the areas we all loved it?

I do like your suggestions though - if my timezone didn't suck so hard I would love to go smack up some Amarrians

[Lyn Farel]

Yeah.

I thought it was worth pointing out what are the main facts to my opinion. And also to insist on the fact that people playing in their own private venues and doing almost only that is not necessarily a bad thing that has to be removed (even if it could be really cool to see them a little more in public venues), but instead trying to create and stimulate something else to build that takes that into account.

[Kybernetes Moros]

Hm, hm, hm.

The OOC agreement of rules of engagement is something I'm in two minds on. On the one hand, it can mitigate some hard feelings if one party feels that they've been sucker-punched, but on the other, there's the risk of making the war seem contrived or phony, especially if it's restricting the ship classes involved directly -- perhaps the limitation of combat to individual systems or constellations could be made to seem less artificial if a reason to defend those particular areas developed?

Structures such as towers and customs offices are a natural game mechanic for this, but RP reasons could exist as well; one idea I was toying with a number of months back was seeing if other corporations OOC would be interested in the idea of a conflict based around TS-F establishing "broadcast relays" or whatever in a selection of systems near where we were then based, transmitting pro-National propaganda to anyone who cared to tune in. I never quite hammered out a means of pulling that off in RP in a method I particularly liked, though (not to mention that most of the corporations that would have been relevant were significantly larger than TS-F), so the idea never got far; I'm not even certain that I mentioned it to other people in TS-F at the time, but it's a model that could be modified to suit other factions.

It seems to me that something like this, i.e. to take pre-existing political conflicts and act on them, could help on the war front with a minimum of OOC clarification to make sure everybody knows what's happening and has fun. To return to the Sansha's Nation example since it's the one with which I have the most experience, it's one thing to declare war on a bunch of Sansha loyalists because they support Kuvakei (or, conversely, have war declared upon you because you don't); it's entirely another to declare war on them because they're actively trying to establish a presence in the area and sway people to their cause. Where the former is relatively passive, the latter has a specific drive or goal -- in this particular example, stopping them broadcasting their messages / maintaining these broadcasts, depending on the side.

This kind of motivation for war could evolve over time, I realised in typing this: if the broadcast relays were becoming too difficult to maintain, a new method could be adopted to spur further conflict, again with the briefest of OOC clarifications to explain what's happening without necessarily ruining any RP based around finding what the other side is up to.

I'm aware that this is a heavily political example and there are entirely non-political reasons for a war, but to completely ignore the political seems counterproductive; stagnant as it is without CCP's direction, the framework already exists for it.

(Caveat lector: Part of the issue with this example is that I ended up thinking "well, why wouldn't they just be stuck in secure cans at safespots where they can't be scanned down, or a few thousand kilometres off a planet where it's more tedious than it's worth to hunt it out, etc.?". For this kind of thing to work, I'm inclined to say that the objectives shouldn't necessarily be easily found, but nor should they be tedious to. It's a game, not work.)

[Desiderya]

The main problem is that there are no public venues, at least none that would be visited without the sole intent of socialization - and there we're going to face the problem again: Either it's all lovey-dovey we're all special friends or there's no IC incentive to go there.


@Kyber
That sounds true. But organizing these (mini) events is work. If it ends up with only a tiny fraction doing things it'll burn out quickly. But the idea of warzones is certainly doable ( RvB ), and I quite like the idea of mini-objectives, too. Such as interdicting a shipment of illicit goods ( cunningly hidden in dairy products ) where the time and destination was 'leaked' prior to the action. But that requires work and cooperation. :/

[Morwen Lagann]

Also, it would be good to revive the NEA or things like that where actual leaders of a lot of RP corps could be there (because they often have no reasons to come to the Summit, which is for the masses).

Actually, I updated the question/discussion prompt set in NEA the other day, thanks to some very good (and very long overdue) suggestions from Nakal. I'd like to leave them up for a couple weeks, then toss up another new set, but I need people to suggest them. I'd been asking for people to do that for a while, but nobody bit until last week.

Kyber: I like the idea, and would have considered getting into it except that we're kinda small on our end, and even your mid-size gangs (according to Tib, anyway) have more people in them than my corp has PVP-capable characters. Perhaps with the new wardec system it would be easier to organize with the defenders' ability to call in allies (ie, SHARE decs one group, who calls in a couple other small groups, then rpew rpew happens until one side's objectives are met. Rinse and repeat.

That said, the thing with containers is actually a pretty good idea that could use some expansion. It requires people to put in a little effort and/or teamwork in tracking them down. Might poke you about it on MSN later.

[Silas Vitalia]

Good timing on this post

I've got something fun cooking I'm putting together.  Unrelated to the IC party, which will be drama free.

This other thing will be conflict-full, and I'll be trying to explode quite a few people on many different sides of the political spectrum with some old friends.  Lots of shiny ships, juicy targets for you RPers, and some actual things in space.

Explosions for everyone!

Long story short, but it's been a while since Silas has been leading any legit fleets into pew pew, so I'm calling in some favors and hiring out some killers, and will be coming to some well-traversed RP areas to explode everything in sight until we all die.

See you all in a month or so

[Aldrith Shutaq]

* Aldrith Shutaq waves a chainsword around, foaming at mouth.

ARRBLRAGARALLGLLBLALLRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

[Saikoyu]

I think I was trying to do something similar here.  You might want to look at the replies I got.  I might be up for something, assuming that the alliance I am in now would be up for it.  And if they aren't, I can work around that.     I do need a reason to get up early on the weekends to ruin someones RP day again. 

Also my opinion, empire politics might work for some of this, but given that most of the empires focus is on the war with each other, to get more personal stories going it would be worth it to put aside the larger war and focus on the sub factions, like Lyn said.  Not Amarr vs Republic, but more slavers (amarrian or otherwise) vs freedom fighters, to pick my own personal hot issue. 

In any case, if possible I'd be interested. 

Silas, any chance you'd be doing that on a weekend?

[Silas Vitalia]

I think I was trying to do something similar [ur=http://backstage.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?topic=3182.0l]here.[/url]  You might want to look at the replies I got.  I might be up for something, assuming that the alliance I am in now would be up for it.  And if they aren't, I can work around that.     I do need a reason to get up early on the weekends to ruin someones RP day again. 

Also my opinion, empire politics might work for some of this, but given that most of the empires focus is on the war with each other, to get more personal stories going it would be worth it to put aside the larger war and focus on the sub factions, like Lyn said.  Not Amarr vs Republic, but more slavers (amarrian or otherwise) vs freedom fighters, to pick my own personal hot issue. 

In any case, if possible I'd be interested. 

Silas, any chance you'd be doing that on a weekend?

Absolutely.  The 'pirate' thread the other day spurned me into action, I'll try and give some of you 'law and order' types some targets to shoot.

[Jev North]

War means work for blood-crazed psychopaths. I can only approve of this direction.

* Aldrith Shutaq waves a chainsword around, foaming at mouth.

ARRBLRAGARALLGLLBLALLRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

+1