Buried Alive in the Sandbox

Note: I had originally planned this post as part of Blog Banter 42, but I kept getting dragged away from writing a review of EVE and into more of a review of the community. I figured I'd put it up anyway for people to read, and may still end up doing a BB42 entry.

Note 2: Apparently, Stan thinks that this should go into the Blog Banter anyway. Thanks Stan, you're a sweetheart!

Every time I see any sort of opportunity for the playerbase to review EVE, I immediately think I'm supposed to go into Bittervet Mode, as if there's an expectation of a long-standing "CCP vs. the players" antagonism. Instead, it comes out more like this XKCD comic.

Ever since the epic backpedalling following the Walking in Stations debacle, I've been pleased to note that at least in the broad strokes, CCP seems to be addressing concerns that players bring up. Is there room for improvement? Absolutely - but I'm not convinced that it's CCP's responsibility to make it happen.


As a lowsec PVP pilot, I'm constantly surrounded by - and sometimes participate in - the cries of exasperation surrounding our preferred style of play. There are any number of things that people in the lowsec community see with varying degress of frustration. Blobs, including the ECM and logi variants. Hotdrops. Unscannable link alts. ECM in general. Drake spam. Arty spam. Nanofags. FOTM anything. My personal pet peeves also include station gamers (especially the ones with triage support) and griefing in general, plus a few other things that are slipping my mind at the moment.

There have been times where I've considered writing long, inflammatory blog posts about things I don't like in EVE. I always end up losing interest, because my complaints actually two different sets of intertwined problems. One perennial example of that is ECM - in my opinion, any module that disables a target as completely as a jammer is overpowered. However, CCP isn't forcing any player or group of players to fly ECM ships. The players fly what they want to fly, they figure out ways to game the system so that they come out on top, and if you're on the losing end, the situation is basically this:

The downside is that for the players on the receiving end, the only choices are to fight back or leave. Fighting back is actually less feasible an option than many would believe; good luck engaging anything while jammed, damped, neuted and pointed from 50km away. Thus, people leave instead, whether it means disengaging from a particular fight/not taking that fight in the first place, not travelling to certain areas, not undocking, or eventually just giving up the game entirely.

As much as many EVE players would answer that with "good riddance", those on the giving end of the trollface fail to realise that the game's going to be just as boring for them when they've driven all their targets away. The Caldari-Gallente side of FW was a great example of this a couple of years ago; actually having even battles between the two sides was a fairly rare thing. More often, one side had overwhelming force, but ended up being bored out of their skulls because the other side thought they were too scary to fight and simply refused to undock. It got to the point that members of both militias would privately arrange more balanced engagements just for the sake of seeing spaceships explode. Shockingly, despite the rough terms being arranged, everyone still had fun.

I guess what I'm trying to say is this: yes, everyone has their own ideas of what's fun in this game, and yes, which idea of "fun" is dominant is whichever one is backed up by the most firepower. But please consider being willing to step outside your comfort zone. If the local pirate corp has five people in a gang and you have 20, don't respond with "lol get moar ppl", because chances are that they actually can't get more gangmates. Who knows, you might even enjoy the style of PVP that you're about to try.