The Mythos of Contention...

~or, Imagine a Hisec That Doesn’t Need a Savior…

(Disclaimer: No this post has nothing to do with Incarna, WIS or any of that stuff.)

Just imagine…

You warp your cloaky scout into an Ice Belt…

“Ahhhh yessss…” you murmer to yourself… it is ripe with many many foolish AFK Retrievers calmly, placidly munching ice…

You fly carefully and make a BM at just the right spot…

You move off so you don’t get decloaked, and with murderous joy you call in the Holy Fleet…

A minute later the Agents in their fleet of Sacrificial Catalysts land on grid and open fire on the stupid defenseless Retriever!!! And you watch in sheer joy as …

Huh? What!?!? CONCORD has landed as usual and all the Cats were sacrificed as planned but the Retriever is still there…

Hmmm… you may have made an assumption, you close to lock range and scan the target… Damn, he is well tanked. This one was not fit for ‘Max Yield’ but for ‘Max Tank’… well, that answers that. Ok, so one out of ten has some brains… you scan the next one… huh, max tanked too, and different corp… so you scan the next, and the next… Damn! They are ALL max tanked! Every single one! You report your findings to your Savior and head to the next belt…

And all you find in belt after belt and system after system is max tanked Retrievers and Hulks and even Procurers… heck in the farthest out belts there was even a fleet of mining Rokhs!! Your Savior calls… and you have to report that ANY gank attempts made today will fail. All the noobs and AFK Botters have learned how to tank their ships… the number of Cats needed now to take down even one Hulk before CONCORD does it’s thing… is simply too high.

“Well…” your Glorious Leader says, “We can still bump em.”

**********

Now, this will never happen for a whole spate of reasons, from the fact many really are bots and botters don’t care about ganks, they are not ‘playing’ the game, they are ‘gaming’ the game for ISK usually for RMT. Some of the real miners don’t really care as they are actually older Industrialists and they make more out of their Mining and Industry than you can ever gank out of them as they build their own ships and mods etc. and mining is just one segment of their ISK stream. The ones the gankers affect the most, the ones that are ‘hurt’ by ganking are the noobs and the casual players who simply aren’t into PvP, and/or really don’t have, or want to devote, the time needed ingame to get into much else.

There are those, James315 (who no longer matters) and Psychotic Monk (who I hopefully does or will matter, and yea I voted for him, low on the roster but he does represent a very real segment of the EvE playerbase and all parties have a right to a voice)… there are those who simply do not accept the above premise about players not wanting to be involved or wanting to play casually. They feel that any player in the game should be, to paraphrase Monk, adding or creating content for the rest of us. If they are not part of the games substance, then they should not be here.

This is a position which I find utterly and completely fascinating. Think on it, more ‘words’, posts, flames, diatribes, dialogs and sheer shit has been written and discussed and argued about and over “Miners” (AFK, Bot or not) in Hisec, than any other single issue I have seen yet in EvE. Seems to me that “Miners” (AFK, Bot or not) have and are continuously creating far more ‘content’ than all of Nullsecs Big Blue Cockring ever has. I mean who else are these guys ‘interacting’ with? Who else does James315 and his minions log on to gank and play with? If there were no “Miners” (AFK, Bot or not) what pray tell would the Savior of Hisec and His New Order do???

James315 damn near turned the whole issue into a probable CSM win until he realized he might actually win and have to deal with REAL people… and Monk has the guts and intelligence to back him doing just that. James315’s self-aggrandizement as the ‘Savior of Hisec’, his site Minerbumping.com (and the billions of ISK he has extorted and scammed from EvE players thereby) would not even EXIST were it not for “Miners” (AFK, Bot or not).

Seriously… really try and imagine an EvE without ANYONE mining. Let’s say the minerals for all Industry were available ONLY through purchase via NPCs like skill books. And please, let’s not get all misdirected on how that would fuck up the ‘existing’ economy, I am postulating an EVE where mining NEVER took place and yet we have the magical ability to look back on an EVE that did… ok? Work with me here. It’s a hy-poth-e-sis (#2) ok?

Anyhoo, try to imagine an EVE without miners. No Hulks, no Retrievers, no AFK Botters (mining at least)… Ruminate on that for a full actual minute and then answer me this. Who would the no-tank gankers gank? Why, Indies of course! Mammoths and Hoarders and Ittys of all marks right? But… would it be the same? to a degree, yes... to a degree, no.

If you are fitting and Indy for Max Load you fill your lows with Expanded Cargohold IIs which could be used for tank… I guess. I fly Matarii ships so my Indy’s shield tank and that’s in the mids, in hisec I Max Load the lows (1 DCUII) with 1 Invulnerability II and an Ancillary Shield Booster in the Mids while in the hole or to/from the hole I switch my lows for GTFO mods usually Overdrive Injector IIs (1 DCUII) for faster warping or Warp Core Stabilizer IIs (1 DCUII) depending on scout info etc.

The thing is, a lot if not the majority of Industrials do tank their haulers as compared to “Miners” (yada yada) so the game in that respect would be very different... but wait… isn’t that what the gankers and War Deccers etc. etc all WANT?? They all talk incessantly about how if players would ONLY learn how to properly tank their ships or actively play the game etc. then they would what? Stop ganking? Stop War Deccing? Oh please.

James 315 wants to ‘force’ everyone into low and null so the “food chain” (read “PvP Killers and Their Victims”) would be unhindered by CONCORD. Plain and simple that’s all he and his kind want. Everyone would get to spend just enough time in Hisec to learn how to become good little targets and then they all go directly to Lo and/or Null so the gankers and griefers can kill ‘em and not lose their ships, IE their version of “How YOU Should Play EVE”.

Monk on the other hand wants to keep the target rich environment he is used to in Hisec… he just wants a richer target environment… and I don’t mean blingy rich, though that’s always good too, I mean no corp jumping kinda ‘rich’. He states that he starts a ‘round of War Decs’ with usually approximately between 600 to 1000 or so targets and by the end of a week and that leaves him with 200 active of which, somehow, only 4 are actually available targets… hence he is prescribed Valium due to the deep depression he experiences at being down to just 4 or so war targets cause they all ran away or logged off… and all of this has something to do with how we look at and run corps… well duh. As far as I know the only way to do that is (1) corp hop or (2) log onto an alt in a different corp (same thing really) or (3) just stay logged off.

Monk wants the rules & mechanics setup so that his War Dec targets cannot so easily evade and/or hide from him, denying him (and all of us) the game enriching content he so desperately needs so he can end his Valium addiction and just start enjoying them again like everyone else instead of actually needing them to get through an hour or so of boring EvE play… (OK, as far as I know Monk is not on ANY drugs… I was just making a point there and having a little fun with him, you should really hear him talk about this subject in the Lost in Eve – Episode 84 – CSM 8 Debates — Debate #4 starts at 56:00) a truly fascinating take on EvE gameplay).

But again all of this is still just a desire to force other players to accept his version of “How YOU Should Play EVE”. Monk feels every player, Irregardless of his or her desire or intent or what they want out of their EvE experience in this great “SANDBOX” game should be playing in a way that will “create content”, for his (he says for all of our) benefit.

I read a lot of blogs and forums and I have my blog here and I play extensively. I have been playing for 2 years, 4 months, 20 days as of today. While I am an Anoikis dweller and vastly prefer the rules and mechanics of holes over Hi, Lo and Null, I have and still do spend a LOT of time in Hisec. I traverse Lo almost daily, have roamed there many times and I lived in Null for several (painfully boring even though highly lucrative) months. And I have flown through the content of EvE everyday of those 2 years, 4 months and 20 days…

Read Minerbumping.com… read the details of the daily Player Interaction that takes place between the New Order and random players… content. Read Psychotic Monk’s blog where he shares his stories of War Decs and ganks, tears and fails… content. If these two guys, myself, Jester and Mabrick just to name a very few of the literally hundreds of EvE Blogs out there (248 by my count on The EVE Online Bloggers Portal alone) If we can fill a page or two every couple of days (or like Jester fill a page or two every couple of hours… sheesh) then pray tell, is there some kinda massive ‘lack of content’ in EvE all these 248 bloggers are missing due to the incredible mass of content we are all so busily creating, joining in on and writing up?

Or is it that James315, Monk and their brethren do not ‘like’ the emergent content as it currently exists in EvE? That the “content” they want is them winning every time without loss or risk? Intentionally getting a ship (or ships) CONCORDED in order to take down a higher value target is not “risk” it is part of a thought out and accepted loss to win ISK ‘winning tactic’.

Like a Jihadist suicide bomber, they accept their ‘loss’ because they KNOW they will take out more than they lose. What they fear most… is that that loss/win ISK ratio might get changed… and thereby change their winning tactic to nothing more than a fail… and that is not the ‘content’ they desire. Who wants to write up a post about how you destroyed a single ship worth less than the gang of ships you lost in order to kill it?

I say quite substantially… No one. I also say… HTFU bros, the myth that “Miners” (AFK, Bot or not) in Hisec are not creating Emergent Content is pure crap. All in all that part of the game seems to be Working just as Intended.  =]

Fly Safe and see you in the Sky  =/|)=