Depends on who it's for. I slept really badly last night, I had nightmares that СG was over and I was knocked out of 50%.
WHY!?
- Thread starter Commander Holroyd
- Start date
Totally disagree. A ganker is very easy to distinguish from a regular pvp. No PvP player will kill without any game reason. If a PvP player kills without a reason, he is just a ganker.
Well, I wouldn't say I'm afraid of PvP, but for me it is at best pointless and at worst massively wasting my time.
I remember being intercepted sometimes, I killed them and they gave me some 2 million, which is very little.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
Maybe to those whose idea of meaningful PvP / combat in general includes the need to inflict penalties (as significant as possible) on their vanquished opponents.
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Call it risk aversion, then. People in this community are, by and large, typically very risk averse. They don't want to risk the loss of their ship/credits/time/data/what have you/etc. This game certainly instills risk aversion, otherwise Open would be far more populous. Is it fear like fear of a bear mauling you in the woods? No, but it's fear in the sense that people are worried that if they fly in Open they take on risk of loss of something, so they don't do it.
They're free to do it, fine by me (some people need to not be in Open due to risk taking tendencies even), but I'm also not wrong in noticing the population trends, either. Been this way basically since Elite came about as far as I can tell.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
.... or perhaps call it what it is for some players: a lack of willingness to have their time wasted in predictably tedious forced encounters initiated by players who don't seem to care whether their targets have any fun.
It's fine by the game rules, which is all that actually matters.
I am calling it what it is. There's a risk that they will have an encounter that doesn't go the way they intended concerning some asset they have (time, credits, etc, pick whichever you prefer), and the hypothetical player doesn't want this risk. It exceeds their risk tolerance so they use one of the allowed methods to circumvent it. Many such cases, and I would bet most of the active playerbase currently falls into this category to some extent, which is why I'm not yet really that expectant that Powerplay2.0 is going to be a jumpstart in this department. If the community is mostly tepid to this type of content... well... idk.
Of course it's fine by game rules. Who said it wasn't?
You're including Powerplay in with PvP, I'm guessing by the wording used?
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
Fair comment. Noting that the loss incurred by ship destruction may be a significant multiple of the rebuy cost.
If the rebuy is removed for Powerplay 2.0, as was suggested earlier in the thread, then that may change how some players approach it.
It matters not whether players accept, or not, what the game allows.
No. I just wrote that there is a clear and simple line of demarcation between PvP player and ganker.
That's one narrow aspect of a much broader thing.
Inflicting penalties on one's defeated foes certainly gives some people warm fuzzy feelings, but it in any plausible setting/context it's also highly utilitarian. A vanquished foe is taken out of play for some meaningful period of time, suffering attrition and logistical setbacks that can function as a deterrent for them and materially increase one's own odds of achieving one's goals.
The absence of that isn't the horrifying part though. That part is the trivialization of one's own efforts when one cannot fail. I want to be immersed in my CMDR's experiences and vicariously feel what it's like to be in these high-stakes scenarios. When the gameplay doesn't depict meaningful consequences for failure, inspire urgency, or abstracts these things away, it dulls the entire experience. This isn't something that can be replaced by self-handicapping either as a large part of the experience is trying one's utmost within a set of firm constraints and seeing how one fares against others who are doing the same. Consequences for one's self are every bit as important as consequences for others, if not more so. This transcends any direct PvP/PvE dichotomy as well; a dichotomy that only exists for a subset of players because it serves as de facto difficulty selector. A large part of why many (though certainly not all) people favor PvP encounters is the potential for some kind of loss that is totally absent from PvE gameplay (again, assuming one isn't setting themselves up to fail), so trying to encourage participation by nutering the consequeces is going to have the opposite effect here.
Indeed it will, in ways subjective to those involved.
I've largely avoided the current incarnation of PP because I have difficulty wrapping my mind around it's dubious contextuality (at least as it's implemented) as a player and because my in-game character isn't the sort to subjugate himself to others for trinkets. I've indirectly participated when certain powers retaining or losing control of certain areas would result in benefits for my character, but he's never pledged to anyone. My early and probably misplaced optimism regarding PP2 was based on the potential for giving more context to gameplay that I enjoyed, and had me considering engaging in PP more directly, but the hints that participants in the new system would have the already paltry risks further neutered is turning me off from the whole thing.
For me, contextual risks are the incentive and optional risk is no risk at all.
The point is always that the rules don't cater to players who want to experience risk.
I'm not really convinced reduced or removed rebuys will attract that many people tbh. I think the risk aversion is related to other things more than credits, which are so easy to get. idk.
Ding ding ding, almost nothing in the game except people in PvP ships and Thargoids offers any risk. Most of the game is about as close to risk free as possible it seems.
Ding ding ding, almost nothing in the game except people in PvP ships and Thargoids offers any risk. Most of the game is about as close to risk free as possible it seems.
There's always some risk of incurring in a loss... but when it's environment, NPCs, Thargoids or resulting from simple distraction (i.e. fell asleep in SC lol) all that loss becomes somehow acceptable. So the point imho it's more that open play (= encounters with other CMDRs resulting in a loss) makes the loss not acceptable because one player suffers a loss and another player is on the opposite side: having fun out of it (or having gain in case of a robbery).
I'm sorry, but for some reason I don't believe that.
It's a simple question. How much cargo have you hauled in the current CG in open mode ?
In my merely anecdotal experience, most of the game is so tame (except a few limited aspects) that people's risk of loss outside of other players is fantastically low. Technically there is risk there, but I would say that how small it is, is worth pointing out. Just my anecdotes, though, of course.
Yeah, I agree in particular for NPCs difficulty scaling... they can offer some kind of a challenge at the very beginning, but once a player unlocks engineers, improves ships etc they're just annoyance and not a real threat. That's why I've recalled many times that NPCs must be scaling with players' level/engineering and become a high threat so that no one should be encouraged to fly shieldless hauling ships in any inhabited system.
Hatchbreakers also are meme tier since they max at 500m/s but a Cutter can boost like 493m/s, so between the fly by and the boost, they'll just never catch a runner. The NPCs don't even spam them, either. They count down, in public, when they're going to boil you up.
I had NPCs spamming hatch breakers against my Corvette in haz res. The ship doesn't even have a cargo rack....Hatchbreakers also are meme tier since they max at 500m/s but a Cutter can boost like 493m/s, so between the fly by and the boost, they'll just never catch a runner. The NPCs don't even spam them, either. They count down, in public, when they're going to boil you up.
All that tasty cargo!