Imagine that in the next EVE patch, new belt rats are introduced. They spawn rarely, but when they do, they can scram and kill weaker mining barges. What would the miners do? Some would whine and cry on the forums, but most would either adjust their fits to resists the new rats or decrease its value to limit the losses if caught. But no one would go and camp the spawn point of the rat to get revenge. That would be quite stupid act considering their low bounty and loot compared to the time needed to catch one.
Highsec gankers are exactly like the mentioned rats: they arrive to a system and gank poorly fit miners, missioners, haulers. I do it for two months now. But many people do exactly what they’d never do if I was just an NPC: camp the station I’m in, follow me around trying to destroy my ships. Some even admittedly settle with slowing me down and being a minor nuisance.
Social people threat other people very differently than equally acting objects. They try to handle challenges from objects by manipulating other objects, responding to the physical threat. But when the challenging actor is a person, they get emotional and try to change its behavior instead of just responding to its physical manifestation. From begging to punishing they try to communicate with the acting person and make him stop what he is doing.
Camping my station or various belts isn’t stupid because it doesn’t even slow me down. It is stupid because it wouldn’t help them if they’d succeed! They wanted to mine. Yet they aren’t mining but camping. When they get on the Concord kill or even destroy the noobship I’m using to pull Concord, they are proudly linking “their” kills on local and cheering to each other. They feel victorious despite they didn’t mine a single piece of ore, the goal they had before I arrived.
Of course their constant failure is closely connected to the futility of their actions. I’m sure that someone who knows that a torpedo battleship or an active tanked Drake isn’t the best tool against ganking Catalysts could cause me some trouble. But someone who is smart enough to do that is smart enough to don’t waste his time for a few 5-10M Catalyst kills and maybe some fitting drops. They rather bait supercarriers instead. So competent PvP-ers ignored me and I had to settle with idiots who trade kill rights, do wardecs against -10 pilots and call it tears when informed about the futility of the above actions.
However the lack of results doesn’t deter the socials from their futile actions. They – like bots – trying to do what’s “right” and “punishing evil” is right. They also self-rewarding themselves with imaginary-emotional gains, talking about that I’m currently raging because they “locked me down”. It’s both funny and sad that I find local chat comments where they celebrate that I didn’t dare to undock all night after I left the computer running while asleep.
This is probably the most obvious symptom of being social: he acts differently if the same action is done by a person and not an inanimate object. Being rational is the opposite. I don’t care if my home is ravaged by hooligans or wild boars, I build a fence and get a gun to keep them out. Fireproof materials and sprinklers protect my home both from arsonists and electrical fire. I don’t care if my EVE ship is ganked by gatecamping players or gatecamping incursion rats, I scout for it to avoid being caught. I respond to the action, not to the actor, therefore I don’t waste my time with “revenge” that gives me noting. This is why I can make 50B income or 100B kills a month while others struggle to get their account Plexed and only have frig kills.
In the anti-tear of today, Skiff miners are celebrating the massacre of ice bots (check the kills, they are identically fit with identical implants, yet they did not warp after their alts died one by one):
The first moron of today challenged the gankers:
The second moron is a permanent one, Hitamino, who follows me around with zero results. But he is a goddamn hero!
Highsec gankers are exactly like the mentioned rats: they arrive to a system and gank poorly fit miners, missioners, haulers. I do it for two months now. But many people do exactly what they’d never do if I was just an NPC: camp the station I’m in, follow me around trying to destroy my ships. Some even admittedly settle with slowing me down and being a minor nuisance.
Social people threat other people very differently than equally acting objects. They try to handle challenges from objects by manipulating other objects, responding to the physical threat. But when the challenging actor is a person, they get emotional and try to change its behavior instead of just responding to its physical manifestation. From begging to punishing they try to communicate with the acting person and make him stop what he is doing.
Camping my station or various belts isn’t stupid because it doesn’t even slow me down. It is stupid because it wouldn’t help them if they’d succeed! They wanted to mine. Yet they aren’t mining but camping. When they get on the Concord kill or even destroy the noobship I’m using to pull Concord, they are proudly linking “their” kills on local and cheering to each other. They feel victorious despite they didn’t mine a single piece of ore, the goal they had before I arrived.
Of course their constant failure is closely connected to the futility of their actions. I’m sure that someone who knows that a torpedo battleship or an active tanked Drake isn’t the best tool against ganking Catalysts could cause me some trouble. But someone who is smart enough to do that is smart enough to don’t waste his time for a few 5-10M Catalyst kills and maybe some fitting drops. They rather bait supercarriers instead. So competent PvP-ers ignored me and I had to settle with idiots who trade kill rights, do wardecs against -10 pilots and call it tears when informed about the futility of the above actions.
However the lack of results doesn’t deter the socials from their futile actions. They – like bots – trying to do what’s “right” and “punishing evil” is right. They also self-rewarding themselves with imaginary-emotional gains, talking about that I’m currently raging because they “locked me down”. It’s both funny and sad that I find local chat comments where they celebrate that I didn’t dare to undock all night after I left the computer running while asleep.
This is probably the most obvious symptom of being social: he acts differently if the same action is done by a person and not an inanimate object. Being rational is the opposite. I don’t care if my home is ravaged by hooligans or wild boars, I build a fence and get a gun to keep them out. Fireproof materials and sprinklers protect my home both from arsonists and electrical fire. I don’t care if my EVE ship is ganked by gatecamping players or gatecamping incursion rats, I scout for it to avoid being caught. I respond to the action, not to the actor, therefore I don’t waste my time with “revenge” that gives me noting. This is why I can make 50B income or 100B kills a month while others struggle to get their account Plexed and only have frig kills.
In the anti-tear of today, Skiff miners are celebrating the massacre of ice bots (check the kills, they are identically fit with identical implants, yet they did not warp after their alts died one by one):
The first moron of today challenged the gankers:
The second moron is a permanent one, Hitamino, who follows me around with zero results. But he is a goddamn hero!
22 comments:
"Social people treat other people very differently than equally acting objects. [...] when the challenging actor is a person, they get emotional and try to change its behavior instead of just responding to its physical manifestation. From begging to punishing they try to communicate with the acting person and make him stop what he is doing."
I found an amusing parallel in what you're doing. You're using punishment and communication to try and change the behavior of other players (untanked miners) because it amplifies the effect of simply quietly killing them.
Because my goal is to teach. But their goal isn't to create a nonviolent EVE society, but to mine.
You are wrong by assuming that the goal is to mine.
For most people, mining is not a self-sustained activity that rewards itself. Sure, a few hours and clicks down the line, some wild ISK appear. But these are mostly treated as a chore and not a rewarding goal.
Hunting down some dude together with others, on another hand, can be it's own reward and is definitely much more fun than camping rats. It doesn't even much matter if you catch him in the end, too.
You are trying to impose your own goals on "socials" and then fault them for being inefficient in achieving the goals that you yourself imposed. Doesn't work that way.
The situation you describe isn't linked to being social or not. It's just about being smart and recognizing the situation. I'm a social one but I would never try to stop a ganker by a wardec. That would be plainly stupid. But it's not tied to me having fun talking by making friends, instead of being a robot. Being social and being smart are two different things. You are juxtaposing two totally different concepts.
@Maxim: if their goal is to PvP, why do they mine?
Hunting a Catalyst ganker is probably the worst form of PvP in terms of success, they would literally have more kills doing any other PvP, including frigate duelling.
@Anonymous: being social stops them from finding better forms of PvP. Since the "bad ganker" hurt them, they MUST hunt that specific ganker.
@Gevlon
"being social stops them from finding better forms of PvP. Since the "bad ganker" hurt them, they MUST hunt that specific ganker."
But maybe they don't want a "better" form of PvP...
You don't want a better form of PvP, so how can you insult them for doing the same?
Recently it seems a lot of your positions you take against white knights and "morons" could easily be reflected on yourself. Have you considered taking a step back and objectively looking at what you are doing?
A lot of people have been telling you this, and you're quick to jump back and tell them they are wrong, but are you actually taking it in and realistically examining the situation? Remember, that it's OK to admit that you didn't get it right once in a while.
I wonder how things would be different if Player ships would be harder to distinguish from NPC-Ships.
So ther could be some NPC miners chilling in the belts with ships indistinguishable from an NPC-Corp Player. And NPC rats could attack in a similar way as PC Pirates.
I don't think that the situation you described is so bad.
In fact I think this is reassuring.
The more I live, the more I see people forgetting that the other people are human like them and instead treating them like simple object, classifying them into useful or useless, or simply ignoring them totally. Doing this they often hurt others and totally fail to see why they are after that in the center of conflict.
This result into more stress, more hatred and a lot of bitterness, simply because people fail to see other as human.
If these people try to change your behaviour, even if they fail, at least they try to treat you as a human, not as a mere "res" that must be changed in another patch from CCP
In a way you are not so different from them, you don't treat them as mere NPC that you must kill before another NPC kill you as you try to change their behavior.
maybe that's what makes the différence between white knight, anti-tear and moron: a white knight try to change you but he don't try to understand you, anti-tear will try to change you but will also change himself in the process, moron will not even consider you as a player and will ask CCP to make all the work by changing the game in their way
There's an old story about this, where if you are rowing down the river and an empty boat crashes into you, then you blame your own actions, "I should have seen the boat and steered around it".
But if you crash into a boat with a person in it, then you get angry at that person, and it was clearly their fault.
But it is a question of probability. If I only see an empty boat once every few years, maybe it is okay to not pay so much attention where I am going. But if the river is littered with hundreds of empty boats, I will need to actively navigate them, and so I am more prepared to avoid any boats with people in them.
Back to eve, I think they should introduce more scramming, ganking rats in high-sec (at least 0.5 to 0.7). It would create new gameplay opportunities running security for mining ops, and incentivise tanked-fits. This would in turn make ganking/counter-ganking a more interesting area of gameplay.
For what it's worth, I've taken a couple of potshots at you in the past. Personally my interest is twofold; first, I find it an interesting technical challenge to try and counter the advantages you use(instant undocks, agile ships etc). Second, I'd like a matching pair of Goblin corpses purely for posterity.
@Lucas: ganking miners provides very high kill ISK. White knighting provides the lowest possible in the game. What I do is completely impersonal, I can't care less who are in the mining barge. They are often not even people but bots, AFK boats.
What they do is completely personal. They ignore every other catalyst, just hunt mine.
I think Lucas has a point, even if your counter arguments are valid.
That is, just read your own post with yourself (ganker) instead of miners in mind, and the new rats being miners. A lot of your arguments fit as well (e.g. you wouldn't gank miners if they were NPCs).
Even if you can point out where the differences are, it highlights something: That the point you are trying to make is not well presented by your analogy and arguments. A good argument cannot be turned right back at you. You shouldn't need to clarify things and need add additional explanations.
So I hope you take the time and reassess the topic and maybe you can better explain your concern, or maybe even come to a better understanding.
@Anonymous: the game has PvE and PvP content. My claim is that killing miners is a very effective form of PvP, while killing gankers is very ineffective.
If miners would be NPCs, they would be PvE content.
My point is that miners don't want to PvP, yet they do because they can't control their social impulses.
Ego points can't be quantified and arguing with those people that have rationalized their need for said points only entrenches them.
This post reminds me of my favorite quote from the dune series: "Revenge is for children and the emotionally retarded."
The great hope of the revamped wardec system and the bounty system was precisely that people *would* get revenge, *would* strike back, *would* grab some friends, take a combat ship out and try to get even. This is true not only of CCP; anyone in a highsec wardec corp will express the same hope.
And here you are, saying flat out that the asymmetry involved in miner ganking makes that impulse futile and counterproductive. That social behavior in a social game is dumb and defeatist.
It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
"My claim is that killing miners is a very effective form of PvP, while killing gankers is very ineffective."
Isn't that EVE Common Sense? The design of the game is extremely tilted in favour of the gankers and it is futile to try and fight them since they operate on a completely different value system and anything you can do to them, they will see a trivial.
Nothing a player can do in-game can be used as a serious detriment against ganking. Gankers are like cockroaches and nothing you do will fully get rid of them.
As others pointed out already, miners in EVE tend to think of gankers as random NPC events and consider it futile to actively protect against them. Miners who don't think that way, will stop mining or quit the game altogether.
Lucas is entirely right. You have decided for whatever personal reasons motivate you that you are going to spend your time killing miners. This earns you no isk, nor any respect from your peers, only personal satisfaction. For you this is enough and as this is a sandbox game that's all you need. Make your own adventure story then do it and then award yourself a gold star.
However this is no different than the people who believe they are hunting you. Sure they're clueless and have no real plan for how they're going to stop you, nor the skill to actually do it. But that doesn't matter because they can roleplay themselves to success in exactly the same way you do. At the end of the day neither them nor you makes any meaningful difference, all you do is live your own personal narrative and shower yourself in gold stars.
If you're looking for an objective measure of achievement in the internet pixels you're always going to come up wanting. That applies not only to you but also to them. Just as you dismiss them as failing to achieve the goals you ascribe to them they dismiss you as failing to achieve the goals they ascribe to you.
" I respond to the action, not to the actor, therefore I don’t waste my time with “revenge” that gives me noting." - so if bots were station camping you instead of people, you still would leave your pc on for the night and pay for the used electrocity?
@Malthan: if the rats have limited time (like there are 5 rats active in EVE) then yes, since the camper rat can't camp other WGBWC members.
So what you're saying is that a very simple computer program could replace you, much like one can replace AFK miners?
@Gevlon
I've played MMOG's for over 20 years.
I'm not against ganking in highsec , however bumping my tanked Procurors says way more about your motives/ego than it does about WHY I play Eve & it isn't primarily to mine ore. I've made your Corp red (just so I know when you're around).A bit less ego & less of tarring ALL miners with the same brush eh ?
When you pay my sub I'll play Eve the way YOU want, until then I'll decide for myself.
o/
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