Greedy Goblin

Monday, May 6, 2013

Blues and morality

Sugar wrote how she disagrees that lowsec pirates who shoot anything that moves are "evil" and deserve punishment in the form of poverty. However I never mixed moral into my statements that pirates eat what they cooked. There is nothing immoral in wearing a T-shirt and a short. But if you do it in winter, you'll end up in the hospital. I believe that non-FW lowsec is necessarily poor and any design change that tries to give income to lowsec pirates will either fail or some block shows up and dominate the zone, destroying its "pirate" nature.

The main "immorality" of lowsec is people hurting each other without reason. Every single society bans that. In EVE alliances killing blues (outside of organized thunderdomes) is a good way to get to the NPC corp. However this rule applies only to society members. Killing outsiders is a common activity both in real life and in games. You can get various medals if you do the bad things to "the enemy". The lowsec pirates actually not immoral, since they aren't blue to their victim, and everyone shoot non-blue "outsiders" in EVE, except the roleplayers in Providence.

Why do others consider lowsec pirates "bad" then? Because they don't "rightfully own" their land, like WH and sov-null alliances. But they are wrong, since the WH and null alliances gained their land via violence, so their ownership isn't more moral than the "gate ownership" of the gatecamper pirates.

What is the action that has poverty as consequence in lowsec? Being small-gang. Everyone else is surrounded by blues. If you are in a WH, most people in your WH are your friendlies (except when an invasion is in progress). If you are in null, blues own every system in several regions. Even the FW-lowsec residents are surrounded by friendly militia members. A blue means someone who doesn't shoot you and even better, someone who shoots the one who'd shoot you (or at least a decoy to be shot instead of you). The more blues are around you, the less likely you are shot at, therefore can farm in peace.

Since lowsec pirates have very few blues and the presence of hostiles in "their" systems is the norm, they can never farm in peace. Since they can't farm, it doesn't matter how profitable it would be to farm, so buffing income sources wouldn't help. Of course there can be a point where it's so profitable that a nullsec block moves in, fill it with blues, exterminate the pirates and start farming.

There cannot be profit without relative peace. There cannot be peace without some form of law, that is usually internalized by the social people as moral, "the right thing. A land where piracy is the norm is an impoverished land. Think of Somalia!

3 comments:

Sugar Kyle said...

People will not read back on anything else and simply latch onto some of what you said.

I will also point out that much of most post also pertains to Tags 4 Sec and people feeling that shooting someone in low sec should have months worth of IRL consequences to pay it back.

Low sec groups do secure space to 'farm' in at times. Many go to high sec. I'd like more to stay in low sec.

I'm not asking for anyone to become mega rich. I'm asking for a reevaluation of basic support methods. If they are fine as is then fantastic. However, the entire battleship mineral re-balance thread goes into how much more expensive things are after each re-balance with income sources untouched. My entire financial pondering have been for new players getting into basic T1 fit T1 ships.

In general I have been wandering all over the topic of low sec and thoughts about it since Fanfest.

Kobeathris said...

I don't think pirates want low sec to be more profitable so they can farm there. I think they want it to be more profitable so other people will want to farm there, and then they can shoot them and take their stuff. Look at it this way, there would have been no real life pirates in the Caribbean were there not Spanish treasure ships moving through the area.

Unknown said...

I must kind of disagree.

"Evil," in a morality context, should be described as putting your own needs above those of others, to the expense of others. Gevlon would agree that trying to do this in the market will lead to hardship for you, though he might not agree with morality (he tends not to).

If you blow up non-blues in your own space, that is pretty much an evil act. The correct course of action is to determine intentions -- much like real life military sentries challenge people. "Halt, who goes there?" and so on. If there is no response, then yes it is probably ok to shoot, since you cannot determine that person's intentions.

Likewise, pirates in low who kill people are killing people for the pew pew or for the ship loot. They are not defending their space, as there's nothing to defend. If they're running pve ops and they operate like a normal military, they could challenge people to determine if the people were attempting to grief them. There's none of that though because the point is to shoot people, not to do pve.