Oh look Gevlon's making more terrible arguments

Honestly I am not sure why Eve News 24 ever extended the offer to Gevlon to become one of their writers. He already has his own near cult like following, his opinions might have been valid in the analysis of trade, but now. No.

The other day I was thinking about why the whole "New Order" thing is just another instance of exploiters and pirates plying their trade. Why their noble quest is nothing more than a poorly veiled excuse to do as they want to do.

It's like Gevlon was thinking the exact opposite at the same time, because he comes out with this gem of a post on EN24 - "Game Harshness, Death Penalties, Miners".

In this article he attempts to start logically, but nearly instantly falls off what I like to call the "doesn't have a clue cliff." In re-reading the article I start wondering why I am starting to agree with his premise and then it hits me... No, it's not when he basically abandons all sense and once again tries to draw direct correlations between WoW and Eve. A tricky task AT BEST and not one that should be tackled by someone without a heavy use of caveats.

It's when he starts talking about the direction, in cost, of fights in Eve. He refers back to a old mechanic, the AOE doomsday where people "had" to risk their caps to defend their space, because two titans could kill off the conventional fleets. But then fails to recognize that the reason that Titan's lost their AOE doomsday is that fleets started showing up with more than one Titan. HAI PL, wonder how much they would love to show up with 40+ titans and kill every cap/subcap on the field in a mass of coordinated AOE DD's. The DD penalty of not being able to move wouldn't matter because the field would be clear. Their removal made for a consistant need for subcap fleets to support capitals, a wise move made by CCP not a bad one. For example in real life where Carrier battlegroups come in, as you guessed it, a group.

Then he comes up with this oversimplification gem

Harshness (of a game) = Death Chance * Death Penalty

Well that is pretty simple. You know, the chance you die when you engage in combat, times the penalty of dying, yup, that's the only two things that make something harsh!

To me the 'Harshness' of a game is determined by a host of sub factors. To break it out into my own harshness equation;

Harshness = Amount risked + chance of destroyed items (not just lost) + skill or knowledge required to be successful + "sloppy play" deficit / ability to recover "dropped" or lost items

In this measure of measurement of course Eve is one of the most "harsh" environments out there.

Eve is harsh because of a lot of factors, not just two. So from there his post just stands more and more assumptions on that faulty logic.

The idea that cheap ships are bad for the risk or for the amount of PvP in Eve is ridiculousness. First, cheaper ships actually lead to a more dangerous galaxy for many reasons, the most simple of those being that cheaper ships lead to people taking greater risks with those ships. Where an individual ship is mere "pocket change" a consistant PvPer, or in other words something Gevlon is CLEARLY not familiar with, would rather fly and use a host of cheaper, but still good ships rather than be forced into more expensive ships.

Even the "casual," read : anyone who can't play 6+ hours a day, (that doesn't make them bad) player would rather have cheaper ships, and it's not because it makes the game less harsh, it's because they are more likely to risk their ships or the ships of their friends if those ships are easier to replace. Risked ships equal more combat. As the price of ships rise, then most players become more risk-adverse, not less.

How does all this tie into the New Order? It's very simple. Gevlon tries to make his entire post neatly tie into the idea that by killing "afk miners" "Botters" and other undesirables, the New Order is doing some kind of good service to the people who play Eve. Clearly anyone who has experience in eve can see this for what it is, where experienced players, greifers and pirate types take advantage of newer or more pacifist players to make money and derive their enjoyment of the game.

James 315's words/goal is not something new, various 'pirate' cartels have been 'controlling', read : extorting, belts in highsec for a vast and long time. When I started playing(2005) there were plenty of highsec griefing corps who claimed ownership to entire systems or constellations. There's nothing wrong with that, if they can enforce it and get away with it, but that doesn't make it any less silly to call it a crusade for benefit of the miners.

Imagine the cost of minerals (therefor everything else) if the profits from mining in highsec was equal to or greater than incursions or lowsec or parts of Null.

How does that encourage people to leave highsec? How does that make people more willing to engage in fighting? Or wars for nullsec space that earns nothing for the rank and file that they can't already get in highsec.

T1 frigates would cost more than a couple mil isk each, just for the hull, cruisers would cost about as much as 40 mil isk? BattleCruisers would cost more than 100 mil isk, unfit. What do you think the chances are that people would want to risk their now super expensive ships more than the cheap ships flown now? The only tactic that would see wide use is fly in a herd or die to one. Even more so than now. Not losing then would be even more important than it already is. A true risk-aversion culture.

The risk of combat in eve is some very simplistic level inversely related to the cost of ships. Lower cost ships means more people in those ships in space, looking to fight. Higher priced ships means less people wanting to fight in and lose those ships. Sure, it's an oversimplification. A valid one.

All this ignores one faulty premise of the article. That ships in Sov Null fleets are getting cheaper. Tell that to the supercap pilots, or the Tengu fleets, or the Maelstrom, Navypoc, Abaddon, Tier 3 BC swarms prevalent in current Sov nullsec fights. Cost isn't down, its up on average across the board.