TLDR: It will take a while for me to get to the point. If you can’t handle the reading, get out of the library, in the grand scheme of things my words are of no consequence, so you’re not missing anything vital. I do not advertise my own postings on principle, I do one tweet that I posted something and that’s it, so if someone thought it worthy of your attention, and you don’t like that, blame them instead, please.
"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." is, actually, merely a special case of a far more general rule which I wish was more widely acknowledged. I find that general rule immensely useful for just about any kind of analysis, from scientific to daily life: "Far more things in this world are because of X, rather than in order to Y."
It’s not that nobody ever does anything deliberately, but there’s less of it than everybody thinks. In any given situation, only a few courses of action are typically rational or acceptable for anyone at all, and beyond interpersonal level, deliberate choice turns into statistics of cause and effect and structured patterns. Once you look at things this way, they typically start making considerably more sense very quickly.
I have already written a lot on the subject of new player attrition in Eve. In fact, I started with it, kicked at it from different angles, and in general danced all around it. It’s a complex, multifaceted problem, which can have unpleasant consequences if not conclusively solved. It’s not just about the competition between newbies and veterans that typically results with newbies being completely unable to be anything other than fodder, but that is the hot subtopic this week.
It takes someone like Ripard Teg to point out the structural similarities to rape and slavery to get it at least commented on, however. Even then, the result is that people put up hordes of straw men and burn them in effigy. Balanced thinking on the subject is quite uncommon. There is enough stupidity in this debate,1 just as there is enough malice, but very little deliberation.
Instead of saying what others have already said, let me instead poke at it from yet another angle, which I don’t see covered well, if at all, in other people’s postings. It’s not about suicide ganking or wardec or anything so specific, it’s about the cultural mechanisms.
Culture Balalaika
Here’s a definition: Culture is positively selected social experience, expressed in semiotic systems.
To be fair, there are hundreds of definitions of "culture", but this one is the work of my PhD advisor,2 and is notable for being the one core phrase of his social anthropology textbook. You spend half the semester explaining what the phrase actually means, and the other half describing what follows from it. I can’t really repeat the whole course here, but I’ll do the very terse breakdown:
- "positively selected" means that only experience that "works", that is, offers a survival benefit, becomes part of culture. The experience itself may be negative, but by being positively selected, it becomes a ‘known don’t', so to speak, and as such, "works". Even a stereotype can be part of such positively selected experience, because it produces a behavioral strategy.
- "social experience" means that only experience acquired and used socially actually matters for culture. There is very little other experience in the world,3 but the distinction is significant when philosophy enters the picture.
- "expressed in semiotic systems" describes the process of cultural regeneration — carriers of culture transmit it to the next generation by expressing it through various languages, whether verbal or non-verbal. Culture exists intersubjectively between people, but it gets there through communication, and constantly loops between brains and words.
The interesting bits for the discussion at hand are these:
- There are multiple mechanisms of positive selection.
- Conscious — you only teach others what you believe is true, or at least worth telling.
- Competitive — individuals which employ working culture enjoy greater success than those who don’t, and serve as a living example to others when their activities are put into words and transmitted.
- Darwinian — populations that cannot adapt their culture to changing circumstances or change their circumstances to match their culture through other resources die out or otherwise suffer.
- The loop can cause a certain lag between the world changing and the culture adapting to it. In Eve’s case it typically takes a few months to loop through, as it’s relatively small. Greater cultures can take generations to adapt.
- Something does not have to be actually true to offer a survival benefit.
Bears
Sociology’s maturation as a scientific discipline is marked by a study of suicide, and that’s not a coincidence — suicide is what happens when someone unsubscribes from reality for one reason or another, and that it happens is indicative of a problem in the society. In Eve, we get "killed" on a daily basis and are none the worse for wear, but we unsubscribe — i.e. suicide — fairly easily.
We therefore have to consider "surivial benefit" to be something that reduces a player’s chance to unsubscribe.
It is a known fact that only 5% of Eve players never solo, 16% always do, and 55% (16+39) mostly play solo, and it takes just a look at the map to see that the grand majority of Eve population is in high sec. I won’t be digging up the numbers now4 but the popular opinion seems to agree that carebears, defined here as primarily PVE, primarily solo players, primarily in NPC or small player corporations, are the majority of high sec population.
The proverbial carebear is invisible like dark matter. Carebears don’t mix with other subcultures, and don’t mix into the bigger public discourse of Eve often, so they’re kind of hard to pin down. A proverbial carebear, as one is imagined, has the following properties:
- Avoids fighting when he can. When wardecced, carebears will turtle up until the attackers get bored.
- Wishes to avoid putting himself in real danger in general, and therefore avoids areas of space other than high sec.
- Is less social than PVP-oriented players, avoiding contact or playing with others.
- Produces delicious tears. That is, treats in-game objects as things of value and does not appear to separate the game context from the rest of the world readily.
- Wishes the game to be changed for their benefit, by positioning themselves as the victim of unjustified aggression and appealing for justice.
The criticism directed against such carebears, whether they really are like that or not, centers around the "victim" bit, attacking the carebear’s pacifistic play style (seen as resulting from cowardice or stupidity, regardless of it’s actual reason) and appeals to higher authority.
Vodka5
The stereotypical perfect carebear, if one exists at all, is clearly a rarity. That they seem less social to people who don’t associate with them is because they don’t associate with non-carebears. That they may express wishes that appear to be motivated with changing the game for their benefit is universal and not restricted to carebears, you can see shining examples from any side of any debate in Eve. The interesting quality for this particular analysis is the risk and conflict avoidance.
Tally up everything I said above and take a look at this logical chain:
- At least half of the entire population of Eve appear to be carebears.
- Therefore, they unsubscribe less often than others, otherwise their population would not grow.
- This means that carebear culture, it’s social practices, offer a survival benefit — depending on the levels of alt proliferation, it can be an even higher survival benefit than any other subculture of Eve.
- The most commonly cited characteristics of carebears are avoidance of risk (which risk mostly results from being put into contact with the PVP culture, as otherwise carebears are not commonly at risk) and being antisocial. (That is, not associating with people from the PVP side of the game.)
- These two are clearly connected by the counter-party, that is, the PVP subculture.
- It is likely that people who don’t avoid the members of PVP-subcultures are more likely to unsubscribe.
- Strategies other than avoidance of possible aggression, like fighting back against it, cause people to unsubscribe.
…what?
Well, actually that’s not the only possible conclusion, there are a few possible branches in here. The survival benefit that carebear subculture offers might be something else. For example, while it might not be quite as directly cooperative as the PVP subculture is, it is clearly more supportive in terms of collating and disseminating information about Eve. The biggest off-world databases about Eve are those describing optimal missioning routines, after all, not optimal PVP fittings or skill builds. I.e. carebears support each other more, and by avoiding direct conflict, they also eat each other less.
But it’s still kind of tricky to dismiss entirely and should sound worrying.6 The question one should be asking is not "why is it that people are becoming more risk averse" but "why avoiding risk is better in the long run than risking". Because if it were otherwise, it would be positively selected, the carebear stereotype wouldn’t exist, and avoiding risk would not be anywhere as popular.
It’s quite apparent that nobody deliberately wished it to be this way,7 but there have to be reasons for it.
Where to go from there?
As I mentioned above, there are multiple mechanisms of positive selection, and something doesn’t have to be true to be selected. And it can also lag behind, though in Eve, the lag is typically short enough.8 But here are some things that I suggest you meditate on:
- Which selection mechanism is in effect? Is the risk and conflict avoidance selected because influential people say it is good, because people who do that are seen to be more successful, or because people who don’t avoid risk lose too much and unsubscribe? I.e., are we dealing with a runaway meme or an actual effect of one or multiple laws of game mechanics? Measures to take against either would be radically different.
- What is your core value in this game? If the game is no longer about the pecking order of domination for the sake of domination, would you keep playing it? If that turns out to be required for it to continue existing, would you say it has betrayed it’s core values? Should continuing existing be a core value for a game in the first place?
If you actually got this far, have a cookie, it helps thinking.
-
Comments on Ripard Teg’s post have quite a high proportion if you ask me.↩
-
It is not unimportant to know how it came about, though probably not essential. The old man narrowly missed WWII, only getting out of flight school months after it was done, and went into science after his retirement from the military — in fact, most of his generation of social scientists are ex-military, this was a common career path — where he served in the fighter squadron that covered the Tsar Bomba test. Being so close to the biggest man-made explosion ever and actually seeing the 8km fireball does a lot of things to a person, and he kept trying to impress on his students that such horribly destructive things cannot be dignified by calling them a part of culture. By his definition, Tsar Bomba was not ‘positively selected’, which is, strictly speaking, true — on multiple stages of it’s development, even. It is not a widely known fact, but the immense 100 megaton device, with it’s yield dialed down to 50Mt as 100Mt was too dangerous to test, so big that the bomber had to fly with it’s bomb bay doors removed, was initially intended as a torpedo — the first ever geophysical weapon, that is, weapon that invokes the Earth itself to do it’s damage. A 100 Mt explosion in water at the right depth would have caused a tsunami that would wash San Francisco or New York right off the map. As far as I’ve been able to dig up, USSR abandoned this line of development for humanitarian reasons rather than any others.↩
-
PVE experience in Eve, for example, is still social even when you run missions solo — you are still part of the greater market and aren’t ever truly alone.↩
-
I would, were they easier to dig up. Most we get is fairly cryptic economic indices once in a blue moon, these days.↩
-
What else did you expect once I mentioned balalaika and bears? In fact, here, have some.↩
-
If you want to read this as me implying that carebears might be prospering only because they don’t play with jerks, feel free. Nobody reads the footnotes anyway. :)↩
-
In fact, far fewer things about Eve are deliberate than I think is good for it. For example, the entire map and mineral distribution was generated randomly.↩
-
Plex tactics in Faction Warfare have propagated over the course of at most two months, so while there’s a lot to say about communication barriers in Eve, it’s not completely separated into mutually inaccessible chunks.↩
Re: footnote 6 – well, now that you mention it…
As always, a very interesting article.
There seems to be a lot of social experience in carebears I think. Look at huge group databases like eve-survival, where missioners provide information that help their fellow bears. Even explorers, who are directly opposing each other in the race to find sites, share information on sites, fits, etc.
I’m not seeing where you’re drawing this: “6. It is likely that people who don’t avoid the members of PVP-subcultures are more likely to unsubscribe.” According to the popular anti-carebear meme, the most delicious carebear tears come from rage-quitting bears. The opposite is the slow death by boredom of someone who does nothing but missions and wears out on the limited PVE experience. Maybe this trouble comes from this statement “A proverbial carebear, as one is imagined, has the following properties…” – but the actual, real carebears as measured by CCP’s data, are not that proverbial carebear.
Firstly consider how many “carebears” are actually alts for PVPers – they are the means by which income is gathered to fund PVP explosions. This is something I’d hope that CCP has tracked via ISK transfers, given that they’ve stated that their current system has trouble distinguishing actual players amongst all the characters. Then the supposition that the person behind the character is culturally difference becomes harder to sustain.
Secondly, consider that since you started your article talking about noobs, how many new players start out mixing all of these experiences, sampling as many as possible. Without the incentive to pour money into multiple accounts, the new player is more like to have a diverse character rather than the specialized alts that the older players have developed.
I hope we’ll hear more from CCP that will help clear this up. I think the spread of multiple cultures in Eve is nowhere near as simple as many would paint it.
Thank you. :)
Where I’m drawing #6: The anti-carebear meme describes people who are rage-quitting. Once they have rage-quit, they have removed themselves out of the gene pool — whatever they say now has much less likelihood to reach the ears of anyone in Eve. (and when it does reach someone’s ears, they become far less likely to subscribe) In Eve, their behaviour remains as a negative example for actual carebears, if they exist.
I.e. if carebears were people who rage-quit, there would be no more carebears, they would have all rage-quit, so the remainder must be those that don’t rage-quit. Therefore they’re the ones who don’t get caught, since we don’t hear of them PVPing. :)
Slow death by boredom it might be, but somehow it seems that slow death by boredom while avoiding conflict keeps one subscribed better than trying to actively resist. For an example, the prescribed action for a mission runner in high sec when anyone enters their mission up until the new crimewatch and AI changes has always been to ignore whoever does whatever he does and pretend you’re a bot — or better yet, warp off and wait. Then he’ll go away. Otherwise he’ll shoot you, and you’ll die under rat fire.
It might, of course, be, that this is a runaway meme, like I said, but if it is, it’s a very strong one, and notice that the idea does not have to be true to lead to survival anyway — the dark forests might not actually contain soul-eating monsters, but as long as they contain mere flesh-eating wolves in quantity, believing in soul-eating monsters can be helpful and will perpetuate.
We don’t know how far the alt interpenetration goes, how many of those carebears are secretly players from completely different careers, cultures and groups, and whether the stereotype really is so distinct as to isolate a large proportion of people so they look like dark matter. And neither does CCP, by their own admission. :) We don’t know exactly how people progress from random newbies to members of coherent groups, either, all the details of socialization process are only available to us as our personal stories and personal stories of others we have access to, but no statistics of any serious kind. If I worked for CCP, that’s where I would start.
I don’t work for CCP. :)
OK, thought provoking post, not so much comment… and here’s why. If you are going to try and understand a thing, issue, type, whatever, objectivity will get you answers, subjectivity just makes you a whiner… take a hard look at Poetic’s blog. I used to look forward to reading often well crafted posts on a wide variety of topics… now with Poe’s eternal, subjective and emotional 24/7/365 rant on “Carebear Creep”… I have stopped listening…
For me, subjectively, this one sentence, “…slow death by boredom of someone who does nothing but missions and wears out on the limited PVE experience.” makes anything you said before AND after, nothing more than subjective tripe.
Why? Because to YOU PvE content is boring. A subjectively emotional determination based on YOUR personal feelings and preferred playstyle. I know, for a fact and from months of personal experience, that your “boring PvE” is for many others very VERY fulfilling game time… So your whole comment was just wasted recycled electrons…
One mans boring repetition, useless busywork and broken mechanic is another mans fascinating creation, interesting complexity and “If they change THAT I’ll quit!” mechanic. Be wary of the subjective analysis… it makes one sound the fool to all those who do not share your bias… and they are the one’s you would most wish to listen and see the error of their ways… otherwise yer just preachin’ to the choir and you will effect and change nothing.
I write every post and comment from 2 perspectives… I write to describe what I “see” as objectively as I can, while my writing style is personal and colloquial… and I re-read and edit as though I am on the other side of the fence in any issue… I already know what the choir thinks… I want to capture and keep the attention of the guy who DISAGREES with me.
TurAmarth, I think you missed the context of the comment. As I read it (which of course could be mistaken), Mary’s post was about what causes people to leave Eve. In that context, one of the reasons is the repetitive nature of missions. If people do not feel bored by missions, then that would not cause them to be selected out of the Eve population in the way that she described. Note also the context that we were already comparing stereotypes – and we all know the downsides of stereotypes. For instance, my comment about the existence or nonexistence of the theorized “proverbial carebear.”
Now moving out this specific context, there is a good thread on the Eve forums about improving missions. I’d like to think that my recent post there offered some suggestions and you’ll noticed that in my context my statement was: “I get that some people might find it relaxing to grind through missions in their pimped Machariel.”
So I think we’re actually a lot closer in opinion than you think – highly unlikely that we’re in complete agreement of course. :)
“Eve pve is boring” has become something of a meme which too often passes unchallenged. It is possible to set yourself up to pve with almost no input required (or at least it was pre-Ret). A guy exploited a perpetually respawning high sec plex for billions using a 23/7 sentry domi setup.
But at keyboard pve is much more effective, in many cases it’s also dangerous plus there is plenty of challenge if people want it. 10/10 complexes and c6 sleeper sites are anything but boring.
The meme is perpetuated by players who want development effort to focus on their issues, not pve.
That’s not entirely fair. 10/10 complexes and C6 WH sites are completely inaccessible to new players. I’ve been in EVE for 16 months now, and I don’t have any ships that would survive either. A few too many of my ships would get annihilated in some of the COSMOS and Epic Arc missions. Maybe that makes me a Failure At EVE(TM). Fine. It’s still true.
And, while it’s true that PVPers are likely to consider PVE boring by definition and automate it to the extent possible, look at L1-L4 high sec missions. These, and mining, make up the PVE that the majority of new players are going to see for a good while. Sure, there are some really fun ones, like Dread Pirate Scarlet, and some challenging ones like Duo of Death, Recon and Buzz Kill, but by and large it’s: 1) warp into yet another cloudy, cluttered area; 2) blow up faraway red crosses; 3) loot and salvage (optional, and increasingly pointless) ; 4) repeat. Ranges in EVE are such that most of the time you can’t even see what you’re fighting, unless you specifically right-click->Look At.
Exploration is fun if you like the scanning minigame (personally, I do) and because it often takes you into dangerous territory, and that makes any activity thrilling.
OK so there’s repetitive missions plus a variety of challenging other content. If you wanted to push yourself you could try a pirate epic arc, could scan sites in high sec, could do low end wh sites with your skills.
Also surely it can’t be as boring as all that if high sec carebearing is the most popular activity in Eve.
A lot of people do it because it’s relaxing, and remunerative. That’s where a lot of the super-shiny mission boats come from: They’re never at any serious risk from NPCs, they blow things up at a satisfying rate, and they don’t require dual-boxing with an alt. (Not that I have any–I fly T1, even in Incursions–but there are plenty of them out there.) There’s a particular satisfaction in one-shotting enemies out of the sky.
What makes missions fun for me personally, and for some of the PVE players I know, is running them with other people. Two or three people running a bunch of missions together is much more fun than me going out solo, and as long as the gang doesn’t get too big it’s not any less remunerative, because we finish them a lot quicker.
Solo, the main reason I run missions is to grind up the magical 8.0 standing necessary for perfect high-sec refining. The other reason is LP to get nice things. Occasionally I’ll take a break from security missions and run distribution or mining missions just for variety.
+1 to wormhole PVE being more interesting (not just in C6s, either), but that’s because, at least at my level, it requires fleet comps, which means other people and tactics, plus the ever-present possibility of Suddenly Proteus, and so I enjoy that a lot.
“magical 8.0 standing necessary for perfect high-sec refining”
Actually it’s 6.7. 8 is for jump clones.
Having been a carebear for years (and still considering myself close to one), there’s an obvious reason this subculture don’t mix with others ;
They are not playing for tears, while others are mostly playing for that.
How do you want people thinking opposing way to socialize on a game where they can hide from each other, and where one subculture has the power to silence the other?
The problem with this analysis is that a “carebear” who “unsubscribes” is a player. Every non carebear player will have at least one (and probably more) characters that would appear to be carebear characters. The Jita price checker alt. The hauler alt. The Incursion ISK farmer. These are all popular carebear characters that could (and often do) belong to a non carebear player.
These are fake carebear characters.
They look and behave like carebears. They are still part of the NPC corporation. They never really play with other players, but they belong to non carebear players. These fake carebear characters are unlikely to unsubscribe due to an inconvenient moment of PvP.
… I forgot to make my point. My point is that I believe the number of true carebear players is a lot lower than you assume, and the crux of your argument is “there are a lot of them, so life can’t be that difficult for them”.
Of course. :) That needs numbers that only CCP can get at to conclusively prove or disprove. Mind you, the crux of my argument isn’t quite that “life can’t be that difficult for them”… Though I guess there is that too.
But this argument is kind of double-edged. If carebears are not actually the majority, then the majority of players are actually alts. Which means that Eve has far less people than it’s online counts or active accounts numbers would suggest. Which means that any problem of Eve is life-threatening. :)
^^ I think that’s probably far closer to the target than a lot would think, and CCP would admit. I regularly participate in the surveys they send out, and one of the questions I’ve seen on each one is “How many accounts do you own?” 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10+. Wait. 10+? Seriously? Obviously SOMEONE clicked that one quite a few times or that option would’ve been “selected out”, as you say, in the next round of surveys.
I flew thru some system in…Genesis, Domain? I don’t remember, honestly, but I was looking for WTs, and just happened to notice that local had a SHIT-TON of toons all named “[xx] of many”. Curious, I went to the lone ice field, and there were literally 30 of them clustered up at the far end, all ice-chopping happily away.
Somehow, I kind of doubt that there were 30 players there, all playing nearly-identically named characters. ;-) Just saying. I mentioned it later to guys in corp and was informed that that was the famous “suicide-tanker” that proved to be Mittani’s undoing. Either way, 30 EVE clients, all logged in, all in the same hisec system. That won’t skew the numbers, not at all.
As for subjective analysis, well, to do truly _objective_ analysis, you need data, the sort of data that only CCP [maybe] has, and is not releasing to the unkempt masses of the rest of us. Therefore, subjective analysis is all that’s really left, given biased data and not a full data set, at that. :-/
That is a good article.
I think you expose exactly what CCP Seagull want to convey when she brings a new vocabulary to EVE development. Words like “lurkers”, “small gang leader” are not loaded with the bullshit that words like carebear, ganker, pirate are.
Every time CCP tried to develop for one of this old groups it fails as they don’t help to understand reality.
I started in EVE as a solo mission runner, then i started “lurking” in RvB channel, get to know people and finally join. Today I can describe myself as an “enabler” and “follower” of some “small gang leaders”. None of the old stereotypes would have describe me in any point of my career.
And I believe it doesn’t describe most of the player base. Everyone in the game dream of being part of space battles and want to do things with others, but bad mechanics and planing from CCP created a paranoid, and violent culture. May sound strange coming from someone that expend hours blowing other people’s ships but there is no violence in RvB. It’s like playing soccer with your mates, one day you win, the other you lose the important is to have fun.
I hope they see that in CCP now and start developing the game towards this kind of culture, and not the hunter and prey game only.
Firstly, thank you for introducing me to Korpiklaani. Always can use more folk metal in my life.
It’s too early given the depth of the post for me to have any sort of reaction other than prepare for more thinking. I guess that’s what the cookie is for =P. At the very least it makes me assess the reasons why I play Eve.
Thanks for the good article and an excuse for some self-reflection.
Another good post.
Re: alts: actual numbers are currently impossible, but Kelduum Revaan of EVE University estimates that, if EVE generally reflects the number of accounts of his corp’s membership, then EVE has about 150,000 actual players, including Chinese playing on Serenity, and the average number of toons per player is three.
I really hate the term carebear. It’s inarticulate, and many of the assumptions about people who get tagged with the moniker are inaccurate at best and self-serving at worst.
Since we’re frolicking through minefields: there are two broad types of player that any game has to account for: people who enjoy the game for the game, and people who project themselves intimately into the game, and take any setbacks personally. Now, the instinct of any EVE player is to say that the latter are carebears. But consider Bartle’s “Killer” type: They get a thrill from dominating another person and reap the resulting impotent complaints and insults as a reward. The game itself and their manifestation within it only matter as a means for them to dominate other people, so they’re just as firmly projected into the game as the most tear-filled mission runner looking at the wreckage of his beloved Raven Navy Issue. And so, the killers are just as prone to tears when any discussion of limiting ganking or grief play arises, because it’s taken a direct assault on them as players and an attempt to deny them the only rush they can get from the game.
I would say that most players do not fall into either category, whether they prefer PVP[1] or PVE or both. But the minority who do are the Scylla and Charybdis that any game must sail safely between, because they will not hesitate to make their displeasure known.
[1] I’m including ganking as PVP here. Not all gankers are killers.[2]
[2] Oh, BTW, I read the footnotes.
Sorry for the double post. I just realized that I expanded a side thought to a thesis and then neglected the subject I was originally going to bring up.
Mabrick has an excellent post about the idea of acclimatisation: It takes a while to get used to EVE, to settle in to it, and how long depends on the individual and the circumstance. On top of that, the NPE is absolutely terrible about introducing new players to the climate of EVE, and the lack of direction after the tutorials doesn’t help either. It’s no wonder, then, that the most successful alliances in EVE have well-established community bases outside of EVE. I was just in Arnon last night, and some poor guy with a 2 day old toon was frustrated in Local because he was trying to PVP, losing horribly, not getting any help from his corpmates, and it turns out it was because the corp was all newbies. The Break-A-Wish Foundation members present were somewhat sympathetic, because EVE is unreasonably hard when you’re just stumbling around blind, and your friends are too afraid and confused to help you out of a tight spot. But unless you come from a pre-existing community, the corp you end up in is a blind guess. The official Recruitment channel is full of scammers, thieves, spies and awoxers, so that really doesn’t help. The gankers out to forcibly acclimate rookies to EVE don’t really help, either. So, if you accept that any game with any personality at all will not work for everyone, how do you ease people into the game?
Other, established players eased me into the game and helped me with my early confusion, but that’s because I knew which alliance to join coming in: It was part of a pre-existing community outside of EVE. So my personal experience isn’t so instructive to the newbie who just came to the game cold.
I.e. to get socialized in Eve. :) There’s a term for it, the process is extensively studied, and Eve’s design does nothing to support it and no end of things to hinder it.
The best method to deal with it devised so far that I have heard about is a randomly selecting apprenticeship system. (New player says “X sounds fun!” and the game matches him randomly to a veteran who says “I want to teach people to X”. Both get benefits as the new player progresses and lose them if the progress stops.) I also have a design of a web-of-trust system brewing somewhere in the back of my head that I won’t require CCP to implement if they let me have a character metadata API of some sort. You need to steer the players around each other if you want community crystallisation to happen tolerably fast and in the ways you want. And if you want to keep your business running in perpetuity, you have to.
But that has been a point I keep making, Eve is designed too randomly, with too much belief in market forces. You can’t just dump something dry into a pit and say it’s a sandbox, and looks like the consequences are finally sinking in. :)
Oooh, thanks for that little factoid. :)
Actually, I disagree with Bartle a lot on this one. I say there is no such thing as a Killer type, and while the classification is useful in some ways, it’s just as problematic as socionics. While there is no question that a behavioral pattern exists, saying that this is a “type” would mean that it is a property of a player themselves. But you can be a killer in one game while you are an achiever or explorer in another, or depending on how your bipolar mood swings you can fluctuate between several otherwise incompatible types over time. It’s a viewpoint one settles on regarding a particular environment which translates into observable and quantifiable behaviour, but this viewpoint can change depending on how one’s path through the game changes — and that can change depending on how the game mechanics laws are altered. I.e. something made the Killers of Eve such, or rather, steered them to become Killers. This can be found and tinkered with.
[2] Ohohohoho. :)
Oh, absolutely. They’re intended as classifications of in-game player behavior, not of the players themselves, and they’re necessarily broad. For instance, a lot of griefing in WoW (the closest you can get to killing on the PVE servers) is done by players who are bored sick of the game but unable to leave, so they amuse themselves by tormenting newbies. The same people might be achievers or explorers or even socials in another game that they aren’t totally sick of. Also, very few people fall neatly into one category or another.
I find them useful as heuristics derived from extended observation, in part because they match up with my own observations.
Thinking aloud here: If the killer mentality is like the bullying mentality, then the people most likely to exhibit killer behavior are the ones who’ve previously been on the receiving end of that behavior. It wouldn’t be a cause-and-effect thing, obviously, but an increase in probability. “Getting ganked showed me what EVE was really about, so ganking this newbie will show him what it’s about,” etc.
Not if you check Bartle’s own paper where “killers have chased everyone else off and then moved on to kill on another game”. (quoted from memory, might be off) :) Though that does happen eventually, it doesn’t quite work like that.
Considering how many people are explicitly hunting newbies “to teach them a harsh lesson about Eve” — pretty much their own words — you can bet on that one. :)
Well, there are those. They’re just a fairly stark minority, but I ran into them even on little ElendorMUSH. They were there because there were noncombatant characters, including one of mine (and I would say, up front, that if attacked the character would flee, that she didn’t fight). Unfortunately for them, there was a FLEE command, my character had maximum stats to avail herself of it, and that led to a lot of whining and complaining from people whose were denied the rush of killing an essentially helpless character–even when I’d told them exactly what would happen in advance. I even had GMs called on me a couple of times, never successfully: I wasn’t exploiting anything, I was just playing the character. They were few, but they were certainly there.
But regardless of what he says, I think his types work better as descriptors of particular behavior, not of player disposition–even if, sometimes, they *do* reflect player disposition. For instance, consider this hilarious article, where a professor who has apparently never read Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games plays City of Heroes by the rules as written, when the emergent endgame had turned everyone into Socials by the time he arrived.
“Bartle’s own paper”
It’s here: http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm
Simply excellent. Well done!
Very interesting and well-thought out article.
I do think that something quite interesting happens with types in Eve. We all start out in high sec and with the exception of a few newbie-friendly null sec alliances are then required to build up there as carebears. There are people who jump in and try to solo pvp in their Merlin in their first week and I’d bet almost all of them quit.
However as we progress in Eve pvp becomes more and more attractive. We find ourselves in situations where we’d like the capabillity to retaliate, we become rich enough to afford ship losses and our skills reach a point where we start to have an advantage over the average pvp pilot. Plus pvp activities are the main social space in Eve. If you want to play with other people you’ll probably pvp with them. There simply aren’t many competent people looking for people to mission with them.
So essentially the carebear v pvper dialogue is to some extent a newbie v veteran dialogue in different clothing. And that has profound implications. The CSM for instance, where veteran status is pretty much a requirement to get a seat, is going to tend towards one side of the debate. And the current delegates tend to be titan owning Tech controllers, not representative at all of the plurality.
Pingback: Plan 9 for Outer Space « Out of Cake
To answer some of your questions:
I think risk aversion comes from time invested into acquiring the stuff you have, time constraints on available play time, combined with the fact that the NPE and your early life in EVE isn’t about loosing stuff all the time. Most of the high sec dwellers aren’t accustomed to loosing ships. And who wants to loose the things that they use to gather ISK?
If any player gears up to go out and have some pvp fun, that is a conscious act, you choose how much ISK you want to sink in it, and you already buried what you undock in.
So it simply boils down to what mindset are players come into EVE, and what the game thoughts them in their early days (other players included).
About the Core value of EVE:
When i first heard of EVE back in 2004 or so there were no other space game where you could a politician, trader, fighter, pirate, bounty hunter, etc. at the same time, and without classes. The possibilities seemed endless. You could be what you wanted to be in EVE, the meta don’t require in game skill training. That was unprecedented at that time. Maybe even still.:)
For me the values of EVE are the player driven Market, the Metagame, and the social aspects of it, and the tools to write your own story, because the game world in of itself isn’t driving you anywhere with quests to follow. And so we are interdependent on each other. And the implications of that are the core value here i think.
I don’t think ‘avoidant carebear’ is a type of player as much as a universal technique. It is also a necessary one unless funded by endless plex infusions or technetium.
Players in this game leave this game either due to boredom, or failure at risk management that result in significant setback leading to giving up. A player skilled in risk management can easily decide to take more risk for the sake for fun!reward! or pull back if nothing interesting is going on, while a player that fails at risk management is only one big mistake away from leaving. I’ve seen many pvpers retire into periods of carebearing, for example as their pvp groups collapsed or between patch cycles where no new content (ships) results in boredom and they just collect SP and make money while waiting for future opportunities. There are also carebearing alts of players that knows far too well of the motivation and capacity of pvp opponents and work to improve avoidance.
PvP and skill in pvp is actually not about “taking risk”, but improved risk management to achieve goals. Every pvper controls his risk exposure in both possible looses, potential rates of failure, and possibility of reward and continuously adjust behavior to optimize the variables.
———–
The rage quitters and self proclaimed victims are stereotypically “carebears” because they are trying to make money, but they have very little in common with skillful players in the same sector with qualities of the above. They are poor at risk management and EXCEEDINGLY SOCIAL and does not have the paranoia of all stable players.
Take the stereotypical carebear “victim”: They tend to be in a “industrial corp” with other actual people(!) with significant shared assets(!), fly poorly fit expensive ship in low reward activities and attempt to have collective goals while not filtering recruitment tightly. They also undock during wardecs and try to fight back and find it outrageous that fighting is grossly unfair and not a realistic option at all. They are also vocal, often to the point of raging on local to be recorded by “tear farmers” and thus attract more attention by players that enjoys inflicting pain. They are playing the ideals or role playing instead of the reality of metagaming with alts.
Why is it that poor risk managers bound by RP notions tend to be carebears? Well, you can’t “sport” pvp as a newbie with no isk and anyone that attempt it will quickly be forced back into carebearing or buy characters, but people that do this probably understand metagaming better, with detachment of character and the personality behind it.
If the incoming player is a griefer that enjoys inflicting pain, then he is not bound by lolRP notions of behavior and would learn metagaming fast to achieve his goals, and understand the risk other players pose to himself.