Wednesday, October 1, 2014

FYI: Frigates aren't Fun

A common answer to my bitter vet mumblings and grumblings is that I should "just go get in a tech 1 frigate and have some fun."

I really hate it when people tell me this. You might as well tell me to go get some warp core stabs and find a button to orbit in order to gain feelings of enjoyment and happiness.

Now, tell it to a null-sec pilot who has been restrained to dealing with politics and capital warfare for the past few years, and you might be recommending something worthwhile. But, telling a girl who's been in Faction War for the past four years, to go 'take a break and fly a frigate' is a laughable proposition.


Furthermore, I'm not one of that crowd that buys into the whole 'solo frigate pvp' deal. My hands don't shake when I kill you with my elite Tristan of doom. And I do not get some sort of weird, egotistical rush by engaging in something that is essentially a super sneaky way of being extremely risk adverse.

I'm not saying that the cost of my ship is some sort of direct indication of the fun I will have. However, I have always had a problem being content with 'for the hell of it' pvp. I like fighting over something --protecting something, conquering something, or etc. Roaming around to randomly shoot someone who is also randomly roaming around can be tiresome.

Also, I don't understand the fascination with 'explosions.' Loving explosions. Making explosions. Gonna go make people explode. According to eve-kill I'm well past 7,500 explosions  and I have to be honest --most of them have looked pretty much the same, and not all that exciting to boot. In fact, much of the time you don't see any sort of explosion of any kind. Nowadays, it's more of a gentle blinking on one's overview that indicates a target that has been turned into scrap. (Or cold flesh, depending.)

Now imagine you're shooting someone, and he's entering structure. Just a little more to go....a little more to go. And he explodes. Your ship rocks back slightly from the force of the nearby impact and your screen lights up with a beautifully grim flash of burning fuels and flying shards of metal. You listen in awe as the sirens that were once blaring in warning and confusion are snuffed out prematurely and you cringe as you see bodies --their faces still etched with frozen horror --pouring from melting, metal edifices.

You turn your ship away as flaming scraps rain down on you, and steer carefully through the smoking chaos.

Maybe then I would be excited about explosions. Maybe, the morbidness that lies within would agree that jumping into a frigate to 'go have some fun' *insert evil laugh* is a very good suggestion indeed.

But explosions (and frigates), like many other things in EVE, are more fun in people's minds then in reality, I think.

All this being said, I'm one to talk. Frigates aren't fun, so what have I been doing instead? Well, enjoying the exciting thrill of market trading of course.




8 comments:

  1. I think many people suggest Frigates simply because they are relatively cheap to lose. And if you're doing true solo pvp (no links, not bat phone, not friends), losing ships is a rather likely outcome.

    But on the other hand - if you don't like pvp for pvp's sake, then you do have a problem with enjoying ship combat indeed.

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  2. So, don't fly a frig. Use a BS - they are a lot more fun, anyways. Or a carrier. Put a PLEX or two in your cargohold, too. Roaming for 1v1 PVP is indeed rather boring, but attracting a bunch of players to gang up on you is pretty darn amusing.

    Get a few friends together, form a corp and go wardec a much larger noob corp (not a industrial corp - pick a corp that does not mind get a bit more PVP experience). Or do it solo. Fighting against the odds is always more fun.

    If you feel that you need to "fight for a cause", then there are plenty of those around, as well. You can go defend the miners against the evil CODE, or single-handedly seek out to defeat the Goons - heck, Gevlon and a few others will probably even fund your crusade - maybe Mittens, too (the Goons are pretty bored). Put on the cape, pull out the sword, damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead!

    And, yes, you will get blown up (a lot). So what? I've lost 10,000+ ships. Risk-adverse in EVE makes no sense to me. Losing digital ships is never a big deal - it is all just a few bytes of data. And, how many ships do you have just sitting in your hanger - unused - anyways?

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  3. Fly with some open fleet groups:

    Spectre Fleet, Bomber's Bar, RvB Ganked and Redemption Road.

    They're all pretty fun. Spectre Fleet usually fly all sorts of things during the week. Bomber's Bar usually camps out gates in bombers (obviously), but they also have some Blops BS's and do the the jump-on-ratting-carriers thing. The other two are weekly/weekend runs.

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  4. I understand your comments about frig PvP. I'm only starting the process of learning how to fly the different classes but frigs are already a little stale for me.

    But the bigger problem is that you sound burnt out. Have you tried sov null? Your comments about fighting for a reason make it seem like this would be a reasonable choice.

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  5. I have to concur with this sentiment. It's always been a sore point with me that it is so difficult to prosecute a war between competing market interests. Even infrastructure has always been "raid level" content.

    Combat is really infrequent in EVE. The average might be appreciable, but the median distribution shows us why so few people who try the game end up staying on more than a couple months. There is a need for more accessible conflict content which can be engaged by small groups or even solo pilots, which in turn would need to be valuable enough that someone would want to patrol to defend them.

    Take all the PVE content, and port it to player infrastructure. Put POS inside deadspaces as the final room. Put hackable objects in some rooms, and intermediate size gang objectives in others. It's great that people are telling their own stories, but give everyone something to provoke one another in the mean time.

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  6. Fly a battleship. Harder to find fights but it gives a better kick when you do :)

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  7. The issue with EVE combat is that a fight in itself is not nearly fun enough to maintain "for the hell of it" motivations for many gamers over an extended period of time. I find the long standing trend towards highly contrived conflict, such as pre-staged tournaments and free-for-alls, as well as FC-agreed honor brawls etc is very unsatisfying. The benchmark for me is whether an EVE game situation/event could simply have been arranged on the test server -- if so, I don't see the gameplay value of it. Everyday bread-and-butter EVE gameplay shouldn't be reducable to consequence-less instances (other than minor ISK loss inconvenience). I hope the proposed dojos do not make it to TQ -- they absolutely should not generate KMs if they do. I would be in favour of KMs/KBs not registering a kill to every character involved as they have done so far (maybe a limit like like first aggro, top damage, final blow).
    KN

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