Pvper Guilt

TLDR: I ramble on about a dumb self-serving opinion about pvp.

Last night Iso5 lost some stuff. About 12 billion in stuff. This may be small potatoes for some groups but it was a fairly significant loss for us.

I’m going to summarize the battle as us going in completely and underestimating the response of the people we were attacking. What I want to talk about isn’t the battle itself but more why it happened.

Let me tell the story from my point of view.

I logged into voice coms with people listing ship types over comes. This usually means someone has eyes on a relevant target and we are prepping to kill them. But that wasn’t what we were doing, we were just watching. I asked several times in fleet, coms and corp, are we forming up? I would get cryptic joking answers, if I got responses at all.

At first this annoyed me. I’m the type of player who wants to jump right in the shit no matter what. Targets on a hole, GETTEM! GETTEM! OMG GETTEM SO HARD WE ALREADY GOTEM! Yea that’s me.

Well, I was wrong. I should have had a greater level of restraint when dealing with the targets we had. I was following the fortune favors the bold adage. This doesn’t play out well in EVE sometimes. I say sometimes, because in my experience opportunity lost is just that, loss. I can’t list how many times I have jumped on something quick and without question having it die without any negative reproductions. I remember nearly every instance where I sat and overthought the situation, then have my potential kill wander away from the kill zone. I’m trained by success to act. Action brings content, inaction brings nothing.

My instincts and the instincts of others lead us away from victory, because we didn’t show restraint.

Well last night our targets were Protean Concept. Nothing against these guys, they played a good game. Mad respect for everything they do and what they bring to wormhole space. Last night they showed tremendous restraint and not playing OUR (Iso5’s) game. I’m not sure if it was intentional but it was effective non the less. They played us like a fiddle.

They sat on their home hole connection and didn’t move from that for what I want to say was 45 + minutes. An unconscionable amount of time in my book. But that’s just it.. that was MY book, because I and others felt it was too long, a level of guilt set in that we couldn’t stand, we were forced to act.. and we died.

So here we have what I want to discuss. The guilt of a pvper, the ability to resist it, play your own game, apologize to no one is what makes a pvper great. How well he resists that guilt is a measure of how successful he is.

People are constantly bringing up the “gud” fight thing, which imo is played out and dumb. Everyone in EVE is going to fight the fight they want or have to, trying to ask for it to be fair is just stupid. Nothing is fair in love and war. This holds true for EVE. We even discussed in coms after if what was done to us, we would do to them. Everyone didn’t miss a beat and said “hell yes, we would have”. “Winning is winning”.

So we lost, but we didn’t lose a military battle, we lost a fight vs our pvp guilt. Our pvp guilt didn’t want to lose the potential kills. Our pvp guilt made us do the thing we did. If risk adversity is weakness of a care bear, the pvp guilt is the weakness of the pvper.

A truly good pvper is guiltless. A good killer fights every battle where he has the advantage, plays every angle and walks away from losing situations. The thing is, this is a video game and its consequences are less extreme. Then why do I feel the way I do?

Perhaps we just like to fight, not matter if we are losing or winning.

I like fighting more than winning, but that positive reinforcement of getting fights is a huge burden because I carry it over to the empathy I share with my targets.

Let me explain; I have said to people in the past ‘You should thank me for ganking/fighting you, I brought you the gift of gunfire/explosions.” That longing I feel to shoot and be shot is a gift! If I sat stoic on a wormhole for 45 minutes and waited for targets to jump into my home, I would fear my targets would get bored, log off and just go on with their dull lives. Gift not received. This could not stand, my pvp guilt won’t allow it!

This is the pvp guilt I carry with me. I must give to them and all who I encounter, what I so value. Explosions.

You’re welcome.

Edits: 

Battle report https://zkillboard.com/related/31002002/201411070200/o/%7B%22A%22%3A%5B%5D%2C%22B%22%3A%5B%2298297019%22%5D%7D/


Video from their perspective. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aNwA5cpktE