It’s been a while since my last post, mostly due to a lack of motivation and lack of time (but mainly the former).

In a game like Eve, many will be confused with what ‘playing to win’ means. As a sandbox game, there is no linear progression, no winning condition or inbuilt goals. However, there is one thing we can adapt this notion to: PVP. Regardless of what a lot of people will say, this is one part of the game where we objectively have winners and losers. Now many people tend to shrug off their losses with “we only came here for gudfites”, or “you had more people/better ships/links/etc” but the undeniable truth is that nearly every engagement is going to produce a killmail and explosions, where it’s very binary to tell who the winner is. An old saying with the game is that ‘in Eve, there are 2 sides of a killmail, circunstances are irrelevant.

There is most definetly a thing called a win in Eve PVP.

Some players might take a big issue with that statement, as it directly contradicts with their views of gaming. In their mind, there is an invisible code of honor and unwritten rules that one must follow for a fight to be considered ‘acceptable’. This is often called the scrub mentality. This ‘cheapness’ is truly the mantra of the scrub. He is restricted by his home-variant of unwritten rules, where bringing more friends to what seemingly looks like a solo fight is ‘cheap’, where bringing ECM ships to a fleet engagement is considered cheap and dishonourable, and that using a ship that drastically counters his own is unfair and ‘lol nanofag’, or if one refuses to fight for whatever reasons he is considered ‘risk averse’ or carebear. The truth is, this set of principles hol ds back the ‘scrub’ from truly ever competing.

The first step in becomming a good player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever increases one’s chances of winning the most. A game itself knows no rules of ‘cheapness’ and ‘honor’, much less a game with such reputation for metagaming, backstabbing and espionage.

A common call of the scrub is to cry that the kind of play in which one tries to win at all costs is “boring” or “not fun.” Who knows what objective the scrub has, but we know his objective is not truly to win. Meanwhile, the good players reach higher and higher levels of play. They can engage entire fleets at once, they can read the other player’s mind and anticipate every move before he even commits to a fight, they will know how to fight the blob even if it means blobbing up themselves, they will know which ship the enemy will use before he even undocks, they will know how to deal with ECM and other eWar, they will learn how to antecipate kiters and deal with them in advance, they will exploit every extremity and take advantage of every mistake made to maximize their kills and minimize their losses. while the scrub is left raging about the falcon ruining what he considers his monkey act of pressing F1 and overheating your whole rack an act of ‘ true skill’. He can either continue living in his mental prision or analyze why he lost, adapt and reach the next level of play.

DISHONOR!

Twenty-five centuries ago in China, Sun Tzu wrote a little manual called The Art of War. In the 2,500 years since that time, countless authors have tackled the subject of war, and wars unnumbered have been waged, yet still Sun Tzu’s words have unnerving relevance. In a game like Eve-online, where every interaction takes place in an open world of war, this bears a lot of relevance for the militaristic aspects of the game.

To sum up, these were considered his 5 essentials for victory:

1. He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.

It’s very easy to interpret this one. If you are temporarily at a disadvantage, the best course of action is to simply stall until you can change the situation. For example, if you are in a fleet and flying a brawling ship with no hopes of catching a kiter, it would be stupid to follow him around and fight outside your group. If the enemy gang is too much for you to handle, you have better options such as splitting them up or baiting them to agress and jump back on a gate. Never engage an enemy in delaying lets you find more favourable conditions.

2. He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces.

You must often employ different tactics when winning than when losing. When losing badly, you are often forced to choose only from high-risk options that have big enough payoffs to put you back into the game. In a close brawling fight, winning might just depend on squeezing in that last bit of damage, so overheating weapons and propulsion at the risk of burnout are probably the only legitimate choices to do. Likewise, if you are long range kiter slowly killing a slower ship, it would be wiser to restrict yourself to stop heating your mods as they approach burnout and slightly shortening your distance witouth orbits to reduce whatever chances he has from breaking tackle and escaping. Relying on low risk moves is completly viable when approaching a situation of victory.

3. He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks.

This one is mostly a metaphor for employing the physical dexterity and coordination in your game. However, it has little relevance to Eve since the mechanical skillcap of the game is very low.

4. He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.

This is closely related to the first of the five points. Advantages shift over the course of a game, and it is the wise player who puts himself beyond the possibility of defeat and waits for the enemy to make a fatal mistake, or at least waits for advantages to shift favorably before attacking. This is absolutely huge both in solo and fleet fights. Wether you are trapped to a kiter and start taking notice of his predictable orbit to slingshot him, or when you notice some members of the enemy fleet accidentaly agressed some rats, neutrals on a gate, it’s time to strike. Waiting for your opponent to keep their guard down is one of the reasons why there’s so much downtime between conflict in Eve.

5. He will win who has military capacity, and is not interfered with by the sovereign.

This differenciates between civic virtues and military virtues. Humanity and justice are virtues of the state, but not of the army, he says. The army must be opportunistic and flexible. The state has principles to live by and precedents to set, but war is fierce and urgent. If you wish to win in battle, you must do immediately whatever is practical and effective. What this means is that you shouldn’t be afraid to emply whatever tactics needed to win despite being friends or thinking what the enemy will think of you,

This is the entire point of Playing to Win. Do not be interfered with by the sovereign. If you wish to win, do not play to be looked up to and admired. Do not play to make a statement about this move or that tactic. Do not play to avoid being called “cheap.” Do not play to make friends with your opponent. Note that being friends with him is a civic virtue that you should indulge in after the match. During the match, you must harass him, annoy him, anger him, counter him at every turn, and surprise him when he is unaware. You must crush him.

If you want to win, then don’t do it with one hand behind your back just because forces outside the game compel you to. And this is why most people won’t hensitate in attacking everything they see if they see fit outside highsec (or even in highsec suicide ganks), be it a veteran or 1 day player. If you killed some noob mining in a Venture, go ahead and talk to him later, explain him what happened and what he can do to avoid it next time. Making friends only happens after the battle is done.

Inside the game, there are only military virtues. If you want to win, don’t worry about what the scrubs will say, and play to win!

Sources: http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/