Evictions, E-Honor, and the Metagame Part 2: A Commentary

For anyone reading who isn't up on w-space, most of the fights there occur on/around the connecting wormholes or on a site of some variety.  There are a lot of ganks, there are some straight up brawls, and there are fights with back and forth maneuvering around one or both sides of a wormhole.  Most hostile fleets will avoid engaging a Player Owned Starbase, because they have a crap ton of HP and are usually packed full of more guns and ewar than the tower can online all at once (so that spares can be brought online as needed).  There are, however, a few times when a tower will come under direct attack:

Eviction - With an eviction, the goal is nothing less than the destruction of every tower owned by the enemy corporation in a given wormhole system.  The evicting fleet will also often pull down any Player Owned Customs Office that the enemy corp holds in the system as well, since they may as well while waiting for the tower reinforcement timers and skipping them can leave a feeling of a job unfinished.  Evictions are a major undertaking, requiring the attacker to bring enough force to bear to overcome the defenders in the first place, to assault each of the defender's towers in turn, to forcibly take control of the system and all connecting wormholes, and then to maintain enough active pilots garrisoned in the defender's system to prevent attempts to bring in reinforcements or evacuate valuable assets.  The garrison needs to remain attentive and in position for up to 36 hours or longer, and there has to be enough pilots available to handle whatever might come up.  Once the reinforcement timer runs down, the attacker has to still be strong enough to defeat whatever final defense is mounted (if any), grind down the last HP from the towers, and destroy and loot whatever assets are left behind.

Invasion - Much like an eviction, an invasion involves planting a large force in an enemy system for a prolonged period; unlike the eviction, however, total destruction of the defender is not necessarily the end goal.  Many invasions are done in order to force a large fight, with the invaders leaving (and the defenders functionally intact) once they are satisfied, although one group can also invade another just to make life hell for a while.  Usually by that point, though, it's turned into an eviction instead.

The Stront Check - By far the most common, when one group is 'checking' another group's tower, they attack it and put it into reinforced mode.  Strontium is the fuel that towers use to become invulnerable and reinforced - if a tower doesn't have any, it won't reinforce, hence the name.  A stront check is often called for on towers that look weak or undefended but potentially full of valuables, or if an attacker is trying to apply pressure to another group in order to goad them into a fight.  The biggest difference between a stront check and an invasion or eviction is that once the tower is reinforced they (typically) return home or go on their way - the attacker is not committing assets to a siege of the defender's system.

If I did not make a big enough point of it in my last blog, or up above, an eviction is a major undertaking and a pain in the butt, even for a major C5 or C6 wormhole alliance.  Capital class ships are often required to perform a successful eviction in a C5 or C6 wormhole, but they can only be brought in intermittently; that also means they can not always be extracted in a timely manner.  Even if an alliance has forty or fifty capitals in their home defense fleet, a dreadnought is a valuable asset and they'll want to maintain sufficient force in the defending hole after the eviction, long enough to escort the ship out.  While the eviction is going on, a significant number of the active pilots of an alliance will be busy - there were times this last weekend where scouts found hostile forces in/near the home wormhole chains of Ragnarok or NOHO, but with the skeleton crews left behind they couldn't engage.  That kind of deployment can leave home systems vulnerable, as well, bringing additional risk beyond the number of assets committed to the siege.

In short, nobody does an eviction just for funsies.

However, one of the best things about Eve is that people can do whatever they want; one of the things that makes w-space so great is precisely that everything can be destroyed.  Nothing in w-space is safe.  If someone is willing to put in the time and effort and can dedicate enough resources, they can blow up every single thing a corp owns in w-space; the question then becomes "What tilts that reward/effort equation from 'stront check them and move on' over to 'EEVICTIOOOOON'?"

Some w-space corps will say that is is an e-honor thing, that corps who fight are encouraged to stay while corps that hide are evicted.  This is not true, though: granted, refusing to fight someone might piss them off, and pissing someone off makes them more likely to want to evict you, but any cause that the attacker feels passionately enough about is good enough for them.  Ragnarok evicted the Goons from their hole because Goonswarm is a major Null Sec power.  People have ended up on eviction lists for being asshats on the forums or on a podcast.  Honestly, if someone decided they absolutely hated my fashion sense and wanted to evict me for it, they are welcome to try.  The thing that matters is how much they care about it, and if they care enough about their cause to put in the effort.

While I am on the topic, this does lead me to something else I have been wanting to write about: e-honor.  Bluntly, it doesn't exist and expecting other people to live by it leaves you open to be taken advantage of.  Most of the corps I've met in w-space are, at the end of the day, pretty cool.  Many of them are just out to have a good time.  Expecting another pilot/corporation/alliance to abide by a set of rules that has not been agreed upon, though, will put you in a bad spot and if you get burned for relying on 'honorable conduct' you'll have nobody to blame but yourself.

That may sound harsh, but w-space is a harsh environment.  You can count on yourself.  You should be able to count on your corp mates.  You might be able to count on your blues, be they in your alliance or just diplomatic friends.  Anyone else is someone you are competing against, and is a potential enemy, no matter how friendly they may be.  Instead of expecting someone to follow a set of rules that you may or may not have told them about, be practical on the matter.  Expect them to behave in a way that they have acted in the past.  Alliances and corporations like having their reputations; for example, I would expect NOHO to honor a ransom request, because that's something they are known to do.  If someone from SSC offered me a spot in a roam and told me they wouldn't attack me, I would trust them - I've seen that behavior from them in the past.  I myself try to be extremely trustworthy, but it isn't out of a need to feel honorable.  It's because people like other people they feel they can trust, and life is easier for me if people know they can take me at my word.

This also ties into the metagame - not the game knowledge aspect of the meta, but rather the people knowledge side of it.  For anyone who hasn't delved too deeply into it, the 'metagame' refers to a number of things - the game beyond the game itself, knowledge of the game as a set of rules, the 'universe' of things that are Eve-related while not strictly coming from within the game client itself, and so on.  When an FC is prioritizing targets and telling the ewar ships who to hit with what, they are using their knowledge of how people play the game in order to guess at what ships will be fitted what way and how they are flown, as opposed to basing it strictly off of what they can see in the present engagement.  When a fleet engages in a fight that they should lose from a strictly by-the-numbers numerical standpoint, it is often because the FC believes they have a psychological edge over the enemy fleet - the knowledge of how people think and react giving them an edge.  For example, a few weeks ago we rolled our home system's static connection and it opened up on a system with four battleships and a pair of basilisks running sites.  I had three pilots available to me, so it certainly wasn't a fight I could take and win; one of our alliance members, though, urged me to ship up into a group of Talos battle cruisers and jump on the logi ships, because who would jump a fleet like that with only three attack battlecruisers?  Ideally one of the basilisks would explode and the rest of the site fleet would attempt to warp off and away from the (non existent) remainder of our gank fleet, and we could point the last battleship to align for another easy kill.  I love that sort of player versus player competition; where it isn't the amount of isk spent on ships or the age of the account that decides the outcome, but a player's skill at reading other players and predicting what they will do, and the player's ability to influence that reaction.  I love my Stratios because it is such a versatile cruiser; it can be fit with guns, with neuts, with double webs or dual prop, and with the covops cloak on it nobody will know how I have it fit until I am on them.  It's one of the reasons I am fond of the Gnosis, and weird things like the blaster naga or the armor/ECM drake - when you throw a curve ball at someone and catch them flat footed, you get to dictate the engagement.

With that being said, I personally feel that the benefits of being trustworthy are too good to pass up and so I leave my metagaming at the engagement level.  I may bluff, posture, or feign weakness before an engagement to get an edge but if I say that, no, for real, my fleet has moved off of the wormhole and it is safe enough for you to jump through... then it has moved off, and it is safe enough.

Just don't expect everyone to play like that, though - anyone can do whatever they want in Eve, for whatever reason, if they want to put in the effort and don't mind the reputation and reaction it'll get from other players.  And if you don't like what someone else has done, you are free to tell them as much, in whatever way you feel will cause them to listen.

Personally, I don't have any Causes in game that would incite me to evict anyone, nor has anyone pissed me off enough to get put on an eviction list - I just want to fly my ship through space, blow some people up, and hopefully be able to afford to replace whatever I lose.

o7