My solo kills post made lot of PvP-ers mad. You can see them raging on EN24, I cleared them up from here. They claim that mining barge kills don't count. The problem isn't their definition of "real" PvP. It's the lack of it.
One thing is sure, PvP is competitive play. But to have a competition, we must be able to compare performances. There are lot of measurement attempts on EVE PvP: number of kills, kill-death ratio, ISK destroyed, ISK ratio. Zkillboard has some "points" and several alliances evaluate their members based on some form of PvP performance. We can argue for and against all of them, but each of them gives a numerical performance review on everyone.
Those who babble about "thrill of the hunt" and "worthy opponent" and such, can't give such exact number. So if we follow their opinion, we simply will be unable to compare two players. Of course they are ready for the answer: let these two do a 1v1 and we'll know who is better. It's not a bad answer, but to make it work, we need official tournaments. Without clear rules and an external power to enforce them we get what every fool got who accepted an 1v1 challenge: being cheated and ganked.
Imagine an ideal world where people in 1v1 aren't using booster alts, scanners on the gate to know the enemy fitting to fit hard counter and turning it 1v10 if still not winning. Would these matches help? Not really, because they only measure the limited number of participants. While in these ideal matches the winner is better than the loser, we can't place them on a global ranking. This is a common problem in WoW, where the best guy of a casual guild applies to a HC guild and they find him totally useless and beyond help. In EVE - exactly because of lack of official performance measurement - this can go unnoticed for long. However reality at the end hits, the most remarkable event was the "so elite" NC. wardeccing RvB to smash them for insulting one of their directors with the horrible word "mate". You probably know how it went.
I'm not saying that every performance measurement is good or even useful. For example the "total kills" and "ISK destroyed" fields of zkillboard are next to useless since they aren't zero-sum. If 1001 smartbombing Rifters, each with 1M price tag gather and fire their smartbombs, every participant will get 1000 kills and 1B damage done. I'm sure that every ship destruction must create exactly one kill and not more (of course it can be in a form of 1/n kills to everyone). Similarly ISK destroyed must be split between the killers instead of everyone getting the full sum.
However the "true PvP-ers" who don't have a globally usable performance measurement aren't wrong in their position. They simply have no position to argue with. What they have is the feeling "I'm having fun blowing up frigs" and they try to rationalize it to be meaningful, great and competitive. If only they'd say "I'm having fun blowing up frigs like others having fun collecting minipets in WoW" we wouldn't have an argument. But for some reason they insist that blowing up frigs in lowsec is somehow more elite than trying to tame a squirrel in Elvyn Forest. From the fact that they blow up frigs and T1 cruisers they come to the conclusion that they are "badass PvP-ers" who have every right to look down on "highsec carebears". I'm not saying that they are wrong. I'm merely saying that to claim that, they have to come up with numbers. And if someone get higher numbers than them, they have accept that guy being better than them instead of coming up with excuses why his kills don't count.
Finally some numbers about PvP, our organization, the New Order has a killboard, let's see our performance in the last 3 months. Since some agents are living in nullsec and just podjump to us, their nullsec kills mess up with the ISK calculation as the killboards give them full value if they do 0.001% on a titan. So let's just stick to barges and exhumers:
Since we aren't cooperating with any other entity, all these kills are 100% New Order kills. Unfortunately we don't have numbers for players because if we add the kills of the members up, we get something like 5000 kills. Someone could really write a program that gets the kills from Zkillboard API and distribute them among the killers. I mean if 3 pilots kill 1, doing 50-25-25% damages, they should get 0.5, 0.25, 0.25 kills. Factoring the ISK destroyed (not the looted, that allows inflating numbers) with the same ratios, we would get individual kills and individual ISK destroyed. I think these numbers would be the best to compare PvP-ers.
To help us gather data if you are in the New Order movement, please submit your kill-log API to both Zkillboard.com and neworder.mindflood.org.
Finally some fun: "true PvP-ers" claim my kills don't count because the enemy had no guns. This one had guns. A disgruntled miner coming for revenge... with this pod.
PS: for the first time since my removal, I wish I could be on TEST forums again to see how they welcome their newest bro.
One thing is sure, PvP is competitive play. But to have a competition, we must be able to compare performances. There are lot of measurement attempts on EVE PvP: number of kills, kill-death ratio, ISK destroyed, ISK ratio. Zkillboard has some "points" and several alliances evaluate their members based on some form of PvP performance. We can argue for and against all of them, but each of them gives a numerical performance review on everyone.
Those who babble about "thrill of the hunt" and "worthy opponent" and such, can't give such exact number. So if we follow their opinion, we simply will be unable to compare two players. Of course they are ready for the answer: let these two do a 1v1 and we'll know who is better. It's not a bad answer, but to make it work, we need official tournaments. Without clear rules and an external power to enforce them we get what every fool got who accepted an 1v1 challenge: being cheated and ganked.
Imagine an ideal world where people in 1v1 aren't using booster alts, scanners on the gate to know the enemy fitting to fit hard counter and turning it 1v10 if still not winning. Would these matches help? Not really, because they only measure the limited number of participants. While in these ideal matches the winner is better than the loser, we can't place them on a global ranking. This is a common problem in WoW, where the best guy of a casual guild applies to a HC guild and they find him totally useless and beyond help. In EVE - exactly because of lack of official performance measurement - this can go unnoticed for long. However reality at the end hits, the most remarkable event was the "so elite" NC. wardeccing RvB to smash them for insulting one of their directors with the horrible word "mate". You probably know how it went.
I'm not saying that every performance measurement is good or even useful. For example the "total kills" and "ISK destroyed" fields of zkillboard are next to useless since they aren't zero-sum. If 1001 smartbombing Rifters, each with 1M price tag gather and fire their smartbombs, every participant will get 1000 kills and 1B damage done. I'm sure that every ship destruction must create exactly one kill and not more (of course it can be in a form of 1/n kills to everyone). Similarly ISK destroyed must be split between the killers instead of everyone getting the full sum.
However the "true PvP-ers" who don't have a globally usable performance measurement aren't wrong in their position. They simply have no position to argue with. What they have is the feeling "I'm having fun blowing up frigs" and they try to rationalize it to be meaningful, great and competitive. If only they'd say "I'm having fun blowing up frigs like others having fun collecting minipets in WoW" we wouldn't have an argument. But for some reason they insist that blowing up frigs in lowsec is somehow more elite than trying to tame a squirrel in Elvyn Forest. From the fact that they blow up frigs and T1 cruisers they come to the conclusion that they are "badass PvP-ers" who have every right to look down on "highsec carebears". I'm not saying that they are wrong. I'm merely saying that to claim that, they have to come up with numbers. And if someone get higher numbers than them, they have accept that guy being better than them instead of coming up with excuses why his kills don't count.
Finally some numbers about PvP, our organization, the New Order has a killboard, let's see our performance in the last 3 months. Since some agents are living in nullsec and just podjump to us, their nullsec kills mess up with the ISK calculation as the killboards give them full value if they do 0.001% on a titan. So let's just stick to barges and exhumers:
| Month | Barge | Exhumer |
| November | 13 | 10 |
| December | 301 | 632 |
| January | 377 | 924 |
Since we aren't cooperating with any other entity, all these kills are 100% New Order kills. Unfortunately we don't have numbers for players because if we add the kills of the members up, we get something like 5000 kills. Someone could really write a program that gets the kills from Zkillboard API and distribute them among the killers. I mean if 3 pilots kill 1, doing 50-25-25% damages, they should get 0.5, 0.25, 0.25 kills. Factoring the ISK destroyed (not the looted, that allows inflating numbers) with the same ratios, we would get individual kills and individual ISK destroyed. I think these numbers would be the best to compare PvP-ers.
To help us gather data if you are in the New Order movement, please submit your kill-log API to both Zkillboard.com and neworder.mindflood.org.
Finally some fun: "true PvP-ers" claim my kills don't count because the enemy had no guns. This one had guns. A disgruntled miner coming for revenge... with this pod.
PS: for the first time since my removal, I wish I could be on TEST forums again to see how they welcome their newest bro.
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