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Important Articles: The Anatomy of PvP |
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2007.12.18
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2007.12.24
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2008.01.24
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Merry christmas, chaps. This christmas, I have prepared a present for all the people who have supported this website even though it's mostly just an eve blog these days. To get back to what is important and to give something back to the people that have supported me, I present part 1 in a series entitled "The anatomy of PvP". This series will detail Eve-Online's PvP inside and out and will be able to be understood by complete newbies to eve and veterans alike. Veterans of the game will likely not get as much out of it but it should be an interesting read nonetheless. I will put a special link to the series on the website, link them together and will publish new parts every month or so. I have been published in EON (the official magazone of eve-online) several times and done editorial work for the insider's guides in issues 3 to 8 (I think). Since I haven't been contacted in a few months and haven't been paid my usual pittance for my work on the last issue of EON, I can assume that EON is either shutting down or they just don't want my help any more. This article was originally intended to be published on a new website that was being released and which I was invited to write for as a regular staff-writer but since that project hasn't taken off and EON haven't been in contact with me, I've decided to release this guide to the public to give something back to the people who support eve-tanking.com. Thanks guys :). The Anatomy of PvP Introduction: Of all the games on the market today, the space-based MMOG Eve-Online is said to offer one of the most unique PvP experiences available. Rather than base the game around NPC-interaction or player-versus-environment gameplay and including PvP as an afterthought, the main driving force behind the development of Eve has always been player versus player combat and competition. It is said that even the markets and the forums have their own form of PvP with fierce market competition, political issues and territorial arguments that often escalate into real military conflict. Eve features an open-world PvP system in which any pilot can be attacked at any time. Star systems are given a security rating between 0.0 and 1.0, with 1.0 being the most secure and theoretically the safest systems. Rather than offering protection to players by simply disallowing combat in the safer areas of the game, the game mechanics support a system to allow unlawful combat but to punish for it. Although the PvP system is extremely complex and freeform, it falls into three main categories based on the three tiers of star system security – high security, low security and lawless space. In the first part of this article, we'll examine PvP in high-security space. Eve-online is a harsh universe with real consequences and solid losses behind the player versus player conflict. It is my hope that this guide will provide new or prospective players with a basic understanding of how PvP works within Eve while still having useful information for older players. You'll need all the help you can get to stay alive and stay one step ahead of your enemies and it's my intention to provide it. Part 1 - High-security space: High-security star systems are those with a security rating of between 1.0 (the highest) and 0.5. They are under CONCORD police protection, which means that unlawfully attacking another player in high-security space will bring the police within seconds to vapourise your ship. Contrary to common sense, a 1.0 system is no more or less safe than a 0.5 system apart from apparent minor delays in the CONCORD response time. For this reason, all systems rated 0.5 and above can be considered a single tier of the security rating system for the purposes of PvP. I fought the law and... While the police enforce a swift retributive strike on players attacking others unlawfully, there are many ways to lawfully attack another player that incur no punishment at all. If someone takes an item from the wreck of an npc ship you've just blown up, for example, that is classified as theft and the thief becomes a valid target for you and your corporation. This combines with the war system to allow players to enforce their own kind of law based entirely on military might. The war system allows one player corporation or alliance to declare war on another for a fee. This weekly fee is essentially a bribe passed to the police to make them look the other way when the torpedos start flying. Players are not required to join a corporation and can stay in the school corp they start in for as long as they like. Many players opt to stay in these NPC-run corporations because they cannot have war declared on them. The harsh reality of corporate life outside an NPC-corp is that the big fish will always try to eat the little fish. Weaker and more industrial corporations will often find themselves at the receiving end of a war declaration from more experienced pilots looking for easy kills for fun or profit. Corps with a little more spine will opt to fight back by engaging in solo or gang warfare with their agressors. The gang warfare model: A standard PvP gang has three main components; the tacklers, the damage dealers and the electronic warfare specialists. Any ship can fit into any of those roles but it's best to use a ship that has a bonus that helps with a given role. The role of the tacklers is to locate targets and immobilise them using warp disruptors or warp scramblers to disrupt their warping capability and stasis webifiers to slow them down. This allows the damage dealers to attack safe in the knowledge that their target can't easily get away. The damage dealer group should be self-explanatory but it's important to remember that every ship in the gang can deal good damage without compromising their role in the gang. A specialised tackler pilot, for example, can put out a significant amount of damage per second but must take care not to run out of capacitor running its weapons as its primary function is to keep the warp disrupters and stasis webs on the target. Electronic warfare ships are not a requirement for a successful gang and are surprisingly often left completely out in favour of putting all pilots in high-damage ships. If you're planning on hitting a group of targets larger than your own, electronic warfare is a must-have and could mean the difference between winning or losing an engagement with the enemy. Electronic warfare encompasses a number of activities but at its simplest is the usage of ECM to jam the enemy's targetting sensors, sensor dampeners to reduce their locking speed and range or tracking disruptors to make enemy turret-based weapons track badly enough to miss your ships. Other things that may fall under electronic warfare include the use of target painters that make small enemies easier to hit and energy neutralisers, which cancel out the enemy's capacitor and may cripple their ability to tank damage . 1.1 - The Tackler: Contrary to what a lot of players think, you don't need to have a few months worth of skills under your belt to PvP. Arguably the most important role in eve gang warfare is the lowly tackler, a job which can quite easily fall to a week-old newbie in a cheap frigate. As a tackler, your job is to get to the target and lock him down. Since most combat occurs at stations or asteroid belts, this means that your ship will need to be as fast as possible to get within warp disruptor range and will need to lock the target fast before he can react and warp out. The lowly frigate class of ship, with its high sensor resolution and base speed, makes the perfect candidate. Tackling in PvP is an incredibly important role as if the target warps out before he's killed, the attack is automatically a failure. If your enemy can always warp out, you'll very rarely actually kill any of them. Stasis webifiers are particularly important near stations and stargates as these are potential escape routes for a target who is warp-scrambled. If he's within docking range of a station, he can simply dock to avoid the combat situation and if he's within jump range of a stargate, chances are he'll jump through and escape. In short, if your gang doesn't have a tackler then it's not likely to be very successful. Required skills Required skills for a tackler are Propulsion Jamming I, Afterburner I and the ability to fly a frigate, almost all of which new pilots start with at character creation. These skills will let you use the “Stasis Webifier I”, “Warp Disruptor I” and “1mn Afterburner I” modules. Should you find the speed of your frigate lacking, it is advised that you train the “Afterburner” and “Navigation” skills to level 4. This should only take a day or so and will let you train “High Speed Maneuvering”, which lets you use the much faster microwarpdrive instead of an afterburner. Tackling gear Apart from the modules listed above, tools for the job include various hull upgrades to modify your ship's speed, agility and lower it's mass. Overdrives will increase your ship's speed by a percentage in exchange for a drop in cargo capacity while nanofibres will drop your ship's structure HP a little but lower your mass, which has the effect of making the speed boost from afterburners and microwarpdrives higher. Inertial stabilisers are useful in combination with either of those as they increase your ship's acceleration rate. Weapons and defensive systems are a secondary consideration and are less important than having enough capacitor to run your afterburner, stasis webs and warp disruptors. There are two types of warp disruptor available and your reasons to use them are important to remember. The short-range “Warp Scrambler I” has a range of 7.5km but a scramble strength of 2. In comparison, the “Warp Disruptor I” has a range of 20km but a scramble strength of only 1. One point of scramble is actually enough to stop any target from warping unless they are using warp core stabilisers. Each stabiliser they have fitted increases the number of points of scramble you need to hit them with to disable their warp drive. Since these stabilisers give a large penalty to targetting speed and range, a combat vessel will typically not perform well with them on but if you're at war and chasing an industrial target such as a mining barge or hauler, expect them to have fitted them. Since combat ships tend not to fit warp core stabilisers and range on the scrambler is particularly important, you'll almost always choose to use the warp disruptor. Common tactics A common tactic with tacklers is to place them on a stargate and have them either orbit it up close or stay completely still but zero metres away from it. This is because the warp disruptor's range benefit has the additional property that if the tackler is right next to a stargate, ships jumping through will usually be within range to scramble or almost within range and easy to tackle. It's also important to activate your warp scrambler before your stasis webifier as doing so in the reverse order could cause your target to escape – if the enemy is already aligned to warp and is accelerating to the required speed, using a stasis web on him will cause him to instantly warp out and you'll have lost him. It's no mistake that the ships that make the best tacklers are paper thin. Frigates won't stand up very well in a firefight and aren't meant to. They should be thought of as cheap, disposable ships and in any engagement where the tackler comes out alive, it should be considered a bonus. In order to help keep your ship alive, you will need to use your one major asset – your speed. If you orbit a target fast enough, their guns will not track you well and they may not be able to hit you at all. Missiles will similarly hit for less damage if you are going very fast. Drones and weapons fired by enemies other than the one you're orbitting are your top concerns and will be the cause of most of your deaths. Another thing to watch out for is enemies with stasis webs fitted to slow you down so their guns can track you better. Many tackler frigates aim to stay over 10km from their target to prevent this being a problem but too far and your transverse velocity will drop and you'll be easier to track. It's a balancing act and most tacklers agree that hovering around the 12-15km mark usually does the trick. So how exactly is a ship that weak and disposable meant to hold a target down for the duration of the entire battle? The short answer is that it's not. A frigate tackler is essentially there to get the initial tackle on a target but the larger ships and damage dealers which can stand up to some punishment in battle should also carry warp disruptors and there should be at least a few stasis webs among the group. The idea is that even if the frigate is killed, by that time the larger ships will have locked the enemy target and gotten within warp scrambler range. Searching for targets Another aspect of being a tackler is to seek out targets. The standings system, combined with the local chat channel, can let you know if any of the enemy are in the current star system at a moment's glance. Often you'll see them in local but have no idea where they are. While this isn't specifically a tackler's job, it is preferred that the first person to find the enemy have the ability to tackle them effectively. Common places for targets to be are near stargates, in asteroid belts or docked in a station. The most useful tool in your arsenal when hunting for targets is the directional scanner, which is opened by pressing Ctrl+F11. This gives you a list of all ships and objects within a given range and angle, allowing you to track down targets without using a blind brute-force approach of looking everywhere for them. However, since high security space is often densely packed, knowing which ship is your target can be difficult. For this reason, many people choose to use the traditional methods of warping to asteroid belts to look for the enemy or camping stargates and waiting for them. Getting an edge In a PvP situation, every advantage you can get over your enemy is worth striving for. For a tackler, there are a number of specialisation routes you can go down to get that edge over the enemy. Training for tech 2 versions of the modules you use such as microwarpdrives is a start but this can drastically increase the price of your ship. A good alternative is to train for specialised ships that can help you perform your role better and there is no shortage of good ships for a dedicated tackler:
Aggro timers Getting an edge in PvP isn't all about the ship and the modules. It's important also to know how the game mechanics work in a given situation so they can be used to your advantage. Probably the most important game mechanics to understand are the various aggression timers in Eve. The simplest one occurs every time you engage in a pvp action such as shooting someone or using electronic warfare on them. This timer lasts for 60 seconds and you are unable to dock at a station or jump through a stargate during that time. For this reason, people camping stargates often have an additional tackler that will not engage a target unless they jump through. If all of your ships attack someone and they manage to get to the stargate, you will be unable to follow them for 60 seconds and they may escape. The most important timer to remember is the 15-minute pvp aggression timer. Any time you engage in PvP, even if you are shot at and don't fire back, a 15-minute long timer begins. Logging out within that time will cause your ship to stay in space after you're gone for 15 whole minutes, regardless of how long was left on the timer when you logged out. This is particularly important because even though your ship emergency warps 1,000,000 km away on a random vector when you log out, scan probes can be used to track you down. One solution to evade capture is to warp between safe spots for fifteen minutes until the timer wears off but the best solution is to warp inside a friendly POS (player owned structure) shield. When you log off inside a POS shield bubble, the emergency warp is cancelled and your ship remains safely inside until it disappears. In closing... Contrary to common sense PvP in "safe" high security space is very much an option and an active part of the game. It is my hope that this part of the guide will prepare new players for their roles in active pvp gangs and corporations. Show this guide to your friends that might want to play eve and see if they like the sound of Eve's PvP. If you're a prospective or new player, I reccomend starting a free trial via this link and once that is over, buying a game time code to activate and extend your game. This is best way to start a new account and minimises the cost. I hope you enjoyed this first part of the guide. There is so much to PvP that I can see this guide taking up to a year to complete even with monthly installments. In part 1.2 of this guide, I'll examine the roles of damage-dealers and electronic warfare in high security space gang warfare. In part 2, I'll examine PvP in the low security systems of Eve - home of pirates, vagabonds and bounty hunters alike. -- Nyphur |
