- Atmosphere
- Unpredictability
- Control
- Complexity
- Consequence
These are the five main pros behind player versus player combat in EVE, and mostly the reasons why people say 'EVE is about PvP'. Let us work backwards on the list.
Consequence
This is the most simple part. The things you lose are gone for good. Some loot remains, but it lands much more likely in the hands of your opponent and there is certainly no free ways to get it back. The game is built upon loss and effort to replace lost items will be one of the main factors that drive your gameplay through your EVE experience.
Opening fire at another player launches a series of events that lead to fatal decisions and results. Mainly, you put your assets at a much higher risk than before the act. Aside from the place you do this, it means that you are within your opponents' engagement range. This is the pitch of the risk your assets are put when you leave the station with them. Once lost, they are unrecoverable. That is not a tragedy, however. What would you do if let's say in a certain cartoonish MMORPG your epic gear could be destroyed, and the rest looted from your corpse? You'd likely be upset.
When doing PvP in EVE, you'll sooner or later learn to see your assets, your things as they are: tools of the trade. You'll begin to form a different connection - rather than looking at your ingame properties for a sense of accomplishment, you'll get attached to the people you fly with.
That is, what real consequence is about. If you allow, it extends beyond the confines of the game universe, it will have an effect on your life, and more often a positive one. Hell yeah EVE is real...
Complexity
The variety of items and the possibilities of situations may seem at first infuriating. In truth, it can be linked to the basic tought beyond Chaos Theory, and thus, the sandbox gameplay style. There are a few basic rules, set. All the other content is nothing less and nothing more than what the players build on them. The mechanics of PvP are driven by your decisions, from the get-go to the killmail.
Many games sport a somewhat similarly or even broader set of possibilities, but their setting, the things that are indirectly linked to the act of someone attacking another player are much more confined. In EVE, chances are, the moment you decide that you will combat with another pilot, you immediately start interacting other people.
There is knowledge to be obtained. There are tactics to be learned, items to be accrued, used, and most certainly lost and replaced. These are all things that have consequences for most likely more than one person. These consequences stem from the complexity of the game itself. It's not like you can just pick the best gun in the game, run with it and murder people - you certainly can do that, but you'll sooner or later be introduced to something that defeats you based on the sole fact that there's it more to it than F1-F2.
Control
This thing is present in many other games. It drives the efforts of most competitive-minded people. Getting ang staying in control has a significant impact on the events around you, moreso in a virtual world. When you play the PvP game that is EVE, flying in space, hunting for prey, you seek control over your and your opponent's situation by applying the pressure of consequence, combined with the complexity of available choices.
What you do is essentially trying to switch roles in a cat and mouse game, while others are trying to do the same. Your understanding of the EVE universe, especially, in ships, related game mechanics and modules, plays a major role in gaining the upper hand. However, there are many possible decisions you can make, and many your enemy can make, and when finally you place a warp jammer on each other, all of your decisions come into play. Control is gained and lost, and most of the time this directly leads to another series of decisions, which in turn have consequences feeding back to your control. The phenomenon has been studied in another context (regular, real gunfights) and several levels have been categorized. If you are interested, this is the topic of Cooper color codes.
Unpredictability
PvP in EVE is always driven by the unknown-unknown factor. Simply put, it is unpredictable. Surely, you can establish working patterns that build on the information you collect on your enemy. Alas, limited perception is key in any engagement. When one of the sides in a fight obtains a correct perception in one of the aspects, it gains a new level of control. The challenge in this is that the game offers many valid choices for most situations, adding complexity to the consequences that emerge.
Some of the ships are frowned upon by the EVE society, because they do not allow for tactics that are commonly perceived as effective. This shows another layer of unpredictability - people expect certain things, while writing off some of the otherwise valid choices as 'not working'. The truth is, you are never going to know the other side's decisions unless they shared them honestly, but why would they do that?
The most apparent layer of the unpredictable nature of ship to ship combat in EVE is that the need for new decisions increases dramatically once an engagement takes place. This will cause the theory of combat, the tactics implemented, often differently than originally planned.
Combat is unpredictable, because you can't plan for every aspect of the fight, and even with good planning and accurate execution, victory is not guaranteed. That is, you have to gain control over the situation, and sorting through the complex mix of choices, weighting all the possible consequences is not possible on the spot. Anticipation and planning gives in to instinct and intuition, theory to actual events. It might be beneficial, it might be fatal. The trick is, no matter how it ends, you can learn from it.
Adding the series of events to the list of possible decisions and outcomes feeds back to the complexity of combat, and will most certainly allow you to better maintain control. On the long run, this will bear consequences in that you become better at PvP.
Atmosphere
Trying to kill someone in their ships is an exciting activity in EVE. There is a certain atmosphere to it. You can read about this a lot, from a lot for people. Your hands are shaking, your mind is flooded with adrenaline, essentially, you live through it like a real life threatening situation. There is a delicate recipe here, which, though simple, is very hard to simulate in a virtual environment.
First, there is a looming feeling that you risk your ship. If you spend much time in space, the look and feel of the EVE ships grow on you, furthering the sense that you are your ship. Then the recognition his you that you are risking your ship, essentially your ingame body. EVE builds on this perception and allows for the full immersion into the phenomenon that is losing your ship. The consequences therefore become both mental and emotional, which is why a combat on the monitor gets interpreted by your brain as a real danger. When fighting players in other games, the mind learns quickly that this event is not a valid alert, but the attachment in EVE means, that many people get the same rush over and over for years.
By allowing you to choose form various tactics, a great variety of items, equipment, and movement, and by enabling full perception of your situation, the game supports its atmosphere of complexity. You will always have a new thing to learn, driven by a simple fact that new choices themselves, as much as perceived possibilities are added to the known list by each encounter. No matter how good you are, how much you have seen, there's always something that happens differently than before.
The pace at which new decisions are required increase dramatically over the time leading to an engagement, and this allows for pressure to build up. The complex set of choices and consequences swirl inside your head, as you try to sort through the information and theory you are bombarded with. The OODA loop quickens with each iteration, and the change is apparent. Out of this, you get the feeling, that what you do is meaningful. And in the confines of PvP combat, it is - each successful iteration of observe-orient-decide-act means that you have kept your level of control, or even improved it.
This building pressure, combined with the real sense of danger give PvP combat its atmosphere of unpredictability. Because under pressure, people act different. In this ancient reaction to the hostile environment, many dumb people do brilliant things, while many good thinkers can commit fatal mistakes.
PvP in EVE will bring out the things you think you lost, it will drive you towards a different perception of the world inside and outside of EVE, and the mental and physical processes involved could serve you very well in the future, provided that you see them for what they are - a method of practice and learning.
