There are several areas of space, designated by security level.
* In "High Sec" - you can shoot whoever you want. When you shoot somebody without the right to (ie, they stole from you, you can shoot them), then you have a few seconds (up to ~30) before an invincible NPC navy shows up and blaps you. If you escape, it's a game exploit and is bannable. Not that a few seconds is plenty of time to kill an unsuspecting player (and that does happen and can be profitable, even after losing your ship).
After killing somebody in high sec, your global security status gets decremented. If it gets low enough non-invincible navies will follow you around to try and kill you when you show up in safe space. This is more annoying than anything, and you just have to be careful and keep moving.
* Low Sec: You can shoot anybody, and no navies will stop you. At certain spots, "gate guns" will help out the agressors.
* Null Sec: Anything goes, shoot who you want, do what you want. This is where player controlled alliances live (if you remember reading about Goonswarm and similarly large organizations).
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It's a relatively complex system, but then again, everything in eve is complex. But fun and deep. The devs are really good about setting rules, and then allowing you to do anything you want inside those rules.
For example, a standard rule of thumb for freighter pilots is to only carry about 1 billion in-game currency worth of goods at a time. Reason? Because it costs about that much worth of ships to blow you up before concord (invincible navy) shows up and kills a group trying to gank your ship. This is just standard knowledge about what is "safe". Which really just means "what would make this unprofitable for people to do to me".
You only get banned if you engage in unprovoked PVP in high-security space and you manage to keep your ship. It's supposed to be impossible to do, but several times techniques/exploits have been developed to circumvent or delay it so they just banned the practice to be completely clear on the mechanics.
I may not understand the full context here, but it sounds like a failure of the game mechanics/net code/implementation if they can't fully enforce some rule via in-game means and have to resort to banning accounts of those who break it.
I don't even know when the last time this has happened but it has probably been a very very long time. This isn't a common occurrence but something that has only happened maybe a few times when an exploit was found. EVE encourages clever use of game mechanics to do devious things and they have just clarified they don't consider escaping Concord clever use of game mechanics but an exploit. If someone actually finds a way to bypass Concord they fix it and don't leave it in the game.
> EVE encourages clever use of game mechanics to do devious things and they have just clarified they don't consider escaping Concord clever use of game mechanics but an exploit.
Yeah, but it's a non-trivial thing to encode in a manner which is realistic in terms of the game mechanics and feels 'in universe'. For one, they are supposed to have a finite response time, so you have a chance to finish off your target before you get destroyed. CONCORD ships used to just be extremely strong and a fixed number would spawn, until people figured out how to tank their damage. Then they would escalate until the target was destroyed, but you could with a large enough ship do a lot of damage before they killed you. Now you get blapped to 0 health by one shot from their guns, but recently there was a technique found which allowed you yo warp around fast enough to evade them indefinitely (though it was hard to do anything else in the time). I'm not sure how that was fixed.
To move a bit on from the others and security status. It is worth noting that the entire game is PVP. The only place where you aren't indirectly or directly interacting with another player is the mission system. Every other part of the game you are interacting or at least impeding other players. Everything you do is at least preventing another player from accessing the resource.
As an example, let's look at the classic non PVP activity of mining. Mining is a race against others to get all the asteroids before they are gone. Sure, you didn't directly kill anyone, but those asteroids you destroyed are gonna be gone for at least a few days. Thus preventing access to them by another player. Meanwhile, some enterprising gentlemen are trying to steal the ore you are creating. Once you get the ore back to the station, someone else is buying the at vastly under the going rate but offering local pickup. A third girl is offering a kings ransom if you drive the whole pile of stuff over to the bad side of town and drop it off at pirate central. You decline both offers and decide to set up a sell order for a reasonable rate. You make money
That is non PVP in eve, only three people tried to screw you over. You screwed over some smaller miner by strip mining an asteroid belt, made some money selling the loot to other players. You avoided an attempt to screw you by the market, one by a theif, and an obvious pirate trap. But nobody shot at you. No one declared war on you.
No, you get banned for running from CONCORD. It basically ensures that "safe" sectors stay that way. CONCORD is just the in-game representation of this.
Correct.
Plus, it's damn-near impossible to escape from CONCORD anyway. If you unlawfully open fire on another player in High Security space you'll find a flotilla of huge police ships appearing almost instantly. Most players can't withstand even a single barrage from those CONCORD ships, so ship-loss is practically guaranteed.
From what I understand, it's if you do too much pvp on players who don't want to pvp. I guess there's some sort of flag to turn on if you want to pvp, a little like World of Warcraft.
No. The most important principle of EVE is that someone can always kill you. Only having consensual PVP makes games boring, as it removes risk.
In some areas of space, killing people has consequences, specifically, losing your ship. Which just means that you should fit it for firepower/cost when you go shooting random people in highsec. Various parties have honed this to an art, for example: miniluv (Goonswarm Ministry of Love).
Choice quote: "There’s just something special about building 15,000 spaceships and loading their guns with 1 round of ammo to shoot. And doing it right in front of the police."
EVE is expressly against such a flag. The only way to avoid PVP combat completely is to stay docked in a station. If you stay in high security space you can make it fairly difficult to attack you though (it'll still happen if your ship value to fragility ratio is high enough though).
* In "High Sec" - you can shoot whoever you want. When you shoot somebody without the right to (ie, they stole from you, you can shoot them), then you have a few seconds (up to ~30) before an invincible NPC navy shows up and blaps you. If you escape, it's a game exploit and is bannable. Not that a few seconds is plenty of time to kill an unsuspecting player (and that does happen and can be profitable, even after losing your ship).
After killing somebody in high sec, your global security status gets decremented. If it gets low enough non-invincible navies will follow you around to try and kill you when you show up in safe space. This is more annoying than anything, and you just have to be careful and keep moving.
* Low Sec: You can shoot anybody, and no navies will stop you. At certain spots, "gate guns" will help out the agressors.
* Null Sec: Anything goes, shoot who you want, do what you want. This is where player controlled alliances live (if you remember reading about Goonswarm and similarly large organizations).
-------------------
It's a relatively complex system, but then again, everything in eve is complex. But fun and deep. The devs are really good about setting rules, and then allowing you to do anything you want inside those rules.
For example, a standard rule of thumb for freighter pilots is to only carry about 1 billion in-game currency worth of goods at a time. Reason? Because it costs about that much worth of ships to blow you up before concord (invincible navy) shows up and kills a group trying to gank your ship. This is just standard knowledge about what is "safe". Which really just means "what would make this unprofitable for people to do to me".