Well sure we can roleplay, and it could eliminate the need for ANY PvP, period.

If another roleplayer (or normally roleplayer, but not here) can see it any different, help me out here, but I'm not seeing PvP as viable in an RP sense -at all-.

Between something as simple as the advert video to the existing lore, the us vs them is us (as earth Agents) versus them (as Nia residents), not us (as earth agents) versus them (as other earht agents).

It's basically - earth is out of resources, there are 3 companies, theyre all functioning through one Perpetuum Project to get energy from Nia.  So there is no RP reason in the lore to PvP, period.  We should all be happily gung-hoing it against the NPCs, anything else is detrimental to the survival of our own planet.

The only people who would PvP in an RP sense would be extra-trerrestrial hippies who feel that we shouldn't be raping Nia if its resources, and so try to stop those who are doing so at every turn.

But keep in mind that CVA also happily roleplayed blasting the *** out of other groups for reasons that existed in the game lore, as did many of the other roleplaying corporations and alliances in EVE. 

Those reasons do not exist in the lore here.  In the case of Earth draining energy from Nia it is do or die.  There is no reference to this triad of corporations being at conflict with eachother at all that I have found - you could 'assume' a conflict of some sort - or at least a 'separation', but it does not exist.

Simultaneously, in a RP sense there is no sense of loss here, which is necessary, even if it is the loss of fictious  'baseliner' crew.  All you lose here is a bot 87,000 miles away.  this leads to in an immersion sense, 'senseless violence'.  It's not 'hurting' anything to blow up your assault bot, so why not?  There's no real consequence.

So atm there is no reason to ally or enemy anyone when roleplaying.  So, you'd end up with the same scenario.

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What's a pet?

Eve terminology.

Derogatory name for a corporation (or even an alliance) that is considered worthless and weak but lives and prosper in PvP areas thanks to the protection/benevolence of a bigger and more powerful one. It especially applies to being weak/worthless in terms of political power, not intrinsically in terms of economical or military one (note however that those things are related: superior economical and military power generally also implies political power, therefore the lack of the latter is also generally considered to imply lack of the former).

Pets will "obey" orders from the more powerful force and have compulsory participation in military operations organized by them, in exchange for the "permission" to live in and use the resources of the PvP area they jointly control.

The derogatory "pet" moniker is not to be confused with the (sometimes also used derogatorily) moniker "renter". A renter also has permission to live in the area and exploit the resources (sometimes with specific limitations), but it is not generally required to participate in military actions, except for those of "territorial defense" of the specific area they are renting and, occasionally, bordering areas. However "renters" do have to pay a weekly or monthly fee for the privilege of living there and not being attacked by the main controlling force.

In simpler terms: "pets" are allies but with no (or very limited) political influence. "renters" are exactly what the name implies: people that pay for not being attacked.

It works the same way as fleet vs blob arguement. If it's one of your blues he's an ally, if it's an opponent's blue he's a pet. Renter is pretty neutral though and yes, as you say it's someone who pays to have access to the space you control.

It's seen as weak by the leet pvp crowd since, by their logic, if you can't do it alone you shouldn't be doing it. It's the whole anti social sociopath mentality "I stand alone, super rambo leetface" surfacing. I wouldn't worry about it.

It's all relative really. A large corp doesn't have to be a faceless mass of people, it all depends on how it's run, how much effort is made to integrate new guys, how often corp ops take place, strong leadership vs weak and a whole lot of other factors. On the same side a small corp can be just as faceless.

And yes it seems to lack coherence because it's not. It's just a stamp put on people by narrow minded folks who insist on painting everything black and white, either because they really don't know any better, or for the infamous "lulz".

Things are sometimes more complex than that.

The dominant force does not need to be larger than the "pet". There have been cases of numerically "small" (relative term) alliances that were extremely powerful.

AFAIK the term emerged from the forum dump of one of such forces. The "PvP l33t" members of it were lamenting about an ally corp that, in their opinion, was failing at strategical and tactical levels during a campaign and needed continuous spoon-feeding. Someone called it a "pet alliance" in a rant posted on the internal forums of the more powerful group.

Of course as soon as a forum dump of their private site became public, that "rant" has been exploited by their enemies in an attempt to grow malcontent in their lines, and specifically in the ranks of all their allies, including those that were not actually being discussed. You can easily imagine how the propaganda went: "you are considered a worthless pet by your own ally, just quit helping them".

EvE PvP reality is far more complex than what you see in Perpetuum (at least now). Metagame is common among the most powerful forces. Metagame is not only spies that join an enemy and steal their resources or report their movements/plans. There also is a lot of psychological warfare. Moles planted in enemy lines sometimes actively work to rise malcontent, dissatisfaction and internal conflicts as a way to weaken or defeat the enemy. Internal forum dumps (from a spy or by cracking the forum security), TS/Vent recordings (again by a spy or by cracking the server) and much more are common tools of the trade. As well as public forum whoring, trolling etc. It goes all the way to cracking the enemy servers and/or mounting DDoS attacks of the enemy TS/Vent server during a fight.

As for the use of "pet" and "renter", as Predator Nova wrote: if it's your friend it's an ally, if it's a friend of your enemy it's his pet or a renter.

Whether this is really the case is irrelevant. You call your enemy's friends either "pet" or "renter" anyway. You are planting a seed. If you are lucky someone among them will start asking "are our powerful allies actually considering us 'just pets'?". And maybe a member of the more powerful force will have to think twice before lamenting about an error of the less powerful one (or if he does not he risks malcontent as the allied corp/alliance may suspect you are considering them 'pets').

Planting such seeds may be subtle, but it has been proven to also be successful in many cases. Of course it does not work "alone". It's just part of a much larger set of stimuli that, altogether, undermine the enemy.

If interested you may want to read Secrets of a Solar Spymasters #20: Inside the Failure Cascade.

Also EVE Online: The Propaganda War and Sins of a Solar Spymaster 21: How to Survive a Failure Cascade are interesting.

In fact all the articles in that series are interesting in some way.

Seems like a lot of mmo insulting is political, not just in eve. If my allies started wondering if I considered them pets because they were smaller, I'd doubt their rationality. I guess it's a question of how much external validation someone needs. I could see someone with especially low self esteem buying into it.

I'm more interested in the numerically small alliances that were powerful. If that is a commonplace thing then I can understand the use of the term, just as I can understand its use in that particular instance. Otherwise, from all accounts it pretty much just amounts to yelling noob at someone who beat you.

Edit: and hoping that someone will beleive you.

From an RP standpoint, there are any number of reasons for the triad of companys to fight each other. While it's true that the earth needs power, each of these companies wants to be the sole supplier. As with many Sci-fi movies, the faceless corporations don't care about the people, environment, or fair-play, they only look at the bottom line. Removing the competition means that your company will get all the profit, and any single corp that controls the power supply for the planet, basically rules the earth - which is probably the ultimate goal of any board, though none would say so out-loud

The Syndicate is kind of the triad overseeing committee, since now no single corp has enough power to dominate, they pretend to work together on the surface for the 'good of earth' but once out of the watchful eye, it's ON. Also there isn't actually any energy flowing back yet, so at this point it's all speculative capital. This is why they aren't too concerned about rogue agents, because other than some minor tech leaking back, the real money will be from the energy, which will have to flow through the Triad. As long as everyone appears to be playing nice, and the engery keeps flowing, they really don't care what happens.

Now, from a non-RP view point, that leads to 'no reason to pvp', just doing it for fun; at least until the energy credit system is in place. The question is if players will value the risk/reward those crystals provide.

In a sandbox game, motivation really has to come from the players. Theme park's give you a trail to follow, but even there you have to actually be motivated by the rewards along the way. In general Theme parks provide more rewards and clearer goals, and theoretical 'end'; even if it's practically impossible to reach.

Politics has to be part of the game, because people are involved in making the goals; and stronger players will be willing and able to influence others to achieve those goals.

Game mechanics should 'stimulate' players to develop their own goals, not be goals themselves. However, and this is a big however, sandboxes are at their core a simulation. It's not possible for players to create and generate everything they need to keep the sandbox a viable 'world', simply because the simulation is limited. This is where the PVE aspect of the sandbox needs to create a bridge over those gaps. NPC's injecting NIC. modules, kernels, and buy orders ect. are there as tools for that.

It's always possible that if a large enough percentage of the simulation organizes for a specific goal, they will always over power the simulation, simply because you can't balance the game around that scenerio not would it be desirable in most cases.

There's no reason to expect to live in peace and harmony on beta, but it also isn't required that beta be an 'arena' where your expected to fight to the death on sight. The trouble is that we don't have the population required to enforce any type of reasonable conduct, i'll use Syndic's estimate, on 5 of 6 Islands.

In essence, the unorganized large % of pvp-4-fun groups have over powered the simulation.

This is every bit as bad for game play as a single corp owning all of beta, because while it's not organized, it is essentially 1 group of players that's dominating 5/6 ths of the game.

I'm all for open pvp and letting players decide the fate of the simulation, but at this point the simulation is not working to the benefit of the majority of players - those same ones that are overpowering the simulation are also ruining their own fun. Since they aren't an organized group, it's not reasonable to assume that a political or meta-game solution is possible.

This leads to the inevitable conclusion that there needs to be an additional game mechanic added to bridge the gap in the operation of the simulation. Or hope that players continue to support the game 'blindly' in the hopes that it will eventually correct itself.

While I can reconize the need for 'something', I don't know what it is, because although I can see much of the big picture, I'm not involved enough in the pvp side to know the effect some changes may have.

In a small world with a small population like we have in Perpetuum right now, this may be true.

But when the world becomes large and, most importantly, the population becomes large, things are not that simple.

While it is still true that if a sufficiently large percentage of the population, if united under a common objective, could dominate and rule the whole simulation, the sheer numbers involved will either make it unlikely or make that group (in fact the unity of the group) extremely vulnerable to well organized political actions enacted by a very small group.

Think about it. If the numbers needed to dominate the whole simulation are in the order of 50~70 thousand people agreeing exactly on a specific objective, what are the chances of anyone leading them to that agreement? And if it actually happens, how long would it take for a couple dozen well organized people to infiltrate them and start ripping them apart from within (politically and psychologically?). I would be surprised if such a large group of people could be kept focused for longer than a 6 o 12 months despite someone actively working against it from within.

Pak, I'm specifically talking about the current Perp landscape at this population, not Eve or even Perp's theoretical future, but how the current unaffliated but similarly motivated corps have taken up similar action because of the way the game mechanics are working.

Specifically the large number of corps raiding the beta islands instead of taking up residence there.

When 62nd first broke away, they were the only group without an outpost that regularily roamed the beta Island. Now that is standard, to live resonably safely on alpha Island and only venturing out with numbers or suicidal tendancies to beta. Where you are most likely to meet only other alpha dwellers doing the same.

The 'concept' of burden free PVP was shown to be effective, without having to deal with logistics, politics, intrusions, blockades, or manical vendetta.

As Kalsius said, there's no corp out there that is willing to take on the addional burden of owning an outpost, and argueably there's no need to do so.

If players don't take 'ownership' of contested land then, as I keep pointing out, the game just becomes an "Arena" game with a little ninja mining and player run market.