High Risk, No Return
The veterans—so stagnant they'd practically fermented into crude oil—started dumping walls of explanation posts so thick they practically wallpapered the entire gallery.
Most of those write-ups weren't saying anything I hadn't already muttered to myself last time around. Even so, there was a reason I found myself staring at those posts like I'd been put under a spell.
[Image 1], [Image 2]
Under this game's systems, PVP efficiency is just pure garbage.
I'll say it straight: it's high risk, low return. Period.
Just look at the result screen in the screenshots I posted — veteran fleet vs. newbie fleet. The vet toyed with the newbie's brain-dead fleet management and ate them alive, and STILL lost half their own fleet.
By the numbers, two-thirds of the fleet got wiped.
The only silver lining was that the vet managed to seize the newbie's SSS-grade cruiser via Boarding Action — but even that was basically just the qualitative gap between a vet and a newbie letting the vet brute-force through the defenses.
Now imagine that same fight, except neither side has overwhelming skill, strategy, or units. Two users with roughly equal fleets and equal skill slug it out?
Best-case scenario, you walk away with roughly as much as you lost. That's it.
Say you're reading this and you've got a fleet of 10. The enemy also shows up with 10.
Even if you win the fight and absorb their fleet, you still can't end up with more than the 10 you started with.
[Pixelated image]
Nobody's pulled one yet, but late-game, capital ships bigger than battleships start popping up left and right, right?
Carriers, super dreadnoughts, the works.
Obviously, the bigger the ship, the longer a Boarding Action takes to seize it. And people have used that. The second the other guy commits his superhumans trying to snatch a capital ship, you drop one superhuman per ship of your own, lock the whole fleet down in seconds, sail the captured ships off, then self-destruct the battleship and wipe every last one of their superhumans. lmaoooooooo
Every single thing the veterans were swarming out of the woodwork to mention — every example they held up — was the fight I'd had with that guy whose name I couldn't even remember anymore.
"Look at that, Commander! Everyone's talking about you!"
"Mmm... well, yeah."
Jessica, reading the community posts right beside me, was thrashing her rabbit ears around like this was her own personal victory, genuinely delighted.
Unlike her, though, I couldn't muster any real joy looking at those posts.
"Jessica, this isn't exactly a good thing."
"You mean people keeping talking about you, Commander?"
She turned her head, big rabbit ears flicking, as if she genuinely couldn't parse what I meant — then her eyes went wide with pure bewilderment.
"If the Commander becomes famous and the ranking goes up because of it, that would be my happiness!"
"..."
She huffed through her nose, planted both hands on her hips, and puffed out her chest. I stayed quiet for a beat, then pressed a finger firmly against her forehead and shook my head.
"Call it fame all you want — when the nickname and everything else is completely scrubbed, what's the point?"
"Nngh—!"
"And this isn't fame. It's pheromones. The kind that only attract people who are genuinely deranged about PK."
"Ah...!"
Thankfully, the guy I'd beaten had spammed the gallery into paralysis, and on top of that the gallery's "mod" had mass-deleted the posts by the page — so I'd at least avoided becoming the bait that lured every PK fetishist in the community.
With that thought, I kept scrolling. The PVP explainers had shifted from regular veterans to endorsement posts from actual PVP specialists — the ones who'd gone full feral for player-killing.
[Cruiser beauty-angle verification shot, weapon layout cleverly obscured]
We went full psycho for PVP from day one. We don't run standard fleet setups — we build dedicated PVP loadouts, then grind like hell to shave risk off that brain-dead high-risk low-return formula while leveling characters and ships with absolute discipline.
Most newbies can barely handle fighting pirates or the Space Kaiju that are about to drop, never mind other players.
Guys who are already wheezing just holding off pirates — how the hell are they supposed to PVP?
On top of that, the people who level properly tend to treat PVP like a formal duel. But if one side goes all-in and eats the losses like those fossils in the examples above? Then exactly like the other guy said — even if you add up everything you gained, you come out weaker than when you started.
And once somebody's been softened up like that, you think the villains or other users are just going to leave them alone?
Reading those posts, I found myself nodding right along with the commenters.
Honestly, this game had clearly changed in a bunch of ways with the update that dropped when we got possessed into it — but had the old meta actually shifted? Looking at all this... absolutely not.
I kept reading the gallery's collective venting about the current state of things, then decided I'd seen enough. I closed the community window.
"Commander, word just came in — all the pirates heading for the base have been dealt with."
"Oh, yeah?"
> Pirate Raid — CLEARED
> Rewards: Corvette-class pirate ships x2 acquired, Minerals 500, Rare Resources 100
An event message window popped up at just the right moment. I nodded and decided to collect the rewards first.
Wouldn't mind a few more quiet stretches like this for a while.
A body gone slack needs tension again... right?
I wasn't sure I should put it that way, but the event chain tied to the pirate raids — the one players were tentatively calling the "Pirate Empress Event" —