You are right and wrong at the same time. Unlike non sandbox games where crafting/industrial activities are just sidelines and most of the economy is driven by NPC's, Here in Eve you are always competing against other players and NPC have a much lower influence on the market. Miners have to compete against other miners to get the ore first, and then get the best price for those ores. If you manufacture you are always in price competition with other players to find the best market and to set the best price. In a broad definition it is PvP.
Is it Pure PvP combat? Debatable. Just like ganking miners. I just cant see ganking as being PvP combat. Its maybe a 6 mouse button click operation.
1. warp to belt
2. lock on to mining ship
3. overload racks
4. fire guns
5. activate Warp disruptor (optional)
6. watch mining ship go pop.
Lets face reality here, mission rats provide more of a challenge.
Having said that, I do not want to eliminate gankers. They add danger to what would otherwise be grinding out isk. Like other posters talk about the heart rate increase when they hit gate camp, the same goes for when any Cata or T1 cruiser enters a belt. there is an increase in heart rate wondering if that pilot is out ratting or if they are eyeballing my ship for a target. What I would like to see changed is for miner to have a reasonable option to occasionally turn the tables on the gankers. One that doesnt involve a second ship doing the mind numbing task of sitting cloaked 3k away from the mining ship waiting on the off chance a ganker does show up. Something that doesnt make ganking impossible or even all that dangerous, but just enough to make them worry every time they start to warp in on their target. Its all about Risk vs Reward isnt it? ( losing a cheap fit Cata or T1 cruiser to Concord is not a risk, it is the cost of doing business, since it happens every time.)

Your comparison to Vegans though is spot on

Just looked at the topics on the forums and many threads have something in the lines of "eve is a pvp game, remove hi-sec, all miners must die, all carebears must be ganked, need force-undock module, etc" Basically if you aren't flying around trying to shoot at other people you are playing the game wrong and should just biomass yourself. I'm interested in where this is coming from. Obviously it mostly comes up for trolling purposes, but a great deal of people do subscribe to this notion and are unwilling to see past it and I would like to know why that is.

I play EvE because I like flying spaceships. I like how you can fit ships in EvE. I like the huge amount of ships and modules available and that there is actually a balance and everything is useful depending on the situation. I like that there is no end-game and no "best ship". I like the lack of safety, "no respawn" and that you can kill anyone and everything (supercap proliferation aside ofc). I like the way the economy works and that there is a history behind every piece of equipment. I like how EvE works, for the most part anyway.

Someone found a DED site and sold me the bookmark. I ran the site and got a mach bpc. I took all my bpcs to empire and paid a guy to move them to a factory station. I had to avoid many people that were out to get me soon as they saw me. Someone had to mine the ice to fuel my carrier. I then got on my alt and bought some minerals in Jita. Someone had to make the ships to mine the rocks to get those minerals and move them to jita and then list them where they eventually end up in my hands. I then paid another guy to move the minerals to my factory station because there were 7 wardecs on me. After my ships were ready they were sold. Perhaps one of them is in low-sec hunting other people, one might be in an incursion fleet as this post is written and I'm sure that at least 2 are busy shooting red crosses in lvl 4s. Eventually they will die, but hopefully not before bringing either wealth or glory to their owners, reduced to a wreck which might live on as a piece of a rig that I myself might buy one day. I think this is beautiful. Why people see this game as only the assisting in the destruction of things is beyond me.

And this PvP that many hold in such high regard isn't even that good. I like reading about all those 2k man blob fests, but I still know that it's a bunch of F1 monkeys with only a few people doing anything skillful. So small-gank... erm gang warfare. Well most of those fights are ganks. Most fights have the outcome decided before the fight begins and if it's not favorable all effort is made to avoid the fight. Most of the time PvP in EvE boils down to a bunch of running around and then a little bit of shooting. It's fun to do sometimes, but it doesn't exactly stand out as something great. The closest thing to a fair fight in eve are the alliance tournaments, but such an arranged arena style combat has no place in the sandbox and thus can be ingored.

PvP can ofcourse be fun. Dropping a bunch of bombers on someone is funny. Being on the receiving end however is not and I can totally relate to the unfortunate victim. For me blowing stuff up just for killmail's sake falls short of having a good time especially if you factor all the time and effort it takes to get it done. The pace and balance of it all is not enough for my liking to elevate it above the other things you can do in this game.

If you compare EvE to something like quake, dota or starcraft you will need to admit that an encounter in those other games will require way more skill then your average skirmish in EvE. And incidentally the more people you have the less skill you need. For pvp I like those games way more. I love getting the perfect rocket-plasma-rail combo in quake, I love a perfectly timed combo in a dota teamfight and I like they way I placed my units in starcraft as they destroyed the other guy's army without me having to worry about someone not aligning or flying out of rep range. With all these and more options why would I waste my time on EvE pvp when in the same time I could get way more good fights from any of those other options that I enjoy more?

I like spaceships and spreadsheets. I would like for someone to explain why I'm playing the game wrong. Oh and there isn't any butthurt in this post. Many will try to prove otherwise, but most of the losses on this toon are from flying drunk or bad cynos so nothing to complain about.

I'm really interested why one activity (pew pew) is so overwhelmingly favored that anyone not of the same mind set and favoring something different deserves ridicule. Anyone got an answer?

1. No, but does have "PvP by mutual consent, only" according to my last girlfriend.
2. Unless you're packing carriers and Titans, or Indy ships, I can fly almost everything you can.
3. It meant exactly what it said.
4. Compared to nothing. That wasn't a comparative statement. It was an opinion-based statement with no caveats.
5. That doesn't mean you should be as soft as the inside of a space twinkie, though.

(if you can't see my humor, I feel bad for you)

I have never said I don't like PvP. What I said was there is so much more to it then just the F1 act of PvP, without which you couldn't even have the PvP you speak of. And my point was that PvP is held in too high regard while everything else seems to draw ridicule as if it's the best measuring stick. Best example would be logi pilots. When you fly logi you do far more work yet it goes completely undocumented.

Probably.


Edit: TRON, DAMMIT !! -.-

Editedit:
What's the ******* point of quoting that huge OP,
when you have the first post following ?

Use your brain ! -.-

Possibly one of the best, well thought out, and reasonable requests for a button in the esc menu that allows you to go back to WoW.

Why do you bring up wow when we are talking about PvP. I've never played wow, mostly because it doesn't have any spaceships in it.

Actually, they recently came out with some research that shows that soybeans when used as a primary source of protein, may be a significant carcinogen.

Not to mention the plants you need for your vegan diet don't even grow in most climates. The resource drain to even enable you to survive a vegan diet with all the supplements you need I imagine are far more taxing on the environment then raising livestock. As for the ethical part... well nature is neither good nor evil, it's neutral.

This game has a high learning curve not a high skill requirement as related to twitch.

Plain old grass? Yes.

The stringent regulatory requirements for all this "organic whole grain no hormones blessed by a hippy pagan princess vegan-acceptable" foods? Still Ludicrously more less than cattle. Why else do you think I can buy 3 pounds of beef for the same price as I can put together one of those vegan meals?