I miss EVE but it is all consuming, especially when you're part of a great alliance/corp.
As an member of Goonfleet/Goonswarm, I ran the logistics for the Battle of XZH, where a scrappy group of upstarts from Syndicate waged a weeks long insurgency against a better funded, better equipped force.
We won, at least until they "bought out" the system underneath us, through superior numbers, tactics and logistics. We had our turn around time from death to back on the front (fully refunded and refitted) down to less than 6 minutes. We cycled several thousand ships an hour into the meat grinder.
We kept "Ol' Ironsides", one of our space stations, up via hundreds of shield repairing cruisers (Ospreys) and a game mechanic we didn't fully understand yet, but would soon learn to exploit (moving the zone boundary).
Anyways, I miss EVE, but it is a second full time job at the top level, and I've got other things to do. I'm glad it is still generating epic battles. :)
I think it's amazing that it has kept growing more and more hardcore. I have the impression that if I started out as a complete newb now in EVE, there would be no way for me to get up to speed and be one of the big guys, running a titan(?)
It's somewhat the opposite with WoW, that it's been consistently dumped down since Vanilla. I've been playing for all 10 years, thoroughly enjoyed all of it (although some expansions were better than others) and the time I had to spend to grind flasks and potions for vanilla Naxx was about 10 hours of killing lowly mobs, grinding away, just to be able to afford 5-6 flasks, which would last me through a raid night. That's 16 hours for 1 night of playing. And we raided every night.
Now, I have a job, I'm still raiding at the highest level, yet I can log in, knowing my character is already fully decked and ready to go, the same second the raid starts. I have to spend about 30 minutes each week, just getting stuff for the remaining time.
It suits me perfectly, due to having a job and a social life (With the people I raid hardcore with normally, so our schedules match), but I do sometimes miss the sense of accomplishment you would get from pushing something for several months, like in the start/middle TBC and vanilla days.
I'm happy that EVE is still able to have such an environment, for the people that wants that.
I think there is a huge misconception of how eve works. It's not really necessary to fly one of the big ships nor train them. But then I started 2 years ago and have 2 super carriers and a titan. It's about getting into the right corporations find the right source of ISK and play the game the way you want it. If you want to fly a titan, you can do it within two years (or less) if you are smart about it.
However what makes EVE every unique is that a new player is valuable as a 10 year old veteran if they are willing to learn. A small ship can hold a carrier or super carrier in place till reinforcements arrive. It takes you 2 weeks to train into that. Hauling for your corporation in a 1 months old character can be as valuable as having a 100million skillpoint character. It's a sandbox after all and only you decide which route you want to go and how mcuh time you want to spend doing it.
> However what makes EVE every unique is that a new player is valuable as a 10 year old veteran if they are willing to learn.
This is one of the most important bits, and people coming from other games might think it's hyperbole.
For mostly every other game out there, there's always some upgrade to be had until you've hit the very highest level of gear. In EVE, there's a larger set of roles than the Tank/Healer/DPS holy trinity, and while some roles can be quite cash/skill intensive (like piloting capital ships), there are other important roles (like tackling) where you can have near-optimal gear and skills within a very short while.
There is no linear progression of ships in EVE PvP. You don't need, or want, a capital ship for tackling. You want a small, fast, ship capable of literally flying circles around the big ships, fast enough that the big guns can't really hit it. If you focus your skills on it, you can get to the point where you're an effective tackler within a few weeks at most, and within a couple of months you'll have a character that's tackling with the best of them. At that point, it's really up to whether _you_ are up to snuff.
Yeah, this pretty much. A misconception when one looks at the game from outside is that "bigger = better", i.e. a Titan is the best ship in the game and one should strive towards it, just like someone should strive to the max level in WoW or any other MMO because that is the goal of the game.
Not so in eve. Usually, big ships can't hit smaller ships, or do effective damage. A Titan on its own is pretty useless, and it needs a support fleet of all kinds of ships to be effective (or survive).
This trickles down the ship class tree, all the way down to the lowly Frigate-sized ships, which cost a thousandth of what a titan cost, or even less.
Fact! Tackling is my favorite part of fleet combat. I've pulled out battleships when necessary, but buzzing between the huge ships in a Vigil at 4.5km/s and fucking their warp drives is so much fun.
Exactly. When I was in TEST, we enjoyed having newbies, and were happy to shower them in ISK and ships, just as I was when I joined. In the end, it became like a second full time job for me, as I basically just started developing systems for TEST and not actually playing the game.
In retrospect, I would probably have enjoyed a smaller corporation with scrappy gang fights.
There are literally people who will invest months of their time to infiltrate an alliance, gain trust, rise in the ranks to then inflict the maximum amount of damage possible (a practice known as 'awoxing' after a character who made it popular a long time ago). This has lead to a level of paranoia among certain people that it would probably be easier to get a job at a Fortune 500 company than one of those groups.
Furthermore, the biggest coalitions [of alliances] consist of thousands and tens of thousands of players. Some of those operations could be considered at least semi-professional with extensive IT infrastructure and dedicated HR and financial teams.
They also have implemented anti-spying features into the communication channels such as hiding watermarks on forum pages that identify the user account of the person logged in. That way if you took a screenshot and distributed it then they could identify who the leaker is.
Goonswarm six or so years ago would raise 20-30k a year from donations to pay for colo and bandwidth. All hardware was donated from corporate IT takeouts.
I know, right! I can't even be bothered to play a game for 2 months consistently.
The game I've played the longest is GW2, but that's only because I play it semi-socially and casually. Not to mention the very frequent update rate keeps me interested!
EVE seems amazing, and I'm sure I'd love it (never bothered to download it for some reason), but I don't think I could provide that much commitment to a game.
And GW2 is free. That's also the only game I play, because I can play twice a month and I won't feel bad about wasting my money on monthly subscriptions.
(I know there are ways to play EVE for free, but there is no way a casual player could make it.)
I have the impression that if I started out as a complete newb now in EVE, there would be no way for me to get up to speed and be one of the big guys, running a titan(?)
That's the beauty of Eve - everything is for sale, including pilots, ships, loyalty, and power. Grinding won't get you anywhere. Being one of the big guys is a reflection of one's ability to navigate the social and power structures in Eve more than anything else - a relative newbie starting from scratch can climb the ranks much faster than someone who's been playing for years but lacks the right metagame skills. You're probably right that you'd be unlikely to be one of the big guys, but that's more because of the time commitment than because everyone else has a big head start.
Not quite the same, but in Travian a reliable newish player who can follow instruction and get up to speed can sit a big account and take on pretty big roles quite quickly. And then there is the background spying and account stealing, password stealing etc that is plain fantastic as background intrigue.
It's easy to think that EVE is not worth playing unless you already have been playing for years, or that it's only worth doing so at the highest level. Though if you dig a bit deeper you'll see there's much more to the game than that.
Sure, there's the steep learning curve to beat. But once you get the sandbox concept and realize you can make a dent in the universe, however small, you can start to have some fun. Find likeminded players, and see what suits your playstyle. Be realistic about what you can achieve (train frigates and cruisers if you're starting out, not battleships) and just have fun. If you end up lucky (or work hard, of course) you could buy characters from other players, or just keep increasing your skills.
What attracts me is that the upkeep is minimal, and yet it does allow me to spend hours on end with people I enjoy talking to. Play more, earn more. Play less, no big deal.
I've never been a gamer in the sense that I play a lot of games. The games I've played for longer than about a month (however casual or hardcore) I can count on 2 hands, if not one. But those games, I've played for months if not years on end. (Counter-Strike for 7 years, EVE for 4ish, WoW for 2-3)
I haven't really gamed ever since graduating college a good 4 years ago, but I did stumble back into EVE after a 5+ year break. Having fun once again, and that's what counts.
I would never say that EVE doesn't reward playing at any level. I'm just wired to do things bigger - and I have a hard time playing at a lower level in most anything.
I would recommend getting into a good corp/alliance though - there's nothing that improves gameplay more than that.
Ok. I have an account with a month playtime from years ago. I want to join back up and get into a good corp. How do I find such a corp? I want to go play in fun battles and null sec.
hard to say, I'd say look through forum posts to see which corps stand out, or just go do the stuff you normally do and talk to people in local, talk to your targets (or killers), fellow miners, ... whatever it is. Join those you enjoy talking to and see where it goes.
Small corps are hard if you don't know them beforehand. It's easier to find a handful of really cool people you get along with in a bigger group.
When it comes to recommending people to EVE, the following rule of thumb has been effective: If you enjoyed playing Dwarf Fortress, you'll like EVE Online.
@That one other guy: When most people want to fly a titan, they don't bother training a character and just buy a titan pilot on the sanctioned character trading forum, so training time is rarely an issue for experienced pilots.
True! And Dwarf Fortress has more action, less waiting around. Eve Online is often like the real military: wait for 2 hours for 80 other people to show up, then travel for 2 hours, then wait, and then the operation gets cancelled, and travel back home for 2 hours. And you trained for 6 weeks before the event to make it all possible. Never happens like that in Dwarf Fortress!
Eve's client is lightweight enough to run two or even three instances simultaneously.
So back when I played regularly I would do that (i.e. fleet manoeuvers i.e. nothing much) on my main character whilst running missions/ratting/managing production or sales with my "carebear" alternate character, or alternatively running around neighboring systems in a cloaked covert ops ship, scouting on behalf of that same fleet. All with Excel and other crucial management tools open on another screen, of course.
If you let it be so, playing Eve is not unlike running a small business and is perfectly engrossing.
This is why it's important to have an interesting corp. Big corps and alliances make this fun because you have entertaining things going on in Teamspeak/Vent/Mumble/Jabber/IRC.
I started playing 2 months ago and enjoyed every second of it. After a very dense playtime for the first 45 days (16'000 minutes / 45 days = 5.9 hours a day average), I started to settle a little bit, realizing my social life and mental health was slowly drifting towards complete dedication...
I keep talking with complete strangers that told me even after years of playing they were still discovering news things, tricks or kinds of gameplay.
I guess for newbies you need the patience and dedication to really have a grasp at the game, but even after intense gaming for 70 days I know probably very little about it; and for experienced players you need ways to renew the pleasure, change the type of gameplay you practice, go from nullsec to hisec, challenge yourself with crazy ideas and so on.
When I played Eve I never really felt the need to 'level up'. The learning curve was big enough that just farming money, and running an interceptor was fun enough for me - even after I had bigger ships.
I'd be inclined to believe you'd be more likely to end up flying a Titan if you were to invest the training time into it, given that the larger corporations have hundreds, if not thousands of Titans lying around. Your WoW comparison is apt in that respect, Titans aren't exactly commonplace, but there's plenty more of those around than there were 'back in the day'.
Unless you're high up in an alliance or have paid for one yourself and lost it on the alliances behalf no alliance is going to toss you a titan. No corp has hundreds of titans lying around either. PL is rumoured to have ~20 on unsubbed accounts but thats the biggest stockpile.
The statements in the article disagree with your numbers. It was stated that one side had lost 18-23 titans and had destroyed more than 40 titans on the other side, with "more to come".
I guess we could debate semantics over what "lying around" means in this case, but it seems to me that the big corps have access to a large amount of titans if they are losing them in those numbers. They don't even seem to be particularly concerned about it.
Some members of those alliances still certainly have titans. But the alliances themselves don't have them laying around to redistribute to those who lost them and it will be difficult for them to replace them since the build time on a titan is over 2 months each and there are not that many builders in game capable of making them.
I wasn't supporting the notion that corporations have "hundreds" of titans sitting around waiting to be activated. I'm just saying that I would double or triple your number and I would be more likely to agree.
The last report I saw suggested over 70 titans destroyed. You don't commit that many highly expensive ships to a battle unless you can replace them, or you are really really desperate to keep that system.
Also, keep in mind that this is apparently just another skirmish in a war that's been waging since October where dozens of Titans have been lost so far.
I'm getting the impression you might not play the game actively. With that in mind let me assure you that as both a player and a super capital pilot that yes they are used without easy ways to replace them regularly. Even if you can afford to replace them straight away build time cuts into that an no alliance can afford to have 70 titans sitting around waiting as replacements. The side that dropped sov in this has had near immunity with using their super capitals as the other side was more risk adverse with them. The other side decided that this was the time to go all in and they happened to win. One of the sides is believed to have a small cache of titans for rainy days. The other side isn't.
Dozens is also high for how many titans have been lost in this conflict. It's been going on for a while but from what I can remember the number is actually less than 12 up to this point with no other real super on super fights.
Another point is that at this level most of the people are just looking to finally use their titans in a fight. When you fly a titan for most alliances almost all you will ever do is bridge other fleets so its not hard to convince titan pilots to get into a fight.
You're right, I'm not an active player. I'm likely referring to tactics that don't apply. I'm just going by the reports I've read so far.
I can see people sacrificing titans out of boredom, it's mostly wasted time unless they invested actual currency into the ship somehow. I seem to recall one of the massive battles lasted longer than normal simply because everybody was ready for a large battle more or less out of boredom.
Anyway, I'm more satisfied with this last statement than your previous as I was only saying that some of the larger corporations surely have a large number of titans sitting around waiting to be active. I wasn't saying they would have enough to replace 70 immediately, I was saying dozens which could be 24, 36, or 48. I say this simply because if you months of time on your hands and raking in serious resources on a large corporation level, why not spend it all on building the biggest ships in the game?
You're changing my words to fit your beliefs. I never said the large alliances have even dozens. Only one alliance is believed to have a decent stock pile of alliance available titans. And even thats just a rumour. You can say that this doesn't mesh with them using them if you want but the fact remains.
To answer you last question it's because it is a LOT of work to build them and not fun work either and it is extremely expensive to get into building them so the number of people that do it is limited and the people that do it tend to do it when there is orders for them and it'd be pretty well known if one entity was offering to buy none stop production.
PL is believed to have a decent cache(~20) the other alliances involved don't. I'd be amazed if the others had even one or two spare ones each, best case they convince a few inactive titan pilots to log on and give theirs to someone that lost one in the short term while they build a replacement for them.
>why not spend it all on building the biggest ships in the game?
Because only a handful of people can fly them and they are almost never useful. It's much better to spend your resources on smaller ships that everyone can use and get 2000 pilots out there not worried about dying.
Flying a Titan often times has more to do with who you know rather than skill progression and amassing wealth, which can take 2-3 years minimum.
Even if someone has only been playing six months, if they are competent, highly trusted, and they fit in, being provided with a Titan and a character to fly it with is a fairly common occurrence.
I'd say it's extremely uncommon. Only a handful of alliances can actually afford to pay for multiple titans and I can't think of any of those that would give one to a player thats less than a year old(most of those wouldn't even accept a player that was less than a year or two old).
You're right; a one year minimum is a lot more realistic than six months, strictly from an experience perspective.
When you take trust into account though, giving the best friend of an already-trusted player a bunch of high value assets, despite the fact they've only been playing for a year, makes a lot more sense than giving those same assets to some player who's been in alliance 4 or 5 years, but nobody really knows them well.
Also, I would argue that at least half of all players with Titans are heavily subsidized. There are organizations that are so obscenely wealthy that such things aren't a very big deal at all.
EVE can be played a lot of different ways, but the novelty in each eventually wears off and it becomes monotonous.
This is especially true for large-scale alliance warfare, which, if you're at the top is something like a full-time job, and if you're merely rank and file, it's more like a part-time job.
In my opinion, the meta-game is more fun than the game itself in this context. There's an entire ecosystem that exists outside of the game that involves communication infrastructure, propaganda, spying, gambling, player services, etc.
Large power blocs have to be able to control the message, mobilize thousands of players on a moment's notice, and continually infiltrate their enemies to glean intelligence.
It's often jokingly said that EVE is "serious business." Players who fly the larger ships (supercapitals) typically receive SMS push notifications so they can mobilize faster. At the very top, certain players have been known to cash out (albeit illegitimately) on their power and wealth, earning a healthy real-life income stemming from their activities. Think hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Of course, as cool as all of that is, 15-hour-long battles suck. The game client, networking code and engine are a lot better than they used to be, but they're still woefully lacking for the purposes of extreme large scale warfare, to the point where participating in such battles is something akin to torture.
For me the novelty wore off in about an hour. Discovering that you it takes (significant) time just to spend skill points so that you can fly the new ship you just bought that it will take you (significant) time just to go and pick up in a game where pretty much all the game play consists of clicking on lists and waiting.
I think it's great the EVE has such an entertaining meta-community. I suspect it's precisely because the game itself is so slow-paced and dull that this is true (the real game takes place in your imagination, and the pace is such that you can spend a lot of time chatting with other players, etc.)
It's worth noting that EVE is an idealized capitalist society, with all the realistic drawbacks that comes with that. I agree that the back story is essentially fantasy, but what you miss is that this doesn't mean you're a classic solo adventurer for whom the world bows down as you pass. (This isn't a jab; in most MMOs, this is the case.)
EVE is principally about market simulation, and pretty much everything you do is either a market externality (e.g., going to war) or a market action (e.g., mining). Contrast with WoW, which is an adventure simulation (if you're not on an adventure, WoW failed), EVE doesn't leave out the boring parts because they're critical to actually simulating the economics.
Which means arbitrage. Which means location matters. Playing the game is about figuring out what kind of entrepreneurship you want to engage in, and then optimizing it to maximize profits.
Yeah, this is non-obvious, and EVE is notoriously bad at teaching newbies. They've been trying to improve it, but it still comes down to finding mentors. Your criticisms are thus on the mark without actually criticizing the game itself; you just never got to play.
I'm not trying to get you to play. You criticized it. I'm explaining what parts of your criticism were off mark. You don't want to hear it, don't criticize it where the fanboys are.
From quick reading: 1) I agree the time-based skilling isn't necessarily a good thing. 2) You didn't seem to realize you could get your stuff FedExed, by any of the player-operated services.
The latter illustrates the good point of the game: there's enough leeway/sandbox aspects that this is actually possible. This, and not the game being slow and dull are why it has a large following. There's plenty of slow and dull games no one plays.
Edit: Didn't realize your review was 8 years old. The game did change quite a bit since, particularly for new player introduction.
I agree. I wish there was something that was EVE-lite or something. If the realism was notched down 2-3 levels it would be much more enjoyable. You can't be a casual (here meaning play 2-3 hours a week) and still enjoy EVE.
I played EVE for a while; actually as part of one of these giant corporations. I'm not sure how fun it'd be without being in one, as they tend to insure you against battle loss and it takes long enough to grind the space-mining-simulator even with their support.
The other thing I remember is that these "Battles" were extremely frustrating, and very long lag-minigames. e.g. get instruction over teamspeak, everyone targets a ship and if you are lucky within the next three minutes your UI will respond and fire a shot before you randomly got targeted and exploded instantly (this was server lag, as the client would run reasonably smoothly). Even giving CCP advanced warning about where we expected to have a battle they said there was "nothing that could be done" and basically refused to acknowledge that there was a problem.
That, plus the fact that living in the UK generally meant operations were extremely late nights, meant I dropped it.
I used to play, maintained being independent up until I got my blockade runner and some game time, then backed off to do life things. I never really did get into the mining since the end result would having to be to trade, so I put focus on the market and finding a niche as a middle-man in one place or another.
For what it is, it is a well developed community a cut above say, Call of Duty. Or at the very least far more advanced at scamming.
imagine that all this energy, time, effort and cash would be spent on some tangible issue. the revolution in ukraine, a movement for civil liberties.
there are very creative minds at work within EVE, reading the mittani is amazing. those guys would run circles around the organisers of, say, occupy wall street.
to put it dramatically and over the top - the world is burning and the brightest minds play games. sort of an inverse ender's game.
Yes, if instead of coding trivial web apps we all became doctors, the world would be a better place, right?
Creativity and talent aren't fungible resources that you can just decide to apply to whatever is most noble. If you put a top level EVE player in charge of Occupy Wall Street instead, do you really think he'd have the passion and interest to do as good of a job as he does in EVE?
People are good at what they like doing, and there's no reason to be bothered over the fact that they aren't passionate about what you think they should be doing.
You could if you chose to do so, but that's a straw man.
Refugee health doesn't happen solely in Syria. There are Refugee Health Centres in most major cities, and refugee health is only a small facet of medicine, and medicine is only a small subset of activities that can make the world a better place.
Writing a better javascript framework will not make the world a better place.
Why wouldn't writing a better JS framework improve the world? Jquery helped a lot of people get into web development, got them jobs, inspired them to enjoy programming and maybe life itself, helped the economy, helped make websites exist that directly and indirectly help people, etc.
There is no reason anyone should be ashamed of doing what they love (unless of course, it's genuinely shameful). Yes, some things are more noble than others, and some things help people more directly, but the world needs a complete diversity of interests to be wholly "good". We shouldn't just rank all tasks from most to least noble, pick the most noble one, and pursue that solely.
>Why wouldn't writing a better JS framework improve the world? Jquery helped a lot of people get into web development, got them jobs, inspired them to enjoy programming and maybe life itself, helped the economy, helped make websites exist that directly and indirectly help people, etc.
Oh please. This kind of smug self-congratulatory attitude is what makes me hate echo chambers like HN. You enjoy writing code on the side? That's fine.
But don't pretend that your competitor to Uber (or whatever other startup that gets funded and is only really valuable to people in first-world countries) makes you a humanitarian.
I didn't say that JS frameworks are a humanitarian effort. I'm just saying that non-noble things can be valuable too. Not everything has to be a cure for cancer. Just because people have bad lives in 3rd world countries doesn't mean positive experiences by more fortunate people are trivial.
All I said was that inspiring someone to enjoy life and to give them the tools to live a good life is something valuable, and is something worth doing. You're the smug one, by choosing to misinterpret what I said so that you can feel righteous about being the only person who acknowledges their trivial life.
Ah yes, if you aren't working a job that is directly helping the poor and/or wounded, fuck you for being a leech right? People lives and humanitarian efforts are solely measured in how many sick people you can save today right?
How can you be so short sighted to believe that unless you are working on a cure to cancer, that all your efforts on this planet are for naught. Does this mean if I am able bodied and finically stable, any service that benefits me and my 70 or so years on this planet are "a waste of time?" A guess every and all artists should kill themselves for not being good enough for becoming doctors right? Art never changed the world and those smug artists shouldn't believe that their paintings actually mean anything.
Someone should have told Gates back in 1975 to give up because building a better BASIC interpreter would never change the world.
> But don't pretend that your competitor to Uber [..] makes you a humanitarian.
He didn't claim he was one. But you started out basically implicitly demanding that we all be humanitarians. It's fine to help people, but it's also fine to build web-apps for cat pictures. If you feel so strongly about humanitarian work, just go to Syria or where ever, and help people yourself.
Great open source software has in fact helped our organisation build apps and services, which supports making the world a better place. I wouldn't be quite as negative as that.
And you can't work all the time. It sucks the creativity out of you. At least for me. So hobbies are important to make the other side function well.
So go and invent some new vaccines instead of whining about it on HN like a little bitch. Invent the vaccines, manufacture them, secure the patents and all that, and then distribute them to the needy. You, yourself, personally.
Once you've done all that, come back here and link to a blog where you explain how you did it, so that we may follow in your shiny, saintly path.
Until that moment, you're a whiny little bitch who thinks their opinion on what other people should do with their free time and money means more than diddly squat. (It doesn't).
He was pretty much one of the most respected diplomats in game and head diplomat for at the time the largest organization in the game. That definitely puts him in the top group as far as players go in a game where ability to 1v1 isn't the only way to win.
I don't know, I like to think Eve has two skill trees, two progression levels. On the one side you have the in-game skills, spaceship command and weapon skills, that kinda thing. But those only get you so far; the other skills are ones you acquire IRL, things like fleet command, logistics, communications skills, organizational skills, etcetera.
Those can be used or applied IRL. I like to think.
Also, playing video games or other kinds of entertainment has a role in life. Sure, that energy could be applied to other, greater goods, but the fact of the matter is, nearly nobody has that kind of infinite energy supply, that kind of motivation, etc. There's a few that seem to do, which turn into people's role models - but those are the outliers. You can strive to be like those, but in reality, you'll just burn yourself out.
Relaxation has its role in life. Always has, too; sure, cavemen could be out hunting more food instead of sit around in their caves sharing stories of their ancestors, but they didn't. To name a random example.
Guy: "So, how much do you smoke"
Girl: "I smoke a pack a day"
Guy: "If you smoke a pack a day, that is 365 packs a day, 3650 over 10 years, and at $20 a pack that is $73,000. if you do that for 30 years, that is $219,000. Just think, if you didn't smoke, you could afford a ferrari"
Girl: "Do you smoke?"
Guy: "No"
Girl: "Oh, so where is your ferrari?"
> to put it dramatically and over the top - the world is burning and the brightest minds play games. sort of an inverse ender's game.
Well, you can look at the games like EVE as a big social simulations - they're sandboxed worlds very much resembling the real one, but they iterate faster and you (i.e. the authors) can alter the constrains and see what happens. I think MMOs should be studied in greater detail.
People wasting time is a sad thing, but failure to learn from any good data that comes out of it is also sad.
I've had this thought as well. The good news is that there are millions of creative minds, improving the world, making a dent in the universe. The sad news is that there are billions of people just trying to get by, looking for comfort, looking for distraction. Gaming is just one of many ways people pacify themselves. (not a criticism of gaming, I'm a gamer as well)
>those guys would run circles around the organizers of, say, occupy wall street
I'm a gamer, and I was an organizer of Occupy Wall Street. That you would even compare the difficulty between running a virtual guild in an online video game, to attempting to organize a real world dissident political movement from scratch, boggles my mind. I've done both, but you clearly don't have the slightest clue what you are talking about.
I'm still awaiting a startup to gamify the political process and getting involved with civic duty. Sadly only then would we see people give a shit about politics.
I myself also had to quit EVE after 7 years, but I had one of the best player experiences you can get in that game.
Highlights: Being a member of Veto. Going to Iceland and meeting long-time friends (and meeting Mittens!). Making a best friend. Being present for the first ever Titan kill. Becoming among the richest players in the game without using T2 blueprints. Succeeding at ultra-high level market manipulation for massive profits. Launching several successful manufacturing enterprises. Epic kills that netted ultra rare item drops (prize ships, T2 blueprints). Running multiple identities and spying on people. Playing a key role in breaking up a large alliance through dirty politics. Plotting revenge on someone, slowly working my way into their circle and brutally backstabbing them 5 years later.
It would be interesting to read more about what you did. In particular it would be interesting to hear the details on the 5 year long espionage plot. Have you written about that somewhere?
I haven't really, no. It would be interesting but also haven't played EVE in a couple of years by now so I don't have the right level of enthusiasm for the game anymore to really write about it, nor the time. Sorry :/
...you see speculation that the whole incident was triggered by a bug in the game. Has anyone confirmed that this is true? If so, it would be very disappointing. Given that the appeal of the game lies in delicate politics and long-term large-scale maneuvering, having all that work undone by a bug seems as though it would discourage players from investing the time and effort necessary to make the game worthwhile.
Almost every single medium to large scale fight in EVE will get "CCP'd" somehow. Whether it's a node crash, a node denying new connections, or any number of other issues.
It's frustrating at times, but generally accepted because it affects every side eventually.
Quite a few of the past large political shifts were due to betrayal and spies, effectively also making months of work undone instantly. The current one was due to a bug or due to a player making a mistake. I don't think players cater all that much for the difference, and we'll likely never know which one it was.
On the other hand, in RL, how many major changes to world politics, wars, etc, have been due to accidents? Bugs? Glitches in the matrix? It would be an interesting study, in some ways. Accidental wars...
I love that the war "started by accident," just like so many real conflicts. I'm not to familiar with EVE, but it sounds like the game glitched and forgot who owned a key area, which people are now scrambling to claim. is that accurate? if so, will the developer make any kind of restitution to the faction that list the territory due to the error?
The sovereignty claim (who controls a solar system and it's station) generates an in-game bill that needs to be paid by the corporation owning the system. In this case a Pandemic Legion holding corp in Nulli Secunda held the system. Enough money wasn't in the right wallet division, or the auto-pay glitched, and when the bill came due their claim dropped.
When sovereignty drops like that, it's free game to claim the system and station, generating a free for all frenzy. In this case it was Pandemic Legion's staging system with a good deal of their forward staged assets stuck in the station that they can't access until they retake the system and station.
Honest mistake or glitch, who knows. The corp CEO is claiming on reddit that it was a bug and petitioned it to the game developer CCP to have the sovereignty rolled back, but it's kinda hard to tell what's truth or just PR spin. CCP doesn't roll back losses like this often (I think it has happened like once or twice that they've rolled back sov)
It actually looks like a pretty cool game - the description reminds me of Elite brought up to today's standards. I can't help but think of this, though:
The combat involved in this battle is sorting a list by name, double clicking a square and then pressing F1. Once that square disappears, double click another square and then press F1.
Oh, I forgot, you might align your camera in a direction of a different square, which represents a local planet, and double click.
Occasionally, and especially if your name starts with an a, the whole screen will start flashing indicating you're the square the enemy is targeting. Then, unless you have spent an extremely unhealthy amount of time playing the game and are in a titan, you will die instantly.
I've heard it described as excel with a 3D engine bolted on the front of it.
Maybe one could market a tool that turns mundane corporate data entry into an exciting battle for galactic domination, and make your white collar peon employees battle each other mercilessly to increase shareholder value. If you die in the game, you get fired.
The irony is that for all Morgan's anti-corporatism, the privatization of war for profit has greatly served to reduce violence, from England's Glorious Revolution onwards. Corporations are better at avoiding war than monarchs, not because they particularly care about people per se but because war is just so wasteful.
Large fleet battles in a nutshell, yeah. That's the downside of allowing >2000-man fights, both the server and the clients have a lot of trouble displaying all of it, and an up-close view is pretty much useless. I wouldn't be surprised if CCP introduces a 'headless' client that just shows the overview without the 3D view and the brackets overlays for instances like this.
When I used to play it was exactly the same with or without the lag and this describes any battle with more than 50 or so combatants, the firepower is so overwhelming.
Small scale combat is more skilful, but it's almost impossible to find balanced fights.
Yep, that's EVE's biggest weakness. It's a well-designed game, and the player interactions, politics, and general sandbox gameplay are fantastic, but the combat is absolutely terrible and unfathomably boring.
There are actually some games out there that have EVE's sandbox features, but with combat that takes significant skill (usually in the style of a first-person shooter/slasher). Unfortunately, few of them have become very popular due to poor funding and the inclination of the general public to avoid very "hardcore" games.
Darkfall Online and Mortal Online are two that were released in the past few years. Both have been plagued by poor development and serious bugs, especially the latter. However, when played with a group of people you trust and like, both can be extremely fun.
Age of Wushu is a Chinese-developed MMO where you take the role of a hero from wuxia fiction. Think of it sorta like Street Fighter meets WoW. PvP fights are very lively, you need to counter the moves your opponent is using. PvP is a huge aspect; in fact, every time you log in it reminds you that the game is Open PvP and asks if you want to continue :)
It's poorly translated but that only adds to the charm. And, as with Eve, goons are among the best players.
As a titan pilot, there is more to do than just clicking broadcasts / sorting your overview / aligning. That's the kind of stuff that happens when everything is going well or you are shooting an inanimate object. As a titan pilot on the losing side last night, there was a lot of refitting, repositioning, and co-ordination. Fleet and sub-channel commanders are constantly relaying information over Skype or mumble channels. I personally spent a lot of time trying to get out of bubbles once the call was made to try to extract if possible. This was after two hours of staring at a black screen, praying that my ship wasn't dying without a chance of me fighting back.
There is also an incredible amount of micro that one can do in small gang or solo PvP, but that kind of stuff doesn't make for fancy headlines.
I thought it sounded interesting so I tried it and came away with exactly the same conclusion. Like another one of these click-click-click games only you look out a spaceship instead of looking down on a bunch of dwarves or whatever. It didn't do it for me at all.
Depends how you play it. I played for a couple of years just doing the missions and a bit of trading. My "multi-player" was occasionally chatting to other people in-system. No corp, no ISK, no spreadsheets (apart from trading - very similar to Elite), no lag. Eventually stopped when the missions ramped up too quickly - you were supposed to complete them with other people.
I wonder, is this sort of war good business for CCP, the Icelandic company running Eve? (Do they want more of them, or battles of a particular size/character?)
• losing side feels sting of loss, faces upcoming grind of reattaining lost status: a likely quitting point
• winning side feels a sense of completion: also a likely quitting point
People who've quit: was it after some big reckoning battle, of either victory or defeat, triggering a re-evaluation of your participation? Or did big battles make you hungry for more?
The first time you jump into a major fleet battle the adrenaline pumps so hard you'll think your heart is going to burst outta your chest. You spend the rest of your Eve career looking for that feeling again (it does come from time to time).
CCP love this stuff and encourage it. They've scaled Eve to support ever-larger fleet battles; nonetheless it's no wonder that an engagement of of this size meant significant lag for some. The players will always be pushing the envelope of what the servers can support.
I had to stop playing Eve because I needed my life back. But for some, yes, a significant material loss in Eve represents such an investment of personal time and energy that they will quit in despair. As a result there is no other MMO with such a richly woven player-driven plot. Nothing else comes even remotely close.
Once you've played Eve, every other MMO seems to be developed for those who need their PvP plotted out for them, conducted in a padded cell of safety where no-one ever really loses anything significant. And tremendously uninteresting as a result. c.f. the upcoming Elder Scrolls Online.
EDIT (addendum): I should add that even reading about this battle sent me running to pull out my old and dusty Eve navigation charts, check on the sovereignty status of my old alliance, rewatch a few old Eve war vids and even confirm that my long-dormant accounts still exist. Maybe if I had to spend six months in hospital I'd subscribe again. But otherwise, no, I have a life now and it's an itch I can never scratch.
1. Video art made using well-composed in-game footage that may not be entirely representative of the general experience. Most of the official promotional videos fall into this category. Since Eve is a visually sumptuous game, it lends itself well to this form. It is practically machinima, although I'd be surprised if anyone has modded the engine as many machinima artists do.
great examples include:
"Dreams of Yasur" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQ_UiIYarhg
"Lacrimosa, Tortuga" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYEaPLCCIrY
"Empyrean Age Trailer" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKdTJjDnYzE (official promo)
2. Capture of a real battle. Here lies the real nostalgia. Unfortunately they tend to be less visually sumptuous and more hundreds of variously coloured & labelled objects in a highly technical 3D HUD that is almost incomprehensible without some Eve experience. They also tend to be long. Ideally accompanied by fleet voice battle chatter because otherwise they are not only dull to watch, you'll have no idea WTF is going on.
recent good samples include:
"the Battle of Asakai" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLqb-m1ZZUA
"Anatomy of a fight" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMFahR4wXTg
"Everlasting II" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMU2SsF0IZk
and just to compare and contrast the fleet battle experience, here's an early Titan-class ship kill, from two opposing perspectives:
"Bhaalgorn vs Nightmare". Must be from around 2004. Two vicious-looking and rare ships duke it out for a few minutes in what looks like a high-stakes stand-up fight. At the end it becomes apparent that this is, in fact, a promotional sales brochure and both ships are on the market. The realization of what that meant for the whole structure of the game is what attracted me to Eve in the first place. http://dl.eve-files.com/media/09/Bhaalgorn%20vs%20Nightmare....
> But on the bad side, perhaps:
> • destroys long-cherished items/positions, weakening interest/attachment
EVE explicitly attempts to cater to the side of the market that wants to feel their actions have real consequences, as opposed to MMOs like WoW where the world is essentially steady-state. Half their marketing material refers to this.(1)(2) For them to succeed at this, it must both be possible to actually destroy something someone else cherishes, and have your favorite spaceship you've worked on for so long be permanently lost.
If you're going to quit because you lost a ship, you're not the sort of player to make it into a Super-Cap fleet for a big coalition. We're talking about people who do things like month-long marathon spawn camps or week-long fleets of shooting at towers. Everybody with a Titan in this fight has at least one other character they play most of the time.
Also I think you dramatically over-estimate the impact of this loss. All sides have dozens of other systems and income and funding that are relatively safe. PL/N3 lost a key forward base and a weapons cache, but it's not a crushing territory loss, and they still have one of the largest super-cap fleets in the game - they may have been set back weeks but they've been in this war for 3 months already and fighting these kinds of wars for years. In 2009, PL lost all their territory and their super-caps (coincidentally while allied to GoonSwarm) and then turned around and re-built into a major player again.
Similarly, while it's a nice feather in CFC's cap it's not like this is them winning the final boss battle. Heck, relative to GoonSwarm's 2006-2009 campaign against BoB and half of EVE or the time in 2010 when they forgot to pay a bill and lost the richest 3 regions of the map (and all of their territory), this is barely a footnote in their history.
EVE is full of stories of large organizations that won the battles but lost the war.
Also, everyone should take heart what you said about lost ships. The best players only fly what they can afford to lose. Many of us players who did smaller-scale PvP had "rich-fit" ships just for comedy. Losing 25bil-fit frigates happens and most of us flew them because "fuck it" to begin with.
My corporation quit when we became so good that no one would fight our small gang unless they outnumbered us 3-1. Eventually the lack of fights and the general laziness of moving to a new area led us to quit. So I guess yea, if we were just ok, we would still be playing.
By the time you're in one of these sorts of battles you've lost ships. Lots of 'em. You never undock without realizing someday, maybe today, you're gonna lose that ship.
When I played EVE, I don't remember being directly affected by these things...I never joined an alliance, just sort of hung out in isolated systems and explored wormholes and tried not to bump into too many people..it was great fun.
Eve is a valid subject for an economics research though. It'll be doubly fun if you can join up with a large corporation and engage in market schemes; pump & dump, blocking supplies / trade routes, social engineering, or doing your own ponzi scheme. The good part is that none of these are illegal in Eve, so, knock yourself out.
CCP Games, the developers of EVE already have a resident economist Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson (aka CCP EyjoG). If you search for his name you can find some interviews and presentations. I think he pretty much lives an economists dream.
Pretty sure this is already a thing. I think some major universities have done some studies on/using EVE. I don't currently have any links though sadly.
In slightly related news, $37.5M has been raised in pledges for a space simulator that still has yet to be released: https://robertsspaceindustries.com.
There has to be something about space that makes people toss money at videogames.
EVE Online and Star Citizen both happen in space, but they're not a lot alike aside from that; the former is a point-and-click tactics 'n strategy simulator where a "skill" is something your character eventually levels up and becomes able to do whether you've been playing the game or not, and the latter is (will be) a first-person joystick-and-throttle space flight simulator in which things like combat and trading depend on the skill of the actual player, rather than an updated modern equivalent of rolling a d20 to see if you can beat a number on your character sheet.
Also of note is that Star Citizen is helmed by the same person who was the driving force behind Wing Commander, which all of us space combat sim aficionados remember fondly as the game which got us into the hobby -- a hobby which has been experiencing a severe dearth of new titles for most of a decade, now, more or less. Given all that, it's not terribly surprising what happened when Chris Roberts showed us a pre-alpha video of the game we've been dreaming of playing for most of our lives and said "Here's the game I want to build. How much is it worth to you to be able to play it?"
(Sources: I've had friends who played EVE Online, and investigated the game fairly thoroughly a while back with an eye toward possibly getting into it; I've donated $140 toward Star Citizen so far, and will probably buy another ship or two before launch.)
Apparently it's railroading time! I'm delighted to see my favorite gaming genre finally getting some love again, and especially now that we've got the computing hardware to really make a proper go of it -- Tachyon and Freespace 2 were great, but that's been 15 years ago now, and it's about time we had some new games to play.
Have you some reason to believe that's what I'm doing, or do you just enjoy snark? I can't blame you in the latter case; so do I. But I'm curious whether you know, or think you know, something that might change my opinion of Star Citizen. (It's not too late to initiate a dispute on the initial $140 charge, should I feel it necessary to do so.)
> There has to be something about space that makes people toss money at videogames.
Which is a damn travesty when people won't throw money at space in real-life. Other than a few huge backers (Musk, Branson) that have loads of money to hinge on this stuff, no one seems to care or pay attention.
It means I get to fly in space. Whether a 30 million, 30 billion, or 30 trillion dollars were to be invested into real life space research, there's about a 0% chance that it will let me fly in space.
That said, the more interest there is in space in concept, the more popular it might be to fund actual space flight research in reality.
Shameless plug: if you think you'd enjoy EVE but are put off by the time necessary to get "into" it, or are just curious about alternative MMOs that are not WoW clones, I encourage you to check my game Gangs of Space, currently in playable alpha: https://www.gangsofspace.com
I'd be glad to provide alpha access keys to any curious fellow HNer (contact info is in my profile, or on the game website!).
Any PC (Windows/Mac/Linux) sold in the last 5 years should be fine (might want ~600 Mb free RAM when a lot of players play at the same spot, but that's all). Up-to-date graphic drivers do help, especially on Linux.
The game's subscription model is actually implemented in such a way that you can have an item (a "Pilot's License Extension", PLEX) that represents a month of account time. PLEX can then be bought and sold by players in-game, at whatever price they're willing to agree to. There's a fairly active market for them, so a USD -> ISK (ingame currency) conversion ratio can be calculated.
Of course, there's no (officially sanctioned) way to convert PLEX back into USD, so such comparisons speak more to CCP's profits than anything else.
I don't think CCP publishes any hard data on this, they keep information like the exact number of subscribers and the number of PLEX sold secret.
The real money values always thrown around in every article about a big battle in EVE are also rather misleading as most of the ships were not paid for with real money in my estimation. The big alliances have huge incomes from ingame sources from which they finance the big expensive ships like Titans and the ship replacement programs for the smaller ships for their members.
You also can't convert the EVE ingame money (ISK) into real money, or at least not in any CCP-sanctioned way.
IIRC they did publish subscribed player statistics a while ago, I think the number then was around 500.000. Usually there's around 50.000 players online during my playing hours.
As for the conversion, whether it comes from real money or not is debatable, but given that PLEX is pretty much the measure for real world vs ISK value, a conversion is easily made - just like for example Bitcoin is often converted to USD in articles.
Usually, reported EVE player numbers are a lie; it is dishonest to mention player numbers when account numbers are what is actually meant (and everyone knows that regular players involved in alliance warfare have and use multiple accounts more often than not).
This is generally true for small-medium scale engagements, but when 2000+ are in local you can safely bet the majority are "real" people. We had engagements where our own alliance would essentially DDOS our VOIP server with 800-1000 people on.
Eve irritates me because I really enjoyed World of Warcraft. I would have much rather Blizzard had stayed on target rather than make many of the changes they did. The advantage of a place like Eve is that space is really really big, and in a planet based environment it sometimes is hard to be that big.
But the cool thing about Eve is how much amazing depth has evolved in that game and how "easily" you can just jump in and be part of something huge.
Eve is one of the best and worst games ever made. I joined Eve years ago as a newbie from a friend invite, within months I had mastered small gang combat. My mentor put me into tackling ships at day 1 and I was a pirate -10 by 5 days into it with over 100 kills.
This whole idea that you can't play unless you have invested years is complete nonsense the most important role in the game is tackling and scouting, which you can do on a day old character.
Eve is a game where you make your own game goals. If you want to be a billionare and give away stuff and be e-famous you can do that. If you want to be one of the best solo pilots out there you can do that. If you want to be a spy and steal massive amounts of information or take down an alliance through meta gaming you can do that. Eve is basically a softer version of real life because you can change who you are within a few clicks of a button by buying and selling characters.
If you wanted to learn how to manipulate people and companies, then Eve is your training ground. It is basically the best sandbox game in the world. The spaceship part has nothing to do with it. If you want something to express every part of yourself you can do that in Eve.
I played for 3 years as a 10 man pirate corp. We set our goal to be the best PvPers in our area, we would constantly fight gangs 2-3 times our size and loose nothing and kill most of them using cunning tactics and game mechanics that most didn't know. It was fantastic, but also terrible, because once you become known, people only bring stuff to kill you, and being smart and scouting 8 systems out you know your not going to fight that. So at times there would be months with no good fights.
I've played since 2003 and done the big alliance stuff, have mroe fun in smaller gangs/fights personaly and whilst I have a over 200SP PVP char who can fly capitals I never wished to go beyond dreads or carriers as being stuck in a boring big ship just did not seem fun to me and most have dedicated super-cap/Titan accounts/chars for that aspect alone.
Still, however many such fights are very much a lag-fest whoever you spell it out (bullet time or not) and the live stream I saw of this engagement was like watching a animated GIF downloading on a 300buad dial-up modem effect.
So sympathy allround to those involved in what should of been epic fun.
I know nothing about Eve, but it seems like the cool parts of Ender's Game come to life. Is that a fair assessment? I love the strategic aspects, but don't appreciate that it seems impossible to enjoy as a casual gamer.
There was a period were some alliance set siege to the gates in. System time was slowed to the extreme.
Heavyweight traders dropped out, I ran my Minmatar craft about making enough coin to pay for several PLEX. After the siege profit margins slimmed back to their normal percentages.
Eve Online is a place where you literally see people grind away to make money for a living, but you don't care because you are working some angle against their trades while battling effing pirates gate camping at Amamake. No one really shouts racial slurs in anger, more disinformation or propaganda while shooting the shit. There is power alliances you cannot reckon with, there are trolls you cannot defeat.
Boring bits for certain professions aside no other game gives you the depth EVE Online does. Spreadsheets rule everything around me.
As an member of Goonfleet/Goonswarm, I ran the logistics for the Battle of XZH, where a scrappy group of upstarts from Syndicate waged a weeks long insurgency against a better funded, better equipped force.
We won, at least until they "bought out" the system underneath us, through superior numbers, tactics and logistics. We had our turn around time from death to back on the front (fully refunded and refitted) down to less than 6 minutes. We cycled several thousand ships an hour into the meat grinder.
We kept "Ol' Ironsides", one of our space stations, up via hundreds of shield repairing cruisers (Ospreys) and a game mechanic we didn't fully understand yet, but would soon learn to exploit (moving the zone boundary).
Anyways, I miss EVE, but it is a second full time job at the top level, and I've got other things to do. I'm glad it is still generating epic battles. :)