Being the editor of a newspaper in Eve Online
rockpapershotgun.com
rockpapershotgun.com
Disney movies like Cinderella, and Snow White can always be remade with newer technology because there core story is worth adapting to the new mediums.
World of Warcraft started with some very good lore. I remember enjoying the huge back stories that came in the instruction manuals before the game even became an MMO. So I think it has a chance to hit that 100 year mark.
That doesn't mean it will have a continuous virtual world for the entire 100 years though. But I think through a couple revivals it could make it. I also worry the IP is not really unique enough to guarantee it will be here, but I do think they are working that.
Speaking as someone that's been there from day 1 (before actually. I've been playing since closed beta back in 2002), EVE is absolutely not the same ruthless universe anymore that it once was. It's increasingly become a fancy pile of garbage, where complexity is removed and the game streamlined to "make it more accessible".
In other words: It's on the best way of becoming yet another World of Warcraft clone and that's mightily showing in the community these days. EVE lives and dies by its community and frankly the community has pretty much degraded to a bunch of screaming children crying for instant gratification and the removal of the last essence of what made EVE be EVE.
So yeah, the only reason EVE is still around is because it's a niche game and it's literally the only available choice in that niche. If CCP had even the slightest sliver of competition, EVE would have already gone the same way as so many other MMOs that lost their aim, spirit and essence before it.
But well, people have given me the title "Epitome of Bittervetism", so maybe take this with a grain of salt. But in all honesty, you're not missing out on much anymore.
Edit: No, you can't have my stuff.
It's been five or six years since I played though, no idea what kind of hot garbage it's turned into since then.
I was a scrounger for my corp (Oberon). I was the guy who went out and bought 100x of some rare bit of gear. Wanted stuff would just appear in our hangars. Quiet cargo swaps in disused systems were my thing. Now corps are so big, the travel system so alterable, that such meetups require days of offline negotiation. That isn't fun.
Plus I think the newer generation of gamers are less patient and the older generations have less time to spend on games.
re: "Bittervetism", I could be accused of the same. If I try to look at it objectively, I think it's a symptom of just being around anything for a long time. Change is, after all, inevitable.
Perhaps nostalgia has ingrained the "holy wtf" UI/spreadsheet experience of yesteryear into my mind without any updates. I (mistakenly) thought that the game hadn't really strayed from the complexity that made it so niche.
I'm disappointed that something you clearly enjoy has morphed into something else before your eyes (I know the feels). I appreciate your correction because I don't miss MMOs (too much) these days for this specific reason.
1. The massive time/money suck and complexity. Playing Eve started feeling like its own career. Having to log in constantly to skill, having to be available at all hours for missions (getting texts at work that we were jumping into WH space where are you???), having to maintain vast excel spreadsheets to optimize ISK income. It was too much, stopped being fun.
2. At its heart Eve was(is?) a PvP game. Sure, you can stay safely in hisec, mining and trading, and getting called a carebear, but if you did, you were experiencing at most 25% of the game. I always found PvP unpleasant and wasteful, and wished the devs made hisec-only play better. But if you wanted to get your money’s worth that meant living in nullsec or WH space, and having to deal with the griefers. Also, if you wanted to make enough ISK needed to fund your accounts through PLEX you had to be in WH space and live with the slugfest. So much was geared towards PvP, and if you didn’t like PvP, the game was ultimately not for you.
That was a big blow to many of the early players. We wanted WC:Privateer. EVE was pitched as a trading/economy game, which it was in the early days. There is still a huge market for a Privateer-style game. Star Citizen is proof that the money is out there. I'd play an EVE online where strong NPCs were the predominant enemy, with PvP being an exception. That was early Eve, back when corps were still struggling to push outwards.
1) In the past, you couldn't enqueue skills beyond 24h, basically forcing you to log in frequently. Now, paid accounts ("Omega") can load up their skill queue indefinitely. There are a lot more casual corps in the game these days, and the player base has finally figured out that newbies are really valuable, rather than seeing them as easy marks for scamming. I only have time to play a few hours per week, and being in one of the big corps makes it okay for me to not show up at 3am for a stratop. Optimizing ISK income is something you can do if you enjoy that sort of thing- and a lot of people do. For the rest of us, we convert cash into PLEX, and sell those in the market for ISK. My time is worth too much to spent it trying to figure out how to set up an optimal production system or to mine rocks all day.
2) This is pretty much true. The "heart and soul" of Eve is in its player-run corporations, particularly ones that engage in PVP. Funding accounts by making enough ISK to buy game time (PLEX) is a bad decision for anyone who has a real-life job. A month of game time is roughly $15. It takes lots and lots of hours of grinding or market trading to generate enough ISK to buy a PLEX in game. Unless you enjoy the grind, and if you make more than minimum wage, it's cheaper to buy PLEX with cash and sell them for ISK than it is to buy PLEX with ISK.
What are they valuable for? (Honest question)
Is it even worth it to join Eve now as a newbie? Or is this one of those games like CS where it's impossible to play because everyone's been at it for a decade and has 100x more experience at that game than you.
There are also newbie-friendly corporations (Brave Newbies, Brand Newbros, Karmafleet, Pandemic Horde) that are part of the major power-blocs, if you want to get into the politics.
These corporations have IT infrastructures that put most real-world businesses to shame; web sites with custom applications that tie into the game's API (swagger: https://esi.tech.ccp.is/latest/ ), authorization services, voice chat services, Slack integrations, custom ERP systems for in-game industrial management, HR systems etc.
I've been interested in Eve for years but only last week realized that it has a free tier.
However progression in the game seems a bit slow to me and tutorial a bit boring. After how many hours in can I expect some more interesting action?
Eve's progression is entirely based on feed-the-meter, where you skill up by scheduling your skills to be learned over time. My knowledge is out of date, but it took me hundreds of hours of paid time to get into higher tiered ships to reach what I would consider the "fun" aspects of the game. YMMV.
Though you can join a corp where you can provide (limited, since you can't even use more advanced tech for a month or two) use in mass pvp.
Massive waste of time.
My little brother used to be really into it, eventually leading fleets during fights, and he credits that experience with giving him the skills he needed to manage teams at an IT company.
Good memories of motivating my teams of 15/16/17 year olds to get online at 6/7am in the morning to work on our skills before school, and for epic days during the summer.
Ah, simpler times.
I think to prevent tax evasion, tax law should be written by people with 5+ years of GMing experience...
They do, except they're employed by the people who want to put the loopholes in.
An interesting article related to minecraft economics can be read here: https://www.alicemaz.com/writing/minecraft.html
Nothing from one server translates to another though to my knowledge
Trade deals come from just NPC's and whatever player interactions had with those NPCs, depending on the plugins installed to the server?
hallmark of a good game! The cutthroat-ness, and the non-consensual pvp nature is what makes the game act like real-life; after all, you don't get to have consensual pvp in real life either!
For instance, succesful ponzi schemes https://www.eveonline.com/article/ponzi-scheme-a-success
He played an important role in making one of the most powerful groups of players in the game what they are today.
I've love to hear more about it.
Could easily source that yourself over a few hours but no doubt, they more than likely take donations to their corporate wallet in game.
The ships they report from are cheap as chips, so not really a sourcing concern given that their reporters need to be hardcore enough EVE players to understand and write about their subject matter—and as a result, would have made enough money in the game already to afford the type of ship you need to do this.
[1] - https://newedenreport.com/2018/06/01/new-eden-report-sponsor...
Battles, chat conversations, player reactions... maybe dip into top players personal lives a bit.
barely enough to afford a supercap!
Two separate IT Directors had a second PC in their office that just had Eve on it. While working with them, they didn't pay attention to it, but when we would take a break or I was setting stuff up they would hop on for a few minutes here and there. Both said it was their part time job, and they did make some ISK out of doing it. I don't know anymore details though.
It was kind of distracting in the same sense as people who hop on their phones for a minute between pages or whatever.
I'll give them this, they did pay attention to the training or whatever and I had no issues with working with them.
Alot of real money goes through EvE, sometimes in the hundred thousand dollar range
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
How much of "doing EVE" is not actually in EVE?
>How much of "doing EVE" is not actually in EVE?
If you're talking about the total game, politics, and all the other stuff that influences the game as a whole, a whole lot.
As an individual player who's not involved in politics or things like that, more than half your time is spent in game. It's a thinking game with a ton of complexity so the thing about it being "spreadsheets in space" is kind of true.
I think it's very difficult to make people see you as unbiased in a world where everyone is an enemy, even your "friends" are probably spies waiting to stab you in the back and steal all your stuff.