A Year-Long Undercover Plot to Blow Up Eve Online's Most Notorious Space Station
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
Only thing this proves is that the problem of gigantic blocks rolling over everybody in their path now extends to wormhole space.
Sure, there was seeding in both, but in the end there was only something like 15-20 caps seeded in Nova and they didn't win the battle. That battle was largely won by a small group of the prevalent untouchable meta at the time: slippery pete's, all of which fit through a single hole anyway.
I find the logistics of seeding 650 battleships and the infrastructure to support them in a hole much more interesting than rage rolling relatively few capitals into a high class hole.
Disclaimer: I won Eve shortly after the Nova eviction because I just didn't have time anymore after graduating and starting work.
Lol, is this what players call leaving? I like this.
They've arguably had the most strategically advantageous position in the game for years now, and have exerted a lot of control over all of J-space.
Wormhole mechanics heavily favor the defender, and they have the most lucrative resource nodes in the game.
If we want to discuss real estate, stratification, and tiny renter alliances getting rolled or Borg'd, okay. But Hard Knocks does not fit in here.
Eh, how do you figure? According to dotlan they're number 11 for space held [1] and number 8 [2] for total number of members.
http://evemaps.dotlan.net/alliance/systems
http://evemaps.dotlan.net/alliance/memberCount
Or are you just bitter vetting in which case carry on.
"Over 550 members of The Initiative logged in to answer the alliance’s call to battle. Elsewhere in EVE, allied fleet commanders in The Imperium and in Snuffed Out were asked to provide additional numbers to help the operation."
The Imperium is a coalition of corps with the goons but it's not exclusively made up of goons as far as I know. So it's kinda of disingenuous to dismiss this as a goon op when they weren't directly responsible for it.
Wasn't wormhole space designed to give smaller alliances a refuge from the bigger nullsec alliances? If it hasn't been formulated already, someone should come up with a law about Eve Online. Any game mechanic designed to keep gankers from messing up your stuff or large alliances from taking over will be subverted, or something like that.
The next question becomes: what possible protections could a WH alliance have against such an attack (or is there anything CCP should change to mitigate the math on such an attack---for one thing, it's a little odd that you can make a freighter un-attackable by logging out with its pilot, squirreling those assets away in-game indefinitely; maybe the balance of power needs to be changed on how freighters warp out at logoff?)
It's actually pretty hard to seed such a big ship in a wormhole, which is why they had to time it for when HK had a small presence. People that live in wormholes tend to obsessively dscan (kind of like a medium-distance radar that lets you see when ships are somewhere nearby you) and rapidly scan down new signatures (which can be PVE sites or new wormholes that people could be bringing things through). On top of that, big ships like freighters are slow to warp and hence quite susceptible to being caught on the way in.
In the freighter example, in order to safe logoff as you describe one has to be uncloaked and relatively stationary (ie: not warping around) for 60s (longer if they've attacked or been attacked recently). This is quite a vulnerable time for such a large (and hence easily scannable) ship. A well skilled player in a well specced ship (like most higher-level wormhole players will be and have) can scan down, warp to, and attack (giving a 15 min logoff timer) such a big ship well within that 60s if they are paying attention.
Removing the option for people to safe logoff in dangerous space would heavily discourage exploration of basically anywhere outside of high-sec which, imo, is where the majority of interesting content in the game is.
Still, it's a hair-raising 60 seconds. ;)
It's a game of cat and mouse, where the mouse can sit afk with a cloak on for however long they like until they think the cat is bored or not paying attention. Also worth noting another trick if you have reliable internet is to stay afk cloaked until the daily downtime logs you off. This way it's impossible to be scanned down because everyone gets kicked from the server at the same time.
But I'm glad Eve exists. As long as the griefers are playing Eve and griefing each other, they aren't playing (or at least aren't focusing on) all the other games.
OP isn't mentioning the hundreds of freighters worth of material that init manufactured and then spirited into the wormhole over an entire year without getting caught (either in transit through multiple wormholes or from spies sniffing out what they were up to). Freighters are not dainty snowflakes, one even getting sighted would have been disastrous since it's presence would have immediately alerted hard knocks to what was going on (there's literally no reason anyone would ever run a freighter through multiple wormholes except if they were setting up for an eviction).
Goons helped put asses in seats for the week the op was going on but what init pulled off over the course of a year is astounding. It also puts the obnoxious wormholer holier-than-thou 0.0-players-are-spod-brains space obnoxiousness they've spun as long as I've played the game to shame.
I find the whole affair super compelling.
No way I have time for it though.
My experience with the game is that the PvE elements are entirely forgettable and uninteresting. The PvP elements could be amazing, but there are too many mechanisms to favor experienced players. It's almost impossible to find a "fair" fight, even as a person with several months of experience under your belt, to the point that it's kind of a joke.
Personally, I don't have that much free time, so I prefer games with a higher ratio of fun to boredom. That being said, if I had to pick a game to play all day for a long time, Eve might be a good choice, simply because of the diversity of experiences and complexity of optimization it offers.
[1]: I just checked. Out of the top ten streamers, nine are ratting (the most boring form of PvE) and one is doing PVP, but he just got killed by five guys after ten minutes of warping around.
Then when you finally did deal with people, they were tribal dicks and any battles were 100% lopsided to the benefit of the experienced player.
Eve Online is everything great and awful about online gaming all in one lag-filled package.
So basically, it's like real life. "Bigger army diplomacy," as CGP Grey says. I think this is also extending to social media space.
An assumption. Like RL, a game cannot be fun 100% of the time. MMOs are the Metaverse simulation Neal Stephenson wrote about in Snow Crash.
This is why I prefer Starcraft and Dota. Both games start with a clean slate. No matter how many games played you have under your belt, you and your opponent are on an even footing at the beginning of the match.
EVE is a job. It's a job that gives you an occasional adrenaline dump from some awesome or horrifying event, with no real-life consequences (other than memories), in a space-based violent virtual environment with no judicial system.
Anyone looking for something fun to do in real life, you're probably not going to match the addictive kind of "fun" you can get in EVE. The isolation from real-life consequences also isolates you from most real-world feedback that would discourage you from continuing to play. Spaceships, lack of judicial system, and the extremely long-interval-based variable reinforcement schedule of boring activities (trading, ratting, logistics) punctuated with very occasional great deals, great drops, or PvP or empire-building success, make it pretty optimal in terms of addictive "fun". If you want to dedicate a part-time or full-time job worth of time to achieve that fun, and you can stomach an environment that's often sociopathic, then jump right in, you'll have a blast... for whatever that's worth... but your real-life life might well suffer for it.
In a nutshell, EVE is a combination of paper-trading (it's not paper-trading in the virtual world, of course... virtual proceeds support virtual world activities), virtual logistics, virtual rock climbing with good loot at the top of each climb. And — for players who do PvP — that part is like WestWorld, with long stretches of anticipation-fuelled scouting and voice comms fun leading up to short, adrenaline-fuelled encounters with an enemy... with much of the virtual money and equipment gathered through trading and ratting being put on the line in combat.
Layered on top of that, on a corp and alliance level, it's like trying to build a real company, with factories and outposts and such, but in a virtual world, while trying to defend and expand the corporation's assets... again in a space-based world with complex but often obtuse game mechanics, and with no judicial system. That means a lot of successful corp and alliance activity centers around psy-ops and team-building to keep all the people in your corp or alliance happy and doing their jobs, and to demotivate and distract opponents... otherwise the corp/alliance assets will get blown up or stolen.
Automation remains prohibited at least as of the last time I played (~1 y ago). It's hard to picture that ever changing.
I've been "dry" for about three years now but I still have to fight the urge from time to time!
And yet, I find it utterly dull to play, and only enjoy it with these yearly big events that seem to trickle out.
Why bother with a spreadsheet, when you can dial it up a level and use their data export and your favourite "Big Data" analysis tools to look for interesting opportunities?
Maybe you enjoy blowing up space ships, but can't think of an in-game method to fund your habit? Build a tool other Eve players will use (and pay for with Isk) instead.
https://developers.eveonline.com/resource/resources
Feel free to ask questions, there's a ton of interesting technical problems I've been meaning to write about, but I wasn't sure if people would find them interesting
The workflow for a new user joining a major alliance generally looks like this: 1. New user creates account on your central services site 2. New user uses EVE SSO to link their EVE characters to your central services site. This also gives us access to advanced EVE API queries that we can use to monitor everything from who the user trades with, what they own, where they're located in the game universe, and all of their EVEMail. This data is used by corporation HR representatives to check for spies (a whole other topic entirely) 3. If the new user is accepted into your corporation, the central services site needs to figure out that the users character's are now in your corporation and grant them services. 4. When the user navigates to an alliance service, they're presented with a _separate_ oauth2 authorization that uses our central services as a provider. This is how we can quickly integrate new services since oauth2 support is so prevalent.
That's all great for IAM, but it's a small part of the equation. Data federation is another big-deal problem. Many times people who aren't on our IT team need access to their corporation's data - we don't want to expose the EVE API keys of each user because of the high security risk, so instead we expose a plug-and-play proxy. All the user has to do is plug in the URL of our central services proxy instead of the EVE API endpoint, and they can obtain access to their users data without requiring each and every user to go through the oauth2 authorization process twice.
Another interesting mechanism we support is our tax calculator. Many EVE alliances implement an alliance-wide "npc farming" tax that has no ingame mechanism for enforcement. In EVE, corporations can easily levy a 10% tax on its members, but there's no ingame mechanism for an alliance to levy taxes against its member corporations. What we do instead is query the EVE API to find out how much each corporation is taking in in tax, then calculate how much that corporation needs to pay the alliance. We can even track payments using the journal API endpoint. The technicals behind this are fascinating - a months worth of raw, unprocessed tax/journal data represents 5-10 million data entries, and requires about 5000 queries to the EVE API. When you have to run all of that including alliance services on a tiny Hetzner box, things get interesting pretty quick.
If you wanna see what the EVE API looks like, there's a swagger documentation page here: https://esi.evetech.net/
I'd argue that it proves that you have a big tactical advantage in wormhole space, but you're not invincible or safe. Nobody is, anywhere.
Which at the same time is a bit of a shame; I wouldn't mind having my own space station in high security space with no risk of losing it by another corporation. I'm more of a casual base building turtling kind of gamer than the pvp type.
The number of bodies was a very small part of the story. Like real wars this was won almost entirely by logistics.
Though I suppose, in the vast emptiness it might be difficult to find someone else. But a ‘radar’ that helps with it could have a limited range.
The entire topology of wormhole space is constantly shifting with wormholes appearing and disappearing. Hole control is paramount to fighting on jspace.
CCP finally decided this is not how they want the wardec system to work. Now, a corporation can only have war declared on them if they own a structure in space. Most small corporations have no need for, or enough money, to anchor a structure in space. The idea is if you have structures in space, you should also have the means to replace them if they're destroyed or be able defend them in the first place.
https://m.soundcloud.com/empiresofeve
The podcast is very well produced and has interviews with the major players from the early years of Eve.
Occasionally when I get the craving to play Eve, I also end up listening to a few episodes of Talking on Stations, an eve podcast that gives fascinating in depth analysis of a world I’ll never have time for.
Yikes
Better wait for the second edition: https://www.empiresofeve.com/
Excited to see there’s going to be a second volume!
Might be cheaper.
I've listened to the podcast and own the book from their kickstarter. They're both really well done.
I've looked at gameplay videos of EVE before and it looks so boring, but the stories that come out of it are so evidently not boring.
Strange dichotomy.
it is boring - but the game isn't the gameplay, it's the meaning behind it and the consequences. A game like World of Warcraft has fun game mechanics. But that game has no consequence, nor does the actions in the game have meaning beyond the game's lore.
EVE is different in that any action has a direct consequence on somebody else in the game - you kill a player's ship, they really lose that ship and have to replace it with another ship, which costs resources and time to acquire. You can steal from people, betray them - and make enemies. Real enemies, not fake 'factional' enemies from the lore (like the alliance vs horde).
Playing EVE is like living a second life. That's why they say 'winning' at EVE is quitting it.
This is part of it, but more than that. Your actions can change the state of the entire game. One person here came up with an idea and executed it. In doing so they have changed the landscape of WH alliance behaviour - and there are many many examples of this throughout the games history. Eve Online rewards long term thinking, meticulous planning, and innovation to an unprecedented scale in my opinion
Does that imply that there's wide-spread addiction to EVE (among those playing it)?
Instead, it's a game that can pull you in through its community, its galaxy-wide events, its huge space battles, all of which are coordinated by and performed by real people, real communities.
Of course, in most cases, in a space battle you're just one of many and the main thing you need to do is lock onto the target being called out by the fleet leader and hit F1 to start firing. It can be quite passive in terms of gameplay itself.
PVP due to the permanent destruction involved must inherently be a rare or meaningless event. PVE similarly must involve winning 99% of the time.
Keep in mind that on average there are 20-30k people online at any time. PVP is pretty much all of the Eve game. Not just pure combat but the markets and basically everything else is tied directly into player competition.
PVP is a tiny fraction of gameplay. (Assuming 20k players 3 deaths per minute 1 death and 1 winning player 20000 / 3 / 2 / 60 = 55.6)
We can probably assume that roughly 20% of the players account for 80% of the PVP combat in the game.
Those players frequently encounter PVP scenarios, while the ones who aren't looking for it don't encounter it as often.
Still, it's ludicrous to think even a timid player only encounters a PVP scenario every 60 hours of gameplay.
(Total kills) / (player base) is going to tell the real story for most players. Some of these numbers are of bots and players piloting multiple ships waiting for an ambush etc.
However, as PvP destroys wealth much faster than it’s created PvP must inherently be rare.
PS: I don’t see any listing for daily ships lost. But 1 per 60 hours of gameplay seems about right from what I recall.
I would say I actively engaged in PvP ~10% of my play time. During that time, I would say we got into 1 fight per ~45 minutes. Nullsec gang patrolling with gate bookmarks or gate camping. That's not counting any time spent in larger fleet actions.
And granted, this is ~10 years old vs current features and meta.
So that would add up to... 1:7.5 hours (clock time) or 1:15/22.5 (2x & 3x logged net)?
Note that the "mind's eye" game exists even for games that don't, or haven't yet been released - people build it from promises and trailers. This can go very badly (No Man's Sky) or well (Star Citizen) for the developers.
I played Eve for a while, and enjoyed it. But it was also clear that it absolutely required sealing yourself in a bubble for every play session, and at higher levels letting it take over your life.
If someone blows up your ship, they destroy and steal real value that you spent time earning. Suddenly all that time spent being bored and grinding weighs on your mind when you contemplate a fight. It means you actually have something to lose.
Consequently, PVP in Eve comes with a shot of adrenaline. On top of that, there's an incentive to raise the stakes even more in PVP: spend even more time/money on better ship equipment and you have a better chance of winning (at the cost of making losses even more devastating).
This also means having allies is a real thing. Not just buddies who play with you, but friends who you rely on to keep you safe, and that rely on you doing the same. It really brings to the surface feelings of comraderie that I can only imagine one must feel in the military.
The big alliance level stuff is awesome, but it takes months to play out. The daily experience that keeps people coming back is very similar to the rush one gets eating spicy food: it hurts a lot, but it gives an incredible rush
How is that not pay to win.
Ever since I've discovered this, I'm fascinated by the divide between what you see with your literal eyes and what you see with your mind's eye when you're playing this.
A good analogy is books. When you read, you see it all, but at the same time it's just symbols on paper. That's where the medium's power comes from, compared to say movies: in a movie, you have to find a way to visualise or audiolise something, so the film-maker's capability to do that is the upper-boundary of what can happen, but in books the upper-boundary is the boundary of your imagination.
Interestingly, I recently picked up reading fantasy. I picked up "A song if fire and ice" and am almost through the book.
When people say that you use your imagination to fill it in, I kind of wonder what that's like. Because I see the words etc, but I don't have a 'vision' of the look of the characters etc. (I've not seen Game of Thrones). If I read about a fight, I'll just.. read about the fight. But I don't imagine the fight.
Usually I have like fragments that I can 'imagine' (afterwards, not while I am reading), but most of what I read, I read more as 'matter of facts'. For example how I'd read a history lecture, without imagination.
I wonder if other people really do have vivid imagination of the events they read about in these kind of books. :P
0 -> 15 minutes, I'm in what I'd call "conscious reading" mode.
15 -> 45 minutes, I start to see the world in front of me, but I'm still consciously reading.
After 45 minutes, I completely forget I'm reading at all - the process of going from words to imagination is automatic. For the most part, I'm just seeing a movie unfold.
Of course, this varies by book and what my mental state is at the moment. Some books are very heavy on descriptions, others heavy on plot. Some books, I never reach that "watching a movie" mode.
For me it is instantaneous. I pick up a book, and from the very first sentence I'm in the book's world. Sometimes I get jinxed by thinking about 'these are just letters'. That's almost like remembering that you're consciously breathing or being aware of the size of your tongue.
But I can get rid of that within a minute of determined reading. On a related note, if I'm sick and I manage to get into a book despite the initial discomfort I can ignore my pain/sickness completely.
What I do remember tends to be abstractions of concepts, not imagery. That's the case even for memories of things I've done.
I took my girlfriend to Nice last year, for example, and have strong memories of sitting at a beach bar with her one evening as the sun went down, but I can't picture it for the life of me. I could "model" the scene from my memory of it, but it'd be more like recreating it step by step in my memory. It'd be precise in many ways as I can recall lots of details down to irrelevant bits like the construction of the furniture, but I'm also very much aware that when I visualise memories it's more like constructing a diorama with props and dolls whose appearance are a synthesis of multiple memories, not necessarily what it looked like that specific moment.
It's interesting, because on one hand I do rely a lot on visual impressions - I remember code by appearance on screen, for example, and so care extraordinarily much about syntax because it affect visual patterns that affect how easily I make connections between them. But I conceptualise it in the abstract based on those visual impressions rather than visualise how it actually looks.
I also experience this when recalling vivid memories.
Though, now that I think about it, when analysing poems in school, I did fine looking for patterns and devices, except when it was something to do with how the words sound. For example, I would never find rhymes, or when some sound is used alot. Somehow the part of my thinking that deals with sounds is latent, and I've not found a way to access it consciously.
Note that this doesn't work for all poetry, something like 'the wasteland' wouldn't benefit and I don't think it would be possible to read EE Cummings aloud at all.
Ironically I absolutely did not "do fine" looking for patterns and devices in poetry. Technically, maybe, I guess - I could do it. But I absolutely detested it. I found it destroyed all enjoyment of a poem to me. When I read, and when I wrote (I haven't written much for years, but I have a pile of a couple of thousand poems I wrote in my youth), it was about trying to capture emotions and imagining things. Just more abstractly rather than visually. Even so, I would often evoke visual cues when writing.
https://de-de.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-i...
If I ask you about the number of windows in your house (or parents/friends house) do you „just know“ the answer or do you imagine with an inner eye to visit each room and count virtually?
Can you imagine, like an inner mirror, the face of your parents or significant other?
Same for faces. I'm badly out of practice when it comes to drawing, but I can draw objects and faces with a lot more detail than I can visualise them.
EDIT: Reading post, to him it certainly goes far further than for me. I absolutely do imagine things, just not visually. I can describe things verbally without having to remind myself of the words the way he describes, but I don't see them. Consider how a blind person might remember what you look like and be able to recall and describe it based on memories of having touched your face. A bit like that maybe, except without the touching your face part.
I certainly do dream with some degree of visualisation, though I can't remember any of that visually once I'm properly awake.
I suspected that I might be an outlier. But I do still enioy reading though.
I like the prose and the story even if it is just a story without image. I am unsure how to explain the pleasure I get from it.
And it can be spooky. There is a scene in Lord of the Rings, where frodo is talking to a lord in a castle, near Mordor. They look down at a pool, and see Golum enter, catch a fish.
When I watched the movie, I found many places familiar, but that scene, where Golum enters, the pool all matched my minds eye well. It was deja vu.
I said to my wife on first viewing:
There it is, I see it, Golum will be over there...
What you need to do is read slowly at first, close your eyes and try to see it. It can help to physically turn, point, and imagine the feel, sights, sounds, smells. What you need to do is invoke your ability to create. Trying to actualuze a scene in your mind takes some effort at first.
I think some of us just do it. But I think anyone can, if they seek it and are helped along some.
Then read more, alternating, until you reach a point whrre the worfs flow and so does that scene in your minds eye.
I remember one of my first. Was the ooening paragraphs in "Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids." It talked about a ship, on the moon, sleek, shiny... as a little kid, I saw it vividly. Went and drew it, just savoring that sight.
Others observing me reading say I will read a chunk, pause, read more, and sometime look choppy doing both.
To me, once I am in that state, I am not aware of the pauses. It is just reading, flow...
Try watching a movie first. I usually reccomend the other wsy, book first. If you do not visualize well yet, a movie may really help as you will have msterial to draw on.
The book will expand on the m9vie considerably. What shoukd happen is your mind will fill in the blanks to give you new "scenery."
It can also help to read simpler, but vivid books.
Try different things. You want this to happen for you. When it does, books becomr amazing!
Ever play old text adventures, like ZORK? Words are the ultimate canvas.
And ever notice how sound can trigger spatial sensations?
What you may want to seek is a little like that.
The "WOOL" series is amazing, and it starts in modern day, familiar settings. As it takes off, you should experience this "mindsight" (my personal word for it) easily and vividly.
And, if you enjoy horror, Stephen King "paints" some of the most vivid pictures there are. He can be quite remarkable.
If I were to do that and draw the object instead of visualising it on the other hand, I'd generally do it with ease and quite precisely.
Similarly my memory of books and movies tends to be very strongly focused on the underlying concept and logic rather than visual impressions.
> Try different things. You want this to happen for you. When it does, books becomr amazing!
Books are amazing without it. I've read hundreds of books, through 35 years of reading, and I've never understood why people care so much about wanting to visualise something; it's not needed to enjoy a book. Maybe that's why I care so much about language, and it may well explain the type of books I prefer (I will often skip overly descriptive language by skimming over it unless the language in itself is beautiful to me).
Seeing the other references here to Aphantasia, I'm curious to what the distribution of visualisation is in the population as a whole, and to what extent there is a correlation - if any - to whether or not people enjoy reading. I could see some would find reading boring if they can't visualise them, maybe, but while it's a possibility, I don't think it's at all a given that it's a major factor - I often prefer to read to watch movies, even though one gives me that visual experience and the other doesn't, and that extends to often preferring the book relative to a movie version of a book.
I appreciate that too. And you are not wrong. Books, sans visualization are amazing.
Language can invoke many things.
I once fixed a black and white TV for an elderly woman. I could have set her up with a color one.
Didn't need or want it. Her apperciation for the programs was sans color.
Totally hear where you are coming from.
The comment is also for passers by who may well feel differently.
There are times when I skip descriptive parts of a text myself. It is not always germane to the overall experience.
It'd always seemed weird to me that some people seem to visualise so much detail.
I completely get how it looks. But if you talk to most Eve Players who engage in PvP (including me), they'll tell you that they get a bigger adrenaline spike from Eve combat than they do in any other game. An intense 1v1 will often leave your hands shaking.
The write-up says this operation was quite costly - 600 billion ISK in resources spent to destroy a station that cost "hundreds of billions of ISK" in the first place. Did the Initiative gain in-game resources and advantages that were worth this costs, or was it mostly just done for the challenge of doing something no one thought possible, and proving their might?
> No one has ever done anything great in EVE without someone else wanting to destroy it.
It's not like they lost that money. Unlike cars, internet spaceships retain their full value after leaving the lot. They can just sell those battleships back or keep them around as part of the fleet.
This is the kind of thing CCP puts up in-game memorials for.
I'm not mocking those that find these stories compelling. _I_ find them compelling. But when I stop to ask myself why, I dont have a good answer. Why is a successful attack (and less so, a successful defense) so much more compelling than the initial construction?
Why is an Eve battle that destroys tens of thousands of dollars of value (or more) more gripping than a minecraft world with tons of detail?
Sure that sounds like I’m setting it up to be a whole “hey, look at these losers!” kind of thing, but that’s not it at all. I’m jealous. They have something they care about _that_ much and I can’t imagine ever having that.
Eve in particular also has appeal to me because of all the other aspects that so accurately mirror real life. There isn’t any other game I’m aware of that does that.
So in reality it’s not about the destruction or construction or whatever. It’s about the depth and dedication.
I identify with this so much. I have some friends who just pour time into games, and sure you can say that's a waste, but to have the human experience of caring that much about something must have some merit.
Minecraft isn't an immersive universe, and it doesn't really have that much detail to draw one's attention outside of gameplay.
Eve, meanwhile, has social and political depth and the complexity of its space opera setting, and its stories would make for interesting sci-fi drama even without the real world financial consequences.
It's basically the difference between the lore of Super Mario Bros and Game of Thrones.
Building stuff is some way down the list, and not nearly as obsessively compelling.
We've done well to sublimate some of it into online games and sports without having to act it out for real quite as much as we would otherwise.
If it was an epic story of how a group of people went through a massive epic quest to collect all the resources they needed for a build in Minecraft, sure that too could be compelling. My son has watched hundreds of hours of roleplaying in Minecraft on youtube that boils down to finding resources in survival because someone wants to build something in their survival world.
But I also think that for Minecraft a large part of it is that most large scale Minecraft servers tends to be focused on minigames or more casual interaction than large scale drama.
Also, is multi-accounting allowed or common?
When you get into carriers or larger ships having multiple accounts is almost a must. The large ships used to not be able to use jumpgates to move around and the largest still can't afaik, so to move you have to log another character in the location you want to go to and set up at temporary beacon (in a sace place) that you can jump to.
What you do is you get a second account and fill your character slots with low-skilled characters who only have the skills needed to fly a cheap 'cyno'-ship and place them where you need them.
The negative being that others could figure out who always jumps into system after that one low skilled character shows up.
Papers Please, Grow Home, factorio, Minecraft/terraria, steam indie games, etc...
Ive already done my time with lengthy MMOs and RPGs and FPS. Next gen gaming may be related to our limited attention spans.
Maybe Star Citizen will one day become a second one?
(Don't get me wrong. I admire cleverness, devotion, and capacity to organize. And this event demonstrates all three on the part of those who made it happen. But you'd think they could turn these skills toward more useful ends.)
~3-hours a game == 9-hours of TV Watching time.
1-hour / day == 7-hours / week of Eve Online.
Is EVE Online something a newbie can join today and not feel just like food for the lions?
The real trick is knowledge and specialization. You play long enough to understand what you want to do, then create a character that specializes in that and that alone.
I don't play Eve anymore, but when I did, my favorite character was a solo stealth bomber pilot. I spent most of my days in the game running around nullsec, cloaked, looking for targets of opportunity. Every once in a while I'd come across someone trying to sneak an industrial ship out into or our of nullsec and ruin their day.
Someone with the idea that they want to be just like one of those characters they see in a spectacular EVE video, or that they hear about in an EVE story, is like the kid seeing or reading about astronauts and thinking they want to be an astronaut. Except most people who grow up wanting to be astronauts never become astronauts, and same with any particular goal in EVE. And what happens in EVE stays in EVE. Even if you achieve something notable in EVE, something that requires a lot of effort... it's still in someone else's virtual universe sandbox that could be turned off or changed on their whim.
The chance that you'll ever be directly involved in corp- or alliance-level "big events", other than as cannon fodder, is almost zero unless you know ahead of time you have what it takes to join or build, and then run and manage that kind of enterprise at the equivalent of the c-suite level. Still, 99.99% of your time will be taken up with ordinary stuff. It's a job.
In the end game you can highsec carebear, or you can sit in a nullsec blob. WH space was a band aid trying to cover the fact that they ruined the risk/reward system between high/low/nullsec, but it was enjoyable none the less.
It was still a great game, and back when I played there was nothing like running around lowsec at -10, or just pulling security for small gang mining operations, or any other small group/solo stuff.
So, Pearl Harbor?
I'm almost tempted to try out EVE again.
The game could do with a bit of modernization in the beginning player's enjoyment and positive reinforcement feedback loop (if that makes any sense). I'm wondering how best to achieve that; maybe make the missions a lot more streamlined, add a bit of story to it, some more cutscenes and voice acting maybe.
I'm imagining a questline where you end up building your own safe base now; one thing I don't like is how you can't really build your own starbase without constantly having to shut it down or rebuild it due to war declarations. What I'd like to see is something like player owned housing in other MMOs where you can build your own starbase inside of an instanced, unreachable pocket.
It would need to have some restrictions, I guess, in e.g. how much you could store there and how much money you could earn there - Eve is all about risk vs reward, and all reward with no risk won't work.
But anyway, a questline to eventually build a starbase, and follow-up quests that develop the base in a variety of directions would be neat.
The problem is that to maintain total control, you have to have players available nearly 24 hours a day who are willing to put in the legwork to find every wormhole in and out of the system as the game auto-generates them. This is tedious work, and so it's basically impractical to have that level of control.
The attackers utilized small gaps in the otherwise extensive hand-monitoring of wormholes that HK undertook to move freighters full of ships through wormholes. Then the player controlling that freighter logged out of their account, and when a player logs out, the ship they're controlling warps off "to infinity" automatically and is completely safe.
For HK to protect against this attack completely, they'd have to have ships on patrol at all times AND those ships would have to be sufficiently equipped to catch and kill a freighter before its player can get logged off and the freighter auto-escapes. It's a tall order.
... and it's worth noting that even given those constraints, this attack was basically thought to be impossible. The Initiative took a year to make this work with enough freighters to shift the balance of power.
If so, this is going to be a one-off event most likely.