Eve Online’s communications blackout explained | Hacker News Reader

Eve Online’s communications blackout explained

polygon.com

108 pointsTomte40 comments

I've always loved games that mixed UI with game mechanics.

When I was a kid there was a game called Pathways Into Darkness. If you unequipped your watch the time disappeared from the UI. If you unequipped your flashlight it got dark. But there was never a reason to do these things. It just added flavor.

Aside from the real practical effects of this change in Eve, I think it lends itself to this idea that your UI isn't some out of body experience. It's what your ship is capable of.

There was a period where Ubisoft was putting in a lot of effort in their games (Splinter Cell/Assassin's Creed are what I know) to justify every little piece of UI in-game. And not only that, they'd let you disable bit-by-bit to have the experience you wanted[0].

I don't know if they're still doing this. I haven't played an Assasin's Creed game since they made it an RPG in... Syndicate I think? And Splinter Cell, well... Maybe in 2023 or so if/when they release a new one.

[0]: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/StanislavCostiuc/20160303/26...

> When I was a kid there was a game called Pathways Into Darkness.

Still playable on modern computers: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pathways-into-darkness/id61723...

I quit EVE after it became "legal" to buy subscription passes and sell them for in-game currency. That's significant because it lets you put a dollar amount on everything you do. It destroys the fun of non-PVP activities when what you're doing changes from "just three more hours of mission running slash mining and I can replace my battleship" to "I'm working for $1.78 an hour." At that point you realize you may as well just buy back your losses every time you get blown up.

>I’m a fan of no local in null, especially if they add observatories/sensor networks structures

Of course he is. The Mittani is completely dedicated to large-scale PVP. Replacing Local with sensor structures is fantastic for alliances who can put a structure or an alt account sentry on every gate in their territory. Never mind how heavily it favors large established organizations and punishes smaller newer corporations.

> I quit EVE after it became "legal" to buy subscription passes and sell them for in-game currency.

I was a very active world of Warcraft player up until wrath of the lich King. At the time I was leveling my alts blacksmithing by traveling around the world and mining minerals just to increase some arbitrary numbers on my skills and professions panel.

Then I thought to myself: I keep hearing about people using bots for that: let's try this!

So I set it up... After it ran for a few hours I came back with a full inventory of minerals and for the first time in my life realized what I've been doing for the last years... Exactly nothing.

I deleted the game a few weeks later, couldn't find the energy in myself to keep raiding.

I sometimes get back to it for a month or three. But it just cannot keep me interested any longer.

I think there are a lot of reasons to actually lose the touch with MMO games and suddenly you realized that the time spent isn't actually achieving anything... For you, it might've been the game time tokens, but I'm sure you would've realized it in some other way if they didn't do that.

I actually think that these tokens help players that just want to play a little without wasting their entire lives away quite a bit.

For example the last time I played world of Warcraft I did some mythic+ runs... I just bought a token and could buy all the required consumables for the whole three month I played.

I wouldn't have had the patience to get these the normal way and as such would never have been able to experienced any higher dungeons.

> suddenly you realized that the time spent isn't actually achieving anything

then you've missed the whole point of an MMO game - you're meant to make meaningful human connections, and find online friends who may even outlast the game.

EVE is one of those games that almost require such friend-making for it to be fun (playing PvE in EVE is boring, unlike WOW).

I was in a top wow guild. Paid to move my character to a new server, even. Was in a number 1 guild, I remember getting thousands of messages when we got a server first. It was insane. It felt so amazing though in that moment. I imagine I’d feel the same if I’d won the Olympics as silly as that sounds. Ultimately it was a hollow victory. The hundreds of hours, the 185 days of real 24 hour days I put into that single character, I can never get back.

Those people were had a thin facade of friendship, but I don’t talk to them anymore. We were never really friends. We were just addicts engaging in the same quest for ever larger dopamine hits. I remember kicking out people from our guild because they “underperformed”, even if they were good guys and we liked hanging out with them. All that mattered was the raid. All that mattered was winning.

It’s weird too because I think back and at a deep level our server first was the most intense positive emotional experience of my life. Not my kid being born, not getting married. My mind was convinced we were in a war against an insurmountable foe and we won. It makes me sad, like my level of what’s exciting is permanently messed up and skewed from what reality can offer. I’ve heard similar stories about meth and other drugs, that colors don’t seem as bright after you stop.

I really wish I’d never played WoW, or EVE. It was escapism for some really terrible times in my life and rather than help it just retarded the healing and mental recuperation I needed for many years.

It definitely wasn’t about friendship, though.

Never got server firsts, but wasn't far behind. Certainly I remember grinding mats and gold for raids. However. To suggest that a bot renders gameplay meaningless doesn't make any sense.

Is it meaningless to tend a garden because there are gardeners? I could pay someone to cook my food, does that make cooking pointless?

You traded your time for experiences and afterwards decided you made a bad decision. That is your right - but I don't regret the entertainment that Eve or Wow have given me. You created a weird equivalence which I don't think holds.

> However. To suggest that a bot renders gameplay meaningless doesn't make any sense.

The bot was my example of how a game lost its magic for me. I was trying to convey that the tokens which disillusioned the previous commenter aren't actually so bad.

It's just that if you stop thinking about these rules as necessary and realize that they're just arbitrary decisions with no actual impact beyond this game and you're currently investing a significant amount of time into them.... Then you're very likely become disillusioned with the game and suddenly everything you do in the game is suddenly tainted by that admission.

the triggers vary widely while the actual reasons for the triggers are generally this disillusionment

I'm also not saying that gaming is a lesser hobby. I play games quite frequently, but never again with that previous zeal. It just became an activity to kill time with. Before, it was more.

I think you’re confusing me in your first paragraph for another person, sorry. I never used a bot.

I’m glad you enjoy your time on WoW and EVE. I was just trying to describe my personal loved experience and contemplation of what I gained (or lost) from it many years later. I was extremely depressed and suffered terrible anxiety after a traumatic experience. I think if socializing had necessitated getting out of my house, or getting a job rather than living in wow and further secluding myself from the world, I would have recovered sooner.

I don’t know if that’s true. Maybe things would have been worse without that escape. To be clear, I’m not making value judgments about other people’s enjoyment of an entertainment product. I’m simply describing in retrospect how I feel about wow and EVE after totally immersing myself in those worlds for years.

These games don’t exist in a vacuum, the social interactions are all purely human ones. It sounds like it taught you about what social groups to avoid in real-world society, and the costs of fixating on things that don’t really matter in the big picture. Replace “the game” with “my job” and you’ll see many parallels with those who end up living entire lives of regret about their careers. Learning that lesson over the course of under two years worth of 8 hour days doesn’t strike me as that horrible.

> I imagine I’d feel the same if I’d won the Olympics as silly as that sounds. Ultimately it was a hollow victory. The hundreds of hours, the 185 days of real 24 hour days I put into that single character, I can never get back.

I wonder if some medallists feel the same way. If you don't leverage it into a retirement (and a lot of the less popular events can't), you're left with some medals, experience, and memories.

Different social games filter for different types of people.

I played Ingress for a while, but the game like many others encourages a certain (sociopathic?) personality at the top.

I gave it up because I wanted it to encourage friendship and collaboration, but I felt that it really didn't.

The problem with that is if you optimize the design of the game to focus on the social and pare away content not applicable to social, the game rapidly flows thru a farmville like state on the way to simply being facebook-tindr-with-a-joystick. Meanwhile the players who wanted experiences and sandboxes and escapism are horribly disappointed. Instagram with an outerspace background theme? No thanks.

There are a lot of games like that -- I wrote a permutation program that pretty much solved Alphabears, whereupon it wasn't fun any more.

Now I just make sure not to look up any tips or hints for games, because discovering them for myself is the fun I'm looking to have.

The first few hours where the world feels infinite and the rules are vague is always the most memorable part of a game, to be sure.

From the game's website:

As previously announced, local chat in all nullsec space is currently in delayed mode.

This means that it will behave as local chat in wormhole space, with pilots only appearing in the local population listing should they choose to post messages.

The duration of this blackout is undetermined, and we’ll be monitoring what effect this has on the cluster.

The Unthinking Depths have bubbled up into The Beyond.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep#Setting

Very cool. It was always a bit too safe to be able to see chat go up by 20 and know a 20 ship fleet had entered the zone.

Cool game but I can't play it any more. So much wasted time doing nothing. It's worse than a second job.

It is literally job. I know a bunch of people in finance that say playing eve as teenagers really taught them how to graft and optimise though, so I guess it's like training for actual jobs in a way.

As a large alliance fc I learnt a lot about effective communication. I truly believe that has helped me in my life and careers, especially in ones where I feel not as capable on a knowledge level but have been promoted due to senior members quitting.

eve is not a job - it's a life. you work a second job to afford to live it!

Their financial model is selling subscriptions, so they have a vested interest in turning the game into an extreme grind.

Elite Dangerous sells a single upfront payment with there's no subscription which has its own weird effects, they have to budget each $X sale will result in Y hours of use before boredom sets in.

I wish there were a viable in between business model such that things are neither boring to get you to quit nor boring to keep you grinding forever. AFAIK no one has tried an ownership financialized space sim. Buy and improve and rent and sell space stations and ships using real microbitcoins or similar.

Ironically enough the game is NOT grindy AT ALL. Well sorry let me rephrase.

The game has no grinding requirements. You can log in, ask someone for 20mil isk, you'll get it trust me. Then basically set a training regiment for the next 6 or so months, you might need to log in once a week to set the next week's training and log out. And suddenly be able to play a high-level game. If you have a friend in nullsec with good farming, grab an appropraite ship, go in, boom boom boom, money. Way less grindy than playing say WoW.

Even better. after those 6 months if you trained your way to a org doctrine, you basically go on, ask the org to please give you a ship, they will, at no cost. And then you have fun. Most orgs make their money from mining moon rocks, so they have fucktons of cash to give away for ships here and there.

Having said that, the times when there's action in the game, its like 3 hrs of hunting for 5 minutes of pew pew. Very uneventful. It is more of a game about making jokes and stories with friends.

A game where the onboarding experience is to not play for 6 months can't be fairly described as "not grindy". The fact that your grinding requirements can be done while logged out merely disguises the fact that EVE's developers get 6 months of subscription fees out of you while you wait for artificially-inflated timers to count down.

I joined the game back in 2008 and within two weeks had already joined a well established UK based corp and was having a whale of a time.

Trust me it doesn't take six months to start to have fun in Eve.

And yet the majority of players wind up only logging in when they feel they need to.

The lack of (required) grinding for XP makes the game a lot more relaxed than most other MMOs.

The ideal subscription customer never logs in and next comsumes resourses.

Grind is not the optimal subscription model. It exists only cause its easy to keep gamers engaged with grind.

Good.

It always seemed boring that you could get valuable Intel by closely monitoring a chat window.

One of the best games I ever played (or wasted my time on). Taught me a lot about leadership.

I was fortunate to learn a lot about organizational failure in my teenage years from it. Saves me from blindly trusting higher-ups as I'd otherwise have done.

I can recommend a bit of the game to learn politics, because it's relatively cheap to do that in the game (vs. in normal life, where it quickly affects your bottom line).

I really hope this ends up permanent, may will dust off my accounts if so. Don't think I'd like anyone currently playing mind you.

I wanted to do something similar to Darkfall, i.e. players would only be able to chat with those in their vicinity.

I'd also add a voice volume so as that in order to whisper, you'd have to come real close to someone and keep your voice down.

Global/area chat and channels simply ruin some aspects of MMORPGs.

It invalidates unknown space a bit. There should be a middle option like you can see a player but not the ships.

Does local chat tell you ship types now? When I played (2006-2009) you would only see the players in the system, you would have to be in scanner range to see ship types, and only if you opened the scanner. I think the new system sounds great; wormholes existed in my time but I never used them I played strictly in nullsec. The changes would actually make it harder to gank ratters and miners though. Because most nullsec systems are unpopulated at any given time when you are looking for targets you would fly from system to system and only stop and investigate when there were people in local. So yes, the miners can't see when a ganker enters local but the gankers can't see when targets are present either. If you want to hide out and rat in a relatively low-quality system probably no one would ever find you.

No, local chat still just shows you names.

There are ways to target yourv search for miners and ratters, using info from the in game map or websites using the API. See e.g. [1] which shows how many rats babe been killed in an hour time period in each system. These kinds of tools were probably less common in your day.

[1] https://eveeye.com/?m=Delve&o=tag_none,con_none,etag_sig,sec...

No; local is just character names. Ship classes are visible on D-scan (except cloaked or combat recon) or combat probes.

As a meta-point the "fog of war" applied to communications seems blindingly obvious and as an Elite Dangerous player (mobius PvE only) I always wondered why E:D never had that obvious gameplay mechanic; seems the article implies EveO probably copyright/trademark/trade secreted that obvious idea so no other game can have it.

That sucks. Nothing impedes technological and economic progress quite like IP laws.

>seems the article implies EveO probably copyright/trademark/trade secreted that obvious idea so no other game can have it.

>That sucks. Nothing impedes technological and economic progress quite like IP laws.

What the fuck are you talking about? Where does it imply anywhere even close?

I'd definitely agree that IP laws impede technological progress, but you're leaping to ridiculous conclusions.

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