Eve Online fans cheer Microsoft Excel features at annual Fanfest
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- Kerbal Space Program. Figuring out the sizes of different stages, how many solid boosters to add, etc.
- Factorio. Ratios of different factories, mostly for creating science packs.
- Cookie Clicker. Figuring out what to buy to get the best marginal cookies per dollar.
Satisfactory requires you to be slightly more intentional with ratios but (at least when I played) I came up with some balancing belt designs that let me get away with not needing to be super accurate with matching input/outputs. As long as I kept things at like 101% it'd all work out at the end. I'd need to do some head math to figure out initial build capacity of some product and I'd expand after that as needed.
But at least with Helmod it’s still in the game UI. Using a spreadsheet seems too much like work.
Same. I'm surprised how many people talk about spreadsheets with Factorio.
I cover a resource patch with miners, then keep building smelters until I end up with an idle one at the end of the line. When I discovered a new item I'd need to produce, I'd just built a small line of assemblers and see what my output looked like, and go back to fix any supply constraints.
Was it optimal? Almost certainly not. But I definitely enjoyed not playing it as a spreadsheet.
As you say, to start out the ratios are simple enough, but to a beginner it'd be a good exercise to plop the Red and Green science ratios into a spreadsheet for practice. Once you upgrade your assembly machines there is a modifier bonus applied across the board, now you need to account for that in your ratios. Not only can you pump out more product from the same footprint, but you potentially need to rebalance your ratios to account for the modifier.
Once you get into speed/efficiency/productivity modules complexity can really ramp up. In addition to getting the ratios correct for the machines, belt speeds need to be factored in, production rates need to be considered...
That's a bit like using crack cocaine to help learn about the pharmaceutical industry.
I ended up enjoying Dyson Sphere Program so much more. It's the "Factorio but with a third dimension" that I really wanted.
I really, really liked the gameplay and the exploration, and to a point, even the plot.
But the gacha was absolutely murder for me. I couldn't talk myself into spending a single cent on it. And I say that as someone who probably spent over $500 on a single gacha game over a couple years.
I know of people who've used spreadsheets for routing speedruns of games you wouldn't think you could optimize that way (e.g. entries in the Mario Kart series).
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/n64/197462-goldeneye-007/faqs/...
Feels like getting out of a time-machine :)
For any game that can be optimized in some way someone has made a spreadsheet for it.
- Divinity Original Sin to track skills i've assigned to which characters as well as discovered recipes.
- Dyson Sphere Program to keep track of which star systems and planets i've visited (there are tons) to show roughly how much of each resource is there, sun/wind energy stats, etc. and whether i've exploited the resources there or not.
- Game Dev Tycoon to keep track of what types of games i released and the resulting ratings (which determine payouts). It's a very arbitrary system and i feel only through trial-and-error can you discover what games will get good reviews. It's borderline cheating but i figured since i did it myself, it's only half-cheating ;)
- Mount and Blade to keep track of which kings, queens and princesses i have interacted with and their likes/dislikes for when i communicate with them. Necessary because once you start a dialog there's no way out until you finish the dialog. And there's absolutely no way i can remember 300+ names and their standing with me, plus i play very irregularly (still Early Access and things change constantly). Yes you can click on royalty names and it'll tell you the standing, but it's just so much easier to have a spreadsheet open on another monitor which you can glance at from time to time.
- Rogalia for recipes, rent, combat, conversion times, selling rates...
I thought it'd be cool to write an optimiser for this. I.e. given this craft file for a payload subassembly, give me the cheapest/lightest/fewest parts booster subassembly that will get me to orbit with a remaining delta V of X.
Parsing the possible mount points seemed like a nightmare though.
Especially Google Spreadsheets; perhaps not math/computation-heavy like EVE, but it's one of the best tools to organize data in a collaborative manner online.
An example: Inventory management/dashboard of a clan of 30 members: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tpbLmB4Fha_0TpMd4h3d...
I also see it (ab)used frequently as a mediawiki/online text-editor alternative, barely using any spreadsheet mathematical formulas, using it simply as a place to write text for others to read, e.g.: this gigantic reference spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JjK7Ws4gfzKChRs5ueox...
It has lots of options to acquire various items and qualities, and depending on our situation, spreadsheets can help a lot figuring out which one is most efficient.
It even has the "bone market", an exchange where you can build skeletons from various bone types, and sell it to NPC vendors, some of which have non-linear payout curves. There's an optimizer for that written in Python: https://github.com/Saklad5/Bone-Market-Solver
It's an awesome combination of great writing, bizarre, whimsical stories and a potential (but not a hard requirement) to optimize by spreadsheet and other methods :-)
- Archmage
- Archspace
I think back on those games fondly and haven't found anything that scratched the same itch.
On the not so extreme level; DPS calculations to decide which item/ability combination is the most efficient in dishing out damage.
Guild Wars 2 is an example of a very casual MMO that nevertheless has an extensive API, and a wide range of fan-built sites that use it to optimize/track history of trades, manage your account, track achievement histories, improve wiki information, etc.
Dropping everything in life for that one perfect game will always be a temptation... ;)
In terms of the spreadsheets in space that's only one aspect. I bought a little package for £5.99 which has skill boosts and some plex. All in all that setup my FTP character to be able to do whatever I want. So you can ignore this entirely and just play the game the way you want tbh.
I don't know if this is true, but it would tell a lot about this world we are living in.
I mean that's what you get from a bunch of eve-playing nerds committing to a labor of love. Best projects I've ever had.
[0] Real time updating mining & trading boards by location, 100bn+ ISK inventory tracking down to the cent across many corps, characters, inventories & contracts, ... Killboard & market data feeds, risk evaluation, resource allocation optimisers... Absolutely impeccable archives & backups going back 5+ years, on top of postgres & flask iirc.
edit: And audit logs EVERYWHERE. Seriously, I've seen better CYA/KYC/chain of responsabilities from eve recruitment corps than some actual for profit entities.
There are still your average gamers, but EVE had a much more adept playerbase (in terms of real world skills) than any other MMORPG I've played.
The real world is generally a lot messier than EVE data, but it's definitely true.
EVE released an update today (as it does most Tuesdays, and also often the next day or two in the week if there are issues). Part of that update included significant changes to a number of blueprints, which are the plans needed to manufacture items in game. Blueprints come in two varieties: originals and copies, and you can perform various activities on them (manufacturing, research to improve efficiency, copying of originals to make copies, etc.). I wrote a tool which imports the game's Static Data Export (SDE) and makes various calculations about all of blueprints in the game (profitability, etc.), so I ran it on the SDE from the new update. Each 'activity' has a set of fields, like what it outputs, etc. But, the 'copying' activity is hard-coded to output blueprint copies. There is a field to say what it outputs (and that field is sometimes present in the data), but the value is always empty. Except today it was not always empty. A relatively obscure blueprint for a Taipan (a kind of upgraded rookie ship given away as a one-off in a past special event) apparently had the information for its 'manufacturing' activity listed as 'copying' instead. So now it claims that if you copy an original, you get the actual manufactured ship, and not a blueprint copy. This broke my tool, because I had put in a check to see if this field was ever non-empty, because if it was it might mean the game had changed in a way that meant something in my tool needed to be updated.
If you look at the information for the blueprint in game, it still claims that the copying activity outputs a blueprint copy. They hard-coded it, too. It now takes as input all of the materials required to manufacture the ship, though. In this case, there are no blueprint originals for a Taipan (if there were you could make an infinite supply of these one-off event items), and any copies that might exist can no longer produce the ship, because you cannot copy a copy. The only valid activites for a copy are 'manufacturing' and 'invention', except a Taipan blueprint no longer has a manufacturing activity and never had an invention one. So I updated my check to ignore this type, and moved on. Needless to say, this change was unrelated to any of the actual announced changes for the update, not mentioned in patch notes, etc. Just another Tuesday in EVE.
I played probably 8-10k hours across three characters and 8 years. So not that much ;)
The world used to be much harder to get into, requiring a ton of RW time, RW skill and grinding to really progress. Then each seperate workflow (PvP, PvE, industry, extraction, scanning, ...) became safer as well as easier to grok and master as a single user.
Then there was somewhat of an eternal september amongst a dwindling population as the old guard finished dropping out.
fortunately CCP managed to ruin it with P2W so I was able to stop my addiction.
it was one of the best games out there ,imo.
Haven't played the game since, but it is pretty damn comfy and I'd recommend anyone to try it out.
Luckily, CCP screwed things up quite badly, and I lost interest. If they hadn't, I'd probably be stuck playing EvE rather than living in the real world. :D
It used to be that the game was really harsh when you screwed up, which made the adrenaline pump when you did something you knew was dangerous. For me as a hardcore gamer at the time, that was the initial kick. Now a days I believe they have lessened the harshness a bit, but it should still be one of the few games where you can lose literally hundreds of hours in investment by losing everything you own in the game.
But somehow this pile of crap mechanics by the sheer mass of them makes for an emergent sandbox. It feels not designed, like so many other video games. Systems that are not meant to interact with each other do in unexpected ways. Don't go in expecting every career path in EVE to have thought behind it. You have to figure that out.
Ended up joining a newbie corp as the return trip to sell stuff often wasn't worth it. They had a hauling corp that offered buyback for most items. Still played solo for the most part.
People kept telling me that I'm playing the game wrong FWIW but not participating in the social aspects freed me up to boot up the game for an hour whenever I wanted. Haven't played for a few years but I did enjoy it.
Is it worth it? No. Is there a good alternative? No. EVE Online always had an element of spreadsheets to it. It was designed that way. The original game design was done inside excel.
Personally I find it fascinating that CCP didn’t build their own spreadsheet functionality into the game considering how many players used spreadsheets to calculate mining yield returns, industrial runs, research and BP copying. The only area of EVE where spreadsheets go out the window is war.
I have probably 20,000 hours in the game. I lived on EVE from 2003-2010 and then would log on every once in a while to get my space fix.
The one thing I will say about the game, it inspired me to try to create my own back in the day. It was too much work for me but I did manage to get a demo of flying around from Star system to star system using an EVE-Online like warp and scene management.
The artwork of EVE is fantastic. The space environments are A+. The actual gameplay though is a bit stale to todays gamers. It’s more a kin to old school rpg’s where you target something and let the auto attack do it’s thing.
Not if you include all of the ship setup calculations, POS and Capitals efficiency, etc.
In reality the game is more an economics simulator where war is the instrument that engages with your numbers.
Stopped playing when the game became P2W, I miss it probably the same way a nicotine addict miss the cigarette.
I tried to describe what it's like to be so involved in a game and then not. This analogy is perfect!
That is very real-life-like then... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment is a very real issue in wars.
There are some built-in 'NPC Corporations' that you start on, and default back to if you get kicked out of a Corp, but they're basically just placeholders.
What makes Eve interesting is that all star systems except for those in the very middle of the map are controllable by players, and actually provide value to those holding them. So that's why you have these gigantic, drawn out conflicts and large battles where player blocs with thousands of players each are fighting for territory.
The big alliances are empires that control many aspects of the game. The downside is that if you want to play casually and don’t like all the boot-licking and drama that comes with player corporations you miss out on a lot of the game.
Check out Astrox Imperium. It's been described as "Eve Offline". It's made by just one developer, but it's really impressive for that.
I've never played Eve myself, so I can't personally say how they compare, but I enjoyed the hell out of AI.
(PS: I have no association with AI. I'm just a very satisfied fan.)
I liked the stealth game as well. Work your way in a stealthy ship deep into Nullsec and do your thing - whether that thing is a bunny rabbit of a frigate designed to find and steal cookies and outwit the fox, or a stealth bomber that hides near the cookie jar to squash the unsuspecting. And both of these have to find a way to get back to civilization with the lootz.
EVE absolutely has the potential for incredible experiences but that tainted the authenticity for me in a way I could never shake off.
It's weird how that made you feel worse than grinding for $0
EvE Online is a deeply interesting game, and I think it's a testament to how long the game has been relevant. But while I love reading about the economics, wars, scams (EvE allows player scams in game), I could never see myself actually playing the game. It would suck up far too much of my time and money.
Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6xHlPki-jE
Let's Play:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0xTNF7fPJg
Dyson Sphere Program | Advanced Belt Tips and Tricks
Is it? How bad does your life have to be, that you'd settle for a game instead?
I tried Eve a couple of years ago. I spent more time puzzling out why anyone plays it, rather than actually playing it. You have to do boring tasks, to get money, to do what? Oh, to get to do more boring tasks, to get more money. Ok, but to do what? Oh, to get to do more boring tasks, to get more money.
Hm... what am I missing? Oh, you get to run around stomping random people once you have a lot of money. Oh, okay, so, you get to be an asshole or do more boring tasks to get to be more of an asshole? Yes.
Ok... that's extremely addictive and enticing for some people? Yes. Wow... What fucking losers some people are. That's the conclusion I came away with.
Here's a short showcase showing what some of the mechanics are like: https://youtu.be/S8vRgG9LrIg
[1] https://github.com/PathOfBuildingCommunity/PathOfBuilding
The bad:
- The dreaded "learning wall" is/was very real. Nothing is/was properly explained or introduced. Best tip is to join a new player friendly corporation ASAP to get some proper explaining.
- The combat is janky and a lot of the skill involved is/was learning how to abuse or sidestep technical limitations such as the one second server tick time and the quirky methods of manually controlling your ship.
- A lot of players prey on newbies to scam or troll them out of what little they have. There is a certain edgy attitude to a lot of pirate players that are attracted to the games "full loot" model.
- Most of the "missions" or "dungeons" feel really stale, and it's slow as molasses.
The good:
- Looks completely amazing. As in jawdroppingly beautiful if you like hard sci-fi.
- Everything that matters is run by players. This is the most unique aspect of the game. No other game has a constant ongoing player driven lore like Eve. The market, the social constellations and much of space itself is run by players. There have been huge market plays, alliance mutinies, assassinations, mineral cartels and colossal battles that has raged for days. All is talked about by players, and since everyone is playing on the same server, it's relevant for everyone.
- The setting is pretty good, and the atmosphere is great. The "races" all have very distinct motivations and character.
- It has a "full loot" PVP-model. If you fly something and it's destroyed, it's gone. Including everything you were carrying. Some of it is dropped so that other players can pick it up. This means that PVP combat can be incredibly sweaty, and I have never had actual adrenaline shakes the same way I've had from Eve. It also makes every kill incredibly satisfying. The rush of flying something relatively inexpensive and managing to kill someone flying a pimped out super expensive ship is quite incomparable.
I probably skipped a lot of stuff, but that's some scattered aspects atleast.
I quit because real life has to take priority for a while, not for anything negative about the game.
Other comments have covered many aspects of the game, so I'll just point one thing out: the players are super friendly!
It's funny because Eve is a game where you can -- and WILL -- get destroyed by anyone, any time. It's dog-eat-dog, it's cut-throat, it's merciless. I remember the first time I lost a 250m ISK Astero to a hunter. The cost was equivalent to hours of gameplay for me at the time. Brutal.
And yet, you know what happened next? The guy who destroyed me sent me a message and asked if I was new (he could tell). He congratulated me on what I did right and gave me tips on what I could've done better. He sent me 200m ISK because that's just not a lot for a seasoned player. He helped me refit my ship so that I could escape future hunters more quickly.
This guy went above and beyond, but that type of friendliness is very common in Eve. I'm sure there are jerks, but I haven't come across one yet.
I do wish we could get more games in a similar vein. I wonder if there is an opportunity out there for an MMO that lives somewhere in between the hardcore player driven sandbox of Eve and the more common, mainstream theme-park MMOs like WoW, if such a game is even possible.
By continually dumbing the game down to "make it more accessible", the constant lying by the devs and them going back on their words and it more and more becoming a microtransaction hellhole, CCP managed to destroy the one single thing that made EVE successful: The community.
I greatly enjoyed the decade and a half I played it (beta until 2018'ish), but truth be told, it's only ever been going downhill pretty much since the Incarna expansion with 60$ monocles (2011).
CCP fucked their loyal player base over and over and over again until most of us simply didn't want to take it anymore. The playerbase these days mostly consists of bots and instant gratification people expecting everything on a silver platter, constantly whining if they don't get what they want, only to inevitably leave again after 3-6 months even if they do get what they want.
I remember my first decade in EVE with great fondness and made some terrific friends there. Regarding the 5 years that followed, I seriously regret not quitting sooner. I'm still somewhat active in the EVE forums, though. After all, that's where the real PvP happens. ;)
- A very bitter vet
The community is the real deal. It can be awesome or real shitty, just like at work :)). It features great politics, economy, social structures and everything above and beyond to make it, for me, the best game I ever played.
The current title is misleading and clickbaity. There’s no Excel features inside the game, heck it’s not even a CSV API.
[1] https://esi.evetech.net/ui/ [2] https://github.com/esi/esi-issues/issues
const myDate = {
type: Excel.CellValueType.formattedNumber,
basicValue: 32889.0,
numberFormat: "m/d/yyyy"
};
Excel add-ins and data types: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/microsoft365dev/ignite-2021-e...
EVE Online and Data Type APIs: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/data-types...
I was just explaining why the title would be more attractive to anyone who follows Eve.
https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/fanfest-is-here
> We’re leaning into the phrase ‘Spreadsheets in Space’ by partnering with Microsoft on a project revolving around democratization of data in EVE Online. Soon we’ll even be releasing an all-new extension that feeds data from EVE directly into Excel without any technical experience needed
If it's clickbaity, it's because CCP intended it to be.
I remember in one of the MonkeyCommend meetings while kicking BoB out of the South, we actually talked about Excel lacking this.
It feels like we created the world we wanted, on a 10 year delay.
Eve Online is getting Microsoft Excel support - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31293066 - May 2022 (103 comments)
There are people who basically do play full-time, running a corporation or something, and even kinda roleplay a bit, and some of the best leverage that into what resembles a salary by doing Twitch shows or selling merch and such.
So in essence, the players are paying these people to effectively become NPCs in the game to better their enjoyment of it! And it's been going for 20 years now.
Eve Online is the prototype for the metaverse.
During my peak Eve time around 10 years ago (I no longer play), I had left spreadsheets behind and was using full on databases to keep track of things and identify opportunities in the market and manufacturing.
I landed on a number of fun activities that I enjoyed and felt an adrenaline rush while doing solo, like stealing loot from pvpers and, especially, gate campers, disguising myself in a Venture and killing other miners, killing MTUs, and hauling through dangerous places (especially Pochven).
Overall, I think the game became more fun for me solo when I started putting myself into danger and hanging out around pvpers. I had to get accustomed to dying in cheap, replaceable frigates to get a sense of what was safe to fly and not get angry and ragequit the game because of some loss.
I think corporations alleviate a lot of that by having generous buyback programs and, often, free ships for members. Definitely still possible to forego all of that if you’re so introverted you don’t even want to join some corp’s comms.
Good times.
everything past excel '03 was downhill imo
Anyway, yeah I played EVE - it is Excel in Space. So good there are finally APIs.
to me it sounds like microsoft is colluding with game developers to lock in users more than to help users
If you want the data in another form, you can just query their APIs instead.
They also have APIs for a lot of stuff.
I used to use a program called pirates little helper that would monitor your clipboard for when you did a ctrl+a ctrl+c in your current chatroom's userlist and it would query those character's recent deaths to see who was likely to be a high value target.
But...the gameplay is just boring as hell. This video sums it up: https://youtu.be/4c6jafaiPh8?t=65
You can decide what level to play at and grow as you like, as you get better.
It's with this approach that I'll probably always return to Eve, play it for a bit, stop and repeat.
Or if not pod you at least destroy your ship and steal all your stuff.
It's never zero, though. Which is a far better situation compared to many MMO games where they really have zero risk areas (or the whole game is zero risk).
Depends on what you are doing. The first time you manage to escape with your ship intact after an incursion in low security or (specially) Null sec space, you get hooked. Or when you do the same, but in wormhole space.
If you are doing missions or participating in alliance shenanigans... yeah. Lots of mindless button pushing. At that point, trading in the market is more fun.
Sneaking into another halls at uni to cover a BoB guy’s door with bees I’d cut out and printed (we became friends over this!)
Also fun:
- Running training exercises for new players. We'd train them how to fly in formation, how to align ships, how to scan. The final training exercise for the corp was a "Snipe Hunt" where I was the snipe. They had to catch me, but if they managed, they were allowed to blow up my ship.
- Hauling for a mining gang. Fifteen people in mining barges and me in a large transport moving rocks back to our Player-Owned Station. Posting nonsense and memes in chat, while having the craziest discussions. Every once in a while, we'd get jumped by raiders and call in the cavalry.
At least three of the corps I was part of got flipped and shredded from the inside. Players worked to earn trust, become officers in the corp, gain security clearances, only to steal everything. They had fun, I guess.
But the time investment became way too heavy to keep playing once I became a father.