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Comment by madrox | Hacker News Reader

I hope we eventually see a truce between developers and server emulators. Emulation really adds something to communities, and in a world where we're losing the public moderation war, private servers seem more and more like the solution for people who don't want to risk harassment.

I remember EVE Online fondly, but I was a pretty casual player. I know this is an educational project, but I wouldn't mind seeing some private servers run some day that lets me experience aspects of the game that never would otherwise.

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You will never see a truce between developers and people who challenge their profits. Be realistic.

Emulators don’t always challenge developer profit. Minecraft is incredibly successful because users can play on alternative server implementations (e.g hypixel).

Minecraft does not sell monthly subscription (as far as I know)

Minecraft sells their own hosted servers called realms that bill monthly [0]. The key difference here might be that it was rolled out well after the game’s release around the 1.5 update [1].

[0] https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/realms [1] https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Realms#Minecraft_version_h...

EVE could allow people to run private servers with a licencing fee... that will never happen though because why open things up when you could engage in hostilities instead.

Potential paying user viewpoint: Why pay when you have server and can hide it behind some vpn which you share only with friends?

Emulators can totally speed up progression though, so you can "finish" the game in days instead of years. And also enable subscription-less perks.

The companies would never allow that.

In Eve Online you don't 'finish' per se, just put it down for a while and bitch on reddit until the next war, then you resub, fight, repeat.

It's pretty much that way for all MMOs, but the "grind" is a huge part of them. And emulators let you dramatically speed that up, get all the rare items (or make your own), etc.

It's not a single player game, you're commenting on what you think Eve is, but it's not that. Eve is the other capsuleers, not the stupid items. Half the good items in the game are nothing, do nothing, and are cheap and readily accessible, Even 'Nude Dancers, Female". Never undock without 'em.

I've played Eve and gave up specifically because of the terrible grind: in skills, in credits, in ships, etc. Yes, there is a lot of emergent gameplay that only surfaces once you're in a big guild, but I never got to experience that because the early-game grind of mining asteroids etc. was so tedious. Eventually I read about the huge armadas and giant wars, but it takes a lot of dedication to get there. It's a lot of players grinding out an entire logistics network...

At an abstract level, that sort of cooperative team-vs-team supply chain building plus faction warfare isn't new either or unique to Eve. Eve's scale is impressive, don't get me wrong, but it's still a lot of grinding.

You suffer from a list of misunderstandings of the game, and that's a shame, because it's a lot more than hi-sec, alone or not. If you spent all your time mining, you were trying to play safe eve which is a game that doesn't exist. "It's only when you lose everything that you're free to do anything", as Cornwallis once said, probably.

War is at your fingertips 24/7, this is the purpose of faction warfare. You didn't see that because you never left high security space. I'm not judging, but I'm also not patting your butt while explaining this either. I was like you at one point.

I think we're talking past one another... I'm not against PvP games or faction warfare, but the grind it takes to be able to meaningfully participate. I didn't WANT to mine or run trade routes ("safe Eve"), but flying out in a noob ship with noob skills and no friends was just suicide. It wasn't so much high-risk, high-reward, it was high-investment-or-get-ganked. The entire economy is designed around the grind, with real-time skills and huge supply chains. Every time I WANTED to do something, I couldn't because I didn't have enough ISK/materials/skills/friends.

I don't want "safety", I want "lack of monotony". They're different things. Eve is like the Foxhole of space games, vs something like Elite Dangerous where even lone-wolf privateers can see meaningful action/combat without much investment.

I would love to play Eve more for the social aspects, but it takes too much time commitment to be able to meaningfully participate unless you join a big guild and they help you up. That's because of the grind.

If an emulator makes the grind much easier (much faster skill progression, higher material drop rates, easier ISK, etc.) I would love to check that out. I'm sure that will also cause communities to be less tight-knit (lower investments in time and social dependence), but that's a tradeoff I'm willing to accept in exchange for being able to experience some of the time-locked parts of Eve...

How can you win if you don't play? <-- Philosophical rhetorical question

I get what you're saying and why you'd feel that way. I'm sure you already know what I'm going to say, and that I disagree because there's a lot of things you're saying that a newbro would say that are not as true as they seem at first glance once you've been going a while.

When I was a kid I used to think about my idols or the people who had things I wanted and it was so inconceivable to think that we're the same people and they they dared to reach for the thing we both wanted. Them being there first made me wrongfully feel like they had something I didn't, when in fact it's been there the whole time and just had to grab for it.

I think we both have some points, and we both have some experiences, but a thing I see a lot of Eve vets doing is badgering the fuck out of a newbro on the internet who just wanted to make a spreadsheets-in-space meme and get some upvotes on r/Eve. I think I'm teetering on the edge of being that guy, and that's counterproductive because I hope some day you come back so some person like myself can show you the finesse of being a digital space-terrorist.

Seriously, if you set up the emulator try out the smart bombs, it's frickin great. Just gonna have to ramp up the imagination without anybody to blow up :/

I’m hopeful that people will realize they’re being (almost literally) milked, emotionally manipulated/gaslit, and unconsensually experimented on by psychologists in these video games as a service. It’s amoral, unethical, and borderline legal.

On one hand, yeah, you're totally right... but on the other hand, isn't that how all periodical/subscription-based entertainment works? TV shows, sporting games, magazines, music, magazines, news, podcasts, gardening, sex... we love our little doses of emotional manipulation, and will pay good money for it :D

I don't know that it's immoral unless it's pushed to the extreme with like pay-to-win gambling (and targeting kids, at that). And heavy-handed censorship (like how China limits game time) isn't great either.

Sometimes these artificial communities are the only meaningful social interactions for some of their players, and having them cooperate on challenges as a team can be good social training (compared to total isolation)...

>pay-to-win gambling

Gacha games have entered chat.

>(and targeting kids, at that)

Same. Also see the subscription scams rampant on walled gardens.

>And heavy-handed censorship

I’m not arguing for censorship, money isn’t speech nor are psychological studies. I think the line is crossed when video game companies bring phd psychologists in house to help design and study game design to drive sales. While I think fomo is a shitty tactic it shouldn’t be illegal. However, if psychologists are collecting data about users and drawing conclusions then not only do the companies need to acquire informed consent the results and data should be required to be published.

Again, video games have been great for socially marginalized people. Lately, these people have become piggy banks for the roaches designing systems with the explicit purpose of maximizing profit, ethics and externalities can be blame shifted elsewhere and guilt can be stifled with extravagant lifestyles.

This was really popular in Ragnarok Online. Some custom servers allowed you to max out immediately and get any item / skill builds you wanted in order to experiment with crazy PVP builds.

Having higher exp and drop rates also makes the game more fun when you don't want to invest hundreds of hours into a game.

It was very eye opening for me as a teen that a lot of mmorpgs lose their appeal once you can max things out. Suddenly they need actually well designed gameplay and story!

Was? It's still going. Gravity has finally stopped looking the other way though, especially to YouTubers that play on them.

What do you mean by “losing the public moderation war” btw?

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