Comment by MrMember | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrMember | Hacker News Reader

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In my opinion EVE is the greatest MMO ever created. I've played and enjoyed other MMOs like World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, a few others, but nothing else even comes close to the experience of playing EVE. The very real stakes of losing your ship, cargo, implants, changes the game entirely. Venturing into low/null sec can be genuinely terrifying when you don't know what's on the other side of that warp gate.

And then there's the enormous breadth of gameplay options. You can be a high sec carebear and happily farm asteroids in relative safety or play the market and never even undock. You can live out your fantasy of being a space trucker and pick up contracts in your freighter. You can join a nullsec corp in player controlled space and participate in the absolutely ludicrous (in a good way) nullsec PvP. You can stalk other players in wormholes in your stealth bomber for literal days, popping out and killing them right when they finally think it's safe. The stories that are generated from its sandbox gameplay make it very unique in gaming.

Unfortunately it's also an enormous time sink and I don't play it anymore. If I could play EVE 18 hours a day I probably would, but it's a very difficult game (for me anyway) to play for maybe an hour a day and feel like I made any real progress.

Seems to me it's mostly empty space with menus on top.

To me, the essence of video games is that play takes place in an interesting space, where terrain matters and a variety of things occupy it.

It would be trivial to recreate the EVE experience in literally any MMO by just having permadeath. And then most other MMOs would be better than EVE because they actually have worlds with stuff in them.

Or maybe they don't and it's just a thin facade, in which case I simply recommend playing better games.

Am I missing something?

There is a lot of empty space in EVE, but there's also a lot of activity. The fact that your empty space can rapidly turn hostile forces you to take a certain approach to gameplay that I've yet to experience in any other game. I used to live in wormhole space, which feels even more empty than regular EVE space as there is no "local chat" listings of people in the same system as you. Corps that live in wormhole space generally just assume that there are cloaked spies everywhere (and they're usually right).

I also don't think permadeath is a reasonable parallel. Your pilot's skills in EVE are not lost on death, and these are required to pilot certain ships as well as gating some other things in game. XP for these skills are simply gained over time from a queue. On death, you respawn as a new clone, retaining all your skills but losing all the physical possessions you had on you at time of death. These have an in-game monetary value, which is where the desire to avoid dying comes from. There are two categories of possession you can lose this way: your ship and everything in/on it (called the fitting), and your implants. Implants augment your skills, and can be rather expensive. Once they are inserted, they cannot be removed without being destroyed, so it's quite common for people to go out and have fun in cheap ships after losing an expensive clone before later reinserting expensive implants again.

I miss EVE too, but I also simply don't have time to give my old characters the justice they deserve anymore.

In my experience EVE online was hours (days?) of boringness for a relatively small amount of extreme fun

This. I was there when BoB fell, and despite being on the losing side those weeks of intense battles were _awesome_. That was it, though. Nullsec warfare became a rather tedious grind shortly afterwards, and CCP didn't bother to fix it, instead prefering to focus on microtransactions.

I assume my characters are still sitting in Amamake a decade later, but getting back into a game only to have it feel like a second job? Narh, I prefer playing Civ6 with the missus instead. Most of the people I played with quit anyway.

> It would be trivial to recreate the EVE experience in literally any MMO by just having permadeath… Am I missing something?

Yes, a few things. Claiming territory and political hierarchy are other missing elements from essentially all other MMO’s. You can claim ownership of territory in Eve. You can then set up an alliance or parent/child relationships between guilds, such that a territory is owned by a group of cooperating guilds. This political hieraechy/network controls who shows up as “red” or attackable. Also you’d need to add full looting of gear on people you defeat, as well as harvesting of their bodies for salvage.

Another aspect missing from other mmo’s is transport logistics. Also the fact that literally every ship, weapon, and piece of ammo is created by players and transported by players with buy and sell orders in a maketplace.

In short, it’s radically and fully different from any other MMO.

Yeah all the failed projects that thought they could “just add permadeath”.

One of the amazing things about EVE is that although it looks quite bare at first blush there is an interesting space, where terrain matters and a variety of things occupy it. Far more so than most games because there is an entire player run political layer on top of it all.

The only game that’s really felt as close to a second existence to me has been Ultima Online.

Yes you're missing it. Every item is player made (few exceptions in recent years).

This means if you're a warrior in combat you have a ship with like 20 items that were all hand-made, and to build the ship itself it went through 6 different stages and the raw materials probably changed hands 12 times.

Logistics is everything too. Bad freight logistics loses wars.

You're both right, just for each of your own audiences.

It's the greatest MMO ever for people who appreciate high-stakes play, cutthroat communities, and rewarding significant investments of time over a long period.

And it's a boring, empty, ugly, poorly designed slog for new players who duck in for a two-week trial, connect with nobody, accomplish or witness nothing that's player-driven (because almost all of it happens outside of where new players can even reach), have a terrible or dull first <10 hours, and realize they'd rather play something that frontloads more of the rewarding gameplay and punishes failure less.

You're not wrong, you're just not the target audience. It's not for visual thinkers. Eve Online is a spreadsheet simulator in so many ways, but for the people who enjoy those spreadsheets, whether they be market buy/sell prices or times of day that idiots in blinged out ratting ships are playing, that's what keeps them going. The space theme is pretty, but not really the point. The harshness of the universe is the point. The empty expanse is thematically nice but not important to the enjoyment.

> It's not for visual thinkers.

As a MUD vet - and recognizing how much MMORPG dynamics borrow back from MUDs - I think it's more about the differences in mechanics and social dynamics than "visual thinking". The interface and interactions are about as abstract and obtuse, and the focus on player-driven events in real time over scripted storylines is similar.

But for me, there are MUDs that are more creative and proactive. Between re-rolling and no-PK MUDs, failure/death often has few or no stakes early in MUDs. Remorts recycle the player base, so on older active servers there experienced players are often in new-character zones. Building mechanics are more open-ended but also not mandatory for success.

EVE always plays more linear and reactive. There are and have been MUDs like that, but it's not monolithic - they aren't the only "non-visual" type of MUD. EVE guides players into corps and other orgs, which by design leads to hierarchical play. A new capsuleer is about even with or less than an NPC to most EVE players. There are few incentives to meaningfully help new players or new characters, outside of making them more useful laborers for your corp. Investing time, effort, and optionally money eventually rewards you as a player, but until then you accomplish and contribute very little.

So I'd say EVE is more for players who want to play the proverbial long game, with winners and losers, and stakes of economy and influence above all others. That's not something that can be pinned on the visuals or the spreadsheet UI. In that sense it's honestly more like Football Manager but with real people as the footballers that get shuffled around and appeased in order to help you win.

Ultima Online was similar in a lot of ways. They're also similar in that I actively avoided thinking about them to avoid getting addicted. :)

Yup, being an enormous time sink it's one of my major gripes with the game.

I guess it is also what makes it one of the most hardcore games in existence... Right next to OGame

I've never played EVE Online, but that is a not because I don't want to. It's basically the game I dreamed about as a kid. And I know if I play, I will want to win, but you can't win, you can only dominate; by investing lots and lots of time. People say I'm not missing much because it's a spreadsheet in space. Unfortunately that sounds right up my alley. I love games where I can find tiny optimizations and compound them into an unchallengeable force. But if I have the time to build a space empire, I have the time to build a new startup empire in real life, which I don't.

> I will want to win, but you can't win, you can only dominate

It is common for EVE players to refer to quitting as "winning EVE". I won EVE around 7 years ago after falling 800-hours-in-6-months deep into the optimisation black hole you describe and realising it was immensely fun but unsustainable.

>I have the time to build a new startup empire in real life, which I don't.

Real life doesn't work that way, you will first have to work 20 years under the previous emperor.

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