Multiplayer Game 'Eve Online' Cultivates a Most Devoted Following
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My eve history is beta, and on and off for years. I have 2 chars, my baby she was born on release day just shy of 90milion now(yes yes i un-subbed for years at a time) and a secondary of 40 million who is the transport/mining hauling alt.
Now I was lucky, like really lucky. I found a group in beta, there was 10 of us, by release we were 8 but within 6 weeks we had our own BPOs and running a high sec manufacturing chain. We did alright but it was dull so we moved to Fountain, and were part of the group that originally found FA. Funny the original corp ended up being a front for BoB for years ran by the bob manufacturing team.
Anyway FA at the start, m0o invaded, FA defended as best we could, my corp got invited to merge with Evol (who never recruited) and so started what I like to think of as the first step towards bob.
The organizational involved to get BoB up and running and running for 3-4 years was massive. Never under estimate what molly and co were able to pull off. They were the first big alliance for me personally. Not that i am taking away from the people in this news bit, but i do think they are just redoing what we did originally in the day. The difference is they saw how we did it and done it better, we had to do it from scratch, and by doing so we made some amazing bonds and were the force for years. Also remember BoB did the BoB BBQ which is where they would rent a camp site somewhere in EU and everyone from BoB was invited, really bob was all about building a close team and i was sad when it got removed from the game like it did but meh a game is a game.
Anyway I is off, Eve is awesome but only play if you have time to play, it will eat years off you
And then there's the management / organizational side - juggling 20+ corporations, each with their own cultures, leadership, and focuses, and herding the cats towards battles. (BoB forced members to join battles, TEST incentivized battles, two methods with the same end goal.) In my tenure as Director of Training, we set up systems where brand-new characters could get free ships, equipment, and skill books and a channel for asking questions. It was nearly a full time job just managing the influx of new players. Ultimately, it fell to the wayside once I moved across the country, and come to think of it, I've been paying for a subscription I haven't actually used in many months...
The truly fascinating part was seeing first-hand which forms of organization and motivation work, and which ones don't. Specifically, how a laissez-faire organization with relatively few rules in a very hostile game world managed not only to avoid falling apart, but rise to be a superpower against established entities with much more defined and rigid structures.
I think TEST's biggest advantages were a shared identity and relatively strong culture (for better or worse) that emphasizes fun over winning , and practically non-existant standards for accepting new players combined with very strong training and bootstrapping (as opposed to more picky corps who either didn't want to bother with newbies or were afraid of spies). And maybe a bit of manifest destiny. Throw in support from a very similar but much more experienced and established ally, a lot of propaganda, and you have something that's very tough to beat in the long term.
I can ramble forever about it, I really am fascinated by how much complexity Eve allows. That game has to be a sociologist's or organizational behaviourist's dream come true.
One of the reasons they were down there in FA was to secure some nullsec mining areas so we could produce battleships for them. This was before any battleships existed in the game. Our primary manufacturing system at that time was in a Gallente system Gisleres. When we built the first battleship for m0o it caused a bit of an uproar in our neck of the woods since j0rt was hanging out for a couple days, we had to move the transaction away from the station to avoid the ties from becoming known. We do know however that we handed over the first battleship in the game to them.
M0o was only a handful of pilots, but they had a huge impact on the game, holding entire regions hostage and they caused the only ever rollback in the game's history, as well as direct GM intervention with in game ships. I am quite proud to be apart of some of those historical events in EVE's distant past even if it was from the shadows.
But reason it is fun is it is diverce, more open than other open games and it involves spaceships.
I also played Elite when it was out, so with that the only thing that will pull me away from eve will be death, or David Brabens new mulitplayer Elite game maybe.
Last time I heard foreigners made up 30-40% of the staff in Iceland.
> Just down the road from the CCP headquarters, the Harpa, a giant glass opera house, glows in different colors at night. It symbolized Iceland’s banking boom. Now it may have to be torn down, because it’s too expensive for the country to maintain.
It's definitely bleeding money but nobody is talking about tearing it down.
One thing I find interesting is that most dedicated EVE players pay for two subscriptions. This allows you to have two characters that are both active and training skills.
A popular setup is to have a subscription for a law-abiding citizen that can pass through all Solar Systems and make a lot of in-game currency through mining, mission running, transportation of goods, or any other means. The second subscription would most likely be used to engage other players, whether their victims are up for the challenge or not. If an EVE player is engaged illegally, the attacker becomes red-flagged, and if they keep it up, eventually won't be able to traverse high security solar systems without being pursued by a Faction Navy or CONCORD(EVE in-game police). Running from CONCORD is a bannable offense - as in, banned from the game.
EVE is a wonderful world of capitalism, piracy, industry, and exploration, but I do wish CCP had a way of counting the number of players instead of subscriptions.
After that it was possible for a long time to have your character training a skill while you subscription had run out. That was a good way to make a specialized alt with Battleship 5, etc. for half or 1/3 the cost of a full-time account.
However, they fixed that as well a couple of years ago. They did add a skill queue though!
* In "High Sec" - you can shoot whoever you want. When you shoot somebody without the right to (ie, they stole from you, you can shoot them), then you have a few seconds (up to ~30) before an invincible NPC navy shows up and blaps you. If you escape, it's a game exploit and is bannable. Not that a few seconds is plenty of time to kill an unsuspecting player (and that does happen and can be profitable, even after losing your ship).
After killing somebody in high sec, your global security status gets decremented. If it gets low enough non-invincible navies will follow you around to try and kill you when you show up in safe space. This is more annoying than anything, and you just have to be careful and keep moving.
* Low Sec: You can shoot anybody, and no navies will stop you. At certain spots, "gate guns" will help out the agressors.
* Null Sec: Anything goes, shoot who you want, do what you want. This is where player controlled alliances live (if you remember reading about Goonswarm and similarly large organizations).
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It's a relatively complex system, but then again, everything in eve is complex. But fun and deep. The devs are really good about setting rules, and then allowing you to do anything you want inside those rules.
For example, a standard rule of thumb for freighter pilots is to only carry about 1 billion in-game currency worth of goods at a time. Reason? Because it costs about that much worth of ships to blow you up before concord (invincible navy) shows up and kills a group trying to gank your ship. This is just standard knowledge about what is "safe". Which really just means "what would make this unprofitable for people to do to me".
2nd sentence contradicts the first.
As an example, let's look at the classic non PVP activity of mining. Mining is a race against others to get all the asteroids before they are gone. Sure, you didn't directly kill anyone, but those asteroids you destroyed are gonna be gone for at least a few days. Thus preventing access to them by another player. Meanwhile, some enterprising gentlemen are trying to steal the ore you are creating. Once you get the ore back to the station, someone else is buying the at vastly under the going rate but offering local pickup. A third girl is offering a kings ransom if you drive the whole pile of stuff over to the bad side of town and drop it off at pirate central. You decline both offers and decide to set up a sell order for a reasonable rate. You make money
That is non PVP in eve, only three people tried to screw you over. You screwed over some smaller miner by strip mining an asteroid belt, made some money selling the loot to other players. You avoided an attempt to screw you by the market, one by a theif, and an obvious pirate trap. But nobody shot at you. No one declared war on you.
Good times.
In some areas of space, killing people has consequences, specifically, losing your ship. Which just means that you should fit it for firepower/cost when you go shooting random people in highsec. Various parties have honed this to an art, for example: miniluv (Goonswarm Ministry of Love).
Their handiwork: http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/28640
Choice quote: "There’s just something special about building 15,000 spaceships and loading their guns with 1 round of ammo to shoot. And doing it right in front of the police."
I did not know CCP bought White Wolf Studios and will be looking forward to what they do with those creative brands. Will they dominate the sci-fi and horror genre?
Not everyone can just throw hard ware at a problem, Time dilation is one of the coolest things that have happened to make the Massively part MMO feel massive.
http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Time_Dilation
Basically, EVE Online's universe spans a bunch of server nodes. When a node is under a lot of stress (large battles, high volume), the node's game speed slows down so that it can handle the load of player actions.
My impression is that chasing people across several different systems is a relatively rare practice, since you're basically blind to what might be waiting for you when you jump after. Worse, you'd have to be giving the other player an impression that you're going to a specific destination and they'd have to notice that there's a faster route to begin with.
Plus, if someone jumps into a dilated node, they've managed to put themselves inside the crossfire of at least two very large fleets anyways.
Basically, the level of mind game necessary to even open the possibility of doing this makes it impractical at best.
Edit: I see what you were saying now. Actually yes, I believe that there have been cases in which capital ships are tackled in TiDi systems. This puts them at a disadvantage since the corporation who captured them can quickly respond, and it takes them much longer to try and escape tackle.