The 49-U6U Slaughterhouse

Yeah, the game is dominated by the nullsec alliances, but I mostly don't notice the mocking. If you want to be active in the forums yeah it can get annoying, but if you just want to relax and do some PVE you'll never notice it.

P.S. I've done just about everything you can do in Eve, and low sec pirating has been my favorite, with high sec PVE and industry probably being second. I didn't really enjoy much about nullsec blob warfare.

I kind of OD'd on MMO's back in the days when Everquest was king. I played with some RL friends and, when they got sucked into an uber-guild, so did I. Pretty soon it was a second job and about as fun. Still, being elite was addictive. Eventually, I had to choose between virtual success and real-world success. There just wasn't enough time for both!

The funny thing is, this experience completely turned me off of multiplayer games, MMO or otherwise. I used to enjoy logging into FPS servers and wasn't half bad at several popular games. There was no time for them when I played MMO's, and I've never gotten back into them since. Since I know people who used to work at Bioware, I've long made a point of playing every single one of their games. That ended when they made a MMO. I briefly played Mass Effect 3's cooperative multiplayer, but I couldn't stand even that! There is absolutely nothing that breaks immersion and destroys your enjoyment of a game universe like listening to teenagers talking smack.

Yeah, I'm a geezer now I suppose. Damn kids, get off my Quake server!

It only affects that system because they can host one solar system on one server at a time; their server engine does not, unfortunately, provide for scaling a single solar system across several servers. They can put several solar systems on one server, though. They like to get a heads up from players when a battle like this is going to happen, so they can pre-balance the servers.

Symptom of the game being 11 (!) years old.

I suppose they could be used by movie companies though: Add actors on sets, voice overs, music, a decent plot. I'd go see the Eve Online Movie.

My thought is that they have the logs, and they know who was where, and when. So they feed that into an animation/rendering engine and can construct 'scenes' from pretty much any angle or view point in the battle, they can take time to render detailed ship interiors for 'in the battle' views (complete with NPC characters). Do the whole military channel 'great tank battles' type coverage with order of battle before the engagement, key maneuvars, voice over commentary from notable Eve strategists etc. I could easily be done as inexpensively as 'clip shoes' like 'Dangerous Acts of Science' (Science channel) and have potentially a much wider appeal.

Those images look like in game graphics. The game really is beautiful, and spreadsheets in space is mostly a joke these days, but there are in game professions that may include actual spreadsheets.

That said, its likely someone spent some time getting the right angle to take that screenshot.

Those are actual EVE Online graphics, zoomed out in game.

The game is shockingly good looking these days. Normally there's not that much going on in one place, and instead it's wide, desolate space (which has it's own beauty). But there are a great many special touches, from the mild red/blue shift in warp to the unbelievable overkill on the character creation, the game looks like it has had years of tweaks and refinements added.

Those are indeed in-game graphics, but they don't animate well during large battles, and controls become unresponsive. It's a bit better since they added time dilation, but it's still frustrating to be in a huge fight. Usually the beautiful graphics come from one guy set up at the edge just to film; people trying to actually fight turn off the eye candy.

To be fair, the most memorable times I've played in games have nearly never been about the graphics or presentation, and nearly always about what something __means__, whether to me personally or to me as a player.

In MMOs, I remember the hard things I did solo, the hard things I organized a team for, and the personal milestones. The zones might be ugly or beautitul. The task might simply be to kite some big demon through a wintry landscape, or it might just be doing something in a new role for the first time. (First time tanking, early raid leading successes.)

In the brief (trial!) time I played EVE, there was a lot I had to learn, and never mastered... but I could see the appeal. While a lot of the success comes down to planning (ship loadout, where you quest/farm/etc), at some visceral level I was still hunting pirates, and trying to solo hard fights that I could not quite beat. It's a rush, even if it doesn't look as cinematic as Homeworld or action movies.

This is likely the same reason people can get amazed or excited about chess or poker. :-)

Hah you should come back. It's still just as tedious and micro-managing intensive as ever. There are supposedly a lot of Chinese players but they are on the other side of the galaxy and I have yet to venture so far (about 16k).

I wonder whether this was a commercial, cultural or geo-political decision. Does the CCP want to neutralise reactionary activity in Eve Online by controlling the server? Is there some political flavour to any of these alliances?

There's a lot of rebalancing going on ATM, I think they're doing rather well.