EVE Online - MMO Space Sim Talks Budget, Space Stations

An anonymous reader writes "MMORPGDot's new game status report details the latest advances in the space-based MMOG EVE Online, discussing the highs and the lows of being the reigning champion of MMO space sims with Hellmar, EVE's lead programmer." The interview shows that the game's 30,000 subscribers, although tiny compared to other MMOGs, is "...more than enough to keep the game running, [as] we are a small company with considerably less overhead than many other MMO operations." It's also revealed that the equivalent of a housing expansion for space is planned: "We have also been working on player owned structures in space for quite some time now and will release them into the game early next year. The structures allow players to build small towns in space, comprised of control towers, sentry guns, power generators, mobile refineries, field assembly arrays, ship hangars, and more." HomeLanFed also has a recent interview with the EVE Online developers.

Comments

I hated Eve

[linuxkrn]

I tried Eve last month. Put a good 25 hours worth of time into playing it. And after that I canceled my subscription. The game had tons of problems but the biggest was the experience system.

THERE IS NO MOTOVATION TO PLAY. You get XP just by having a subscription. You don't have to be online or even playing. Basically they just want you to pay your $$$ and they give you XP for it. You can't get XP any other way and the times needed to upgraded skills can take days or WEEKS.

The entire game economy is based on mining. Yep, you PAY real money to work. Go out and find asteroids to haul back and sell for money. Of course you can do anything with your money you get until the XP system gives you enough points to BUY a skill.

Then to top it all off, they have one devel guy working for new content. Half the "planned" things are "coming soon (tm)" as of six months ago...

Sorry, but real life is boring and slow enough for me. I'm sure not going to pay someone to put rocks into cans for fun.

Re:I hated Eve

[Winterblink]

Yes, EVE is a pretty timesinky game but I have to ask: were you going it solo? I found solo play in EVE to be a little like watching paint dry or grass grow. It's DEFINITELY a group game, no matter how much they insist you can play it however you like. With a corporation you can do more together faster than you can soloing, which helps everyone advance faster to the more interesting aspects of the game. Eventually I myself cancelled my subscription to EVE as well, but I gave it a decent number of months.

In the end it was the fact that the people I played with only logged in to start a new skill to train and I found myself playing solo. I suppose I could have gone and found myself another corp in the game to play with but I'd hoped to keep things together with people I knew in real life. That's not to say that EVE isn't a fantastic game, there's certainly lots to do; the question is indeed as you put it, what motivation is there to do it?

Re:I hated Eve

[Danse]

Ugh. Even when I was part of a corp during the beta, it was just like 12 of us out there putting rocks into cans, and one guy in a freighter picking the stuff up occaisionally. Eventually we had to have people sit there in combat ships to guard us as well... talk about boring... EVE is a beautiful game to look at, and the economy is a pretty significant achievement as well. I really wanted to like the game. I was hoping that it would bring back the old TradeWars days. The problem is that it's just too damn realistic. Nobody actually wants a realistic economy. Realistic economies mean realistic jobs like mining and security guard. Those jobs are boring. They don't belong in a game that's supposed to be fun. That is the downfall of EVE.

Re:I hated Eve

[swright]

Sorry but this is completely not true! I've been playing now since August and I haven't even touched a mining laser for at least 2 months.

My play revolves purely around....

- manufacturing and selling ammunition and missiles to support players who are fighting and having wars.

- trading ore and minerals for profit. Ok so people mine this stuff, but I just cart it about, refine it and sell it.

- pirating is fun too.

Oh, and yes you gain *skill points* even while not online - but you have to buy the *skills themselves* first, and they cost up to 10,000,000isk each (a lot!).

The motivation to play, for me at least, is cash - buying and selling stuff, trying to get the most profit, selling it where its needed (e.g. buying ore in places where people mine a lot, refining it, shipping it to where my refinery and labs are, manufacturing guns and ammunition, shipping that out in the wildlands where people are fighting and selling for huge profit).

Great fun!

Re:I hated Eve

[Enfors]

If you ask me, Eve's realistic economy is by far its strongest point. There is just so many ways you can do business in it. The market works a bit like a stock market, where you can create buy orders for a certain quantity at a certain price. If somebody places a sell order that matches your buy order, the transaction is made. There's much more to it than that, though, but that's the basics of it.

One method of doing business in Eve is trading. Buying where it's cheap, and selling where it's expensive. What I do is I put a region-wide buy order at a cheap price for a certain mineral. Region-wide buy orders allow you to buy stuff "remotely" - I can place a region-wide buy order for a mineral in one system, and that buy order will apply to all systems in that region. When I check back a few hours later, a bunch of people have usually sold me various amounts of mineral in various places in the region. So then I go pick the mineral up, and go somewhere else and put a sell order (at a higher price) for it. A few hours later, people (or NPCs) will usually have bought it.

However, my favourite method of trading was trading without moving around. Instead of flying around picking up the mineral that I bought, I create missions for other people to deliver my recently bought minerals to my home system (the game supports creating delivery missions like this). I pay whoever does the delivery perhaps 30% of the profit I'll get for selling the minerals after they've been delivered to me.

It's also possible to buy stock in player created corporations.

And that's just scratching the surface. I can think of at least 4 or 5 other ways to do business, none of which would be possible with a more simplistic economy. I realise that this is not everybody's cup of tea though, but for those of us who likes this particular brand of tea, this cup is the only one around.

There is something better than EVE

[Kervokian]

EVE is just point&click and requires no skill to play, on top of being extremely boring. There is a small game out there called Jumpgate. It doesn't have the eyecandy that EVE has, but its flight and physics engine is superbly done and the game requires decent hand-eye coordination to be able to fly around. Community is small but very friendly. The emphasis is on PvP, but there are players of every type. Most of the RP is player driven, and money can be made in various ways. Communication between players and devs is constant and open. The download of the game itself is not very large (121MB w/music 53MB without) and 10 day free trials are available. Sorry if this sounds like an advertisement, but the game is really great, and the people who play are very passionate about it.