Where's the Massive in MMOGs?

Grimwell writes "Like MMOG's? Concerned about their future? You should read Darniaq's article questioning the general approach to these games. From the article: 'I expect invention from Blizzard as I much as I would from the local Top 40 radio station. I'd hate to think that the entire breadth of MMOs is measured by the playing of a few of the hot selling titles. It's great what WoW has done for the genre, but man I hope people don't give up on the genre just because they hit 60 and realized they didn't want to spend 3 hours a night in Molten Core.'"

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The "Massive" is in EVE Online

[syukton]

EVE Online is the best Massively Multiplayer Online Game in existence. When I say "massively" what I mean is that there aren't "shards" or "realms" or other divisions between groups of players. Everyone plays on the same "realm" which had 26,000 players online concurrently last weekend, out of a playerbase of about 110,000. How is that for massive?

There's also the in-game universe, which consists of a network of more than 4,000 solar systems. How many zones are there in other MMOGs like WoW, Everquest, Everquest2, and so on? 200? 300? Again, massive.

Oh, and you wanna talk massive? Check out the ships you can fly. You do of course start the game in a tiny (by comparison) ship, but through the training of skills you will be able to fly bigger and badder ships over time.

Skills are another area where EVE takes the term massive to the limit. Any player can learn any skill, of which there are literally hundreds. You aren't limited by your "class" because there are no classes. The skills you have determine the activities you can perform, period. There are certain types of spacecraft which are designed to be used by members of a particular race (there are four: Caldari, Amarr, Gallente and Minmatar) but there is nothing preventing say, a Gallente pilot from learning the Amarr skills so that they can fly Amarr Battleships. One thing about skills that differs from other games is that you select a skill (one at a time) to train, and then it will train over a period of time, regardless of whether or not you're online. So if it will take you a few days to get the Caldari Cruiser skill from level 3 to 4, you can put the game down for a long weekend and come back to your new skill and the benefits it entails.

Everything (item-wise and ship-wise) in the game is produced in one of two ways: you take it as loot after killing an NPC pirate ("rat" in game terminology) or players make them. Most of the equipment and ships are player-produced. It is possible (although difficult) for a single player to mine her own ore, start her own production queue, and start producing her own ships, guns, ammunition, microwarp drives, armor plating, and so on. It's much easier to be part of a group.

That brings us to Corporations. Corporations of many types exist. Some corporations exist solely to mine the ores of the asteroid belts in the outer regions. Some corporations are pirates, who exist solely to kill other players and take their equipment. Some corporations are explorers, or escorts, or manufacturers. Corporations can be as small as 20 people or as large as 1,000 (or more). Multiple corporations can form Alliances, perhaps granting a Mining corporation the privelege of mining precious ore in an outer system controlled by a Pirate corporation in the alliance.

At the beginning I mentioned the 4,000 solar systems. These systems each have a sovereignity and a security level. The security level determines a player's safety in the system, ranging from 1.0 (secure) to 0.0 (insecure). At a security level less than 0.5, any player can attack any other player. At a security level less than 0.3, players can set up their own space stations (you read that right, you can deploy and operate your own space station) and claim sovereignity over that system, effectively making it "theirs." Alliances will claim sovereignity over vast networks of systems, as well. So of that massive 4,000 systems, perhaps half are at a security level of 0.5 or greater and are "protected" by The Federation. Outside of these systems though, anyone and anything is fair game, and the stakes can be quite high.

Outside of Federation Space, there is one thing that is more massive than any other game out there. If you have two alliances, each with 4,000 players or so, who both want to control a region of space because of, say, the extremely valuable minerals in the asteroid belts required to build a certain type of ship, th