Slashdot Mirror
Gamers Don't Want Grief
An article at the Guardian Gamesblog looks at the frustrations of online griefers. They talk about some of the unpleasant activities online gamers engage in, and briefly discuss the future of dealing with griefers. Scott Jennings and Richard Bartle chime in with ideas on how things might be handled. From the article: "'I expect we'll see more and more self-government,' says Scott Jennings, game developer and author of Massively Multiplayer Games For Dummies. 'The reason is fairly obvious if not particularly noble: it's less expensive for game companies to have their customers police themselves than hire people to do it. The trick, and why you don't see it generally, is to construct self-policing schemes in such a way that they don't enable unscrupulous players to use them as tools of grief.'" Darniaq disagrees, on the basis that players just don't care about immersion.
No, but eve definately has some of the highest penalties ...
... it really does create that sense of danger, fear, and paranoia that should be a part of most mmorpgs, if you choose to participate and live life on the edge. Reprocussions for getting your ship destroyed or being podded make keeping your eye on your radar, warp-in message list, etc ... I don't play mmorpgs much, but Eve has easily been the 'coolest' experience because it feels the most real in terms of risk/reward and giving the player real options to progress quickly based on skill and cunning or keep it safe and easy if they're just there for the social side.
Basically (and I'm sure there are some corrections here, I only have about 4 months playing experience) if your ship is destroyed, its destroyed. You need to buy another one. You can buy insurance, but that only pays for slightly less than a new ship; all the cargo, weapons, hardware, ammo that you had is gone.
Better yet, once your ship is destroyed, you end up in a pod. You can be 'podded' (ie, the pod is destroyed, and your character dies) and your character is restored to the skill level you had when you last cloned your character. I've had my ship destroyed twice, and both times it takes minimum a few days to get 'back up and running', and its a HUGE pain in the ass.
WoW has nothing on Eve in terms of the true pvp experience, and guildwars is what many seasoned Eve players would call a 'Carebear' party. A carebear is somebody that sticks to high security space (where pirates generally can't operate because they get hounded by powerful NPC police) and plays the game to avoid as much combat as possible.
Eve is freaking cool
To answer your original post, no, you can't lose your account for playing poorly, but you can essentially fail to progress at all and in some cases lose ALOT of time if you risk too much. Thats a cool concept, and one other games really havn't created a suitable game system to explore in a satisfying manner.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I sometimes wished I had joined a pve server. Especially for the grind from 50-60. I realized at that point that I prefer an environment where I can PVP when I want to, and get away from it when I want to. It was exciting at first, but got old after awhile. I wouldn't mind if PVP servers had safe zones that went all the way to 60, with most of the good content still in PVP zones. Yeah, I know I could have leveled up in instances with a group, but I would usually rather kick myself in the balls than run an instance. Guess I am a bit of a carebear after all, even though I spent 90% of my time in WoW in battlegrounds or lookin for world pvp.
As for Hillsbrad, I don't think I finished half the quests I started there because of the ganking, but I did have some good times there defending lowbies.