Slashdot Mirror
EVE Online's Next Frontier
If you look at the graphs over at MMOGChart.com, most of the lines that aren't WoW seem to be heading downwards. The little engine that could, though, is personified by the Icelandic dynamo EVE Online. FiringSquad has an interview with CCP Senior Producer Nathan Richardsson. He discusses the popularity of EVE right now, and goes into some of the company's plans for making sure the game stays that way in the future. From the article: "This iterative process is based largely on our crazy future views of how EVE should be and a lot on player feedback. We then want to do some revolutionary stuff to the EVE universe and then evolution comes and bites us in the ass, reminding us that it's not cool to always throw new stuff in, the current game needs to be constantly maintained and evolved. In the end, we're never happy and I guess this is part of what is fuelling our continued passion for EVE."
After EA's recent acquisition of WAR, It's nice to see some non-WoW MMORPGS getting some attention. There may yet be hope for those of us trapped in Azeroth...
...are all of random ships floating around in space. There to show off the "beautiful graphics" with absolutely no indication as to what a screen of actual gameplay looks like. Too many games out there rely on these cherry-picked screenshots as selling points.
Great. Now how about a Mac version!
--
When the MMO chart was posted, I downloaded the demo for EVE online for the very same reason...
I havn't installed or set up a trial account yet because
A: I can't afford WoW and EVE
B: I don't have time to properly "abuse" a trial account right now.
But their website is very informative, and the game seems interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if this game continues to gather new players.
I might play Eve. In fact, I think it may be what the MMORPG genre was meant to be in its fullest form. I downloaded the free trial and after a few hours of gameplay, I hadn't finished with the tutorial. The game is huge. It's not all about killing or casual violence, it's about a life. You can buy, sell, trade, build companies, overthrow other companies in bidding wars, all sorts of things. You never have to fire a shot.
Yes, you can dance to Radiohead.
Interesting how the second largest MMO, Guild Wars or even the expansion, Factions, fails to appear on this list. It does have over a million users. And it's not having it's licensed pulled like some mmo's we know about.
The entire reason I started playing Eve was because the lack of shards. During my time on WoW, I would run into friends IRL who would say they would be playing WoW, but unless I wanted to do the entire level grind again, I would never be able to hang out with them in game. So, if any of my friends started playing Eve, I could hook up with them and fly. It was good times. The economy, though spread across so many regions, really makes it interesting to trade.
My corp currently holds an outpost, and it's really interesting to see the idea of player run stations, where it's not any different than a normal station that people dock at. I am really looking forward to the Kali upgrades which should really expand the world.
For those who havn't tried it, remember you can try it for 14 days free, though it will only get you hooked. heh A couple people I know are now playing for 'free' by trading in game isk for time cards, which buys you time in the game.
Anyway, it's a fun game, I'm glad to see it getting the attention it deserves on slashdot. Even though I've only been playing 7ish months, I've already got the two accounts going, and I suspect i'm going to keep them going. And even though I'm head down in work currently, my characters are still leveling skills in game, so when I get done with this project, I'll finally be able to fly that hauler that can fit everything. heh
-Kismeteer in game
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
Yeah, I played the game in the subject. Hated every second of it. I tried to play the 'stealthy' ship. It's the only one that appealed to me. I haven't played Eve. Can anyone give me a good comparison? Is it worth my time to try it?
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Yes.
*Goes back to playing WoW*
-gjr
As someone who's played a bunch of MMOs, I find EVE to be an anomaly. The ridiculous attention to detail and depth hooked me more than any other game I've played, and has been the only game which has inspired me to create an online comic for the community. In fact the community of players in EVE is unlike anything I've seen before, willing to create streating audio and video sites to cover events (EVE Radio), create special sites for hosting pictures and videos for other players (EVE Files), and planning large scale gatherings on other continents for folks who can't make the yearly fanfest in Iceland (EVE Gathering). It's really quite something. For the curious, my comic is called Warp Drive Active. The humor is fairly contextual, but I try to make it general enough that folks not having played the game might still be able to get the jokes.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Nope - the non-WoW lines and the non-EVE lines haven't hit 0 yet. There are others who, just like you, haven't given WoW (or EVE) a chance yet.
You really should, though. You'll likely be pleasantly surprised. If you liked Diablo, you'll probably like WoW.
I wish more games would get the 'you actually put something you value on the line' idea right. Eve does, and that's what makes it brilliant. I never cared a whit about dying in WoW, but every battle in Eve practically flips me out. CCP missed a bunch of polish, but they got this one detail right and I love it.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
I'm playing EVE right now.
EVE I consider somewhat like Shadowbane-in-space, without the sb.exe and with a far better engine.
EVE graphics are great. Far better than anything else on the market that is an MMO.
I love the depth of EVE - you can trade, mine, pirate (PK), pvp, run NPC missions, or kill NPC pirates.
The huge amount of players online at any given time is great too - it isn't like standard MMOs with everything being on seperate servers.
EVE has a different levelling system also - basically time based. You set a skill up, it finishes after a set amount of time. No need to kill a mob over and over again, then move on to tougher mobs. Just time, based on the attributes of your character.
EVE requires a high performance system in order fully experience it in all its glory. I am using a p4 2.8 C, 1 GB ram, gf fx 5900 ultra typically at 100hz @1024x768 and my framerate is somewhat substandard. Going to build a new system specifically for this.
Also, alt usage is rampant in EVE. Because you can only train up one character at a time, a significant % of people run alts. I know of people that have as many as 5 accounts!
EVE's territorial, and risk vs. reward system is far superior to most other modern MMOs. In most other MMOs, there is no risk really, because of the watered down pvp. You die in WOW, you basically lose nothing. Not so in EVE. Dying in EVE can be seriously painful because of the massive expense of well fitted ships.
My only gripes with EVE is the time based levelling has some of the oldest players nearly at 55 million skill points (SP) so newer players cannot dream of competing with them, not for years. There is significant amount of time to be spent in your initial learning tree, and follow on into chosen skills based on your professions.
I'm an EVE-ONLINE player. Training up HAC skills as we speak, only 8 days from time of this post for Cruiser level 5.
EVE will never be very big in America. There is a portion of the population in America who play, I myself am American. But, while the entire world loves soccer, Americans typically don't care much for the sport. Probably, the reasons why Americans don't like soccer is the very same reasons why EVE will not gain much widespread appeal in America.
Not to belittle any sportsman, let's do consider the facts of raw game mechanics:
Basketball, Baseball, NASCAR and Football... the four big American sports.
NASCAR is an exception. It is a difficult (in that the drivers are all, highly skilled, no doubt), and very dangerous sport. This is odd, why so many Americans like this sport yet they might shun X-Games. (It's my belief that X-Games is a social backlash of a small group of peoples at the dumbness of the mainstream sports to include, all the safety associated with those sports.) In NASCAR, people do die, you can become seriously injured... and though the same is possible in all other sports, as it is in everyday life for that matter, the difference is... in NASCAR, it's even PROBABLE you will face mortal danger. It's not common, infact it's even mind blowing and bewildering, to hear of a basketball player dieing on the court; it's just not a common event.
So, danger and tangible loss does not appeal to Americans. (With the exception of NASCAR and a select few alternate forms of such sport like top-fuel dragracing.) This is inline with generalized social characteristics of an American. In that, being so common for an American to refuse to be held responsible and always trying to blame someone else, even for his own self-enduced misfortune. This is very important to consider, becuase the fear of being held responsible stems from the prospect of suffering consequences and in suffering, danger and loss is implied. (Going to prison, certainly jeopardizes 'serenity' and 'sanction' and the apparent loss of 'freedom' which whether 'freedom' is infact tangible, is an entirely other discussion.)
How does this relate to EVE? In EVE, you do suffer tangible loss. If you "die" in EVE, you lose your ship and all modules you worked hard for. The components are simply.... *gone*. Now, you might have a friend loot your own "can", but things are always destroyed during ship destruction so you will never get 100% of all your fittings back even in the best scenerio. You can even lose skillpoints if you do not update your clone... this is a very big deal, moreso than losing "property" as in real life during a hostile engagement (such as getting robbed). Losing skillpoints in EVE really hurts, becuase it's takes a long time to attain them and the skillpoints govern what functionality are capable of. (Such as flying certain ships, using certain modules.)
Basketball, baseball and football are all mechanically... very simple. Afterall, a jock has to understand what to do.
"Take this ball... no not that one, this one... and run there.... no no, wrong direction... ok, stop, turn around.... ok start RUNNING. Don't stop, just run straight into the wall... SCORE!!! you are a hero!"
Americans don't like 'options', which is bizarre becuase the general population are supposed to be 'consumers'. Options, require making a choice and making a choice requires some degree of analysis which is another way of saying "thinking". Americans don't want to think... and this is apparent on so many levels, from VCRs with only three buttons, to the noticeable amount of Americans with degrees from an American college is... get this... English or maybe psychology. All of this is for the sake of simplicity... hell, no matter what interest you take... mainstream music isn't even as musically "advanced" as even 30 years ago. Compare the melodic sophistication of GreenDay with that of Jimi Hendrix, or The Beatles. We can even take this one step forward and compare most A
For anyone remotely curious about Eve Online, this story is a must read:
http://static.circa1984.com/the-big-scam.html
From the intro:
This is a story of deception, intrigue, and doublecrossing. It is a story of liars, bandits, and greed. It is a story of the worst of the human condition, and how the motive for profit will drive a normally nice guy to the deepest depths of evil and betrayal.
This is the story of my life in Eve Online.
Education is the silver bullet.
For a few months now. I think the biggest thing keeping people playing it is the complexity. On eve-online there are programs to help you choose the right types of weapons for range, speed, ship size, ammo type, and so on. There are about five different types of each turrent, going from really cheap to really expensive...and there is a definate difference in game play. Hundreds, if not thousands, of different combinations of different ship moduals that can change various attributes of the ships such as CPU usage, power output, sheilding (against four different types of damage like explosive, thermo, emp) all combine to make a complex game just to start out with.
.4 or lower (on a scale of .0 to 1, with 0 being mad-max land) anything goes pretty much. A few times I've come through a gate to be immediatly attacked. If I have a mission into low-sec space I'll put 2-3 warp coil stabilizers on the ship just so I can escape if I'm jumped.
Throw in corporations, pirates, wars...it really is like a different world. What I find most interesting in it is the fact I can start my character training on something, and then don't really need to go back and mess with the game until the training is done if I don't want to. The biggest problem is the amount of ISK (in-game money) that things cost. It takes weeks to get enough ISK together to build a decent battleship, and you can loose it in less than a minute. You sit in your escape pod...hopefully you bought some insurance, and even that isn't enough to get a ship like you had. There are pirates everywhere in low security space, and once you've dropped to
EVE is definetly not a game for the casual player. To get a really good character is usually takes at least 6mo to a year to build up one character. But, if you enjoy space combat and corporate subterfuge, it is a very fun game. Also, even though it have great graphics, it's not overly-taxing on the system like WOW and COV.
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
This interview is worth reading if you are interested in Eve Online, though the interviewer asks a lot of easy questions. Some of the frontiers that Eve has arrived at are no longer virtual or strictly game related.
One question that the interviewer should have asked, since CCP was being candid about its revenue sharing with the Chinese licensee, is to what degree it will cooperate with the Chinese government on requests for user data a la the Yahoo! China fiasco? CCP seems to be adopting the policy of many other technology businesses by saying that the local licensee company is the one following Chinese laws.
This is, of course, a complete dodge of the pertinent question since there is a revenue sharing agreement and it's essentially required in China to have a local licensee because of restrictions on foreign ownership. In many instances, it's akin to saying, since I incorporated my business, I am no longer ethically responsible for the actions taken by my corporation with my consent.
The greater specter raised, and this is not a situation unique to CCP, is how willing will CCP be to provide information to the Chinese government from the *non-China* server? People may initially scoff at this and claim no Western company would do this on principle, but consider two points:
1. The Chinese government now has leverage on CCP as it could simply shut down the local licensee, or nationalize it, or keep it running and simply stop sending the agreed revenue stream to CCP. What would the impact be of the threat of this, especially if the Chinese operation is providing a lot of revenue?
2. That Western companies are willing to reveal any information, as admitted to the United States Congress, at all brings into question the ease of batting this concern aside by claiming that principle prevents.
I think it is clear that the Chinese government would be very interested indeed in chat and mail logs and corp/guild members of someone they suspect is a member of, say, Falun Gong on any of the systems, and, since everyone who signs up to play divulges their real name and address, this becomes more than a virtual concern.
I was somewhat interested in the game until I read this. The bad taste in my mouth has always prevented me from picking up a copy.
I played EVE for a long time. One of the biggest things to me was how Open ended it was. You could kill the police, be the police, raid your home station, or go make your own. There was SO MUCH you could do it was amazing.
Allot of players do say the game is slow to move. As in you have to work for a long time in order to get anywhere. For instance skills are based on a Real Time clock. When you want to train a skill it has a timer for how long it takes before it is complete. You can log off and the timer is still going. The downside to this is skills take a long time to level. Some taking months. This is what I think draws allot of players away. With simple games that you can be uber in less than a month such as WoW, most of the younger folks and less patient will migrate there. But for a hardcore, work your arse off, do whatever you want gaming experience, EVE is the winner hands down.
You will also hear that players who have been in the game longer will always be ahead of you. To an extent this is true. There player skills will be higher but that does not mean they will have advanced as much. You can be much lower in skill and still outwit another player. Where as WoW if you are down by 3 levels just start running now. The battle system in EVE allows the player to use his natural playing skills and strategy to overcome the odds. Other games it's a simple click...special here....mega bomb there....and it's over. There is so much strategy involved with EVE it is insane.
To put it short, EVE is the only game I know that is player Driven. What you do affects the world as a whole. You can do what you want be who you want, and really put your skills to the test. It's great to see games like these with such a mature community prevailing against the odds.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
This is perhaps the dumbest thing ever written on Slashdot. The depth of your ignorance is matched only by its breadth. The one topic on which you come close to expressing some level of reasonable expertise, EVE Online, is overshadowed by your obvious contempt for a wide swath of human existence which you seem determined to not understand.
Please, for the love of God, never try to communicate your thoughts to another human being ever again.
I'm an American and I've been playing EvE for over a year. I've been in four corporations (guilds/factions/whathaveyou), and at least 50% of the people I meet are American. The other 50% I meet are mainly from Europe.
GP doesn't know wtf he's talking about.
Eve Online, as a concept, is really an amazing thing. Actually playing it, not so much.
It sounds like some sort of PvP nirvana, but the entirety of Eve Online PvP consists of mugging. Becuause of the costs, nobody enters combat unless they have a massive advantage.
The combat interface is about as bad as you can possibly imagine, requiring the user to bring up right-click menus for common tasks, keyboard shortcuts are virtually non-existant, save for turning modules on and off. The whole thing is incredibly tedious.
It took them three years before they put in a hotkey for "Reload All Guns". Previously, people apparently had to right-click and select reload on every gun, every time.
When I first started playing, I figured I probably didn't understand, or wasnt' used to, or whatever. Eventually I realized that it simply sucks, and Eve Online programmers are now working on a completely revamped graphics engine that will require Windows Vista and have absolutely no interest whatsoever in giving Eve a halfway decent combat interface.
From what I've seen of it, EVE reminds me of what Escape Velocity would be like if they implemented a 3D Engine and made it massively multiplayer. Unfortunately, I use a Mac, so no EVE for me, or any MMORPG really, as WOW never appealed to me.
The only thing that is slightly strange about the graphics..... are there *really* that many clouds in space?
Every MMOG has all that stuff you mentioned. Even games like City of Heroes/Villains that you can barely even classify as a MMOG have all that stuff created by community people.
EVE had a great concept. A complex, diverse, player driven economy. A player could focus on a wide variety of professions - Mining, research and development, manufacturing, combat, NPC hunting, or more.
Unfortunately, the implementation was horrible. Within 1-2 months the economy was in the crapper. There was virtually no profit in manufacturing, research never proved to be useful as there was almost no benefit whatsoever to putting a blueprint in for more than 3-4 cycles of research. Mining was insanely profitable only if you could get into one of the corporations that dominated insecure space. Combat was boring as hell - 2-3 hours of flying, 2-3 hours of gate camping, only to finally reach 30 seconds of intense combat.
I made it as far as having a Thorax blueprint of my own, along with owning my first battleship. Then I got BORED. Even as a member of one of the largest corps in the game, there was nothing that actually interested me.
Then Tech 2 came along. It was supposed to be the savior of the economy, finally guaranteeing manufacturers unique items that might actually make a profit. Nope, one corporation who had managed to stay in the lead with mining and one of only 3-4 that managed to get in on the manufacturing boom before it crapped out bought out all the Tech 2 blueprints and made the market even more FUBAR. While I happened to be in that corporation, it was sad seeing how lopsided the game was becoming.
Throughout this, let's not forget the bugs. Frequently major functions would get broken with a patch and not get fixed for 2-3 more patches. CCP NEVER revamped their precaching system to properly avoid gatecamping load lag exploits.
Last but not least, I can't point to any one single aspect of the game mechanics to cause it, but in general they were very conducive and if anything encouraged internal corporate strife. I was horrified what was happening to my corp, which consisted almost entirely of comrades of mine from a previous game, Planetarion. As the months went on, there was more and more internal arguing and strife, in many cases by people who used to be great friends.
I got tired of seeing what was happening and quit the game. A month and a half later, Xanadu practically split in two. I wasn't surprised at all, as it had been brewing for ages, but it was horrible to see former friends so angry at each other. EVE basically destroyed one of the best groups of gaming comrades I had ever been in.
I'm back in DAoC, and while I'm in general annoyed with Mythic, at least the game mechanics don't encourage guilds tearing themselves apart.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
What an incredibly boring game. Its not even real time, the best you get is sending a course adjustment every 5 seconds. The leveling system is based on time. Real world time. Seriously, the advancement system consist of "have your account for a long time", so new players are completely fucked. Even the combat is ridiculously slow, tedious and boring, and that's the most exciting part of the game.
So in other words you haven't played the game in 2 years?
When it comes to player vs. player in EVE, EVE has so much more tactics and strategy than most other MMOs. The simple reason behind this is the massive variety of ships, loadouts, skillsets. Whereas WOW has certain classes that specialize in killing other classes, and strictly defined skilltrees, EVE has far more variety.
Unfortunately, citing any of the current crop of MMO games as an example of 'tactics and strategy' is about as useful as stating that your buddy is a better programmer than Paris Hilton.
High-level combat in EVE (or most of the alternatives, but ESPECIALLY in EVE) has at best a passing relation to tactics and strategy, it's an exercise in brute-force solutions to logistical problems, with the results being determined by which group has spent the most time preparing for the conflict. "My corp has spent more time buying tricked-out ships and finding rare parts for them, playing with spreadsheets to find the optimal damage loadout, and planning to gank you when you're not expecting it, so we crush your souls. PWNED!"
Ironically, this mirrors the fixation that professional soldiers have with logistics, but it's an uphill battle to make it 'fun' when the benefits of innovation and thinking are so massively outweighed by sheer teenager-grind-hours. Sure, CCP said all through the alphas and betas that EVE would be different, and it was different... but nowhere near different enough to change that balance, especially with the horrendous timesink UI/design they ended up with. That's why I stopped playing EVE shortly after it went into release, and hate current MMO games with a passion.
I will admit that EVE has more promise than the other MMOs I've seen, but I don't want to play any of them until things have changed more than any of the current generation of MMOs can imagine. Bring on the MMO singularity!
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
How well does Eve work using Linux/Cedega? I've made the switch away from Windows -- I really don't want to have to boot back into that world...
I played Eve when it first came out and loved it -- it just tends to replace your real life too easily. For anyone with a real life, this game is acid.
> EVE basically destroyed one of the best groups of gaming comrades I had ever been in.
Or consider this: if a group's camaraderie is predicated on a particular set of game mechanics, perhaps the group wasn't all that tight to begin with: 'fair weather friends', if you will?
On the other hand, I agree that there is plenty for CCP to do to improve the game (bug fixes, features promised but not yet implemented), but I find it sufficiently fun already that it beats the other MMOs that I've played. The game has changed a lot since you played it, judging by the details you mention.
If by 'tactics', you mean '5 BS's sniping at anyone who warps through the gate into '. I played EVE for a good while, and the VAST majority of PvP combat was stuff like gate ganks and suicide kessies hitting ice miners in high-sec.
I quit because I lost about half a billion ISK to a bug that wasn't acknowledged at the time, and because trying to get past a certain point in the game without joining some huge low-sec group was pretty much impossible within a reasonable timeframe, unless I wanted to be very, very bored. This was about a year ago, I've heard that things got shuffled around a bit. Maybe they finally fixed the POS fuel consumption bug that was my last straw, but unless somebody feels like fronting me half a billion ISK to make up for the assets I lost, I'm not interested in playing again.
I did like the ability to manufacture stuff, though. I was hoping to eventually set up POSes out in BFE for my small org, and just sort of mind our own business and sell to people. Arms dealer, baby. Alas, it wasn't to be...
Fill in your four or five-letter word of wisdom here _ _ _ _ _.
"amateurs discuss strategy; experts discuss logistics."
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
EVE needs mobile suits.... ;)
Exactly - I started playing EVE in 2004 and I'e never seen the problems that this guy is mentioning. I turned my small 150m isk fortune into over 1b isk by running a MODEST (10-15 items) production operation that started servicing Yulai after CCP revamped the intra-system gate routes and everyone had moved their operations to Oursaluert. One thing that I've noticed is that almost every person that thinks the game is boring are usually empire carebears that never set foot in 0.0 space. 0.0 space/pvp is the other 50% of the game and it is a shame more people don't understand that.
The only real complaint I have with EVE right now that is serious enough to make me consider quitting from time to time is the lag in large fleet battles. Nothing like jumping to a gate to break up a large enemy camp and having your Raven jammed, warp scrambled and melted by the hostile fleet without ever seeing a single ship on the screen.
EVE, once you get out of high security space becomes more and more of a sandbox and this to me is it's appeal. The physics are just right for a game of this type although in the future something along the lines of I-WAR would be better. It isn't game for instant gratification but if you want to carve your own path and have an oppertunity to make somehting of yourself in a non sarded wourld with over 20,000 people in it at any one time then this is the game for you.
This might be a game but the politics are real and to me that is one of the major attractions, being ablt to fight warfare using a combination of violence, politics and negotiation provided hours of fun as I led an alliance from being a small NPC hunting alliance in poor space to one of the ten argest in game occupying multiple stations that had been conqured from once of the oldest in the game. Seriously, fir it up, get into a corp and you'll find your other games won't get much of a look in.
Hans Roaming
President
Huzzah Federation
PS: Big hello to all the other EVE players in here.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
To some extent this is true - there are many cases in which numerical superiority or better equipment rules the battlefield.
However, with better tactics and skilled pilots (not just in-game character skills but player skills) a numerically inferior force can truly obliterate numerically superior opponents. I've been involved in fights where we have 10 pilots on our side and 30 on the opposing side, yet we come out with 3-5 losses vs 10-15 kills and we hold the battlefield. Tactics aren't necessary - most of the time just showing up with more ships will ensure victory - but if you want to engage greater numbers they are crucial and differentiate a mediocre pilot/fleet commander from the exceptional ones.
On the equipment side, there is some pretty uber equipment and many times it can preordain an engagement's outcome. With that being said, even the multi-billion isk capital ships can be destroyed by a few battleships with the proper tactics. I've been involved in killing several carriers and a dread while only having battleships and smaller support on our side, so I know this to be true.
In my experience, EvE allows tactics to rule the field more often than in any other mmorpg. THIS flexibility and reliance on player smarts vs character skills is what has kept me in the game with 2 accounts for more than 2 and a half years.
"In the end, there is simply no weapon more devastating than the truth, delivered in just the right way." - tnk1