Slashdot Mirror
EVETV - Sport For Nerds
Your grandparents will be watching golf tonight, so why not watch some sports of your own? If golf isn't your thing, then perhaps multi-ton space vessels slamming each other with lasers and missiles might be more entertaining? Virgin Worlds is carrying some details for the riveting EveTV. Today, the channel is in reruns, but tune in anyway to see some matches from the last few days. Footage from ongoing PVP matches in the space MMOG EVE Online will make your Sunday go by much quicker. From the article: "The commentary is just like a traditional sports cast and the fellows calling the matches seem quite knowledgeable not only on the technicals of play, but also the backgrounds of the competitors. If you have an opportunity to check it out, I recommend it. Kudos to CCP for organizing this event."
So you're wondering "big deal, why does that affect things?"
Simple. People for the most part would rather PLAY video games than watch them.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
This is not just watching "some people play EVE." These are quick, 5-on-5, tournament style battles between alliances. I really don't see any difference between that and watching a physical sporting event. "Watching people play EVE" sounds like "watching football players practice for the game," which is not what this is.
;). For those of us that do play, it's fun to have open in another window to watch the alliances we fight with every day get their asses handed to them by a relatively unknown one.
If you haven't or don't play EVE, it might be hard for you to enjoy (unless you just like watching space ships blow each other up
Screw multi-ton space vessels.
The sport *I* would like to see would be a normal sport, like football, soccer, or hockey, where the "no drugs" pretense has been dropped, no testing is perormed, and players are encouraged to enhance their performance by any means possible wink wink. A game where all the players are on uppers and going through 'roid rage would make me more interested in the sport.
One of the nice things about EVE is that you can focus almost exclusively on one type of gameplay that you like. Want to mine and build stuff? Go ahead! In most other games if you wanted to do this, you'd have to be a fighter as well to go get experience and materials to support your skills and craft. In EVE, skill training is real world time based, not play time based. So to mine, you just need to train up to pilot a mining ship and use some mining lasers. Now personally, I don't really understand why you would want to mine all day long (even though I do have a mining/building character to build ammo and ships for myself), but again, there's no reason why I should ever have to bother with that. You can be entirely self sufficient by only fighting, making money through running missions or whatever, and buy all of your equipment off the market.
So in that sense, it's no different from Doom. Between fighting, it's just traveling to the next solar system and maybe stopping to buy some 'powerups' along the way... it just takes quite a bit longer on the traveling part
Well, simple:
;)
Eve has one server for all players. the peak concurrent user count was 26000, in one "shard".
Eve is incredibly complex game, and very well balanced.
well, and these things result in a very good PvP environment.
For features go visit the webpage, because eve has come a long way since its release.
Some Namedropping:
Player built Outposts(spacestations) and smaller strucktures.
ships in all flavors (frigates,cruisers, covert ops, battleships, carriers, logistics, support,transports, mortherships, titans...)
most of the space is ruled by player alliances and not npcs.
The economy is completly player run begining with minerals->components->ships, outposts, whatever.
and you can be a Pirate. what else could you want
i'm actually waiting for more games to broadcast live... of course it would help if the game was something i was interested in. it's an opportunity to see the best player's skills and learn from their techniques. (yeah, I know player demos are a good way of doing that too). and i can also see people playing in real world situations where there is added pressure (you think you are good enough to play in front of hundreds to millions of viewers in competition style play). i think i could be entertained just as much by game related competitions as i could by sports related competitions (or even faky faky stuff like american idol or survivor).
Out of all the mmorpgs Ive played, Eve-online is the most involved and interesting. Ive been playing for under a year and there is still a lot to learn and experience. There are lots of different things to do in the game, but its the principally the pvp that is core and the wars and relationships that evolve between the entities that live out in deep space beyond the stable "safe" core empire systems that is intriguing.
One concern new players have is that with the skill system is that they will be never able to catch up with those that have been playing from the start. While its true you'll never have the versatility of a veteran there are only so many skillpoints that are relevant to piloting a certain ship so as long as you focus you can be just as effective as some vet and any conflict comes down to player skill. Moreover its quite feasible for an organised gang of newbies to gank a solo vet or uncoordinated gang.
Troodon / Irrilian of Eve University.
troodon.net