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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."
I don't watch sports because I don't like sports, not because there are none I like. If I was going to watch something, I'd watch football (soccer to you), not some people playing Eve.
If I wanted to do that, I'd go to a net cafe and stand over people's shoulders.
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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.
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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
Seriously, when has that ever been fun?
It runs almost flawlessly on Cedega, and its on the top of the list of games that Wine is working on supporting.
maybe know something about eve before you post crud like this. CCP actively work with Transgaming and the client works perfectly well under cedega. A simple google would have found that out. The directX 10 client is going to co-exist with a directx 9 client for a long time as not everyone is going to windows vista and it would be utterly stupid to think that a company that relies on subscribers would cut most of them on older platforms off. To each his own with regard to you leaving. I've been playing a long time now, probably over 2 years, yet i have a character i started 4 months ago who specialized and regularly takes down far older players in pvp. it's down to player skill not character skillpoints. One of the key elements that people with the opinion "I'll never catch up" forget is that by combining forces with other players, you can overcome far older players. There is never a case of an older player being a god of every facet of the game. GoonSwarm (an ingame alliance) is a great example, with over 2000 members, this is an alliance that consists mostly of newbie players and yet they are one of the powers in the game at the moment. Swarming works :)
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
Let's address these points eh?
* They run the backend of their *supercomputer* on MSSQL, mainly because as a bunch of game devs, they didn't really have the time to learn the intricacies of a UNIX based system when they needed to roll out their updated hardware ASAP.
* Client is indeed Windows only. Mainly because it's DirectX only, I'll give you that.
* They are porting it to DirectX 10, but that ported client is *optional*. If you want to stay with XP/DX9 you can. Not to mention the upgraded graphics engine will still run on DX9 machines, with some minor graphical details missing.
* And you know, this stream works with other players, like the open source VLC. Use that.
And yes, the system has no way of catching up to older player's skillpoint counts, but the whole purpose is to specialise in a class of ship, where the skillpoint/age difference disappears as old players were not able to specialise. And as a bonus, the skill system is time based rather than grind based, meaning poopsockers get no real advantage.
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.
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I found the opposite.. it was as boring as hell. All the 'missions' are 'take this item from here to here, and talk to this person'. Maybe there's the occasional 'kill the pirate' (but they're way too easy). No grouping (definately no group missions0, and you rarely if ever actually see another player. I like my MMORPGs to actually be multiplayer, otherwise I'd sit at home and play any one of a dozen good non-online games.