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EVE Online PVP Tournament Streamed Live
infinitevalence writes "Every few months the good Viking programmers of the north organize and present one of the most geeky e-sports out there. Thanks to them, for three weekends in a row we get to watch player-controlled spaceships fight it out for accolades and unique in-game items available only to the first, second, and third place winners. This year CCP has all of the content live online and streaming in HD for your viewing pleasure. So find a drink, whip up some snacks, watch the shiny explosions, and listen to the soothing words of player experts as they walk you through the action!"
Day one's battles have already been posted on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/user/CCPGAMES#g/c/29BA4E251AA2A6F8 , in 720p HD for your viewing pleasure.
I'm surprised more game companies aren't taking advantage of streaming and even static online video. If you look around youtube, most of the game videos are "Let's Play's" or other fan material, not official content. Maybe they don't think it's worth the effort.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
I'm glad to see this. I've been playing EVE lately, but I just can't get into it. The things that make EVE stand out to me are the single player-controlled universe and the lack of XP grinding. But (and I'm not trying to troll, here) I find the user interface to be excruciatingly bad, and most of the time I am wondering what I should be doing. You could argue that a user interface and having a supply of fun stuff to do are two cardinal properties of a good game. It seems EVE is calibrated for players that have been at it for a long time. But for a new player, I'm really frustrated.
EVE players hate it when people compare their game to WoW, but I think there's a lot to learn from other massives like that. When you get a fresh WoW account you're off to the woods killing Kobolds or whatever right away, and maybe it is not totally challenging, but there's always something to do, somewhere to go, and pretty things to look at. But in EVE the first few *days* are mostly doing boring agent missions where you don't really even do anything (at least in WoW you have to click on the damned Kobold) except fly around and learn to use the maddeningly bad UI. For good chunks of time, I set it on autopilot to do some 6-jump mission, go clean the kitchen or play with the dog, and come back in 20 minutes and I might be at the destination, where I will then need to set autopilot to go back to where I came from once I've dropped off the shipment.
But it is interesting to see this tourney going on, because the PvP really does look fun and full of lots of aspects: advance planning, massive social coordination, and straight up pvp videogame carnage.
"So find a drink, whip up some snacks, watch the shiny explosions, and listen to the soothing words of player experts as they walk you through the action!"
no.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
EVE online has many critics with very valid points, but never in my life have I had a PvP experience like in EVE. I've been gaming for over 20 years and never before EVE had I had a genuine fight-or-flight adrenaline rush. The terror of combat and the thrill of victory are unmatched outside actual combat. I've since quit the game, but I always look forward to watching the 10 man tournaments.
For those of you unfamiliar with the epic scale combat can reach, I suggest you look at the EVE Dominion trailer. It's a moderately accurate depiction of an alliance battle, or at least what it would be if the servers didn't get borked every time 100 ships jump into a system (one reason for quitting).
My roommate just recently began playing Eve again and, naturally, tried to get me to buy into the game. However, every time I see clips or streams of the game I...I just...I....*SNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE*
Roughly 50K players a day, every day.
Right now, the player count shows 56556 players, with an all-time record of 56817 players.
Stats here: http://www.eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
So less than your average South Korean shovelware MMO then.
In EVE, you aren't flying fighters, you are flying frigates, cruisers, battleships, and the like. You want EVE game to behave as though you were piloting a TIE Fighter when in actuality you are "piloting" the equivalent of Star Destroyers.
If you change your user agent string accordingly, you'll see that most of the examples work fine in Chrome, just not the first (video doesn't play) or the VR one.
From http://www.eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility
Player statistics
Currently online: 55,783
Max today: 60,453
Current record: 60,453
It seems the tourney and this slashvertisement is doing them some good.
Well I didn't say unique players :)
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Damn... I blame Slashdot RSS/Google Reader for that.
In one single shard? You'd wish.
Keep in mind this is a single-universe game, where everyone can interact with everyone else.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
If you want to understand this game... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxBnf-wk6tU&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fuser%2Fccpgames%23p%2Fc%2F29BA4E251AA2A6F8%2F1%2FAxBnf-wk6tU&feature=player_profilepage/ this is the match to watch (second match from day 1). I know more then most about what happened and even I am going WTF!
"Playing" EVE is like watching a screensaver. Watching other people "play" EVE? My Futility Detector just went off the scale!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
When you die, you lose your ship right? What on earth would compel a team to enter a tournament unless they were sure they were in range of the top 4 spots? How isolated are these tournaments? Can random people just fly in and start messing stuff up? Can you run away if you're about to be killed? What are the limitations of the team? What's to stop a really rich team from having a better loadout? Or a really big team? Can you have a large team of cheap ships? How many human players are involved in a battle. Don't you think for streaming purposes they should remove the red/blue overlay which makes a cool space battle look like just a bunch of squares standing around if you don't know the game?
These would be fun to watch if they had decent announcers. They are just saying "Team A is doing a lot of damage to Team B's (insert ship name)" and stuff like that. Even someone who has never played the game could look at the screen and tell you that. I wouldn't listen to a baseball announcer who just said "It's the 3rd inning, and the guy in the middle is throwing a ball at someone holding a bat. Look! He hit it! Now the scoreboard shows Team A scored."
Instead, they need to be informed of the loadouts ahead of time so they can say "Team A is using speed tanking to prevent missile damage by the (insert ship type here). This loadout is weak against smart bombs but works great against Team B's choice of long range missile damage."
I haven't played in years, and it is hard to make the action of a bunch of icons interesting without someone giving relevant background. It's too bad: the game is so highly tactical it really would add a lot of value to have people who know what they are talking about.
Tonight the record was broken and there were over 60,000 players online ^_^
http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1331799&page=3
"The new record is 60,453 pilots online at 19:53 GMT on 6 Jun 2010."
Simplicity lies within chaos
To dumb it down it's basically world of warcraft but in space. What I mean by that is you're constantly button mashing while you watch your model ship circle around your target shooting at something. When eve players talk about "skill" they're talking about it in the same sense as WoW players do...
Hardly. In Eve you'll notice a lot of combat involves ships circling around each other in orbits whereas in WOW tournaments the arenas are close combat and involve line-of-sight tactics. Example
SK Gaming vs TSG http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFo2yObhOS0 (HD video)
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
What I mean by that is you're constantly button mashing while you watch your model ship circle around your target shooting at something. When eve players talk about "skill" they're talking about it in the same sense as WoW players do, knowing when to mash the right buttons and when to run away.
Actually, no. When those of us who actually have it talk about skill we take things into account such as:
- Should I focus on trying to take him down asap or should I destroy some of his drones to reduce the amount of damage I'm taking myself?
- What distance between myself and the target is the most ideal? This varies from ship to ship(and there's well over a hundred different ships) and loadouts.
- Does he have any help coming in? Are any of the other people in the area interfering in the fight?
- What is my opponent trying to do? Fight, flee, stall, what's going on inside his head?
Add to that managing the supplies of the various kinds of ammunition, the status of your own ship etc...and then consider that this is just for a situation involving 1 ship on each side and now extrapolate that to 10 vs 10 where ships take on specialized roles.
Ow...and one of the skills in EVE is to prevent other people from running away...heck, it's probably the single most important one in PvP ;-)
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Too bad they're not showing the hundreds or even thousands of hours worth of mining that went into making the largest ships.
Or the 2 years worth of subscription that went into getting the ability to pilot the more advanced ones (learning skills is on a clock using real life time).
Yes, I've played EVE in the past: left when I came to the conclusion it's too much like work, only slower.
EVE has a lot of grassroots advertising above and beyond what it's size would seem to justify because it is fun for the small group you've been there for a long time and belong to one of the player Alliances that control the space with the rarest minerals. It's not really fun for newer players - addictive perhaps, but not fun.
Because of how skills are learned over a period using real-life time (u need not be logged-in for the time to count) a new player can never catch up on an older player.
Also the economy is based around the mining of minerals (used for making ships), the most common (least valueable and used in larger quantities for ship making) are found in safe NPC controlled space while the least common are found only in player controlled space (where if you don't belong to the right group you'll be shot on sight).
Somebody has to spend hours and hours mining all those low level minerals needed for making the largest ships for the players in those player Alliances that control "unsafe" space and who beter than newer players (who cannot go outside safe space without being shot) who are suppose to "work" before they get to have fun in PvP?
It is in the best interest of the estabilished players to get as much fresh meat as possible into the game to do the mining.
If you have several years of EVE under your belt and are in a player Alliance you're probably having some fun fights once in a while (a lot of time is wasted in other things and you still have to do some mining of higher level minerals), but if you're not one of those then the game is much lot less interesting than the fanboys portray it.
Newsworthy, because this time they stream also the qualifier rounds live (again), whereas last tournament, they put those on YouTube the day later and only showed the final round live. Also newsworthy: (working) HD stream this time.
If you want a first-person dogfighting multi-player space game, my first suggestion would be (free)Allegiance (http://freeallegiance.org) which, while not actually an MMO (the world isn't persistent), is an incredibly strategic and tactical experience where an individual game or match can involve over a hundred players and last for hours. Dogfighting skill is definitely critical in Allegiance, and you're not generally fighting NPCs - aside from fixed defense turrets, all armed units are manned by at least one player, and no player directly controls more than one ship. It's a game just made for joystick jockeys, with the critical caveat that you *must* be able to work with your team - a solo ace who ignores the team commander is unlikely to have as much benefit toward victory as a rookie flying a free scoutship, dropping sensor probes and repairing his side's ships. For added awesome, Allegiance is now free and open source, the system requirements are quite modest (the graphics were probably good by the standards of 7 years ago, and the community is actually quite welcoming of rookies.
That said, while EVE combat is nothing like Elite (or Descent, or Allegiance, or...) it's also nothing like WoW. WoW is a game of timing and button-mashing, and while it's not totally devoid of tactics, the "correct" approach is generally fairly straightforward from what I've seen. EVE is all about tactics, except for the part that's about strategy. It's easy to lock onto an enemy and fire your guns; this takes a total of two clicks. With a third, you can set up a pre-determined orbit around your target. The catch is that your target isn't likely to let you have the orbit you want. Maybe they're faster, and try to keep transversal velocity so high that your guns can't track. Maybe they use long-range guns, and fly directly away from you, forcing you to absorb massive damage just to get in range. Maybe they use stasis webifiers and warp scramblers, crippling your ship's speed while they rip into you with close-range guns. Hell, maybe they're barely even armed, but mount heavy defenses and a warp interdiction field that keeps you from escaping until their fleet shows up surrounding you. Solo fights, wolfpacks, roaming gangs, gate- or station-camping, sniper fleets, and the various capital ships all have different strategies on when to use them and how to set them up, an different tactics of what to do once the enemy is engaged, depending on the objective and the strategies and tactics of the enemy. It is also the only game I know of where a single fight can last hours, involve over 1000 players, cost hundreds of ships and possibly the equivalent of $1000 in damage to each side... and have everybody involved enjoy the whole thing and look forward to the next one.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Yeah, it's kinda like poker. It may look like it's just random cards and luck, but it isn't really.
-- Computers are not intelligent. They just think they are.
Not only that, you have to figure in tracking speeds of your turrets, overheat status, engaging drones (and if you are using ECM drones, the ol' "attack, withdraw" tactic that you constantly have to do), explosion velocities, getting webbed/ scrammed, etc. If you are a kiting ship, then keeping distance, minimizing/ maximizing transversal (depending on ship size), and manual flying are you're bread and butter. I convinced all my roomates to get back into EVE several times after deactivating their accounts when they see some of my PvP antics. ^_^
Not to mention attempting to actually *find* targets to attack at, which is a skill all in itself. Probing can be a fine art, with deepsafes to consider around the system. Directional scanning takes a long time to become competent at, much less skilled.
Fitting the ships out with modules is another world in itself. I'm sure all you WoW Min/ Max'ers will love extremely deep statistics that are there and the choices that you will have to make. Combine ship fittings with fleet composition and you have hundreds of hours of theory crafting ahead of you.
Think you can't interact with the universe? There are so many blogs about EVE, #TweetFleet, and the various forums (Scrapheap, Official EVE Forums, your Corp/ Alliance forums and killboard), it's retarded. The only thing that's holding you back in EVE is you.
Replace drones with mages, ship with character and you've basically described every other MMO such as Warcraft Battlegrounds or even guild wars.
I know a lot of Eve fanboys modded you up but what I said still stands. The kind of skill you're talking about isn't flying a ship, it's communicating, assessing a situation and applying tactics which you have to do in every game.