Well now let's take that one step further. If it's legal for me, you, the police, or anyone else to walk up anyone's driveway and attach a foreign device to their vehicle without their knowledge or consent, what other kinds of devices is it legal for me to attach? How about an device which just happens to generate massive amounts of interference on CB, GSM, CDMA, GPS, FM, and AM frequencies? How about a device that emits a frequency that'll draw every dog within a 10-block radius in howling and half-insane? What about one which delivers a sudden electrical current to the vehicle's chassis at random intervals? Or maybe a device attached to the starter of the vehicle that randomly engages and disengages the neutral safety switch?
Basically, I want to remote control these asshole judges' cars around with them in them like the Joker did to Batman and quiz them on some constitutional topics during their adventure. Barring that, I think I like the whole GPS'ing the judges' cars (and the cars of their families) and reporting on their every move after about 6 months of data collection. Just alert them and/or the police first in case some wacko decides to use the info to do something stupid like hurting someone.
I think these kings in black robes need to start feeling the effects of their decisions. SCOTUS says private property can be seized by your government and given/sold to private entities? Have the state/local government their property and build a bunch of burger joints. Ninth Circus says it's legal to track someone's every move by attaching transmitters to their vehicles? Track their vehicles and the vehicles of everyone they care about. I'm sick of these people handing down rulings from on high as if they're appointed by God himself to rule over us proles and not ever having to experience real world consequences for what they say.
Well, first of all, citizens can already see the monetary costs of wars in the Middle East, etc. Hiding little taxes here and there to nickle and dime people to death seems dishonest and cowardly. Simply say: "here are the costs for each of the things we're doing" and then apply appropriate taxes right out in the open (income tax, sales tax, etc) so people can see what it's costing them. If they don't want to pay that much, they have the option of working to change government policy such that spending is reduced on items deemed less worthy by the taxpaying public.
Secondly, even if you're buying into the idea that fossil fuel use is causing some sort of climate shift (and that's far from universally accepted, especially among the people you're trying to tax), your ability to quantify a monetary cost specifically associated with the exact effects of that particular influence is virtually nil. So again, you're back to hiding costs and taxes from the public, which is dishonest.
Most cryptic is your comment about giving this money back to citizens. If you're going to hand it back to them (minus huge amounts of administrative costs, corruption, accounting errors, etc), it's a completely inefficient mechanism of simply moving cash around for the purposes of trying to make a point.
I say we eliminate gas taxes AND subsidies across the board. Let the gas cost what it costs. If you're looking to educate the public on a particular issue they should be more informed about, you do that via public education campaigns; not taxing them to death with hidden taxes. The complexity of the income tax code is another area that does nothing but adds hidden costs for citizens to pay. The whole thing is simply solved: apply a blanket tax to all non-essential goods and services sold to end-users only (otherwise you're hiding taxes within the supply chain) and adjust them to sufficient levels as needed in order to cover spending. That provides a progressive, fair, and humane tax structure that's overtly transparent to citizens, cannot be avoided by anyone dealing with a legitimate business, and which can fund all necessary government operations.
Of course, I would also eliminate all other government subsidies (excluding temporary, emergency public assistance to individuals in immediate need) because if you're subsidizing a product at one end and taxing it at another, all you're doing is adding overhead, creating inefficiencies, and begging for corruption.
I'll buy into someone's estimate on the maximum safe amount of CO2 when that same someone can accurately model the actual Earth's climate to such an extent that the model shows a reasonably complete and in-depth understanding of all the various mechanisms causing changes over tens, hundreds, thousands, and millions of years.
Thus far, every single model ever produced has utterly failed to work for >4 years at a stretch without arbitrary corrections (ie cheating) being fed into the model. What that tells me is that nobody actually understands all the different feedback loops, cycles, and other mechanisms of the Earth's climate and is therefore speaking directly out of their anus when ranting on about the "damage" a particular component is causing.
I have my own worldwide climate model that says it's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's telling me that above 1,000 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere, a negative temperature feedback mechanism will be triggered which drops temperatures by about 1.2C over the following 100 years. It's also telling me that "it's a greenhouse gas because look, if you do a lab experiment in a closed environment which ISN'T an accurate representation of the Earth's model and lacks all the various feedback mechanisms, heat gets trapped!" is a bunch of scientifically bankrupt horse shit.
So you believe that the government has a right (if not a duty) to control what citizens do via oppressively high taxation?
And spare me lines about the 'public good', Chairman Mao. The very idea that the government is capable of judging what is best for individuals is beyond laughable; it's offensive.
I'm all for cutting subsidies to all forms of transportation, energy production, and agriculture, but to Hell with using taxes as a weapon to stamp out things deemed "doubleplus-ungood" by the political elites.
Crashplan is about $4 a month and if you don't pay, your data goes out the window. Otherwise it's very securely stored off-site with a crypto key that you control.
Yawn. If you really thought there was a 'substantial risk of losing it' you wouldn't take it out, unless you already had a backup that was nearly as good, if not better, or enough isks lying around that you could afford to lose it.
You never fly what you can't afford to lose. Every Eve player with half a brain learns that lesson pretty soon. So yes, there is real risk. Yes, you can mitigate that risk. And yes, you can afford to lose things. Just like if you have two cars in your garage. If one gets stolen, yes, you still have a car to get yourself to work, but you've certainly still experienced a major loss. It doesn't matter if they were the same car. Yesterday you had two, today you have one. The other is just gone. You can't use it anymore and now you're one car away from being stranded. Just because one isn't so stupid as to risk everything in one shot (in most cases) doesn't mean they aren't putting a lot on the line when they go into a fight.
Indeed. I'm no stranger to risk, I've played EVE, I played Diablo2 online "Hardcore" (permadeath) with level 85+ characters in Hell (and not just safe hillz runs) and I lost them time and again, along with piles of difficult/impossible to replace sets, uniques, and rares.
I played Everquest on Rallos Zek - with open PVP and the ability to loot opponents. I played Asheron's call on DarkTide with open PVP and opponent looting. I'm certainly no 'pussy' when it comes to risk.
In all of these games, when there is conflict, its almost always extremely one-sided. Few combats are between remotely balanced forces. And most of the time group-A knows it can't lose, while group-B knows it can't win and just wants to escape... and if its stuck around to fight its because it CAN'T escape. Nearly all combat in EVE falls into this category.
The trouble is, most of the time you don't know if you're in group A or B until it's too late to do anything about it. You can't run if you're warp scrambled and the more outnumbered you are, the better chance there is that you're scrambled. Most PvP ships are fit to either fight or run. If you're trying to fit a ship to do both well, you'll end up with a ship that does both poorly. That's why modules you fit have drawbacks to them. That's the rush about Eve combat: not knowing whether you'll be taking down some great targets or whether you'll be ground up and spit out.
Yet despite all that, I can also say that I've been in plenty of fights that hinged on good cooperation and coordination among the participants. A great example of this is 'spider tanking', in which everyone in your little group has a module fitted to repair someone else's armor. Whoever is getting shot at the most (the other side's "primary" target) has everyone else repairing their armor. When the "primary" is switched (also requiring coordination, but on the other side), the spider web of armor repairers has to switch also (often quite quickly). Getting more than a few people on the same page at the same time is a skill unto itself and in roaming group fights, it will quite often mean the difference between a horrible death and a glorious victory. This is to say nothing of larger fleet battles where good coordination can ensure maximum damage to the other side. Even if you lose the battle, strong coordination and cooperation can mean inflicting a Hell of a lot of painful losses to the other side, and that can be as effective as outright winning when you're fighting a fragile alliance.
The trouble with EVE is that despite this potential adrenalin shot... EVE is still 99% tediously and drearily dull spreadsheet reading with a terrible UI and a lousying colour scheme and font. Interesting combat is rare.
Real competition is hard to find... if you want to go get blown up, that's easy, just wander off alone. But if you want to have a good fight? Good luck finding it in eve... anybody worth fighting will run if you outmatch them, or your group will flee from a group
I used to play EVE. It really, truly is designed to favor behavior that would be considered griefing in most games. The developers have made it clear that encouraging in-game piracy is a major design goal.
If you think that walking out of your house is highly likely to result in your immediate death by sniper fire, then sure, it's a realistic simulation.
Where have the developed said that encouraging in-game piracy is a design goal? Please quote them if you're going to claim that.
CCP doesn't consider "piracy" an issue because it views Eve as a sandbox. They do provide a very limited set of safety nets to allow new players and those who don't want to play PvP an opportunity to further mitigate risk beyond the smart play one can develop over time. You can easily play Eve in a way where you'll never be killed by another player, but that means missing out on a lot of very fun things. I've got one character who's parked in a station 24/7/364 (he does get out once in a long while). He's never died. He probably never will. Why? I mitigate risk when flying him.
In fact, those who engage in what you might call "griefing" of a violent nature (ie ganking) in the more protected areas of the Eve universe lose security status. They get low enough and they can't fly into those protected areas with ships without getting shot on sight by in-game "police". When you enter the truly lawless parts of the Eve universe, you do so with the full knowledge and consent that anything can happen. Want to be as safe as possible there? Get together with a bunch of people. The game supports those. They're called corporations and alliances.
He's absolutely right, though. I've played WoW before and I've played many other games. I play Starcraft 2 (and have throughout the Beta). No other game has ever gotten my heart racing like Eve. No other game has ever gotten my adrenaline and fight-or-flight instincts so pumped up like Eve. In Eve, I jump from one system to another, I could be killed on sight. Maybe there's nothing there. Maybe some absolutely irresistable target will be just sitting there waiting for me. Maybe that irresistable target will be a trap. Will the fleet I'm in fly to this player-owned station and destroy it? Or will there be a fleet three times our size sitting there waiting for us when we get there? Will our trap work to kill off enemy targets? Or will they flood ships in where we only have seconds to try and escape? Will I play my part correctly? Or will my mishap kill off a dozen friends?
When actual, serious loss is involved (as opposed to simply re-appearing elsewhere fully or mostly intact), and you actually care about what you could be losing, it's easy to find a physiological rush coming over you in dangerous situations. That risk, that uncertainty, causing adrenaline jolts to surge through you makes it more worth the subscription cost than anything else.
I can get excited about a new game like Starcraft 2. I can be happy about playing it. But I'll never never have the rushes and highs of Eve while playing a game with a 'reset' button.
First, a small subset of gamers? It's the second largest MMORPG behind WoW.
As for the playerbase, if what you claim were true, there wouldn't be thousand-person alliances working toward a single united goal. There wouldn't be "care bear" alliances formed simply to do non-PVP stuff in peace. There wouldn't be traders, high-sec miners, ship and item manufacturers, etc.
In fact, if what you claim were true and it's nothing but a bunch of griefers, everyone in Eve would have negative security status and nobody would be able to enter high sec without Concord popping them.
In other words, you haven't the slightest clue what you're talking about and probably spent a couple days actually looking at Eve if you ever created an account at all.
Couple weekends ago, I made enough ISK to buy a half dozen fully equipped battleships while riding roller coasters and not even thinking about the game. How does one manage such amazing feats, you ask all doe-eyed? My gf used my laptop for about 30 mins on the way to the theme park and put up some orders for me.
Eve is a sandbox. If you're grinding day-in and day-out trying to scrape out a living, it's because you haven't learned how to play smartly. Only thing I see anyone experience doing in terms of grinding would be missions for standing. Even then, if you have a corp or alliance buddy who enjoys doing the missions, you can simply fleet up with them wherever you are and enjoy the standing increases while you do what you enjoy.
It isn't CCP's fault that in all your attempts to play Eve, you never found a way to do what you enjoy in the game. CCP just provides the venue; it's up to you to figure out what you want to do and how to go about doing it. If you can't find anything you enjoy doing or can't figure out how to get to where you can, quit and go do something else. Eve's the second largest MMORPG behind WoW. It'll be just fine without you.
Everyone starts out not quite sure what to do or how to do it. Eve isn't geared toward making it simple for you to pick up and go, but it is geared toward making it possible for clever players to quickly advance. It took me a couple months of doing dull stuff to figure out what I was doing wrong and how to get into what I really enjoyed doing. Frankly, if you're finding yourself stuck grinding in Eve, you're doing in wrong. Learn to do it right or quit and go play something else. But don't pretend there must be something wrong with the game design simply because you couldn't figure it out.
Now see, you've gone and commented about something you know absolutely nothing about.
The game mechanics of Eve provide little inherent benefit to playing "hardcore" versus casually. If you started a week ago and I started 5 years ago, depending on the ships we're flying and how they're equipped, you could easily destroy me without me being able to do a thing about it. And I'm not talking about lottery odds either. A week is more than enough time to get a T1 battlecruiser up and running and fully equipped without any help. I can be in a T2 stealth bomber, interceptor, etc equipped with the best stuff money can buy. You happen across me, stick a point on me, web me, and go to town on me, and I'm dead inside a minute.
If you're talking about a totally even one-on-one match with identical ships and similar equipment, the real life skill and experience of the players will make more a difference than most of the stuff the longer-playing person could train or buy.
If you want to comment about what's fair, who gets an advantage, and other such hypotheticals, maybe you should have at least a sliver of knowledge about the game first. If you just don't know anything about it, then don't type up some ridiculous, factually bankrupt post and hit the 'submit' button.
You'd have to keep it fairly cheap to start though. Maybe charge like a quarter for a handful of lives?
And if you widen the machine, you could have two, even four people at a time playing cooperatively or competitively, each popping in additional money in order to assist or best their peers...
To use the same example I did above, it'd be like if I rented a car from Enterprise for a week. I don't own the car; Enterprise does. They're simply allowing me to use it. If I then pile explosives in the car on day 3 and blow up the car, I don't get to sue Enterprise, even though I was only able to use the car for 3 of the agreed 7 days.
Not a good analogy because: 1) the player holding it did not blow it up, another player did. 2) the rental company would either give you another car or refund you for the days you didn't get to use it.
So unless CCP refunds the money when the object is lost due to another's actions, the analogy doesn't work.
1) The player holding the object stuck it in a flimsy ship on a character with an active ongoing war and brought it to the most active and populous system in the game. He may not have lit the fuse, but he most certainly did pack Enterprise's car with the explosives and park it at a Bic convention.
2) I have an uncle who totaled a rental car in an accident. He most certainly did not receive a refund for lost days of access, nor did he receive a refund. He did, however, receive a bill for the car even though he didn't intentionally destroy it.
It doesn't matter that the player didn't intentionally destroy the objects. He got what he paid for, which was access to the objects. That his own negligence resulted in their destruction is of no consequence to CCP. CCP provided exactly what he paid for and are thus clean from any liability so far as I'm concerned. The ToS is quite clear about the fact that any and all in-game objects are property of CCP at all times.
In what way was it a "scam" to enable players to move PLEXs around? Does CCP try to sucker you into doing stupid stuff with PLEX? Do they guarantee your safety if you're carrying PLEX? Did they claim game mechanics would be altered if you have PLEX? Or did they outright tell everyone that PLEX are to be treated as normal game objects (with the implication that they could be destroyed like normal game objects too)?
CCP doesn't protect you from your own stupidity. CCP doesn't care when stupid people pay (one way or another) for their own stupid mistakes. That's what makes Eve so much different from other MMOs.
By your line of reasoning, it would be a "scam" if the user clicked "trash" in the context menu with PLEX selected. The user clicked stuff with well-known and well-documented consequences which resulted in PLEX being destroyed (like any other in-game object). TFB.
As for none of them dropping, you know what? I've had a million missiles in the hold of a ship I lost and I've seen every last one of them go up in smoke rather than drop. A low drop rate does NOT equal PLEX being treated differently from typical objects.
Nothing of value? You buy those things with about $15 real world cash, each.
They had no real-world value to the person who lost them because that person didn't own them. CCP owns all in-game objects in Eve, including PLEX and ISK. The only possible thing the person could have done was trade the PLEX for other things owned by CCP or given the object back to CCP (ergo destroying it) in exchange for subscription time, which would be identical to the person having never bought said PLEX in the first place.
They paid for access to something, then got that something destroyed.
Actually, it's nothing like a gift card. A gift card just holds value, allowing you to make a purchase in a store using the value accessed from within that card.
With PLEX, we're talking about an in-game object which you are NOT purchasing. You do NOT own ANY object in Eve (including ISK) per the ToS for the game. ALL in-game objects are owned exclusively by CCP. So when you purchase PLEX, you're simply purchasing ACCESS to an object OWNED by CCP. If you somehow destroy that object (or someone else does), you haven't lost something that belongs to you; CCP has.
To use the same example I did above, it'd be like if I rented a car from Enterprise for a week. I don't own the car; Enterprise does. They're simply allowing me to use it. If I then pile explosives in the car on day 3 and blow up the car, I don't get to sue Enterprise, even though I was only able to use the car for 3 of the agreed 7 days.
Similarly, when CCP was paid for access to THEIR in-game object (in this case PLEX, rather than a car in the Enterprise example above), they should not be held responsible if the person who paid for access manages to get the object destroyed.
While I generally agree and would tell this guy "tough shit, should have been more careful, but it's only a game", I wouldn't say nothing of value was lost. These items do have a value which directly translates to a USD amount. So it is definitely arguable that they have a "real world value". Even if it was just ISK or another in game currency. Alternate currencies are legal and still have a real value. I think it would be interesting to see what a court would say on this. For example, if somebody had been in some way been defrauded out of $1200 worth of in-game items. Fraud is a crime, and it does not only apply to a US Dollar; it applies to any item or items of value. I would suspect most judges would throw the case out, as taking on a case like this could open the floodgates.
I am not a lawyer, nor have I ever played EVE
Eve's ToS specifically states that all in-game objects (including ISK, PLEX, etc) belong to CCP. This is the basis upon which CCP bans those who sell OR buy ISK and other game items outside CCP-sanctioned venues. As such, it's a legally difficult argument to make that the virtual objects or ISK have any real-world value since nobody could (per the ToS) pay any real-world money to get them from you. In the eyes of CCP (via their ToS), what happened here was that two players used established and functional in-game mechanics to cause the destruction of in-game objects belonging to CCP. The person who owns the account has no firm basis to bring a suit because they received what they purchased from CCP (access to the in-game PLEX objects) and the person lost those objects via well-known and well-documented game mechanics.
CCP gave them access to the objects (which is what they paid for) and through a series of events initiated by their own actions, those objects were destroyed. If I rent a car from Enterprise for a week and I blow it up with explosives on day three, I don't get to sue Enterprise for fraud because I paid for 7 days' use of a car that no longer exists because I blew it up.
It's not possible to succeed at doing that. By the time you got 80% of the universe together in one big united alliance, people in that alliance would get bored and double-cross like crazy, stealing everything not bolted to the deck plating along the way. And you'd get a huge group of people banding together to destroy the uber-alliance just like what's happened every single time domination has been seriously attempted.
The larger the alliance, the better the chances it'll collapse from within.
CCP doesn't pamper its hardcore players. If anything, the hardcore players get the short end of the stick.
In Eve, there are no levels for characters. You can be as hardcore as you like, playing 14 hours a day, every single day, for 5 years. I can play an hour or two a week, with sometimes a week or more between logging on. After 5 years, you'll probably have a whole lot more cash than I do, but we'll be pretty close in skillpoints (depending on implants we each use and how much PvP you're doing to lose implants), and I can undock a ship I just bought and blow your ass away in 1v1 depending on what we've each happened to have undocked with.
In fact, given the right circumstances, a week-old player could certainly kill a 5-year veteran if the ships were right and the newbie had at least some idea what they were doing. Add to that the fact that fleet battle lag has been an ongoing issue since the Dominion patch (while Planetary Interaction got loads of dev time) and you come to the inescapable conclusion that CCP's more interested in adding new players and keeping things unpredictable and challenging than they are in kissing the arses of their most obsessed players.
Eve doesn't have an "endgame". It's a sandbox where you can do what you want (and so can everyone else) limited only by what features exist within the game mechanics. If the game mechanics are working correctly, CCP doesn't care what you do or how you do it. The nice thing is that there's essentially no "power leveling" and a week-old player could potentially kill someone who's been playing for many years (and not "potentially" in the winning-the-lottery sense either, but in the getting-the-ball-in-the-cup-during-Beerpong sense).
While you could choose to do nothing but grind PvE missions all day, every day, actually completing all of them for all the races, plus the epic arcs, would likely take a number of years. By that time, plenty more missions would have been added and you'd probably be more than ready to try something else.
This is the kind of world you enter when you sign up for an account in Eve. It's the second most popular MMORPG behind WoW and there's a reason it's as brutal and unforgiving as it is.
See, when you have to actually risk something that means something to you (even if only the product resulting from your time and effort), you get an adrenaline rush you'll never experience playing safe games where you're protected. You learn to play smart and you learn to accept loss or you go back to WoW. NEVER fly what you cannot afford to lose. Most Eve Online pilots learn this lesson within weeks, if not days.
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Well now let's take that one step further. If it's legal for me, you, the police, or anyone else to walk up anyone's driveway and attach a foreign device to their vehicle without their knowledge or consent, what other kinds of devices is it legal for me to attach? How about an device which just happens to generate massive amounts of interference on CB, GSM, CDMA, GPS, FM, and AM frequencies? How about a device that emits a frequency that'll draw every dog within a 10-block radius in howling and half-insane? What about one which delivers a sudden electrical current to the vehicle's chassis at random intervals? Or maybe a device attached to the starter of the vehicle that randomly engages and disengages the neutral safety switch?
Basically, I want to remote control these asshole judges' cars around with them in them like the Joker did to Batman and quiz them on some constitutional topics during their adventure. Barring that, I think I like the whole GPS'ing the judges' cars (and the cars of their families) and reporting on their every move after about 6 months of data collection. Just alert them and/or the police first in case some wacko decides to use the info to do something stupid like hurting someone.
I think these kings in black robes need to start feeling the effects of their decisions. SCOTUS says private property can be seized by your government and given/sold to private entities? Have the state/local government their property and build a bunch of burger joints. Ninth Circus says it's legal to track someone's every move by attaching transmitters to their vehicles? Track their vehicles and the vehicles of everyone they care about. I'm sick of these people handing down rulings from on high as if they're appointed by God himself to rule over us proles and not ever having to experience real world consequences for what they say.
Well, first of all, citizens can already see the monetary costs of wars in the Middle East, etc. Hiding little taxes here and there to nickle and dime people to death seems dishonest and cowardly. Simply say: "here are the costs for each of the things we're doing" and then apply appropriate taxes right out in the open (income tax, sales tax, etc) so people can see what it's costing them. If they don't want to pay that much, they have the option of working to change government policy such that spending is reduced on items deemed less worthy by the taxpaying public.
Secondly, even if you're buying into the idea that fossil fuel use is causing some sort of climate shift (and that's far from universally accepted, especially among the people you're trying to tax), your ability to quantify a monetary cost specifically associated with the exact effects of that particular influence is virtually nil. So again, you're back to hiding costs and taxes from the public, which is dishonest.
Most cryptic is your comment about giving this money back to citizens. If you're going to hand it back to them (minus huge amounts of administrative costs, corruption, accounting errors, etc), it's a completely inefficient mechanism of simply moving cash around for the purposes of trying to make a point.
I say we eliminate gas taxes AND subsidies across the board. Let the gas cost what it costs. If you're looking to educate the public on a particular issue they should be more informed about, you do that via public education campaigns; not taxing them to death with hidden taxes. The complexity of the income tax code is another area that does nothing but adds hidden costs for citizens to pay. The whole thing is simply solved: apply a blanket tax to all non-essential goods and services sold to end-users only (otherwise you're hiding taxes within the supply chain) and adjust them to sufficient levels as needed in order to cover spending. That provides a progressive, fair, and humane tax structure that's overtly transparent to citizens, cannot be avoided by anyone dealing with a legitimate business, and which can fund all necessary government operations.
Of course, I would also eliminate all other government subsidies (excluding temporary, emergency public assistance to individuals in immediate need) because if you're subsidizing a product at one end and taxing it at another, all you're doing is adding overhead, creating inefficiencies, and begging for corruption.
I'll buy into someone's estimate on the maximum safe amount of CO2 when that same someone can accurately model the actual Earth's climate to such an extent that the model shows a reasonably complete and in-depth understanding of all the various mechanisms causing changes over tens, hundreds, thousands, and millions of years.
Thus far, every single model ever produced has utterly failed to work for >4 years at a stretch without arbitrary corrections (ie cheating) being fed into the model. What that tells me is that nobody actually understands all the different feedback loops, cycles, and other mechanisms of the Earth's climate and is therefore speaking directly out of their anus when ranting on about the "damage" a particular component is causing.
I have my own worldwide climate model that says it's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's telling me that above 1,000 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere, a negative temperature feedback mechanism will be triggered which drops temperatures by about 1.2C over the following 100 years. It's also telling me that "it's a greenhouse gas because look, if you do a lab experiment in a closed environment which ISN'T an accurate representation of the Earth's model and lacks all the various feedback mechanisms, heat gets trapped!" is a bunch of scientifically bankrupt horse shit.
So you believe that the government has a right (if not a duty) to control what citizens do via oppressively high taxation?
And spare me lines about the 'public good', Chairman Mao. The very idea that the government is capable of judging what is best for individuals is beyond laughable; it's offensive.
I'm all for cutting subsidies to all forms of transportation, energy production, and agriculture, but to Hell with using taxes as a weapon to stamp out things deemed "doubleplus-ungood" by the political elites.
My girlfriend loves playing Farmville. I had no idea there was funding available for it.
Crashplan is about $4 a month and if you don't pay, your data goes out the window. Otherwise it's very securely stored off-site with a crypto key that you control.
Yawn. If you really thought there was a 'substantial risk of losing it' you wouldn't take it out, unless you already had a backup that was nearly as good, if not better, or enough isks lying around that you could afford to lose it.
You never fly what you can't afford to lose. Every Eve player with half a brain learns that lesson pretty soon. So yes, there is real risk. Yes, you can mitigate that risk. And yes, you can afford to lose things. Just like if you have two cars in your garage. If one gets stolen, yes, you still have a car to get yourself to work, but you've certainly still experienced a major loss. It doesn't matter if they were the same car. Yesterday you had two, today you have one. The other is just gone. You can't use it anymore and now you're one car away from being stranded. Just because one isn't so stupid as to risk everything in one shot (in most cases) doesn't mean they aren't putting a lot on the line when they go into a fight.
Indeed. I'm no stranger to risk, I've played EVE, I played Diablo2 online "Hardcore" (permadeath) with level 85+ characters in Hell (and not just safe hillz runs) and I lost them time and again, along with piles of difficult/impossible to replace sets, uniques, and rares.
I played Everquest on Rallos Zek - with open PVP and the ability to loot opponents. I played Asheron's call on DarkTide with open PVP and opponent looting. I'm certainly no 'pussy' when it comes to risk.
In all of these games, when there is conflict, its almost always extremely one-sided. Few combats are between remotely balanced forces. And most of the time group-A knows it can't lose, while group-B knows it can't win and just wants to escape... and if its stuck around to fight its because it CAN'T escape. Nearly all combat in EVE falls into this category.
The trouble is, most of the time you don't know if you're in group A or B until it's too late to do anything about it. You can't run if you're warp scrambled and the more outnumbered you are, the better chance there is that you're scrambled. Most PvP ships are fit to either fight or run. If you're trying to fit a ship to do both well, you'll end up with a ship that does both poorly. That's why modules you fit have drawbacks to them. That's the rush about Eve combat: not knowing whether you'll be taking down some great targets or whether you'll be ground up and spit out.
Yet despite all that, I can also say that I've been in plenty of fights that hinged on good cooperation and coordination among the participants. A great example of this is 'spider tanking', in which everyone in your little group has a module fitted to repair someone else's armor. Whoever is getting shot at the most (the other side's "primary" target) has everyone else repairing their armor. When the "primary" is switched (also requiring coordination, but on the other side), the spider web of armor repairers has to switch also (often quite quickly). Getting more than a few people on the same page at the same time is a skill unto itself and in roaming group fights, it will quite often mean the difference between a horrible death and a glorious victory. This is to say nothing of larger fleet battles where good coordination can ensure maximum damage to the other side. Even if you lose the battle, strong coordination and cooperation can mean inflicting a Hell of a lot of painful losses to the other side, and that can be as effective as outright winning when you're fighting a fragile alliance.
The trouble with EVE is that despite this potential adrenalin shot... EVE is still 99% tediously and drearily dull spreadsheet reading with a terrible UI and a lousying colour scheme and font. Interesting combat is rare.
Real competition is hard to find... if you want to go get blown up, that's easy, just wander off alone. But if you want to have a good fight? Good luck finding it in eve... anybody worth fighting will run if you outmatch them, or your group will flee from a group
I used to play EVE. It really, truly is designed to favor behavior that would be considered griefing in most games. The developers have made it clear that encouraging in-game piracy is a major design goal.
If you think that walking out of your house is highly likely to result in your immediate death by sniper fire, then sure, it's a realistic simulation.
Where have the developed said that encouraging in-game piracy is a design goal? Please quote them if you're going to claim that.
CCP doesn't consider "piracy" an issue because it views Eve as a sandbox. They do provide a very limited set of safety nets to allow new players and those who don't want to play PvP an opportunity to further mitigate risk beyond the smart play one can develop over time. You can easily play Eve in a way where you'll never be killed by another player, but that means missing out on a lot of very fun things. I've got one character who's parked in a station 24/7/364 (he does get out once in a long while). He's never died. He probably never will. Why? I mitigate risk when flying him.
In fact, those who engage in what you might call "griefing" of a violent nature (ie ganking) in the more protected areas of the Eve universe lose security status. They get low enough and they can't fly into those protected areas with ships without getting shot on sight by in-game "police". When you enter the truly lawless parts of the Eve universe, you do so with the full knowledge and consent that anything can happen. Want to be as safe as possible there? Get together with a bunch of people. The game supports those. They're called corporations and alliances.
He's absolutely right, though. I've played WoW before and I've played many other games. I play Starcraft 2 (and have throughout the Beta). No other game has ever gotten my heart racing like Eve. No other game has ever gotten my adrenaline and fight-or-flight instincts so pumped up like Eve. In Eve, I jump from one system to another, I could be killed on sight. Maybe there's nothing there. Maybe some absolutely irresistable target will be just sitting there waiting for me. Maybe that irresistable target will be a trap. Will the fleet I'm in fly to this player-owned station and destroy it? Or will there be a fleet three times our size sitting there waiting for us when we get there? Will our trap work to kill off enemy targets? Or will they flood ships in where we only have seconds to try and escape? Will I play my part correctly? Or will my mishap kill off a dozen friends?
When actual, serious loss is involved (as opposed to simply re-appearing elsewhere fully or mostly intact), and you actually care about what you could be losing, it's easy to find a physiological rush coming over you in dangerous situations. That risk, that uncertainty, causing adrenaline jolts to surge through you makes it more worth the subscription cost than anything else.
I can get excited about a new game like Starcraft 2. I can be happy about playing it. But I'll never never have the rushes and highs of Eve while playing a game with a 'reset' button.
First, a small subset of gamers? It's the second largest MMORPG behind WoW.
As for the playerbase, if what you claim were true, there wouldn't be thousand-person alliances working toward a single united goal. There wouldn't be "care bear" alliances formed simply to do non-PVP stuff in peace. There wouldn't be traders, high-sec miners, ship and item manufacturers, etc.
In fact, if what you claim were true and it's nothing but a bunch of griefers, everyone in Eve would have negative security status and nobody would be able to enter high sec without Concord popping them.
In other words, you haven't the slightest clue what you're talking about and probably spent a couple days actually looking at Eve if you ever created an account at all.
What absurd drivel.
Couple weekends ago, I made enough ISK to buy a half dozen fully equipped battleships while riding roller coasters and not even thinking about the game. How does one manage such amazing feats, you ask all doe-eyed? My gf used my laptop for about 30 mins on the way to the theme park and put up some orders for me.
Eve is a sandbox. If you're grinding day-in and day-out trying to scrape out a living, it's because you haven't learned how to play smartly. Only thing I see anyone experience doing in terms of grinding would be missions for standing. Even then, if you have a corp or alliance buddy who enjoys doing the missions, you can simply fleet up with them wherever you are and enjoy the standing increases while you do what you enjoy.
It isn't CCP's fault that in all your attempts to play Eve, you never found a way to do what you enjoy in the game. CCP just provides the venue; it's up to you to figure out what you want to do and how to go about doing it. If you can't find anything you enjoy doing or can't figure out how to get to where you can, quit and go do something else. Eve's the second largest MMORPG behind WoW. It'll be just fine without you.
Everyone starts out not quite sure what to do or how to do it. Eve isn't geared toward making it simple for you to pick up and go, but it is geared toward making it possible for clever players to quickly advance. It took me a couple months of doing dull stuff to figure out what I was doing wrong and how to get into what I really enjoyed doing. Frankly, if you're finding yourself stuck grinding in Eve, you're doing in wrong. Learn to do it right or quit and go play something else. But don't pretend there must be something wrong with the game design simply because you couldn't figure it out.
Now see, you've gone and commented about something you know absolutely nothing about.
The game mechanics of Eve provide little inherent benefit to playing "hardcore" versus casually. If you started a week ago and I started 5 years ago, depending on the ships we're flying and how they're equipped, you could easily destroy me without me being able to do a thing about it. And I'm not talking about lottery odds either. A week is more than enough time to get a T1 battlecruiser up and running and fully equipped without any help. I can be in a T2 stealth bomber, interceptor, etc equipped with the best stuff money can buy. You happen across me, stick a point on me, web me, and go to town on me, and I'm dead inside a minute.
If you're talking about a totally even one-on-one match with identical ships and similar equipment, the real life skill and experience of the players will make more a difference than most of the stuff the longer-playing person could train or buy.
If you want to comment about what's fair, who gets an advantage, and other such hypotheticals, maybe you should have at least a sliver of knowledge about the game first. If you just don't know anything about it, then don't type up some ridiculous, factually bankrupt post and hit the 'submit' button.
You'd have to keep it fairly cheap to start though. Maybe charge like a quarter for a handful of lives?
And if you widen the machine, you could have two, even four people at a time playing cooperatively or competitively, each popping in additional money in order to assist or best their peers...
But when you buy PLEX, you aren't buying service. CCP provided exactly what was purchased: access to in-game objects.
(And yes, I do realize that your overall point about CCP gaining from this is correct, but the distinction is important)
To use the same example I did above, it'd be like if I rented a car from Enterprise for a week. I don't own the car; Enterprise does. They're simply allowing me to use it. If I then pile explosives in the car on day 3 and blow up the car, I don't get to sue Enterprise, even though I was only able to use the car for 3 of the agreed 7 days.
Not a good analogy because:
1) the player holding it did not blow it up, another player did.
2) the rental company would either give you another car or refund you for the days you didn't get to use it.
So unless CCP refunds the money when the object is lost due to another's actions, the analogy doesn't work.
1) The player holding the object stuck it in a flimsy ship on a character with an active ongoing war and brought it to the most active and populous system in the game. He may not have lit the fuse, but he most certainly did pack Enterprise's car with the explosives and park it at a Bic convention.
2) I have an uncle who totaled a rental car in an accident. He most certainly did not receive a refund for lost days of access, nor did he receive a refund. He did, however, receive a bill for the car even though he didn't intentionally destroy it.
It doesn't matter that the player didn't intentionally destroy the objects. He got what he paid for, which was access to the objects. That his own negligence resulted in their destruction is of no consequence to CCP. CCP provided exactly what he paid for and are thus clean from any liability so far as I'm concerned. The ToS is quite clear about the fact that any and all in-game objects are property of CCP at all times.
In what way was it a "scam" to enable players to move PLEXs around? Does CCP try to sucker you into doing stupid stuff with PLEX? Do they guarantee your safety if you're carrying PLEX? Did they claim game mechanics would be altered if you have PLEX? Or did they outright tell everyone that PLEX are to be treated as normal game objects (with the implication that they could be destroyed like normal game objects too)?
CCP doesn't protect you from your own stupidity. CCP doesn't care when stupid people pay (one way or another) for their own stupid mistakes. That's what makes Eve so much different from other MMOs.
By your line of reasoning, it would be a "scam" if the user clicked "trash" in the context menu with PLEX selected. The user clicked stuff with well-known and well-documented consequences which resulted in PLEX being destroyed (like any other in-game object). TFB.
As for none of them dropping, you know what? I've had a million missiles in the hold of a ship I lost and I've seen every last one of them go up in smoke rather than drop. A low drop rate does NOT equal PLEX being treated differently from typical objects.
Actually, the player lost $1200 REAL DOLLARS worth of in-game items!
Impossible. You can't lose what you don't have. The player didn't own the objects lost; CCP did. Read the Terms of Service.
Nothing of value? You buy those things with about $15 real world cash, each.
They had no real-world value to the person who lost them because that person didn't own them. CCP owns all in-game objects in Eve, including PLEX and ISK. The only possible thing the person could have done was trade the PLEX for other things owned by CCP or given the object back to CCP (ergo destroying it) in exchange for subscription time, which would be identical to the person having never bought said PLEX in the first place.
They paid for access to something, then got that something destroyed.
Actually, it's nothing like a gift card. A gift card just holds value, allowing you to make a purchase in a store using the value accessed from within that card.
With PLEX, we're talking about an in-game object which you are NOT purchasing. You do NOT own ANY object in Eve (including ISK) per the ToS for the game. ALL in-game objects are owned exclusively by CCP. So when you purchase PLEX, you're simply purchasing ACCESS to an object OWNED by CCP. If you somehow destroy that object (or someone else does), you haven't lost something that belongs to you; CCP has.
To use the same example I did above, it'd be like if I rented a car from Enterprise for a week. I don't own the car; Enterprise does. They're simply allowing me to use it. If I then pile explosives in the car on day 3 and blow up the car, I don't get to sue Enterprise, even though I was only able to use the car for 3 of the agreed 7 days.
Similarly, when CCP was paid for access to THEIR in-game object (in this case PLEX, rather than a car in the Enterprise example above), they should not be held responsible if the person who paid for access manages to get the object destroyed.
While I generally agree and would tell this guy "tough shit, should have been more careful, but it's only a game", I wouldn't say nothing of value was lost. These items do have a value which directly translates to a USD amount. So it is definitely arguable that they have a "real world value". Even if it was just ISK or another in game currency. Alternate currencies are legal and still have a real value. I think it would be interesting to see what a court would say on this. For example, if somebody had been in some way been defrauded out of $1200 worth of in-game items. Fraud is a crime, and it does not only apply to a US Dollar; it applies to any item or items of value. I would suspect most judges would throw the case out, as taking on a case like this could open the floodgates.
I am not a lawyer, nor have I ever played EVE
Eve's ToS specifically states that all in-game objects (including ISK, PLEX, etc) belong to CCP. This is the basis upon which CCP bans those who sell OR buy ISK and other game items outside CCP-sanctioned venues. As such, it's a legally difficult argument to make that the virtual objects or ISK have any real-world value since nobody could (per the ToS) pay any real-world money to get them from you. In the eyes of CCP (via their ToS), what happened here was that two players used established and functional in-game mechanics to cause the destruction of in-game objects belonging to CCP. The person who owns the account has no firm basis to bring a suit because they received what they purchased from CCP (access to the in-game PLEX objects) and the person lost those objects via well-known and well-documented game mechanics.
CCP gave them access to the objects (which is what they paid for) and through a series of events initiated by their own actions, those objects were destroyed. If I rent a car from Enterprise for a week and I blow it up with explosives on day three, I don't get to sue Enterprise for fraud because I paid for 7 days' use of a car that no longer exists because I blew it up.
It's not possible to succeed at doing that. By the time you got 80% of the universe together in one big united alliance, people in that alliance would get bored and double-cross like crazy, stealing everything not bolted to the deck plating along the way. And you'd get a huge group of people banding together to destroy the uber-alliance just like what's happened every single time domination has been seriously attempted.
The larger the alliance, the better the chances it'll collapse from within.
CCP doesn't pamper its hardcore players. If anything, the hardcore players get the short end of the stick.
In Eve, there are no levels for characters. You can be as hardcore as you like, playing 14 hours a day, every single day, for 5 years. I can play an hour or two a week, with sometimes a week or more between logging on. After 5 years, you'll probably have a whole lot more cash than I do, but we'll be pretty close in skillpoints (depending on implants we each use and how much PvP you're doing to lose implants), and I can undock a ship I just bought and blow your ass away in 1v1 depending on what we've each happened to have undocked with.
In fact, given the right circumstances, a week-old player could certainly kill a 5-year veteran if the ships were right and the newbie had at least some idea what they were doing. Add to that the fact that fleet battle lag has been an ongoing issue since the Dominion patch (while Planetary Interaction got loads of dev time) and you come to the inescapable conclusion that CCP's more interested in adding new players and keeping things unpredictable and challenging than they are in kissing the arses of their most obsessed players.
Eve doesn't have an "endgame". It's a sandbox where you can do what you want (and so can everyone else) limited only by what features exist within the game mechanics. If the game mechanics are working correctly, CCP doesn't care what you do or how you do it. The nice thing is that there's essentially no "power leveling" and a week-old player could potentially kill someone who's been playing for many years (and not "potentially" in the winning-the-lottery sense either, but in the getting-the-ball-in-the-cup-during-Beerpong sense).
While you could choose to do nothing but grind PvE missions all day, every day, actually completing all of them for all the races, plus the epic arcs, would likely take a number of years. By that time, plenty more missions would have been added and you'd probably be more than ready to try something else.
CCP already released the perfect response to this incident back in October of last year: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgvM7av1o1Q (warning: NSFW).
This is the kind of world you enter when you sign up for an account in Eve. It's the second most popular MMORPG behind WoW and there's a reason it's as brutal and unforgiving as it is.
See, when you have to actually risk something that means something to you (even if only the product resulting from your time and effort), you get an adrenaline rush you'll never experience playing safe games where you're protected. You learn to play smart and you learn to accept loss or you go back to WoW. NEVER fly what you cannot afford to lose. Most Eve Online pilots learn this lesson within weeks, if not days.
That doesn't make any sense, how could you have a book already when the movie isn't even [i]done[/i] yet?!