Eve really is as fun as it sounds in the articles, for a few hours every couple of months. Unfortunately, you have to "work" for many more hours than that to get to the fun parts that spontaneously happen every few months.
Now, if you are just looking to relax and blow up imaginary spaceships PVE style, that can be done easily and on a regular basis and can be reasonably fun. If you are looking for the amazing PVP battles, those are much tougher to come by, and require a lot more work to support the fact that your stuff is getting blown up. When they do happen though, it's the best part of any game I've played. It really is the best game there is, for a few hours every couple of months. :-)
The other problem is that EVE is advertised as a "choose your own destiny" sort of game, but if you choose to perform low-risk work in highsec you will forever be mocked as a carebear by 75% of EVE players. It gets tiring, regardless of how thick your skin is. I learned quickly that you might as well not even post on the forums; "carebears" are second-class citizens and most players consider it okay to level homophobic and other slurs at them (and this is encouraged by the game's culture).
It's also hopeless to work in highsec (and usually lowsec), really.
EVE: "Choose your own destiny, as long as that destiny is nullsec PVP."
I kind of OD'd on MMO's back in the days when Everquest was king. I played with some RL friends and, when they got sucked into an uber-guild, so did I. Pretty soon it was a second job and about as fun. Still, being elite was addictive. Eventually, I had to choose between virtual success and real-world success. There just wasn't enough time for both!
The funny thing is, this experience completely turned me off of multiplayer games, MMO or otherwise. I used to enjoy logging into FPS servers and wasn't half bad at several popular games. There was no time for them when I played MMO's, and I've never gotten back into them since. Since I know people who used to work at Bioware, I've long made a point of playing every single one of their games. That ended when they made a MMO. I briefly played Mass Effect 3's cooperative multiplayer, but I couldn't stand even that! There is absolutely nothing that breaks immersion and destroys your enjoyment of a game universe like listening to teenagers talking smack.
Yeah, I'm a geezer now I suppose. Damn kids, get off my Quake server!
>There is absolutely nothing that breaks immersion and destroys your enjoyment of a game universe like listening to teenagers talking smack.
Sounds like my experience with console games lately except I don't even think some of them are even teenagers yet. It really ruins some of the new games.
I wish we had a reliable way to play online games and play by age groups.
As I was reading your comment, I heard "Call of Duty: Seniors Tour". Sadly[1], that actually would be a great idea although the definition of seniors might be interesting.
1) sadly that the environment is so toxic that this would be desirable
Conversely, we attribute far too much immature behaviour to the mythical '14-year-old gamer'. Gamers aren't teenagers anymore, and haven't been for a long time. There's plenty of twentysomething immature gamers, and a few higher as well.
When I said not teenagers I was talking about people younger than 13, and believe me they are all over any COD game. Trust me some of them told me how old they were as they sang Miley Cirus songs to everyone playing.
The 20 somethings just talk trash and are rude the kids are just annoying and never stop talking.
This won't stop eve "local chat" being full of obscenities. There are plenty of ways to play games (of all sorts) with a social group that meets your preferred ideals, but when you encounter people outside that group the communication is unlikely to be either pleasant or PG-13. Specifically in eve, but often elsewhere.
I'm well past caring at this point, it's all just words.
Yeah, the game is dominated by the nullsec alliances, but I mostly don't notice the mocking. If you want to be active in the forums yeah it can get annoying, but if you just want to relax and do some PVE you'll never notice it.
P.S. I've done just about everything you can do in Eve, and low sec pirating has been my favorite, with high sec PVE and industry probably being second. I didn't really enjoy much about nullsec blob warfare.
Nullsec is dominated by the nullsec alliances, and big battles, which are the only thing non-EVE media reports on, happen almost exclusively in nullsec.
This is where I make my obligatory comment about the game I've been developing on my own for 2+ years: Gangs of Space. It is heavily inspired by EVE Online, more arcade-oriented (but keeping or expanding all the good parts like unique shard, territory control, trading, research...) but without the PVP component.
And since it might tickle some hacker's imagination, most of the game data is accessible over a REST API (like EVE Online) but also modifyable by this API. Writing custom tools, bots, notifiers, collaboration tools, or anything else is actually encouraged :)
Eve online looks so fun. But the problem is massive battles like this the server 'slows down', and runs at 1/50th to 1/100th real time speed. The in-game lore says its time dilation based on player reaction speeds increasing in times of crisis for the computer aided implants.
So while it sounds like a 22 hour long epic battle the vast majority was likely spent browsing youtube and reddit, doing house work, homework, sleeping, etc. There likely wasn't hundreds of player manning their computers for the entire duration in heated combat.
Time dilation is officially capped at 1/10th of regular speed. Of course even beyond that threshold the additional load can have an effect.
These big battles are the exception, and they certainly get the outside attention, but there are many more smaller fights for every one of these big ones. And the small ones are typically over far more quickly and aren't fought in time dilation.
To some extent you are correct. There is a lot of waiting around, but the time dilation only effects that system. Behind the sence there is a ton of logistics and other operations such as system lockdowns, resupplying, intell gathering, and planning.
It only affects that system because they can host one solar system on one server at a time; their server engine does not, unfortunately, provide for scaling a single solar system across several servers. They can put several solar systems on one server, though. They like to get a heads up from players when a battle like this is going to happen, so they can pre-balance the servers.
Actually it is because they don't shard the world. Every other MMO has the exact same scaling problems.
Many non-MMOs can manage more players by avoiding direct contact (which turns your linear scaling problem into a quadratic one, since everyone has to know about everyone else).
I'm not suggesting sharding it, I'm suggesting that almost everything in the sim can be set up in an embarrassingly parallel way, take advantage of 4/12/whatever cores, and lower the amount of slowdown.
physics simulations like that in EVE are far from embarrassingly parallel. Especially because the 'balls in space' physics simulation needs to be deterministic and synchronised between server and client.
There isn't much physics simulation besides direct user-induced velocity modification (or macro'd velocity modification, e.g, orbit-at-n-kilometers). It's not like they're calculating n-body gravity here.
One interesting thing about this battle vs. the previous big one is that it was a deliberate action on both parts rather than an accident caused by a careless mistake or UI issue (depending on whose version you believe).
It seems like a victory for the PIBC in strict ISK terms, but it's not clear whether it was a strategic success (who ended up controlling the system?). Indeed less emphasis on numbers and more emphasis on the point of it all would be nice. Seriously, the whole thing ends by congratulating all involved for having a big fight without discussing the actual outcome.
Submitted under the title "EVE Online shatters its records with new largest war: The 49-U6U Slaughterhouse". I understand the reasoning behind the editor's title changing, but it always feels clickbait-y when you can't reason out what the article is about with the title (or the first few comments.)
But this battle was in China where isk x real money prices are different, apparently the PLEX (the only formally recognized way of turning real money into isk) is a lot more expensive in-game over there, thereby depressing the real-money value. According to [1], isk is worth 1/6th in the Chinese server, meaning the total damage was around $110,000.
Note that this is on the Chinese server - so I don't know if the USD translation is the same.
Most of the time it's (USD per 'plex' divided by ISK to sell a plex on the market) to get the price in USD per ISK. a 'plex' is a 30 day pass to play the game, and is also an in-game item suitable for sale.
The Chinese server is totally distinct from the RestOfWorld server - no shared space / market / anything. So I have no idea what the price of ISK is on the Chinese market, or if they even support that kind of trade.
`With the bar set at 11 trillion ISK in damages during the battle of B-R5RB on Tranquility in January, Serenity went ahead and smashed that record, almost doubling the ISK value of hulls destroyed at an astonishing 26 trillion ISK worth of damage.`
I've always wondered what it would be like if Eve Online did hi-def movie re-enactments of these. Certainly at least as exciting as watching a couple of hours of some sporting event.
An interesting idea. They'd have to find a way to condense hours upon hours of sluggish battle into something outsiders can understand and appreciate. Lots of alliances and corps have montage-like recaps of notable battles, but it's not something that can be appreciated by the average person.
My thought is that they have the logs, and they know who was where, and when. So they feed that into an animation/rendering engine and can construct 'scenes' from pretty much any angle or view point in the battle, they can take time to render detailed ship interiors for 'in the battle' views (complete with NPC characters). Do the whole military channel 'great tank battles' type coverage with order of battle before the engagement, key maneuvars, voice over commentary from notable Eve strategists etc. I could easily be done as inexpensively as 'clip shoes' like 'Dangerous Acts of Science' (Science channel) and have potentially a much wider appeal.
More like a bunch of dots, if your lucky icons, and text all over the place. Watching a few on twitch.tv was more like watching a bunch of bright dots here and another pack over there and occasional flickers.
The only time I have seen really good shots of the ships is when the one streamer parks outside the major port and just broadcasts all the coming and going. Even when watching single player combat versus pirates(npcs) or the like it never was like the vids I have seen coming from the publisher.
To be fair, the most memorable times I've played in games have nearly never been about the graphics or presentation, and nearly always about what something __means__, whether to me personally or to me as a player.
In MMOs, I remember the hard things I did solo, the hard things I organized a team for, and the personal milestones. The zones might be ugly or beautitul. The task might simply be to kite some big demon through a wintry landscape, or it might just be doing something in a new role for the first time. (First time tanking, early raid leading successes.)
In the brief (trial!) time I played EVE, there was a lot I had to learn, and never mastered... but I could see the appeal. While a lot of the success comes down to planning (ship loadout, where you quest/farm/etc), at some visceral level I was still hunting pirates, and trying to solo hard fights that I could not quite beat. It's a rush, even if it doesn't look as cinematic as Homeworld or action movies.
This is likely the same reason people can get amazed or excited about chess or poker. :-)
Those images look like in game graphics. The game really is beautiful, and spreadsheets in space is mostly a joke these days, but there are in game professions that may include actual spreadsheets.
That said, its likely someone spent some time getting the right angle to take that screenshot.
Those are indeed in-game graphics, but they don't animate well during large battles, and controls become unresponsive. It's a bit better since they added time dilation, but it's still frustrating to be in a huge fight. Usually the beautiful graphics come from one guy set up at the edge just to film; people trying to actually fight turn off the eye candy.
The game is shockingly good looking these days. Normally there's not that much going on in one place, and instead it's wide, desolate space (which has it's own beauty). But there are a great many special touches, from the mild red/blue shift in warp to the unbelievable overkill on the character creation, the game looks like it has had years of tweaks and refinements added.
Mmmm I wish I still had the time to really get into persistent MMOs. I recently got back into playing this really old school MMORTS called Mankind that is still chugging along.
Hah you should come back. It's still just as tedious and micro-managing intensive as ever. There are supposedly a lot of Chinese players but they are on the other side of the galaxy and I have yet to venture so far (about 16k).
Everyone except China does play in the same game world on the same server. If CCP (Eve devs) had their way, China would play on that same server too.
But real life politik trumps video games, so that can't happen for now. Instead, the game is licenced to a Chinese company who runs their own instance for Chinese players so they can at least play the game - even if it's not with the rest of the world.
I wonder whether this was a commercial, cultural or geo-political decision. Does the CCP want to neutralise reactionary activity in Eve Online by controlling the server? Is there some political flavour to any of these alliances?
Some Chinese play on the world server but it's actually more or less illegal (wrt Chinese law) for them to do so...
Some years ago there was also an hilarious "invasion" of the Chinese servers by euro/US people, with patching the Chinese client to put it in English and using some stolen Chinese citizens national ID numbers in order to be able to subscribe... See http://failheap-challenge.com/showthread.php?1733-Serenity-C...
I'm going to be 'that guy' and say that I totally don't get games like EVE, and miss the quick recoil of my Desert Eagle laying volleys of .50 rounds in a split-second as I turn towards the enemy jumping out of an obscured door a yard away. While I eventually quit because of the culture and the cheating, (and Q3 mods were better in general), CS was really damn exciting.
This is a bit like a footballer saying they don't get sports like golf, or marathon running. Fair enough. They are very different things. You wouldn't expect a devotee of one to enjoy the other.
I once considered myself a fairly savvy gamer, but for the life of me I can't figure out what the actual underlying mechanics (and therefore the optimal individual and team/clan strategy) of this game are. In the live video I've seen of these big battles, as far as I can tell literally nothing is happening. There is very little movement of anything on screen, and very little input from the player. I'm obviously out of my element.
In large fleet battles like this individual players are doing very little. There's a bit of clicking, a bit of chatting about orders, and a lot of waiting. However, there are people in charge of those people who are doing much more interesting things like coordinating battleship sniper groups, logistics, supply chain harrying raids and so on.
That's a good question. I haven't played for 3 or 4 years and wouldn't mind trying again but I don't want to spend a day setting it up to discover that my battleship pilot has been nerfed to oblivion.
Now, if you are just looking to relax and blow up imaginary spaceships PVE style, that can be done easily and on a regular basis and can be reasonably fun. If you are looking for the amazing PVP battles, those are much tougher to come by, and require a lot more work to support the fact that your stuff is getting blown up. When they do happen though, it's the best part of any game I've played. It really is the best game there is, for a few hours every couple of months. :-)