I have received a lot of great advice since joining Eve, and almost all of it can be boiled down to one core concept…Â you MUST plan ahead.
Category: EVE Online
[Eve] Wonderous Complexity
So… I installed Eve Online last week for the first time in the game’s eight year life span…  I can’t pinpoint why it has taken me so long, perhaps there was a perception that the game didn’t suit my tastes, since I like DIKU high fantasy settings, and since I left UO, have played all class/archetype, level progression games.
Well it suits me just fine.
SynCaine, of Hardcore Casual, was kind enough to offer me a 21-day free trial, with nearly no limitations and membership in his Eve Corp, so that is about as risk-free as you can get with a new game.  After just over 24 hours, I bought a three-month subscription, and by day three I have subbed a second account to duel-box with my main.  My undivided loyalty to GW2 has been replaced with a foreboding sence of indecision about whether I should even pre-purchase the game, or wait and see how this Eve addiction holds up.
What attracts me most about Eve, is the complexity of the game systems.  Complexity for the sake of complexity can be a bad thing, but in Eve it just seems so organic and interconnected.  The industry, harvesting and player economy is so involved and so active it immediately causes me to question why all game economies aren’t designed the same way.  The immensity of the server (50,000 players concurrent last night) and the dynamics of the political and social meta-game is just staggering…  If CCP can do it, why isn’t every AAA game server capacity designed in the same fashion?
I am very glad I gave this aging, niche game a try, and my only regret is that I waited so long.  I can’t wait to explore more of the universe and start to peel back the layers of this onion…  I keep hearing and reading about Eve events that each make me realize that this game goes so much deeper than I can comprehend, and I am looking forward to having my mind blown over and over!
~Cyndre
Lost in the Sandbox
In a relatively rare bit of Skyrim criticism, Chris Sims talks about how the open-ended nature of Skyrim, combined with the mutability of its many choices, led him to lose interest in the game. I think this is a good critique of many of the things I say arguing for open worlds, options, player choices, etc. Some of it is specific to the game, other bits apply more broadly. Most people seemed to take to Skyrim as their own little world, but I suspect we have heard less from those who found the setup less compelling.
: Zubon
I’ll pick up the PC version at some point.
Forward Progress
The Guild Wars death penalty is wiped when you head back to town, so there are no permanent setbacks. At worst, you can fail to gain. You will usually come out at least marginally ahead: a little gold in your pocket and experience toward a skill point. After an evening of utter failure, you still gained a bit of rep, added 0.3% towards Cartographer, and banked some change.
Item wear is a minor death penalty and gold sink, but it can lead to your losing progress in a night of play. However many hundred times you are supposed to fail a raid, you are losing each time you do unless the raid comes with enough trash to pay for your repair bills (and that is just wrapping in the farming you could do outside the raid). You have heard of people hitting their heads against a wall so hard that all their armor broke and they could not afford to fix it. Then there are the expected consumables of potions, food, scrolls, etc. that get burned for each attempt. Those are dispiriting evenings, when you leave with less than you started with, and that experience cannot be wholly beneficial for player retention (which is funny when the game that avoids it does not have subscribers).
EVE Online is a game where you can lose everything you own but keep making progress because skill training is time-based. You are supposed to lose ships over time. Don’t get attached. Even if you are down some ISK, your skill points keep increasing.
There is something to be said for a lack of consequences. It’s a game.
: Zubon
2012 Predictions
I will now get the highest score of any MMO pundit making predictions. Ready? “It will not go live in 2012.” Whatever we’re talking about, I’m predicting that it will slip into 2013, or later, or just never ship. The game, the expansion, whatever: not in 2012. I’m going to lose a few points, since something will ship in 2012, but I don’t see how anyone can beat my accuracy rate here.
: Zubon
Bonus Quote for the Weekend
Richard Bartle on EVE’s pivot:
“we look at what our players do and less of what they say” works only if your players aren’t the hardest-of-the-hard-core who do exactly what they say they’ll do
The post also includes a lovely, expandable economic model for game servers and customization, although MOBAs and modded games are covering a fair amount of that territory in the non-persistent world.
: Zubon
[EVE] Idiot’s and Outsider’s Guide to Controversies
Regardless of whose right or wrong, Ms Freak definitely gets a swath of internet points for clear cutting to a ton of issues currently going on in EVE Online. Being an outsider myself, I had mostly just agreed with Tobold that the delivery of many of these items was what made it so big of a list of problems. This list makes it seem a lot more real than I had suspected.
There are rumors and filings that CCP is going through some serious growing pains regarding cash flow and management. The cash flow issue is to be expected at the very least since they are working on three MMOs, only one of which is making money. (I did find it funny that Ms Freak in the list says that CCP can do whatever they like with regard to microtransactions for Dust 514 and World of Darkness.)
Again as an outsider, I am not opposed to a $70 appearance item, and I do think it is a little sensational that it’s being used as the poster child for all that is wrong in EVE. Hopefully for all those not really understanding what has been going on as of late, these links might help clear the air.
–Ravious
Quote of the Week
Inertia is the inclination of moving objects to keep moving, and for stationary objects to stay put. Once you get going in EVE, it’s easy to keep going. The skill queue charts your course, you have your market ops and your research and the ongoing political situation with your allies and enemies, and it’s just easy to keep moving in that space.
But should you stop — your skill queue empties out and you forget what you were training to do, nobody in game remembers you anymore, your research seems pointless and you are no longer connected to the game.
— Tipa
: Zubon
Start Small
Projects that will work only if they grow large generally won’t grow large; people who are fixated on creating large-scale future success can actually reduce the possibility of creating the small-scale here-and-now successes needed to get there. A veritable natural law in social media is that to get to a system that is large and good, it is far better to start with a system that is small and good and work on making it bigger than to start with a system that is large and mediocre and working on making it better.
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus
EVE Online is a good example of the former. I have about a dozen MMO examples of the latter.
: Zubon
Most Typical Member
Prototype theory holds that we conceptualize through categories in which some members are more central than others. If I ask you to name a piece of furniture, you are quite likely to come back with “chair,” “table,” or “sofa”; if you immediately thought “armoire” or “ottoman,” you are weird; if you went with “Charles, or Susan if it’s a girl,” you are very weird. If you asked an American for the best example of a bird, the most bird-like bird around, you will get far more robins than penguins and almost no emus.
The usual concept of a western MMO seems clearly descended from DikuMUD, through EQ and terminating in WoW. I would tend to insert DAoC in there, sometimes described as “EQ without the parts that suck,” but I may be atypical. Perhaps I am uncreative, but I do not see much more room for the Diku model to evolve. It has reached its full flower in WoW. You can have refinements and variations (-raids, +PvP, +story, -classes, +Tolkien, -fantasy, +F2P), to say nothing of lousy clones, but it will take something massive to change the view of the most typical member. There is a lot of room (and money) in WoW’s orbit, but if you do not want to be (seen as) conceptually subordinate, you need to head a good distance away.
We have some less typical members, most notably EVE Online. You all know how I love to pull out “here is how City of Heroes solved that problem,” or how I mix a dozen niche games into my bloviations. These can be annoying in the MMO blogosphere when commenters contribute them independently, not in the sense of “here is an alternate way of implementing that” but rather “your entire argument is invalid because it does not apply to my game (or playstyle).” It is as if you were complaining about birds pooing on your car, only to have a passerby disdainfully remark that there are not any penguins in the area and they could not have flown over your car anyway. Well, no, that is not what I meant by “birds,” but thank you for contributing.