[bsphil]

That's what makes EVE so much more interesting to me. There's only one server. The monthly fee can be earned in-game. The economy is tied to actual dollars because it's so reliable. There have been plenty of universe-spanning conflicts that impact the entire game with genuine political drama, and the dev team steps back to let it unfold with minimal intervention.

[pooriaazimi]

Can someone explain what EVE is? And explain it like I don't know anything about it (and I don't). Wikipedia, etc. don't cut it and I still don't understand what EVE is and why people like it.

Thanks a lot!

[saraid216]

Let's slingshot you into the future, where empires span hundreds of solar systems, spaceships abound everywhere, cloning technology is available to an elite class called capsuleers, and human beings still act human.

You're a capsuleer. A capsuleer is someone who can pilot certain specially designed ships. As someone who has ascended into virtual godhood by the benefit of effective immortality, you have entered a new plane of power dynamics. And because you're a gamer, the galaxy is an oyster to exploit for your amusement.

The simplest play is to fly around and shoot things. There are pirates, other players, other factions. They all shoot back, probably. Some of them do it better than others. Eventually, you run out of ammo, or your ship is destroyed, or you want something bigger and badder. That gets you to start thinking about how you shoot things and how to do it efficiently and effectively. That gets you thinking about which ship to fly, which guns to put on it, and so on... and how to get all those things cheaply, or at least for a smaller cost than it takes to make money with it.

The ships, the guns, the ammo: these all come from somewhere. Other players make it. They do it by stripping asteroid belts of resources, holding territory where they can conduct R&D, and build every bullet you expend, every ship you pilot. Some of those resources are more elusive: they come from gas clouds which are hard to detect, or components found in uncharted systems. There are ways to get there and exploit those resources, too.

And naturally, with so many moving pieces, so many different agents, you get hierarchical organizations, larger infrastructure, traders conducting arbitrage and moving freight, bigger and badder ships and bigger and badder groups to hold vaster tracts of territory. And with that comes opportunities to scam and con others, opportunities to be a leader or a spy, and so on.

And all of that is supported by the game. You're constantly going to have to deal with the social repercussions of whichever path you take: a lone pilot won't have support infrastructure from their corporation; an alliance leader has to maintain the interest of his members; time spent shooting things is time not spent mining asteroids; and so on.

What sounds cool? What do you want to do? Can you stomach what it'll take to be in that role? Can you understand mechanics and people well enough to make it happen? Then you can probably do it. That's EVE.

[pooriaazimi]

Thanks a lot. It suddenly seems so clear.

But I wish you hadn't responded! I suddenly want to be 14 again so bad it's hard to get back to work on the app I'm building ;-(

EVE will be around for a few years, I hope. And by then I should be able to play it.

[sliverstorm]

It sounds really cool, but I've done some reading and it sounds like the most amazing moments of emergent gameplay (like the hostile takeover of a monster in-game corporation a few years back) are brief and rare, and the rest of the time I'm told it winds up feeling like a second job.

[mquander]

I played for about two and a half years fighting in the big war leading up to that event. I'd say it was about 10% having really exciting and fun things happen, 60% plotting how to have future fun things with other people, and 30% feeling like a second job.

Thing is that the 60% is actually pretty fun too if you find people you like to hang around with and if you like thinking about how to optimize stuff and achieve goals. So all-in-all I enjoyed it a lot. But I don't recommend it unless you figure out who those people will be before you start.

[podperson]

I think obsession with EVE is yet another example of the kind of Stockholm Syndrome like devotion intentionally tedious MMOs engender in players (I speak as a recovering victim, although not of EVE which is unbelievably tedious and boring even by the pretty vaunted standards set by earlier MMOs).

http://loewald.com/blog/?p=59

[doesnt_know]

As an EVE player I don't usually make a habit of defending it so sorry if this comes across as "fanboyish". I'm in one of the largest alliances in the game and general consensus is that it can be "a terrible game", but there is so many things that are wrong or is just misunderstood in that post that it would take me all day to go through them individually.

Setting aside all the inaccuracies and misunderstandings of basic game mechanics in it (which is in part due to the steep learning curve of the game I admit, so it's somewhat understandable) EVE Online at it's core is ultimately a geek social hierarchy with a thin veil of "science fiction video game" masked over it.

Nowhere in the post did it mention ever interacting with other players, let alone leaving the safety of high security space to join one of the established social powerhouses in player controlled space. This is where the real "game" takes place and which is why the retention rate of new players is so extremely low, they don't get to see it.

If you are wondering why people keep playing this game, it isn't because they are stuck in some kind of "WoW-like" grind trance and just want to see a progress bar inch forward. It's ultimately the chance to ruin another social groups day and proclaim that your social group or culture "is better then theirs". You can visibly view a generated map of player controlled space[1] and say "we own this, we took it from you". The large super capital ships used in these battles are also worth upwards of $1,000 USD. A battle not long ago[2] resulted in the destruction of somewhere around 13 to 15 thousand dollars worth of capital ships.

Ultimately, EVE Online is a social experiment first, a war simulator for privileged first world geeks second, and a science fiction video game somewhere down at the bottom of the list.

[1] http://go-dl1.eve-files.com/media/corp/Verite/influence.png

[2] http://themittani.com/news/supers-tackled-station

[saraid216]

I had a similar experience with WoW, except that mine was pre-launch. After following it for some time, it was announced that cities could not be captured and I realized it was just not going to be a deep enough game to be worth paying attention to anymore.

I did finally run a trial of it earlier this year, after I had tired of Rift and SWTOR, and it was about as vapid as I expected; I got to level 20 and stopped.

[saraid216]

I actually made it a point not to focus on the brief and rare aspects. Exceptional events that make headlines are, by their nature, exceptional and often glossing over a lot of the necessary and boring foundation that makes it possible.

My chief advice for playing is to find a good group of people with whom to try to achieve something specific and ambitious. You're probably not going to make any headlines, but you're a lot more likely to have fun despite the grind.

[willvarfar]

suddenly I understand http://0x10c.com/ :)

[CDRdude]

EVE is a MMORPG, where people fly around a galaxy (this one: http://go-dl1.eve-files.com/media/corp/Verite/influence.png ), in spaceships. Unlike WoW, there are no player classes (warrior, shaman, mage, etc), there are just different spaceships you can fly. You can't jump into any spaceship you want right off the bat though, you have to spend skill points in order to have the skill "Pilot spaceships of type X". Also, some are horrifically expensive, and can take up to two weeks of real-world time to construct. If your spaceship dies, you have to buy a new one. A rule of thumb is never fly what you can't afford to lose.

Unlike WoW, there are no raids and bosss. There are NPC spaceships that you can kill for loot, but that sort of thing is small potatoes--there's no equivalent to a 40 man raid grouping up for a boss fight to get good loot. EVE has no stated goal, there's no endgame, except for what you make of it. Also, the mechanics of EVE let player created alliances control territory, in the form of star systems. Right now, I understand that Reddit and SomethingAwful are the two giants in the galaxy (Test Alliance Please Ignore, and Goonswarm Federation in the map I linked above). There's also a bit of the galaxy set aside for NPC space, where people are somewhat safe from other players, which is the bit in the middle of the map I linked.

Another interesting aspect of EVE is the economy, which is quite a bit more in-depth than other MMOs. Since I don't play EVE myself, I can't say much about it, but I do know that people can become fairly wealthy in-game, just by playing the market, even to the point of paying for their subscription. I'll just say that EVE is noted for it's economy, and leave it at that.

But the most notable thing about EVE is the politics. Because everyone is in the same game world (again, unlike WoW, where there are hundreds of identical Azeroths on different servers), the stage is set for conflicts on a huge scale. Also, the developers are notoriously hands-off. A spy infiltrated your alliance and stole your entire treasury? It's happened before, and it will happen again.

If you have the time, I think you should consider reading a little bit of this: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=881..., which is a snapshot of an interesting event in EVE, that I put together from various sources a few years back.

[joshstrange]

I just read through that entire EVE post and WOW was it long. It was a really good read, even if somewhat repetitive, and just wanted to say thanks for linking to it!

[Evbn]

Does the TAPI name trick anyone for profit?

[pests]

It's a joke on the reddit post with the highest score:

test post please ignore

http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/92dd8/test_post_please...

[inopinatus]

Do you remember how Excel 97 included an easter egg flight simulator? It's like that, only inverted.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

EVE Online's a space massively multiplayer online game. Unlike World of Warcraft, instead of there being multiple servers for a given areas (hence not everyone sees the same people in that area), EVE allocates one server per area, or something like that, meaning there is only one EVE online world. EVE's considered very interesting because there's a quite sophisticated virtual economy and a larger emphasis on trade.

I don't play the game though, so I might be wrong :)

[njharman]

If you don't know what a MMO is then you need to back up and ask that question first.

Eve is an single "shard" MMO with a starship piloting theme. Similar in ways to Elite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game) The economy (and related such as production, resource ownership, politics, warfare) are, to an extent not found in most MMOS, player driven. That is what sets Eve apart.

People are a varied lot and thus like it for varied reasons. There are several ways to enjoy game.

[Tooluka]

EVE is a spreadsheets with a chat. Why people like it? Because everything else is so much simpler and dull (except elves in armored bikinis of course). It's like comparing Lego Mindstorms to a Barby game set. The latter is way more popular though :) , just like WoW and Lineage vs EVE.

[jpxxx]

Someone once referred to Eve Online as 'Ayn Rand's Battle Spreadsheets".

[DigitalJack]

There are many servers in eve. Each time you go through a jump gate you are usually hopping to a new server.

[saurik]

I don't think he means in terms of implementation detail like "how many machines are running the world": the idea is that there is only a single shard (to use UO terminology; I believe WoW calls these "realms"), which means that everyone is playing together in a single massive alternate universe.

[DigitalJack]

I agree, that is probably what he meant, but it was factually incorrect.

Even so, in eve there are only small aspects that span servers simultaneously (the market place, and maybe other things too--I haven't played in a year or so).

The unique thing about eve is being able to jump between "realms" or servers or "shards." That gives the illusion of playing together in a much larger world.

I've never played WoW, so I don't know if you can jump between shards or realms, or if they are treated more like parallel dimensions.

[mquander]

It wasn't factually incorrect, you just didn't understand him because you're not using the video-game-specific meaning of the word "server."

As you suggested, it refers to multiple "parallel dimensions" between which the playerbase is split to avoid overpopulation; that's how almost all other MMOs work. Whether each of those runs on a single physical computer is irrelevant to anyone except the host.

[saraid216]

The original poster, jpxxx, was clearly referring to a physical box. His words were "single server blade".

[chmodd]

Depends on the definition of jumping. Besides paid character transfer (which is a "true" jump from realm to realm) a lot of activities in WoW take place in "instances" and players from different realms may participate in the same instance (PVP matches, dungeons, raids). A few weeks ago crossrealm zones were introduced, so normal questing areas can now span several realms too. It's kind of a hybrid between EVE's approach and classic UO's "shards as isolated universes" system.

[podperson]

WoW is not that sophisticated. Or perhaps a better way of thinking of it is that Blizzard wants to provide a highly predictable customer experience. The world has no real state so it's simply like being locked into parallel _identical_ dimensions.

[astrodust]

There's only one game context, but there are undoubtedly many servers involved.

[antihero]

Unless BoB was involved, in which case they jacked up their areas and played as part of the corp.

[kahawe]

Also a lot of EVE is actually played outside the game... think about traders and crafters and their excel spreadsheets or websites put together for trade networks.

And of course the spies! Their activities went so far as cutting an important fleet commanders electricity so his thousand-of-real-world-dollars titan could be shot down.

EVE is fascinating!

[tome]

They cut his real world electricity?

[rcxdude]

I think it was seriously discussed, but never actually executed.

[ben0x539]

That's how the story goes, anyway.