A pod - the last barrier between you and explosive decompression.
After the structure of the world itself, perhaps the most important decision a virtual world designer makes is about the nature of death. How death happens, and the consequences for the dead form the foundation of most of the mechanics in the world.
In most virtual worlds, death is pretty inconsequential. When you die in World of Warcraft, you reappear in the nearest graveyard in non-corporeal form and can either pay money to resurrect instantly, or you can run back to your body (conveniently shown on your map) to resurrect there for free. So death is just a time penalty. You’re forced to do something menial and time consuming (running back to your body) to encourage you not to do risky things that might lead to death. So in World of Warcraft (and in most worlds) this penalty is just a matter of minutes.
In EVE, death is a very different matter. Ships in EVE are a sort of russian doll setup. The ship contains the pod which contains the actual player’s body. So death happens in two phases. As your ship takes damage, your shields get worn down first, then your armor, and then finally the structure of the ship itself. When your ship explodes, it’s gone. Forever. Some of the modules you’ve equipped on the ship will be left behind, but you won’t be around to pick them up. They’re there mostly as spoils for the winners of the battle. This loss hurts a lot – you can see in my visualization of ship prices, you’re losing much, much more than a few minutes of work. Even the smallest ships will take more time to earn the money to pay for than it would take you to run back to your body in World of Warcraft. There is some consolation, though. Most of the time you’re flying a ship that is well insured, so you’re only losing like 40% of the ship price instead of 100%, but T2 ships can’t really be insured, so they really hurt to lose.
When your ship explodes, you’re left in your pod. Your pod has very little health, and will explode pretty much as soon as someone looks at you the wrong way. If your pod gets blown up, you lose that particular clone. All pilots have a bunch of clones, so losing one isn’t too costly. What can hurt is implants. You can install expensive items inside the head of a clone to give it special abilities. These implants do things like increase the speed at which you learn new skills, or confer combat benefits of various kinds. These can be quite expensive. In some cases, they cost substantially more than the ship itself. Managing to kill someone’s pod (known as “podding”) is usually tricky, but you have a chance of costing them quite a bit of money, so people really enjoy pulling it off. There’s also a tiny chance that the person who’s pod you’re blowing up hasn’t been keeping it “up to date.” This is kind of obscure, but every so often you have to pay to get a nicer clone — your character is older and has more skills, so needs a more expensive clone to hold them all. If you forget to do that and get podded, you can easily lose a month or more of training. This is quite rare, though, and such a stiff penalty that people tend to remember to stay up to date.
This is all a long way to say that in EVE, death hurts. It can be brutal and fast and it stings. For me, at least, my ship’s you’re-about-to-explode alarms really get my heart pumping. So why play a game where death is so awful? Paradoxically, it makes the rest of the game way more meaningful. When death matters, people will do a lot more to avoid it. More than anything, death is what pushes pilots together. Death is less scary (and less likely) when you face it in groups. It has geopolitical implications, too. If death didn’t cost money, the entire infrastructure of war wouldn’t make sense. Losing a war is expensive for the pilots in your fleets, and makes it hard to sustain serious losses for a long time. To assuage the financial implications, most alliances have a reimbursement program to keep their pilots flying (and losing) ships as much as possible. Still, alliances that go on long losing streaks tend to start shedding members because they’re a) not having fun anymore, and b) getting quite poor. If death was just a matter of five or ten minutes work, war would be nothing but an attendance competition.
Comments
8 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.I think that despite its flaws, the reason EVE appeals to so many of us and keeps us hooked is that it feels SO REAL! It takes effort to get stuff. One must always weight risk vs. reward in PvP situations because losses are meaningful. They hurt. Avoiding them through skill or cleverness or just beating the crap out of an opponent so they can’t beat you back feels great.
I absolutely agree. I always laugh when people complain that they love the cool stories of EVE, but hate how intense it is. Those two are, if not inseparable, tightly entwined. It just doesn’t feel the same to win if you know that it doesn’t hurt to lose.
There was a really fantastic article about how we feel about winning and losing in different situations over at Lost Garden. The psychology he describes plays a big role, I think, in why we so often fly together. Winning and losing alone are very different feelings from winning or losing in groups, both when the stakes are low and when the stakes are high.
There’s also a psychological component. I think even when stakes are low, some people are really motivated by the idea of humiliating someone else, regardless of the consequences. That just doesn’t do it for me, though.
Awesome workup. Whenever I explain “dying” in Eve to my friends, I always put it in terms of time it takes to recover for perspective. This takes it a step farther to include financial costs. Nice work.
You say “podding” is tricky… yet you also say pods are very lightly armoured
why exactly is it tricky then to finish the job?
Pods have two things going for them – they’re a separate ship from your old one, so anyone who wants to shoot you has to lock onto your ship again. Since pods are really small, this could take > 10 seconds for battleships, down to a second or two for small ships. So that gives you some breathing room. In that span of time, you need to get your pod out of the battle area ASAP. And here’s the pod’s other benefit: it “aligns” instantly. This just means that when you hit the warp button, your ship doesn’t have to point itself at the target – it just turns on its engines and warps about a second or two after you hit the button. Bigger ships usually spend 2-20 seconds aligning, depending on their mass. So to catch a pod, you need to either (1) get lucky and have a very fast-locking ship near-by, (2) be inside a warp disruption bubble (which pretty much guarantees a pod kill; pods aren’t that fast, just agile), (3) be using area of effect weapons like bombs that don’t require a lock to fire.
2 things kill pods, lag and inexperience… cause if your about to die, and your an experienced pilot your spamming the warp to celestiral button by about 25% hull in a bs (90% hull in a cruiser LOL)
And if u’re spamming warp no way they can lock you in time even with sensor boosters.
Thanks for the explanation. That clears it right up!
Without death, missions and fighting become as great as STO, Also known as idiots just rushing into missions loosing then rinse and repeating it till the mission is finished its really stupid.