Jump On Contact

Perhaps you’ve been looking at people’s EVE Spaces recently and thought you could really use some more EVE-related graphics on your walls? Maybe you’d like a way to describe to your friends why having a carrier makes you so damn cool?

I’ve put my visualization of EVE ship prices onto Imagekind, a graphics printing service. You can find it here. You can choose the size you want, but I think I’m going to buy a Large-sized one for my room.

I’ve also uploaded the source file for the graphics, in case you want to print it (or otherwise manipulate it) yourself. You can get the resolution independent PDF here.

Enjoy!

Stevie from Planetside Perspective had a great find today – In the New York Times review of Star Trek Online (STO), Seth Schiesel compares STO to EVE, which he describes as “titan of cyberspace science-fiction games.” Aptly put.

His core complaint is that STO is fundamentally not a massively multiplayer game. The descriptive quip he uses (which it sounds like he’s pulled from the forums, or other player responses) is “moderately multiplayer”; players nominally exist in the same world but have very little interaction with each other. I haven’t played STO myself, but from what friends of mine have said this definitely rings true. This isn’t necessarily bad, though. We’re seeing a significant broadening of the “massively multiplayer” category. We’re seeing a lot more deviation from the World of Warcraft style design. Worlds like Guild Wars are somewhat less multiplayer than WoW; outside of cities, the world is entirely instanced. You can even skip the leveling process entirely and just start with a top level character for use in player versus player combat that looks a lot more like Halo or Counterstrike in format than WoW.

Coming from the other end of this multiplayer-ness continuum, we also see games like Sony’s new MAG, where teams of 128 players are common. MAG even has a lot of the character progression mechanics we expect to see in MMOs. As you play more, more possible combat roles unlock for you, you move higher up the command chain, your character begins to look more powerful, and so on. At that scale, MAG is essentially a scaled-up version of battlegrounds in WoW (which never have more than 40 players on a team). All that seems to be missing is a coherent world to live in between matches.

So what is it that actually makes a game an MMO, if what are nominally MMOs are looking less like what we’re used to, and non-MMOs are looking more than more like MMOs? Should we fault STO for not looking like the MMOs we expect? I don’t think the moderately-multiplayer place on the continuum that STO occupies is necessarily doomed to be un-fun. STO’s real sin is that having few opportunities for player interaction is just un-Star Trek. The world of Star Trek is one that’s very strongly focused on the interpersonal dynamics of the people involved, not relentless combat. A game that required people to work together to achieve common goals – or even just to peacefully coexist on a ship – would be a much better fit with the fiction of the world. EVE offers some of the social part of this vision, but it’s a cold, harsh, and deadly world. But I don’t think it would be at all unreasonable to imagine an STO where players served on ships together, worked towards industrial or combat goals that benefited their faction in different ways, and had some of the utopian flavor of the Trek universe. That’s the real tragedy, I think – Cryptic blew their chance to make a game that was more than thin Star Trek skin onto a game design that it just doesn’t fit.

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.

That’s exactly right private, wars over, we won, turns out you’re the big hero. They’re going to hold a parade in your honor. (Red versus Blue)

It’s probably an open secret now that the Northern Coalition has pulled back from its base in ROIR. Pure Blind has quieted down pretty significantly, and I just finished moving all my stuff back home to Tribute, the reverse of my trip a few weeks ago. I never really got settled there before the hostilities started, so it’s going to be a bit of a change of pace in my EVE-life to learn about how to make ISK in 0.0.

This was my first campaign, so it’s hard to really know if we won. I’m not even sure I know what winning would look or feel like. But at least internally, people are pretty happy with how the campaign went. There’s a lot to learn and practice for our next big fight, but there’s definitely some celebration and relief that we can get back to being the professional carebears everyone thinks we are.

For your amusement, I’ve embedded a bit of NC propaganda footage below. I think the message is pretty clear – don’t screw with people who have 40 titans at their disposal. I’m sure the NC haters (and they are legion) have plenty to say about how this is wishful thinking, but it’s still a pretty mighty thing to behold.