What corps and where do y’all operate?
That EVE shake up sounds awesome. Truth be told, it’s so far removed from my gaming experience that I 'm having trouble comprehending it all. It’s just mind-boggling that a game, or simulation, can be that complex and inter-connected.
Hope you EVE dopers managed to salvage something out of it.
Currently The Firestone Group and 3MCO, soon to be merged. Most operations out of Altrinur. Production and mining are the main focus.
Aruvqan … =)
Im normally in game an amazing number of hours … I telecommute, and have it up and running on the other computer to do stuff for the corp while I am waiting for my work remote server to gently and slowly drizzle new data onto my work screens …
We are about to get more involved, we are getting a corporate website, and forum and such as we are growing faster than usual, and we need to get better organized.
Yes we are all geeks, not that this is such a bad thing=)
Actually what still amazes me is that gold sellers will still try spamming newbie chat and certain systems chat with offers to sell gold - seems that the typical price they are trying for is 100 million ISK for about $30 … CCP has put a legal way to buy ISK into the system, you buy a time card and sell it either in their forums or now in the in game market place - going price is 300 million ISK for a 30 day time card [about $15]
The game money farmers need to learn that people are nOT going to really buy from them and risk losing access when they can do it legally.
The Guiding Hand heist is what brought me to Eve. This thing with BoB I expect to increase Eve’s playership significantly.
One thing non-Eve players need to understand about what happened to BoB, was that if you weren’t able to lose space, then the older players would dominate the game and there would be no capability to get space yourself. It’s not infinite, resources are finite and thus are the source of conflict. That’s the backbone of the game. This makes the game more exciting because it proves the invincible really isn’t. Also, BoB will come back. They’ll still be a force to be reckoned with. Everyone is losing tons of ships in the war, it’s anarchy.
I’ve played a lot of MMOs, I first started playing around with Diablo back in the day–unfortunately it was client based and completely overridden with duped/hacked items that quickly made the game lose any appeal it had to me.
Of the current batch of MMOs I think Everquest 2 is amazingly made if you like the classic fantasy PvE oriented concept of MMOs. However I play WoW exclusively.
Four years ago when EQ2 and WoW both launched I had been a very hardcore EQ player. I went to EQ2 with many in game friends and we all quickly powered to the top level and quickly found nothing to do. So some of us tried WoW and I’ve never really stopped playing it since then (I’ve taken periodic breaks.)
I went back to EQ2 about 1.5 years ago and man the game has improved so much. The only reason I’m not playing EQ2 and am playing WoW is because I’ve been involved in running a raiding guild for three years in WoW. My guild has torn through everything Blizzard has ever thrown at us, and while we’ve only grazed the world top 50 rankings a few times we’ve always been at the top of our server and after awhile running a guild almost sort of becomes a “responsibility.” Which isn’t to say I don’t enjoy WoW, I enjoy it a lot but I do feel that I’m so entangled in the community of my guild that leaving my guild behind is probably the biggest reason I haven’t gotten “hooked” on any other MMOs.
I have a story that is basically one of the reasons I’m still playing MMOs to this day.
EVE reminds me a lot of what Ultima Online was like back in the good old days.
I started playing UO at its launch, I had a friend who was in the beta and he convinced me it was going to be a great game.
For the first few weeks it was brutal. I’d collect a huge haul of loot and I’d book back to the main city in hopes of reaching a bank before I was killed by another player. See, in Ultima Online, originally there was no real structure or rules to the game. You could kill people at will and take everything they had on them. Well, after a few weeks of getting killed by PKs every time I tried to bring a haul back to the bank I decided to start hitting back. It took months but eventually I was in one of the most powerful PKing guilds around. My main drive was killing role players. In UO most players could be broken down as PKs or role players.
The serious PKers like myself were the wealthiest characters in the game, our guilds had a castle in the most prime real estate. Land was a limited resource in UO and once castle building really got under way any land that you could place castles and houses on was gone. In UO initially getting a castle built was no small feat, the game had been out for months and months before someone placed the first player owned house.
The other major force aside from PKers was RPers. Where we were made wealthy by murdering and pillaging, they had vast resources because they simply invested a huge amount of time and energy into acquiring stuff legitimately; in general the big RP guilds also had a large number of members which worked to their advantage.
Anyway it was hugely common for us to plan elaborate “ganks” on RP guilds. Two that I remember to this day involved a lengthy infiltration by one of our people.
In the first instance we had a guy in an RP guild for 3 months or so just waiting for a prime opportunity to come up. What ends up happening is we get wind that a guild wedding is being planned in game, we find out the date and time. When the day comes right in the middle of the vows we strike, we kill everyone. The bride, the groom, all the guests. We steal everything in sight and are gone like thieves in the night.
The second instance was one of the most epic things I’ve been involved in as far as games go. Another plant had been in the most powerful RP guild for months upon months. Keep in mind this is a guy who generally enjoyed killing other players all day. Instead of that he was spending considerable time each day role playing in Elizabethan English (an annoying aspect to UO RPing.) He eventually found out they were going to replace their castle. Now, I’m sure some of you have heard about people in UO getting everything they owned stolen including their player owned home. This was possible because in UO initially ownership of a structure was based on who had the master key, that and nothing else.
If you were smart you got your master key and you put it in the bank. You NEVER took it out, you made copies off the master to let people come and go but you NEVER took your master key out. Simple enough concept, right? Well, despite how simple it was people did in fact get caught on occasion with their master key out and about, which is ludicrously stupid but it happened nonetheless.
Now when you “placed” a castle in UO it wasn’t all that easy, it’s a big structure and the game client at the time didn’t make it the easiest thing to do. It wasn’t uncommon that your first placing might not be exactly where you wanted it to be. In this case this RP guild had placed theirs slightly “off” where they wanted to and it generally caused a few issues for them and they wanted to adjust its position. Now, the trick to this is when you go to place your castle there is a not-negligible chance that someone else could swoop in and place a castle on your spot while you’re trying to re place yours. Keep in mind, real estate is very finite in UO and by this point in the game there were no unoccupied areas that could hold a castle. However simply taking the spot was an inferior way to strike at these RP guilds, the superior gank was to kill the guy placing the castle and get the master key, place it and take ownership of it for yourself. For this reason a castle re placement was usually done under heavy guard. Well, since we had a plant in this guild we knew when this was going down and we were ready. When the time came we fought an epic battle that took some time to resolve itself, but when it was all over we had won. We had their castle instantly reducing one of the most powerful RP guilds on the server to relative poverty.
UO started to go down hill when they made changes to the game, unfortunately. They created servers where there was no PVP and within a few months 90% of the player base had moved to these “care bear” servers. But even prior to that they had instituted a system of “marking” criminal characters and being so marked made the game a bit less convenient.
In a lot of ways it seems like EVE online took the same sort of approach as UO had in the beginning and took it to the next level. I actually tried EVE online out for this reason, hoping to recapture the sort of fun I used to have; but something about EVE never fully clicked. It has everything I’d love in an MMO.
This is everything I hate about PVPers, right here. I’m so very glad that games are not like this any more. You did more than anybody else I’ve ever met to make MMORPGs into playable, enjoyable pastimes.
That should tell you something about how popular such behavior is.
EVE is.
And its players like it like that. On purpose.
One of the great things about EVE is that while you can prey on the “carebears” (god I hate that word, can’t we come up with something better?), they can just as easily strike back. For instance, n00b pirates like to steal ore from n00b miners. One guy fitted his Hulk, an advanced mining ship, with a bunch of combat gear. He then went and took on ore thieves flying frigates, destroyers, and even a few cruisers. Video here.
If you’re not so wealthy that you want to risk fighting in a Hulk, you can always have a combat ship in the nearest station ready to go. Or even have buddies lurking at a different point in the system that can swoop in.
I didn’t really like EVE, but I once got killed by a pirate and got all my stuff taken when I tried to mine in space I shouldn’t be mining in. It was the most memorable experience I had from that game.
Which is a sad reflection of peoples’ ability to take a risk and get burned. EVE (and I would say games like EVE, but there aren’t any, unfortunately) is a game for people who don’t want everything handed to them on a silver platter, where there is no safety net to catch you if you fall. That’s what makes it fun (or would if the implementation were better; even still, I might try it again after this BoB fiasco): when nothing is guaranteed; everything is earned.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
PVEers. It’s a little awkward, but it works.
Different people are drawn to different parts of EVE, obviously. Me, I love that it’s ruthless, player created, largely unbound, and tactically and strategically deep. I like that it has a very steep learning curve that rewards personal experience over character skill points. I like that it has perfectly legal ‘griefing’ that’s even deliberately encouraged by the game’s very design. I like that it’s got a ‘death penalty’ which is severe enough that undocking in a ship is a real choice and you can’t just rez yourself back with armor that needs a few coins to fix up bright as new. I like that the meta-game is based around spying and intrigue, that individuals’ and groups’ actions have real consequences and don’t disappear after downtime or on a European server, or what have you. (Yes, China has its own server but that doesn’t count).
The excitement from any fight in EVE, even a small one with a throwaway frigate, is a heck of a lot more significant than the best single player game I’ve ever seen.
It also provides people, even with a few random bits of time a week, to get on and hunt someone, somewhere. If you haven’t tried PvP at least once, you haven’t really played EVE.
Just, ya know, for anybody considering trying the game out. Do not, not, not, stay in Empire and/or never shoot at another player. You’re just trying out the ISk grind, not the game.
Pfft, those are the best parts. Why go to the trouble of shooting at people when you can just sell ammo to both sides? I like my thousands of lines of code compressed into numerous spreadsheets that tell me how to make the most profit from any given market and production situation. Something for everyone, EVE is.
Fair enough.
Some people even prefer to mine.
Although I still contend that someone on a free trial can try some limited mining, trading, mission running, etc… and get a feeling for them. But without trying out the PvP mechanics, they’d be neglecting a lot about EVE that a person could like.
Even though some people still prefer freighters to throwaway frigates. (Which is often a good argument for suicide ganking in Empire 
)
There are some people who make their EVE playing experience about utterly dominating the markets. Forget speculating on the WoW auction house, that’s small potatoes. Teras Menac (mswas here) moves millions of ISK a week, and he’s a newer player than I am. We know a few people who move tens of billions a week. On that scale, it’s pretty much financial PvP as opposed to the traditional pew pew PvP. Hell, even putting up a sell order for a single crap item is market PvP, if not very impressive.
Well, all right. Again, it doesn’t sound at all fun to me, but it’s clearly within the bounds of the game, and something that motivates and excites the playerbase.
And I should thank you guys. I’ve considered trying out EVE a time or two, and now I am 100% convinced that I need never do so!
I was mainly playing the markets myself but was still doing the buy low/haul/sell high thing.