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EVE Online: Staring Death in the Face
Stradden
Managing EditorMember CommonPosts: 6,696
MMORPG.com EVE Online expert Andrew Wallace writes this look at the new pod designs in EVE Online as he waxes poetic about death in the sandbox-style MMO.
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Death comes to us all in New Eden; no matter how safe you think you are; if you choose to leave the protection of a station you risk destruction. Losing your ship leaves only a wreck behind, which contains whatever modules survived the explosion, and unless you have some way of looting the wreck before other players can get to it you'll lose almost everything you brought to the fight. This can be a shock to the system, and a difficult thing for new players to adjust to, especially those coming from MMOs with minor death penalties. How it handles death is what makes EVE stand out from the majority of its peers.
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Comments
Sums it up pretty nicely.
actually the phrase is :
"Fly only what you can afford to lose"
There's no safe place!
At least never 100% safe... Being killed or loosing your ship is loosing ISK, and this is an activity you can have even while docked in a station, or anywhere.
Might be that nowhere is safe, but nowhere isn't a place we should visit!
Its the harsh death penalty that makes the PvP as lame as it is aside from the big corp fleet ops.
I've never, ever, seen a "fair" fight outside of two players dueling in Eve. It's always a) have more people and/or b) have better ships and/or c) attack when the target is already near death.
That makes PvP in Eve unstimulating to say the least to me. I enjoy a challenge, skill, well fought battles that hang in the balance. Not these lopsided gank fests we have now. And if you dare try to challenge the current squad of gankers with your own larger gank squad, they just run at first sight.
Hmmm, yeah...
Well, I guess the article was pointing out the beauty of the "unfairness" within the game and I enjoy it as well. Nothing in life is fair and EVE Online definitely reminds you to watch your back at every corner. Not many games provide this sense of danger. For a fair fight, there are more appropriate games for that like WoW where you can simply /duel
Frankly I'm tired of battlegrounds and instanced pvp maps in order to provide "fair fights", they feel more like I'm playing an FPS than anything else. Achieve objective within 15-30 minutes of play, rinse and repeat. /yawn
"Death comes to us all in New Eden; no matter how safe you think you are; if you choose to leave the protection of a station you risk destruction. Losing your ship leaves only a wreck behind, which contains whatever modules survived the explosion, and unless you have some way of looting the wreck before other players can get to it you'll lose almost everything you brought to the fight. This can be a shock to the system, and a difficult thing for new players to adjust to, especially those coming from MMOs with minor death penalties. How it handles death is what makes EVE stand out from the majority of its peers."
Wow i so didn't know this before.
Thats for sure.
*Looks back at Maruu's give away and all of the Suicide Gankers*
*Sighs*
*Giggles to himself*
Well, I guess the article was pointing out the beauty of the "unfairness" within the game and I enjoy it as well. Nothing in life is fair and EVE Online definitely reminds you to watch your back at every corner. Not many games provide this sense of danger. For a fair fight, there are more appropriate games for that like WoW where you can simply /duel
Frankly I'm tired of battlegrounds and instanced pvp maps in order to provide "fair fights", they feel more like I'm playing an FPS than anything else. Achieve objective within 15-30 minutes of play, rinse and repeat. /yawn
Waiting at a 0.4 gate for hours with 5 other people for a newbie to fly through is more fun? Or scouring asteroid belts looking for the foolish miner who doesn't have 10 people backing him up?
That style of gameplay doesn't appeal to me as it requires no skill.
So don't do it...
Seriously, I've never camped a low sec gate for a newbie nor have I ganked a unaware miner... wait, okay that one gas miner in wormhole space but then again I figured that she would have left after i warped right on top of her in a heavy interdictor and let her get away the first time. But seriously you can go hunting and if your anti-pirate you can always find pirate to go break up a gate camp at if your in the right corp. The only reason you here about the above 2 the most is because the people who whine about the losses are the people who don't understand the game mechanics and systems to allow you to avoid the above losses.
Waiting at a 0.4 gate for hours with 5 other people for a newbie to fly through is more fun? Or scouring asteroid belts looking for the foolish miner who doesn't have 10 people backing him up?
That style of gameplay doesn't appeal to me as it requires no skill.
Apparently you missed the point, its not the fact of losing stuff is fun. Its the absolute sense of danger involved. Sure, it doesn't require skill in the sense of straight game play but it does require some form of "street smarts" to know which areas to avoid and what time or what to bring to combat those types of people for either the greater good or your own. These are the types of things that create stories and different experiences from perspectives of all kinds. Its so easy to look at it from the "campers" point of view, but try taking a look at the bigger picture -- the loser's point of view, the defender of newbies point of view, the transporting and omg I got to gtfo point of view. These things create excitement which many other popular MMO's are lacking.
Its easy to notice all the bad actions because I think in a way as humans (or at least Americans) we are wired to notice the "bad events", look at the media, news, celebrity gossip. There are plenty of players that aren't camping gates and finding ways to distrupt other people, its just harder to notice them.
EDIT: and if being able to create different experiences and stories with other players isn't interesting to you, then there are better more linear MMO's that will suit your needs much better than EVE would
The truth is very simple: if you like spectacular space battles then Eve is not for you. Eve is more a survival MMO - you try to survive in a very harsh environment. There is nothing wrong with that, a lot of people like that.
But if you are looking for a space MMO witch includes also spectacular balanced space battles then you should look elsewhere. I for example would much more enjoy a long spectacular space battle with another player inside an asteroid belt than nervously looking over my shoulder when mining and not knowing if I would survive or lost everything what I made in the last five months of playing. That's the reason why I quit playing EVE very quickly.
The problem is that a lot of new players start playing EVE because of space battles and they are quickly disappointed and because of that you have a lot of negative critics.
There is though a very interesting question: how would you obtain a lot of pvp spectacular space battles in a space sandbox MMO without changing the sandbox nature of the game.
Well, I guess the article was pointing out the beauty of the "unfairness" within the game and I enjoy it as well. Nothing in life is fair and EVE Online definitely reminds you to watch your back at every corner. Not many games provide this sense of danger. For a fair fight, there are more appropriate games for that like WoW where you can simply /duel
Frankly I'm tired of battlegrounds and instanced pvp maps in order to provide "fair fights", they feel more like I'm playing an FPS than anything else. Achieve objective within 15-30 minutes of play, rinse and repeat. /yawn
Waiting at a 0.4 gate for hours with 5 other people for a newbie to fly through is more fun? Or scouring asteroid belts looking for the foolish miner who doesn't have 10 people backing him up?
That style of gameplay doesn't appeal to me as it requires no skill.
If you are going to comment on a game that you completely don't understand you should cut your losses and not reply again, instead of looking so uninformed.
It takes a lot of skill to play Eve. How to fit ships, how to form a decent fleet and how to coordinate them. It is a shame you have not figured that out yet. I know some very skilled players that take on 2 or 3 times their number regularly and win.
I think that's the biggest point about Eve. It IS a sandbox game at it's core. It's what you make of it.
If you think ganking newbs and lone miners is what you want to do go for it. If you want to run a giant coproration go right ahead. If you enjoy the thrill of transporting cargo through blockades or sneaking behind other corps territory that's an option. That's the stuff I liked about Eve.
I've also enjoyed the fact that you didn't HAVE to do anything to progress. At least not as far as your skills were concerned. I didn't have to go ratting to increase my skills I just had to load the program. I didn't HAVE to find rarer and rarer minerals to increase my mining I just loaded the program.
It was also a good learning experience to get my new ships blown out from under me when I got too cocky.
So Yeah Eve's system is unparelled in MMO's because you can cheat. You can bring bigger guns to the fight. You can bring the shock and Awe. Or you can run away like a little beetch. It's much more "real" in that sense.
Current Game: Asssasins Creed 2(PS3, Gamer Tag: Happy_Hubby)
Current MMO: World of Warcraft and World of Tanks
Former Subscribed MMO: Star Trek Online, Aion, WoW, Guild Wars, Eve Online, DAoC, City of Heroes, Shattered Galaxy, 10six.
Tried: Too many to list
Fair is boring.
Always knowing that the sides have been perfectly balanced and tailored so that both sides have Equal Chances is boring.
Overcoming long odds, being able to escape the 5 pirates that descended on you...and even sometimes suprising them by using a 'bait' ship to mine and draw the gankers...to their death
That is awesome. Epic Space Battles do occur...they just dont all line up and go "Ok, we have 30 v 30...ok its even...oh wait how many skill points does everyone have? Oh and do we all got about the same tech level of ships and fittings?" Gag me please.
These three things doth a wise man fear: A storm at sea, a moonless night, and the anger of a gentle man
"spectacular balanced space battles" is nothing more than inability to put an effort into engagement preparation.
Because some fight can't be won does not mean they are not fair. If you engage in such fight, it's your choice only.
That's just ridiculous, people implying that the only PvP options are to camp gates or to gank miners...
Even worse, people thinking big fleet fights are fair or really interesting. Nothing is fair, the side with the best logistic to bring reinforcements wins. It still needs a proper command chain to pop the right targets first, but most alliances have this, or they would already disbanded.
The outcome of a fight is nearly always written before it happens, because people planned things, because they have a better fleet composition because the pilots are reacting faster than the other side, because while both sides had several fitting options, one side made the right one. Most of the time, unless you have very experienced pilots only the things you planned will be possible to do.
Now, to the waiting game of the PvP, waiting hours at a gate is indeed boring, I don't know how people can stand that.
You have to be mobile to find your targets, going into a belt in lowsec is not to gank miners, miners in lowsec are either fools or people with a fleet near them for protection. Belts in lowsec are rich with pirates willing to blow up your ship. They are also rich with people like me, playing as a bait (pirates take only a minute to show up on you if they are in the system) while shooting some NPCs then coordinating the reinforcements to pop the pirates that drop on me.
When people flee a fight if they are outnumbered, you have to make them think they outnumber you, pin them down and them bring in reinforcements. Shooting people is not just bringing more people, you have to set traps plan reinforcements, choose ships for the fleet, choose fittings for the ships. That's a lot of planning, that's how eve works.
The above comments are very good. They describe the gameplay of EVE very accurately. I think every new player should read something like the comments above before he starts playing EVE.
Don't get me wrong. I think EVE is a brilliant MMO, probably one of the best MMO's ever made. But it's not for me.
I don't agree that this is the only way a space sandbox MMO can be created. Let me explain the following mental experiment.
Let us make a new game, which would be an exact copy of EVE with just one small difference: the insurance for ships and the costs for clones would be much cheaper. The last time I played EVE I think that the insurance for the ship was very expensive. For three months of insurance you would pay the value of your ship and if your ship would be destroyed you would get back 70% of the value of your ship. Now let change that and for example set the price for a year of insurance to 20% of the value of the ship. The game would still be a space sandbox MMO, but I think the gameplay would be very, very different. And so we could have two very different games.
This is not about EVE, it is about PVP in general.
Why would I want to remove one whole layer of PVP?
Insurance cost of T1 ships is about 30% of the ship price for pay out of ship's full price.
EVE insurance system is nothing random. It is very closely tied to mineral prices and changing it like that would mess up EVE economy.
I fail to see how is this related to 'fair' fights or what your point is.
Hmmm, insurance.
Better insurance would cause not to fear loss maybe. But I'm not sure people avoid PvP in fear of the loss, if they fear the less, most of the time, they'll downgrade the ship type they use to make it cheaper.
It's not like we can say PvP doesn't happen in Eve, it would be wrong. Reducing the cost for loosing ships might make people hold their positions and never retreat, I'm not sure this would improve the game.
What happens in a game where death penalties are nearly non-existing? I play warhammer, and people wander around, are careless, charge in an ennemy pack without a chance to win... And just come back 1 minute later.
There must be something in the middle...
The other part of the insurance system is the economy.
If people never loose their isk, they will just have more and more money, which is not helping. Older players already get to be kind of rich. The economist (yes, CCP hired one to study the eve economy to avoid either crash, help find what is wrong and such in the system) could tell a lot about that.
There is ISK being created and ISK being lost.
First, when a ship is lost, it's not really ISK being lost, it's minerals, components and time that has been lost, the isk simply went to the manufacturer. When the insurance gives too much money compared to its global cost to players (that's why it's short, expensive and only covers the hull), it would "create ISK out of thin air", which is bad, so the insurance is an ISK sink for people that don't loose too many ships and create isk for the players that loose a lot (but still doesn't create too much ISK and the players still looses ISK). Creating too much ISK would cause long term constant inflation (which is not the current trend) and cause new players to be even more broke that they are when they start, as the market prices would raise and become unaffordable for them and the older players wallets raise beyound what can be imagined (some already do, but much more would).
So, in order to maintain the stable economy there is in eve, there must be losses somewhere.