Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/09/14/judgement-day.html
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If your idea of fun is living in constant paranoia over losing your low-stakes investment while waiting for your chance to screw others out of theirs, Eve has been the top gaming choice for many years now.
Oh, I hear it has spaceships, too.
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Someone needs to get IBM’s Watson into the game to destroy it.
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So it’s basically day trading meets Star Wars?
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It seems like EVE is functioning as a perfectly good outlet for quite a few people’s pathological need for intrigue, warfare and capital accumulation.
If only we could persuade more of the power-hungry to take it up, the rest of the world could see quite a few benefits.
Oh, hang on. Someone else has already thought of that:
Megalomaniacs are not unknown in the Culture, but they tend to be diverted successfully into highly complicated games; there are entire Orbitals where some of these philosophically crude Obsessive games are played, though most are in Virtual Reality
-A FEW NOTES ON THE CULTURE
Iain M Banks
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itsatrap.gif
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Seems to me that Eve is less about typical gaming skill but the ability to excel in social engineering and asset management within the rules of a game. For most games social engineering plays a small part, and generally involves putting together a party or guild. In Eve it seems quite central to surviving or excelling.
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Sort of. When I played, I was a kind of ronin type moving from job to job, so I saw quite a bit of the low end; the social engineering is definitely there, but you have enormous amounts of players shifting between “corporations” (EVE guilds) regularly too.
These stories about giant alliances wielding massive amounts of funding and power are taking place in their own game, mostly separate from the worlds of say, worm hole explorers or 1.0 security space station owners. (Economically, they interact in interesting ways, though usually through market proxies etc)
What I mean is, EVE is actually different games coexisting and sometimes overlapping, depending on a player’s profession and home region.
It literally doesn’t matter that the alliances have trillions of credits to do stuff with, as their strategems and maneuvers against one another barely ripple the markets elsewhere, never mind change the rules by which those people elsewhere play.
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Exactly right. Everything i needed to learn about MMORPG:
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I’d be careful about conflating this with EVE in general. The giant alliances and coalitions make for great entertainment but remember there are tens of thousands of other players doing their own things. The wonder of EVE is all the different ways you can play it ranging from solo PvE to industry and trading at many levels to the machinations and organization needed to run a giant alliance. I would also be careful about fully trusting the story told by Aryth. The Goons are always playing the PR and info war game.
For a good history of the early days of the game and the origin of the Goons check out Empires of EVE: A History of the Great Wars of EVE Online by Andrew Groen. Great book.
I would also hesitate to call this a debacle. Events like this are an expected part of the game every few years. If you’re in one of these big alliances expect to get burned eventually. For the players, most should be able to move one, they’ll have lost some or perhaps all their assets (if they were unwise in where they kept them) but they’ll find homes in another alliance and get back to the game.
Personally I found my home in Signal Cartel, a corporation of neutral explorers. Among other things we do search and rescue for stranded pilots in wormholes. I get the benefits of a decent corp, while still being able to roam solo, and the fun of the occasional rescue op.
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Seriously, what does a single word in the linked article mean? The simulacra that people can get swallowed in is truly terrifying.
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Vile Rat would be so damn proud.
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Destroy Eve, or Watson?
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If Watson could actually do so(when subjected to limits on how many accounts it could operate simultaneously, not just how many IBM could buy for it); I would be genuinely impressed.
To the best of my understanding, the core ‘game’ is considered atypically rote and grindy, and adequate(possibly even better than human) performance is within reach of the sorts of basic bots that MMORPGs are always fighting against.
The metagame, though, and all the player organized corporations and stuff, are where the real action is; and aside from providing the primitives(like ownership mechanics); the game doesn’t do much to hold your hand.
Could Watson grind ISK or minerals against the NPCs? Probably pretty close to optimally. Could it construct a successful (much less dominant) corporation? If so, team PR should probably watch their backs; but it would be the first such project it has succeeded in.
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I find it’s best just to think of it as performance art.
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Not an EVE player but I love reading about these things.
This one, though, I can’t make head nor tail of :-/
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The explanation from Kotaku i found a bit confusing. I had previously read the one from Polygon talking about it and i found it much easier to follow
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I think once you strip away all the game specific stuff, it’s fairly straightforward.
The Yorkists have managed to take advantage of Warwick’s feud with Somerset and persuaded Warwick to change allegiance, taking Calais with him and bringing all of his lands and everything he can control onto the Yorkist side.
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To think that people used to do this stuff as Play By Mail games…
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