EVE General Discussion

EVE is like playing poker with all of your cards on the table. If you know you have a bad hand, you bow out before the round begins.

There simply isn't a lot of game there for people who are not part of social networks. Even established players and networks of players tend to rely on spies to generate and share content. That's actually, really, genuinely terrible for any game.

On top of that, the PVE centric focus of development has led to most organizations having only minimal interdependence on warm bodies beyond a critical threshold for basic activites. The given set of prescribed ambitions tend not to scale in terms of social or operational risk or range of interdependency.

Some really good reads so far, thanks for the input from my side too.

Without the intention to judge anyone at all I think it´s up to the player if he or she wants to "rely" on a another player or use an alt for it. While using an alt seems to boost your min/max ratio the "relying on someone else" totally boosts your player with player interaction. I have 3 characters by myself (as mentioned earlier) but they are all on one account and I use them differently with different "mind sets". Coming from a pen&paper backround I like to have different characters and act completely different depending what char I am playing. This lessens to some extend when people learn me, speak to me in TS and realise all my accounts but it´s still there. So for me having "alts" is more like living my "multiple personality disorder" that I grow in pen&paper/online games. But back to the player with player interaction vs min/max. I am currently living in Thera exploring w-space and looking for some people I like to fly with more regularly. My other character has good scanning skills and I scanned down stuff for hours and days to get better in it. Now it´s a thing of >1min to scan down a w-hole in Thera so I can undock, warp to safe, scan down the hole I need, get into my hauler and ship stuff in or get through to do whatever else I like to do. The hole thing doesn´t take me more than 4mins. On the other hand I can ask in the scout channel, if someone is available to scan down a hole for me, has it already bookmarked and can give me a warp-in. This will take an undefined amount of time but I like to use that option because it builds relationships and I give these people one reason more to do what they are doing. In other words I am adding a little bit of content. Same goes for other activities, I can ask someone and rely on him/her to do it or simply do it by myself. Doing it by myself usually cuts the costs but it also cuts the connections you might build in the game. Another example would be my time in Factional Warfare where my alt was producing frigates and mining some rocks during times I had nothing better to do. To be relatively safe I talked to some Russians who were hunting in the systems I was in and asked them to "protect" me so I can produce the stuff down there and give them a good discount on the frigates. People of my Faction told me I am stupid to pay "ransom" to them when I could simply avoid them. Sure, I could avoid them but for both sides it made more sense to "work together" instead of one avoiding and one hunting when there was enough stuff to shoot. Since I came back to EvE I tried to get in touch with a lot of people, trying to slowly build up some connections and interact with entities that seem to benefit my playstyle. This is no short term goal and has some drawbacks here and there but at the end of every EvE session I log off with a good chunk of new experiences and sometimes more enemies and/or friends. So my conclusion is, there is no real problem with using several characters/accounts the problem is more how the player base is using them - if you want to call it a problem. To me personally it´s more that CCP created this sandbox and allowed things like multiple accounts and characters and some people don´t like what others made out of it. Maybe it´s poor game design but maybe we can call it poor player choices too. At the first glance it looks way more efficient to have a "trading alt" in Jita and use that one for your buy orders, sell orders and whatnot. But what if you try to find a good trader to do that for you and a good hauler even inside your coorp to haul the stuff up there? The interaction with those players might open up new options for you and more connections and who knows this connections might come in handy one day. But this is all a player decision and therefore something the community has an impact on and not so much CCP. I honestly don´t believe that limiting accounts to one account per player would change anything to the better. So at the end of the day and this post it is in the hands of the community to change the impact of multiple accounts and whatnot - if they want to change anything.

Use those spaces it makes reading so much better.

No more than any other MMO. It's a convention of the genre that you get out of it what you put in. If you don't play imaginatively and explore the game's mechanics to their full extent, then you're boxing yourself into a niche and you've only yourself to blame for your own boredom. It'd be like playing chess with the same pre-determined course of moves, hoping the player opposite will make the game interesting for you.

Eve players don't have clocks - they've got their calendars.

Sorry, for the lack of formation, was typing half awake while drinking coffee. Usually I don´t post wot´s or at least try to avoid it.


@xxxTRUSTxxx

I guess my lack of formation lead you into some totally wrong understandings of my wot :D
I by now way believe CCP will change anything with multiple accounts.

Great points. I'll admit I haven't taken the missed opportunity of building player relations into account when just doing stuff myself instead of asking around. I think for me a lot of this comes from an attitude of independence I have in RL. I tend to like to do anything and everything myself and not need to rely on others, but I can see how this means I'd miss chances to meet new people and make connections.

The other issue for me in eve is trust. I am a bit overly cautious and almost expect that anyone outside my corp wont honor any agreement that isn't set by game mechanics. This one interesting as I have no first hand eve experience of being betrayed. People making dumb mistakes sure, but no-one yet has directly awoxed me or anything. I think I spend too much time reading forums and eve news... I am amazed that those Russians didn't shoot you though. I probably would have.... maybe....

EVE is essentially a largely non-consensual slow paced RTS space game where every client controls one unit.

People who want to win recognize that using one unit is a stupid idea, so they use more units.

I have more than one account as I was an avid homeworld addict and really liked controlling an entire fleet of dozens of ships.

I suppose two ships better than one but not as good as dozens..

I dunno.

What was I talking about.

And then you watch your loss for 120s.