EVE General Discussion

MMORPG

Massive MULTIPLAYER Online Role Playing Game.

There are other people to interact with in EVE. If you try to avoid interacting with other players then you shouldn't complain considering you have the option to and are encouraged to do so.

If you are just going to run missions, only seeing other players when you undock from the station then you are better off playing another game. There are much better options out there if you just want to kill NPCs.

not sure if you're aware, but these aren't very lucrative. more like the best bang for the buck.

Funny, last I checked, 0.0 alliances are based on the communities they represent and rely entirely on their strength and resilience under pressure.

You don't need to be a one man band to be anti-social. I'd view Goons as anti-social. They are an invert, xenophobic alliance who see everyone not under their boot as a threat. They also fully expect people to hate them so they get it.

If you feel some driven need to be anti-social, go for it. Just don't be surprised when people don't really like you. That's kind of the point and end goal of anti-social behavior?

Akirei has wisdom. Not everybody is out to get you. As a matter of fact being good friends with some select few will offer you a nice shield between you and getting ripped off. I have *counts on one hand* 5 people I trust completely in this game, and we've flown together for years. We, as a group, distrust everybody else, but because we're all together in our distrust, we protect each other.

I'm not sure what sort of established fact you claim here.

I know ccp found that people who joined player corps quickly tended to stay in the game longer. Perhaps they found that people who had real life friends in the game stuck around longer too. But what conclusions can we draw?

Well it may be that if several people who are in my real life social group are playing eve and they introduce me to it I will likely join their corp right away. I will also be more likely to stay in the game because I have friends in the game. But this is true of any game regardless of whether the game itself pushes social interaction. If all my friends played poker I would be more likely to play poker as well. I tend to think someone at ccp read something and jumped to all sorts of unwarranted conclusions.

That said certainly a game company might want your life to revolve around their game. They may want you to build your friendships in game, at the expense of friendships out of game. (With time being finite that is inevitable) Its easy to see why this might appeal to a game company.

But lets set aside the question on whether this is healthy for the players. Is it good for the game company? What sort of people will be attracted to their game? When people think of an eve online player will they imagine well adjusted people who have a life outside of a computer game? Or will they imagine someone else? How does this image work for promoting the game?

Is it possible that eve is suffering because the gameplay is unrealistically skewed toward numbers advantage = iwin? If someone says they will cut my lawn with three friends, I will not pay them more than if he does it alone. Yet look at how incusions pay.

Do the countries with the most people always have the most powerful militaries? Well in eve thanks to nerfs to supers and other mechanics that is pretty much the case.

Might EVE have a much larger base if it offered game play opportunities that didn't require "killing time" socializing with others?

I think what skex says is true for the beloved sov null sec. In eve you can be a pawn for someone who has all day to develop good friendships in a null sec alliance. Or you can set your real life aside and do that yourself.

Of course that is just the sov null sec part of the game. You can also do the small scale pvp stuff of low sec and be ignored by ccp - or worse have ccp announce that they want to change your game play to be more like sov null sec.

Again I am not saying dumb the game down. Indeed the game is dumbed down most when one side just blobs the other. Keep the game interesting but realize that most people don't look to mmos as a "friendship service" and forcing that down everyones throat is not good for the game.




No one thinks this is a single player game. Its also not just a "team play" game. It is a virtual universe with thousands of people doing different things in that same universe. That is one of the things that makes it great.

A perfect mmo is not one where everyone is friends and plays together as a team. A perfect mmo is one where there is no need for any sort of computer ai to do anything in the game. Eve is substantially there. Given the constraints of it being a game, eliminating all the computer ai functions would not be good.

If you want to team up with folks you can.

Of course, if you develop real friendships in game it will be more emotionally rewarding than if you don't. But that is because friendships are emotionally rewarding. Its not that friendships that you make over the internet are somehow inherently more rewarding than friendships you make with people you meet in person. So you can choose to spend time socializing in game or in person and you will be emotionally rewarded with friendships.




Yeah you said the whole point of playing an mmo was to socialize and make friends. I'm just saying that is not really true for everyone. For me an mmo is a "better than television" alternative, even if I don't have time to kill socializing.

lol so you buy into the argument that what ppl do here or on the net theyd do IRL?

IE Im nuts here so I must be nuts IRL

I am not sure what you would consider an "accomplishment." Actually I often wonder what I would like to "accomplish" myself in this game. I am not sure exactly what it is but it certainly does not involve being a grunt and its unlikely I will be able to dedicate the time necessary to run a large alliance.




I will politely say: I strongly doubt this.

What spaceship mmo has a persistant universe with a realistic ecomony on a single shard? No other computer game, spaceship or not, even comes close to eve IMO.

Single player games aren't MMO's. You play them by yourself, hence the emphasis on 'single' player. And in that regard Egosoft's franchise seems like a good example with a massive universe of its own and with similar career paths to pursue.

As a casual player like myself time is an important factor. I just don´t feel I have the time to schedule events with a corp, do operations the whole night and chat. I enjoy my playstyle, log in, fly something cool and blow stuff upp.
I think many solo players aslo enjoy the flexability and scaling of game time with optional group contant as they see fit in their RL commitments and schedule. EVE has somthing for everyone.