EVE General Discussion

I suppose it depends - could you see this as how a political system that doesn't bind voters to one party or another would act if there were no true constraints put upon it?

In truth, it's never going to be an accurate-to-real-world representation.
Some amount of abstraction is necessary - this being a game after all.
But it's amusing to see what can happen when different world views or structures are applied.
Especially when talking about null alliances (and I don't just mean in the CSM here).

I guess it depends how you define "politics". If you mean "governmental voting structure" then yeah, you're right, the CSM is a limited weak version of the real world that's pretty much a popularity contest that allows the members to take issues we throw at them and talk to CCP about them. And that really is it. More than others, but still...

On the other hand, if you mean "general grouping of players based on their world view as applied to the game in the way that proves most advantageous regarding their outlook, values, attitude, and so on" then the "capital-communist dictatorship" of goonswarm (and the larger Imperium) - or other such alliances - makes for a good example of this, albeit in a general gaming sort of way, rather than some ridiculous hyper-serious real world hurf blurf sort of way.

Certainly there aren't any repercussions to your actions beyond a certain degree of finger wagging, but this is because A: this is a game (~whoop de do, whatever shall we do :qq: etc as we both pretty much seem to be saying), and B: because this is all set against the backdrop of a fictional universe where there are no limits, and also CCP can't be bothered to mess with us too much.



A little from column A and a little from column B?
It's got a long way to go before it could properly act like a real world economy, don't get me wrong - but a bunch of the principles used between the two can still be applied.
There's a few M&D forum threads covering this sort of thing far better than I can (it's a little terrifying how seriously they take it!).

Granted we don't have futures markets (yet?), or similar trading structures, but that's a matter of getting CCP to upgrade the contracts system some more, really. But then as I said, I was only disputing your use of the word 'severely', rather than the rest of that particular paragraph - I do agree with you in the main.




I think at this point, we agree. (on both parts). Didn't say minecraft was good for anyone older than primary school age logic gate learning

A lot of the core mechanics, when broken down far enough, are still WoW-esque in terms of UI and underlying physics (2d solar systems etc).

The only thing that makes it "better" is the sheer degree of player created content as a sandbox vs, say any WoW style themepark.

Most other sandbox MMOs are even more niche than EVE is (which is saying something).

We do now have Elite Dangerous, but I wouldn't call it an MMO on the scale of EVE, and it's still bound to treating solar systems like 2d planes, as we still align ships in ED to that plane. It's also stuck with instancing, which is another thing EVE doesn't deal with.

Star Citizen under the current mechanics doesn't *seem* to have this issue (the 2d plane thing), but we don't have an actual persistent universe that is worth checking just yet. But it will also have instancing, and currently has issues dealing with more than double digit numbers of players.

Both of these may be "better" mechanically speaking, but their scale will leave a lot to be desired, and I doubt they'll even have a quarter of EVE's community presence or interpersonal issues.

Which, in reference to space games, is the reason EVE still gets touted this way.
No other game has the same combination of single-server, community involvement/issues, space game, economy that happens to be more than an auction house, politics and spies, less-than-terrible player council, giant fleet fights (press f1), or other assorted features. There's an awful lot of "close but no cigar" here.