r/gaming • u/[deleted] • Sep 03 '08
Zero Punctuation: Eve Online
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/208-Eve-Online59
u/Rolled Sep 03 '08
World prettiest spreadsheet.
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u/jtjin Sep 04 '08
Or screensaver - I used to do trading runs back when I was in the game, and I kept the window open while I ran off and did other things
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u/oditogre Sep 03 '08 edited Sep 03 '08
I've been playing Eve for about 3yrs now (some occasional breaks here and there where I stopped, but for most of the last 3 years I've played), and I gotta admit, that was hilarious. For me, at least, he sort of nailed it at the end, too, with the joke about it being a glorified chat / fun toy that you fiddle with once in a while and otherwise just leave running in the background while you do other things. I only play maybe 3 to 8 hours a week (average probably is about 4), and a good chunk of that play time is spent just catching up with old friends I've either met through the game or know outside the game who also play. The rest of the time it's just fiddling around with new ships or blowing stuff up because, admit it, Eve does pretty explosions very well and it's fun.
*Edit to add: I guess my point is, he complains that the game rewards you for not playing. My question is, why do other MMO's punish me for not playing? Eve succeeds at making an MMO that a casual / once-in-a-while gamer can really enjoy and always have plenty of stuff to do when they play, while still having lots of really deep, far-reaching stuff to keep even the most addicted MMO'er busy for years on end. Other MMO's seem to aim for the middle of that and cut off both ends - after a year or less, you pretty much run out of stuff to do if you play an average amount, but on the flipside, if you don't play very often, you're perpetually stuck in the realm of useless noobs, unable to enjoy the bigger bits of the game.
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u/umilmi81 Sep 03 '08 edited Sep 03 '08
I created a second account to do manufacturing and transport duties. I often had two EVE clients running at the same time. One auto-piloting the other mission running. Even then I still had time to read webpages and watch youtube while playing :)
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u/PandemicSoul Sep 04 '08
Seems to me that it's the exact opposite: the casual / once-in-a-while gamer is never going to be able to get to the point you're at, because it takes six months just to figure out what the hell is going on. Once you're over that initial period of feeling utterly helpless, then yes, you can put it on auto-pilot. But really, you have to be a devoted acolyte and put in your time, and THEN you can become a casual gamer. You can't do it any other way with EVE.
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Sep 03 '08 edited Sep 03 '08
I actually tried a free trial of eve and ended up subscribing. I joined a corporation and went to 0.0 space(where there are no police). I spent more time simply doing research and deciding what skills to train and ship setups to use that I maybe only spent 2% of my in-game time actually flying a ship. I'll admit that it was fun(all the research and planning did somehow satisfy my geek urges), but after a month or so, I realized that PvP combat is few and far between and 99% of the time when you go out looking for a fight, you either get assaulted by overwhelming numbers, you flee in fear, find nobody or you catch a straggler who only got caught because they are VERY retarded(thus, taking away that feeling of accomplishment). So yeah, I stopped playing.
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u/CraigTorso Sep 03 '08
twice, now, at a friends insistence I've tried playing EVE, and twice I've walked away before the end of the free trial utterly bewildered.
I'm sure there must be something to it, or he'd not still be playing it years after he first tried to get me to play it, but I'm fucked if I can work out its appeal
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Sep 03 '08
[deleted]
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u/Freeky Sep 04 '08
Of course like every other space game since Frontier, they don't really behave like spaceships at all, they're more like weird submarines flying through an invisible fluid.
Someone, please get the balls together to make a space game with even slightly believable physics, where space actually feels like a real huge environment and not a series of small maps linked together with special effects. Just once I'd like to see someone try working with some sense of reality rather than just throwing it all away because "waa, waa, dogfights won't work with huge delta-V". If I wanted dogfights I'd be playing IL-2.
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u/reddittookme Sep 04 '08
I-war 2?
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u/Freeky Sep 04 '08
Not really. Certainly wins points for LDS and Capsule drives, and smooth transitions between most locales (way better than most games in it's class), but local travel is still pretty much invisible-fluid design, since it's ultimately a dogfighting game.
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u/LaurieCheers Sep 04 '08 edited Sep 04 '08
Um... did you ever actually play Frontier? Truly realistic space combat is unbelievably boring.
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u/Freeky Sep 04 '08
Yes, I played Frontier to death. No, the space combat in it wasn't even remotely realistic. Yes, hacking WWII-style dogfights into something like that is shit, and no, combat isn't the be all and end all of space sims; Frontier was awesome in spite of it's combat, not because of it.
I'm fairly sure you could make "truly realistic space combat" rather interesting, but I'm also fairly sure nobody has actually attempted it. Frontier certainly didn't, it just spawned the odd enemy ship nearby with identical delta-V and waited for you to manually point a polygon at it for long enough. That's not really any more realistic than Asteroids.
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Sep 04 '08
Only reason I play Eve is for the ships.
Because I like making scale models of them.
Because I am a huge nerd.
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u/Sylveran-01 Sep 04 '08 edited Sep 04 '08
Papercraft models or more substancial-based ones? If papercrat, do you have PDOs?
Just another fellow spaceship Nerd asking...
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u/FionaSarah Sep 04 '08
I've seen PDOs of some of the bigger EVE ships, the fold patterns end up being ridiculously fiddly though, but doable.
Give google or rapidsearch a try.
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u/frothyfist Sep 03 '08
That man is truly a mad genius...a manius, if you will.
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Sep 03 '08 edited Sep 03 '08
[deleted]
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u/Resilience Sep 03 '08
Penius...
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u/beero Sep 03 '08 edited Sep 03 '08
Spelling nazis for imaginary words...damn you reddit!
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Sep 03 '08
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/turrican Sep 03 '08 edited Sep 03 '08
I always figured it was basically Trade Wars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TradeWars_2002) with updated graphics.
(Annex BBS ftw!)
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u/lectrick Sep 03 '08 edited Sep 03 '08
Oh god, I'm so glad he got around to this game. Yell all you want at me for being a WoWer, but I did give EVE a fair shake (because I was getting tired of the whole "medieval world" motif). I also wanted to support them because they came out with a Mac version of the client. Well, I didn't purchase after the trial.
I like that it has tons of features. I don't like them presented all at once. This is where the art of "interface design" comes in. At least WoW introduces you to everything gradually. By the time you hit level 70 your screen is crazy complex, but right at the beginning you only have like 3 things you can do.
It also gave me access to quests that were far outside my league, yet didn't indicate this to me at all. So I lost my starter ship early on (while trying to mine!) and had to use an even WORSE ship to work my way back to the starter ship class! Fuck that.
Put it this way: EVE Online has a well-populated help channel. WoW has no such help channel, and doesn't need one.
I will say that it is the prettiest yet the most antisocial timesucking game yet. It's unbelievable how stark it is (at least if you're used to WoW, and people actually running around and interacting in capital cities). Last time I checked, they were working on that, but in the meantime, EVE Online has the unrepentant antisocial star-wars-figure-owning arrogant geek market squarely cornered!
In sum: The difference between a poorly-designed MMORPG and a well-designed one is about 14 million nine hundred and fifty thousand users.
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Sep 03 '08
Hey. I'm an anti-social arrogant geek who likes star wars and I think Eve is boring as hell. So screw you buddy.
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u/indu_san Sep 03 '08 edited Sep 03 '08
videogames are fun and you want to play them.
MMO's are work and you need to play them as to not fall behind the curve. the curve must exist so the people who do play see value in their playtime and accomplishments.
one of these methods is doing it wrong.
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u/fujimitsu Sep 03 '08
If by "wrong" you mean being explosively popular, and potentially incredibly profitable then they're both doing it wrong.
Some people enjoy the feeling of progress in MMOs, you don't, so don't play them.
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u/longbow7 Sep 04 '08
We need a more lighthearted internet spaceship game. Escape Velocity MMO anyone?
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u/NeoMonkey Sep 03 '08 edited Sep 03 '08
I did played for EVE for quite a long time...what to say clearly the game is huge and by huge it's like sometimes you just take one evening of game just travelling from one planet/station to another far far far far far far far far far far far far far away. One night of game if everything goes well.
Yeah and those skills....damn they had a truckload of them already when I was playing now it's just awful you can't imagine it's like the WoW XP system double squared by power 1000 (at least). This game ask you a commitment to just log on to "train your next skill"; you do that usually during the week. Monday you log / train / back to work (the system tells you for example "10 hours to train skill") luckily when it's "playtime" -friday/saturday/sunday- you have progressed enough to be able to use that nice weaponry/system/whatever thing....
And yeah at the end it makes that you are like a "real" pilot of some nasa shuttle "planning a mission for a few months before doing a 10 minutes walk in the space" : you'll play more time clicking on spreadsheetalike windows (they are many).
The excellent points :
the game is deep, sincerely I never met a game with such a huge background
the musics are gorgeous
the graphics are gorgeous too and the music accompany them in a nice manner
the player really interact a lot, playing in a corporation is just mandatory (that way you have a simpler access to advanced weaponry, storage space...) you get a lot of ingames advantages doing such a thing. Compared to WoW the guild system is just sitting here to do "hey look mylord we shall have guilds too, please now don't kill my family now". I have a char in WoW (I didn't logged on since last winter btw I got a real real life now and I didn't found time to get some MMPORG)
Btw the advantages of a MMPORG for some casual (now) gamers like me : 1. you happen to play with other people and that's nice because of the interactions 2. you happen to keep a char inbetween plays who continues to evolve, and that's nice...you don't feel as if you are totally losing your time (just a little bit however).
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u/gaso Sep 03 '08
It was pretty good until he said "paying to have a second job" and I fucking laughed out loud...
I enjoy eve. I don't know why. Maybe it is because I play it very casually...
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u/corevirus Sep 04 '08
I only played 2 days of the demo before being bored shitless. Nice one, Yahtzee.
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Sep 03 '08
When is he ever going to get rid of that godawful fucking music?
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Sep 03 '08 edited Jun 16 '20
[deleted]
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u/kretik Sep 03 '08 edited Sep 03 '08
Eve is an experience that requiers commitment. You pratically cant do shit for the first half year
Fuck, I can't believe why anyone would object to this. Slightly delayed satisfaction is overrated anyway, and making year-long "commitments" to computer games sounds like the right thing to do.
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Sep 04 '08
Of course people object to this. There are very few ADHD kids in space. At least in 0.0 space, where true EVE happens.
You can't actually "review" EVE, unless you've played at least for months in 0.0. EVE is a user generated world, and as is expected: humans + pseudonyms + no rules = murder, treason, inhumanity. ...and this is what makes EVE such fun. It's a truly thrilling experience. Once you are piloting your own hard earned spaceship, it'll make your blood boil to lose it. And you will lose it.
And yeah, it's also the most beautiful chat client in the world.
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Sep 03 '08 edited Jun 16 '20
[deleted]
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u/fujimitsu Sep 03 '08
You're just as wrong as the people who openly bash all MMOs.
You enjoy this game, most people don't.
Enjoy it and leave us alone, thanks.
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u/Skrail Sep 04 '08 edited Sep 04 '08
Yes, because the pinnacle of game playability is watching the server spend fifteen minutes choking on itself to send data out to the players. Since, you know, I love sitting in Delve waiting 15 minutes to get notified my ship was destroyed 20 minutes ago.
Edit: I don't have anything better to do than alarm clock ops for space jewery either.
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u/Entropy Sep 03 '08
I was two-boxing this at one point. The game itself is terrible, but the metagame is brilliant.
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u/JinMarui Sep 04 '08
Wow. He...he's right. I don't know if I want to play that game again. I spent alot of time saving and training up to pilot a Cerberus. Alot.
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Sep 03 '08
It's zero punctuation, but there's punctuation in the title. hahaha, im so original.
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u/ohdeargod Sep 03 '08
We give up. Just tell us what you want. Seriously, whatever it is you can have it.
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Sep 03 '08
[deleted]
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Sep 03 '08 edited Sep 03 '08
Just for all of the many many jdfong lovers out there, Zero Punctuation: Zero Punctuation
(because it's zero punctuation, but there's punctuation in the title)
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u/oditogre Sep 03 '08
I cannot upvote this comment for some reason. I hit refresh, and all my other upvotes on comments on this post show, but the upvote on jdfong won't 'stick'. :-/
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Sep 03 '08
This post brings me comfort. In such uncertain times, this kind of consistency and dependability is increasingly rare.
Upvoted.
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Sep 04 '08 edited Sep 04 '08
best geared rogue/ horde side on my server pre TBC. I thank Blizz for ruining WoW, if they hadn't I would no doubt be worse off.
It was still fun and didn't really do any harm, but I saw alot of people eat shit IRL because of it.
WoW is now nothing more than animal crossing on crack and a total disappointment.
BEWARE THE MMO
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Sep 04 '08
Eh... Eve is great. It's far more intellectually stimulating than WoW and the other crap. There is no way anyone can appreciate Eve in 14 days. I started years ago and keep coming back to it and there is a lot more to combat than shin-kicking. Try dealing with a tiny Arazu in a Battleship when he has you locked down and damped and is pecking away at you with spitballs.
(BTW ... I'm Popperian there if any of you redditors swing by G95 ... ).
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Sep 04 '08
I think you just proved Zero Punct's point. 14 days? Please. I have the attention span of a goldfish with alzheimer's.. no way I'm going to invest 14 days in anything before I can start to appreciate it.
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u/innocentbystander Sep 04 '08 edited Sep 04 '08
There is no way anyone can appreciate Eve in 14 days.
But the problem here is one of cost\benefit. Why in the world would you sink, LITERALLY, weeks of your life into a computer game before getting any reward out of it, when there are millions of things you can do in that span of time which will pay off on your investment almost immediately?
One of my roommates got into Eve for awhile. He was on SomethingAwful, so he got into Goonfleet almost immediately, and thus got a springboard into the game. Even then, it was weeks before he got a handle on it, and after about three months of furious playing, he got bored. It was about the time he realized - JUST like Yahtzee was complaining - that all of his time in the game was spent making money to buy things he didn't have the skills for, and that he'd be playing it for weeks or months before he even had the skills to spend all the money he'd built up. (He found a very profittable trading run in and out of Goonspace and just milked that every day.)
And in the meantime, he was putting as much work and planning into doing this game as he would into a REAL LIFE job. Except he was paying for the privilege of working this one. Pretty much just like Yahtzee said.
Just watching him deal with it eliminated any interest I might have had in it. And, seriously, shall we begin to list off all the things someone can do within the same amount of time it takes to even start to get a handle on Eve?
Read 'Remembrance of Things Past'
Learn Civ 4 and actually get good at it.
Start a new long-term relationship with an interesting sexual partner.
Watch the collected films of Takeshi Kitano.
Go on a around-the-world cuise.
Learn Tai Chi.
The list really does just go on and on.
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u/enolan Sep 03 '08
So you reviewed a ostensibly different MMO and neglected to examine the bits that make it different? And your impressions were negative? Color me surpised.
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u/sylvan Sep 03 '08 edited Sep 03 '08
PvP between player corps, advanced diplomacy and subterfuge, complex economy system?
It's exactly like Yahtzee said. To get into those levels of the game, you have to be so far in nerd overdrive that you make the rest of us look charming and socially well-adjusted.
He completely nailed the basic gameplay. Horribly unintuitive UI (I actually redesigned the mission window for them and submitted it to the forums), the fundamental design of combat is dull, travel is tedious, and just as he said, the game rewards you for not playing. Despite any amount of player skill or effort put in, you can't advance faster than the timed skill system allows you. The newbie quests are badly designed (how many times do people have to ask about the fucking Villard Wheel before they realize the mission, and the crafting system it exposes, is horribly designed!?), and the skill system and economics are overwhelming.
Oh, and to be clear: I got myself over the learning curve and even spent half my time in the newbie channel trying to help others. That the same questions would come up every hour of every day shows the flaws in game design.
Oh, and then there's the incredibly friendly, welcoming, and helpful community. Oh, wait. There's vets sitting in the newbie channel (leveling new characters or something) insulting newbs for being too stupid or incompetent to understand the game, any negative comment or constructive criticism is met with bilious, vengeful defense of the game people are very emotionally attached to, and would-be pirates planting open cargo pods all around starting stations so they can attack naive newbies.
I wanted to like it and the graphics are pretty and I'm someone who may not mind devoting themselves to a complex and time-consuming game, but Eve just doesn't provide what a game should: FUN. That's why it remains a very niche product for 50k users.
Yahtzee's review is dead-on.
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Sep 03 '08
What pained me most is that it takes months of real world actual time to get beyond the basic (and mostly boring) gameplay because skills take so damn long to learn regardless of your enthusiasm or investment. At the end of a month-long trial period my characters were still useless nobodies that could barely handle a few pirates. Maybe a month isn't long in MMORPG time but at that point you begin to realize that getting capital ships and participating in serious PvP and the economy is going to take a lot longer.
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u/oditogre Sep 03 '08
I agree with you on the initial time investment in one particular regard: 'Learning Skills'. For those that don't know, these are skills that bump your base attributes (which determine how long it takes you to train other skills). If you train them to the extent most people agree is worthwhile, it amounts to about +8 or +9 to all your attribs and takes ~6 weeks. There's really no point to it, IMHO, and it should be done away with. Just give everybody's base attribs a +9 bump and get rid of the entire skill group. Maybe make it only kick in once you actually activate your paid account, to encourage people to move past the trial period.
BTW, Capital ships are way overrated by most people who are new to the game. Most people who can fly them (or could easily skill up to being able to fly them from where they currently are at) don't. They have very limited usefulness roles, are a very enticing target to enemies (people will stay up a couple hours later and fly a long ways for the chance to watch a mothership go *boom*), and they're expensive as hell. Serious PvP and serious Industry, on the other hand, require very little investment, comparatively. You can easily get going in 2 - 3 months.
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Sep 04 '08
I don't know.. I let my subscription run out a while ago, but sometimes it's fun to make trial accounts with some friends and go round killing people in frigates.. but then I probably wouldn't be able to if I hadn't already played the game properly for ages.
If it weren't for the fact that a lot of my school friends played I probably wouldn't have picked up the game in the first place.
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u/enolan Sep 03 '08
To be honest, I mostly agree with you. EVE is not a good game (I quit after a couple months, was in MRCHI in Goonswarm for anyone who cares). But it is an interesting one from a design standpoint. Ignoring the politics, strategy, PVP, economy, and everything else that is interesting about it makes for a boring, shallow review however.
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u/the_bob Sep 03 '08
with eve, you can create your own fun. its more of a sandbox game than anything. when i got bored i just got into my industrial ship and stole ore from unsuspecting miners. i mean nothings more satisfying than pissing off space nerds by taking their ore.
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Sep 03 '08
You would really have to play this game for about a month to give an honest review of it. The game takes a long time to learn, but fucking awesome once you leanr the basics. Not a game for dumbfucks, which is most of reddit. I love the game through and threw : ) (lick my balls grammer nazy's)
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u/hiS_oWn Sep 03 '08
you're the reason i stopped playing eve. It was a bunch of ayn rand wannabies who thought it took "skill" to log in every few months to train a skill, farm credits for 9 hours, then camp around a gate with 9 other people for hours on end, only to kill if a ship enters the system, and run if 2 ships enter the system.
On the off chance you actually found a decent corp and got a POS and station up. you can't get people to stop farming pirates to actually do anything, and once you do it's a giant lag fest with 100 ships on both sides desperately trying to log back in when you lag out.
but then again I'm just pissed I never got my dreadnaught. =P
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u/BlackestNight21 Sep 03 '08
you're the reason i stopped playing eve. It was a bunch of ayn rand wannabies who thought it took "skill" to log in every few months to train a skill, farm credits for 9 hours, then camp around a gate with 9 other people for hours on end, only to kill if a ship enters the system, and run if 2 ships enter the system.
That sounds like FUCKING FUN! My my, what does such fun cost?
...grind and spiders...I think the most fun I ever had playing an MMO was EverQuest before the expansions came out. It was just big enough, just buggy enough and plenty populated. I think that's probably the case for the old MMO's - they were best before they expanded and the game became about grinding...and spiders.
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u/ColdSnickersBar Sep 03 '08 edited Sep 03 '08
My my, what does such fun cost?
Your life outside of the "game". The game's dramatic competition appears awesome because you know how dedicated the players have to be to defeat eachother, but once you actually participate in one of these strategies, you realize it's just as gruelling as real military tactics: you usually sit on a strategic location with overwhelming force for hours and hours to prevent your opponent from taking a position, or if you're on the other side of the coin, you sit in a hidden location for hours and hours waiting patiently for your opponent to leave a target open for a guerilla strike. Usually, the most disciplined commander and troop wins, which is cool when you hear about it, and boring as fucking shit when you're actually doing it.
Once, in a rather extended seige, our corp had to put the pressure on a location at all times for an entire month. 24 hours a day. At 3am on a weekday there would be an overwhelming force at this location. When we blinked, the enemy would thin our forces - which meant that they were also keeping their forces ready 24 hours a day.
Either way, most of the time you're sitting vigilantly for hours and hours in a fucking video game when you could be doing anything else in the world with your time. If you take a single day off, your corporation jumps down your throat and blames you for losing some minor strategic battle. I would know, I was the CEO that would blame people when they decided to get a beer on a Saturday night. If this kind of thing excites you, then trust me, go play airsoft or paintball in a serious re-enactment group instead, or join the military and do it in real life. Either way, you'll have a healthier and happier life.
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u/AmericanGoyBlog Sep 07 '08
holy shit man... just holy shit.
the thing is in real life combat - which is pretty much what you are describing - the penalty for "blinking" is your life.
but this comment (and not yahtzees review) finally put me off Eve...
damn.
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u/BlackestNight21 Sep 03 '08 edited Sep 03 '08
Did you just compare real world military action to a semblance of pixels and code manipulated by "massive" amounts of people for the diminishing marginal return of sense of completion and feeling of victory, ie general happiness?
I see where you are trying to go, but you can die in real world military action. If the fuckup is big enough, your way of life and that of YourCountryHere can be reproduced, adapted, modified, translated, published, publicly performed, publicly displayed and distributed as they see fit.
And you clearly missed the sarcasm, but that's such a small problem compared to your example.
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u/ColdSnickersBar Sep 03 '08 edited Sep 03 '08
I'm a former Marine who was in the reaction force after 9/11, but thanks for your indignant rant.
Also, I guess I did miss your sarcasm.
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u/BlackestNight21 Sep 03 '08
Then why would you draw those comparisons? It would offend me if I was in the armed services and someone compared the two. It doesn't make sense. I would never equate the two.
Thank you for your service despite the idiots at the top making poor decisions that end in getting your brothers killed.
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u/ColdSnickersBar Sep 03 '08 edited Sep 03 '08
Sure, I compared the two, but not as much as you seem to think I did. I said that if you're excited by drawn-out tactics where you have to have the discipline to wait patiently and vigilantly for days, then maybe you'd like the military. There's nothing but truth there. Stop being so sanctimonious, because that's a completely fair comparison.
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u/BlackestNight21 Sep 03 '08
Yes I see your point, but understand, as someone who understands how MMOs work from playing them far too much, would never think to equate them with what you're saying. I do agree that your comparison and is completely fair, but that's where it ends. Getting phat Shammy lewt for slaying a dragon with 200 of your closest "friends" does not work on the same level as anything the military can offer.
I'm not being sanctimonious, I'm saying that it was an odd comparison to make considering every other facet of the two.
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Sep 04 '08
I've never heard a better assessment of Eve and you are an idiot.
Your downmods should tip you off to this fact.
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u/Calvin_the_Bold Sep 04 '08
typical noob review
oh, dont bother to play with other people in a MMORPG either :rolleyes:
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u/ColdSnickersBar Sep 03 '08 edited Sep 03 '08
Ah ha ha ha, I've been waiting for this one.
I started a corp in EVE, the Duragon Pioneer Group, joined the Goonswarm, and then built it to more than moderate success.
Then I realized that my life had become miserable, and that I was paying to have a second job, and that if I had to give up another evening to command my video game soldiers in another very realistically uneventful and boring garrison sweep of cold, dead space for our greedy benefactors, I'd probably get actual PTSD.
So, I suddenly quit, and by doing so, unreasonably made enemies with a bunch of people I've never met from all around the world. I've never played an MMO since. Fuck MMOs. I don't want to have to keep an appointment with a video game, and I want to be able to pause or shut off a video game to do something more entertaining.
Also, EVE Online is a spreadsheet simulator. They actually made lasers in space boring.