https://zkillboard.com/character/258455591/
Shocking news, for years I was a hardened criminal, leading a large, organized gang of fellow criminals. So wanted that if I stepped into more civilized areas of the Galaxy, I was almost immediately hunted down by local law enforcement. I ran a large extortion racket and also murdered and plundered for no reason other than to see the world burn.
Luckily for me, all of this was inside a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) called Eve Online. The very first link that starts this entry is a link to a killboard. Eve is a harsh game and if anyone that already plays Eve happens upon this post, killboard stats are almost required to show that what I am saying is not complete BS. To give you an idea of what the game is like, most Eve players will see my 95% success ratio and think that I suck. They will look at what ships I was flying when I was blown up and make fun of me.
To take a big step back, a MMO is a type of computer game where you are playing with many other people at the same time. Probably the first successful game of that type was Ultima Online. The first one that really took off and made a lot of money for its creators was Everquest. And probably the biggest and most famous game of that type is World of Warcraft. Most of the games of this type are fantasy based, but there are a few science fiction ones like a star wars game.
Eve Online is very different that most other MMO games. The differences are what appealed to me the most, but it does take a certain mindset and type of player to make it enjoyable. Eve is very much a sandbox style game where the economy is in the hands of the players as much as possible (and every year CCP, the company that is behind Eve, adds even more player control to the economy). It is one giant shared universe (there actually are two universes, one main one and one just for China). Most MMO divide their games into different “instances” and you tend to play on one server and only interact with the other players on your server. You are all playing the same story and what you do in your subsection of the story does not effect the other players. Not so for Eve, since it is all one universe, what happens at any one place effects everyone. If you go to the main trade hub and buy up all of one component, it will not be available to anyone else until players restock it.
Eve is also much harsher than other games in that the base game in Eve is focused on player vs. player combat with real consequences. In many other MMO, if you die you just respawn somewhere else and do not lose much or any of your equipment. In Eve, if you ship is blown up, then it is gone and all the equipment attached to it is either destroyed or attached to your wreck and you can only recover it if you or your side controls the battlefield. Otherwise it gets looted by the winner.
These main elements – player controlled sandbox, one shared universe and game focus on PVP with consequences are what both make Eve very interesting to play and very hard to play at the same time. If you make a mistake, you can lose everything you may have worked months to accumulate. Since there are many areas of the shared universe where there is no law enforcement at all, you either need to be extremely careful or very strong (usually as part of an organized group) or you will die and lose all of your assets. People can scam you. Players can steal from you. All is allowed in the game.
I have not played the game seriously with lots of time in it for several years. I played pretty steady for almost 5 years, but once I moved to China it became a lot more difficult to coordinate time zones and the Great Firewall. Plus Eve is the type of game that can take up a lot of time and I was spending that time on work and now I am spending my free time on other hobbies. Even so, I keep an eye on what changes in the game and did rejoin to play for a little while last year.
The game is so open ended, that it can be hard to explain it fully. What I’ll try and do is give a brief summary of my “career” in Eve and use that as an example of some of the things you can do.
I started a character called Myrdin Potter in 2006 (I think) and my original idea was to be an industrialist/trading character. I played solo for quite a while, running through the automated content available and slowly learning the game. I was approached quite often by people trying to get me to join their player groups (called corporations) but wanted to develop my character more before making a real commitment. I finally was approached by the Ceo of a corporation called Diplomatic Disruption and I joined them.
The game immediately changed for the better. Everyone has a different personality but Eve Online is meant to be played as part of a group. So I encourage anyone who wants to try to join a corporation sooner rather than later.
Our group did asteroid mining together and also ran the automated missions which are two ways to earn ISK, the games currency. Then another corporation declared war on us and what was a safe and well patrolled area by local law enforcement became a war zone for us. We were inexperienced and easy targets. However, I had chosen my corporation wisely and we pulled together as a team and learned how to fight. The combat against enemy went from us losing to us winning and killing them. The war ended and now I had the thrill of combat as part of my game play.
As I was living in Singapore at the time, I had a lot of hours where I did not overlap with others in my corporation and spent a lot of that time going into low security areas looking for trouble. Eve has three main security areas – High, low and 0.0. High security has space cops that will attack you if you attack other players. Low security has no cops, but if you attack other players your security rating is reduced. Eventually you cannot enter high security again. Finally, 0.0 has no security at all and there are no consequences to PVP other than the results of the PvP itself.
While looking for trouble, I ran into a small corporation that was mainly Greek players that were pirates. They chased me all over the place trying to kill me and we chatted in “local” as they chased me. Eventually we made a truce and I started flying with them hunting down other players.
Things snowballed from there. My corporation formally joined with theirs first as allies and then eventually as part of an Alliance. We were able to broker some living space in 0.0 and I tried living out there for a while. 0.0 is the area with the most content and gameplay possibilities but your assets are always at risk from other alliances that can come and take your space away. The group that had given us living space was pretty weak and not long after we were out there another group came and defeated us time and time again and kicked us out of the area and I return to low sec. The game design is quite good in that some systems have a resource that you get via “moon mining” and some locations are quite valuable. That make other groups want them which leads to conflict.
At this point, our Alliance (which was called Chain of Chaos) went to war with another pirate group over a system called Antem. After a long, several month effort we defeated them and drove them away. Moving to Antem was a big change as it was connected to the main grouping of low security systems and it had decent moon mining resources in the area. We eventually ran into another low sec Alliance called Rooks and Kings (search for their videos on youtube) and had many epic fights against them (their video don’t show when we beat them).
I then spent years controlling that space, first as the number 2 in the Alliance and finally running the whole thing. I went from being a soldier to being a fleet commander with several hundred other players depending me to make the right choices and give the right commands in combat. My skills that allowed me to rise up in my finance career worked well in the game and commanding fleets helped me to think quicker and make decisions faster.
I had years of fun in the game and still recommend it. Some days, when I am lying sleepless and jet lagged my pirate blood starts boiling and I want to go back to ruling space fairly but with an iron fist and a gang of blood thirsty pilots on my voice chat and waiting to kill whatever I pointed them at. I not only fought, I also mined and built ships, from the smallest all the way up to capital ships. I ran space stations and moon mined. I hunted and killed other players and I destroyed other corporations, often costing them years of investment.
Game play examples:
I think the easiest way to see what the game is like is via these two videos. The first captures the immersion you can get while playing the game (these videos are all on Youtube. For readers in China, search for Eve Online in Youku and you can find the same videos):
“I was there”
This second one is a good proxy for what fleet combat is like:
Retribution Trailer
And as a bonus video, one celebrating the sandbox nature of Eve Online
Butterfly Effect
And one more showing my Alliance beating Rooks and Kings in small gang PvP