Enough Of Single-Player MMOs

xmido · 2012-05-24T03:39:29.589246+00:00

Might have been pretty lucrative, but it really wasn't the easiest.

xmido · 2012-05-24T02:52:33.149743+00:00

This happens in eve all the time... There are such things as FOTM in every multiplayer game.

xmido · 2012-05-23T23:52:27.065850+00:00

Why not? Armor, weapons, mounts could all directly translate to eve skills.

xmido · 2012-05-23T22:33:16.619349+00:00

Was there an upper limit to the different skills you could take?

In Eve you have hundreds of different skills, and you learn them over time (not playtime, or login time), regardless of what activity you're doing. So you can say "<Some Race> Frigate II" is the second level of that race's frigate skill. And you can level all of the skills up to V (5).

Once you learn something, you don't lose it (you can, but it's another mechanic regarding death, and completely avoidable) and you keep its bonus forever.

The trick is then, who has the highest level of skillset X, where X is required to fly some ship really well. Generally older players will have the highest combination of skills, but since the highest you can learn to is V, it's possible for other players to catch up if they put the same amount of time into those skills.

Primat · 2012-05-23T21:32:08.684399+00:00

I love how the silver car is holding a checkered flag out his window as he drives past. "Okay! You finished the race. You can slow down now!"

xmido · 2012-05-23T20:51:16.696669+00:00

Games should be easy to learn and hard to master

I don't know that games need to be 'easy to learn'. Eve definitely has a wicked learning curve required, but the first couple of days are anything but tough.

That said, I know there are easier games to learn out there, but in the spirit of the OP's topic, Eve becomes incredibly easy to play once you've made friends. And one could argue that making friends should be one of the first things you do in a non-"Single player MMO".

xmido · 2012-05-23T20:34:05.196782+00:00

It may have, but UO was before my MMO time.

farmarm · 2012-05-23T20:33:31.849551+00:00

Damn. I stared at this picture for 20 seconds before realizing it was the lights on the stairs.

I was expecting some little mechanical arm to come swinging down the stairs and bring a glass of milk with it for you.

xmido · 2012-05-23T20:26:22.154186+00:00

While definitely fun, it was actually more profitable to mine veldspar (the really common one in highsec) than anything else, even if you take risk out of the equation altogether. It was more or less because of how important the tritanium minerals were, since they got used in everything.

Gen_Jack_Oneill · 2012-05-23T18:08:52.414817+00:00

Is his amount of gold and XP really abnormal?

24238 gold sounds like it would cost hundreds of dollars, and that amount of XP seems unreal.

I only started last thursday, but geez.

xmido · 2012-05-23T17:31:25.842109+00:00

Exactly. It doesn't take too long to get back to where you were when you died.

There's a "Golden rule of Eve" which players live by, and that's "Don't fly anything you can't afford to lose". The principle is pretty sound, because it means that you can get back to where you were when you died, you just need to have the money banked up to do it.

Counter-Strike rounds aren't ongoing, your money doesn't carry over when you log out and back in, so you need to be able to get everything you could want within the span of a single session. Not so much for an MMO, because things are persistent across logging out and back in, so you have things that people aim for.

It's also why you don't get as excited about an M4/AWP in Counter-strike, compared to getting your first HAC in Eve.

xmido · 2012-05-23T17:13:56.743502+00:00

Quite.

It's pretty unfortunate, because in my experience the people who play the sandbox MMOs are some of the smartest and friendliest people you could ever meet.

CCPs new MMO should be pretty good for this respect too. I look forward to reading more about it.

xmido · 2012-05-23T17:08:49.185173+00:00

Thanks. I stopped playing Eve a while ago, but I feel I need to hang in there when someone argues based on what seems like an incorrect impression of a great game.

xmido · 2012-05-23T17:06:43.403311+00:00

All of the things you mentioned work together to create Eve. The reason I'm focusing on loss is because it drastically alters your decision making process when deciding when to fight and when to run.

The scarce resources actually become usable by the mightiest warriors, because people won't just rush in and attempt to take them over without thinking. If we think about how a game without loss works, if you put in these scarce resources, they would become a constant battlefield. People don't care about dying, so they'll run in constantly hoping to disrupt the other side long enough to get their own share of the resources. It doesn't happen in Eve because if you keep rushing in you'll run out of ships to run in with.

xmido · 2012-05-23T17:01:49.302563+00:00

Why what? Why it's not a big deal?

Because the whole game is a span of minutes. Every time you join a new server, your game is reset, and so is everyone elses. You start on equal footing with them when a new map starts, and since a map will only last 20-30 minutes, it means that people can only ever be 20-30 minutes ahead of you in money.

xmido · 2012-05-23T16:59:34.215422+00:00

I honestly think that a good sandbox game needs to be devoid of traditional classes.

Eve does this really well by letting you create a character and based on choices while creating it, you get a set of starting skills. But no skill is off limits if you have the pre-requisites.

xmido · 2012-05-23T16:09:10.544959+00:00

Ah, I misunderstood your post. And Yeah I wanted to imply that it was from the perspective of someone who would create such a game. They cater to "gamers these days", and try to make a top selling game by attracting the attention of the masses.

xmido · 2012-05-23T15:56:47.253845+00:00

I, for one, would love to see more MMOs being made with the "EVE model," a huge sandbox in which almost everything is player driven (crafting, warfare, economy, trading, etc.).

The problem is that if you don't have loss, player crafting, and therefore a large chunk of the market, loses value. The more theme-parky MMOs still have player crafting, but it's quite obvious that the consumables market is much better than anything else. The loss that Eve gives its players means that the market is constantly moving, people always need to buy new ships, buy new guns, buy everything. Without this loss, the only thing that constantly moves is consumables.

xmido · 2012-05-23T15:41:20.949551+00:00

That's fine. I'm not going to try and persuade someone who's made up their mind about it.

I will say that, from your arguments you've done, you may not have experienced everything that Eve had to offer. If you ever feel like another attempt, there's a 2 week trial you can do. Instead of dropping it as soon as you hit a wall, go ahead and ask someone in a help chat, and maybe you'll get passed it.

If not, happy hunting.

xmido · 2012-05-23T15:33:24.868406+00:00

Oh, so you were responding to my solution of a problem you wouldn't find yourself in anyway.

xmido · 2012-05-23T15:26:33.095202+00:00

Wat? When did PvP come up?

xmido · 2012-05-23T15:21:39.630601+00:00

So, I need some special skill to pick up the phone and call for pizza?

I edited it out. You don't need a skill to buy things remotely, just sell things remotely (need a broker to handle it on your behalf or something).

Oh, I'm sorry, I can't figure out how to use this weapon because I'm currently reading a book on capital ship piloting Of course, while I'm training this skill I can't be running a treadmill or doing anything else to improve my "character" because we all know that multi-tasking skill progression in Eve is impossible.

I don't quite understand the latter portion of your comment. But think about how the the matrix learning abilities work, but it doesn't incapacitate you and it takes a lot longer. So you can do things while the skill is training, you just only have one 'slot' or whatever to learn skills at a time.

Heaven forbid you want to take more than one class and learn more than one thing at a time.

There are no classes in Eve. How much did you play? Oh, I just realized you meant classes as in school. well as I mentioned, you learn skills similar to how the matrix does it, and it can only be done one thing at a time. If you want to switch skills midway, you don't lose progress, but it stops while you learn something else.

But just one target if I remember correctly.

It's configurable up to 7 or so, but also limited by your ships ability to target.

So if a gang of pirates wants to kill you they have Big Boss lock on and while your guns are busy tracking him they fly in and start overbearing you?

Sure, but if you realize that's happening you'll do something about it like an actual captain, right?

xmido · 2012-05-23T15:05:30.426523+00:00

It's about the absurdity that technology of the time cannot communicate to a space station and obtain a list of commodity prices.

You can view the market while in space, and even buy things remotely. Not only that but you see the prices for items in all other stations in the region too.

It's absurd to think that you have to dock with anything for any other reason but to repair or transfer a commodity.

And set up a clone, but that's really it. You can use the market remotely, and you can set up contracts remotely too, so transferring a commodity can be done remotely. And if you get the skill for it, you can even sell items on the market remotely (contracts are separate from the market). Oh, and switching and equipping ships (this can be done in space, but you shouldn't leave your ship out in space, since anyone can hop in it and fly away; you can also equip out in space, but you need a carrier or mothership around, which aren't allowed in the more secure regions of space).

If you are flying around in a capital ship and an enemy/unknown flies up behind you ... don't you think an automated turret system should kick in to defend the ship?

If he locks on to you, you can have the game return the lock if you have it enabled. You then need to activate the guns if you don't have them primed. Most capital ships won't have any kind of automated turret system in the game. But they do have drones which can be released and will fire on any aggressors (if you have that feature enabled). But both of those practices (auto-lock, and priming guns) is generally a bad idea since "friendlies" will sometimes lock you to heal you (or enemies will lock on to you in an area where you shouldn't immediately fire on them, to see if you're following the bad practices). IFF isn't really something that Eve deals with because of how grey allegiance is.

xmido · 2012-05-23T14:57:55.096018+00:00

Was it boring to accumulate the money needed or did it result from participating in something fun?

There were a lot of ways. Unfortunately the ones that were the quickest, and required the least setup were also the most boring (Level IV missions).

Did everyone always have to run around in a faction battleship or did most of the players have fun outside of spending such a large amount of money?

Faction battleships were a luxury / elite item. Not everyone had to do it, but it's not very dissimilar from that epic mainhand from the toughest raid. People could definitely have fun without spending anything near that much money, but faction battleships took more than just money to get, unless you paid out the nose for them. If you're interested, continue reading this paragraph. Faction battleships could be gained from 3 methods: farming rats and getting a blueprint and then building it, doing missions for the factions until you get enough loyalty points (a currency you get for each faction after you do a mission for them) to either buy the blueprint and then build it or just buy it for 3x the loyalty, or buy it from someone else who has done one of the first two.

I only ever ran faction once. I didn't like it very much and so I sold it before losing it, and that was just a faction frigate. Faction battleships can get into the 800mill range for buying on the market.

Acidictadpole

TROPHY CASE

Acidictadpole

TROPHY CASE

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