EVE life

Awhile back I posted a little snippet on how I started playing EVE. Yes, it's a video game and this post may not interest many of you, but hey...just remember...no one's forcing you to read on. And hey, dad gummit, this is my blog, I'll post whatever I feel like, 'mkay? Well, I will apologize about that "'mkay", but that's the last apology for this post.

I'm enjoying and playing EVE more than any game since Diablo 2*, and that's saying a lot because I logged many an hour building up my L93 Sorceress. But where Diablo was more like high tech thumb twiddling, EVE is game that grows and changes and keeps you guessing. But there are many reviews of EVE if you'd like to peruse. Not all positive, but most at least acknowledge that this is a pretty cool thing the company is trying to do. To better illustrate why I'm enjoying this game so much, let me talk about what I do day to day.

*-(I don't include Final Fantasy games here. They somehow don't fit under the same umbrella.)

First, a quick explanation of terms. EVE is a space/sci fi Massively Multiplayer Online game (MMO) that is hosted on a single server. That means 100,000+ people play this game in the same universe. It means that when I fly past that spaceship over there, it could be some guy from Russia or Australia for all I know. Within that context players take time to learn skills, make money, outfit and fly spaceships, and lead whatever kind of life they'd like from naval officer to spaceship engineer to pirate. Now my day.

EVE life in general is ruled by corporations. For any familiar with other MMOs, these are the same things as guilds. For the rest of you, this is a group of players who generally play either together, or share the same items, headquarters, etc. Our corporation is mid sized, about 30 players, and we deal mostly in mining and production. At first blush that may sound boring, but let me elucidate the big picture.

EVE is based almost solely on an excellent free market simulation. Supply and demand and capitalism are alive and well. Unlike some other games, just because you spend time mining and producing something you don't necessarily make a profit. Watching and knowing market trends and carefully directing your production will lead to higher profit.

That said, our CEO is pretty bright. He has made friends in a non-formal way with a very large military alliance. While some corporations mine and produce, others destroy and obliterate. However, to play war is very expensive in EVE. To replace even a small war frigate can take hours of in-game mission/mining time to recoup the cost. And losing a battleship can put a serious dent in corporation finances. One way to ease these costs is to have players within your corporation learn the skills necessary to produce your own ships. But where do the parts come for this?

That's where we come in. Our CEO said, "okay, you guys need these parts. We'll get you the materials and save you a few steps, 'mkay? (dawgunnit)" They jumped at this offer and agreed to buy all we could produce. But again, where does this stuff come from?

It all starts with Ice (and this is where one of my characters comes in). Big huge chunks of ice float around in space and it takes specialized mining equipment to bring it in to the starbases. My character is one of about 4 or 5 in the corp that spends a lot of time mining ice. In fact, over in the other window, I'm mining ice right now. This ice does nothing on its own so I take it back to the station where another member of our corporation has the skill necessary to process the ice into Hydrogen Isotopes, Oxygen Isotopes, and a few other byproducts that are necessary to run our outposts.

We currently have about 10 outposts orbiting various moons. Another member of our corporation has the skills necessary to analyze the composition of these moons and find out which ones have sufficient quantities/types of elements to make a profitable mining outfit. When he makes his report, our CEO authorizes the huge cost of setting up an outpost (control tower, defenses, processing plant, etc.). Once this is done, raw minerals are extracted and stored in a silo. But we're not done yet.

These raw minerals are taken by another corporation member who is able to haul large quantities of these elements between our different outposts. We do this because Caesium by itself is not worth much, and Cadmium by itself is not worth much, but when you combine them in a reactor and produce Caesarium Cadmide...now we're talking. But we're still not done talking.

After again hauling the spoils from various reactors to a central processing plant, we're able to take these reagents and combine them to form advanced materials. These are the materials that all those warlords need to keep their armies running and because they need them we make them pay through the nose. I guess that sort of makes us opportunistic arms dealers, but we're the friendly types that don't make many headlines.

If only life were this simple, we'd all be rich and bored. Right now, our corporation is in debt from the aggressive/risky outpost investments. If this corporation were real, it'd be out of business. The reason it works is that everyone in the corp could care less if the CEO keeps taking some money out of our paychecks**. We're just having fun playing a game. Real money's not on the line. But corp debt is not our only problem. Remember those guys who haul all those materials? Well, their barges are big...and slow...and loaded with expensive stuff. Along with capitalism, pirates are alive and well in EVE and we've run afoul of a few.

**-(We don't actually make any money, so they're actually garnishing what they might've paid us, but that we didn't actually sign on for, but that we might be compensated for in the future, and...it gets a little complicated. Most of us don't care and play for fun.)

So, pirates, eh? That's where our combat wing comes in. A few players in the corp are dedicated miners, but a few have plenty of combat skills to go along with anything else they offer. The other character I play is in training to be a part of one of the pirate hunting groups. The others in our potential group are a couple of guys from Scotland, a guy from Texas, and a guy from California. Add me from Japan and that's quite a few timezones we cover. When we do operations we all communicate via headphones and a google talk-ish program designed for games like this. I haven't done this kind of in-game communication before and frankly, it's wicked cool (sorry, this language thing is going south today). I won't go into combat, but rest assured, the game balances very well in this area as well. A battleship is powerful, but it and its guns are slow. A couple of small fast ships can take one down if it doesn't have fleet support ("Their ships are so small they're evading our turbolasers."). Teamwork, organization, and planning are needed to make combat successful.

And I guess that's what keeps me excited about this game. It's balanced and built in such a way that no one person can do everything. One person mines, one refines, one produces, one fights, etc., etc. It makes the community aspect of the EVE universe more central than any other MMO I've played.

So, is that enough of an ad for this game? There's a few videos floating around, but none really capture the experience I'm talking about up there. Naturally they focus on the combat and flashy graphics because that's what sells. In any case, here's a video that does that, but also has some nice footage showing the scope of the game. Enjoy.