The Glade 4.0

Meant to post this a while back, but I just remembered it.

I'm sure almost everyone here has made a misclick in an MMO that was disastrous, either for them personally, for their guild or raid, or something like that. Sold an item you really didn't want to, deleted the wrong thing, pulled aggro when you REALLY didn't want to (5 minutes before logging for work, for example), sent that cybersex tell to group chat instead of the fat guy pretending to be an elf chick, whatever.

You haven't done anything to compare to this. I'll let you read the article, but basically, a Titan pilot in EVE was trying to "bridge" (allow his fleet to jump from his ship to a target location) onto an enemy fleet, and accidentally jumped his OWN ship (sans escorts) into the middle of the enemy fleet. For those unfamiliar, Titans are the super capital ships of EVE, bigger than dreadnoughts, which are in turn bigger than battleships. Along with supercarriers (which are exactly what the label says) they are the largest ships in the game. They're also incredibly expensive and valuable; a Titan takes 8 weeks of real time to construct, AFTER all the components are constructed, and it has to be built out in space whilst the alliance or corp protects the build site from attack by other players.

sizes

The tiny, tiny frigates are the size of a 747, more or less. The Titans... you get the idea.

Anyhow, once the Titan arrived, the opposing fleet immediately tackled (pinned it in place) while the attacking alliance went "holy ****, what did he do!?!" and then raced to aid their beseiged Titan.

This resulted in a battle that was several hours long (most EVE PVP is measured in seconds to minutes) and involved around 3,000 participants. Losses (this tally of losses is actually low, but gives you an idea:)

626 kills
530 billion ISK lost (although other estimates put that over 850bn)
3 dead Titans
4 dead Super-Carriers
46 dead Dreadnoughts

Over 3100+ players.
Over 250+ separate alliances.
Over 700+ separate corporations.


I post this account first because this guy's blog is awesome, and has hilarious pictures for most of his posts.


Sand, Cider, and Spaceships.

Here's some other accounts:

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/28/eve-o ... le-asakai/

http://themittani.com/news/breaking-mas ... kai-lowsec

http://io9.com/5980387/how-the-battle-o ... me-history

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Wow. From what little I played of EVE (and rather enjoyed), this looks like a blast. One of the videos on that page is very funny to watch - a lot of lingo I don't understand, but the Slavic-sounding guy who keeps saying "All neuts (nukes?) on the Leviathan" really adds some flavor to the chatter. Thanks.

(I should log back on some day, see how much experience or whatever I have banked up, not having played in two or three years.)

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This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

I've never played EVE but that video makes it look quite fun.

It's a lot of fun as long as you A) aren't afraid of PVP (since you're always subject to PVP; high security areas just make it less likely) and B) don't get into terrible nerdrage because your pretend internet spaceship blew up. It's a VERY harsh game, and you can lose real money (indirectly) playing it, and the skill points you spent months or years of real time training up can (again, in theory) be lost.

The skill points can be lost if your capsule/pod that your avatar rides in inside the spaceship can be destroyed by other players after your ship is blown up if you don't get it out fast enough. You then wake up in a new clone. If that clone wasn't upgraded enough to hold your skill points, you lose some of them. Enough times, and (in theory) you could lose years of training, although in practice its rare that people forget or can't afford to upgrade the clone.

The money thing comes from what's called PLEX. A PLEX is a pilot license extension which means a subscription extension (and confusingly, is also used in lowercase to mean a 'complex', or game instance/event). They cost around $18 apiece for a month of playtime (although packs of 1, 3, and 6 are discounted right now for the anniversary!), but the thing is that you claim them as ingame items.

There are several ramifications of that. One is that you can sell them for ingame currency, and they go for about 500 million apiece in ISK (game currency). That's more than all but the most expensive battleships, capital ships, and rare modules for the ships. What that also means, however, is that in-game values can be directly converted to real-world dollar values. So, that 850 billion high-end estimate for losses means around $30600 real-world dollars worth of pretend internet spaceships got blown the **** up in that battle.

Note though, that you can't sell your stuff for real money according to the EULA; they don't want to subject gameplay to real financial laws. Scams, most forms of griefing, and general mayhem are allowed in EVE that aren't in most MMOs.

The other ramifications of PLEX are that you can buy your PLEX with game money, and essentially play for free if you have enough income! Because they're a game object, they also can therefor be transported in ships. This is unwise, but people do it. That also means they can be blown the **** up, and that real-world money just became pure profit in CCPs pocket. One incident I heard of involved a guy carrying (count em) 46 PLEX in a shuttle (tiny, fast, and totally defenseless). He got ganked. Not a single PLEX survived to be looted. When a ship blows up, the items it was carrying that survive are determined randomly.

As for that battle itself, apparently it was the king of lagfests, and large-scale battles have endless problems with lag. It's not a major problem in smaller battles however. The PVP I've been involved in has involved less than 2 dozen ships per side and there's been no problem.

That's actually another thing - there's plenty of PVE content, some of it quite hard (incursions) and PVP comes in many flavors. Faction wars, small-scale, solo, piracy, bounty hunting are all there. If you want to take part in huge battles where only specialty ships, battleships, and capital ships matter you can do that. If you want medium battles where caps are rare, battleships are king, and battlecruisers and smaller ships all have a place, you can. If you want to fly a lone destroyer and face off against single enemies, you can. Just remember, your 1v1 fight can turn into 5 people ganking you in a heartbeat.. or theoretically, could become another massive clash of capital ships.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The closest I ever came to playing EVE was playing Pirates of the Burning Sea, which had close to the same level of PvP-centricity (if you played in the right circles) and player-driven economic depth, but the combat was much more interesting to me.

That said, as much as I've never been able to get into EVE, I have a lot of respect for its economic model and its foundation in a playerbase willing to live with (and work to mitigate) real risk and consequences. I really hope Star Citizen is able to strike a balance where it approaches the same, but is able to convert a broader audience to that tolerance of risk.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

EVE is a game I like to hear about, but I can't stand playing it lol

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It's interesting you would say that. I think this is pretty spot-on as a problem for PVP in MMOs in general. I think the key is to make sure that "ganking" is hard; if you jump an opponent of roughly equal strength, he should be able to fight back and not be helpless because he wasn't set up specifically to fight you off, to the exclusion of doing what he was going to do. (In EVE this applies to combat ships; industrial ships should have a hard time fighting combat ships or there's no point in combat ships).

In pretty much any MMO I've played, EVE included, PVE includes a lot of engaging relatively stupid opponents in large numbers, and staying power is paramount, where PVP is more ****!!!! and high alpha or DPS is paramount and defense focuses on either buffering or mitigating enough for your DPS to win before the enemy's does.

Changing player behavior is probably a total no-go, so the only thing I can figure is that PVE encounter design has to be such that the same setups that work for PVP work in PVE. I think that a lot more people would be willing to accept the risk of ganking if they knew they'd have a reasonable chance of fighting back.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

There's a joke about this, called playing EVE offline, for people that don't actually fly spaceships that much, but constantly station trade, look at blogs, EVE news and websites, and such. Some people claim they really don't like actually playing that much but they just can't leave the metagame alone.

They have their own economics professor on staff:

Dr. Eyjolfur Gudmundsson

This guy has an entire economy to study in perfect detail, and left academia to do it full-time. He's the ultimate example, IMO. I have no idea if he actually plays much; he may be out there in nullsec, camping stargates with Goonswarm for all I know.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Dr. Gudmundsson still publishes in the appropriate journals for his field and several others. He did not leave academia so much as leave an academy for a private sector job. He is also not alone. Blizzard typically has several interns from various high profile Economics programs studying the Auction House and other elements of the World of Warcraft economy. MMOs are an interesting market at the top-level; at the game-level, they are perhaps the closest thing to a control group economists have ever found.

SOE and Blizzard employ economists for other, more nefarious reasons as well.

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"Do you know, it’s amazing how many supervillains have advanced degrees. Graduate school should probably do a better job of screening those people out."

I should probably have put nefarious in scare quotes. By and large, the economists on staff are used to preserve design integrity in gear mills. They determine drop rates, watch the auction houses or transaction systems to derive micro-economic data, and use that to shape, direct, and develop various procedural systems: drop rates, rarity scales, respawn rates, etc.

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What you say is true. However, I can't think of many attempts to take the PvP MMO thing outside the normal gear-and-ability based milieu typical of the fantasy MMO.

EVE isn't a fantasy MMO, but its combat is very much tab-targetted ability use, so it really falls into the same problem space. They've solved the problem (such as it is) by managing to shift player behavior via extreme selection bias, and being the only established game in town for the people who self-select as EVE players. This has created a critical mass situation for them that has monopolized the hardcore PvP-only tab-target combat demographic. The folks who aren't hardcore PvP-only stick around EVE because the hard-core PvP-only crowd, and their willingness to tolerate risk of property destruction has created the only fundamentally sound economy that can support the very awesome crafting market, essentially.

What I'm really hoping is that, by virtue of NOT being a tab-target-and-ability combat game, Star Citizen is able to just sort of bypass the whole player behavior thing entirely. Because you're right -- PvP, by its nature, highlights and rewards quick, lethal strikes over endurance-based slugfests. Wolfpack PvP tactics ensure that focused fire scenarios among coordinated PvPers will obviate any defense unless it's simply so broken as to be literally unkillable.

By creating a twitch piloted system with hitbox collision weapon systems, Star Citizen is creating a very different expectation of playstyle that may or may not make shifting the playerbase's behavior and philosophy on PvP easier to shift. That said, it could well be that the intent for the PvE content is to make them easy-to-hit (or easy to evade) bags of massive hit points, setting up a similar disconnect between PvP- and PvE-centric equipment. I'm hoping that's not the case, because twitch-based bot/NPC AI is, historically, certainly good enough that one can create NPCs who use the same movement rules, weapons, and hit points for FPSes and the like.

So, really, that's what I'm hoping Star Citizen can deliver.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I agree with everything you say there, although I would say that the nature of EVE combat is a little less straightforward than the tab-targeting of fantasy MMOs, because the player must be careful about engagement geometry. Large ships will have a very hard time hitting small ships under the wrong circumstances and small ships will get one-shotted by large ones in the opposite. There's also the fact loss of end-game equivalent gear in EVE means you just have to buy more. Still, you're fundamentally correct; I'm just pointing out details.

I think that the twitch speed thing; replacing straight random-number combat with direct player control will definitely shake up the works. This is also going to be the case in TESO. The hardcore crowd is having a very hard time understanding that because attacking, blocking, and doging are done manually, all the normal ideas about "optimal" are a lot harder to implement. It doesn't matter how perfect your gear setup is if you're not fast enough on the draw with the mouse buttons. There's an element of FPS that breaks up the normal spreadsheet-based strategem methods.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Personally I think EVE is as close to a realistic Sci-Fi Space Simulator as it probably can get. We read about players who venture into lower security space for some lucrative opportunities only to have a gang of players who've "claimed" that territory as their own show up and obliterate the smaller player and loot his ship. We read that and think, "What ganking, ******* douchebaggers."

Then we see the same scenario happen with the Reavers on Firefly and think "They had it coming. Damn this makes for some good tv!"

Every single player in that game has a Sci-Fi equivalent counterpart. It's just more easily overlooked because players are more personally invested in it, and they prefer to view the enemy as "geeks at a PC" rather than ominous fleets they command. Possibly for some psychological reasons that I don't know. Maybe it's easier to focus their anger and disappointment over the loss of fantasy equipment toward a real-world counterpart.

The corporations that form, the battle over territory, the strained alliances ready to fall apart at a moment's notice, espionage, rise and fall of empires, ships holding other ships hostage unless a toll or tribute is paid; nothing that hasn't been shown on our favorite Sci-Fi movies and television shows (or from human history and human nature, which all good stories are typically based on). Other MMOs have a small bit of that, but not to the extent that EVE does. An Uberguild in WoW disintegrates and while it may make a single paragraph on a WoW news site somewhere, it will be forgotten in a day. Something like that happens in EVE, and it's a *massive* deal. A power vacuum is created that others will scramble to fill, the game's economy will actually shift, etc.


As for "skill based" PVP MMOs, it will only be a matter of time before people complain about the top tier players there as well. Not every player with great gear will be terrible at his class. There will be many players who will have great gear and great skill. It's just the nature of video games. There will always be better players than you (whoever is reading this right now) because there will always be people with more time to invest and the will to use that time to become even better than before.

The only way to truly equalize a PVP MMO is to water it down to First Person Deathmatch levels, where everyone gets all the same health, armor, and weapons.

I don't actively do PVP in games. But while I'm not the biggest fan of it, I will say out of the entire history of my warcraft experience the best, funniest stories that immediately bring a smile to my face are the ones revolving around PVP in some way. I haven't touched a PVP only server in years, and never plan to again, but damn were there experiences that were more intense and/or more humorous that put the regular game to complete and utter shame.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

I think the difference comes from the fact that in a movie there's a protagonist; in a game, everyone is their own protagonist. When someone gets ganked in a game, they see it as their playtime and fun getting taken away. Some people get their kicks just knowing they did that to someone else.

If you can accept it as part of the game, you'll be fine, but if you can't, you won't like it.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yeah. Like I said, it's more of a realistic simulator. And if the Sci-Fi world was a real thing, not everyone is going to be the hero who is impervious to "bad stuff." The idea of playing in a pseudo-real sci-fi world will either appeal to you or not. But it is the difference between being a child playing happy fairyland where you always win when you play board games against the adults, and playing in a living, breathing gritty sci-fi world.

I choose not to live in the realistic simulator. But I respect it.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!