Anyone play Internet Spaceships?

[Kuja900]

So Kuja has been playing an internet spaceship game called "Eve Online" lately. It is absolutely no fun at all and filled with elitist cunts, having a blast. Was wondering if there was anyone else out there in the alt community torturing themselves with this game.

[Evan20000]

I played the tl;dr version in Mass Effect 2, surveying planets for minerals.

[Ajuk999]

Originally Posted by Kuja900

So Kuja has been playing an internet spaceship game called "Eve Online" lately. It is absolutely no fun at all and filled with elitist cunts, having a blast. Was wondering if there was anyone else out there in the alt community torturing themselves with this game.

I find the bolded the best part of this thread. -.-

blahblah

[Fatknacker]

Originally Posted by Kuja900

So Kuja has been playing an internet spaceship game called "Eve Online" lately. It is absolutely no fun at all and filled with elitist cunts, having a blast. Was wondering if there was anyone else out there in the alt community torturing themselves with this game.

I've got a friend who plays, he's supposed to be quite big in a clan or summink, Its appears to be the most boring game ever invented!!

[tyr]

It is indeed extremely boring.
You're like spending most (80%+) of your time doing absolutely nothing docked in a space station. The rest of the time, you're flying in the emptyness of space. You're shooting at other ships like 1% of the time you're playing.
So yea, I played this for numerous months, because it's basically awesome, as you can deduce from the posts in this thread. But I stopped, at least for now, cuz I don't have enough time at the moment to do nothing in a space station.

[Kuja900]

my 1200 man alliance is getting owned by a 20man corp LOL

[tyr]

What
Are you bad or something

Well I know you are but like even more than I thought ?
Are you on GC btw ? Or what alliance ?

[Kuja900]

Im terrible at eve lol, i just joined it yesterday its some new alliance called ZERG, their down to like 700 members cause they kicked bunch of scrubs. Most of the pvpers have **** sec status and cant come in high sec where the 20man corp gate camped a bunch of the **** members lol. They went like 70-0 in kills.

[tyr]

Oh I see lol
Getting pwned in high sec is always painful
What kind of ship did you lose ?

[Kuja900]

Oh just two frigs I was just heading back to my mission hub, I just hopped in a drake today ^_^.

[tyr]

heh drakes are good

I was about to get a dominix with practically all the necessary support skills to be a very good droneboat for missionning when I stopped playing
But since I was on GC and they're like pvping all the time I wasnt really sure if it was worth it. Oh well, we'll see when I start playing again.

[GGQ]

I still dont understand how Eve is so boring and yet so awesome.

[tyr]

For those of you who are like GGQ, I suggest taking a few hours, and read the OP of this :
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/view...topic_id=88121

Yes, it's indeed ****ING long. But worth it.

[Kuja900]

That thread is what did it for me, its really captivating ****.

[GGQ]

That's what I mean, Tyr. I've read that thread and I've played EVE, and reading the thread was much more fun than playing the game, lol.

[Kuja900]

Originally Posted by GGQ

That's what I mean, Tyr. I've read that thread and I've played EVE, and reading the thread was much more fun than playing the game, lol.

Eve isnt actually fun at all lol. Ive never met someone in game who would describe it as fun

[X_denied]

i played eve for 2 mins. and deleted it.

[Stormich]

Originally Posted by X_denied

i played eve for 2 mins. and deleted it.

.
Same I had a spaceship that i couldn't control and then I quit.

[X_denied]

Originally Posted by Stormich

.
Same I had a spaceship that i couldn't control and then I quit.

graphics are nice tho... wish graphics are like tht to alty, so my fds wont think im playing a cartoon game and say im childish hahaha

[Wall-Street-Guru]

I've tried it once a month ago and I found it boring. I'd rather play altitude so I never tried playing it again. Also tried to the thread tyr linked but it's not too interesting so I didn't read everything.

[elxir]

i downloaded it and am playing the free trial

pew pew

[Kuja900]

Originally Posted by elxir

i downloaded it and am playing the free trial

pew pew

about 1/10 people stick around after the trial lol i give u 2hrs

[D4rt]

Originally Posted by Kuja900

about 1/10 people stick around after the trial lol i give u 2hrs

Surprisingly many stay after the trial. 1/10 is left after the first month (or probably less ).

[Fatknacker]

Spoke to my nerdy mate and he said
"Check out the Eve University, it Will help a lot"

[Smushface]

So i did a little reading up on this game because that post was awesome and I'm pretty interested. What's the end-game time commitment look like? I played a ****load of WoW a few years back and kind of enjoyed it, but I'm not really up for a 18 hour / week raiding schedule. And yea, to me it's all about the end-game. I hate just putzing around in video games. No fun.

[Scottgun]

Originally Posted by Smushface

I hate just putzing around in video games. No fun.

You will hate EVE. See: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/vide...208-Eve-Online

[GGQ]

Depends on how involved in the game's politics your corp is, and how much you want to play. There's no such things as raids or instances in EVE, so there's going to be no dedicated time blocks of playing. It's all open-ended player driven end-game, so you can either log in for a minute just to set up your skill training for the next day, or you can spend all day mining asteroids or whatever. If you really get into it, you can play basically indefinitely and never run out of stuff to do.

[Kuja900]

Well there are instances in the form of deadspace.

[Anhi]

meh, the time spent to learn this game is sooo huge that I rather find a cure for cancer or something (also got time left to learn rocket science after)

[Sarah Palin]

That story is pretty neat.

It reminds me of a game I used to play called Urban Dead, humans vs zombies.

Back when I was playing there were 60,000 characters logging in every night which given the small gameworld (100x100 squares, each representing a building in the city) made the game pretty crowded. On a typical night I would go raiding with 200-300 other people which was a lot of fun given how simple the game was to learn.

The game was in HTML and each day you got 50 Action Points (clicks) to spend in the world - about 15 minutes to play each evening.

The zombies used their APs to shamble around town, tear down barricades, and eat humans. Dead humans would rise as zombies.

The humans used their APs to erect barricades, search for weapons and first aid kits, shoot zombies, and manufacture "cure" syringes. Headshot zombies just rose again (for a few AP) but a zombie who got cured would fall down then rise as a human.

So the zombies were trying to eat all the humans, and the humans were trying to stay alive by reviving their brethren.

Logging off in the street generally meant death for a human so they congregated in huge numbers in strongly barricaded buildings, especially malls and hospitals. Malls generally had 500+ logged off characters sleeping inside. Which of course made them zombie targets, but very hard to break into.


What made it interesting was the punishing asymmetry of the game. The two key asymmetries were communication and barricading.

Communication:
Zombies could not talk to each other outside a few moans and groans. So most zombies were feral - not belonging to any organized groups. Most zombie characters just wandered the map, looking for unfortunate humans who "AP'd out" in the middle of the street.

Humans could talk to each other, spray locations with graffiti, AND with some effort they could set up RADIOS. They used speech to organize groups and direct people to forums. They used graffiti to set up "revive points", where zombified humans could wait in line for a quick revive, without being mistaken for genuine zombies and headshot.

And with radios, any mall that was under attack could call to all the other malls in the game for reinforcement.

Barricading:
It cost a zombie around half of his nightly AP to tear down a barricade. It cost much less than that for a human on the other side to re-erect it. If the human and zombie were logged on at the same time, it was no contest - the zombie would not be able to get through.


So because of these features, the "mall culture" developed. Once an organized human group dedicated itself to defending a mall, that attracted a snowball of other human players. Once there was a massive crowd of humans indoors, the chances that at least one character would be logged on when a zombie came knocking approached 100%.

The average day in the life of a "mall rat" was log in, step outdoors for some air, shoot the zombies on the doorstep, step back inside, scrounge for ammo and log off.

In the event of death, the mallrat would go stand at the clearly marked Revive Point and be turned back into a human before the end of the day by a highly organized team of syringe-manufacturing characters.

Feral zombies also "snowballed" into sieges - when a zombie saw 300 zombies and 100 dead bodies outside a mall, he knew there was action happening - but without organization the "Pile Of Zombies" was just a shooting gallery for humans.

There was one mall (Caiger Mall) that had remained in human hands since Day 1 of the zombie outbreak. At any given time there were two to four THOUSAND people sleeping inside it.

There were a few organized zombie groups, and they had tried to siege Caiger, but they never succeeded - even one giant siege that collected about 1,000 organized and feral zombies together. A siege would last for about two or three weeks. Each night there would be a break-in, but the humans would repulse the zombies and repair the damage. Finally the zombie players would be frustrated into going away.

This was the situation when Shacknews came along. They were a forum that discovered Urban Dead and decided to go zombie. I was a feral zombie who watched them raid and decided I really wanted to join up with them. Because I was a levelled zombie and most of their players were newbs I got promoted fast into one of the five raid leaders.

They had a private internet forum that updated similarly to an IRC. This made it easy to organize; we were even more organized than the best human groups. Every evening a raid target was posted, and a countdown, and we would all go knock on the door at once. It might take 30 AP to break down a barricade but when each of 70 raider-zombies donates one AP, you're inside and munching brains in three seconds.

I was part of the Bean squad (i.e. we were in charge of inventing crazy new stuff that might or might not work). Our best invention was parachuting. We would go stand in revive points, and get revived as humans. Then we would go scrounge for shotguns and ammo. Shortly before the night's raid, we would go inside the target building. Then as the raid unfolded, we would shoot every logged-on human who was active in repairing the barricades or shooting at our zombie friends

We got to be such a nuisance that the humans started graffiti-ing all over the city NOT to revive our characters.

Eventually we turned our undead eyes to Caiger, whose population had swelled because all the people from the malls we had already trashed had fled to Caiger, hoping its magical aura of invincibility would protect them.

An epic siege ensued. We organized about 400 ferals to raid at a given time each day (thus hopefully distracting the feral humans) while we had Shacknews proper raid (about 100 members by this point) at a secret time, different each evening. Even though we had been in the game for a month and were obviously the greatest zombie threat, I guess no human had successfully infiltrated onto the Shacknews boards, because we were able to keep our raids secret.

Of course when you are using 100 zombies a night to raid a mall where 2000+ people are sleeping, there is inertia on the side of the humans. We had another trick up our sleeves though - we had certain low-profile zombies station themselves in the revive point line, where they could see which humans were doing most of the revive work. This info was communicated via the forums. So each night when we broke in, we focused on killing the revive team.

After about a week we saw results. The humans started running low on cure needles and the revive point line got longer and longer. The human radio broadcasts started to get a note of panic in them, and one of our guys set up a radio station that the humans could never find and started broadcasting as the zombie Tokyo Rose. Generally by playing this song at them:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjMiDZIY1bM

Anyway long story short, after a few weeks we had one big raid and - we were amazed to see that we had successfully cleared out the mall. Caiger Mall, which had stood as a human bastion uninterrupted for more than a year, was in zombie hands. We ransacked and trashed the place so that humans could not return as long as zombies roamed the aisles.

Then, having sacked every mall in the game, we went to the Brain Museum and logged off forever. It was awesome

Sadly the game has gradually wound down over the years (I quit in 2006), and now has a quarter of the population it once had, which makes the streets look really deserted to my eyes.





When I was reading the EVE story I kept rooting for the Goons to win. They were more creative and inventive, they were better at PVP, and at least they took risks and tried to attack. As the author noted, that made the game more exciting for EVERYONE, with lots of territory changing hands, massive speculation over resource prices, etc.

Being part of a REALLY well coordinated PVP raid team is one of the most fun experiences in an online game.

[Kuja900]

There are a ton more stories like that, eve really does have just the most interesting political spectrum of any game ive ever seen tbh. It is interesting that you started rooting for goons. That article is what got me into the game when I first started and I (still at the time being completely ignorant) found myself rooting for BoB. Btw Bob later reformed as IT Alliance and conquered all their old space in a hilarious fashion involving epic fail on the part of goonswarm and friends. Goonswarm was disbanded by a rogue director 1 day off from the day that BoB got disbanded a year later. Its really amazing how things have gone full circle and now BoB has even more territory than before and a better political position.

Eve Sov Map:

http://go-dl1.eve-files.com/media/co.../influence.png

ps- The alliances in their territory are pet alliances subservient to them.

[Stormich]

Originally Posted by Sarah Palin

That story is pretty neat.

It reminds me of a game I used to play called Urban Dead, humans vs zombies.

Back when I was playing there were 60,000 characters logging in every night which given the small gameworld (100x100 squares, each representing a building in the city) made the game pretty crowded. On a typical night I would go raiding with 200-300 other people which was a lot of fun given how simple the game was to learn.

The game was in HTML and each day you got 50 Action Points (clicks) to spend in the world - about 15 minutes to play each evening.

The zombies used their APs to shamble around town, tear down barricades, and eat humans. Dead humans would rise as zombies.

The humans used their APs to erect barricades, search for weapons and first aid kits, shoot zombies, and manufacture "cure" syringes. Headshot zombies just rose again (for a few AP) but a zombie who got cured would fall down then rise as a human.

So the zombies were trying to eat all the humans, and the humans were trying to stay alive by reviving their brethren.

Logging off in the street generally meant death for a human so they congregated in huge numbers in strongly barricaded buildings, especially malls and hospitals. Malls generally had 500+ logged off characters sleeping inside. Which of course made them zombie targets, but very hard to break into.


What made it interesting was the punishing asymmetry of the game. The two key asymmetries were communication and barricading.

Communication:
Zombies could not talk to each other outside a few moans and groans. So most zombies were feral - not belonging to any organized groups. Most zombie characters just wandered the map, looking for unfortunate humans who "AP'd out" in the middle of the street.

Humans could talk to each other, spray locations with graffiti, AND with some effort they could set up RADIOS. They used speech to organize groups and direct people to forums. They used graffiti to set up "revive points", where zombified humans could wait in line for a quick revive, without being mistaken for genuine zombies and headshot.

And with radios, any mall that was under attack could call to all the other malls in the game for reinforcement.

Barricading:
It cost a zombie around half of his nightly AP to tear down a barricade. It cost much less than that for a human on the other side to re-erect it. If the human and zombie were logged on at the same time, it was no contest - the zombie would not be able to get through.


So because of these features, the "mall culture" developed. Once an organized human group dedicated itself to defending a mall, that attracted a snowball of other human players. Once there was a massive crowd of humans indoors, the chances that at least one character would be logged on when a zombie came knocking approached 100%.

The average day in the life of a "mall rat" was log in, step outdoors for some air, shoot the zombies on the doorstep, step back inside, scrounge for ammo and log off.

In the event of death, the mallrat would go stand at the clearly marked Revive Point and be turned back into a human before the end of the day by a highly organized team of syringe-manufacturing characters.

Feral zombies also "snowballed" into sieges - when a zombie saw 300 zombies and 100 dead bodies outside a mall, he knew there was action happening - but without organization the "Pile Of Zombies" was just a shooting gallery for humans.

There was one mall (Caiger Mall) that had remained in human hands since Day 1 of the zombie outbreak. At any given time there were two to four THOUSAND people sleeping inside it.

There were a few organized zombie groups, and they had tried to siege Caiger, but they never succeeded - even one giant siege that collected about 1,000 organized and feral zombies together. A siege would last for about two or three weeks. Each night there would be a break-in, but the humans would repulse the zombies and repair the damage. Finally the zombie players would be frustrated into going away.

This was the situation when Shacknews came along. They were a forum that discovered Urban Dead and decided to go zombie. I was a feral zombie who watched them raid and decided I really wanted to join up with them. Because I was a levelled zombie and most of their players were newbs I got promoted fast into one of the five raid leaders.

They had a private internet forum that updated similarly to an IRC. This made it easy to organize; we were even more organized than the best human groups. Every evening a raid target was posted, and a countdown, and we would all go knock on the door at once. It might take 30 AP to break down a barricade but when each of 70 raider-zombies donates one AP, you're inside and munching brains in three seconds.

I was part of the Bean squad (i.e. we were in charge of inventing crazy new stuff that might or might not work). Our best invention was parachuting. We would go stand in revive points, and get revived as humans. Then we would go scrounge for shotguns and ammo. Shortly before the night's raid, we would go inside the target building. Then as the raid unfolded, we would shoot every logged-on human who was active in repairing the barricades or shooting at our zombie friends

We got to be such a nuisance that the humans started graffiti-ing all over the city NOT to revive our characters.

Eventually we turned our undead eyes to Caiger, whose population had swelled because all the people from the malls we had already trashed had fled to Caiger, hoping its magical aura of invincibility would protect them.

An epic siege ensued. We organized about 400 ferals to raid at a given time each day (thus hopefully distracting the feral humans) while we had Shacknews proper raid (about 100 members by this point) at a secret time, different each evening. Even though we had been in the game for a month and were obviously the greatest zombie threat, I guess no human had successfully infiltrated onto the Shacknews boards, because we were able to keep our raids secret.

Of course when you are using 100 zombies a night to raid a mall where 2000+ people are sleeping, there is inertia on the side of the humans. We had another trick up our sleeves though - we had certain low-profile zombies station themselves in the revive point line, where they could see which humans were doing most of the revive work. This info was communicated via the forums. So each night when we broke in, we focused on killing the revive team.

After about a week we saw results. The humans started running low on cure needles and the revive point line got longer and longer. The human radio broadcasts started to get a note of panic in them, and one of our guys set up a radio station that the humans could never find and started broadcasting as the zombie Tokyo Rose. Generally by playing this song at them:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjMiDZIY1bM

Anyway long story short, after a few weeks we had one big raid and - we were amazed to see that we had successfully cleared out the mall. Caiger Mall, which had stood as a human bastion uninterrupted for more than a year, was in zombie hands. We ransacked and trashed the place so that humans could not return as long as zombies roamed the aisles.

Then, having sacked every mall in the game, we went to the Brain Museum and logged off forever. It was awesome

Sadly the game has gradually wound down over the years (I quit in 2006), and now has a quarter of the population it once had, which makes the streets look really deserted to my eyes.





When I was reading the EVE story I kept rooting for the Goons to win. They were more creative and inventive, they were better at PVP, and at least they took risks and tried to attack. As the author noted, that made the game more exciting for EVERYONE, with lots of territory changing hands, massive speculation over resource prices, etc.

Being part of a REALLY well coordinated PVP raid team is one of the most fun experiences in an online game.

That song is really good lol

[Sarah Palin]

Yeah it's the same guy who did the end song for Portal. When I played Portal I was like "Hey isn't this that guy?" and it was!

There are a ton more stories like that, eve really does have just the most interesting political spectrum of any game ive ever seen tbh.

Yeah, and as you mentioned, SA Goons lost their in-game corporation to the exact same trick, a year later (this spring). Their CEO got involved in some forum drama so he went "f*** it," withdrew all the cash and assets to his character's account and booted everyone else.

I also read about the Guild "hit" where mercenaries were contracted to infiltrate people into a guy's corp for almost a year, then on a signal they stole EVERYTHING from his corporation, ambushed his flagship and shot down his escape pod.

On the one hand I really like that there is real PVP conflict, politics, intrigue, instead of the lame gameplay of World of Warcraft which has never appealed to me (cooperate with 30 other people to defeat an "instance" of a boss monster?).

On the OTHER hand, there are a lot of out of game factors affecting the game that I don't like.

Like people mixing their alts - the Goon heist would not have even been possible except they approached a guy who happened to have an alt in BOB. When I played Urban Dead, coordinating alt characters was a SERIOUSLY frowned upon offense, dunno how it is in other mumorpuguhs.

The other thing I don't like, is how "virtual possession" can make large amounts of assets change hands in an instant. Essentially enabling the Goon heist, or a year later the Goon CEO's tantrum.

If this really is lawless space then I would suppose possession is 9/10ths of the law. If I want to give you spaceships I have to fly them over to your base - which means I have to hire people to fly them, and it means pirates or PVPers could ambush us if we don't defend ourselves properly, etc.

[tyr]

Originally Posted by Sarah Palin

The other thing I don't like, is how "virtual possession" can make large amounts of assets change hands in an instant. Essentially enabling the Goon heist, or a year later the Goon CEO's tantrum.

It's not only virtual actually.
The assets an alliance like the Goons used to have, or some other big alliance like IT, AAA or Atlas have today represents easily tens (if not hundreds) of thousands US dollars.

Some people even "work" EVE.
They have a few accounts and play them all at the same time and like go mine with all of them with extremely precise schedules and stuff to maximize their income, and then they just sell the minerals and then sell the in-game money to the gold-selling sites.
It works pretty well for people who know what they're doing.

[asparagus]

im gona get the trial of eve how long does it take to download?

[Sarah Palin]

Originally Posted by tyr

It's not only virtual actually.
The assets an alliance like the Goons used to have, or some other big alliance like IT, AAA or Atlas have today represents easily tens (if not hundreds) of thousands US dollars.

Some people even "work" EVE.
They have a few accounts and play them all at the same time and like go mine with all of them with extremely precise schedules and stuff to maximize their income, and then they just sell the minerals and then sell the in-game money to the gold-selling sites.
It works pretty well for people who know what they're doing.

Yeesh, that's scummy.

I guess that's the price of a big MMO. I wish someone would invent a fun easy HTML mumorpuguh.

[CCN]

Parachuting, killing other humans, seems like it would be against the rules, and if not is at best against the spirit of the game and super gay.

[Sarah Palin]

Originally Posted by CCN

Parachuting, killing other humans, seems like it would be against the rules, and if not is at best against the spirit of the game and super gay.

Not really... the borders between human and zombie were fluid. You could be zombified and revived several times in a week. So player alliances and factions didn't line up perfectly with "alive vs undead."

(this is also something I wish MMOs would do, instead of "Oh hey you're part of Elf Faction, and of course they hate Dwarf Faction, etc.").

There were 4-5 groups, really:

There were "loyal humans" - humans who wanted to stay alive. If involuntarily zombified they stood around in revive points until they were returned to the living.

Similarly there were "loyal zombies" - players who wanted to stay dead. They avoided revives. If someone stuck them with a needle while they were sleeping and they woke up human, their usual response was to jump out of a window into the sweet embrace of undeath.

There were "dual nature" players who were happy to explore both sides of the game depending on what side they were on at the moment. These were players without factions mostly.

There were "PKers" (player killers) who were outlaw humans - shooting other humans to earn XP and notoriety. They were hunted down by loyal humans who circulated "Kill On Sight" lists, especially when the PKers terrorized malls.

Finally there were "zombie spies" - zombies who got revived just to infiltrate human organizations, snoop on human preparation for sieges, or kill humans at the opportune time to help their zedthren. The humans kept a KOS list for these guys as well.

There were "zed killers" who tried to become zombies and kill zombies, but it didn't really work out because it's MUCH easier to kill zombies as a human with guns.

These were all accepted factions in the game. The zombies and PKers actually had a grudging mutual respect, due to both groups disdaining the "easy" playstyle of the loyal humans.

[Kuja900]

So my alliance has moved to 0.0 space (stain region) and I thought I'd share my first 0.0 experience lol. The journey from Amarr (where I was at previously) to Stain is around 65 jumps, thats around 2 hours of manual jumping through hostile territory. Two days ago I tried this and got to within 8 jumps of my destination but I bumped into some faggy romanian gate camp and they popped me, sending me back to where I started 65 jumps out......So late last night I finally mustered the will to try again. Things were going well early on again as the first 50 jumps were relatively unharassed. But then im in Romanian territory again. They were actively harassing migrators and knew our route . Every hostile in every system was looking for people to pop and without constant use of our intel channel for enemy intel I would've been undoubtebly popped. This one Romanian fag plays cat and mouse for me for like an hour and 25m while I hopped planet to planet while his friends were roaming the local gates (like 3 of them). I somehow just went for it and 1 second from one of them locking on to me and warp scrambling me I escaped into the next system and it was just 4 clear jumps from there.

[Kuja900]

Just bumping this real quick to show you all what happened to my alliance that my corp has now left:

http://evemaps.dotlan.net/alliance/Z.E.R.G/stats

check the member count lol