Posts Tagged ‘Eve Online’

First confession…

My name is Molly.  Inside my dog house I have 5, 284 slippers – none of them matching. I am a slipper thief.  I just happen to like slippers and hey, the people I own already have alot of slippers. In fact they also have 5,284 slippers, and incredibly none of them are matching either.

Back when I was studying television directing they always told us that two things really sells a commercial – baby animals and children.  Now not everyone likes children but nearly everyone likes four legged babies.  And so we start out today’s article with the confession of a slipper thief.

Second confession…

Broken Toys calls the move by EA pictured above as “Exploit that IP my lord…discreetly” (read it here)  If I may be so presumptious as to defend EA for the Briefest of moments by assuming their role..

We confess – we are just trying to make a living here.

As much as I love Broken Toys and everything that Scott Jennings writes, and as humorous as the observation is I found myself saying, “Come on Scott,  the people at EA are just trying to make a living you know?”  Now I might sound suspiciously like a Ferengi when I say “What’s wrong with a little profit?”  However, too often people forget that before anything else a video game be it console or mmo, is about making a profit.   J. Paul Getty once said “Money is only dirty when it is someone else’s”.  It used to be that if you had told the average game designer or gamer that Free to Play would be not just accepted but welcome, that you would be looked at suspiciously in the least and more probably taken behind the barn and shot.  Now Free to play seems to be the wave of the future, at least for the immediate future.   The first mmo I ever played was Ultima Online back when you could say “What is World of Warcraft” and have people reply “I don’t know” without laughing afterwards.   I think the concept of  a strategy game set in Britannia could be a lot of fun…and if it keeps some game designers and publishers in business I am all for it.  After all, the more games that are out there to choose from the better off gamers are.

Third Confession…

First Bill Roper is a nice guy and anyone who doesn’t like that I say so can kiss my posterior.  Cryptic, in the form of Chronomancer issues a State of the Game on February 9, 2010 (you can read it here) Champions Online, ask Cryptic. Cryptic says, “O.K. we confess. We’re not perfect we made a mistake. We are listening to the community. You asked for the next Champions Online expansion free and we are giving it to you.” The “Community” (those not actually playing the game and who have likely never played it because “it’s Cryptic”)  basically say “We don’t care you are still a jerk.” (those still playing the game) say “Thank you for listening.”  The simple fact of the matter is that when Cryptic had problems with their “kitchen sink patch” they explained it.  Players wanted the Revelations expansion fee, and Cryptic said here it is…free.  Like it or not Cryptic is listening to the gaming community.

Fourth Confession…

When Tobold is right, he’s right.  Here is an excerpt from his recent article entitled “Working in Eve for $2 per hour” (you can read the whole article here).

“I would say that EVE has two major gameplay parts, one being a PvP game, and the other being an economic game. With me not being interested in the PvP part, I’m looking mostly at the economic part. And I would say that legal RMT makes the economic part look a lot less attractive. At the start of the game, when your character is still very weak and has no capital to work with, you will earn a lot less than $2 equivalent per hour. Thus the temptation will be great to jump-start yourself with the 300 million ISK or so you get in exchange for one PLEX. Thus if you think of your power in EVE depending on your skill points and your virtual wealth, you end up having bought both for real money. Skills don’t go up from gameplay, but go up with the length of your subscription, thus there is a direct skill points to dollars correlation too.” – Tobold

As much as it may irk Tobold, I couldn’t agree more – he has that part of the game “sussed”.   Hard Core Casual (whom the No Prisoners No Mercy team has admittedly run afoul of on a  previous occasion) had this to say:“The major problem about Tobold writing about EVE is the same one I get accused of when writing about WoW; not playing the game.”  He called this, as you will see “How awfully Keen of you Tobold” and followed that up with, “It’s the Keen kind of entertaining if you know what I mean.”

Oh yes we know exactly what you mean when you say “keen” entertaining as in “Keen” from “Keen and Graevs gaming blog.”

The sort of entertaining that’s interesting, witty, well thought out and all around entertaining.  If I may be so bold, the major problem that Hard Core Casual has about Tobold writing about Eve is the same thing he has about anyone writing about anything…they aren’t him.  In the mean time, dear readers, feel free to jump into the Tobold vs. Hardcore Casual fray – if nothing else it is always entertaining. And to quote someone we once read, when ever we read Hardcore Casual we just have to shake our collective No Prisoners, No Mercy team heads.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

One of the subjects that was suggested by Saylah of Mystic Worlds (and one that I am sure we will end up using) was to have a show were we had another round table discussion about what each of the guests looks for in Star Trek Online (STO) and in Eve Online.  This would, of course, necessitate using guests that have played, one or the other or both. Fortunately we know people (including members of the No Prisoners, No Mercy Team) who fall along all three of the delineations. 

One of the factors in what a gamer looks for  in a new game may very well be not finding it in the last game they played. It was not that long ago that I read an article about marketing mmos that pointed out that when someone leaves your game, you don’t just lose a subscriber, you gain a detractor.  That is certainly true – at least in many cases.  

Sometimes people leave a game because they are bored with it.

However, leaving a game because you are bored with it doesn’t necessarily mean there is something wrong with the game you have left. Perhaps it has run the course of your interest, or you just don’t feel like leveling up yet another alt. “Bored” can come in several shades of meaning where games are concerned.  You can be bored with a game mechanic, bored with the content, and bored with the boors.

In Aion Online I left purely because of some of the game mechanics used.  Both Star Trek Online and Aion Online make use of quests that can be repeated.  The difference between the two is that in Star Trek Online not only do the parameters of the quest/mission change, so do the settings themselves.  This is one of the benefits of using instanced content – the setting change be changed every time it is entered. procedural generation can be used, generating content algorithmically rather than manually, creating a level that changes whenever the game needs it to, the player needs it to or both.  Hellgate London made use of this technique extensively to keep content fresh. There is a nice discussion of procedural generation here. In the end, it was because Aion Onlines repeatable quests were about nothing more than “go kill 10 more rats” that bored me to distraction.

Now and then a case presents itelf where the market presents the player with a new opportunity in the same genre.   This, of course, is one of the benefits of competition in the market place – it can, and often does, drive improvements in the product being marketed as the manufacturers of the product vie for both the consumer’s attention and dollars.  A limiting factor in this particular case occurs when the product addresses what is a limited market. Many is the time that a large manufacturer doesn’t address the needs of a smaller market because by definition that market is limited, and in turn limits viability and profitability – and so we have what gamers have come to call the “niche market”.  In this particular case Star Trek Online has an intellectual property (IP) that may very well expand the number of players that are interested in a game with an outer space theme.  Caution should also be taken any time we consider that a given market is only “so big”.  If nothing else, one of the lessons that the success of World of Warcraft taught us is that the market can surprise us by being bigger than our estimation of it.

On rare occasion, as the No Prisoners, No Mercy Team is seeing in the case of Eve Online versus Star Trek Online,  detractors come out of the woodwork, not because they have left a given game, but rather because they still play it.  As I have always said, hell hath no fury like a gamer whose game has been scorned.   Lately we have received an increasing number of spams by individuals who purport to be Eve Online players (they may just be people who simply don’t like us…in that case the line starts to the left, make sure to take a number).  The general nature of the spams (or so I am told – I never check the spam filter, I just hit the “delete” button) when we write about Star Trek Online often turns to those individuals who feel it is necessary to enlighten us as to all that is wrong with STO.  The webmaster tells me that the missives go on to attempt to convince us how much superior one product is over the other, and that a truly unenlightened being wouldn’t dare play a game of which the author of the email does not approve.

I will borrow an analogy from Tobold and say that I don’t like cooked carrots (it changes the flavor). That doesn’t mean the carrot is bad simply because I don’t like the flavor after it is cooked. Likewise there is nothing intrinsically wrong with either Star Trek Online nor Eve Onine.  However, in the case of Eve Online, one of the lessons to be had from games such as Warhammer Online come in to play: Mark Jacobs pointed out that the major game mechanic that embodied the reason for Warhammer Online was the realm versus realm combat.   What I saw, while I was playing the game were the many players who took the path of least resistance and spent their time in scenarios (battlegrounds for all you World of Warcraft players out there).  In the end, no matter how Mythic Entertainment tried to entice players out of the scenarios, they couldn’t control how their customers made use of their product. Likewise the developers at CCP may be incredibly talented, but short of actions that would drive away many of their long time customers there is no way to control the way Eve Online players use their product.  Beau Turkey once wrote an interesting article where he maintained that Eve Online was a pve game (I will try and find the url later).   Even if CCP did want the game to be geared toward pve there is very little that can be done to keep it that way if their customers chose to do otherwise. As a senior producer friend of my said, “gamers will always find the path of least resistance.”

In the end there are many games likeEve Online where the developers either can’t, won’t, or don’t care to even attempt to change the way their product is used.  And that is often where the “bored with the boors” enters the picture.  The odd little side effect of that particular quality, that shade of the word “boredom” comes into play when those individuals who have chosen one path in their pursuit of happiness feel the need to enlighten those “poor souls” who “just don’t understand.”  We often see individuals who have not only been busy hurling handfuls of crap over into our virtual back yard when they see things in a different light than we, but sometimes include their e-peen measuring stick…to which I can only reply, “we’re nuns,and we don’t care about your e-peen”.  I might also add that some of those measuring sticks are very, very small.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

Unfortunately you would have to pay for her to resubscribe first.

You know you are doing something right when the Eve Online pirates, out to destroy everyone else’s good time (and trying to convince themselves it is for the good of the game) put a 25 million isk plus mark on your character…

  Read the rest of this entry »

Normally we don’t like to add fuel to the fire.  After all, as we have said all along there is no such thing as bad publicity, only publicity.  The exception we take is when we see a player or band of players who decide it is necessary to ruin a game for others in order for them to have fun.  And this is about an event in Eve Online that is creation of someone name “Helicity” who admits that it is about being “evil and mean spirited.”  Never the less I am constantly amazed by people who want to be “evil and mean spirited” and expect there to be no backlash.

To fill you all in back some time ago someone organized an event in Eve Online, the point of which was to gather a great number of very cheap ships in order to go out “en masse” and destroy a ship in Eve Online called a “Hulk”.   A hulk is a mining ship that takes a long time to learn to fly and quite a bit of virtual currency to purchase. Now no one here on staff has ever had the misfortune to have their Hulk blown up but that doesn’t stop us from championing a cause.

It took the person who (and we can only surmise the truth of the matter) claims to have organize the event nearly two months to respond. Normally we would have simply posted our response and left it at that.  Then it struck us how ironic it was that someone has organized an event that makes use of one “allowed game mechanic” merely because they are displeased with someone else’s use of other game mechanics – in other words, the organizer of the event doesn’t like the fact that other people don’t play the game to his or her satisfaction so he is going to either make them quit or play the game the wayhe wants.  We might also point out the incongruity of telling us our opinion doesn’t matter than making the effort to come tell us what we think about said opinion.

In short, if the organizer of the event doesn’t like the way other players play Eve Online it is he who should leave the game and leave the adults to their fun.  We will let the response by the person who claims to have organized the event (and here the word “allegedly” fits right in) and Julie’s response speak for themselves:

First a word from the “alleged perpetrator” of the event (sounds kind of like a criminal doesn’t it?):

Helicity Boson says:

December 27, 2009 at 4:40 am

Very classy, calling people that organize suicide ganks “imbeciles”.

Who is the imbecile here? The people playing outlaws that will go above and beyond the law for any sort of financial gain, or the AFK miner that is not even near his ship when he is attacked?

I understand your bias, but I would point out that EVE is marketed as a dark and dangerous place, furthermore, it’s incredibly easy -not- to get ganked while mining.

I organize hulkageddon, but I ALSO have a hulk pilot myself. Simply by being AT my computer when I mine, and observing the local channel and being ready to turn on my tank and/or warp out I have eluded two suicide ganks myself.

We are agitating against players that believe they should make large amounts of ingame money without actually being at their desk and playing the damned game. “But mining is so boring!” Well, that’s CCP’s fault, not ours.

We have destroyed hulks fitted with incredibly expensive faction tanks that would have easily weathered our attack had they been present at the keyboard; and indeed during the first hulkageddon several -active- players handily avoided death at the gankers’ hands.

As far as I can tell, your understandable bias has coloured your words, but it is a mistake to call people names for an activity they pursue within the allowed game mechanics, if that bothers you so much, then it’s just not the game for you. YOUR opinions are meaningless to what the people running the game allow/disallow.

as CCP put it: HTFU, this is now hello kitty online, this is the dark dog-eat-dog world of EVE, this is why we love it, if you can’ t take that sort of heat, then stay out of the kitchen.

And now a response from our own Julie…time to cross a few swords:

December 27, 2009 at 8:41 am 

Here we go gang…time for Julie to sharpen her ruler.

@ Helicity Boson: You are quite correct in that I should not have called “people” who organized the ganks of miners “imbeciles”. I probably should not have inferred you are in imbecile either.

After all, it’s not your fault that it took you this long to respond – we respect the fact that someone with your obvious Neaderthal-like intellect took this long to develop the ability to read. We congratulate you on developing the ability to read and taking a moment to surface to reality long enough to respond nearly two months after your bout of living off the misery of others in a feeble attempt to boost your own sagging ego.

“We have destroyed hulks fitted with incredibly expensive faction tanks…”

Why does this sound suspiciously like Hitler marching in to Poland beaming with pride at the good he has done for the world. What good do you feel you have done the world in getting together a bunch of thugs whose totaled IQ wouldn’t exceed a box of hammers so that they can work off their anger at having to shovel their moms sidewalk and actually having to come up out of the basement when their mom calls time for dinner?

You live in some pathetic fantasy world where you feel the universe rotates around you and you are somehow teaching players a “lesson” when all you are doing is trying to make up for the fact you have an inferiority complex the size of a third world nation.

Finding a way to circumvent game mechanics (for that is all that you have done here) to ruin somebody else’s participation doesn’t do anything other than point how feeble your intellect is, and how Neanderthal-like is your “we be teaching them a lesson boys…get yer ropes, yer hound dogs, and your white hoods…we is gonna have us a hanging” mentality.

Thank you for providing us with the opportunity to personally tell you what a pathetic hunk of anthropomorphic swamp gunk your actions portray you as. Let’s hope you are a much better person in real life – in game you are a waste of skin.

Got anything else to say? I don’t hide behind pseudonyms. Say what you want spell the name right. That’s…

JULIE WHITEFEATHER

I will respect the wishes of our web master and leave comments off for this post. I would like to quote from the original website belonging to the commentor above:

“And there we have it, people blame us criminals and pretend we are not right in the head, but when you look at this… well, i guess we know where the really unhinged types hang around huh? First one to kill julie and bring me her killmail and frozen corpse will get a special prize”

It seems I have touched a nerve when I commented on the whole “Hulkageddon” fiasco.  A bounty out on my character in Eve Online? Heck that is amost worth resubbing.

 

 

We received a newsletter here at No Prisoners, No Mercy – this one was for Eve Online. Now nothing is unusual about that of course.  We are still receiving newsletters from every MMO we have ever played.  The way we look at it is that it’s sort of like joining a cult…once they have you they figure you are always a member.  Or to paraphrase a military phrase “grab them by their disk drives and their bank accounts will follow.”

The difference is that this particular offer actually had one of the No Prisoners, No Mercy team thinking about the offer.  She actually thought about resubscribing…and then she laid down until the feeling went away.  Now what, you might ask, is it that would tempt our own Julie to come back to Eve Online? Isn’t this the woman who has said on several shows that she “just doesn’t have the ovaries to play Eve Online any more?” Isn’t this the same woman who wrote the article “Zen and the Art of Astroid Mining” for Virgin Worlds.Com? The answer, of course, is that it is.

Here is what was so tempting:

As you will hear Tipa talk about on show 52 (it’s been a busy holiday we promise to get show 51 out on early release soon) one of the “big push” game mechanics over at the CCP offices these days has been space exploration…and this space ship is just the ship for it. Here is why in an excerpt from an article by CCP Wrangler:

“The Zephyr is a unique starship design, relying almost entirely on solar winds for sublight propulsion. Super-light sails allow it to ride the torrents of photons streaming through space, and its barebones construction gives it a tiny sensor footprint and almost negligible mass. Originally conceived by the ascetic Intaki polymath Valsas en Dilat as a demonstration of minimalist starship design, it was never intended as a commercial venture. The recent discovery of the uncharted Sleeper Territories and their myriad wormholes has brought the Zephyr new attention – its mass makes it an ideal exploration vessel. Valsas remains adamant that the Zephyr never sees mass production, but at the close of YC111 he authorized the Intaki Syndicate to distribute a single hull, paired to a specialized Prototype Iris Probe Launcher, to every registered capsuleer…And here‘s what makes it unique: It has it‘s own special probe launcher (for wormholes) and Sleeper NPC‘s won‘t shoot it in the same way that all NPCs won’t shoot pods.”

Now it isn’t the thought of shelling out another $20.00 or so to “come back to the fold” that stopped her.  No, thats not it.  There were several determining factors, the first of which was the thought of zooming through Sleeper Space in her brand new ship.  Now while the article by CCP Wrangler says that the Sleeper NPC’s won’t shoot at the ship nothing says that other players won’t – which of course means that they will.  There is nothing that will loose you your wonderful collectible space ship  faster than actually using it.  Now if there was some way to actually participate in the whole pve aspect of Eve Online without getting blown out of space that might be another story. But as any long time Eve Online player will tell you, the only place in Eve Online that is truly safe is inside a space station hanger…in other words no where is safe in Eve Online.

So…as tempting as the Zephyr is, as nice as it might be to sail the solar winds of the Eve Online universe, they still haven’t managed to overpower the siren song that is the draw from Star Trek Online.

*edit byJulie*

If it reached the point where the folks at CCP actually gave a damn about the PvE side of the game I might be tempted to come back. But everything I have seen so far shows that they still have a “hands off/anything goes” attitude and the “walking in stations” has become vaporware, while Cryptic is actually doing it.

Splintered Reality

By Julie Whitefeather

Eve Online fiction

The Story…

Brighde sat across from her grandfather. A warm fire crackled in the background as a cool evening breeze blew across the barren, rubble strewn remnants of what had been one of the largest battlefields of the Caldari-Gellante War. On a distant rise, an aged Caldari shuttle was silhouetted against one of the twin moons of Caldari Prime.

A strand of Brighde’s strawberry blonde hair blew across her cheek, its color a strong contrast to her dark skin. The color of her hair was, in itself, telling of her French heritage on her mother’s side – going all the way back to the human settlement on Tau Ceti, before they became known as the Gallante. Her dark skin on the other hand, that told her of her father’s heritage every time she looked in the mirror. It was a heritage that traced itself across the centuries, long before the human ever came to the place they called “New Eden” The name itself seemed ludicrous to her – New Eden. Some Eden, she thought to herself. After the collapse of the worm hole that brought them here centuries of war and blight flew across the galaxy; racing the progress of the remnants of humanity to what seemed would be their ultimate extinction.

Across from her the fire played a rhythm of light and shadow on her grandfather’s wrinkled face. The crevices of his dark skin, reminded her of the cracks in the dry plain on which they now sat. Her grandfather’s white hair told of an age that belied the sharpness of his mind. Her grandfather was the keeper of the oral traditions and the history of her father’s people. Her grandfather carried with him the history of thousands of years, stretching all the way back to the Oglala Sioux of the original Earth.

Grandfather and granddaughter stared into the fire for some time. The younger of the two broke the silence first…

Read the rest of this entry »

Tommorow’s article today – my fingers are itching to talk about this one, so here is tommorow’s article today:

EA just announced another round of lay offs, and Mythic  sadly is feeling part of the bite of the axe (we hope it isn’t really true) Sort of Ironic as “Broken Toys” (one of our “must read” sites) pointed out considering they just spent $300 million for a Facebook game developer. The particular pause that this gives me thought for is about accessible games – something we discussed with Scott Hartsman on an earlier No Prisoners, No Mercy show.

At the risk of incurring the wrath of thousands, I will use a game that I used to play as an example: Eve Online. 

Anyone who has ever played Eve Online, or attempted to, knows that it has a steep learning curve. So steep, in fact, that generally it requires a requires a team of Sherpa guides to reach the summit (read “master the game”). Now, in the last year or so the good folks at CCP have made strides in this area.  Still, this is the same game that merited hiring a full fledged economist to study it’s virtual economy.  Without any solid knowledge about subscriber numbers, it is at least easy to say the game is successful. It is either a case of a steady stream of new customers replacing the old ones, or keeping their core market happy. If we consider the learning curve with where EA seems to be putting their dollars these days a key word comes to mind…

“Accessibility”

Accessible games are an issue we discussed with Scott Hartsman on a previous No Prisoners No Mercy show. One such application is Farmville (one of those Facebook applications like Mafia Wars). Recently they hit the 60 million users mark. Obviously this doesn’t all translate into cold hard cash, but the investment needed to create such games is (at least as far as Mr. Hartsman indicated) negligible.  Now obviously we aren’t all interested in pretty ponies, virtual farms, or bunnies dancing around with toilet paper (the last being a Rod Serling quote). Still, it seems that the growth market lays more with the accessible games.

All things considered, it leaves me wondering  about games that are developed with such a steep learning curve, and the gamers that play them (considering I was one of them). Why develop or play a game with such a steep learning curve over something that takes the middle road, such as an Everquest or World of Warcraft?  Is it the thrill of playing a game where you can lose everything in a moment? Is it the virtual equivalent of an adrenalin junky? Perhaps instead it is the idea of putting up with the drudgery of staring at mining lasers for hours on end, staring into space watching the game play itself, so that  you can one day proudly announce yourself to be a “captain of  Eve Online Industry”?

A more important lesson in what seems to be a move toward more accessible games should be that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. MMO gamers seem to have a tendency to complain loud and long about those games and developers who don’t cater to their particular whim.  It may certainly be true that these are those gamers who are, as I have described them, the “un-silent minority”.   Aside from a sincere hope that the news EA “released” today isn’t true, I hope the un-silent minority takes the hint to wake up and smell the coffee, as grandma used to say. If the squeeky wheels that are used to getting the most grease keep it up there may come a day that the only online game we have to play will be “My Pretty Pony”

See you online

Julie Whitefeather

There is an old joke that goes like this:

Two men are riding along in a horse and carriage. After a while the horse stops. The man driving the carriage gets out, walks around the front where the horse is.  He looks the horse right in the eye and says, “That’s one.”  With that the two men go riding along until eventually the horse stops again.  The driver gets out, walks around front, shakes a finger at the horse and says, “That’s two”. Eventually the horse stops a third time. With that the driver gets out, stomps around to the front of the carriage and shoots the horse dead.  With that the passenger says “Are you insane? What did you do that for?”  The driver looks at the passenger and simply says…

“That’s one.”

Note: No actually horses were harmed in the telling of this joke.

The point to all this is that there are some games that I want to love playing, but just can’t. Sometimes these games are such that I really do enjoy playing them but there is some factor that make me feel about as welcome as  “skin head” at a bar mitzvah.

Eve online is one of those games.

Despite what some of our learned readers and listeners may insist, pvp in Eve Online is not consensual. Far from it in fact. It was not that long ago I wrote an article for Virgin Worlds called “consenting adults and other Eve Online PvP Myths.”  Now don’t mistake my disappointment for disapproval.  In fact where CCP is concerned it is quite the reverse in my opinion – the devs at CCP are (at least as far as game mechanics are concerned) by far one of the best development teams out there.

The big “But” (no not mine) is this: if there is any game out there in the internet global village that is the equivalent of the lawless wild west, Eve Online is it.  There is very little that the devs at CCP consider against the rules.  Isk selling? Sure, as long as the source is CCP.  Players who scam other players out of months or real time hard work? It’s all part of the game. I can put up with all that, but for me the whole “That’s three” was non-consensual pvp.  And now, it seems, the dung is starting to hit the proverbial fan if only in some small way. Here is a quote from one of my regular reads, The Ancient Gaming Noob (see below). You can read the full article here:

“Gangs of suicide gankers in destroyers have been roving the asteroid belts hunting Hulks for sport.  We just can’t seem to get away from suicide gankers in EVE, no matter  what anybody says.  Some people just find it too much fun.” – The Ancient Gaming Noob 

And here, (in its most recent incarnation) is the source of the angst of which the Ancient Gaming Noob wrote.

Now for those of you who aren’t “in the know” where Eve Online is concerned, a Hulk is what is called a “Tech 2″ ship.  It involves a great deal of time and money to buy or make or both – millions, upon millions of isk. The hitch is this – although you may have heard that ships can be insured in Eve Online, the truth of the matter is that a Tech 2 ship can only be insured for a tiny small fraction of what it costs, including the fittings (which can’t be insured at all). 

Everyone who has ever played Eve Online will tell you, “Don’t fly what you can’t afford to lose.” The problem is, you should at least be safe in high sector space.  There should be some part of the game where you can pve without being killed by players who live off the misery of others. 

There was a time when CCP sais they would take action on this. Here is a statement from an article over at Massively.com from August 2008 (Thanks Michael for the correction):

 ”CCP Fear states: ‘We have been looking at suicide ganking and overall security standing issues, and how these features affect the general landscape of EVE. We are not happy with the current ease of suicide ganking and the relative ‘no hassle’ it has become. In many cases, unsuspecting victims have no chance to escape, nor any help from CONCORD. We want to change this.’” – via Massively.

In the end, not much has changed between when CCP Fear made the statement and this day.  Even if they had, those who are determined enough will find a way around said changes.  As a Hulk pilot myself (at least until about a week ago) between corporate war declarations and threat of suicide ganks perhaps I had found my Hulk a virtual prisoners in space dock once too often.

There will always be players like the imbeciles who organize suicide gankings. Why do they do it? Certainly not for the money, as blowing up someone else’s much more expensive ship, knowing you will lose yours to the “in game police” (called concord) mere moments later only costs you money.  There is a line in the recent Batman movie called “The Dark Knight” where Alfred the Butler (in the personage of the great actor Michael Caine) says “Some men just want to see the world burn.”  The sad truth is that if you get enough gamers together in one place there will always be at least a few assholes out to enjoy themselves by ruining the game for other players.

Now it is at this juncture that some of my readers may point out things like “it’s just a game” and that is true.  But the players who live off the misery of others, especially those who find ways to circumvent game mechanics, have a much more far reaching affect than that. Long run, if enough players leave a game, because of it, those same players could find themselves with no one to prey on but themselves. Eve Online doesn’t have much in the way of competition now, but Star Trek Online is just around the corner (Yes I am fully aware that are some players don’t consider it direct competition).  

However, that is far from what I hope happens

What I hope happens is that the devs at CCP finally take a bit of a firm hand in things (something they are known for NOT doing) and resolve the situation.  PvP is great and I am a big PvP fan – .just so long as both parties participating in it agree to it – And agreeing to it DOESN’T happen simply by logging on to Eve Online.  However, as Michael points out in the comments to this article, if there is anyone who can “Square that particular Circle” CCP can – I just hope it doesn’t take too long.

 See you online,

Julie Whitefeather