I am Joe Blog’s Left Ventricle

The trouble with EVE online.

• It’s a space game with bottlenecks deliberately designed to pack a large number of players into a small area. So you have solar systems with billions of cubic kilometers of space, and all of the players clustered around gates and in stations.
• You can’t interact with planets at all.
• You can only interact with moons by mining them with and orbiting starbase.
• There is only one kind of mining with ships - asteroid mining with mining lasers and it is mind bendingly boring, devoid of challenge and highly unrealistic. Asteroids spawn and grow daily. You float in and mine them. Nothing happens whatsoever, except minerals accrue in your holds.
• It’s a space game with up to 40,000 people online and only a few thousand star systems. Anyone who’s played Frontier knows this is not how space games are supposed to be.
• It’s a space game skewed heavily toward PVP. Yes there is safe space where if you are attacked the friendly police will blow up your attacker, usually before they pop you. But in areas without police protection the advantage lies with attack and attack only. Defence, eg building fortifications is heavily discriminated against by the system. You can build fortifications but there are artificial limitations of where you put them and caps on how strong they can be. Starbases only at moons, one starbase per moon.
• The “safe” non-PVP areas still have several ways where non-consenting PVP can invade them.
• The non-PVP areas have quite limited challenge. The most challenging things in there are generally “Level 4 missions” (how artificial does THAT sound!) which are entirely predictable. Once you have done a certain kind of mission, it is exactly the same the next time you do it. Missions have little to no random element and only a few exist at each level.
• The non-PVP areas do not encompass all aspects of non-PVP play. Level 5 missions are in the most dangerous PVP areas only, and you can only use capital ships in dangerous PVP space. There is no reason for either of these to be true, except purely discrimination against PVE players.
• PVE NPC AI is brainless. Completely. They don’t switch targets once they’ve locked one, so you can “tank” indefinitely without even the moronically simple “agro management” that medieval MMO’s have. They don’t really call in help, they don’t even try to warp away or run - ever - if they are being beaten. All the apparent AI (when they do call in help, for example) is the script of the “missions”.
• As the game is PVP oriented and has different “races” (Yawn!) of human, the developers waste a metric fuckton of time and effort on “balance”. I.E. making each ship type of each of the four races roughly equal in PVP ability to every other race of that ship type. Not only does this eat development resources, it just isn’t realistic or believable. In the real world, sometimes the Ford is better than the GM, and sometimes the other way around. Ships that are “worse” will just end up being cheaper and/or less often used. Ships should only need “rebalancing” when they aren’t used at all. Interestingly totally unused ships aren’t a development priority, they often take many months, even years to be balanced back into play. Why? because they’re wasting time eking out that last 3% of balance with the big, boring racial battleships.
• “Balance” fucks the game up in ship customisation too. You can’t gut a giant freighter and fill it with extra reactors, 30 shield generators and weapons. Why? because you have a maximum of eight high power, eight low power, and eight medium power “slots” to put “modules” into. They have to do this because it’s a PVP game. Don’t be fooled, each ship still has one or two “best” setups, and most other ideas are inferior, but it’s “Balanced” because each race’s “Best” setup is roughly equal in each ship class to every other race’s “best” setup. Yawn!
• It has no real competition. There is no great PVE space MMO. If there was, it would be to EVE as WoW is to Everquest. Why do I say that? 80% of the characters in the game never leave safe, PVE-only space. What do you reckon will happen when someone makes a better PVE space game? That’s right, I would expect that game to get 80% of EVE’s current playerbase, plus probably hundreds of thousands of former EVE players (I read somewhere that the average eve character is 7 months old - eve’s been going for years it must’ve had a lot of turnover by now).

What’s good about it?

• Beautiful graphics, sound and music.
• It’s a space MMO that has SOME PVE content for those of us who derive no enjoyment whatsoever from destroying what other people have worked to build.
• It’s a space MMO!!!
• It’s the only MMO to date which seriously has in-depth tactical and strategic play. You can plan something for literally months, and execute that plan, and profit from it.
• It’s got fabulous PVP play.

What would I rather?

• Masses and masses of procedurally generated content. Millions of stars. Define “mission” types but randomise them heavily each time to produce new play continually. The only thing you need to actually store is things players have done. Everything else, procedurally generated and pretty much infinite.
• Maybe one or two NPC government factions to begin with - say the United Nations and the Empire.
• Build anything anywhere you want, but not within a million km of a planet or moon claimed by the UN or the E (or they blow it up)
• Leave the advantage with fortification. If I deploy a space station in the middle of nowhere, like halfway between two stars, I should be able to put the most ludicrously huge reactors in it, with lots of hydrogen fuel, and masses of shield generators, and the most fuck off weapons you can have. Hundreds of them. I should be able to make it not worth attacking.
• At the same time, if I publish its location I should be able to charge anyone who docks a docking fee, and a small sales tax and broker’s fee for market transactions. Why the hell not?
• Skew the rules toward PVE not PVP. Prove that human nature is not necessarily evil. The EVE guys seem to feel that human nature is proved to be evil by their “sandbox”. Well, I say if you reward attack and not defence, take away the consequences for death, take away any means for player justice, yes all you are left with is a bunch of back-stabbing self serving factions who will kill each other just for fun.

Vanguard is very pleasing on the eye, fun and relaxing to play, almost always rewarding, everybody’s nice… but it’s not overly intellectually stimulating. The most complicated strategy I’ve yet formed goes a little like “as a platemail wearing character, I’m going to go through something like five or six suits of armour before I hit level 50, at which point I’ll probably STILL be looking to upgrade my armour. So I’ll become an armoursmith!” Duh.

Eve is a strategic masterpiece where you can form a 12-month strategy and reap the rewards. Every decision involves maths, tactics, risk and rationalism. I built a small empire of three starbases moon-mining precious minerals to achieve my goals. But it’s cruel, it’s stressful, and it’s full of assholes. You can lose months of what you’ve been playing towards with one silly mistake. Those three starbases? One of them has been destroyed and the moon taken over by pirates already. Meanwhile, with its completely realistic market, Eve is punishing me doubly for my efforts - the price of Technetium is falling. I guess like every other starbase owner out there, I rushed to find moons with these rarer minerals when their prices skyrocketed earlier in the year - and now supply has caught up with demand and the price has gone into freefall. It will probably hit rock bottom and stay there - the motivation to tear down your starbases and abandon your moons just isn’t there. A risky enterprise, hours of fucking around, for no gain whatsoever - except you can finally stop refuelling the damned things.

In Eve, I’ve finally got myself a Carrier. Now I’m a strategic force, ready to enter Zero space with my alliance and help them push our enemies out. The carrier took half a billion isk to build and over a billion in training costs to fly it. That represents months and months of play just to get that much money up, even if the training didn’t take that long in the first place - and it does. I haven’t named the fucking thing yet, it’s still in kit form in a hangar waiting for me to get the pilot over to it - through vicious space infested with our enemies. The least stressful way of doing so is to ship a clone out there and commit suicide. I am seriously considering doing exactly that.

In Vanguard, I just bought myself a pretty little sloop. Her hull is forest green, so I named her the Spirit of the Woods. If I walk near a river or beach and right click the title deeds to the ship in my inventory, the ship appears. If I hit U, I appear on her decks, and if I hit U again standing behind the wheel I can control the ship with the arrow keys. The captain’s training program consisted of typing “how the fuck do I control my ship? :)” into guild chat.

Meanwhile, I currently have two jobs at work. I’ve been promoted, but there’s really nobody to take over my old role. So I’m trying to be a manager (succeeding, for the most part… I think) while still halfassed being a Systems Administrator at the same time. My replacement’s hired but wont start until Nov 12 - at the earliest - he now wants to start as late as Nov 29. Up to seven weeks of shit are ahead therefore - the combined stress load of learning a _completely_ new job on the fly and still trying to do my old one without anywhere near enough time to do it. Last week was the most stressful I remember - I’m pretty sure I’ve got symptoms of high blood pressure.

So what game do I find myself more drawn to? Vanguard… by the time I get home from work these days, if I feel up to looking at a screen at all, I tend to shy away from the high stress option.

Still… there’s a hangar out there with a million tons of metal in it waiting for me…