Reality in EVE Online: A Rebuttal

I've been thinking about the EVE Online scenarios in a previous post and how a game can be written that offers a similar freedom and fun but with more realism and less of a hardcore gamer element. As I was thinking about this, a lot of "flaws" started to show up in the two scenarios that could be solved by applying more in-game automation and less of a "wild wild west" approach.



For example, take the Ubiqua Seraph assassination. Although many of that corporation's members likely resigned outright in its aftermath, EVE Online supposedly attracted numerous new players because of the "raw realism" of the events that transpired. But how realistic is it that a group of people could infiltrate a relatively small number of high level positions and then essentially liquidate the entire company? This is hardly real-world, and the flaws are largely to do with in-game corporation management.



Look also at the Nightfreeze scam. This is reminiscent of the Bernie Madoff scandal in recent American news. Essentially, a person claims to invest a large amount of money for a group of people but just shuffles it around and takes a big cut for himself, leaving all of the investors with little to no resources remaining.



It has been said that the EVE Online manifestation was realistic, but is that totally true? Not really. For one thing, once the scam was revealed, Bernie Madoff didn't get to keep his money. In the EVE scam Nightfreeze immediately quit the game after handing $300 million to some new player, but that would never happen. If Bernie Madoff killed himself that might be equivalent to "quitting the game" but if he walked up to a McDonald's employee and handed him a cheque for billions it's not likely that the American government would have allowed him to keep it.



So, is it possible to have a more realistic in-game situation that allows full player freedom without being so arbitrarily non-interventionist?