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?

Two Articles about EVE Online

Here's two reasons why EVE Online is one of two MMOs that are truly multiplayer experiences that I have seen (the other, by the way, is Planetside):

Nightfreeze's Great Scam

The Assassination of Ubiqua Seraph

This is exactly the kind of deep player griefing that makes an MMO good. Yes, it kinda sucks that you can get stabbed in the back like that, but the only thing that would be worse is if there were an admin who logged in and undid it.

I played both of these games for a fair bit. I quit Planetside years ago because it is a very player skill intensive game and I simply couldn't put in the hours needed to be as skilled as my adversaries. That's not really a negative reflection on the game itself (other than the fact that there's no such thing as a casual Planetside player).

I quite EVE a few months ago for a few reasons. First, the game doesn't offer sufficient ways to automate mundane tasks. For example, I can't ship goods from point A to point B without doing it myself, and that shit gets B-O-O-O-O-R-I-N-G. And mining - don't get me started. It's basically "click every 30 seconds", if you call that a game. This could be mitigated in a few ways that I've thought of.

Second, there should be more elegant user interfaces for setting up financial or trading automation. The contract system doesn't allow you to automate things like private insurance or banking. I'm not suggesting the game should prevent you from putting up a fake bank or force all players who create a bank to follow certain financial rules. I'm suggesting that you should have some automation capability if you want to set up a bank (real or fake) so depositors could use a nice UI to create accounts with you. Escrow management in the game as it is today is time intensive and inelegant.

Third, the game has a few unrealistic constraints that simply serve to increase effort (I suppose, to increase scarcity). For example, there's no global stock market and no way to see stock prices in other regions. That's an unnecessary restriction that prevents some of the deeper economic richness that the environment should have. Another is the restriction on copying blueprints. That's just silly - you should be able to buy a blueprint from anywhere and immediately copy it to anyone. You could eliminate both of these restrictions, foster a good automated trade network, and the one-hour-a-day players could focus on trading while the 1337 kids could focus on being pirates and stealing automated or player-controlled convoys. Players shipping cheap bulk goods might let them go with limited protection while players shipping expensive items would personally guard them.