Not related to this project, but one of my fondest memories of gaming is playing EVE and sitting on a Vent server with my fellow pilots. Reading about it just makes me nostalgic for those days.
I still remember the heart-pounding moments when I was putting millions of isk on the line in some sketchy engagement I probably had no business getting in. Also, the RP on Eve was top-notch, I recall one point where I was in a dedicated vent channel "voting" on initiatives for the corporation. Good times...
Oh man, these memories! I also has a moment where I prepared my ingame social standing to a point where I was able to steal a huge amount of isk and was able to hide my tracks with alts.
Oh and I had a station container with a massive amount of corpses. Not my preys but rather the dead opossums from the road.
I want my first time experience back from 2002/3 where I started with an Ibis, worked my belt to gain enough for a krestrell because of the additional hardpoints just to get eventually my tristan with an 10wd booster to crack the lightspeed record. What a nice time..
Today I have no time to play it anymore, yet I could fly almost anything and have a lot of isk on the wallet.
In my opinion EVE is the greatest MMO ever created. I've played and enjoyed other MMOs like World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, a few others, but nothing else even comes close to the experience of playing EVE. The very real stakes of losing your ship, cargo, implants, changes the game entirely. Venturing into low/null sec can be genuinely terrifying when you don't know what's on the other side of that warp gate.
And then there's the enormous breadth of gameplay options. You can be a high sec carebear and happily farm asteroids in relative safety or play the market and never even undock. You can live out your fantasy of being a space trucker and pick up contracts in your freighter. You can join a nullsec corp in player controlled space and participate in the absolutely ludicrous (in a good way) nullsec PvP. You can stalk other players in wormholes in your stealth bomber for literal days, popping out and killing them right when they finally think it's safe. The stories that are generated from its sandbox gameplay make it very unique in gaming.
Unfortunately it's also an enormous time sink and I don't play it anymore. If I could play EVE 18 hours a day I probably would, but it's a very difficult game (for me anyway) to play for maybe an hour a day and feel like I made any real progress.
I've never played EVE Online, but that is a not because I don't want to. It's basically the game I dreamed about as a kid. And I know if I play, I will want to win, but you can't win, you can only dominate; by investing lots and lots of time. People say I'm not missing much because it's a spreadsheet in space. Unfortunately that sounds right up my alley. I love games where I can find tiny optimizations and compound them into an unchallengeable force. But if I have the time to build a space empire, I have the time to build a new startup empire in real life, which I don't.
> I will want to win, but you can't win, you can only dominate
It is common for EVE players to refer to quitting as "winning EVE". I won EVE around 7 years ago after falling 800-hours-in-6-months deep into the optimisation black hole you describe and realising it was immensely fun but unsustainable.
Seems to me it's mostly empty space with menus on top.
To me, the essence of video games is that play takes place in an interesting space, where terrain matters and a variety of things occupy it.
It would be trivial to recreate the EVE experience in literally any MMO by just having permadeath. And then most other MMOs would be better than EVE because they actually have worlds with stuff in them.
Or maybe they don't and it's just a thin facade, in which case I simply recommend playing better games.
You're not wrong, you're just not the target audience. It's not for visual thinkers. Eve Online is a spreadsheet simulator in so many ways, but for the people who enjoy those spreadsheets, whether they be market buy/sell prices or times of day that idiots in blinged out ratting ships are playing, that's what keeps them going. The space theme is pretty, but not really the point. The harshness of the universe is the point. The empty expanse is thematically nice but not important to the enjoyment.
As a MUD vet - and recognizing how much MMORPG dynamics borrow back from MUDs - I think it's more about the differences in mechanics and social dynamics than "visual thinking". The interface and interactions are about as abstract and obtuse, and the focus on player-driven events in real time over scripted storylines is similar.
But for me, there are MUDs that are more creative and proactive. Between re-rolling and no-PK MUDs, failure/death often has few or no stakes early in MUDs. Remorts recycle the player base, so on older active servers there experienced players are often in new-character zones. Building mechanics are more open-ended but also not mandatory for success.
EVE always plays more linear and reactive. There are and have been MUDs like that, but it's not monolithic - they aren't the only "non-visual" type of MUD. EVE guides players into corps and other orgs, which by design leads to hierarchical play. A new capsuleer is about even with or less than an NPC to most EVE players. There are few incentives to meaningfully help new players or new characters, outside of making them more useful laborers for your corp. Investing time, effort, and optionally money eventually rewards you as a player, but until then you accomplish and contribute very little.
So I'd say EVE is more for players who want to play the proverbial long game, with winners and losers, and stakes of economy and influence above all others. That's not something that can be pinned on the visuals or the spreadsheet UI. In that sense it's honestly more like Football Manager but with real people as the footballers that get shuffled around and appeased in order to help you win.
There is a lot of empty space in EVE, but there's also a lot of activity. The fact that your empty space can rapidly turn hostile forces you to take a certain approach to gameplay that I've yet to experience in any other game. I used to live in wormhole space, which feels even more empty than regular EVE space as there is no "local chat" listings of people in the same system as you. Corps that live in wormhole space generally just assume that there are cloaked spies everywhere (and they're usually right).
I also don't think permadeath is a reasonable parallel. Your pilot's skills in EVE are not lost on death, and these are required to pilot certain ships as well as gating some other things in game. XP for these skills are simply gained over time from a queue. On death, you respawn as a new clone, retaining all your skills but losing all the physical possessions you had on you at time of death. These have an in-game monetary value, which is where the desire to avoid dying comes from. There are two categories of possession you can lose this way: your ship and everything in/on it (called the fitting), and your implants. Implants augment your skills, and can be rather expensive. Once they are inserted, they cannot be removed without being destroyed, so it's quite common for people to go out and have fun in cheap ships after losing an expensive clone before later reinserting expensive implants again.
I miss EVE too, but I also simply don't have time to give my old characters the justice they deserve anymore.
This. I was there when BoB fell, and despite being on the losing side those weeks of intense battles were _awesome_. That was it, though. Nullsec warfare became a rather tedious grind shortly afterwards, and CCP didn't bother to fix it, instead prefering to focus on microtransactions.
I assume my characters are still sitting in Amamake a decade later, but getting back into a game only to have it feel like a second job? Narh, I prefer playing Civ6 with the missus instead. Most of the people I played with quit anyway.
Yeah all the failed projects that thought they could “just add permadeath”.
One of the amazing things about EVE is that although it looks quite bare at first blush there is an interesting space, where terrain matters and a variety of things occupy it. Far more so than most games because there is an entire player run political layer on top of it all.
The only game that’s really felt as close to a second existence to me has been Ultima Online.
Yes you're missing it. Every item is player made (few exceptions in recent years).
This means if you're a warrior in combat you have a ship with like 20 items that were all hand-made, and to build the ship itself it went through 6 different stages and the raw materials probably changed hands 12 times.
Logistics is everything too. Bad freight logistics loses wars.
> It would be trivial to recreate the EVE experience in literally any MMO by just having permadeath… Am I missing something?
Yes, a few things. Claiming territory and political hierarchy are other missing elements from essentially all other MMO’s. You can claim ownership of territory in Eve. You can then set up an alliance or parent/child relationships between guilds, such that a territory is owned by a group of cooperating guilds. This political hieraechy/network controls who shows up as “red” or attackable. Also you’d need to add full looting of gear on people you defeat, as well as harvesting of their bodies for salvage.
Another aspect missing from other mmo’s is transport logistics. Also the fact that literally every ship, weapon, and piece of ammo is created by players and transported by players with buy and sell orders in a maketplace.
In short, it’s radically and fully different from any other MMO.
You're both right, just for each of your own audiences.
It's the greatest MMO ever for people who appreciate high-stakes play, cutthroat communities, and rewarding significant investments of time over a long period.
And it's a boring, empty, ugly, poorly designed slog for new players who duck in for a two-week trial, connect with nobody, accomplish or witness nothing that's player-driven (because almost all of it happens outside of where new players can even reach), have a terrible or dull first <10 hours, and realize they'd rather play something that frontloads more of the rewarding gameplay and punishes failure less.
I hope we eventually see a truce between developers and server emulators. Emulation really adds something to communities, and in a world where we're losing the public moderation war, private servers seem more and more like the solution for people who don't want to risk harassment.
I remember EVE Online fondly, but I was a pretty casual player. I know this is an educational project, but I wouldn't mind seeing some private servers run some day that lets me experience aspects of the game that never would otherwise.
Emulators don’t always challenge developer profit. Minecraft is incredibly successful because users can play on alternative server implementations (e.g hypixel).
Minecraft sells their own hosted servers called realms that bill monthly [0]. The key difference here might be that it was rolled out well after the game’s release around the 1.5 update [1].
EVE could allow people to run private servers with a licencing fee... that will never happen though because why open things up when you could engage in hostilities instead.
It's pretty much that way for all MMOs, but the "grind" is a huge part of them. And emulators let you dramatically speed that up, get all the rare items (or make your own), etc.
It's not a single player game, you're commenting on what you think Eve is, but it's not that. Eve is the other capsuleers, not the stupid items. Half the good items in the game are nothing, do nothing, and are cheap and readily accessible, Even 'Nude Dancers, Female". Never undock without 'em.
I've played Eve and gave up specifically because of the terrible grind: in skills, in credits, in ships, etc. Yes, there is a lot of emergent gameplay that only surfaces once you're in a big guild, but I never got to experience that because the early-game grind of mining asteroids etc. was so tedious. Eventually I read about the huge armadas and giant wars, but it takes a lot of dedication to get there. It's a lot of players grinding out an entire logistics network...
At an abstract level, that sort of cooperative team-vs-team supply chain building plus faction warfare isn't new either or unique to Eve. Eve's scale is impressive, don't get me wrong, but it's still a lot of grinding.
You suffer from a list of misunderstandings of the game, and that's a shame, because it's a lot more than hi-sec, alone or not. If you spent all your time mining, you were trying to play safe eve which is a game that doesn't exist. "It's only when you lose everything that you're free to do anything", as Cornwallis once said, probably.
War is at your fingertips 24/7, this is the purpose of faction warfare. You didn't see that because you never left high security space. I'm not judging, but I'm also not patting your butt while explaining this either. I was like you at one point.
I think we're talking past one another... I'm not against PvP games or faction warfare, but the grind it takes to be able to meaningfully participate. I didn't WANT to mine or run trade routes ("safe Eve"), but flying out in a noob ship with noob skills and no friends was just suicide. It wasn't so much high-risk, high-reward, it was high-investment-or-get-ganked. The entire economy is designed around the grind, with real-time skills and huge supply chains. Every time I WANTED to do something, I couldn't because I didn't have enough ISK/materials/skills/friends.
I don't want "safety", I want "lack of monotony". They're different things. Eve is like the Foxhole of space games, vs something like Elite Dangerous where even lone-wolf privateers can see meaningful action/combat without much investment.
I would love to play Eve more for the social aspects, but it takes too much time commitment to be able to meaningfully participate unless you join a big guild and they help you up. That's because of the grind.
If an emulator makes the grind much easier (much faster skill progression, higher material drop rates, easier ISK, etc.) I would love to check that out. I'm sure that will also cause communities to be less tight-knit (lower investments in time and social dependence), but that's a tradeoff I'm willing to accept in exchange for being able to experience some of the time-locked parts of Eve...
How can you win if you don't play? <-- Philosophical rhetorical question
I get what you're saying and why you'd feel that way. I'm sure you already know what I'm going to say, and that I disagree because there's a lot of things you're saying that a newbro would say that are not as true as they seem at first glance once you've been going a while.
When I was a kid I used to think about my idols or the people who had things I wanted and it was so inconceivable to think that we're the same people and they they dared to reach for the thing we both wanted. Them being there first made me wrongfully feel like they had something I didn't, when in fact it's been there the whole time and just had to grab for it.
I think we both have some points, and we both have some experiences, but a thing I see a lot of Eve vets doing is badgering the fuck out of a newbro on the internet who just wanted to make a spreadsheets-in-space meme and get some upvotes on r/Eve. I think I'm teetering on the edge of being that guy, and that's counterproductive because I hope some day you come back so some person like myself can show you the finesse of being a digital space-terrorist.
Seriously, if you set up the emulator try out the smart bombs, it's frickin great. Just gonna have to ramp up the imagination without anybody to blow up :/
I’m hopeful that people will realize they’re being (almost literally) milked, emotionally manipulated/gaslit, and unconsensually experimented on by psychologists in these video games as a service. It’s amoral, unethical, and borderline legal.
On one hand, yeah, you're totally right... but on the other hand, isn't that how all periodical/subscription-based entertainment works? TV shows, sporting games, magazines, music, magazines, news, podcasts, gardening, sex... we love our little doses of emotional manipulation, and will pay good money for it :D
I don't know that it's immoral unless it's pushed to the extreme with like pay-to-win gambling (and targeting kids, at that). And heavy-handed censorship (like how China limits game time) isn't great either.
Sometimes these artificial communities are the only meaningful social interactions for some of their players, and having them cooperate on challenges as a team can be good social training (compared to total isolation)...
Same. Also see the subscription scams rampant on walled gardens.
>And heavy-handed censorship
I’m not arguing for censorship, money isn’t speech nor are psychological studies. I think the line is crossed when video game companies bring phd psychologists in house to help design and study game design to drive sales. While I think fomo is a shitty tactic it shouldn’t be illegal. However, if psychologists are collecting data about users and drawing conclusions then not only do the companies need to acquire informed consent the results and data should be required to be published.
Again, video games have been great for socially marginalized people. Lately, these people have become piggy banks for the roaches designing systems with the explicit purpose of maximizing profit, ethics and externalities can be blame shifted elsewhere and guilt can be stifled with extravagant lifestyles.
This was really popular in Ragnarok Online. Some custom servers allowed you to max out immediately and get any item / skill builds you wanted in order to experiment with crazy PVP builds.
Having higher exp and drop rates also makes the game more fun when you don't want to invest hundreds of hours into a game.
It was very eye opening for me as a teen that a lot of mmorpgs lose their appeal once you can max things out. Suddenly they need actually well designed gameplay and story!
Persistence and impermanence are both what make EVE such an immense milestone in gaming. You lose a ship in battle? It's gone forever. Ferrying goods you manufactured out of in-situ resource gathering, and a pirate ganks you at the nullsec gate? You just lost weeks worth of revenue. It's the antithesis to "it's fine I'll respawn". Everything matters, because it only exists due to players. Nothing is a given. It's a real economy with a real society. Man I miss that game.
Yeah :)
I unfortunately don't have the time to put into it because when I played it would completely suck me in. I have too many unfinished projects to not work on!
You'd think it would be the ideal candidate for nft integrations but seems their experiment with minting kill certificates on the tezos chain was short lived...
I'd say two things:
1. Proof to players that game actions are actually permanent instead of something that a server moderator can change at will.
2. A publicly accessible API layer which does not need to be paid for by the developer* that can be used for community-driven plugins & third-party integrations, guild & tournament websites etc.
(1) Unless the server itself is running on the blockchain, which is impractical for anything like Eve, nothing stops the server owner from ignoring what the blockchain says about ownership and changing things at will.
(2) This is just externalizing costs incredibly inefficiently. The blockchain transaction fees will necessarily be greater than the costs of simple database storage, probably by several orders of magnitude based on current implementations. Eve already provides a fairly full-featured API [1], so this would provide little to no benefit at exponentially increased cost.
EVE, no, but you could imagine a game with a mechanic in which players may write and deploy code. Some sort of distributed coordination layer may be the best choice to enable this mechanic. It may make the most sense in that context to store ownership inside the execution environment rather than externally in a database.
What advantage would be gained from distributing the coordination layer? It seems cheaper, more efficient, more performant,you have more control, can enforce game rules and tweak them for fun and fair gameplay more easily, etc. if you do this with centralized control.
It would not, it takes new players months to get to 1 billion in-game currency while it takes veterans logging in for a few minutes to do that. A friend has reached 1 trillion in net worth after playing for 2 years (I only reached 300b before realizing I should grind IRL instead of in-game, but I had an operation that made it somewhat easy to gain 50B/month).
So if I can sell my 50B per month for like $100 or $200 I'd probably do it (because if you're lucky in market speculation you can make way more)
So what about new players? Eve is a zero-sum game. You take resources and other players can't use it anymore. Imagine playing a game that emphasis that you can sell items for real world money but playing for a year would only get you $10 or less.
Eve Online isn't zero-sum, it's a semi-managed economy where resources are balanced by a team of actual economists. The goal of the company isn't perfect economics either- it's about getting as many players as possible.
There are a lot of levers the company can use to move that economy. For base resources they can spawn more resources in easier to access areas, for items they can release more through their NPC traders or increase drop rates.
Even outside of that there are a lot of aspects that aren't zero sum. There are more resources in the game, by far, than are currently mined. As new players enter the game then more resources start flowing through the economy as a result. The only resource that is really limited is territory, but even that has been increased over time (such as when wormholes were introduced).
Wanna go ratting? Oh the BRM tanked because someone else uses the same system.
Wanna go after npc sotiyos? There's a monopoly on them and your alliance probably has deals with the guy involved in RMT
Wanna go hauling? You hunt for public contracts against other haulers or join a private company and someone takes all the lucritive stuff. Or you have to compete to be the hauling company for your null-sec alliance
Wanna manufacture? Someone else started manufacturing the same ship and tanked the market
Wanna do reactions? The index is going up and taxes are eating into your profits because someone started using the same system as you.
Wanna mine r64s? Yeah so do other players. It's a race to get there and the guy multiboxing 30 hulks is hogging it all.
If you want to liquidate an investment you have to becareful with not crashing the market. And then someone else just dumped all their Isogen on the market so your net worth just got a big haircut.
Almost everything other players do are hurting you. Yeah there's unlimited npc missions which give low isk rewards, but for the good stuff there's always competition.
For those of us unfamiliar with the game, would anyone like to summarize what this is, and/or why it's desirable?
Nothing in the Readme, the website, nor the wiki explains what EVEmu actually does, or why anyone would want it done. That, alone, is interesting in a world rife with marketing copy: these developers think their value is self-evident.
It emulates the Eve Online game server, so that in theory you could run a private eve server for yourself/your friends (in practice it's missing large parts of the game so it's not really playable).
Eve is famously a single-server [1] game and doesn't officially allow private servers.
You will have to (and should) look up EVE online yourself, there are litteral books written about it. (check amazon, you can buy 2 History books about EVE.)
Eve is an online game. That means servers and game clients that connect to them.
That also means, if the company shuts down, the game is gone.
Enter: Server emulators.
If a working game server exists in the public domain, someone could run it and run the game client connecting to this server and still play the game.
This reminds me good old times when we all emulate wow servers. I think that today you can't build such a huge community around it because people simply have more money to just pay for official servers.
Nevertheless I deeply admire your effort and skill invested to emulate game servers. Incredible.
I think community run wow servers are just less popular now because of official wow classic. When Blizzard inevitably fucks that up people will go back to community run servers.
Private WoW servers have been alive and well all this time - some of them being pretty massive and mostly for the purpose of playing old expansions (though Classic is slowly going through those now) or to play with less grind or free etc.
I discovered WoW emulators very recently and it is shockingly easy to set up a server. You can go from nil to working in 30 minutes of reading docs, with minimal Linux/MySQL knowledge. AzerothCore seems to be the standout project in this space, though I understand the full lineage is quite long.
As a former CCPer (not on the backend, though I did touch it from time to time and learned a lot from its architecture) this is pretty interesting - is it common for people to make emulated servers for games? I can see why people would want to do it for other games, but what is the motivation for EVE specifically, since it loses a lot of the appeal when you’re not playing with a massive amount of people.
I can understand WoW, because it's sharded and works as a playground for your friends without needing a huge amount of people. Also the game changed so much and people wanted to still experience the older version (something Blizzard recognized)
The most compelling parts of EVE require a pretty high threshold and density of users. Using mods or restricting the number of systems could be interesting though.
At any rate, if you're looking at it for you and your friends, then it's def an achievable goal - The hardest parts about the eve server is the architecture to support such a huge number of people, and it's much simpler without that restriction.
> Guess so? At least for popular ones. Aren't private WoW servers like that? And I know Ragnarok Online had similar servers
Ragnarok Online is a bit of a special case as some of its private servers are actually running leaked server code (versions of the official server "Aegis" have been leaked multiple times, including right when the game left beta) versus open source emulations.
(Did not yet read the publicly stated reason cited above)
As someone who wishes they spent more time playing videogames and just pulled the trigger on an RTX 20 series card in these times of price drops, I was looking forward to trying for the umpteenth time to get into EVE (I've done the Exploration activity as my primary source of income for 6-9 months a long time ago... admittedly a less social activity than most in EVE).
But, looking at the state of the game today, two things (among others) all but dashed my interest: the game's purchase by a big name publisher with a pretty commercial image and the subscription model.
It had not crossed my mind before seeing this submission, but I can see myself humoring a popular community's attempt to erect a private EVE server and play around on it.
EVEmu is an educational project. This means, our primary interest is to learn and teach us and our users more about C++ project development in a large scale
I have tried to play Eve for 2 or 3 weeks. It was terrible.
Nobody talking about the "great wars" on EVE will tell you, but multiaccounting/multiboxing is not only incentivized, but a part of the business model of the game itself. So you can see 50 ships, but it's actually 1 guy spending a lot of money. For what I have seen, these whales are central to the game, as they are the people leading the corporations etc
For the gameplay loop it's either engaging socially with the whole corporate structure, or dealing with the core game which is pretty boring with it's minigames, it's grind and it's spreadsheet-like economy.
Pvp is utterly boring and feels so unresponsive - I think I also had a lag problem (as eve consists of 1 server only, in the us, afaik).
To learn about the game you have to read entire wikis, the missions are terrible, etc
EVE is a very small game (by playerbase, even though it's not a real number because of alt accounts and bots) considering the amount of publicity it gets now and again and the grandeur of it. It's only alive because they have mastered the whole whale-based business model a loooong time ago it seems lol
> Nobody talking about the "great wars" on EVE will tell you, but multiaccounting/multiboxing is not only incentivized, but a part of the business model of the game itself. So you can see 50 ships, but it's actually 1 guy spending a lot of money.
Exactly. Not only you're losing your ship, you're losing it to some guy who runs a scout account, a combat account and a logi account repairing the combat account. Not my idea of group play.
... and that person is probably playing for free* because they're doing profitable null stuff with their fleet. They're buying subscriptions with ingame money, while some poor schmucks pay for those with real money then sell them ingame to cover their losses.
* not that it makes sense economically above a certain income.
I'm sorry that was your experience with EVE. I can totally see how joining certain types of corporation could yield the boring experience you describe. I also agree that the ability/incentive to multibox is a serious flaw in the game.
But I also want to disagree with you as EVE is (was?) enough of a sandbox that it could be enjoyed in many different ways. I've been winning (not playing) EVE for 4-5 years now, but my experiences with EVE PVP were some of the most memorable gaming experiences I've ever had. I owe this to avoiding grinding, large null-sec corps and sovereignty battles as much as possible. 99% of the engagements I participated in had under 50 participants total, with about 75% in the single digits. I almost always flew cheap ships so I never had to grind much- even at my most addicted I was always a casual evening player so had no time for serious grinds.
I flew a lot of frigates- small, fast, delicate ships that took a lot of manual control and quick reflexes to use effectively. I became known as a scout/interceptor pilot, who would fly ahead of the main group, quickly pass intel back to the fleet commander, then engage until the rest of the fleet arrived. I would also do a lot of less formal hunting and dueling, solo or in very small groups. To make money, I would do the "exploration" PVE activity, which involved a lot of travel through wormholes which could send you anywhere across the game's universe. You had to find your way back home through hostile territory, hunted by players for your cargo hold full of valuables.
All these activities involved constant movement, huge bursts of adrenaline and immense satisfaction when your skill and knowledge pays off. The sense of place I felt was also incredible-you really got to know systems as "good and bad neighborhoods" and the habits of various players populating them. I never really cared about progression or building wealth, so I lost a lot, but also won a fair amount and experienced a rush that no game before or since has matched. Some FPS battle royale-type games came close but ultimately were shallower and therefore less satisfying.
Only rarely did I deal with the typical large fleet experience of waiting, following orders and dealing with TIDI (server lag). When one corp I was with started primarily engaging in those kinds of fights, I left them as there were always other groups or individuals interested in the kind of small group content I liked. It's been years for me, but I hope those folks are still out there, whether docked up in Stacmon, camping plexes in Tama, forming a NPSI fleet in NPC nullsec or cloaked up waiting for a ratting super to feel safe again.
Pvp is utterly boring and feels so unresponsive - I think I also had a lag problem (as eve consists of 1 server only, in the us, afaik).
I remember reading devs being able to launch new "shards"/servers for great wars or crowded areas so they have multiple server support at least. I highly doubt it is a single server but I might be wrong
But nevertheless, the gameplay is designed in a way to compensate large amount of lags (like most MMOs, but I would guess even more so in EVE) so I am not sure how much lag would matter unless it is a major spike
I agree with your other points though. I heard "great wars" sucks for people that participated as well. They crawl server timescale down so it can handle that many concurrent players interacting with each other and laggy and chaotic as hell on top of that. They are probably only fun to read about
I've been wondering about private server design. These games mostly use UDP, right? So does that mean the server has to be written in Java or C++? Also does the server need to be very fast, again requiring near-native performance with Java? Seems like inventory management and chat could be simple HTTP API calls, but player movement is a whole different level of complexity.
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Oh and I had a station container with a massive amount of corpses. Not my preys but rather the dead opossums from the road.
I want my first time experience back from 2002/3 where I started with an Ibis, worked my belt to gain enough for a krestrell because of the additional hardpoints just to get eventually my tristan with an 10wd booster to crack the lightspeed record. What a nice time..
Today I have no time to play it anymore, yet I could fly almost anything and have a lot of isk on the wallet.
And then there's the enormous breadth of gameplay options. You can be a high sec carebear and happily farm asteroids in relative safety or play the market and never even undock. You can live out your fantasy of being a space trucker and pick up contracts in your freighter. You can join a nullsec corp in player controlled space and participate in the absolutely ludicrous (in a good way) nullsec PvP. You can stalk other players in wormholes in your stealth bomber for literal days, popping out and killing them right when they finally think it's safe. The stories that are generated from its sandbox gameplay make it very unique in gaming.
Unfortunately it's also an enormous time sink and I don't play it anymore. If I could play EVE 18 hours a day I probably would, but it's a very difficult game (for me anyway) to play for maybe an hour a day and feel like I made any real progress.
I guess it is also what makes it one of the most hardcore games in existence... Right next to OGame
It is common for EVE players to refer to quitting as "winning EVE". I won EVE around 7 years ago after falling 800-hours-in-6-months deep into the optimisation black hole you describe and realising it was immensely fun but unsustainable.
Real life doesn't work that way, you will first have to work 20 years under the previous emperor.
To me, the essence of video games is that play takes place in an interesting space, where terrain matters and a variety of things occupy it.
It would be trivial to recreate the EVE experience in literally any MMO by just having permadeath. And then most other MMOs would be better than EVE because they actually have worlds with stuff in them.
Or maybe they don't and it's just a thin facade, in which case I simply recommend playing better games.
Am I missing something?
As a MUD vet - and recognizing how much MMORPG dynamics borrow back from MUDs - I think it's more about the differences in mechanics and social dynamics than "visual thinking". The interface and interactions are about as abstract and obtuse, and the focus on player-driven events in real time over scripted storylines is similar.
But for me, there are MUDs that are more creative and proactive. Between re-rolling and no-PK MUDs, failure/death often has few or no stakes early in MUDs. Remorts recycle the player base, so on older active servers there experienced players are often in new-character zones. Building mechanics are more open-ended but also not mandatory for success.
EVE always plays more linear and reactive. There are and have been MUDs like that, but it's not monolithic - they aren't the only "non-visual" type of MUD. EVE guides players into corps and other orgs, which by design leads to hierarchical play. A new capsuleer is about even with or less than an NPC to most EVE players. There are few incentives to meaningfully help new players or new characters, outside of making them more useful laborers for your corp. Investing time, effort, and optionally money eventually rewards you as a player, but until then you accomplish and contribute very little.
So I'd say EVE is more for players who want to play the proverbial long game, with winners and losers, and stakes of economy and influence above all others. That's not something that can be pinned on the visuals or the spreadsheet UI. In that sense it's honestly more like Football Manager but with real people as the footballers that get shuffled around and appeased in order to help you win.
I also don't think permadeath is a reasonable parallel. Your pilot's skills in EVE are not lost on death, and these are required to pilot certain ships as well as gating some other things in game. XP for these skills are simply gained over time from a queue. On death, you respawn as a new clone, retaining all your skills but losing all the physical possessions you had on you at time of death. These have an in-game monetary value, which is where the desire to avoid dying comes from. There are two categories of possession you can lose this way: your ship and everything in/on it (called the fitting), and your implants. Implants augment your skills, and can be rather expensive. Once they are inserted, they cannot be removed without being destroyed, so it's quite common for people to go out and have fun in cheap ships after losing an expensive clone before later reinserting expensive implants again.
I miss EVE too, but I also simply don't have time to give my old characters the justice they deserve anymore.
I assume my characters are still sitting in Amamake a decade later, but getting back into a game only to have it feel like a second job? Narh, I prefer playing Civ6 with the missus instead. Most of the people I played with quit anyway.
One of the amazing things about EVE is that although it looks quite bare at first blush there is an interesting space, where terrain matters and a variety of things occupy it. Far more so than most games because there is an entire player run political layer on top of it all.
The only game that’s really felt as close to a second existence to me has been Ultima Online.
This means if you're a warrior in combat you have a ship with like 20 items that were all hand-made, and to build the ship itself it went through 6 different stages and the raw materials probably changed hands 12 times.
Logistics is everything too. Bad freight logistics loses wars.
Yes, a few things. Claiming territory and political hierarchy are other missing elements from essentially all other MMO’s. You can claim ownership of territory in Eve. You can then set up an alliance or parent/child relationships between guilds, such that a territory is owned by a group of cooperating guilds. This political hieraechy/network controls who shows up as “red” or attackable. Also you’d need to add full looting of gear on people you defeat, as well as harvesting of their bodies for salvage.
Another aspect missing from other mmo’s is transport logistics. Also the fact that literally every ship, weapon, and piece of ammo is created by players and transported by players with buy and sell orders in a maketplace.
In short, it’s radically and fully different from any other MMO.
It's the greatest MMO ever for people who appreciate high-stakes play, cutthroat communities, and rewarding significant investments of time over a long period.
And it's a boring, empty, ugly, poorly designed slog for new players who duck in for a two-week trial, connect with nobody, accomplish or witness nothing that's player-driven (because almost all of it happens outside of where new players can even reach), have a terrible or dull first <10 hours, and realize they'd rather play something that frontloads more of the rewarding gameplay and punishes failure less.
I remember EVE Online fondly, but I was a pretty casual player. I know this is an educational project, but I wouldn't mind seeing some private servers run some day that lets me experience aspects of the game that never would otherwise.
[0] https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/realms [1] https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Realms#Minecraft_version_h...
The companies would never allow that.
At an abstract level, that sort of cooperative team-vs-team supply chain building plus faction warfare isn't new either or unique to Eve. Eve's scale is impressive, don't get me wrong, but it's still a lot of grinding.
War is at your fingertips 24/7, this is the purpose of faction warfare. You didn't see that because you never left high security space. I'm not judging, but I'm also not patting your butt while explaining this either. I was like you at one point.
I don't want "safety", I want "lack of monotony". They're different things. Eve is like the Foxhole of space games, vs something like Elite Dangerous where even lone-wolf privateers can see meaningful action/combat without much investment.
I would love to play Eve more for the social aspects, but it takes too much time commitment to be able to meaningfully participate unless you join a big guild and they help you up. That's because of the grind.
If an emulator makes the grind much easier (much faster skill progression, higher material drop rates, easier ISK, etc.) I would love to check that out. I'm sure that will also cause communities to be less tight-knit (lower investments in time and social dependence), but that's a tradeoff I'm willing to accept in exchange for being able to experience some of the time-locked parts of Eve...
I get what you're saying and why you'd feel that way. I'm sure you already know what I'm going to say, and that I disagree because there's a lot of things you're saying that a newbro would say that are not as true as they seem at first glance once you've been going a while.
When I was a kid I used to think about my idols or the people who had things I wanted and it was so inconceivable to think that we're the same people and they they dared to reach for the thing we both wanted. Them being there first made me wrongfully feel like they had something I didn't, when in fact it's been there the whole time and just had to grab for it.
I think we both have some points, and we both have some experiences, but a thing I see a lot of Eve vets doing is badgering the fuck out of a newbro on the internet who just wanted to make a spreadsheets-in-space meme and get some upvotes on r/Eve. I think I'm teetering on the edge of being that guy, and that's counterproductive because I hope some day you come back so some person like myself can show you the finesse of being a digital space-terrorist.
Seriously, if you set up the emulator try out the smart bombs, it's frickin great. Just gonna have to ramp up the imagination without anybody to blow up :/
I don't know that it's immoral unless it's pushed to the extreme with like pay-to-win gambling (and targeting kids, at that). And heavy-handed censorship (like how China limits game time) isn't great either.
Sometimes these artificial communities are the only meaningful social interactions for some of their players, and having them cooperate on challenges as a team can be good social training (compared to total isolation)...
Gacha games have entered chat.
>(and targeting kids, at that)
Same. Also see the subscription scams rampant on walled gardens.
>And heavy-handed censorship
I’m not arguing for censorship, money isn’t speech nor are psychological studies. I think the line is crossed when video game companies bring phd psychologists in house to help design and study game design to drive sales. While I think fomo is a shitty tactic it shouldn’t be illegal. However, if psychologists are collecting data about users and drawing conclusions then not only do the companies need to acquire informed consent the results and data should be required to be published.
Again, video games have been great for socially marginalized people. Lately, these people have become piggy banks for the roaches designing systems with the explicit purpose of maximizing profit, ethics and externalities can be blame shifted elsewhere and guilt can be stifled with extravagant lifestyles.
Having higher exp and drop rates also makes the game more fun when you don't want to invest hundreds of hours into a game.
https://thestackreport.xyz/dashboards/tezos/contracts/KT1WQ1...
(*because it is paid for by transaction fees)
(1) Unless the server itself is running on the blockchain, which is impractical for anything like Eve, nothing stops the server owner from ignoring what the blockchain says about ownership and changing things at will.
(2) This is just externalizing costs incredibly inefficiently. The blockchain transaction fees will necessarily be greater than the costs of simple database storage, probably by several orders of magnitude based on current implementations. Eve already provides a fairly full-featured API [1], so this would provide little to no benefit at exponentially increased cost.
[1] https://esi.evetech.net/ui/
NFT's are a waste of time and the sooner they die out like the digital beanie baby fad they are the better
So if I can sell my 50B per month for like $100 or $200 I'd probably do it (because if you're lucky in market speculation you can make way more)
So what about new players? Eve is a zero-sum game. You take resources and other players can't use it anymore. Imagine playing a game that emphasis that you can sell items for real world money but playing for a year would only get you $10 or less.
There are a lot of levers the company can use to move that economy. For base resources they can spawn more resources in easier to access areas, for items they can release more through their NPC traders or increase drop rates.
Even outside of that there are a lot of aspects that aren't zero sum. There are more resources in the game, by far, than are currently mined. As new players enter the game then more resources start flowing through the economy as a result. The only resource that is really limited is territory, but even that has been increased over time (such as when wormholes were introduced).
Wanna go ratting? Oh the BRM tanked because someone else uses the same system.
Wanna go after npc sotiyos? There's a monopoly on them and your alliance probably has deals with the guy involved in RMT
Wanna go hauling? You hunt for public contracts against other haulers or join a private company and someone takes all the lucritive stuff. Or you have to compete to be the hauling company for your null-sec alliance
Wanna manufacture? Someone else started manufacturing the same ship and tanked the market
Wanna do reactions? The index is going up and taxes are eating into your profits because someone started using the same system as you.
Wanna mine r64s? Yeah so do other players. It's a race to get there and the guy multiboxing 30 hulks is hogging it all.
If you want to liquidate an investment you have to becareful with not crashing the market. And then someone else just dumped all their Isogen on the market so your net worth just got a big haircut.
Almost everything other players do are hurting you. Yeah there's unlimited npc missions which give low isk rewards, but for the good stuff there's always competition.
Nothing in the Readme, the website, nor the wiki explains what EVEmu actually does, or why anyone would want it done. That, alone, is interesting in a world rife with marketing copy: these developers think their value is self-evident.
Eve is famously a single-server [1] game and doesn't officially allow private servers.
[1] outside of China
Eve is an online game. That means servers and game clients that connect to them. That also means, if the company shuts down, the game is gone. Enter: Server emulators. If a working game server exists in the public domain, someone could run it and run the game client connecting to this server and still play the game.
Nevertheless I deeply admire your effort and skill invested to emulate game servers. Incredible.
At any rate, if you're looking at it for you and your friends, then it's def an achievable goal - The hardest parts about the eve server is the architecture to support such a huge number of people, and it's much simpler without that restriction.
Ragnarok Online is a bit of a special case as some of its private servers are actually running leaked server code (versions of the official server "Aegis" have been leaked multiple times, including right when the game left beta) versus open source emulations.
As someone who wishes they spent more time playing videogames and just pulled the trigger on an RTX 20 series card in these times of price drops, I was looking forward to trying for the umpteenth time to get into EVE (I've done the Exploration activity as my primary source of income for 6-9 months a long time ago... admittedly a less social activity than most in EVE).
But, looking at the state of the game today, two things (among others) all but dashed my interest: the game's purchase by a big name publisher with a pretty commercial image and the subscription model.
It had not crossed my mind before seeing this submission, but I can see myself humoring a popular community's attempt to erect a private EVE server and play around on it.
Nobody talking about the "great wars" on EVE will tell you, but multiaccounting/multiboxing is not only incentivized, but a part of the business model of the game itself. So you can see 50 ships, but it's actually 1 guy spending a lot of money. For what I have seen, these whales are central to the game, as they are the people leading the corporations etc
For the gameplay loop it's either engaging socially with the whole corporate structure, or dealing with the core game which is pretty boring with it's minigames, it's grind and it's spreadsheet-like economy.
Pvp is utterly boring and feels so unresponsive - I think I also had a lag problem (as eve consists of 1 server only, in the us, afaik).
To learn about the game you have to read entire wikis, the missions are terrible, etc
EVE is a very small game (by playerbase, even though it's not a real number because of alt accounts and bots) considering the amount of publicity it gets now and again and the grandeur of it. It's only alive because they have mastered the whole whale-based business model a loooong time ago it seems lol
Exactly. Not only you're losing your ship, you're losing it to some guy who runs a scout account, a combat account and a logi account repairing the combat account. Not my idea of group play.
... and that person is probably playing for free* because they're doing profitable null stuff with their fleet. They're buying subscriptions with ingame money, while some poor schmucks pay for those with real money then sell them ingame to cover their losses.
* not that it makes sense economically above a certain income.
But I also want to disagree with you as EVE is (was?) enough of a sandbox that it could be enjoyed in many different ways. I've been winning (not playing) EVE for 4-5 years now, but my experiences with EVE PVP were some of the most memorable gaming experiences I've ever had. I owe this to avoiding grinding, large null-sec corps and sovereignty battles as much as possible. 99% of the engagements I participated in had under 50 participants total, with about 75% in the single digits. I almost always flew cheap ships so I never had to grind much- even at my most addicted I was always a casual evening player so had no time for serious grinds.
I flew a lot of frigates- small, fast, delicate ships that took a lot of manual control and quick reflexes to use effectively. I became known as a scout/interceptor pilot, who would fly ahead of the main group, quickly pass intel back to the fleet commander, then engage until the rest of the fleet arrived. I would also do a lot of less formal hunting and dueling, solo or in very small groups. To make money, I would do the "exploration" PVE activity, which involved a lot of travel through wormholes which could send you anywhere across the game's universe. You had to find your way back home through hostile territory, hunted by players for your cargo hold full of valuables.
All these activities involved constant movement, huge bursts of adrenaline and immense satisfaction when your skill and knowledge pays off. The sense of place I felt was also incredible-you really got to know systems as "good and bad neighborhoods" and the habits of various players populating them. I never really cared about progression or building wealth, so I lost a lot, but also won a fair amount and experienced a rush that no game before or since has matched. Some FPS battle royale-type games came close but ultimately were shallower and therefore less satisfying.
Only rarely did I deal with the typical large fleet experience of waiting, following orders and dealing with TIDI (server lag). When one corp I was with started primarily engaging in those kinds of fights, I left them as there were always other groups or individuals interested in the kind of small group content I liked. It's been years for me, but I hope those folks are still out there, whether docked up in Stacmon, camping plexes in Tama, forming a NPSI fleet in NPC nullsec or cloaked up waiting for a ratting super to feel safe again.
But nevertheless, the gameplay is designed in a way to compensate large amount of lags (like most MMOs, but I would guess even more so in EVE) so I am not sure how much lag would matter unless it is a major spike
I agree with your other points though. I heard "great wars" sucks for people that participated as well. They crawl server timescale down so it can handle that many concurrent players interacting with each other and laggy and chaotic as hell on top of that. They are probably only fun to read about
Also someone linked this, but not sure what is supposed to be done with it. https://files.evesharp.dev/cruc/