New efforts!

[LaughingAlex]

Eve is an odd bird.  I don't think the player community isn't actually explicitly hostile. To be precise, it is locally inviting but globally problematic.  That's something that would be jarring to a City of Heroes player.  In City of Heroes, there's your friends, your team, your group, your SG, your channel members, and then The Community - the nebulous player community at large.  The Community was relatively tame and usually inviting in City.  That hierarchy doesn't exist in Eve in the same way.  In Eve Online, there are many out of band player communities that are very inviting to new and existing players.  They exist out of game and help players in a meta way: teach them about the game so they can be more successful in-game.  But in-game, its a dog eat dog world where your experience is driven by the corporate culture of your corporation (guild).  Some are casual, many are not.  The largest tend to function very seriously, and casual anything is not encouraged, because of the gaming experience.

I know people who play Eve who are in small groups that have no problems with efficiency or back stabbing.  But if you are looking for some casual fun and want to be surrounded by like-minded individuals, Eve's not that.  Eve players can be very helpful, but there's always the presumption that what you want to do is play Eve as intended: they will help you become strong, efficient, and fit into the corporate structure.  They won't help you if you decide they are doing it wrong and/or you have the right to play the game any way you want.  That attitude will get you a "good luck to you" and leave you to your fate.  That's just how it is.

If you want structure, you want tightly integrated group play, you want people willing to help you pursue efficient and integrated play, Eve's community is very helpful overall.  If you don't, "you can have it your way" is not their motto.  So some people find the community very inviting and helpful, and others don't.  The difference is you have to want what they want.

The way you describe it makes me think somewhat of the dwarf fortress and deus ex communities.  The speed run community also comes to mind.

It seems EVE's community is more about competeting against one another in a variety of ways but encouraging competition to come around.  This is in a way a good thing for a game about competeting against others.  The more a corporation can do to "win" the better, overall.  But winning means nothing without good competition, so they encourage people to join in to compete with and against.  This isn't so much as elitism as friendly competition, a good thing in reality, even though that friendly competition may fire a missile at ya in the game.

In the dwarf fortress community, players are actively encouraged to find ways to make bigger and better fortresses at ever increasing risks of failure.  There is no elitistic "you suck!  LEAVE CAUSE YOU SUCK!" mindsets, in fact players welcome newcomers and welcome people to make something bigger and more badass than they.  This is again friendly competition at work.  It's not as cut throat, but it's more about raising the bar as a means to simply see how far one can do.  It's friendly competition in a cooperative sense.

While Eve Online and Dwarf fortress are about bigger, deus ex's community is about beating the games with LESS.  Players encourage attempts with ever increasing limitations to see ingenuity at work, it takes creativity on the players behalf to beat the games without inventory items/augmentations/skills.  Again this is friendly competition/cooperation at work.

And this takes me to the speed running community.  It's all about the fastest runs possible, there is no "this guy is better" and no "you suck get out" or elitism.  It isn't about ego.  It's about simply trying to see how fast a human being or even machine could beat a game.  Numerous categories have been made from tool-assisted to any% and 100%.  Some games even have variations of 100% or any%.  Doom for example, the 100% is "UV-Max", which is 100% kills and 100% secrets.  Nightmare speed runs do not care about %'s due to respawning enemies, and tend to be shorter than UV-max runs.  "Tyson" runs are speed runs in which the fists are the only weapons allowed ect.  But regardless of the game, it's a cooperative competition, it's all about the fastest speeds possible.

[h2o2Cognac]

C'mon 2017!!! I'm rolling the mofo'ing dice here back me up

[Paragon Avenger]

Ok, it is time once again for the weekly update.

Everything is wonderful.  NCSoft has agreed to a lot of the stuff we wanted.  And we agreed to a bunch of stuff that NCSoft wanted.  I can't tell you any specific details, because there is a non-disclosure agreementin place, and I have no idea what I'm talking about.  Talks are still on-going, and we love you.  No really, we love you so much.  Can you come over tonight?  Bring snacks.

[Brigadine]

EVE is one of the most hostile player communities I've ever seen in a 'healthy'** MMO environment. There is a substantial portion which chooses to organize events for the explicit purpose of hunting down miners for the dire offense of daring to play the game in any fashion that doesn't directly involve combat with other players by default.

Setting aside that lovely element, just about every corporation has to be excessively paranoid with their hiring practices, because ANY prospective member might be an infiltrator of some kind.

I mean, if you can get something out of that, more power to you, but the culture at work basically means eventually something bad happens to you or someone around you. If this doesn't happen naturally, eventually someone will decide that you're unfortunate for having so little hostility in your life, and seek to 'help' you with the lack.

** Healthy as in 'in approximately a good space from a fiscal perspective'. There are so many pathologies in EVE, in CCP, and in the surrounding community elements, that I couldn't begin to enumerate.


EDIT: Someone else suggested this might be a joke that I'm responding to. I thought on it. Mused. It's possible. If so, however, it's a fairly weak one, because I've had this conversation quite a few times with other people, so 'meant it seriously' seemed far more plausible to me. Hell, I actually had people leave City for EVE while City was still running citing 'community'. So I dunno.

As someone who played EVE for 3 years the community is unbelievably hostile. I like to look at it as only 30-40 people play the game. They just have thousands of player slaves. IF you aren't the CEO of a mega coalition you literally are not allowed to do half the stuff in that game. Its not teamwork, they just need you to build the bigger blob.

The DEVs literally haven't developed a feature in years for the 99% of their player base. Its all about making the richest 1% and those who control the biggest player blobs happy.

I get enough of the 'haves' and 'have nots' in real life. I don't need to pay $15 to deal with it for fun...

The community says I need to harden the **** up and fallow my slave driving glory hound FC more for fun...

[Surelle]

As someone who played EVE for 3 years the community is unbelievably hostile. I like to look at it as only 30-40 people play the game. They just have thousands of player slaves. IF you aren't the CEO of a mega coalition you literally are not allowed to do half the stuff in that game. Its not teamwork, they just need you to build the bigger blob.

The DEVs literally haven't developed a feature in years for the 99% of their player base. Its all about making the richest 1% and those who control the biggest player blobs happy.

I get enough of the 'haves' and 'have nots' in real life. I don't need to pay $15 to deal with it for fun...

The community says I need to harden the **** up and fallow my slave driving glory hound FC more for fun...

Oh, I don't know.  I played from January, 2007 to 2011, and had six accounts going by the end (and three from the start).  I ran my own casual high-sec corp, was in a separate mining corp, and had another low-sec corp run by another of my characters.  I've played many an open PvP game, and Eve really boils down to a bunch of griefers and gankers who like picking on hapless newbies, just like it is everywhere.

All the big-money scams that go down in Eve only go down because there's somebody out there who's dumb with their isk (in-game currency).  If you use the slightest modicum of common sense, none of that is an issue.  There are enough nice corps (Eve University comes to mind) that actively seek out new players and give them the rundown that you're only an unwitting victim if you really want to be one.

The #1 rule of Eve is:  Don't fly anything you can't afford to lose.  I have done some pretty crazy stuff in newbie ships and shuttles-- especially shuttles!  In four years straight and with all those accounts (and doing things like jumping directly from high sec to zero space right into crazy PvP zones just for fun) I never got shot down in a shuttle, ever, and I am not Miss Coordination in a Cockpit by a long shot, lol.  Parking fighter ships where you're gonna need them, and hauling zero space ore successfully, are more an exercise in "working off-peak" and having a sense of humor than anything. 

And when jerks like Goon (sorry, I can't stand the metagamer zerg mentality) would have their Hulkageddon events and go after innocent miners in high-sec who had no guns on their ships to fight back with, I would infiltrate their Orphanage ganker corp and ruin their fun.   ;D  I'd find out where they were coordinating an attack, bring out an alt account, then go charging into that zone before they got there with that alt, and yell all over the chat that Goon was coming so anybody who wasn't a bot should dock up, or prepare to fight them!  Then the gankers would show up and there'd be no miners left to blow up except a gold farmer here or there, so they couldn't rack up many kills for their contests, ROFL.

I dunno.  What killed Eve for me was really CCP; they're their own worst enemy.  They were part of one corp, Band of Brothers (BoB), and they made blueprints (crafting recipe-type things, if you're not an Eve player) just for BoB that no one else in the game could get.  Then they began working on Incarna, the tacky walking-in-docks 2D crap that was really just a forced beta test for World of Darkness, and left Eve to languish in half-finished/buggy land while they invested all its profits into DUST 514 and WoD.  You can see where those got them.  Monoclegate, and then that idiot Mittani (corp leader for Goon) doing that live fan-fest broadcast across the internet, with the CCP GMs yukking it up beside him on camera....as they literally tried to incite the whole Eve players base to harass an Eve player into committing suicide in real-life....

VOMIT!

Oh yeah, it is so over for me and CCP.

The icing on the cake was that they never did anything much to Mittani, but then when players defaced a real-life Eve statue in CCP's home city, they perma-banned everyone they found out had anything to do with it.

If you want to be disgusted by Eve Online (although there are certainly a proportionately high amount of complete whack jobs that play it, because scamming and abuse are encouraged there), the worst jerks are easily the developers.

[LaughingAlex]

I take back what I said about EVE's community then, they are nothing like the DF/Deus Ex/Speed run communities.

They sound like a bunch of extreme right wing brutes who don't allow any opportunity....

[Remaugen]

Yay Canada:

http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/news/Pages/2016/acquisition-records-supersoldier-james-howlett.aspx

What a wonderfully creative Apr 1st page!

They did good!

[Brigadine]

Oh, I don't know.  I played from January, 2007 to 2011, and had six accounts going by the end (and three from the start).  I ran my own casual high-sec corp, was in a separate mining corp, and had another low-sec corp run by another of my characters.  I've played many an open PvP game, and Eve really boils down to a bunch of griefers and gankers who like picking on hapless newbies, just like it is everywhere.

All the big-money scams that go down in Eve only go down because there's somebody out there who's dumb with their isk (in-game currency).  If you use the slightest modicum of common sense, none of that is an issue.  There are enough nice corps (Eve University comes to mind) that actively seek out new players and give them the rundown that you're only an unwitting victim if you really want to be one.

The #1 rule of Eve is:  Don't fly anything you can't afford to lose.  I have done some pretty crazy stuff in newbie ships and shuttles-- especially shuttles!  In four years straight and with all those accounts (and doing things like jumping directly from high sec to zero space right into crazy PvP zones just for fun) I never got shot down in a shuttle, ever, and I am not Miss Coordination in a Cockpit by a long shot, lol.  Parking fighter ships where you're gonna need them, and hauling zero space ore successfully, are more an exercise in "working off-peak" and having a sense of humor than anything. 

And when jerks like Goon (sorry, I can't stand the metagamer zerg mentality) would have their Hulkageddon events and go after innocent miners in high-sec who had no guns on their ships to fight back with, I would infiltrate their Orphanage ganker corp and ruin their fun.   ;D  I'd find out where they were coordinating an attack, bring out an alt account, then go charging into that zone before they got there with that alt, and yell all over the chat that Goon was coming so anybody who wasn't a bot should dock up, or prepare to fight them!  Then the gankers would show up and there'd be no miners left to blow up except a gold farmer here or there, so they couldn't rack up many kills for their contests, ROFL.

I dunno.  What killed Eve for me was really CCP; they're their own worst enemy.  They were part of one corp, Band of Brothers (BoB), and they made blueprints (crafting recipe-type things, if you're not an Eve player) just for BoB that no one else in the game could get.  Then they began working on Incarna, the tacky walking-in-docks 2D crap that was really just a forced beta test for World of Darkness, and left Eve to languish in half-finished/buggy land while they invested all its profits into DUST 514 and WoD.  You can see where those got them.  Monoclegate, and then that idiot Mittani (corp leader for Goon) doing that live fan-fest broadcast across the internet, with the CCP GMs yukking it up beside him on camera....as they literally tried to incite the whole Eve players base to harass an Eve player into committing suicide in real-life....

VOMIT!

Oh yeah, it is so over for me and CCP.

The icing on the cake was that they never did anything much to Mittani, but then when players defaced a real-life Eve statue in CCP's home city, they perma-banned everyone they found out had anything to do with it.

If you want to be disgusted by Eve Online (although there are certainly a proportionately high amount of complete whack jobs that play it, because scamming and abuse are encouraged there), the worst jerks are easily the developers.

Actually, I got scammed for a few billion on the market. Basically, I purchased an item sold it on the auction house and got nothing. You cant even trust the auction house in this game... That's like buying salvage in CoH in the AH and not being able to pay for it and The GMs not caring

I agree, they cannibalized eve to develop games that they then abandon.

Your experience was probably enhanced by having no less than 3 accounts. Not everyone can afford to do that.

I honestly don't understand how this game still exists.

[Taceus Jiwede]

Actually, I got scammed for a few billion on the market. Basically, I purchased an item sold it on the auction house and got nothing. You cant even trust the auction house in this game... That's like buying salvage in CoH in the AH and not being able to pay for it and The GMs not caring

I agree, they cannibalized eve to develop games that they then abandon.

Your experience was probably enhanced by having no less than 3 accounts. Not everyone can afford to do that.

I honestly don't understand how this game still exists.

The game is an economist wet dream.  And there have been coup's that took years to complete in EVE.  It's just a different kind of game. 

There was once a guy who basically an entire server agreed to betray one time cause he was such a dick.  Don't remember exactly what happened but he is now an enemy of the larget's guilds on the server.  As well as the main NPC faction as well.

Another instance a guy took over a guild, liquidated every single part of it.  And then purchases the biggest, meanest ship in the game.  And began going on a rampage that took basically the whole server to end.

The game is without a doubt ruthless.  But if capitalism and meritocracy are your things.  Its a perfect game for you.  If not.  Probably not the game for you.

[Brigadine]

The game is an economist wet dream.  And there have been coup's that took years to complete in EVE.  It's just a different kind of game. 

There was once a guy who basically an entire server agreed to betray one time cause he was such a dick.  Don't remember exactly what happened but he is now an enemy of the larget's guilds on the server.  As well as the main NPC faction as well.

Another instance a guy took over a guild, liquidated every single part of it.  And then purchases the biggest, meanest ship in the game.  And began going on a rampage that took basically the whole server to end.

The game is without a doubt ruthless.  But if capitalism and meritocracy are your things.  Its a perfect game for you.  If not.  Probably not the game for you.

Its not true capitalism because a handful of people have total control over the money making. There is no way to beat them because they have the biggest blobs. Why don't you go back to the Eve forums, you would get along great with those power tripping elitests.

[Brigadine]

Look how downhill this convo went. I swear Eve does nothing but bring out the worst in people. People can't even talk about it in a civilized manor.

[Arcana]

Look how downhill this convo went. I swear Eve does nothing but bring out the worst in people. People can't even talk about it in a civilized manor.

Unless there was a major culling of the thread I missed, this seems pretty reasonable discourse to me.

[Beltor]

The problem i had with EVE is that it's too much work and not enough fun. I played it for about a year and a half. I was skilled enough in the game to do well, both in game stats and playing skills, but one day i noticed that most of the time it was a booring grind or just stressful. That's when i quit and decided to play offline games while i wait for COH and/or the spiritual sucessors.

[darkgob]

Unless there was a major culling of the thread I missed, this seems pretty reasonable discourse to me.

They're blaming a video game for their own rudeness, which is a pretty impressive feat.

[Brigadine]

They're blaming a video game for their own rudeness, which is a pretty impressive feat.

Uhhhhhh there is reason I don't play anymore,...I'm not mean or rude enough.

[MegaWatt]

Eve is a sandbox, the only problem is some one left the lid off and all the neighborhood cats and dogs crapped in it. it's also not even a game its just a social experiment.....and the argument that it is a meritocracy is false......its a game where the biggest *PANCAKE*ing *Pancake* wins.



now where is my CoH damng it ! *flails about*

[Arcana]

and the argument that it is a meritocracy is false......its a game where the biggest *PANCAKE*ing *Pancake* wins.

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-J0XXIpsKZNo/TWwutLgxYII/AAAAAAAAARI/VPEWv57rLq8/s1600/pancake.jpg

I win.

[Vee]

Its not true capitalism because a handful of people have total control over the money making.

:o

[HorseManDemon]

the biggest *PANCAKE*ing *Pancake* wins!

Personally, I'm more curious as to how one "pancakes" as a verb. Is it simply the act of making pancakes, or is there more to it? Is this a case where ignorance is bliss?  :P

[LadyVamp]

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-J0XXIpsKZNo/TWwutLgxYII/AAAAAAAAARI/VPEWv57rLq8/s1600/pancake.jpg

I win.

'fraid not.  According to Guinness World Records:

"The Co-operative Union Ltd based in Manchester, England, organized the making of a pancake measuring 15.01 m (49 ft 3 in) in diameter and 2.5 cm (1 in) deep at Rochdale, Greater Manchester on August 13, 1994."

But I'm betting yours tastes better.