So instead, lets step back a bit. We’re in general agreement that EVE Online is a game which doesn’t particularly care about “fairness,” it’s closer to real life.

A new player will grind one million ISK worth of ore, and the veteran player who purchased that ore will have the skills and connections to turn a ten million ISK profit by manufacturing parts from that ore. This is the “rich getting richer” with no chance of the new player to catch up.

As a new player, my 10 million ISK ore trawler might be all I have, while the guy who I’m selling the ore to is able to afford ten said ore trawlers.

Sometimes, as these new players with their ore trawlers are harvesting for the safety of 1.0 space, somebody will come in with a tricked out Frigate and they don’t particularly care about losing, and obliterate the trawler. The new player loses everything, the guy in the tricked out Frigate loses the frigate to the 1.0 security forces. He ganker doesn’t care because the Frigate is cheaper and, unlike the new player, he might have several fold more wealth than the new player.

This happens so often that this is what Ganking means in EVE Online. Again, realistic, if not particularly fair.

Now, if you’re fine with “realistic, if not particularly fair,” then that’s all that needs to be said. Many EVE Online players don’t particularly care – they’re just in it for the moment, not to win. Me, I prefer to have a chance to be something more than the established player’s wage slave or pinata to burst.

What imbalances do you think exist that requires any additional regulation, and what regulation do you think is necessary or even useful? From what little I remember, the system works just fine as it is.

I understand skill improvements in EVE are asymptotic, but I wonder how the relationship looks with ISK. Still, though, there are other balancing factors, such as shifting alliances and rebalancing of alliance populations.

EVE could probably do with a bit more “regulation” to provide a more interesting and robust competitive environment (as is true with real capitalist environments), but I suggest this more as a refinement than a fix. This are quibbles, I’m not EVE-bashing.

Oddly enough the fact that the buyer can go on to make more money than me doesn’t bother me a whit when that big chunk of isk goes into my n00bish wallet.

“Despite its skill-training system, it’s definitely not a casual-friendly game, and that annoyed me most of all.”

EVE is extremely casual-friendly. I’m about as casual a player as can be and it fits me to a T.

Not at all. Were I to still be playing Eve (which I am not), and you were just starting, our paths would never cross, because you would wisely be spending your time in 1.0 space learning the interface, acquiring skills, and accumulating assets while I would be elsewhere. There is no benefit to be gained for me to come looking for people in 1.0 space and there is considerable risk. That looks to me like good game design.

Again, Geld says, “However, from the perspective of a, “I play games with an understanding that they’re fair competitions,” it’s not whining, it’s pointing out that this is not the kind of game I’d be interested in playing.”

In 1.0 Space, it’s about as fair as is humanly possible, since almost everyone there is just starting out, just like you would be, and the penalty for aggression from the NPC patrols is an effective deterrent, so one can only presume that is Geldonyetich, yet again, talking out his ass about a game he apparently knows little about.

He says further, “Perhaps, but would a new player be able to gain this kind of understanding implicitly? ”

Perhaps not, but would a new player know implicitly that there is an numerical, although not an insurmountable functional skill gap between him and those who have played longer, or would he simply like the sound of the game and jump in, as many still do? Once the new player becomes more familiar with the game, he can always choose to learn more on the Eve forums, where he can learn as much as he ever would want to know about the game. Even if he never visits the forums at all, Eve allows him to seek his own level in the game. Venture too deep too soon, and you will get burned. Bringing a friend (or a dozen) is a good idea.

Like many games, you can play Eve as casually or as seriously as you wish. But for a casual new player to criticize the game because he can’t compete on an equal footing with an experienced dedicated player is foolishness.

I’m not really sure what CCP could do more in order to accomodate players with different playing styles.

Further, Geld says, “Then there’s the matter of actual asset accumulation – earning ISK. EVE Online is a very good unregulated capitalism simulator in that the rich simply get richer, and the players starting off are pretty much working for them to make sure they stay richer. Those giant offers to buy piles of ore in newbie space are coming right from the pockets of veteran players who can break down the ore and make more profit from it than the newbies can.”

Exactly what is wrong with this? Sounds like a equitable arrangement. The new player is unskilled, and veteran players provide him a market for his raw goods that allows the new player to generate more profit that he would be able to make on his own. Both the new player and the experienced player benefit from the relationship, and as the new player gains experience and becomes established, he can take advantage of the same ecomomies of scale and efficiencies over time. What is you complaint here?

On a different front, Vetarnias says, “Unless a veteran player screwed up his own leveling by failing to level up the learning skills first (unlikely), or that he did not renew his subscription for a few months, there is no way for a new player to catch up with him.”

Numerically, perhaps. Functionally, and for all practical purposes, as IainC points out, within a relatively short period of time, the new players can be roughly equivalent with the more established players, due to diminishing incremental returns on subsequent skill gains, and because you can’t use all skills simultaneously. I may have maxed out energy weapons, and missiles, and slug throwers, and all the classes of ships available, but I can only fly one type ship at a time, and I am limited in the number of weapons I can equip, so the more experienced players can only use a subset of skills at any one time, allowing a new player who has specialized in a small number of skills to start with rough parity.

He ends with, “Then you may want to ask yourself: What is the point, for a latecomer, of wanting to play at all?”

The point is that Eve does permit reasonably safe environments to permit you to develop to the point where you can compete effectively with those who have been playing longer.

If you are a casual player, you never need worry about the giant corporations, and can spend an enjoyable time by yourself or in a small group of like minded friends in areas that are only as risky as you want them to be.

If you are more ambitious, then you can strive to build your own empire. Over time, the functional difference between you and those who have been playing longer will diminish, and eventually become inconsequential, because if you are an effective empire builder, there will develop a synergy between yourself and your partners, and collectively you will be more effective than you are alone. That is how these games work.

If you insist on treating an MMO as a single player game that happens to include an inconveniently large number of other players, then taking on the large corporations may not be your best course of action, but that seems to be the chief criticism of Eve around here, and as criticisms go, it’s one of the more pigheaded ones I’ve heard lately.

Finally, Geldonyetich offers this bit of irrelevance. “Personally, I’m not such a great believer in tradition to find that something which survives is necessarily in an ideal state.”

There is no such thing as an ideal state, and tradition has nothing to do with it, which is the root of your irrelevance. The fact that Eve has survived, prospered even, demonstrates a degree of success that is by no means guaranteed in the MMO industry, as can be seen in a landscape littered with failed MMOs.

Eve is not to everyone’s liking. I don’t care for the ‘ship as a personna’ aspect of Eve, but otherwise, there is a great deal about the game from a design point of view that I admire, and that over time has proved to be very successful. You should be so fortunate as to be as successful as the Eve developers have been.

True, you might be able to do something decent with a relatively new character, but what I hear about is some corporations requiring a skill point threshold of more than six months’ real time, and actually dictating what you should train next.

So don’t join one of those corporations then. There are plenty of others from small family corps to major 0.0 alliances that don’t have those requirements to choose from.

I assume you mean unbalanced in the RvR, as far as WAR is concerned. I don’t recall hearing much about individual imbalance, especially not in PvP, where the game was particularly innovative. Other things seem to have sunk WAR, such as its failure to set itself apart from WoW or the lack of a united community.

EVE’s RvR still seems to be doing well, though it will be something of an anticlimax if the Goons win. I agree, though, that the CCP response to the “Band of Developers” scandal was decent enough to restore trust in the company.

Theres also the fact that you guys are watching this in a battle-for-battle basis, of course that who bringed more ships wins a battle, but if you got a lot of your manpower in one place, it isnt in another, like your territories or, in EVE case, the POS, the things that gives your alliance soverignity over territories.

And thats supposing that both alliances make strategies. But, like in many games, a lot of guilds, or in this case the corps, are not organized, they are just a bunch of guys with an IRC channel and a nametag.

Add to that the fact that any game with the word “PvP” its going to attract the retards of the Internet like flies to the honey(and makes forums even more of a cesspool), and you got a lot of corps without any clue about organization or even solidarity between the members.

Also given the characteristics of the ships in EVE, a large ship its going to have a hard time hitting a smaller ship if the small one its too fast, gets enough close or both. And thats good, because one shot of the large ship could blown apart the small ship in pieces instantly.

The scandal was 2 years ago and after that the CCP guys did have to get their heads outside their asses and make a stronger company policy.

In short, if EVE was truly unbalanced, if it wasnt no way that a new player beat an old one, it would have sunk like WAR.