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MMORPG: Why did I pass on Eve?
Thu, 09 Feb 2006

Numerous times in the last few weeks it has been asked -- why did I pass on buying into the Eve Online game experience. (An MMORPG for the new is an online game in which you're playing alongside thousands of other real people; often much more involved than single-player or arena games, and often have monthly fee's as a result.)

Quite simple really.. but first the preamble. Eve seems like a pretty good game, in the same sort of way Civilization and Sim City are good games -- theres more to it, and a lot of the game simply comes from what you (and in this case, other players) do. ie: In Civ you can dig into a city and manage its populations jobs and attitude, work over the buildings to suit your strategies, create and alter units, work with technology and religion and economics.. as deep as you want to go. In Eve you can dig quite deeply and live your dreams of a virtual space pirate, a miner, a trader, a union boss and can buy a fleet of ships, customizing them, and wheeling and dealing in the player run economy and product/stock market. Cool stuff, and probably one of the most sophisticated game settings ever. It's even very pretty to look at.

By contrast there is World of Warcraft, a 'wank fantasy' world with Elves and Trolls and mighty-thewed barbarians. As a player you begin with small weapons, skills and wallets, and run around following well defined quests in order to eventually make your character 'level up' into the Smurf-slaying wizard. One doesn't need to say too much, as you can guess what its like. It too is very pretty, with Blizzard's fun art style and a lot of combat. My quick summary is that its a more shallow game than Eve or the heavy pencil-and-paper RPGs such as Dungeons and Dragons or Rolemaster or the like - about as sophisticated as the popular Morrowind computer RPG from a couple years back.

I signed up with WoW, despite my enormous desire to pilot a missile cruiser and assault capital ships in a Battlestar Galactica inspired orgy of destruction :) So, the question again is.. why?

Easy answer: Time.

Time is hard to come by .. at best I'll play a game for 5 minutes every few days (so I chose Space Invaders and Rolling Thunder, I kid you not.) and occasionally a couple of hours when my brain is over-fried from software development and support. EVE is a pretty serious seeming game, and it requires an investment in time in order to play halfway well. WoW is more "pick up and play" -- you can sign in for 10 minutes, play around a bit and perhaps advance a quest a little bit in half an hour, or finish up a couple of quests in a couple of hours, getting a new 'level' for your character with just a couple hours of screwing around.

Both have monthly fees, which I find very intimidating; sure, $15USD is not a huge wad (compare it to going to the movies!), but it is every month.. forever :) WoW strikes me as an unsustainable game -- I'll give it a month or two, maybe even three if I'm really enjoying wandering around the world and exploring at that point.. but I really doubt it can maintain itself in my interest for any length of time. Sure, one can play in the player auction econony or wander around forever, but after how long will I have explored enough to feel I've gotten enough value out of it, but not wish to pay more monthly fees? A finite time. (And if everyone comes to this conclusion.. will it grow and then burst in its own Dot-Bomb? Probably not as there are a lot of twelve year olds :)

EVE on the other hand will have you screwing around for a couple of weeks just to get really started, but it also has the potential to keep you amused for months and months by the sounds of it -- that the game really gets going after you've invested a few months -- that it gets better once you know your way around and have earned some alliances and friends and can start playing in politics or running a corporation instead of just being a grit of sand in one.

So I ended up chosing the game thats more fun right away, for limited long term appeal, over something that really "should" have more time invested. (Though by no means is EVE not fun right away.. it was pretty amusing, though I'd hate to give up after a month or two, having not really 'gotten' anywhere.) (Also note -- Eve is very easy to just dive into and sample -- the client is free to download and you needn't slink up to a FilePlanet-type evil service to get it.)

ie: Specifics.. well, the cons I could mention would be the same as thousands of others, but okay, you asked -- in Eve I found I was getting beaten up a bit in some areas by newbie-killers. Fine and so be it, but it did get a little annoying.. but as a PvP favouring person (player versus player) myself, I can't fault that too much ;) More to point, I ran into these situations while trying to find ore to mine, since that would seem where people spend a lot of their time.. mining ore, which means actual work for the human player -- moving ore from place to place in your ship as it gets inhaled from asteroids. Finding good asteroids took some time (other newbies were clustered like flies around the nearby goods) so you'd be flying around, which also takes time. Learning skills and making enough money to get a good ship with which to inflict orgy levels of combat takes time. The skill system is quite enormous and one of the high points of the game, as you customize your character over real-time -- pick a skill to learn or upgrade, and your character will learn it while you are off or online, a function of real time rather than player time.. a good way to balance skills of people with less game-time than a twelve year old -- but one that requires _real time_. Remember, the currency of MMORPG's is the monthly fee, and so to me any game which requires a lot of time and makes you pay for it is akin to cocain. In Civilization a game might take 6-8 hours to complete, but at least I can do it at my leisure and pay no more or less for the experience.

So thats it -- I chose the weaker game because it could be played to a level of satisfaction in less time .. meaning I could actually enjoy it in cramped time, and it would also cost less to get to that level. After all.. aren't we just paying $x to Y-Happyness over Z time?

I'm sure theres a cool polynomial waiting to happen here.

Edit;

An addendum; with regards to the skill system, which rewards the casual player by not requiring play-time but real-time (at the cost of $$$), it does to some extent punish play-time. Should you really want to just do somethign, theres not likely a quick way for you to do it.. you simply cannot accelerate your skill learning by any meaningful way. Naturally, this does make the game more interesting, since you should involve other players.. ask them to use their blueprints to build you somethign you cannot yet build yourself.

But lets cut to the chase .. the skills progress in real time, so what is the $x/skill-level function? It is well defined exactly how far you can get in terms of skills (abilities) in X time, and you cannot change that.

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