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If you want a time sink, learn a new language, start a website, do something productive. Don't play in someone else's sandbox; create your own. The UI is purp

If you want a time sink, learn a new language, start a website, do something productive. Don't play in someone else's sandbox; create your own. The UI is purposely opaque so that automating things is very difficult, and of course in-game automated activity (scripting the UI) is banned by the EULA. That's the opposite of what any hacker naturally wants to do, because it's simply not productive. The interesting aspects of EVE are human aspects: running corporations and alliances, and spying. However, the sheer amount of work to get into a position of authority in a corp or alliance worth being in, and the amount of tedious logistics involved when you are in the leadership, make the exercise overall not worth it.

huhtenberg 14y ago
> If you want a time sink, learn a new language, start a website, do something productive. Don't play in someone else's sandbox; create your own. Awesome. How have I ever not thought about and done any of that.
- harshreality 14y ago
  Sarcasm aside, commercial game sandboxes are designed to get you to do tedious repetitive crap in order to get enough in-game resources to be able to do interesting things. The interesting parts of EVE are not the problem. The problem is the tedious parts. Either you end up grinding in-game to get isk (in-game money), or you pay real money to buy GTCs and sell them in-game to get isk. Once you understand all the aspects of the game, Only PVP remains interesting. The ratio of game tedium (flying around, maintaining any resources you control, finding people to fight, etc) to actual fighting (or market manipulation if you're a trader) is unacceptably high. Let me try to elaborate. In order to get to the point where you can do most things in EVE, you need isk and you need a character ("toon") with a lot of skillpoints. You can convert real money into isk and use isk to buy other people's toons, but you end up spending a significant amount of money one way or another to get a good character. A moderately capable toon might have 50M skillpoints, and might have ten or twenty billion ISK. If $35 60-day GTCs are worth about 500mil (I haven't checked recently, but it's the right order of magnitude), and that toon costs 8 billion, that's $560 worth of GTCs for the toon, and another $700-$1500 in liquid assets for the toon, on top of the $12-$20/mo you pay for the subscription. Or, you can plod along with your own character which will take years to get that much experience. (Toon prices very roughly track the cumulative subscription cost for the time it takes to accumulate that many skillpoints.) When you gain an understanding of most of the game, either you quit, or you keep your subscription going because you think you might want to play again some day though you probably won't, or you get addicted to the corp logistics or PVE grinding aspects of the game, and you mistake that for a fun distraction. Regarding game architecture, although the initial design with stackless python was clever and scaled pretty well into the range of 10s of thousands of users, their overall architecture is horrid. It's stackless python around a small core implemented in C, a MS SQL database that crashes frequently, and a one-solar-system-per-process model that created so many performance problems for fleet fights that they've resorted to "time dilation" (read: slow down fights so the servers can handle it). For the longest time, their SQL database would crash, and their response was "we're failing over to the backup database, it'll be back up in xx minutes", clearly indicating they have no idea what failover or redundancy actually means. Also, be warned that if you do anything even remotely against CCP's interests, you can get banned. That includes downloading leaked EVE "source code", talking about vulnerabilities publicly, or similar kinds of things. They don't tolerate criticism very well.
huggyface 14y ago
If you want a time sink, learn a new language, start a website, do something productive. Don't play in someone else's sandbox; create your own. Or you can get two monitors and have Eve running in one while you do stuff in another. Eve is a rare game that is something distracting when you want it, yet you can productively focus on other work. I can't speak for other people but I am more productive with something like that running.
- harshreality 14y ago
  Doing what, trading? Even if you sit in jita 4-4 all day trading, even if you have market analysis fully automated, it still requires tedious updating of market orders. Nevermind what a pure trader would do with the isk made in playing the market. If you fly ships, you can't do something out of game at a moment's notice without losing ships or getting stranded if you're in a group that moves on in lowsec/null by the time you're back, or pissing people off if you're in a group in highsec doing PVE. A lot of time in EVE is spent moving around. It's approximately one minute per system jump, and that's in highsec (with no scouting). Like so much else in EVE, it's purposely designed to keep people active by requiring tedious participation, rather than allowing things to be automated so that time spent in-game is not tedious. The only thing I know of in EVE that requires no tedious commitment and allows task switching to/from EVE near instantaneously is in-game chat.

huhtenberg 14y ago

> If you want a time sink, learn a new language, start a website, do something productive. Don't play in someone else's sandbox; create your own. Awesome. How have I ever not thought about and done any of that.

harshreality 14y ago
Sarcasm aside, commercial game sandboxes are designed to get you to do tedious repetitive crap in order to get enough in-game resources to be able to do interesting things. The interesting parts of EVE are not the problem. The problem is the tedious parts. Either you end up grinding in-game to get isk (in-game money), or you pay real money to buy GTCs and sell them in-game to get isk. Once you understand all the aspects of the game, Only PVP remains interesting. The ratio of game tedium (flying around, maintaining any resources you control, finding people to fight, etc) to actual fighting (or market manipulation if you're a trader) is unacceptably high. Let me try to elaborate. In order to get to the point where you can do most things in EVE, you need isk and you need a character ("toon") with a lot of skillpoints. You can convert real money into isk and use isk to buy other people's toons, but you end up spending a significant amount of money one way or another to get a good character. A moderately capable toon might have 50M skillpoints, and might have ten or twenty billion ISK. If $35 60-day GTCs are worth about 500mil (I haven't checked recently, but it's the right order of magnitude), and that toon costs 8 billion, that's $560 worth of GTCs for the toon, and another $700-$1500 in liquid assets for the toon, on top of the $12-$20/mo you pay for the subscription. Or, you can plod along with your own character which will take years to get that much experience. (Toon prices very roughly track the cumulative subscription cost for the time it takes to accumulate that many skillpoints.) When you gain an understanding of most of the game, either you quit, or you keep your subscription going because you think you might want to play again some day though you probably won't, or you get addicted to the corp logistics or PVE grinding aspects of the game, and you mistake that for a fun distraction. Regarding game architecture, although the initial design with stackless python was clever and scaled pretty well into the range of 10s of thousands of users, their overall architecture is horrid. It's stackless python around a small core implemented in C, a MS SQL database that crashes frequently, and a one-solar-system-per-process model that created so many performance problems for fleet fights that they've resorted to "time dilation" (read: slow down fights so the servers can handle it). For the longest time, their SQL database would crash, and their response was "we're failing over to the backup database, it'll be back up in xx minutes", clearly indicating they have no idea what failover or redundancy actually means. Also, be warned that if you do anything even remotely against CCP's interests, you can get banned. That includes downloading leaked EVE "source code", talking about vulnerabilities publicly, or similar kinds of things. They don't tolerate criticism very well.

huggyface 14y ago

If you want a time sink, learn a new language, start a website, do something productive. Don't play in someone else's sandbox; create your own. Or you can get two monitors and have Eve running in one while you do stuff in another. Eve is a rare game that is something distracting when you want it, yet you can productively focus on other work. I can't speak for other people but I am more productive with something like that running.

harshreality 14y ago
Doing what, trading? Even if you sit in jita 4-4 all day trading, even if you have market analysis fully automated, it still requires tedious updating of market orders. Nevermind what a pure trader would do with the isk made in playing the market. If you fly ships, you can't do something out of game at a moment's notice without losing ships or getting stranded if you're in a group that moves on in lowsec/null by the time you're back, or pissing people off if you're in a group in highsec doing PVE. A lot of time in EVE is spent moving around. It's approximately one minute per system jump, and that's in highsec (with no scouting). Like so much else in EVE, it's purposely designed to keep people active by requiring tedious participation, rather than allowing things to be automated so that time spent in-game is not tedious. The only thing I know of in EVE that requires no tedious commitment and allows task switching to/from EVE near instantaneously is in-game chat.