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How Eve Online went to the edge of apocalypse and back
- vog 11y agoCould anyone tl;dr that? I guess those "The long read" articles are not for me. That one is a very long article with almost no visible structure. It only has paragraphs, but no sections, summary, or anything like that.
- Andrenid 11y agoTL;DR - Eve Online went to the edge of apocalypse and back.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ghshephard 11y agoIt's a medium read at 5,000 words. Took me about 10 minutes to read, and even a slow reader should get through it in about 15-20 minutes. It's an excellent review of the history, mechanics, people, and themes associated with Eve Online. Worth the 20 minutes of your time if you have interest in online communities, and aren't already well versed in Eve. Might be and interesting read for people who are well versed in Eve anyways.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- alexc05 11y agoI actually started reading it, but was rather bored with it quite quickly. It just didn't appeal to me. I do however, greatly respect the HN community and if this was interesting enough to get to the front page, I found myself curious as to the reason it got a significant number of upvotes. "Edge of Apocolypse" is VERY hyperbolic and meaningless, but the TLDR; that was eventually posted at the very least satisfied my "curiosity gap" I for one am thankful that the TLDR has been posted.
- gr3yh47 11y agotl;dr: Someone got betrayed by an ingame friend and lost approximately 10K pounds (real money) worth of virtual assets. Players were pissed the developer didn't do anything, and 500 people left the game over it. The game almost collapsed. Then there was a news article about the incident, and 5000 people joined the game.
- vog 11y agoThanks! A straight answer to a straight question. Much appreciated. Sounds like it will be worth the time to read that article.
- codeulike 11y agoAnd, importantly: That incident was way back in 2005 and set a precedent for how the game would be played in future: espionage, counter-espionage, huge complex teams, and battles and sabotages that cause damage to in-game assets with real-world values estimated in the tens of thousands of dollars. edit: see also recent metafilter comment discussing the lengths people go to in espionage/counter espionage in EVE online http://ask.metafilter.com/278002/Are-there-any-hobbyist-espionage-groups#4031599 http://ask.metafilter.com/278002/Are-there-any-hobbyist-espi...
- Squarel 11y agothe metagame in Eve also happens way outside of the null sec areas, figuring out which character is a new incarnation of an old scammer by many hours of internet digging is an entertaining way to spend time while waiting for your wallet to blink, as well as digging deep to find links between people who are setting up loan and bond offerings. Not as much impact on the game as the null sec meta-gaming, but nonetheless it is oddly satisfying when you have had a "feeling" about someone, and then after working with a few others with chat log cross-checking, internet digging, and generally being very suspicious of everything you end up finding the final pieces which put it all together, and (hopefully) put paid to their loan/bond/trading scams (until their next alt pops up).....at which point the whole thing starts over again.
- erikb 11y agoPosts like this are always downvoted but they are very valid. Many people read at a 5 minute break at work. You can't spend 30 minutes on a full blown article in that time frame. So thanks for posting that so I didn't have to take the downvotes! ;)
- lmm 11y agoNo - it's not trying to make a point, it's a history of Eve. It would be like trying to tl;dr Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain.
- hnnewguy 11y ago>It only has paragraphs, but no sections, summary, or anything like that. Almost like a book. I pity the "tl;dr"/buzzfeed generation.
- vog 11y ago> Almost like a book Books do have structure. They have sections, although these are named chapters. They have a summary at the back. Also, many books provide an "Introduction" and/or "Abstract" section (frankly, novels don't have that, but there are more interesting books out there than just novels). > I pity the "tl;dr"/buzzfeed generation Me too. When deciding what to read, I think it's better to filter the article to read by their summary (if they had one), rather than merely by their short, link-baity titles.
- eloff 11y agoI was on my way to being an eve trillionaire once. I hacked the game client to make a network of market arbitrage bots. They had human reflexes and took frequent breaks, ate, slept, even took vacations. I had a quarter trillion isk in assets and cash by the time I was detected and banned. OracleOfJita was my main account. Eve is a pretty crazy game with an insane learning curve. Thanks to being a python veneer over a bunch of network services, it's also very amenable to automation.
- Squarel 11y agoAh, I remember your name cropping up from when I used to do lots of market stuff in eve.
- orf 11y agoI did something similar thing with Python and Guild Wars 2, probably not as advanced though. It would place buy orders for under priced wood logs which were brought very quickly, and then sold them when the market price fluctuated higher. Fifa Ultimate Team is easily gameable as well, the web frontend uses a surprisingly well made API which makes it super simple to automate trading of cards. It was interesting to see how the PS3 and XBox economies differed (a lot). Python is surprisingly awesome for such tasks I find.
- lmm 11y agoPython still lets you get working code faster than anything else; it tends to be less maintainable in the long term / large codebases than something with a stronger compile-time type system, but with this kind of small bot you're likely to completely rewrite it as the API changes rather than wanting to maintain and add features to a codebase.
- eloff 11y agoThis has been my experience with python. When I was younger I wanted the fast out iteration times and speed of coding. Now that I work on a large python project I really miss having a compiler. Go offers a great tradeoff with fast iteration time and good speed of coding while scaling to large teams and codebases well. I actually find the iteration time faster than python because the tests run so much faster.
- FLUX-YOU 11y ago>The most famous of Eve’s players is Alexander Gianturco, alias the Mittani. Ugh. Way to keep a low profile, CIA: http://www.gameranx.com/updates/id/9639/article/glenn-beck-thinks-eve-online-is-a-front-for-the-cia/ http://www.gameranx.com/updates/id/9639/article/glenn-beck-t...
- xelfer 11y agoGreat article. One of the best video game trailers I've ever seen has come from Eve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdfFnTt2UT0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdfFnTt2UT0
- Andrenid 11y agoI will never, ever, ever get sick of watching that video. I played EVE for a fair while, CEO'd a decent sized corp in a major alliance and took part in some of the biggest battles, and had to stop (aka: winning EVE) because "Life™".. but that video makes me want to get back into it SO badly. It's the most insane, addictive, complex, fun, rage-inducing, adrenaline-charging game I've ever played, but it will CONSUME you.
- xenophonf 11y agoEVE looks like how I imagine TradeWars 2002, and considering the countless hours I've sunk into that game, I'm going to stay _VERY_ far away from EVE. (So shiny!)
- sleepybrett 11y agoEve is tradewars with graphics. All the stories that are told about the crazy hijinx in EVE take me back to 2400bps modems and tradewars.
- Squarel 11y agoI love that video. The article was also one of the better articles written about Eve. EDIT: Not as emotive as the "This is Eve" video, but the MoMA exhibition video is also fairly good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGuDUbZIo_o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGuDUbZIo_o
- davidslv 11y agoWow, I've never see that one, it just makes me feel like playing it right now :D
- s_kilk 11y ago
- baldfat 11y agoI always am entertained by Eve Online stories. It is always amazing that months and years of work are thrown into battle and the stories of betrayal and demise are epic. I played in beta for 6 hours and sadly I was done with the game. I am spoiled by RTS and now MOBA were the fun is quick hectic and doesn't require so much patience.
- edem 11y agoThis is a rather old post. I think last year there was a space battle where 70 titans perished: http://www.pcgamer.com/eve-onlines-biggest-ever-battle-trillions-of-isk-in-damages-and-over-70-titans-lost/ http://www.pcgamer.com/eve-onlines-biggest-ever-battle-trill... I don't playe EVE anymore because of the (80% preparation 20% fun) rule but I did nearly everything in the game (trading, mining, pirating, exploring) and it was fun but I don't have the time to do so anymore.
- Squarel 11y agoIt is not an old post, it was published yesterday. I do not play eve anymore because I found myself just sitting in the chat channels, and not even bothering to trade anymore, so now I just hang around in the IRC channels instead.
- LanceH 11y agoWho's spinning the ships?
- Squarel 11y agoA good point! resubs to spin more ships
- edem 11y agoThis is just niggling. The post was published yesterday but the event it describes was almost 10 years ago.
- Squarel 11y agoIf the entire article was about that one incident, I would agree with you. However, the incident is one part of the article, which goes on to describe events up to recently. So yes, if you only read the opening, then this article is old news, and is only about the event. If you read the rest of the article, it is about how Eve and the community have developed over time.
- cjslep 11y ago> [...] Low Security, a more dangerous patch of cosmos where unscrupulous bandits hijack vessels to sell them on for profit. The third, final and most notorious territory is Null Space, the galactic wild west where even the most well-tooled characters live in a state of constant peril. When I played a couple years back, low-sec was considered the most "wild west, dangerous, insecure" space you could be in, even when with fiendlies. It was made no safer due to my participation in FW, so Amarr/Caldari FW fighters could be added to the usual troves of pirates and gate campers. The reasoning was for null sec if you joined a major alliance and stuck to their space, the actual realized danger was no greater than that of high sec. While null and low-sec both don't have CONCORD (NPC police), low-sec was typically teeming to the brim with pirates and gate campers due to the lack of sovereignty and major alliances kicking them out like null-sec has. FW was major fun in low sec, heard they revamped the system, hope it's been revitalized!
- erikb 11y agoThe stories from Eve certainly are awesome. I always feel I want to be part of that, but at the same time I'm also sad that this amount of energy is not put into something more meaningful. The main part is building a huge community right? That you fly around in space ships is secondary at some point. Then why don't people exchange that secondary part with something like organizing free food for homeless people, or building shelters instead of space stations, or making computer cheaper so every school can afford to put one on every desk? *edit: That nobody has to become defensive here: All time spent on that kind of activity is time lost for humanity at all, in my books. It does not mean someone else need to have the same priorities. I can be sad about it without wanting to tell anyone that they need to change their ways. Keep your ways. But allow me to be sad about it.
- Squarel 11y agoPeople can do more than one thing. It is not an either or option. Whilst ingame? They do things like this https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/plex-for-good-philippines-results/ https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/plex-for-good... https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/plex-for-good-nepal/ https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/plex-for-good...
- erikb 11y agoYes, there are people who play the game who decide to spend additional time/energy on positive things. But having a limited number of hours per day and a limited number of days per life I'd say it is either or. The time one invests in killing a CEO in Eve is time that can't be spent helping people in Nepal. And that nobody has to become defensive here: All time spent on that kind of activity is time lost for humanity at all, in my books. It does not mean someone else need to have the same priorities. I can be sad about it without wanting to tell anyone that they need to change their ways. Keep your ways. But allow me to be sad about it.
- Squarel 11y agoApologies if it came over as defensive, that was not the intention at all.
- larzang 11y agoIt's extremely odd that the article completely fails to mention the real apocalypse that almost broke Eve, and was the real motivator for the establishment of the CSM years before the Summer of Rage: staff cheating. In an MMO, not having staff play the game often leads to a strong disconnect between the company's interpretation of the state of the game and the reality, but in an MMO like Eve where the entire game is built on forging long term interpersonal relationships on a massive scale, having staff play the game can present a great danger too. The most successful of the early 0.0 power alliances was fueled in part by having a developer who revealed his identity to the alliance leadership, funneled limited rare items (blueprints) to them which were used to fund the alliance's growth, and abused their GM powers to threaten other alliances. The revelation was a massive blow to the playerbase's faith in CCP and the CSM was established in large part to increase the transparency and communication between CCP and the playerbase, as some of the foul play was long-suspected but the concerns unheeded.
- Squarel 11y agoIt is odd that they didnt mention the T20 incident, but, I guess they went for the more well known incidents, and the GHSC and Summer of Rage are more well known outside eve, when compared to say, the T20 scandal or the 4 year unfixed duping bug which resulted in quite a lot of the T2 items in existence being there because of duping.
- tinfoilman 11y agoThe T20 incident was massive but I would like to make make some points. T20 never gave bob the t2s he keep them in RKK yes RKK was in bob and one of the original 4(5) depending on how you look at it. Originally he just rented them to bob for a cut via his corp (which was very common in bob to share Tech). Yes Bob got access to some T2s they might not have otherwise but in no way is it the reason that bob got where they were in the EvE world. In the upper levels of bob (I cannot say 100% as I only spoke to those in my corp) people were not aware until the incident broke. A few people in his corp knew based on the originally leaked emails. I think CCP did mess up by not removing the T2 BPOs and being slow to deal with the issue but that is not what we talking about now That being said you say "abused their GM powers to threaten other alliances." I have never seen this claimed or proven, I would be very interested if you can show me anything on this. T20 was never fired from CPP, the idea he was threatening alliances based on his job(GM powers) would have been instance dismissal On a side note, the T2 lottery had meant that it was very possible he did have these BPOs. I had one friend have 3 alts, 15 research agents and he himself got 2-3 T2 ship BPOs and 10+ items. I got 2 from 1 research agent The worst out of all of it from my point of view was that this derailed BoB and made us look like cheaters. Bottom line is we did not need those T2s to achieve what we did, they did not give us the edge. What gave us the edge was the trust between us all (Band of Brothers) which started to erode with this incendent and was smashed when bob was disbanded over night a few years later. All Hail BoB and SirMolly. the true creators of the political/military structure we see today in eve.
- outworlder 11y ago> It presents a cosmos of 7,500 interconnected star systems Is that counting the Wormhole systems? Don't think so.
- IkmoIkmo 11y agoMight be a tiny bit exaggerated, losing 1% of your subs is no joke... but it wasn't the edge of apocalypse. Eve had 50k users around the time of this event in April 2005. Losing 500 players isn't exactly the end of the world. In fact, despite subs cancelled, the amount of subs never dropped during that time and grew to 100k before year's end. I know there's a bit more context to it but this is just another hyperbolic title to an otherwise fun and interesting article :-/
- technofiend 11y agoNot sure where you got 1% from? The cancellations at the time seemed much higher based on player login rates and I saw much larger numbers bandied about in the press. I played during monocle-gate and during TEST's holding sovereignty down when they lost it all. Login rates went from peaking around 50,000 online at a time (and averaging above 35,000) to about 26,000 today. That's a huge drop. But don't take my word for it, read The Mittani's blog - he was mentioned in the article - https://www.themittani.com/features/graphing-eve-online-history-retribution-kronos https://www.themittani.com/features/graphing-eve-online-hist... - for yourself.
- IkmoIkmo 11y agohttp://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-2.png http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-2.png 500 cancelled in 2005 is 1%. It certainly were more than 500, don't get me wrong, but still the subs rate never dropped and in fact doubled that year. I can't find anything about the loss of players due to that event in the link you sent. But you mentioned monocle-gate... we're talking about two different things here. I'm talking about the 2005 event when 500 players cancelled their sub which the article talks about. Monocle gate was more than half a decade later and not something I said anything about, the article does mention it but not in reference to the article's hyperbolic title which referred to the 2005 event after which, the article said, EVE was on 'the brink of destruction' and 'skirted apocalypse', which I'm disagreeing with. Monocle gate was different, they actually lost significant subs (including myself, for that and other reasons). But even then they didn't skirt apocalypse. Subs didn't drop more than a few percent and they ended the year with more subs than they started. EVE is definitely struggling with online users. But that's a function I think of the game's design and the nature of MMORPGs. Few people play for a decade, and there is an easy character transfer mechanism, and an easy way to buy ISK legally through plexes. In other words, it's relatively easy to buy characters and money nowadays. And when you do train, you may get a sub and just keep it offline to train. The entire entry game and mid game is basically useless for 95% of players. So you get high-end gameplay, which is mostly people who login every now and then to run some builds off a blueprint, fuel a tower, jump drive some freight, or login for a large alliance battle. You can sustain all this gameplay on very few logins. The days of many thousands of people mining, trading by traveling through gates instead of jumping around the universe, new players doing lvl 2-3 missions, piracy and small corp warfare etc are gone. It still exists, of course, but not at the scale it used to. It's too easy to mine & trade & build with fewer ships and in less time, leading to fewer logins, and fewer targets for pirates.
- arkem 11y agoIf this article interested you, keep an eye out for an upcoming book "A History of the Great Empires of Eve Online" http://evehistory.com/ http://evehistory.com/
- golemotron 11y agoThere should be a fanfic about Eve's universe raiding SecondLife or vice-versa.
- vasticles 11y agoIstvaan Shogaatsu ended up in my WoW guild. Never quite realized the magnitude of what he did in Eve (though to be frank, I never bothered to care at the time). What a badass! Thanks for the nice read, OP.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]