Chan's Personal Blog

During my time in academia, there was an astronomical rise in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs); the king of them being World of Warcraft (WoW). It was always tempting to play, but there was no way I could maintain my grades if I got sucked into one of these games, because they're massive time sinks. Part of it was also that everyone I knew was playing WoW, and I hate jumping onto bandwagons as I like going against the mainstream.

Even though I had a self-imposed embargo on not playing MMOGs, I actually did a lot of research into them. I was fascinated by the economies that developed in the games, and how sophisticatedly groups could organize complex strategies, etc. One game that stood out for me was Eve Online; a space game where you fly a ship. It was refreshing to find this game because it wasn't yet another World of Warcraft clone.

There were a few intriguing features in this game.

• One Server - The game has about 200,000 players, and everyone plays in the same universe. Games like WoW has about ~5,000 players per server. In WoW, if your friends played on a different server, you couldn't play with them.
• Death Has A Price - When you destroy an enemy's ship, they lose that ship, for good. In terms of PvP, that's quite something because you can cause serious economic damage to your enemy. In other MMOGs, death doesn't really have huge consequences.
• Player Driven Economy - Everything in the game has to be manufactured by players. This gives rise to a very interesting economic system. Goods don't magically appear in space stations, they have to be transported there and supplied. So, in a war for example, you could squeeze your enemy by cutting off their supplies, by depriving them of resupply ships. Yes, waging economic war is interesting to me.
• Level In Real-time - Normally in games like WoW, if you kill x number of bunnies, you'll level up. Eve takes a different approach. Your character advances by training different skills. Training takes place in real-time, even if you're not logged into the game. So for example, if a skill takes 2 hours to train, then 2 hours later, you'll have that skill.

Fast-forward to now. With a rapidly crumbling social circle, I decided to take the dive and try out Eve Online because I had some time and they offer a 14-day free trial.