EVE Online - Why Casual is Difficult when not Consistent

Responding to a post on Ardwulf's Lair about EVE, my comment brought up another topic that I feel is interesting to discuss some more - expanding EVE's passive game via out-of game-web client tools.  You'll see my comment did tie into the original posting and his thoughts of going jumping back into EVE Online.  I didn't derail his post.  *Smile*  I'd like to continue the conversation about what I think will add RTS-like options to EVE Online.

my comment there...

I didn't quite buy Karen's impressions that the antics they pulled in EQ1 were in any way near the possibilities and consequences of what takes place in EVE Online on a daily basis.  Espionage or not, the most you could do was cause guild drama and interrupt encounters.  Pfft.  Every game has guild drama of epic proportions.  That’s old news now and NOTHING – no sort of guild drama in another game can equal the impact of a huge corporation being broken in EVE, unless it leaks into real life and people end up on Cops.  In my mind, the two cannot be compared. 

The drama I witnessed as noob, in a noob corporation that was hit with a war declaration, had people crying on vent and rage quitting.  Not knowing they’d be caught up in a war dec that evening, some players had logged in and gotten their uninsured ships and outdated clones blown to bits.  Miners and PVE players lost everything in seconds – months of work evaporated.  Stupidity on their part for sure, but these are huge losses that can’t be compared with shenanigans pulled in a PVE game.

I think players are more forgiving with EVE because it is a no-holds-barred environment.  There are no rules of conduct and players always test the bounds of games.  You find it in WOW - players stumbling across things the Devs didn't expect and exploiting them, and that's a game on rails.  No one is surprised when that sort of stuff happens in EVE. 

Has CCP been slow to address some things?  Yes.  Have employees been accused of wrongful behavior? Sure.  Here again, EVE is like the wild-wild west.  Players aren't happy when these things occur and the forums going into nuclear disaster mode.  However, it’s much less, ZOMG how on earth...  I think it's a different mindset that you don't get if you haven't played EVE.

As for having the taste to play again, I keep going back myself.  I'm about to kick off another EVE tour so to speak.  The quandary with EVE is that it takes a lot of time just planning what you're going to do let alone executing it.  I love that side of it when it's the only game I'm playing.  But it makes it hard to fit in my schedule when it's not. 

It's difficult to pick EVE up for 30 minutes and do something active when you've been gone for weeks.  When you stay connected to the game it’s much easier to play in casual spurts.  30-minutes of mining, PVE, salvaging, production (crafting), play the market, etc.  However, that is very difficult to do when you leave for long stretches of time.  That’s one of the reasons why over a year ago, I’d posted about hoping CCP would open up aspects of the game to web clients.  You could stay connected without logging in and perform things like skill training, fitting a ship, kicking off production runs, etc. from the Internet.  All the things you do in a hanger could be accessible via a thin web client.  This would make it much easier to jump back in and “do something in your dang ship” when you have the time to log into the actual game. 

I think enabling web client access for the passive activities in EVE will be HUGE win for CCP.  I’ve read that they are looking into these options.  I predict a huge surge in subscriptions when they unveil these options.  It’s going to be the ultimate sort of solo RTS addition/mod for an MMO, if that makes any sense. *Smile*  It would be the first and only MMO to embrace these options and this game is ripe for it. 

You already have a whole segment of the population that is playing a crafting game in EVE because everything is player-made.  You can’t just run up to an NPC and buy equipment.  You have players that are focused on empire building (corporations) and are more engaged in the business side of the game.  Imagine what will be possible if all the passive stuff was offline.  I believe they’ll attract RTS type players who might not be interested in PVP or PVE but will settle into a combination of the other casual (non-combat or flight) opportunities to be had in a game like EVE.  I’m excited to see what this brings to the game.  I fully expect a new type of EVE player to enter the fray for the betterment of the whole game population.  Good stuff.  Exciting stuff.  I can’t wait to watch it unfold.

Whoops – long response.  Going to post on blog to get other’s opinions.  I think this is a good topic.

Comments

[Tipa]

When you open up things in the live to the wider world, you have given the keys to the kingdom to whomever finds them hanging on the hook.

If I had a web based method of performing actions within EVE without logging in, then I guarantee I could write a bot that would do market arbitrage better than a human, who has to sleep sometime. The whole economy would be built around program training -- and those who just played it casually or without automation would be out of their league.

If Player A can do something in a game, you can write a bot to do it better. The only reason EVE isn't just bots is because CCP polices it. Outside the game, would they be able to do that?

[Alysianah aka Saylah]

@Tipa - Well I'm not sure that it matters so much for the casual in-hanger activity. You can only train one skill at a time and only one 1 character at a time. There isn't much to be gained by botting that and now they have the skill queue implemented to help people keep something training at all times.

Based on your skills you're also restricted to the number of production runs for crafting. In the auction market there are restrictions on the number of buy orders you can place. And if you make a bot to buy stuff in your absence not sure anyone needs to care. Your ISK going out the door un-monitored and another player is getting paid.

I don't think there's a lot of things you can exploit about the activity that takes place sitting in your hanger. But I'm sure someone will work on making me a liar. *Smile*
I'm confident that CCP will be very careful. They'll have to be since botters are here to stay.

[mbp]

@Tipa (what is the @ symbol really mean anyway?) , excellent point about botting and the impact on the economy. I imagine EVE's economy could survive it though. The game already automates much of the buying and selling process. There are no instant arbitrage opportunities because low priced sell orders are immediately matched against open buy orders. In addition Transporting goods between stations requires human intervention and incurs significant risks. The big change online access would provide is instant information about prices throughout the EVE universe. At the moment that information is hard to get but there are web sites who try to provide it using historical data. Even if a computer tool did spot a killer trade route someone would still have to load up a ship and fly through dangerous regions of space to profit from it.

[Iggep]

One of the aspects of EVE that I really didn't care for was the lack of a training queue. Prior to Apocrypha it was necessary to juggle skills in training to to have no downtime when you couldn't be logged in. I'm fairly satisfied with the new queue system they rolled out though. I'm not convinced that they couldn't simply allow something like EVEMon coordinate my training for me offline, but they seem to have explicitly rejected that approach in dev blog posts on the matter.

In regards to the bot issue, I think we would be naive to believe that there isn't already market botting in-game. So I'm not sure enabling limited access to markets via an external client would be any more of an issue.

[Alysianah aka Saylah]

@ means "at" or "addressed to" in the case of responding to people on the web. :-)

I think mbp and Iggep both make valid points. EVE is an unusual situation where it's less vulnerable to someone really profiting from botting the hanger activity I'm speaking of because you have to get your butt into a ship and take very explicit action to do more than planning and queuing things, which is why I'd love them to open up these planning opportunities. i can seriously spend a couple of hours dinking around in my hanger doing stuff that is valuable to me at the time but ya know, do I really need to be logged into the game client?

One of the reasons cited for not having the skill training offline is they didn't want too many ghost players. People who never log in the game just queue training. I can understand that. however, without ambulation no one knows I'm in my hanger doin' stuff anyway. I don't contribute to player interactivity. Sure I'm a statistic when it shows how many active players they have in the world at any given time but that's not valuable to other players.

I hope they find a happy medium. It looks like we can save ship fittings now. I haven't tried it yet though. If I can hot swap/fit a ship from a saved profile, oh my. I might not publish my rage post about WTF some UI things that were too big in the first place, are somehow even bigger now. EW.

[Nef]

What all things are you wanting to do/plan out of game? I think some or a lot of it could be done already. EVEmon, EFT, and various other tools exist. (think there's one for your market orders, probably some for manufacturing)

Being able to manipulate some things out of game would be nice though. Apart from PvP ops all I really do is sit in Amarr playing the market. Botting would be the problem though and there's already plenty of them in Eve.

[Alysianah aka Saylah]

I'd like to queue my training offline, manage my inventory, actually fit my ships (not plan), surf the market, make purchases, kick off production runs - things like that in a web client would be nice. And don't see the point in anyone botting those sorts activities. what would be the point or value?

[Nef]

Market-wise botting would thrive on it. Trading can require a lot of attention if you want it done quickly and efficiently. It would make running multiple (as in hundreds) sell/buy orders so you can always undercut easier, especially for botting. There's some really amazing macro's out there, so I wouldn't be surprised if they could even do some pretty advanced marketing maneuvers.

As for the other stuff, that would probably be OK. Actually, being able to import builds from EFT would be really great. I'd also like corp and alliance chat out of game.

[Alysianah aka Saylah]

Isn't there a limit to the number of buy/sell orders? Isn't that capped by a skill?

[Iggep]

It is indeed.

[Nef]

I think the max number of active orders is around 300 for a single character.