14 years since Everquest and ten years since the release of WoW, game designers know a lot more about how to keep people playing and coming back. What follows is a comprehensive discussion of the four major ingredients and how they relate to EVE-Online.

Social Encouragement in a Group of Like-minded Folk

Only interaction with real people can breathe life into a virtual reality. The clan, guild or corp exerts a sense of community, a friendly supportive environment, as well as social pressure but most importantly common goals and ambitions, these goals are often in accord with what designers have in mind.

To put it bluntly, the tool of social isolation among the like minded, is widely used. Anywhere from religious camps to company retreats in serves not to just improve cooperation but to generate a mutual goal that people work towards. Like all tools it can be used to either create something productive, or prepare people for the humiliating experience of missionary work or chain people to their PC desk for 12 hour long stretches at a time.

Progression of Varying Tedium

A virulent pandemic, the progression of points and unlocks, has spread among games. It is the ultimate hook that keeps people coming back and almost needs no explanation. Less well known is the fact that progression not only ought to be well paced, but also has to swing up and down within an amplitude of comfortable tedium: down and up from frustration to a strong feeling of empowerment. As such, frustration is an important part of the game and both required and intended. It is by no means an oversight.

EVE-Online progression is of course the most gruesome, bloody and rusty meat hook imaginable, it would take a player 22 years on average to unlock all available bonuses, (18 years at an unrealistic maximal pace). Even though these points accumulate over time that a player spends subscribed, he is also required to plan and set skills every day or two.

As such EVE-Online demands commitment both to the progression system and to ingame friends. For the first seven Years EVE players had to set their alarm clock, to change their “training” skill in game, or they'd lose out on progress, this was removed and a “gracious” 24 hour queue was implemented, but the progression was slightly slowed down and Tech 3 skills were introduced, that take several days time to train and can now be lost.

Randomized Rewards

This is a very old and well understood form of entertainment known from gambling and also reproducible in animal experiments: Essentially, randomly timed reward elicits compulsive behavior in rats or primates.

EVE, like other MMOs has those kind of dungeons and the kind of loot, which creates the same form of “loot-lust” compulsion like any other RPG, but the main randomness of reward, ultimately comes from PvP!

Because there is no matchmaking or arena combat, the encounters are somewhat random, you either trip over and subsequently thwart a flock of newbies or you fall for a lure, soon being “hot-dropped” by a fleet of capital ships. Sometimes out of the blue you are blown up by a suicide attack as soon as you undock your ship...

EVE players hold PvP as the ultimate goal, the gift that keeps on giving, their “fun” and raison d'être, yet they are oblivious to the fact that it is ultimately the same kind of randomness that sports betting provides. Despite the ridiculously complicated strategy and the deviously, paranoid meta game it often comes down to chance.

PvP in EVE is not a sport, it's a way to randomize triumph and defeat. In EVE combat is also a strong emotionally devastating destruction of the time, money and effort that players put into EVE, or a short satisfying schadenfreude, which then is carried over to forums, kill-boards and gloat-blogs.

Obsession

Since the latency of electrical signal doesn't truly allow a timing, dexterity based game, EVE gameplay is both strategic and openly mathematical. It boils down to problems of optimization, compromise and choice. Without digressing into stereotyping and name-calling. There is one particular attribute to mathematics that lends itself exceptionally well to the addictive nature of MMOs.In the words of Marcus du Sautoy a mathematician and a prominent British popularizer of science, “Maths is an obsessive subject.”

Like a mystery that doesn't let you go, a puzzle that with every solved piece creates more questions, the strategies of EVE can keep people engaged even without actually playing the game. The guides, fully fledged software and politics that comes out of these calculations is very impressive, but the point I'm trying to make is that it is simply impossible to play EVE casually, particularly if you have an imaginative mind.

To all the truckers and their mighty champion Icewind Dave, too. I say: “Steer clear of MMOs.”

Too late...

Please put down the thesaurus next time! I would say that there are numerous factual errors strewn throughout the piece along with a bit of rambling, but it doesn't truly take away from the point of the article: sandbox MMOs are still MMOs.

The key to EVE is that each moment of the game is dictated by social interaction. Whether you're buying an item from a player or waiting to backstab your CEO, it's a collection of social links. If this isn't something that interests you, EVE probably won't be appealing.

it is simply impossible to play EVE casually

The problem there comes in defining "play." You surely should not expect to play as a galactic emperor casually. You can definitely take part as a minor level diplomat casually, though. What new players don't take into account is the aforementioned social interactions. You won't grind battlegrounds to rank up, you'll manipulate and fight your way to the top with other people.

Give it about three months. That used to be the stretch after which most players burned out and left, according to a 2012 CCP keynote. But then again, nobody quits EVE

For EVE developers a sandbox supposedly means: if you build a sand castle, ultimately someone probably stomps on it. Which is unusual but fine, honestly I like it. What bothers me, and what creates a deep ambivalence in many bitter vets, is a feeling that eventually creeps in - rather than playing, I'm being played, delayed and manipulated. The pressures systemic, economic, social or otherwise dictate my behaviour. Players generally compete over everything, so nothing comes easy , thus I compromise: I postpone glorious exploits and combat, to grind missions, complexes, standings, incursions, I afk-mine and push pennies in Jita.

Even in your own words: the hypothetical Player X doesn't stab his CEO in the back, he waits.

There sure is a lot of waiting.

I've been an off-and-on player for about 3 years now. B|

To me the ideas of delaying and manipulating the player are aspects that define most of today's MMOs, not just EVE. They are always focused on making building your character take time, and making rewards and accomplishments slow or difficult to acquire in order to make them meaningful and keep players engaged.

Of course EVE takes this a step further with time based skill training which is simply a different way to limit player progression, not necessarily better or worse. The obvious downside is that it can make playing sometimes feel pointless since your next meaningful upgrade could potentially be weeks away. On the other hand, there is no leveling grind to worry about in the traditional sense - which means you can play for a few minutes a day and know your character is still improving.

Most sandbox games I have tried (Like Darkfall, Mortal Online, Xyson, and Salem) also make any meaningful accomplishments in the game world require many man-hours of work. Unfortunately I do not see how that can be changed as for anything to be meaningful, it must be difficult to acquire. That means we're stuck with resource grinding, farming and other repetitive actions that may cause players to burn out. I do think that EVE offers more ways to make in-game currency than most other MMOs do. Player created jobs and contracts, scamming, and the amazing EVE economy all stand out to me; I don't have to grind missions if I know how to make isk off of someone else.

You mentioned "meaningful" a couple of times, saying slow progression makes things have a meaning, I think we have to specify what this meaning is. For EVE the < 2700 SP/h ( < 2 Mio SP/month) progression rally makes time a 3rd in-game currency and you trade it in for either a PLEX or your subscriber fee. I'd say this kind of progression gives you a coupon, a reward rather than meaning. It's even possible to sell and buy spent time in a sense, when you buy a 'used' character with the skills that you want.Eve players are not just paying rent for the servers or their time in a virtual world, they literally invest time and money into the promise that skill training will pay off some day. I'm not saying that this will never happen, I'm just repelled by the unusually long term of that investment, the troubled history, and the risk, the EVE bubble may indeed burst. A promise is what sells any product. We find out if we were lied to usually some time after that, even though it may take a proper investigation and a even more time to admit that we were tricked. Also, we may never find out.
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