It's official, EVE Online really IS a spreadsheet.

EVE Online, the game that apparently lets you do truly bonkers epic space battle shit, (but only if you really like doing hours and hours of math) is getting Microsoft Excel integration.

I don't have a lot to add here, except that EVE sure still is EVEing it up. What a weird, fascinating but somehow simultaneously boring thing that game is.

I saw this earlier and, as a former EVE player, I laughed my ass off. I only played in a dedicated fashion for about 6 months, and that was mostly on a character who focused on mining. I joined--and I'm not kidding here--a corp that was modeled after the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Taggart Transdimensional had a 0% tax rate and was a strictly business venture. The corp never started a war and was reliant on mercenary help for defense, either in the form of other player corps or (as was standard) in the form of alternate characters focused on combat roles.

"Hang on," you might say, "that entire paragraph is dumb as shit."

You'd be correct.

Space Jesus wept.

Randian objectivists are like crypto cultists but with waaaay lower earning potential.

So what I'm saying is, yeah, finding them playing EVE makes a lot of sense.

This is also my experience with the game. It was cool thinking about how all the tritanium I was pumping onto the market was going to be used.

From what I've seen EVE Online is a full on RPG. But in the turest sense of "Role Playing", and is something I wish I had the time to dedicate to.

I'm sure the community has its fair share of assholes(it's the internet after all) but the fact that there is made up set of rules that all the main groups adhere to is awesome. More power to them.

That's my take as well. In a world where most big games are chasing to sand down all the corners in an attempt to appeal to the broadest multiplatform audience, it's nice to have examples like this where there's a target audience on a single platform and the developers are focused on it. If your game is a PC game and you can leverage more features of the PC in a legitimately useful way, then go for it. There's an entire genre dedicated to sports management simulation where the entire UI is spreadsheet-based, never mind external support for Excel.

They missed an opportunity to call themselves IntergalAtlus Shrugged.

@shindig: @el_blarfo: I literally had to fill out a questionnaire to join. Now, I've never been an objectivist. I had read Atlas Shrugged and played BioShock while deployed to Iraq a couple of years prior to playing EVE. As far as I was concerned, Ayn Rand had it half-right: you can't trust the state. Of course, she missed the other key point: you can't trust the corporations, either.

The forums for this corp were a fun time. One of the debates people had was, "Is it okay to destroy another player's property (ships) in the game if you're not acting in self-defense or defense of others?" Some people argued that yes, it was (although they would not do so as representatives of this corp) because everyone who played EVE knew that piracy from other players was a possibility. Others argued the very objectivist line of thinking that there is no separation between the real world and the game world, because there is only one, objective reality and the game exists within the real world, in which players have put it time and money to secure property. So yeah, these people are 100% the types that would today be way into "decentralized" crypto and complain that someone saved an image of their shitty monkeys.

Spoiler tagging this because it's a somewhat crass political opinion and not strictly about EVE: These were Ron Paul guys. Ron Paul guys in the late 00s followed one of two trajectories. They developed empathy, and became Bernie Sanders guys. Or they now treat January 6 as a holiday.