I guess what gets me back into EVE, well, reading about EVE, is always their latest update. It seems that every six months they come out with a major retooling for the system, giving it an intriguing name and laying out a list of new features. I managed to listen to CCP's presentation on the economics of EVE, and it seems that they, too, get a bump with every new content upgrade. Understandable. The latest part of Incursion was released within the last 24 hours, so it prompted me to write a bit about my feelings for this weird game.

When I think of the only MMORPG I spent any decent time with (Everquest, a few months), it seems that a lot of their content upgrades were a bit esoteric to me. Everquest now has 17 expansions, which is sort of mind boggling for me. Many of them seemed to be updates to things I knew I would never even touch upon during my brief time playing, although the first expansion was what let me play my Iksar lizard dude. Other than that it was Puzzle Pirates on a free account, which is actually a good game I think, but harder to sell to people who can't see past the theme and cartoony visuals.

EVE's updates seem a bit different, mainly because it feels more like a single environment that gets new stuff, rather than new environments being connected to the familiar world, as in Everquest. I hesitate to call them paradigm shifts, because some of the feature upgrades I see are pretty esoteric stuff for an outsider, like equipment upgrades and the like, but things like wormholes that allow for new places to exploit help change the way the game is played, if you participate in them.

Unlike with other MMOs I haven't even seen EVE over someone else's shoulder. The closest thing I've ever got to vicarious playing is through youtube and hearing about other people's experiences, but I'm still fascinated by its commitment to a market system and player agency. (Puzzle Pirates is another market-driven system, but I guess I respond a bit more strongly to space themes. Star Wars kid in me, I suppose.) The actual gameplay seems more in your interaction between players than in interacting with the environment. There are plenty of environmental missions, but I've heard they tend to be rather wan in comparison to the kind of legal skulduggery you can get into with other players.

In Incursion they're ramping up the character portrait system, which seems to be a first step to the full avatar system they're going to introduce later. The avatar creation system is rather striking in its detail, although how much of that you'd actually be able to see I don't know. As with a lot of character creation systems I see in this generation of game machines it seems that some of the details are there to please the player as they're creating the avatar, but they're either discarded or all but invisible for practical purposes (even in 3rd person games with custom avatars, you can put a lot into sculpting the face just right, only to wind up never seeing it for most of the game). If they get to the point where people will be walking around in stations looking at each other, I can see that being pretty neat, but I also wonder just how much of the usual illusion breaking silliness that comes with virtual avatars will break the illusion for people.

It's not like EVE has a roleplaying server or anything. Its claim to fame is that they have one active server (with at least one to the side for testing). It's a very large community in that respect, despite games like WoW and such having larger overall populations. That community aspect, even when they're virtually murdering each other and talking shit, makes me wonder if there might be a bit more brand loyatly in this game than in others, since the experience is fully collective no matter how directly you relate to the big events. And the players whom I've talked to swear by it even when they get abused by the system; someone who spent a lot of money getting a huge ship who promptly gets nuked still plays it.

There is a bit of attrition, though. Another player I talked to about it loves the anarchy of the game, the way players sort of passively push the development along through market behavior and feedback, but that the game's appeal dissipates over time. Big space battles take so long to coordinate now, and often fail to fully get underway, that the need for such spectacles is rarely ever met.  I've also wondered about how little the rule of law seems to function. In a conversation with another player, I found that contracts are basically little better than verbal agreements in the real world. In a sense they're legally binding, but they're hard to prove they existed, and in EVE there's no in-game justice system for contact violations. WIthout contract enforcement, contracts are a bit too tenuous, and contracts in the real world are one of the underpinnings of business relationships.

My main issue with games like this, though, is that I have trouble imagining myself paying a monthly fee for a game. Sure, in EVE you can train even when you're offline, meaning you don't get punished for not getting your money's worth as much as another game might punish you. But paying 15 dollars/euro a month just training is pretty clearly not a good idea. It's why the micropayment trends are actually OK with me in theory; as long as a game winds up being decent for one-time or no-time subscribers, I'm OK with having a lesser experience than someone who wants to dump a 5-spot on a golden helmet.

My weirdest reaction to the game, though, and this came out when I was listening to the CCP economic meeting, was that I think playing that game would make me want to earn real money for all the effort I put into it. I can't imagine having that kind of reaction if someone was describing WoW to me, but for some reason EVE seems much more closely related to the real life that's interfacing with it, so the lizard part of my brain tells me all that effort should be rewarded with actual payment from CCP if I'm, say, head of a corporation or whatever. I'm not sure why that is; maybe because the fiction of the universe isn't so neatly defined as in fantasy RPGs? I dunno.

Anyone out there playing EVE right now, or know someone who does? If not, does this thing even show up on your radar, so to speak?