The slow rate of posting around here for the last couple of weeks is not a sign of anything except my vast enjoyment of EVE. What little spare time I have had lately has been shot into space, where, at least for newbies, there seems to be an endless number of things I COULD do at any moment.

Inspired by both my enthusiasm for the game and the $5 starter packs on Greenman Gaming, about a half dozen of my old WoW guildies have also joined in. I think one thing we all like is the slow pace of the game, or at least the fact that one can easily choose to play it at that pace. There admittedly is not a lot of game to the PvE game, but that seems to suit many of us quite nicely. I can come home after a long day and watch a movie on one screen* (or work on an article or edit the podcast) and space truck on the other one. Add in friends to chat with, and EVE starts to remind me of retro raids in WoW, where the goal was more to hang out and do stuff rather than paying strict attention to everything on your screen.

Of course, I suspect to many people I’m playing EVE wrong. Carebear! Casual! I am very guilty of all charges. In fact my corp just recently decided to engage in faction warfare, where half of space becomes our shoot-on-sight enemies, and I opted out because it would.. affect my most profitable trade route. I am officially a space wuss.

To be fair, the thing about a sandbox game is that one gets to do what one wants. EVE is my first sandbox, and honestly I found the whole thing pretty overwhelming for a couple of weeks. Finishing the tutorials reminded me vaguely of graduating high school back in the day — the world is your oyster, so what are you going to make of it, huh? HUH? ANSWER QUICK. Anyone who knows me will be unsurprised that I ended up in station trading/hauling, and now my version of PvP is more exploiting someone who posted a typo in their buy order than shooting at things.

I did invest in a second account (look, don’t judge) to train up logistics for future battles, but it’s a long training time. Until then, I will be happy carebearing it around for mad ISK.

* If you like sci-fi stuff, watch Orphan Black! It’s legit good.

As you’ve probably already heard, EVE Online was EVE Offline yesterday thanks to a DDOS attack. Everything that happens in EVE is usually treated as a hostile action, so it’s no surprise that people are formulating conspiracy theories around the downtime. And to be fair, things did get quite heated between the big factions in nullsec space mere hours before the server attack…

But hey, I’m just a humble space trucker. My point is that since EVE was down I needed a different game, and so I decided to continue my very slow playthrough of Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

For those who haven’t played DE:HR yet the lead character is one Adam Jensen, a super serious super security guy. Jensen has been having a pretty bad time of things at the start of the game, what with someone he cared about being killed by mercenaries and his arms and legs being chopped off and replaced with robot parts basically without his consent. (No spoilers, this all happens before the opening credits.)

The result of all this is that Jensen is a pretty stern fellow. He refuses to take any crap and uses punching as a form of communication. He is a trained killer and head of security for a controversial high-tech firm, Sarif Industries. Sometimes he gets sad and breaks his reflection in the mirror. He wears a dark trenchcoat.

Which is why some of the things that I do as Jensen seem pretty incongruous. For example, early on in the game you can explore the offices of your fellow coworkers. Often this means hacking a door lock and spontaneously auditing the coworker’s company email, which seems a little jerkish but I suppose reasonable in the grimdark cyberfuture.

Other times, though, Jensen gets into offices at Sarif’s headquarters by crawling through vents, and then once he gets in he… steals their granola bars. Occasionally the occupants of the office are present and just sit there and watch him do it.

I like to imagine that the new employee orientation at Sarif Industries goes a little like this:

“So this is your new office. Security is important so please keep your door locked at all times and pick a good password for your computer. If you need any suppli–”
“Um, sorry, but did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“It.. it sounds like there’s something in the vents.”
“Oh! That’s our head of physical security, Adam Jensen, and his goddamn robot arms. Occasionally he might crawl in here and steal your snacks.”
*muffled voice from vent* “Jensen out!”

Before I started playing EVE I had heard over and over that the game is actually pretty boring in between flashes of heart-stopping action. Now that I’ve been playing it myself for a couple of weeks I think “boring” is unfair but I can see where the sentiment comes from. In between shooting and fleeing and selling and fleecing, there is an awful lot of waiting around.

Over the weekend a few friends and acquaintances offered to take me out on my first trip to low security space, where life is hard and likely full of rockets to the face. It was a fairly lengthy process, certainly more so than usual because I am a newbie.

First I had to travel to our meeting place close to a low-sec border. Travel is no small matter in EVE. There are over 7,500 star systems in the game, so even with the warp drive function it can take a very long time to get to certain places. My course this time only required 11 jumps, but that’s still a fair bit of time — imagine having to take 11 gryphon flights to your destination in WoW. (I’ve taken to playing Candy Crush Saga on my phone while I’m travelling in high-sec space.)

A while later I finally arrived at the meeting point, where my friends graciously gave me an appropriately appointed ship. After a few minutes of fiddling with our UIs and going over protocol, we formed a fleet (group) and headed towards low-sec.

Group travel is a little strange in EVE. With the game allowing travel in any direction and few landmarks (spacemarks?) it’s pretty easy to get separated. Because of this, Fleet Commanders can warp the entire group to one spot. In this group we would warp to a spot, everyone would use the jump gate, and then we’d indicate when we were through so no ship was left behind.

I was starting to get the hang of it all when things got very exciting. We warped over to a gate only to discover that there was a large group camping it, hoping to pick off unaware travellers like us. Everyone in the fleet started talking at once as all the hostile red names popped up on our Overviews. “Jump! Jump!” the Fleet Commander called out, and I scrambled to click the little “Jump” button.

As soon as we all appeared on the other side of the gate (and we all did surprisingly), the FC warped us a short distance away. After a moment someone said on Mumble, “They’re through the gate! That blob is coming after us!” and I felt a tinge of panic. We started zipping around the star system, eventually chilling out between a couple of planets until the scanner came up empty. My heart was pounding the entire time.

After that we skipped across the universe some more until we found a suitable spot in low-sec. The FC told us to start a 2500 meter orbit around a nearby abandoned space station.

And then we waited. Slowly, gently, quietly drifting in a rough circle around a bit of space debris, we waited for someone to come along and shoot at us. And waited. And drifted. And waited. No one came. I started to play more Candy Crush Saga.

“Welcome to EVE,” someone said on Mumble.

(PS: Would you like to see some boring video of people talking about EVE while floating in space not really doing much? Watch my video!)

Yes, despite all expectations I am still playing EVE and in fact just bought a month of subscription (or PLEX or whatever). I’m still working on the many career tutorials in high-sec space, and picking up lots of good world tips from my corp.

At this stage much of the game is like an endless UI puzzle. The features are surprisingly deep and customizable, but cryptic at first. Perhaps I’m doing it wrong, but navigation and awareness seem to come more from overlays than from actually looking out of your ship. The Overview Scanner is your true window to the world, and I’m currently in the process of bashing it into something I can understand — red is bad, obviously, but the list of names and symbols still takes me some time to decode.

Your window to the world, from the EO forums

For one brief moment last night I felt I had perhaps actually grasped the basics of space combat. I was doing a Military mission and blasting away some NPC pirates. Everything seemed to be coming together — I was picking off pirates that got too far away from their pack, starting on the outside and working my way in. I would orbit in close for a few shots off my close-range, more powerful gun, and then move back out to continue plinking with my less powerful ranged weapon. I got in the groove of activating my shield repair for a couple of cycles and then turning it off again, keeping my ship healthy while not depleting my capacitor. The pirates were no match for me. I was Liore, SPACE WARRIOR.

Then five more stronger pirates popped out from behind a structure and blew up my ship real good. Oops.

I flew my pod back to the local training station and assessed the situation. First, rereading my mission showed that I should have spotted the second wave of pirates and then warped the heck out of there. Look, people, I am Liore, Space Warrior not Liore, Space .. Mission Reader! Okay fine.. there might be a lesson there.

Second, I had no ship now and my “good” (the finest fittings newbie tutorials have to offer!) shield and weapons were gone. Welcome to the sandbox. It was a little disconcerting, and it took me a minute to realize that I should hit the Market. Fortunately Ibis Frigates were cheap and my station had a lot of sellers. It took about 30,000 ISK to get back to a flyable state, which in the scheme of things is not much. (Being blown up also activated the Insurance tutorial, which was amusing timing.)

Azuriel wrote in his recent post on Dust 514 that he is the kind of player who doesn’t like using consumables, “still hesitating to use the stockpile of Elixirs while fighting the final boss”. EVE makes me feel the same way. Technically I have a very slightly better ship in my hold (a Mantis) that I got from a mission, but I’m afraid to use and then lose it. I think just like how raiding in WoW got me used to the idea of dying all the time, I am going to have to get used to the idea of losing my baby ships in EVE.

Plans for the future: More tutorials and my first trip to Jita, the big market hub.

I’m on this week’s episode of the MMORPG.com podcast, “Game On: Epic Slant Press Edition“, talking about RIFT’s move to free-to-play. Thanks a lot to hosts Adam and Chris for having me on — it was a ton of fun!

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In my post about RIFT last week I mentioned feeling like a bit of an MMO dinosaur. The things I value in my massively multiplayer games — community, group problem solving, rewards for completing difficult or time-consuming tasks — have fallen out of favor recently with both players and developers, and while the market goes where it will I still wanted a game to play.

I moped about it for a day or two, honestly. “I need an MMO that still values old school style”, I thought to myself at some point. “One with an emphasis on teamwork and difficulty and slowly working towards goals an– oh shit. EVE.”

And that is how I came to start my new life in space. My mission: be social, throw myself into group activities, embrace the infamously inconvenient game design, and see just how much of my pining for the old MMO dinosaur ways is nostalgia and how much is truly how I like to play MMORPGs.

Day One

The first thing I did after creating my character and logging into the game was join a Corporation (guild). A discussion site I frequent has a smallish corp that seems full of chill adult nerd types, so that was my first stop. Even here, though, I had to go through a series of tests, sending emails around with secret codes and whatnot to prove my identity and that I was probably not a spy coming to steal space valuables. Truth be told, I enjoyed the extra layer of skullduggery.

Once that was sorted out, it was time to actually learn how to play the game. One of my new corp-mates said that my many years of MMO experience would make the learning process faster, but I’m not sure how true that is. EVE has.. many menus. Many. Maaaany. At one point in the very first tutorial the game reminds you to close UI windows when you no longer need them, because otherwise your entire viewport very quickly becomes stacked up with information grids.

EVE newbie interface. Image from GiantBomb.com. Click for big!

The trend towards streamlining the first few minutes of an MMO and packing them with action doesn’t seem to have made it to CCP’s headquarters in Iceland. For example, shortly after I undocked for the first time I realized that I didn’t properly pick up a quest. I managed to figure out how to turn around and head back to the station, and then I had a very peaceful 10 minutes or so while my pod slowly putt-putted its way back. Was it the most exciting use of my game time? No, but it made me laugh and I certainly learned a lesson about checking I had everything I needed before jetting off into space.

I will have plenty of time to learn these kinds of lessons before I meet up with my corp. Along with the basic introductory tutorial there are 50 advanced tutorial missions that teach you skills in Business, Industry, Military, PVP, and Exploration. These missions are optional, but they give skills, ships, currency, and other bonuses that seem useful for a new player so my plan is to work through them. (I’ve finished the intro tutorial and about half the Military missions so far.)

While I’m doing the tutorials I can start training my skills. Even my casual corp has a list of strongly recommended skills that will take players anywhere from two weeks to a month to learn. That’s right — it could conceivably be a MONTH before my character is properly prepared to jet off and meet up with the rest of the corp. Things do not move quickly in EVE, it seems.

Speaking of proper preparation, I have already managed to earn my first PVP death although it was a little underwhelming. At one point my game crashed while logging off, and I guess my little pod was left drifting through space. When I logged back on I was in a strange location with an automated “Sorry you got blown up” letter in my mailbox. I look forward to being a more active participant in my death in the future.

Tutorials and skill training started, corp joined, and a space death. Day One of EVE: success!

If you look at my Raptr or Steam stats it looks like I haven’t been playing any games recently. In actual fact, I have been playing hours and hours and hours of a game but it just happens to be the untracked browser-based Kingdom of Loathing.

KoL has been around for just over 10 years, and probably most gamer enthusiasts have poked at it at least once by now. But for the uninitiated, KoL is a RPG that is infamous for combining clever, sassy writing and extremely deep gameplay. Each day players get a limited number of turns to play, although that number can be increased through consumables. There are very few graphics in KoL, and those that do exist are all done in a minimal black-on-white style. (That stick figure over to the left is probably one of the more in-depth graphical moments, it being my character Laplume in a goblin costume. Obvs.)

KoL has many of the familiar trappings of RPGs, although mostly with delightfully silly names. There are classes (like Accordion Thief and Seal Clubber), a myriad of main and secondary stats, gear drops, familiars, consumables, and quests. On a micro scale, the goal of KoL is to level up your character from 1 to 13 or so, beat the final big boss (the Naughty Sorceress), and then sacrifice yourself for the good of the world. Yes, that’s right: you die.

Or at least that incarnation does. Unlike most RPGs, character development in KoL mostly comes from repeatedly leveling up (and then dying). The run from level 1 to death is known as an ascension, and as ascensions stack up you will accumulate special skills and gear and familiars and just know-how that will make your character more powerful even at level 1.

An example of my wardrobe

Running the level 1-13 quests over and over again, even if you change your class around, sounds a little dull right? Oh hell no. For each ascension you can pick a number of different variables to shake things up. Try choosing a different difficulty, and pick one of a number of special ascension “paths” like oxycore (no extra turns from food or booze), or Bad Moon (limited familiar options and unlucky adventures), or Zombie (be a zombie with special skills but no access to stores and stuff because, um, you’re a zombie). Currently, new paths are added about every 3 months.

One of the neatest things about KoL is the flexibility in content. You can farm for rare items, you can play the notoriously unstable marketplace, you can work on collections and trophies, you can take on the clan (guild) raid dungeons. If you hate spare time and love numbers, you can focus on speed ascensions and nerd out over math and strategy to come up with the most optimal way to go from start to ascension with your particular set of skills and familiars. Try to hit a new personal best in either days or turns spent!

The strategy rabbit hole goes extremely deep if you like that sort of thing, and boy do I. I started playing KoL in 2009, and I usually can play it for about 3 months before I have to stop because all my friends have forgotten who I am and my dishes have become a sentient life form. (It is entirely possible to play the game without obsessing over turns, but just not something I’m good at.)

Although there aren’t any synchronous multiplayer activities, there are plenty of asynchronous interactions and global chat channels. Clan raids require group participation but are organized by turns (“you open X gate later, then in a few days I’ll go kill Y and send you half the loot”), which is nice for people with limited playtime.

KoL is a game that benefits from research. If you want to play, I advise checking out the wiki. The game is free, and if you play now or in the future say hey to Laplume.