I love reading about EvE once in a while. It's almost as if there were a completely different space world out there with unlimited freedom and unlimited possibilities. I always feel the urge to join this world and explore it -- but then I come to the realization that it probably needs an exuberant amount of time and dedication to partake in these news worthy event and that most of the time it's probably a grind.
Very true. A favorite tactic in the 2000's, was for one side to just harass the other over a period of many, many months, denying any opportunity for decisive battle, until they became demoralized -- only then to bring out their big guns.
The alliance I was involved in kept almost winning battles, when the server would crash, then the devs would come in and reset the node, undoing all the enemy damage we'd caused. I think there were some shenanigans going on.
EVE can actually be played very casually. The grind is for money, but you can supplement that with real money. I know that sounds really bad in a world where every mobile game is a P2W nightmare, but it works for EVE. You cannot P2W EVE. Most people don't use real money, once you get to a point where you understand most of the game it's not really required. The only significant time sink Eve requires is learning how it works because it's an extremely complex game.
EVE has a really good Free to Play system in place and I definitely recommend checking it out.
I would not suggest getting an account then trying to throw a bunch of money at it until you really understand what that money is used for. We once killed a new 15 day old player who was flying high end implants that buffed their shields, in a ship that was armor tanked. In real money terms we probably blew up $40 that they were using completely incorrectly. There were 3 of us flying a total of less than $5 worth of real money ships. It's a very unforgiving game, but most players are nice to new players and we ended up giving that person a lot of advice on what they did wrong, what they can do to fix it, and which direction they needed to go to get better. We throw money at newbies often if we kill them, but since this one was flying several times more than our entire fleet we figured it was pointless. To put it into perspective, I've been playing for about 4yrs total spread across 14 and the most expensive thing I've flown cost about half as much as what this person was flying.
For the other payers: it was a full High-Grade crystal set in a blingy Apoc we found ratting in a Haven, so you know he was injected too. Almost 7b total on zkill.
It takes a lot of time to get familiar with how the game works, how combat works, and how you should fit your ships for your play style. Definitely can feel like a job and/or hopeless at first, but once that initial investment of time has been put in the game can definitely be played casually.
It's a lot of fun to just mess around with a few people in some cheap frigates (basic small ships), sometimes more so than the actual "expensive" areas of the game.
Back when I was TEST's training director, my favorite thing to do was lead squads of about a dozen people in either alliance-provided free rifters, or any T2 frigates people wanted to bring. Great learning for the newbies; easy to replace if we lost everything; and every once in a while, we'd find a T2 battleship or carrier doing PVE, all alone, out in space...
Unless you become a lackey of a powerful group, you can't set out for a new frontier without the expectation that another powerful outside group will come along and wreck and/or steal what you've spent time and treasure to build. Wormhole space was designed to break this pattern. However, people have recently figured out how to invade and break those places as well.
The only way there could be unlimited freedom and unlimited possibilities, is if the in-game world were truly unlimited. I've been thinking about how to build that. (Basically, Eve with a No Man's Sky sized universe, and an equally vast forest of procedural tech trees. Throw in in-game coding of player-owned assets.)
The powerful groups in EvE will also require that you have at least a year worth of skill points before they'll take you.
A literal real life year worth. Not kidding.
Skills level up in EvE even while offline, and there's not way to increase them other than the passage of time (except by leveling up other skills that decrease the learning points needed for new skills, but still).
I remember when I was a noob in Eve. There was a caper involving some billions of ISK in the official magazine, and I was in low-sec and saw one of the characters from the article. We hid out in the station in fear. After awhile, one of us asked one of them, if we ran for it, if they'd try and kill us, and they were like, nah, you're good.
Later in corp chat, we were telling about our run in with characters so infamous, people wrote articles about them printed on actual paper!
Your information is years out of date.
There are now alternate ways to acquire skill points quickly (injectors) and since the cultural revolution and the rise of the F2P accounts there has been a new appreciation of new players in Eve. Most large groups now have some form of new player program in place, often a corporation, (eg. Brand Newbros, Karmafleet) and in the largest cases they have full on newbro alliances (eg. Pandemic Horde, Brave Newbies, etc.)
Eve is really hard to play alone, it's mesmerizing and it's a great experience to try.
But once you get addicted to some feeling it creates, I urge to join a corporation with well experienced and active people which will be able to let you earn more in a shorter and more social way.
My Eve reality is that I mostly tchat on Discord with my friends while killing some stuff to buy ships / licence / whatever and watch to fight for other people.
There are plenty of activity to do and it's a very unique and awesome piece of experience I never was able to really leave for good.
> I urge to join a corporation with well experienced and active people
Absolutely this ^^^
After a couple of months learning the basics I joined a mostly UK based corp who's members had been around since the inception of Eve back in the early 2000's. This was around the time Eve introduced the faction war update (Empyrean Age - 2008) and these guys wanted to encourage new players to do PVP but in safer non-null sec space, which the faction warfare update was sort of intended to do.
Being in my early 40's at the time I wasn't a hugely "social gamer", however it turns out many committed Eve players are in that older demographic (30's or older I'd reckon) and many of us had the same interests and senses of humour.
To cut a long story short, I had an absolute whale of a time with these folks (Dark Rising - who're still around operating back out in null-sec again) for a year or so. I don't think I've laughed so hard such as at the times we had spies...on TeamSpeak...in opposing faction corps and they had no clue we'd infiltrated them. The game really took over my life for a while and was amazing fun, and the way to have that kinda fun is to join a corp.
I definitely agree with this, but with a small note: joining corporations in null sec can be challenging for new players, and can sometimes bring more stress than benefits. You can be attacked by campers anywhere (including high sec space) and you have to constantly keep an eye for ganks.
Most of the newbie friendly corporations recruit players from day 1, but in doing so they kill off casual gameplay for these players.
The best approach is to first learn the basics by playing solo or with some close friends, and only after join a null sec corporation.
Even some things are super easy to do alone. One of the things I really enjoyed doing was drifting through wormhole space in a stratios salvaging abandoned POS and drones while watching Netflix/listening to music. Super relaxing
I think I still have around 3B in faction drones and random loot from a couple of weeks of jumping around exploring. Super fun game, you just need to find your niche.
I feel the same way. I spent a good amount of time playing some online games throughout my youth, I still remember playing StarCraft and StarCraft: Brood War. So much fun. Now I don't have time for the free re-make either sadly, or SC2. Becoming an adult sucks. :)
It's either spend the little free time I have coding and sharpening my skills, or goofing off in a virtual reality. To be fair I do play games now and then, but it's not the same as when I was 17 and out of high school.
My problem with eve is that you think "oh this career path might be interesting", and then either you invest $300 or spend 3 months training in that direction, BEFORE YOU CAN TRY IT! Usually try or not is something a human wants to decide in a few days if he's patient.
I actually think it has pretty good systems for "trying out" a specialization before committing to it (except for maybe the capitals and super capitals). Pretty much all of the T2 "specialized" ships have a T1 equivalent that can be fitted similarly. If you want to try out exploration, or mining, or hauling, or ewar, you don't have to wait until you can fly the expensive, high skill requirement ships. You can learn the basics and see if you like it in expendable T1 ships with cheap fittings.
Ever since I got a job I haven't had time for it. It really is a full time job to play, I noticed a lot of people who would play from work with cushy IT jobs.
Games as a service tend to optimise for these kinds of players because they are the whales that pour obscene amounts of money into the game. it's part of why i refuse to buy into any game that sells itself as a "platform".
also the balance tends to suck in these games - how do you balance for someone who can basically put 8 hours a day every day in the game and someone who can log on for maybe 2 hours a week(if they're lucky)
also i may be nitpicking at this point but eve hasn't really evolved their tech stack for how popular they are(practically household names at this point). consequently the game shits the bed and is pretty unplayable when actually fun exciting events like a huge corporation being cannibalised happen...
It's possible to balance this with proper game design. Look at Guild Wars 1 for example. Most of the content comes in small 0.5-1h pieces in form of missions, so a casual player can advance at his own pace. The "power" of gear quickly evens out, and what remains afterwards is gathering better looking weapons/armor (even though their stats are identical to the cheap weapons/armor). Even then, a casual player can just focus on getting and using the items that look cool to him, while a hardcore player can work on getting all the possible cool items, just in case or to use as achievements to show off.
> also i may be nitpicking at this point but eve hasn't really evolved their tech stack for how popular they are
The last I heard (~10 years ago), they were heavily into Stackless Python. And I believe they did things since then (micro-sharding zones and global time dilation?).
There's only so many things you can do with a real-time single world with arbitrary 3D positioning.
No kidding. I used to fly with a bunch of close friends, but that was years ago. We were all a bunch of carebears, though, and I never got into PvP. In fact, we had our own corp, mainly because someone wardec'd the corp we were flying for, and one of my friends got ganked and got mad enough to make the jump.
But if you have the time, I do think it's quite rewarding. o/
Off topic question, is the name EVE or EvE? Usually the small "v" would denote a "versus". Is there a backstory to the name?
Never actually played it but I was always fascinated by the the extent to which the devs went to capture real life interactions inside the game. Now I'm fascinated by the extent to which the article's author went to capture game interactions in real life.
EVE. Not sure where the "EvE" usage originated, although there is a running joke that it's "Everyone vs Everyone". Also not sure why it's all-caps.
However, generally the name originates in the game's backstory with the "EVE Gate" which was a now-expired wormhole that appeared somewhere in Earth's proximity and lead to "New Eden" which is the cluster where the game takes place.
The hidden secret to Eve is there is a test server which lets you buy almost anything for 100 ISK. At one time you could also set all skills to V, letting you fly any ship but I think that feature is gone. Regardless you can fly around and experience much of the content alone.
It's likely a bit out of date these days, but it's one of the best books on BGP I'd read back in the day when I was involved with building an internet exchange point circa 1999.
Years ago I looked into treating pathfinding in EVE as a graph problem because I was annoyed by losing money in the collapse of the Mt. Gox scam and read that its owner had solved the same problem. I thought I'd show him up by showing how easy it is to blow his terrible PHP code out of the water. :)
You can find the writeup and a link to the code on my blog:
Just a note, unless you have negative edges, running V Dijkstra's is likely to perform better than Floyd Warshall. Dijkstra's gives you distance from a single node to all other nodes in V log E time. If you run it V times, you'll get V^2 log E, a substantial improvement upon V^3.
It also seems to me like it's likely to be easier parallelized, considering that the V runs of Dijkstra are completely independent.
Hmm, wouldn't Dijkstra's be V E + V^2 log V? I take your point though. I suspect that I was dazzled by the cache locality advantages of dynamic programming and skeptical that messing about with a bunch of heap nodes would be faster, but looking at it now I bet you're right that knocking one of those Vs down to a log V would help. Thanks for the feedback!
Can the BGP diagrams be generated with avg latency taken into configuration? It would be interesting to see the tube map's diagram if that was the case.
Also I'm interested as to how the author generated the original TfL map JSON, as it would be nice to expand it to perhaps the TfL's Tube/Rail map.
> Meaning every router/station on the network knows it’s time to get to every station through every route:
I am confused by this - does it mean each station knows the latency to it's neighbour and BGP can figure out the fastest route based on that? Or does it mean we have to pre-calculate the combined time to every other node based on the shortest per-stop route (which seems less cool)?
