Sunday, January 31, 2010

Why I love EVE

EVE Online; the greatest MMORPG that anybody has ever played. If you’re reading this, you will most likely be agreeing with me. But, what is it in EVE that makes the game so fun? Is it the PVP? The economy? The exploration of new areas? Why we love it so much can be defined by one word: diversity.

According to Webster’s dictionary, diversity is defined as: “the state or fact of being diverse; difference; unlikeness.” The last part of this definition fits EVE Online perfectly-unlikeness. It is unlike all other MMOs. There is yet to be another game where the players have superior power over almost all of the game’s aspects.

‘Well, what are the powers of the players?’ many people are probably wondering at this point. Well, complete dominative control over a vast market. Where if you have enough money, you can literally buy out all of the other players, and sell what you just bought at a higher price and other people will follow. My brother once noticed that crystalline carbonate was becoming unstable, and so after buying all of the available units of the item, and after waiting a few weeks, he sold them for 8000 ISK each. When he bought them, they were at 6000 ISK each. Now this may not seem like a big increase, but the amount he bought, brought him a large profit. This is just one of many examples of the market that makes EVE better than other MMOs.

‘So, you can manipulate the market to your favor, but what about PVP?’ this is a familiar question, although not always stated exactly this way. As many of us know, the PVP in this game always gives an adrenalin rush. Be it gate camping, solo hunting in deep 0.0, or just blowing some stupid noob up in a level 4 after shooting your destroyer and not docking. There’s always that feeling of joy when you get the loot from another person and keeping their corpse to taunt them with it..

‘Market manipulation and PVP don’t sound that fun. What else is there?’ Well, recently CCP decided to add exploration back to the game. The addition of wormholes in Apocrypha brought back that sense of being the first to ever explore a new system: not knowing who may be there, or what riches you can exploit is always exciting.

There is one more thing I truly love about EVE and it’s what has kept me playing for all these years. The Game Time Code (GTC) system. As many of you probably know, there are ways to use money in game to buy time. This is useful to most people by paying for their main subscription and using the GTCs for their alternative characters. However, this reaches a personal level, for I have never paid a dime to CCP. Even though I don’t have any income in this point in time, I might just continue with the GTCs and live on.

Hoping to see more diversity later on, I end this article and hope to see you at my next gate camp.