cynyck wrote:
idiggory, King of Bards wrote:
Of the successful MMOs, the only one I would wager is still growing is EVE.
EVE's metagame is
interesting. There are people posting in threads on reddit who, if they are to be believed, have never played the game but love to read about it. The intrigue, machinations, double-crosses, the people joining corporations just to gain trust and then either start killing as many corporation members' ships as possible or steal as many corporate assets, or both. The giant alliances breaking up and going at each others' throat with member corporations suddenly flipping to the other side.
And all of this encouraged by the game's developers. Recently, a player
posted on the official forum after losing a ship worth
nearly 8 billion ISK (which would pay for 16 months of game time). He made the mistake of flying into the main trade hub (Jita) during the "
Burn Jita" event. Basically, this is an event "hosted" by one of the big alliances (there's a lot of background to it), during which any freighter flying into or out of Jita gets attacked even though Jita is in High Security space and the game's space police (Concord) will respond and kill the attackers (I've read that CCP has stated that if a player escapes death when attacked by Concord, it is considered an exploit.)
Unfortunately for the poster, he was not aware of the event (he had to be hiding under a rock) and so he lost his ship. He claimed that he was rebuffed by CCP when he opened a ticket, this is from his post (with his quotation marks) and is what he claims he was told: “tough luck – games working fineâ€. What is surprising is that he opened a ticket at all. CCP encourages this type of behavior. Even outside of the "Burn Jita" event, suicide ganking is a risk in HighSec (one player suicide ganks a ship carrying especially valuable cargo, hopefully killing it before being killed by Concord, and an associate loots the kill).
CCP has said that "EVE isn't designed to just look like a cold, dark and harsh world; it's designed to
be a cold, dark and harsh world." The risk is what heightens the fun.
And that's not even in the record of most losses. Two days ago a 75 billion ISK Titan was taken out. I don't think the pilot got podded though, so he should probably consider himself lucky. If he's flying around in a 75b ISK ship, chances are he was flying with some very expensive implants, too.
But yeah, CCP's stance on things is: "Do whatever the hell you want. Short of aggressively exploiting something obviously not intended, we don't care."
And that pretty much comes down to: You escaped Concord, you managed to bypass all security-standards (for a period maybe two years ago, one corp had figured out how to engage anyone, anywhere, without concord intervention), hacking, or other obvious ISK exploits.
Minor exploits? "Wow, awesome, look at this thing you figured out! Congrats! We may or may not patch it, what you're doing sounds kind of cool."
The one thing I WILL say, is that I think there should be a point where Concord will pod people. (For anyone confused by my language by this point: Your pod is the part of your ship your character occupies. When your ship explodes, you escape in the pod. If someone kills your pod, that body, and any implants in it, is destroyed. You then wake up in a clone body, and clones are graded by cost to keep a certain amount of skill points. So forgetting to update your clone means you can potentially lose a ton of skill training time-spent).
Yeah, intervention in 1.0 space is really fast. But if they're ganking with something powerful, they're almost certainly going to be able to pod you if they have a warp scrambler fit. And I'm not saying that this shouldn't be possible, I think it should be, but I think Concord should pod them in response in security spaces of at least .9 and above. Maybe .8/.7 depending on their security standing.
That said, I don't think Empire Police should ever be able to pod players. (For our other listeners, CONCORD is the police force that responds if you attack another player in high-security space. Empire Police are far weaker, you can actually engage and fight them off, and will attack anyone with a super low security rating depending on the security status of the area of space you are in. But you have to be LOW for this to occur. Most people balance their aggressive actions with ratting (killing hostile npc ships) to keep their security status up high enough they can go wherever they want.
[EDIT]
One of my favorite EVE-related stories is that bank scheme run a couple of months ago. Essentially, this one player was running a banking corporation. He would accept deposits and meet withdrawals of ISK, and the people investing would earn interest at a pretty decent rate. Not so low to make it pointless, not so high for it to arouse any suspicion that this would be a scam or unsustainable.
One day, after having over 800 billion ISK invested, the user just clears out the entire bank. Just like that. All his. He posted on the official boards that he should be considered EVE's Robin Hood - he stole from the rich and gave to himself.
100% acceptable, 100% working as intended.
Edited, May 10th 2013 7:02pm by idiggory