EVE: delayed until 6 May 2003

[xane]

Originally posted by Scienziato
How much will subs be roughly?

You are probably looking at $12/month.

 

[Tom]

That sounds acceptable to me, so long as the game itself is priced reasonably (ie no more than £30)

 

[adams901]

I am playing as adams901, so would be nice to group up with you guys, then we can terrorise the universe .

what region are you guys playing in?

 

[Steiny]

#barrycorp now has a channel bot

#BarryCorp on stratics.frws.com now has a proper bot, so it is a proper channel, there all the time. Join up and I'll give out ops like santa claus!

Steiny

 

[Gef]

Whats the verdict on it so far? Think I might install it tonight, getting really cheesed off with DAoC atm.

 

[.Cask]

It's better than DAoC that's for sure

 

[Louster]

Come idle in #barrycorp and we'll tell you about it and stuff!!!

 

[DaGaffer]

Originally posted by xane
You realise this will actually be a subscription game ? The game itself will probably be a free download.

I can say pretty much categorically that this won't be the case
http://www.game.uk.com/review.asp?tab=pc&rev_id=149391 (the free download bit I mean)

 

[raw]

Had a look at the site, game looks promising.

 

[Summo]

A lack of cockpit view makes immersion very hard, though.

 

[xane]

Originally posted by Summo
A lack of cockpit view makes immersion very hard, though.

Er, have you actually thought about this ?

There are no ship controls as such as this is not a "twitch" game like Freelancer, instead you click on a distant target and the course and orientation are done for you, therefore you need a view that displays your ship relative to other objects, something very difficult to do from a cockpit view unless it had 360 degree vision.

Perhaps a cockpit view would be nice, but as far as gameplay goes it adds nothing.

Other MMOG live quite happily with 3rd person, Asheron's Call and Anarchy Online had 1st person too but no-one ever used it.

 

[Summo]

BUT I WANT TO FLY MY SHIP ABOUT, FS!

I seem to want some sort of cross between Freelancer and EVE. Seems that EVE is closest, though...

 

[Tom]

Well there won't be a cockpit view, but I am assured there will be plenty of cockbadgers.

I'm gonna start my own company, and it will sell cockbadgers by the thousand.

 

[Dr_Weasel]

Is the cockbadger tester position still vacant?

 

[stu]

The "player controlled universe" thing won't work. Quite simply, there will always be a "best" way of doing any element of any task in a game, and 95% of players will do that. Trying to simulate a real economic system is impossible - there are *far* too many contributing factors to take account of.

Oh, and Freelancer is WAY more like Elite than EVE. In fact I'd go so far as to say Freelancer is basically Elite with a storyline.

 

[Gef]

Pardon my ignorance but what is a 'cockbadger' ?

Its not on urbandictionary.. I was going to add it

 

[Durzel]

Originally posted by stu
The "player controlled universe" thing won't work. Quite simply, there will always be a "best" way of doing any element of any task in a game, and 95% of players will do that. Trying to simulate a real economic system is impossible - there are *far* too many contributing factors to take account of.

That's definitely a truth right there.

If you take E&B for example (statements about its "lameness"/"greatness" aside), the market channel online largely consists of people demanding 200% quality (the highest) on all crafted items of any level. Trying to sell items that are 150% quality, which ultimately have about 0.4 sec less firing rate in the case of weapons, is near impossible. Or people will pay less than 1/3rd for them. It's madness.

I don't bother crafting at all for the above reason, and the fact that I can't be arsed collecting/refining the ores required for manufacturing said items. Nor can I deal with the apparent randomness of the manufacturing terminals, regardless of your build level. But that's by the by...

As stu has said, the player driven economy sounds nice in principal but as with exploits, people just find out the quickest/cheapest way to do/achieve something and do it that way.

And as for the whole roleplaying aspect, whilst it would be nice to see people doing menial jobs to "make up the numbers", how likely is it that we're going to find people doing "dull" jobs in, say, SWG like - for example - growing crops. What's more likely is every man and his dog will be trying to become either a Bounty Hunter, or Jedi. Or both, assuming its even possible.

 

[Scooba Da Bass]

I want to be a jedi farmer :/

 

[Gef]

I heard it has Winamp and a web browser built into the client, how cool is that.. If you get bored you can just go surfing, come on BW or summit. One day it may even become a replacment desktop! Wicked laa..

 

[xane]

Originally posted by stu
The "player controlled universe" thing won't work. Quite simply, there will always be a "best" way of doing any element of any task in a game, and 95% of players will do that.

I disagree.

The whole point of a "player controlled universe" is that if everybody started doing something them it becomes meaningless and unprofitable, it's a self regulating way of limiting the exploits.

For example, if someone found that you can sell Roasted Barnacles to planet Aubergine for 500% profit, as soon as everyone started doing it the price would drop rapidly and the "exploit" would no longer be available.

In the same way with weaponry, if the best weapon was a Monkey Laser, then everyone starts buying up Primate Armour, eventually Monkey Lasers are useless.

The "player control" extends far more than you imagine, eventually new and better ships may only be available from certain player controlled corporations, and the demand for commodities would be from corporation requirements not from the market generated by the AI. For example, if a Lemming class frigate requires 50 tons of Bozo Oil to make, then the corporation may decide to pay higher for Bozo Oil, creating a demand.

(You can tell I've been reading the NDA).

 

[Wij]

You revealed that it has lasers of some kind.

Ban Xane !!1

 

[xane]

No so, I could have equally revealed it has monkeys.

 

[Wij]

BAN XANE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!







































!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111

 

[stu]

Originally posted by xane
The whole point of a "player controlled universe" is that if everybody started doing something them it becomes meaningless and unprofitable, it's a self regulating way of limiting the exploits.

For example, if someone found that you can sell Roasted Barnacles to planet Aubergine for 500% profit, as soon as everyone started doing it the price would drop rapidly and the "exploit" would no longer be available.

In the same way with weaponry, if the best weapon was a Monkey Laser, then everyone starts buying up Primate Armour, eventually Monkey Lasers are useless.

Which is great in theory. But my point was that it's impossible to simulate in practice. The rules of economic stability are based on literally *millions* of variables that exist in real life. Supply and Demand isn't as simple as "10,000 units of product A will cause an inversely proportional relationship with product B". It's a great concept to think that a team would actually be able to create an organic "balance" to something in an MMO, but unfortunately there will always be a *best* way of doing something, whatever it is. And that is the way most people will do it. If for no other reason than the vast majority of people don't *want* to try new stuff, they just want to go for guaranteed returns. That is why within a day of any patching of any MMO there are new character guides, trade guides, etc - because the canny players find the best way to do something (and that might not necessarily be the most profitable - it might be the quickest, the one that requires least travel, etc), and everyone else follows the guide to the letter. People don't want to try new stuff out, they want to go for the guaranteed returns.

Talking of EVE though - is it just me or is the beta still insanely lagged? It takes literally 2 or 3 seconds for any mouse clicks to actually do something on the client. I've just spent over 5 minutes downloading a 1mb patch (on ADSL). I want to give this game a lengthy try but it just seems to me like the infrastructure is shit (newbie dev team biting off more than it can chew - shades of AO and Neocron :/)

 

[GDW]

Penny for my thoughts....

I havent had a chance to try out EVE yet (still waiting on the Beta list), but having played a few of MMORPHS (AO EQ an AC) its safe to conclude that although companies try their best to release the next generation product that will steal the hearts and minds of the MMORPH compatible public, they are still limited by finance.

We are still years away from realistic immersive MMORPHS, we are the generation of the Model T Ford......give it another couple of generations away yet


......roll another one there Jack...............

 

[stu]

Bored yesterday, so decided to give it one final go. Despite me having downloaded the full client when the latest beta (ie the *public* one) came out, there's no valid patch for my version - so I need to re-download the entire new client. Which of course takes around (literally) 7 attempts, with the server cutting out repeatedly and maxing out at 10k/sec. Finally get the whole thing, double-click: "Error, unable to install, missing somerandomfile.txt".

Where's the organ grinder, because this game team certainly has its fair fucking share of monkeys.

 

[.Cask]

If you do decide to download it again I'd recommend using the Belgium FTP site. Was much faster than the http's and didn't cut out.

 

[WPKenny]

Speaking from 3yrs of playing UO (Ultima Online) which was largely player run once you got past the newbie stage, the player run economy works very well.

You ask about how many people would want to be a crop farmer? Well if no one can be arsed to do it then there'll be a huge demand for this commodity and it'll be worth someone's time and effort to cash in on it. It IS true that these things do balance out whether you think it or not. It's in place in UO and it does work. Maybe not the way most people would want but it's got a very good supply and demand model in place.

I don't know much about these new space MMORPG's as they don't really have any pull for me. I may give them a go if there's enough hype and good things said.

But for the "argument" that player run economies do not work because people find the best/fastest way of doing something is not een an argument. Changes will be made to the game by the dev team and also the players themselves will balance it out with the whole supply and demand thing once again.

 

[stu]

Well I played UO from release for about 3 years, and if any game perfectly demonstrates my argument, it's that. There are loads of character guides out there which tell you exactly how to earn the fastest cash/improve your fighting skills quickest/raise tradeskill quickest for money/etc. The dev team changes the balance and what happens? The guides change. Hence why everyone started out being a tank mage with halberd. Then switched to fencing when they improved interruption speed on the kris. Then switched to xbow when they upped heavy xbow damage. Hence why everyone used to use fireball, then lightning, then energy bolt, then flamestrike, now back to energy bolt. Etc. Because for every single task, be it something as basic as killing a monster to something as complex as raising the cash to buy a guild house, *there is a method which is most efficient*. This is the method the vast majority of people follow.

If no-one can be arsed to be a crop farmer it's because there's no benefit in doing it, so there is 0 demand for it. Then when the game is patched and crop farming becomes beneficial, everyone does it.

Thx for the tip Cask, incoming at 500k/sec. Is the game any better lagwise than before?

 

[osy]

@ stu

The economic system present in EvE works. And it works _exactly_ how it was intended.

For example, basic thing to _get money_ is to erm, mine. That, or do missions (quests), which may be player or NPC submitted.

.... or Trade. Which i did, discovered that on the lemmings planet there was no mining hammers, so i went to the ogre planet, bought mining hammers cheap, returned to the lemmings one and sold them for 40x value, nice profit.
Of course, few of the lemmings knew that and baffed at me, but i sold my hammers to the unknowing ones, thing that rendered me rich, very very fast. Looking at the diversity of offer/demand in EvE, you can say trading will work.

Not to mention manufacturing, which was mentioned earlier... one lemming can't mine on a large scale... he can only get about 300 stones in his backpack at one time, and he needs 1000 in order to be able to sell them, so its a time consuming process. Now if the ogre's company wants to craft hillbilly stone launcher, they need about 1.000.000 stones. Do the math, and realize that the ogre alone cant harvest those stones by them selves. What does the ogre do ? Goes to local pub, and knives a mauler cub skin on the wall, with the following writings on it:

Buying stones for 50 coppers a piece, need 1.000.000 pieces (price of stones on market being 1). So one lonely lemming like myself goes out mining, selling stones to ogres, Ogres craft launcher, everybody happy.

I love the concept, and yes, i think it works just great.

[later edit] stu, comparing UO with eve was a bad one, howgh... they have absolutely nothing in common, except they run under windows environment and they need a internet connection.