So, you’ve probably noticed I don’t seem to write very much these days. This is mainly because I haven’t been playing EVE a whole lot. The week + break I took at Thanksgiving kind of broke my groove, and some computer issues I’ve been having running EVE lately have kind of sapped me of the will to play in any serious capacity.
So instead, I’ve been playing Minecraft. Some Amarr invited me on their server so the last couple days I’ve been trying to build a house and a sustainable food source –you know, the usual stuff you do when you start on a new mc server.
Even so, I often can’t help comparing any game I’m playing to EVE:
Food. If you don’t have it on a mc server set on the hard mode (which is what we’re playing) then you will starve to death.
Being close to starving several times means that I had to borrow some food from Almity (yes…the same Almity who is one of the Amarr’s fcs…lol) and quickly change my tune from immediately building something grand to creating a sustainable food source/farm.
There is a certain sense of urgency, being close to death, to doing what needs to be done to survive.
And interestingly, as ‘cutesy’ as Minecraft is and as ‘hard core’ as EVE is, EVE completely lacks this sense of urgency. I can sit in a station doing nothing for as long as I want, and it doesn’t matter. And, we call that the ‘sandbox.’ It is inconceivable to anyone to ‘force’ them into doing anything. And as a result, we let them do nothing at all.
I’m not saying we should make people eat in EVE. However, I do wonder what EVE would look like if we were encourage to have more of a fire in our tail. We NEED to defend our home. We NEED to make more ISK to survive. We NEED to mine more minerals, we NEED to kill more enemies.
We NEED to survive.
What if there were consequences in EVE for doing nothing?
This is what I love about w-space. If you do nothing you lose all your stuff. Come abandon the evil lands of local and stations!
ReplyDelete"What if there were consequences in EVE for doing nothing?"
ReplyDeleteBut there are...
"I'm bored, there's nothing to do. This game sucks. :unsub:"
On the other hand, "66% of players like boring, and _safe_," so I'm told, so obviously those two ideas are in some sort of contradiction. ;-)
Play WoW. It's fun.
ReplyDeleteGlad to see you're enjoying our server, Susan.
ReplyDeleteThere are consequences in eve for doing nothing, in a way. If you don't defend your home system, you lose it, etc. You can't buy a new ship unless you earn isk. There is no timed universal limit like starving to death in MC tho. Of course there are people like me too, who can't stand MC with hard mode on mainly because I would have to spend time eating. There's nothing to do in MC besides whatever you make of it, so why would I want to spend some of that time eating square watermelons? IDK different strokes I guess.
ReplyDeleteThe chief consequence of doing nothing in EVE remains all the somethings you aren't doing. Or getting done to you. It balances.
ReplyDeleteI have actually enjoyed station-tanking would-be warfighters and gankers. I can take a *lot* more boredom than they can, when I have unaffiliated alts to play and/or a real life to live.
Try setting up a POS and doing nothing, or a PI chain, or setting up a null-sec empire. Plenty of consequences for inactivity there.
ReplyDeleteThere are plenty of consequences to doing nothing in Eve, it might just be that you took on a particularly care-free play style that allows you to get away with doing nothing. A game like MC has different servers that allows it to cater to different play styles, but in Eve we all share the same server.
In order to cater to all play styles (or most anyway) they need to have activities that can be done whenever you want and those that require your periodic attention (fuel those POS), the real challenge is in balancing the time/profit balance so that people choosing the needier play style are getting some benefits out of it.