West Karana

While discussing the possibility of “classic” servers in World of Warcraft, Cameron waxes nostalgic about his own yearning for the simpler days of gnoll-pounding in the Karanas. I loved those days too — my blog is named after one of those old zones, and my header images are all from EQ1, so you know I’m standing right there with Cameron, casting SoW, shooting off careless lightning and healing as best an old-school druid can. I was so nostalgic at one point that I restarted on a new no-transfer server, Stromm, and went through the entire game from scratch (xping in East Commonlands and Permafrost and Oasis, seeing the world once again), so that helped sate that particular yearning.

Honestly, though, you can’t become the person you were, who didn’t know what was around the next corner. Not in a game you have already played. You have to move forward. And so this is my challenge. It is difficult, INCREDIBLY difficult, but will leave you with those same sorts of memories that you had when you first got into MMO gaming.

Pick a MMO — any MMO — and uninstall every other MMO from your hard drive. Additionally, pay no attention to any new MMOs that may be coming out. None of this trying it for a month to see how it goes. Just make it a game you have not played before. The game itself doesn’t have to be new — just you. It could be fun to pick up a really old game like Asheron’s Call and just jump into the deep end, or pick up Age of Conan and wade through blood for twelve months.

One player. One game. One year.

If you run out of content, bug the devs in the forums about expansions and run through the game again. Meet people like yourself. Form new friendships, see things and do things that dabblers will never see or do. You almost certainly did this once with another MMO and now you remember how much fun that was. So do it again. Here’s some suggestions.

Vanguard, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Mythos, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, Chronicles of Spellborn (assuming it ever releases), EVE Online. I deliberately leave out EQ2, WoW and LotRO, since they are popular enough that there’s no mystery or chance of discovery to them at all (especially WoW, but then, you probably already played that game anyway). If you’re daying, you might even try Star Wars: Galaxies. Don’t believe the common wisdom about games. People absolutely thrive on trashing games they don’t like, even though other people may enjoy the game (in which case, they feel, those people are WRONG and should be playing a different game). It doesn’t matter what people say. You’re going to choose your game and through thick and thin, when you decide to sit down a spend a few hours in an MMO, that’s the one you will choose.

MMOs cannot be fully enjoyed by dabblers. Commitment is part of the attraction.

Second step to this is to blog about it. If you aren’t a blogger, Blogspot and Wordpress (West Karana runs on Wordpress) will set you up, for free, no cost to you, in about a minute. Day 1 of the new game: Create a character and just write about how that goes. Win or suck, this is your game for a year. So keep a journal online, and in five years when you look back upon this year fondly, you’ll remember everything that happened.

The question is — could you play a single MMO for an entire year in order to get that same sort of feeling for a new game that you did for the one you remember?

Me? Well, I’m still loving EQ2. But there will come a time, maybe this year, maybe next, when I *will* take this challenge. Currently, Chronicles of Spellborn and Champions Online (neither with any sort of release date) are at the top of my list. I expect AoC and WAR to be too dominated by griefers to be much fun, but I’ll be trying out both games just to see.

A feature of mine about good games that DON’T have Warcraft in their names and could use some well-deserved love is up on Massively. Check it out, let me know what you think :)

I had the pleasure of being on SUWT #22 this weekend. I was first on SUWT #12, so I guess I’ll get another chance to mix it up with the crew on SUWT #32!

The fights, the yelling, the smashed windows, the death threats and broken relationships that make podcasts fun, are all here. Our souls laid bare. Tune in and listen to the terror that inevitably occurs whenever someone lets me get too close to a microphone.

We talk about how many billions of dollars would be needed to compete with WoW (short answer by our guest presenter, the Ghost of Carl Sagan: BILLYUNS and BILLYUNS), what game we would unmake (my choice: hopscotch, because what is the POINT of that game anyway?), what we’re playing (um, my hopscotch team is first in the league, by the way) and all that drama last week about SOE making an EQ2 community leader into an EQ2 community wiener.

Check it out!

There’s been a lot of topics going around the blogosphere, and I’ve been holding off on them because, well, I don’t really have anything groundbreaking to say about them.

But, what the heck.

eBook Readers

First up is a non-MMO one, but something I’ve covered extensively in this blog — eBook readers. “Ask Slashdot” fielded a question from a reader who asked Which eBook Reader is Best? The comments fell predictably into the camps that felt nothing could come close to the experience of reading an actual book; PDAs, cell phones and laptop computers were more appropriate for the task; Sony’s Reader comes from Sony and nothing more needs to be said (these are people angry less for the SWG NGE than for Sony’s rootkit adventures and their role as a quarter of the allegedly evil* RIAA). I use my Sony Reader every day, and daily rediscover old friends — yesterday brought Fred Saberhagen’s “First Book of Swords” and Julian May’s “The Many-Colored Land” onto my Reader. I didn’t comment on Slashdot, though, because… well, commenting on Slashdot on matters of opinion is pretty pointless. I doubt many would be sympathetic to my “I use a Reader because it looks good and is REALLY EASY TO READ” stance anyway.

* Evil. What does evil mean in this day and age — and of course, by evil, I mean the Dungeons and Dragons definition. I’ve been categorizing people according to their D&D alignment. The killer in “No Country for Old Men”, strictly adhered to his moral code — that’s lawful. But then, he would kill random people. That’s chaotic. So in the end, he’s Neutral Evil. Sony is too large a company for one alignment, but I think Sony BMG’s anti-customer stance has to make them at least Lawful Evil.

Other MMO Genres

Next up: What other genres, besides Fantasy and Sci-Fi, could make a successful MMO? Well, I don’t know if a decent MMO in either genre has yet been made. I was watching Battlestar Galactica Razor last night and… wow… what I wouldn’t give to be part of that world, in a game. Or even Star Trek. Just… part of that world. Eve *perhaps* comes closest. Tabula Rasa is just a balls-out shoot ‘em up, SWG was the dullest game I ever played… I think there’s plenty of room in SF for a decent MMO. As for Fantasy… that genre is still waiting for the break-out game. World of Warcraft? It’s a well-refined distillation of those that came before.

Other genres, though. Cthulhu mythos? Well, almost nothing ever happens in those stories. A person finds things are not as they seem, and is then exposed to implacable, faceless horror. Same problem with horror, in general, as a genre. You can’t scare people all the time, because it loses its sting. But you have to show them the money at some point, or they get bored.

The spy genre we’re getting in “The Agency”. That looks like an arcadish shoot-em-up, but I don’t know much about it. I doubt it will explore every cranny of the spy genre, though. What if you had an MMO where you had a public persona, let’s say, newspaper reporter for the New Zork Times; and a private persona, let’s say, assassin. You would gain levels by doing missions on your private persona, but the more people outside your faction who knew what you really were, the more chance your public persona would be destroyed, and you’d have to start a new one? Dual advancement paths, secrets, distrust everyone… I think that could work!

War… war is well-understood. Of all the genres, I think this is the most widely played. From tactical games, to shoot-em-ups, RTSs, FPSs, we have endless games of people blowing each other up in interesting and exciting ways. How about… peace? A game built around negotiations and diplomacy? Probably be dull as dishes, but let’s explore it a little. You are a politician, or you are a member of a diplomatic envoy, or you are an ambassador. And so is everyone else. You have a variety of goals you must advance, other things you must not allow, and some things you can be flexible on. This is like those old high school Model United Nations of which, as a true geek even back then, I was a member. Politics and negotiation was *fun*.

And if that fails, well, there’s always war.

Truth is, I think the limitations of technology have been and are still blocking that first great MMO from being made. In the next ten years, I bet we see an MMO that completely changes the genre. Maybe then a game can finally approach the complexity of a movie or a TV show.

Favorite MMOs

Oh yes. If it’s the end of the year, it must be time for lists. Fine, I can play that game.

#1: Nothing. I have not yet played my favorite MMO. I can say that it will be a game where the players have a great measure of control and are active participants in the creation of the game, though talented game-masters and designers will still guide the game into fun paths.

#2: EverQuest. The game itself was just okay. But the community surrounding the game has never been matched. Almost nine years later, you can meet an EQ1 player, ask them their server, and launch into many, many stories about the guilds and people they knew. The game was never as strong as its players, and SOE is still making money from the bonds people formed.

#3: EverQuest 2. Game-wise, EQ2 is today the game EQ1 wanted to be. I think (this is opinion, folks) that it is the strongest MMO out there as regarding scope, variety, looks and gameplay. I haven’t played anywhere near all MMOs or even all fantasy MMOs, but I wouldn’t be playing EQ2 today if I didn’t think it was the best. But, you say, EQ1 is higher on the list? EQ1 still wins on community. I just can’t stand the game itself any more. It underscores, though, how important I feel community is that even after I stopped liking the game very much, I still played for a couple of years.

#4. World of Warcraft. The first thing I look for in one of these lists is, how high did they score the big giant of MMOs? The second things I look for is where EQ2 falls. It’s hard to overstate WoW’s impact. I was playing EQ1 when WoW beta came out. From the time I started in WoW beta to the time it released, I played no other game. It was that gripping. I also felt, when it released, that I had seen the entire game and had no interest in playing it again, having leveled a night elf druid and a human mage. A year later, I took another look, this time as the Horde, and was pulled in just as strongly a second time. And having brought that char to 60 and raided MC and Onyxia and ZG, once again, felt I’d finished WoW, and unsubscribed. I don’t look back fondly on WoW, a lot of it was really boring, but then, a lot of it was fun and it was always compelling until raiding turned it from a game into a job.

#5. Final Fantasy XI Online. Other games dabbled with requiring players to be skilled, but none made it as much a requirement as FFXI. With precise, to the second teamwork to pull off combos, and having to work together so well to get the experience multipliers, no game I have ever played before or since made such a wide chasm between the good and the bad players — or between the West and the East. This was a game made for a different culture, one that valued following directions and working as a team, a culture far different than the more laissez-faire Western culture that celebrates lone heroes. If you could make it in a Japanese group, and gain their respect, then you could get a glimpse of a different kind of gameplay. FFXI was wonderful in a good group. In a bad group, it was about as rewarding as chewing bricks. It was an experience I will always remember.

#6. Dark Age of Camelot. I derided this initially as “EQ-Lite”, but when I got into it, I found the PvE boring but the RvR portion extremely fun. Whether sneaking into enemy territories to take out some hapless newbs, or trying to do some PvE in the frontier while being stalked, or the massive keep battles, or the battle-lines at EM. The battlegrounds defined the casual PvP experience, and I enjoyed their re-imagining in WoW and look forward to it again in WAR. In the end, I went back to EQ1 when Luclin came out, but I always did enjoy myself in DAoC. I tried coming back a couple of times, but the game had changed too much.

#7. City of Heroes. I’m scraping the virtual bucket here, because I don’t really consider CoH an MMO. It has nothing of the scope of the other games on this list. But for casual beat-em-up action, it’s hard to beat. I just find myself playing it once or twice, then several months later, unsubscribing, as it just doesn’t have the pull to make me want to log into CoH vs some other game.

#8. Star Wars Galaxies. It’s hard to call this a game, or what I did when I logged in, playing. I was intrigued by unusual professions such as entertainer, and so after a brief fling as a combat-type going out and running around animal burrows firing guns into dirt and stumps, I decided to go into cantina life and find fame and fortune on the glittering stage. It turned out to be tough to make conversation with people who had largely programmed their avatars to repeat the same actions in perpetuity while they went off and did something else with their lives. I’ve always had a problem with games that you pay not to play, and so I eventually also did something else with my life.

#9. EvE Online. I did like this game. I just didn’t know anyone else who played, and I hate playing by myself in an MMO, and so I didn’t last past the 14 day free trial. Mining and running missions just didn’t do it for me, and while my occasional madcap runs through low security space were exciting, they weren’t compelling. I spent most of my time in EvE thinking of cool names for my ships.

#10. Lord of the Rings Online. Where WoW took all the good things from the MMOs that came before it and melded them into something unique, LotRO took all of the really boring things from MMOs and melded them into something boring. Grind? Oh yes. Killing the same mobs over and over and over and over? Yup, check that one off. The world has a well-known plot and it’s your job to not be a part of that plot? Huh. PvP limited to artificially contrained “Monster Play”? Durnit, I wanted to level a goblin! Newbie grounds in the roots of the Misty Mountains, maybe finally leveling enough to threaten the despicable bright lands of the Shire! The game I wanted to play was not the game they made, and so when my free month ran out and a billing error canceled my account, I couldn’t find it in me to fix it.

What if we took EvE Online, and made a fantasy game out of it — using all of EvE’s mechanisms, as closely as possible? Syncaine claims that EvE has solved nearly all MMO problems. Fine, let’s turn that around.

In EvE, you fly ships from system to system, battling, exploring, gathering resources, trading, or any other purpose you can find. You, though, are not your ship. Your ship can be blowed up. You can try to escape, but maybe you get blowed up, too. But not to worry. Upon word of your untimely demise, a clone will arise from a vat to carry on where you left off.

An eternal warrior, who though all his companions might be killed, though he himself may die, will live again. That drips of fable and fantasy.

Story kind of writes itself from here, doesn’t it?

You start your adult life in your family home on the outskirts of a village. The masters and wizards in the village can teach you much, but their knowledge has limits, and soon you will have to set out from your home in search of your destiny.

You won’t set out alone, though. You’ll have a cart, and a horse. An old sword you inherited from your father. A wooden shield, once painted white. A leather jerkin. And some hired hands — a trained woodsman, who can forage and hunt food for the trip, and maybe an old fighter who has asked to come along on one last adventure.

If you stay on the King’s roads, you’ll be safe, and can find your fortune in the world, never worrying about the wider, wilder, world outside the cities. You’ll find more people who wish to join you as your fame and knowledge grows; more fighters and better ones; a healer; perhaps even wizards to cast spells of divination and warding for you. You’ll bring them back to your village, which will become a city; and your cottage, which will become a castle.

Soon you will have a small army, and now, perhaps, you want to venture off the King’s roads and into the Wild, where monsters dwell and treasure hides. You gather your army and set off. One night, you camp at the edge of an ancient swamp, with crumbling ruins poking from it that resemble the broken ribs of some gigantic creature in the smoky moonlight.

The fog thickens… and from that fog comes a spectral army, slaughtering and slaying and catching you entirely unaware… your army fights back, bravely, but their weapons are no match for the ghostly crew that assails them. The screams of your men and the dead cackle of the specters chase you through the forest, back to the King’s road and back to your city. You rest, set your wizards to finding out who commanded that dread legion, and then slowly begin to amass an army, even greater, to get your revenge…

CCP, makers of EvE Online, announced yesterday that they will soon have official support for their game on the Macintosh and Linux.

It’s little things like this that chip away at Windows’ dominance in PC gaming. The kind of thing that would make me want to resubscribe — I’m writing this on Linux, I do nearly everything on Linux, except for the times I reboot to Windows to play a game.

EvE Online has worked to some extent for awhile with Wine and Cedega, open source and commercial versions of a library that provides Windows compatible libraries with which to run Windows games and applications under Linux. Since all this does just use Cedega (or Cider for the Mac) and isn’t a truly native client, this doesn’t really add anything players didn’t already have in some fashion, but it’s nice to see more games companies offering *official* support.

Unfortunately, the Linux client doesn’t ATI cards. The card I use on my Linux box, an nVidia 6600 (which handles EQ2, Portal and Dungeon Runners fabulously), is the *minimum* card listed; they recommend at least an nVidia 7600.

The Mac client is recommended for cards better than the ATI X1600 or the nVidia 7300. (Yay, Mac supports ATI…)

This is the kind of thing CCP does that is going to get me to resubscribe. Not have to boot out of Linux to play a game? Nice…

On the other hand, Cedega runs like crap on my machine, so I don’t know if EvE would run any better…

Shut Up, We’re Talking! #12 is up. I had the pleasure of being part of it, along with Grimwell (SOE EQ2 Community Manager) and Tom-Tom from Gamer’s Mind.

Thanks, Darren, for being such an awesome host! Darren really knows how to keep the discussion going and moving to interesting places. I was positive I’d have nothing to say :P

My two week EvE Online trial has come to an end, and now EvE wants me to pay $14.95, each and every month.

Did I have fun? I did. EvE is an exciting, original game. Although the NPC-given missions are fairly cookie-cutter, it’s understood that this is just filler to get you ready for the real game that lives in 0.0 space. EvE doesn’t insist upon leveling or grinding, though there definitely is a grind in the game. But if all you want to do is find rare stuff to mine, you can do that from Day 1 and make a fairly decent living and see a good portion of the universe. But fly your little mining frigate near someone else’s battleship, and soon you’ll be working on the necessary skills to command one yourself.

It comes down to how many monthly fees I want to pay. I am paying for three EQ2 accounts — my two and my son’s — and my money there buys me EQ2; EQ1 (if I ever get it working again); Vanguard (potentially, but it better make itself very different from WoW before I try it again); Gods & Heroes; Pirates of the Burning Sea; quite possibly Star Trek Online; given its EQ heritage, 38 Studios’ effort wouldn’t surprise me if it came on the Station Pass; the Agency; possibly LittleBig World and @Home (unsure if the PS3 stuff uses the Station Pass).

EvE’s monthly fee buys me EvE. That’s all. If they partnered with SOE, or NCSoft, and got more value for their game… then I’d do it. I’d pay that extra money if they were on NCSoft and my fee got me City of Dress-up Dolls, Dungeon Runners, and my favorite game of all time, Auto Assault.

I just can’t afford to play every game I would like to play. EvE Online is a great, influential game. But these days, it isn’t enough to be great — games don’t exist in a vacuum (well…. maybe EvE does…. :P ). There’s a crowded MMO world out there, and people will only be able to afford few of the games they would like to play.

When it comes down to a question of, “would I give up my current game to play your game”, the answer to that question will usually be “no”. When avatar play is added, I may be back for another look.

Whilst playing EvE Online today, it occurred to me that SF book authors are missing a real savings, book-cover wise, by not just finding a good screenshot in EvE and using that for their cover… Why, if more people did that, we could have books like… hmm…

There’s a big seller for ya. Who wouldn’t buy a book by someone named Spock?

One woman’s tale of reaching middle age and coming across a nest of Kilrathi in Beta Sector…!

Hmmm… Wonder if this works for Fantasy pics?

Yup!

I hadn’t finished training Gallenite Frigate III before I left for work, so there went the whole day… not training anything… Naturally, the very first order of the night when I got home was to start my training (I chose Electronics up to skill level II, now doing Science V which seems required for a lot of fabbing).

The second was to buy my Incursus Killing Death Machine of Hurt. Those smug jerks bringing their trash through Luse thought they’d seen the last of me when they blew Isis’ Dark Laughter out of the sky. They were going to understand just how cold space can be.

Isis in Shadow strained at the force beams holding her in her hanger bay. Her sensor displays were rimmed red around the edges with blood lust. She couldn’t be more different than my amiable miner, Dark Laughter. But then, I wasn’t looking for a ship that could settle down for a nice meal of Veldspar Chex. I wanted a killer.

Three turrets, fitted with 150mm Gatling rail guns shoving superheated iridium into the astonished maws of my killers. Backed up with the best shield boosters I could use, a nano-armor repair unit I picked from some pirates, and an afterburner I had left over from an orgy of afterburner production I made accidentally during a tutorial mission.

I had to blood in Shadow first. I had some drones who needed schooling. The three guns chugged once for each drone, and that was that.

Back to Luse for the personnel transport. The CEO of my corp offered to help, and he met me at the acceleration gate into deadspace. We warped in together, cleared the vanguard, then warped to the second encounter and watched in wonder as wave after wave of ships popped out of warp. He released his cloud of combat drones, and then went link dead.

I tried to turn back, but Isis in Shadow refused. We rode in on a trail of plasma and skulls. I’d grab their attention with a shot or two, then lure them back to the drone cloud, where even link dead, my boss could help kill. That was too easy. That wasn’t revenge enough. So I went in alone. Guns overheating, cargo hold getting low on rounds, capacitors dryer than last year’s Thanksgiving turkey. Bam! All dead.

I wasn’t ready for the last attacker… in an evil twist, my CEO’s link death had turned his ship aggro, and he began his approach run. his shots somewhat more effective than those of the wrecked rebels. Thinking that destroying his ship while he was link dead would be a Bad Idea, I just tried to stay out of range until his ship finally was able to leave the game.

in Shadow proved herself many times that night. But I may just find a kindly old shipyard somewhere that might have another Maurus in the back lot who needs some love.

I have some mining lasers waiting.

Why, you do a Pod-cast, of course!

One Tired Eve Pilot… limping from battle… sensors on the blink… never sees the asteroid wot got ‘im… dispatches from the clone bank…

Good luck :)

It was a difficult mission — stop a military transport, take everyone on it prisoner and bring them back to base for some fun — and I think I did fairly well. Defeated the two scouts guarding the acceleration array (ie, zone line) to the instance, no problem, I was cooking with antimatter. Inside the deadspace instance, were a couple of ships… okay, I can take them on… and then many more… so much that I had to rabbit it back to base for some quick repairs. When I returned… two minutes until the transport arrived… I couldn’t defeat all its guards by then. I decided to lead them a chase and circle back around.

The transport popped in from warp… with even more friends… so I bore down upon it with guns blazing. My shield boosters were redlining, my guns were over heating, and my hull looked like a hunk of Swiss cheese that had met a family of enthusiastic mice. I destroyed the transport… and then a dozen angry rebels finished off Isis’ Dark Laughter.

I tried to take a shuttle back to retrieve the wreckage, but with so many rebels swarming about, there was nothing I could do.

I knew it was over when the insurance company paid off my claim. They even gave me a basic ship in which to scoot around. How nice.

I wasn’t planning on keeping Dark Laughter forever, but I did hope she’d see me safely until I finished training to pilot Type III Gallenite Frigates, which I should achieve sometime early tomorrow morning. (Then it’s back to the Science classes for me…)

I had a blueprint for a basic frigate hanging around, and last night I’d mined all the rare ores I will ever (ha!) need for basic shipbuilding, so I sent the job to a factory to build and logged into EQ2 to raid.

When I came back, Isis’ Silent Kiss was ready for christening. A ship of that class is no match for the rebels, so I spent the evening killing some of the prowlers that lurk about various asteroid fields and doing odd jobs to get ISK.

Tomorrow, Dark Laughter II will hunt down those rebels. They will die quickly. Three 150mm Gatling Railguns with hybrid antimatter charges will see to that.

Above: Isis’ Silent Kiss. I didn’t have any pictures of my beloved Dark Laughter because I thought taking screenshots saved them to disk.

Number one question I asked when I saw EVE screenshots before I began playing was, is that what the game actually looks like? Yes, yes it does. Very cinematic pictures of spaceships and nebulas. And… that’s pretty much it. EVE is not a very visual game. You can cover your screen with various windows and you won’t miss much (I end up doing that quite a lot). They could make a client for ASCII terminals, probably. Even combat doesn’t really require you to look — when I fight, I’m watching the targeting scanners, keeping my weapons loaded, trying to keep the hull in one piece, keeping at correct weapon range and leaving a spare eye for the mission objectives.

The thing that frustrates me most about Fantasy MMORPGs is their lack of imagination. Not imagination like in creating the mystical world of Elflandia populated by mystic Elfians who are under siege by the vicious Orcanauts or however they manage to fit elves and orcs into any fantasy game world (Does it have elves? CHECK. Orcs? CHECK. We’re GOOD TO GO!) I do wish that MMO devs would look beyond Tolkein for inspiration. Why not the world of “The Worm Ouroborous”? Or of “Ill Met in Lankhmar”? Or “The Dying Earth”?(*)

But that’s a rant for another time.

I’d give MMO devs a break if there weren’t already MMOs out there starting to give us crude glimpses of the future.

After I wrote my Dogs and Frisbees post, I just had to see if anyone was truly doing next generation gameplay — gaming where the devs had let loose their iron grips on their IP and allowed players to collaborate with them to make their world come alive.

In EVE Online you are dumped, in a powerless ship, into a hostile universe.\ There’s some tutorial missions to teach you how to play, but after that, you are on your own. No helpful arrows telling you where to go next. I dunno. Maybe mine? And so you mine. Ooops, there are baddies there, baddies that you are unable to kill, and the game has not told you that you need to sneak around, mine what you can, find a decent place to sell it and then buy a ship. What do the weapons do? How do you fight?

Sorry, on your own (they do have noobie chat).

Just for the record, I know now that if I want to use that 150mm Gatling Pulse Cannon, I’d best be keeping about 10km from my opponent, where at least the Serpentis Scout ship weapons can’t hurt me much. But those hybrid plutonium rounds — ZING.

I had to figure all that out by myself. It was a challenge.

There are NPC missions at most starbases, and you can do them for fairly decent rewards. The mission line I picked up right after the tutorial eventually netted me two ships (one of which needed to be built from blueprints) and lots of good upgrades. Getting the correct ores to build that ship? I eventually found out that they expected you to get the rarer ores from reprocessing junk taken from killing pirates in the asteroid belts, but not knowing that, I went searching through the universe, eventually finding myself ten jumps from home making ninja runs into low security space (and finding rare and highly prized Silvery Omber ore which goes for $$$ in high security space).

NPC missions are great to just pass the time, and they tend to be bring this here, mine this, kill these — the same kinds of quests you see everywhere, except with spaceships. (Well, the Mountains from Molehills mission line eventually had you invent and construct a Perpetual Motion Machine II, which was pretty funny).

The real fun comes from the PC quests. These are people who put open contracts on the market — make this for me at this price, or bring this stuff from here to there (sometimes you make something you can’t fit into your cargo hold, but it’s useless to you sitting at the factory — solution: hire a player with a big, fat transport ship to move it for you). Contracts on people you don’t like. All sorts of stuff.

If you don’t like that, you can earn money as I did (I can’t afford the collateral to do the big PC missions yet… yes, you have to be bonded to ensure completion of the contract. I work in bonds in real life. I got such a thrill…). I find rare ores, then find the best buyer and make bunches. You can also play the market, bringing items players have made in abundance in one place and selling them in another. That’s another way to make money. Craft stuff. Then let low level players do the hard work of bringing it where it needs to be for the best price.

And all this is just the pink frosting around the real game — the game of politics, rivalry and warfare for which EVE Online is famous (and is way out of my league). I’m a bit player in a larger world. Not some hero out to save the world, but a lowly miner in a small ship making a living doing the things other people can’t be bothered to do. I was mining in my tiny ship, when a massive transport vessel hailed me. They were recruiting for their corp and needed some stringers. And so I joined Waste of Space (even though I might poof when my 14 day free trial ends). I immediately got help finding those rare ores I needed, was offered a better ship, upgrades and ISK… friendly folks…!

It’s games like this, games unafraid to challenge their players and not caring if they are everything to everyone and willing to hand the game to the players, that are the new face of MMO gaming. I’ll be eventually looking at A Tale in the Desert, where the players make the rules; and Hero’s Journey, where the players make the content (not sure what the status of this game is, I meant to take a look at it a couple of years ago but never got to it).

(*) Jack Vance, author of the Dying Earth books, had a short story where humans had domesticated dragons. They had dragons for pulling stuff, dragons for riding, dragons for flying around dropping bombs and stuff. Once they went to war, and on the field found their opponents were dragons… who had domesticated humans. They had humans for pulling stuff, riding, carrying loads… :)