Welcome to the RTSC
EVE Online pages

	Hello :) What you're seeing here is the beginning and evolution of a new RTSC games section. These things usually grow and shrink organically, depending on how things play out.

EVE-Online is a massive multiplayer online (or MMO) game developed and published by Icelandic developer Crowd Control Productions, (or CCP). In a nutshell: Internet Spaceships. If you're familiar with ye olde 8-bit titles of personal computer gaming, then you'll instantly recognise that old spaceship sim called Elite, reconstituted for the new century as a vast MMO. Like Elite, your character in EVE is secondary to the ships you fly and equip. Character progression is all but non-existent, compared to your capacity to earn an income, access resources and produce your own hardware.

New Eden is a cold, hard universe where the playerbase is pitted against itself. EVE's basic premise is of a bold push by humanity into a a future ruled by space borne corporations and alliances. Everything from benign industry through to ruthless piracy and corporate espionage is perfectly acceptable within the game mechanics. Its dystopian in the sense EVE models a form of hyper-capitalism, with little or no room for compassion or ethics. The central feature of EVE is that most of its space is up for grabs for players, and most of the interest and action takes place between player corporations and alliances vying for control of territory and thus power. And in achieving those objects, anything goes. EVE feels more like a long term social experiment than a roleplaying game sometimes. This is not a world based on the ideals of a Star Trek; this is a world based on the dystopian universe of a Blake's 7.

For a lot of old timer gamers like myself, EVE represents a sort of ultimate game. EVE has in concrete terms what most games usually only hint at or suggest.

There are no aliens in EVE, only humans factions. There's no racial profiling (i.e. no dwarves, elves, hobbits, etc. with unique abilities). Any player can learn any skill and fly any ship, once they've skilled up for it. The market that characterised Elite so much is now a genuine, player driven economy where most of the thousands of different items on the market have been built by players one way or another, from simple ammunition through to vast space vessels called Titans. Most of the time you're staring at your own ship in space or the interior of a hangar, buried under spreadsheets and menus.

World of WarCraft (or WoW) became emblematic of what the general public considered to be an "MMO". Before it was published, there was a lot of uncertainty about the medium: MMO's seemed to be the exclusive domain of hardcore internet nerds, and the problems of trying to fill these vast virtual worlds with enough material to keep the players entertained was burning out art directors, writers and developers alike. When it took years to develop a roleplaying game that might last 40 hours of solo gameplay, trying to fill something that gangs of players were occupying for months at a time (and paying a monthly fee for) was a titanic jump. These games either degenerated into nasty player versus player (or PvP) zones where older (in game time terms) players preyed merciless on "newbs" who had no hope of retaliation - or nothing more than themed chat channels as people ran out of things to do, got bored, and only stayed on because they're friends were there.

WoW managed to enjoyed titanic success and effectively became the template that all other MMO developers strive to emulate; the secret of its success is that it catered to the casual gamer - in spite of a million know-it-all MMO vets views to the contrary - and offered a rich smorgasbord of content for them to roam in. WoW epitomises the seduction of loot, experience levels, slick presentation and polish, and offers about eight styles of gaming, ranging from simple solo missioning, exploration, player trade, crafting, tournament duels and large guild level PvE raids.

By stark contrast, EVE-Online goes the other way. EVE is fundamentally a sandbox: the onus is on the players to set their own objectives and fulfil them. Or rather, try to fulfil them whilst dealing with the restrictions imposed by the presence of other players and player entities. It is possible to lord it over other players like an emperor in this game; EVE player politics is central to the antics of most of the territorial squabbling. There's no leveling system or experience points to lead you by the nose from one encounter to another; a lot of the time its a zoo out there.

Sometimes, I find it hard to shake the feeling that EVE-Online is more of a subtle sociological experiment, - a human ant farm. There's something about the corps in EVE that eclipse the dull pretensions of your typical gamer. If you thought Guilds could be up themselves, then you're going to be shocked at how seriously a lot of EVE Corps take themselves.

	Notes: MMO For the uninitiated: MMO is short for Massive Multiplayer Online game. This is a game that exists on an Internet server somewhere. Players access it by logging in using their game clients (the game file they run off their local hard drive). They enter a game world that is populated by other players, or rather, their avatars, the characters that they've nomiated to represent them in game. The appeal of MMO's is that they are persistent: that is, the changes that happened to the game world persist and continue to change over time. Avatar - The character onscreen that represents your presence in the game. Often these are three dimension figures that can be extensively customised or dressed. NPC - Non Player Character. An Avatar generated by the game server to represent parts of the game. NPC's range from simple tutorial characters to monsters to bash or end-level bosses to overcome. In EVE, they're called Rats, short for Pirates. Rats are conjured up around asteroid fields, stargates and populate mission spaces. PvP - Acronym for Player Versus Player. In MMO circles, PvP duels are half the reason why people log in in the first place. Why bash stupid PvE - Acronym for Player Versus Environment. This is where players play against the game environment itself. This would include missions, raids and pre-set scnarios. Grind - the dull, monontous process of playing the same repetitive game mechanic in order to progress in the game. In WoW, grinding levels from 1 to 70 is sometimes seen as a necessary prerequisite before "starting" the game proper. In EVE, most players "grind" for ISK. placeholder WIP stick-'em-in-as-I-remember-them MMO terms

Players role play spaceship "pod pilots", near immortal characters who are forever resurrected by their own clones they die. Unlike most roleplaying games, your avatar's stats are secondary to how you equip your space. There's an elaborate player creation process, but this creature is relegated to little more than an immobile postage stamp in the game interface. You're looking at a flashy spaceship centred on your screen or the interior of a giant hangar buried in menus and cargo manifests.

What makes it unique amongst MMO's everywhere is that the entire EVE universe is run on a single shard. What this means is that the entire EVE universe is genuinely persistent in a way that most other online games aren't. Every player, regardless of whether they're helpless newbies, casual mission runners, or hardcore player killers and griefers, all live in the one space called New Eden.

The game makes absolutely no concessions when it comes to casual gaming.