I guess the closest thing in real life would be playing high-stakes poker.

Flying with the Goons was always an adventure.

Hell yes. I play WoW in a moderately successful raiding guild (very roughly rank #250 worldwide), so a lot of the people that I play with played various MMOs and other various competitive games over the years, but they all act like I'm crazy when I bring up Runescape as a game that did some things right.

I played RS for a year or so when I was 15 (feels forever ago now, just turned 21). The game is totally different now than it used to be, but at the time the risk/reward aspects of RS Pking, dueling, and full scale clan wars made the game amazingly fun at the time. Now don't get me wrong, in retrospect the game was bad. Lots of the good things about the game came out of the player community, lots of the good things about the game were later nerfed or removed altogether, and last but certainly not least the gameplay itself was awful. Despite all this the risk aspect of dueling someone for a million gold or a rare item, or pking someone in the wilderness and taking their armor, or to encounter a 10-15 person group while roving as a 30 person clan in the deep wilderness and then finding out they were luring to another 30+ people just a little bit away was epic and a ton of fun.

WoW isn't really much better. The general gameplay in WoW is actually good and PvE in WoW can be really excellent, but there is no risk in anything, class balance is always a touchy subject , server communities are generally not big or if they are big they are usually horribly imbalanced to one faction, game lag is a problem when that ugly first M in MMO rears its head (for certain definitions of massive, 200 players in combat in the same place is near server crashing in WoW), and million other things are wrong with the game.

Long comment long, suffice it to say the "real" aspects of Eve are probably the most intriguing aspect of the game to me.

Unfortunately, such an MMO would not be economically stable in the real world in the medium and long term. Most people who play games do so as an escape, not as a proxy for real life power politics. If nothing else, any game content dependent on loss mechanics tend to become avoided by players past a certain user base size, as they figure out which game content is lower risk. (Grinding boss runs and the like, for example.) Yes, for some players, this isn’t “fun,” but game designers have to focus on where the majority of gamers who provide the monthly fees or “freemium” content.

EVE is the only MMO I’m aware of that avoided this problem, but it has done so at the cost of being confined to a very tight user community with limited prospects for growth or mainstream awareness. EVE doesn’t sound very fun to me; the requirement to make corps (guilds in other games) and be beholden to your peers makes the social stress requirement worse than public school and megacorp office work in my mind.

Believe me when I say we are at the cusp of such online worlds. UO is still online. Guess how many years! But, how much profit is enough? When I "escape," I can/'t help but expect the basic rules of property and ownership to entail the possibility such property to be stolen or taken! (I would rather be subject to such in a game, rather than real-life of course.) What is the root of your escape? How do you need to do so? To me, giving real life attributes to a game allows people to choose different paths than they normally would which provides that escape you deem important. "Immersion" is of course the goal however.

Personally, I don't even like character level-ups. I much preferred UO's skill based numerics. I didn't even mind Stat-loss era when, if you died as a PK, you would be penalized 20% of your skills when it was heavily weighed at the higher end(it took just as long to get from 80 to 90 magery as 99 to 100.)

I wasn’t referring to MMOs in general, but those that assess the players various forms of "loss" for sloppy play. I played WoW for about a year, and for the most part, the game has mostly removed the "loss mechanics" that the original poster was complaining were absent in most modern MMOs. Originally, WoW had experience and even equipment loss penalties for dying too much. These have gone by the wayside, as well as making the crafting mechanics in the game more about personal buffs than creating goods for an economy, something that EVE is supposed to excel at.

It's also a very unlikely thing in real life. In a game with penalties, it happens often (because there are no real life risks for doing it), and your only recourse is getting stronger and doing the same thing to the person who did it to you.

I play games for fun, not to bring the negatives of life along for the ride. If you see the negatives as positives, you wouldn't understand why someone would think like I do. Revenge-based gameplay seems extremely boring (and frustrating) to me.

I think the success of games like WoW over games with significant death penalties shows which viewpoint is more common.

Another example of a "dangerous" CRPG would be nethack, which also is played by many people. ("dangerous" meaning permanent deaths and stuff like that).

The roguelike games are a better example, though. However, they are for the most part very niche. (Full disclosure: heavy Moria/Angband player in college.) When such a game goes commercial, like Diablo or Torchlight, they invariably make “hardcore” an optional, unlockable mode instead of the default.

I know, the odds don't look good. On the other hand, EVE seems to prevail, and there are people who long for that kind of environment.

I guess it is always the choice: create something really good, and hopefully survive making a decent dough, or target the masses with a less worthy product, but making more money.

You may argue that in music the people have already spoken and that Lady Gaga (or whoever is all the rage these days) is it, or that the Da Vinci Code had set the direction for literature a few years ago. But there's a whole universe of tastes out there. Not only the mainstream is worth catering to.

Having said that, the most fun in EVE Online comes from playing in the less secure areas where the interactions are almost all player-driven.

The thing about games is that, even when they're challenging, there needs to be thought and care put into balancing the challenges. Griefers don't do this. That's why they're called "griefers" rather than "funners."

The reason this is an especially big problem in RPGs (more than, say, an FPS) is the defining quality of the genre — character progression. To my level 3 bard, your level 100 demon master is much more than an obstacle, he's the equivalent of the 256th level of Pac-Man. Game over, instantly.

I used to think the way you do, because it really does sound nice in theory. But it requires a very special kind of community to make work, and most gamers do not have a place there, and I don't know any way to apply the right kind of social pressure to make sure everybody is dedicated to making the game fun at the expense of winning.

As I said, I really like PVP. I wish it worked that way you're talking about, but it doesn't. When I used to play WOW, I played PVP, hoping for exactly the experience you're describing. But it didn't mean fun challenges to overcome, where enemy players are a great obstacle to overcome. It meant getting stunlocked and then finally killed by a rogue 30 levels above me. There's no overcoming that. The only winning move is not to play.

I guess you've never played nethack? ;-)

over 1000 dollars worth of these items were destroyed.

now the bit at the end of the article just basically mentions how the reported event was verifiable, by way of the authenticated api for viewing player information

The ship exploded and all cargo (worth a supposed $1000 USD) was lost.

The players that destroyed the ship (and associated cargo) weren't trying to destroy the cargo, just got unlucky.

Replace the word "keep" with the phrase "cash in on". Eve never really cared about isk farmers/sellers, they are paying subscribers after all. Sure they would ban a few hundred accounts every few months, but it would only be a small percentage of the total farmers.

Once they realized they could be making some of that money themselves did they create PLEX. And the farming continues as they don't want to stoop to the level of selling isk for money.

It can be argued that what happened in your instance wasn’t a “real” loss, since players got to actually play for a few hours, and could have maintained or created new social ties during that time period, even if they lost virtual “loot.” It would still sting, but not quite as bad as what happened here.

Uh, no. We spent two whole months down in zero-security space on a campaign where we lost a player-constructed station. (The kind with a market!) This happened to us again and again -- we were winning and the other side lagged out the system and got everything reset. If it weren't for severs falling over, we would have won by taking down enemy towers and gaining ownership of the system.

Not only did this add up to well over $1000 of lost player-time, but the whole experience was demoralizing and social ties were broken by the experience.

You can easily make >1b a week in Eve without too much effort so losing 22B while not fun isn't equal to losing $1000 for most people that have that much in game currency.

I've lost ships worth over $300 by this thinking without blinking because its just in-game currency and apparently have over $3000 worth of in game assets but its not real and I can't just go cash it out at that rate. Best case is I never pay for the game again.

Jugding from this direction, $1000 was saved for someone, because the server costs which would have appeared if the game time was used disappeared.

But besides this, I agree.

In EVE, players fly spaceships about. There are different classes of spaceship, but the smallest and weakest ship are called frigates. They are also by far the most common ships to see in EVE as they are the only ships that can be flown by new players.

EVE also permits (and encourages) player on player combat. When a player's ship is destroyed, there is a random dice roll for each item in cargo to decide if the item will survive. Surviving items are dropped into the game world and can be taken by other players. Therefore players can attack other players and steal their items. This is normally done by a gang of pirate players who wait at the stargates that act as bottlenecks between areas. These pirates scan passing ships to see what cargo they are holding and if it's worth it, they attack. Mostly they attack large cargo ships, not beginners frigates as the loot you get from a beginning player doesn't outweigh the costs of attacking a ship.

What's happened here is that one player (probably working for some sort of large ingame player run group) was trying to move PLEX around (probably for profit, the market is player run and prices are different from area to area) in a weak frigate in an attempt to avoid attention, assuming that pirates would not bother scanning a tiny frigate. If it works it's a very cheap and easy way to move items about. In practice the pirates much have cargo scanned the frigate and then attacked it, seeking to steal the PLEX's. However the PLEX's were destroyed by an unlucky dice roll, robbing the pirates of their loot.

Its why I'm still subscribed after years.

At its worst, its terrible, the lag, the waiting, the bordem, and CCP making terrible decisions.

But its hard to beat the rush of crushing a human powered fleet, of hundreds of players. Realistically, you can do 300 vs 300 in Eve Today with relatively little lag, its only when systems top 1000 thats things fall apart -- there is a strategy to some of that, but in the sub 600 person fights, it can be absolutely Epic, and no other MMO or game on the market is even close.

Its Fun. You just have to pick and choose.

I used to be in Sniggerdly / Pandemic Legion but I havent't played for more than a year now. Even during the last year that I was a member I played less than I was coding corporation and alliance tools against the then new EVE API.

Sometimes something seems inappropriate but popular, and I think I understand why. I flag it and carry on. But once in a while there's a post that I think is inappropriate but I don't understand why. So I ask.

That being said, I do get why using the question as a passive-aggressive way of saying "Not HN" is tiresome and also a violation of the guidelines. No judgment on this specific question, just a general comment...