EVE Corporation - Page 13

On May 05 2009 20:14 motbob wrote:
Sup guys. Wrote a long essay on why YOU should join EVE. Wouldn't mind if it found its way into the OP. It's from the Metagaming thread.

"0.0 is what a lot of people call EVE's "end-game" material. It's what players strive for: the most expensive ship in the game is a Titan, which works only in conjuction with big fleets, etc etc. But there is so much more to EVE.

EVE PvP is the most complicated online warfare you could possibly imagine. The possibility for setting traps, outmanuvering your opponent, using ship combinations in creative ways... is limitless. A fleet with good leadership and competent members in shitty ships that, though cheap, complement one another, can take down a fleet with many times its cost in isk.

It is the same way in the market. It is entirely player driven. Finding a profitable trade route is simply a matter of time and intelligence. For example, the price of an item called "implants" recently collapsed in EVE. The perception of the cheapness of implants had not yet fully hit players who had not looked at prices recently. So I bought a bunch of them, took them to a trade hub, and advertised sets of them at prices that would have been low a few weeks ago. I made 15 million isk per set, an amount that it would take an hour to make running missions for NPCs, if you had the correct skills and know-how. You can see how this is an example of "market PvP." I used the perceptions of other players to take their money.

Everywhere in EVE you can see signs of incredibly smart players using their wits to gain even the slightest advantage. An "invention calculator," a simple 3rd party program that allowed a single corp to make billions of isk by plugging in the costs and benefits of "inventing" different of Tech 2 items. People watching killboards for Tech 2 BPOs, of which there are only a handful per item in the game. Every time one is destroyed, the price of its corresponding item shoots up, and those prepared for the price surge can profit greatly.

There are so many fools in EVE with money, just waiting to be stolen from. Imagine this scam: two collaborators go into a trade hub. The first (call him Joe) posts a public contract, a Want to Sell order, for a very expensive item at a stupidly low price, which is immediately bought by his partner (call him Jack) before anyone else can act. Joe advertises the contract in local chat, and everyone starts commenting on it since it is, of course, incredible that anyone would be so stupid to sell such an item at such a low price. Jack gloats in the chat at having won the item, and chides Joe for being so stupid. Joe defends himself, claiming that he's done his research and that he sold the item at a fair price. In fact, he's so sure that it's fair, that he has a few others to sell. Of course at this point, other members of local chat have jumped on Joe, calling him an idiot or worse, because people in local chat in trade hubs are horrible people who delight only in others' sufferings (you have to play EVE to know this.) Joe then posts another contract and advertises it in local, except this time, the contract is a scam; either the item is similar to, but worth much less than, the item previously sold, or the price is much higher than advertised. Either way, people are falling over themselves to take advantage of Joe's apparent stupidity, so they immediately open and buy the contract without taking a close look at it.

You can see that this implements common street hustling tactics into a MMO. In what other game is this possible?

Every day... there's something new in EVE that baffles me. Every day I open EVE and wonder what someone will do or say to make me hang my jaw open. And every day I, myself, am thinking of new ways to make money. Some of my ideas work, and some of them don't. But it doesn't matter. The pursuit of the next brilliant idea is what matters.

The best part is that I'm in a corp with the sharpest group of guys I could ask for. Team Liquiders are obviously a smart breed, because in a few short months we've got a fleet coherence and a grasp of the game that a lot of the vets in corp simply don't have. When we joined our alliance, we were amazed at the basic mistakes they were making on their PvP ops that we had figured out how to avoid long ago. It was then that we truly realized that we will be a force to be reckoned with once we get into more effective ships than tech 1 cruisers.

If you want to test your wits against more than 30,000 other people, every day, in a hundred different ways, then for fuck's sake, join EVE. Other TL guys will help you grasp the tools the game provides you with. Once that happens, if you've got the right mind for it, the possibilities are endless.

JOIN THE TEAM LIQUID CORP IN EVE"