
Eve Online’s communications blackout explained - Tomte
https://www.polygon.com/2019/7/12/20692205/eve-online-nullsec-blackout-chat
======
Waterluvian
I've always loved games that mixed UI with game mechanics.

When I was a kid there was a game called Pathways Into Darkness. If you
unequipped your watch the time disappeared from the UI. If you unequipped your
flashlight it got dark. But there was never a reason to do these things. It
just added flavor.

Aside from the real practical effects of this change in Eve, I think it lends
itself to this idea that your UI isn't some out of body experience. It's what
your ship is capable of.

~~~
reificator
There was a period where Ubisoft was putting in a lot of effort in their games
(Splinter Cell/Assassin's Creed are what I know) to justify every little piece
of UI in-game. And not only that, they'd let you disable bit-by-bit to have
the experience you wanted[0].

I don't know if they're still doing this. I haven't played an Assasin's Creed
game since they made it an RPG in... Syndicate I think? And Splinter Cell,
well... Maybe in 2023 or so if/when they release a new one.

[0]:
[https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/StanislavCostiuc/20160303/26...](https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/StanislavCostiuc/20160303/267105/HUDless_Design_of_Assassins_Creed_1.php)

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Causality1
I quit EVE after it became "legal" to buy subscription passes and sell them
for in-game currency. That's significant because it lets you put a dollar
amount on everything you do. It destroys the fun of non-PVP activities when
what you're doing changes from "just three more hours of mission running slash
mining and I can replace my battleship" to "I'm working for $1.78 an hour." At
that point you realize you may as well just buy back your losses every time
you get blown up.

>I’m a fan of no local in null, especially if they add observatories/sensor
networks structures

Of course he is. The Mittani is completely dedicated to large-scale PVP.
Replacing Local with sensor structures is fantastic for alliances who can put
a structure or an alt account sentry on every gate in their territory. Never
mind how heavily it favors large established organizations and punishes
smaller newer corporations.

~~~
y4mi
> _I quit EVE after it became "legal" to buy subscription passes and sell them
> for in-game currency. _

I was a very active world of Warcraft player up until wrath of the lich King.
At the time I was leveling my alts blacksmithing by traveling around the world
and mining minerals just to increase some arbitrary numbers on my skills and
professions panel.

Then I thought to myself: I keep hearing about people using bots for that:
let's try this!

So I set it up... After it ran for a few hours I came back with a full
inventory of minerals and for the first time in my life realized what I've
been doing for the last _years_... Exactly _nothing_.

I deleted the game a few weeks later, couldn't find the energy in myself to
keep raiding.

I sometimes get back to it for a month or three. But it just cannot keep me
interested any longer.

I think there are a lot of reasons to actually lose the touch with MMO games
and suddenly you realized that the time spent isn't actually achieving
anything... For you, it might've been the game time tokens, but I'm sure you
would've realized it in some other way if they didn't do that.

I actually think that these tokens help players that just want to play a
little without wasting their entire lives away quite a bit.

For example the last time I played world of Warcraft I did some mythic+
runs... I just bought a token and could buy all the required consumables for
the whole three month I played.

I wouldn't have had the patience to get these the normal way and as such would
never have been able to experienced any higher dungeons.

~~~
chii
> suddenly you realized that the time spent isn't actually achieving anything

then you've missed the whole point of an MMO game - you're meant to make
meaningful human connections, and find online friends who may even outlast the
game.

EVE is one of those games that almost require such friend-making for it to be
fun (playing PvE in EVE is boring, unlike WOW).

~~~
wincy
I was in a top wow guild. Paid to move my character to a new server, even. Was
in a number 1 guild, I remember getting thousands of messages when we got a
server first. It was insane. It felt so amazing though in that moment. I
imagine I’d feel the same if I’d won the Olympics as silly as that sounds.
Ultimately it was a hollow victory. The hundreds of hours, the 185 days of
real 24 hour days I put into that single character, I can never get back.

Those people were had a thin facade of friendship, but I don’t talk to them
anymore. We were never really friends. We were just addicts engaging in the
same quest for ever larger dopamine hits. I remember kicking out people from
our guild because they “underperformed”, even if they were good guys and we
liked hanging out with them. All that mattered was the raid. All that mattered
was winning.

It’s weird too because I think back and at a deep level our server first was
the most intense positive emotional experience of my life. Not my kid being
born, not getting married. My mind was convinced we were in a war against an
insurmountable foe and we won. It makes me sad, like my level of what’s
exciting is permanently messed up and skewed from what reality can offer. I’ve
heard similar stories about meth and other drugs, that colors don’t seem as
bright after you stop.

I really wish I’d never played WoW, or EVE. It was escapism for some really
terrible times in my life and rather than help it just retarded the healing
and mental recuperation I needed for many years.

It definitely wasn’t about friendship, though.

~~~
Ntrails
Never got server firsts, but wasn't far behind. Certainly I remember grinding
mats and gold for raids. However. To suggest that a bot renders gameplay
meaningless doesn't make any sense.

Is it meaningless to tend a garden because there are gardeners? I could pay
someone to cook my food, does that make cooking pointless?

You traded your time for experiences and afterwards decided you made a bad
decision. That is your right - but I don't regret the entertainment that Eve
or Wow have given me. You created a weird equivalence which I don't think
holds.

~~~
y4mi
> _However. To suggest that a bot renders gameplay meaningless doesn 't make
> any sense._

The bot was my example of how a game lost its magic for me. I was trying to
convey that the tokens which disillusioned the previous commenter aren't
actually so bad.

It's just that if you stop thinking about these rules as necessary and realize
that they're just arbitrary decisions with no actual impact beyond this game
and you're currently investing a significant amount of time into them.... Then
you're very likely become disillusioned with the game and suddenly everything
you do in the game is suddenly tainted by that admission.

the triggers vary widely while the actual reasons for the triggers are
generally this disillusionment

I'm also not saying that gaming is a lesser hobby. I play games quite
frequently, but never again with that previous zeal. It just became an
activity to kill time with. Before, it was more.

------
HenryBemis
From the game's website:

As previously announced, local chat in all nullsec space is currently in
delayed mode.

This means that it will behave as local chat in wormhole space, with pilots
only appearing in the local population listing should they choose to post
messages.

The duration of this blackout is undetermined, and we’ll be monitoring what
effect this has on the cluster.

~~~
EvanAnderson
The Unthinking Depths have bubbled up into The Beyond.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep#Setting](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep#Setting)

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brianwawok
Very cool. It was always a bit too safe to be able to see chat go up by 20 and
know a 20 ship fleet had entered the zone.

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chimen
Cool game but I can't play it any more. So much wasted time doing nothing.
It's worse than a second job.

~~~
VLM
Their financial model is selling subscriptions, so they have a vested interest
in turning the game into an extreme grind.

Elite Dangerous sells a single upfront payment with there's no subscription
which has its own weird effects, they have to budget each $X sale will result
in Y hours of use before boredom sets in.

I wish there were a viable in between business model such that things are
neither boring to get you to quit nor boring to keep you grinding forever.
AFAIK no one has tried an ownership financialized space sim. Buy and improve
and rent and sell space stations and ships using real microbitcoins or
similar.

~~~
Justsignedup
Ironically enough the game is NOT grindy AT ALL. Well sorry let me rephrase.

The game has no grinding requirements. You can log in, ask someone for 20mil
isk, you'll get it trust me. Then basically set a training regiment for the
next 6 or so months, you might need to log in once a week to set the next
week's training and log out. And suddenly be able to play a high-level game.
If you have a friend in nullsec with good farming, grab an appropraite ship,
go in, boom boom boom, money. Way less grindy than playing say WoW.

Even better. after those 6 months if you trained your way to a org doctrine,
you basically go on, ask the org to please give you a ship, they will, at no
cost. And then you have fun. Most orgs make their money from mining moon
rocks, so they have fucktons of cash to give away for ships here and there.

Having said that, the times when there's action in the game, its like 3 hrs of
hunting for 5 minutes of pew pew. Very uneventful. It is more of a game about
making jokes and stories with friends.

~~~
na85
A game where the onboarding experience is to _not play for 6 months_ can't be
fairly described as "not grindy". The fact that your grinding requirements can
be done while logged out merely disguises the fact that EVE's developers get 6
months of subscription fees out of you while you wait for artificially-
inflated timers to count down.

~~~
teh_klev
I joined the game back in 2008 and within two weeks had already joined a well
established UK based corp and was having a whale of a time.

Trust me it doesn't take six months to start to have fun in Eve.

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kpU8efre7r
Good.

It always seemed boring that you could get valuable Intel by closely
monitoring a chat window.

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deepsun
One of the best games I ever played (or wasted my time on). Taught me a lot
about leadership.

~~~
namibj
I was fortunate to learn a lot about organizational failure in my teenage
years from it. Saves me from blindly trusting higher-ups as I'd otherwise have
done.

I can recommend a bit of the game to learn politics, because it's relatively
cheap to do that in the game (vs. in normal life, where it quickly affects
your bottom line).

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sshagent
I really hope this ends up permanent, may will dust off my accounts if so.
Don't think I'd like anyone currently playing mind you.

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axilmar
I wanted to do something similar to Darkfall, i.e. players would only be able
to chat with those in their vicinity.

I'd also add a voice volume so as that in order to whisper, you'd have to come
real close to someone and keep your voice down.

Global/area chat and channels simply ruin some aspects of MMORPGs.

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wolco
It invalidates unknown space a bit. There should be a middle option like you
can see a player but not the ships.

~~~
jeremyjh
Does local chat tell you ship types now? When I played (2006-2009) you would
only see the players in the system, you would have to be in scanner range to
see ship types, and only if you opened the scanner. I think the new system
sounds great; wormholes existed in my time but I never used them I played
strictly in nullsec. The changes would actually make it harder to gank ratters
and miners though. Because most nullsec systems are unpopulated at any given
time when you are looking for targets you would fly from system to system and
only stop and investigate when there were people in local. So yes, the miners
can't see when a ganker enters local but the gankers can't see when targets
are present either. If you want to hide out and rat in a relatively low-
quality system probably no one would ever find you.

~~~
CrazyStat
No, local chat still just shows you names.

There are ways to target yourv search for miners and ratters, using info from
the in game map or websites using the API. See e.g. [1] which shows how many
rats babe been killed in an hour time period in each system. These kinds of
tools were probably less common in your day.

[1]
[https://eveeye.com/?m=Delve&o=tag_none,con_none,etag_sig,sec...](https://eveeye.com/?m=Delve&o=tag_none,con_none,etag_sig,sector_npc,node_npc,sub_none)

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VLM
As a meta-point the "fog of war" applied to communications seems blindingly
obvious and as an Elite Dangerous player (mobius PvE only) I always wondered
why E:D never had that obvious gameplay mechanic; seems the article implies
EveO probably copyright/trademark/trade secreted that obvious idea so no other
game can have it.

That sucks. Nothing impedes technological and economic progress quite like IP
laws.

~~~
gammagoblin
>seems the article implies EveO probably copyright/trademark/trade secreted
that obvious idea so no other game can have it.

>That sucks. Nothing impedes technological and economic progress quite like IP
laws.

What the fuck are you talking about? Where does it imply anywhere even close?

I'd definitely agree that IP laws impede technological progress, but you're
leaping to ridiculous conclusions.

