
The Amazing Life of Sean Smith, the Masterful Eve Gamer Slain in Libya - danso
http://kotaku.com/the-extraordinary-mischievous-too-short-life-of-sean-481060252
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GuiA
I have never played EVE Online, but I absolutely adore the stories it enables
its players to tell, and the human interactions that result.

On that front, I think that EVE Online is the only true "MMORPG"– i.e. one
where the players directly affect the economy, the wars, the alliances, the
supply and demand, and so on.

I'm disappointed that we don't see more games taking from EVE, but confident
that that's where the future of online entertainment is headed.

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sliverstorm
_I'm disappointed that we don't see more games taking from EVE_

Well, it doesn't surprise me. A "true MMORPG" as you are picturing it is a
strong natural monopoly. Nobody wants to live a second life in five different
games, and the more people you have the more sophisticated the economics etc
become.

~~~
pyre
Not everyone wants to play EVE. There could be plenty of people that would be
interested in some fantasy mash-up of WoW and Ultima Online, for example.

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saraid216
What exactly are you picturing as such a mash-up? The critical element of EVE
that makes it what it is isn't the economy: it's the ability to take ownership
of land by force. That's what creates emergent politics. AFAIK, neither UO or
WoW have this. The only fantasy game that has considered this was Shadowbane,
but they had a bad release.

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ZirconCode
Wurm online has this. The reason why you probably have never heard of it is
that it is too realistic. It takes days to build a house for example. The
creator of minecraft used to work on it, I found out later.

~~~
saraid216
I've heard of Wurm Online. I haven't played it.

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biot
There's something accidentally poignant about "the fund that raised $127,001
for Sean's family". It's as if they were trying to send the money to
127.0.0.1, looping him back in the game.

~~~
nicholassmith
There's every chance a Goon saw what the fund was on and made sure it went to
a special number. A final tribute as it were.

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danohuiginn
It's sad that the State Department had this brilliant strategist on their
payroll, but left him doing IT rather than tapping his skills as a diplomat.

~~~
6d0debc071
Yeah, it sucks. Fairly typical workforce neglect really. Assuming that he'd
have been up for it - maybe he just enjoyed his job.

~~~
chris_wot
There's a big difference between doing this sort of thing in a game and in
real life.

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GhotiFish
I like EVE in some respects, but this game is built specifically, and only,
for oldplayers. Everything added is for old players, if you want to do
anything interesting you'll need to buy at least a year of subscriptions and
religiously log on to train your character.

The way eve metes out rewards is just completely hostile to some people, (ie.
me).

EVE online: "Boy I sure wish I was able to do that, that sure looks like fun"

i recommend not playing.

~~~
MSM
As someone who starting in January, I would disagree with this.

The most HN relevant things that are awesome about EVE are how open the devs
are with data. The developers have released their databases (Items, ships,
stations, etc) which I have made some extremely handy apps with. The market is
a ton of fun to play with an also has pretty easy to use APIs (Eve-Central). A
lot of the files can be read extremely easily, and there is apparently talk of
making market orders updateable via API in the future (This could mean full or
partial automated trading).

With my ~4 month old character I've explored low-sec, played in worm holes,
gotten into PvP fia FW, etc. There isn't much I haven't been able to do and I
currently have more ISK (~2B) than I can really lose with the ships that I'm
currently flying.

~~~
hellerbarde
I was thinking about getting into EVE. I'd be interested in a few things: How
often do you log in? Daily? Weekly? How long are your sessions on average?
Hours? Did you have friends to help you along?

Thanks :)

~~~
MSM
It depends.

I have a lot of fun toying with the market and writing apps to leverage APIs
to make me money in game. If I'm station trading (Which I have been a lot-
this is similar to playing the stock market in that you sit in one place and
buy low sell high) your orders cannot be updated more than once every 5
minutes. I'll usually have EVE up on a monitor but I'm not paying much
attention to it. I'll pop over to the game every 20-30 minutes and quickly
update orders then head back to my coding project / a blog / etc.

I also have swings of near obsession where I'm really excited to play with
something new to me. When I was learning about exploring I spent probably 6-7
hours in a row flying around and tracking down litle exploration sites.

I log in maybe 3-4 days a week, but only get a nice block (more than a half
hour or so) of time maybe once a week. I'd say the game is up on a monitor and
accessable to me probably 15 hours a week. I'm probably actually spending more
like 5 hours a week actively engaged. Honestly I have probably spent the same
time coding applications around the game as I have playing.

I started the game solo but have since realized that a couple friends also
play but weren't vocal about it. Occasionally we'll play together but I don't
have the time or desire to join a permanent group ("Corporation") yet so I've
been playing lone wolf for the most part.

I believe you can start the game for free with a 14 day trial. There are also
21 day trials that are available if a current player reffers you. I've never
done it so I'm not sure on the details on that though. Either way, you should
get a good taste of what EVE can offer you after that period.

~~~
hellerbarde
Cool, thanks!

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jeffgreco
Really good piece. This is probably the most lauded a Something Awful member
will ever be (other than perhaps Jon Stewart).

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mynameishere
I'm honestly disturbed that one of the United States' greatest foreign policy
disasters may be remembered because some guy involved was an accomplished
gamer.

I really miss the GWB days. Had this happened on his watch, people wouldn't be
talking about Eve or WoW or whatever the fuck.

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pstuart
> I really miss the GWB days

Are you trolling? because "the United States'greatest foreign policy
disasters" under GWB far surpassed what happened in Libya. This is being used
as political hammer by the GOP, so it's hard to take at face value.

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mynameishere
The Bush administration's foreign policy mistakes are still continuously
condemned by the press. Many, many years later.

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illuminate
And? Even with his family and party's influence over the popular media, he's
not entitled to control over his "legacy".

