EVE-Mag.com

The Dumbest Game in Existence?

Published on 26. Mar, 2009 ... written by Ecaf Ersa, Tags: Articles

These are not my words! I could never say such a thing about what is for me the greatest game I have ever played and the only one ever to have engaged me so completely or for so long. The statement was made by an in-game friend who, for his own safety, shall remain nameless. It came in a conversation regarding the loss of his passive shield tanked Drake in the level 4 mission Recon part 1.

He had related to me how his Caldari battlecruiser, which would normally fare very well in level 4 missions, was destroyed in about 5 seconds. Recon 1 is pretty much accepted as the toughest level 4 mission there is so I questioned as to whether he had read the mission guide and he answered that he had not.

His argument was basically that to have to read a guide in order to just survive a mission was dumb. He has a point in so far as that in most games you would only read a guide if you repeatedly failed to achieve a particular goal, whether that goal be just to complete the objective or to excel to a point that opened some kind of cheat or bonus.

So, do we give any credence to my friend’s insult to one of the greatest games in existence? Well this writer says no, because EVE is not most games – it has the unique element that losses are permanent. The loss of your ship or pod, and the isk needed to replace everything lost or destroyed, is absolute. For me this is one of the greatest things about EVE – you do not go gung-ho into a hopeless battle on the gamble that your 1% chance of winning will come off nor do you enter the unknown without some sense of trepidation. It adds a healthy dose of realism into your tactical decisions.

In this kind of environment, where there is a real chance of loss, you must prepare yourself for the possibility that you might not survive any given situation and, just as in real life, you have to adjust your approach according to this fact.

You can do this in many ways, the simplest being to make sure that you have enough isk for a replacement ship. A more pro-active solution would be to scout out the mission in a shuttle or rookie ship first. What most people, including myself, will do is read the mission guide. The fact that eve-survival.org is most mission-runners in-game browser home page bears testament to this.

But as my friend suggests, reading a guide written by somebody who has already done the exact same mission that you are about to do spoils the realism of the situation somewhat! But if you want to immerse yourself as completely as possible into the realism of the game then you could take option 2 instead and check it out in a shuttle first. But then if it was as real as it could be then the NPC ships would move on somewhere else once they realised their position had been compromised. You could follow this train of thought for some time.

That conversation and all these thoughts that it provoked in my head led me to the real question I wanted to examine with this article – not whether the game is dumb but how real it is, in terms of both actual realism and gameplay.

The Physics of Space

I’ll start with one of the biggest problems for the game developers, the physics of space. This is tough not least because we as a race don’t actually understand it all completely anyway but also because it takes a lot of computing power to do it all really accurately. But putting these two factors aside the hardest problems of them all are balancing and playability.

In this section we will conveniently ignore technologies currently unknown to us, such as faster than light travel or stretching and contracting space.

Lets look at a recent contentious issue with EVE, the speed nerf. Sub-light travel is one area where EVE really fails to mimic reality. On our planet the maximum speed of a body is limited by, among other things, form drag, basically the need to fight against the atmosphere. It’s generally accepted that, due to the absence of form drag outside of the planet’s atmosphere, there is actually no limit on the speed that a body can achieve in space. Ignoring things like objects obstructing your path, the only limits in this respect are a) acceleration, which is limited by the propelling force and the mass of the body being moved, and b) time, ie. how long you have in which to accelerate.

In theory, assuming you can travel in a straight line, the quickest method of getting from point A to point B in space without any kind of faster than light travel is to constantly accelerate for half your journey then constantly decelerate for the second half. Given that, as far as we know, the only way to brake in space is to apply propulsive force in the opposite direction to which you are travelling, deceleration is basically negative acceleration and the same forces and limitations apply to both.

Another factor in sub-light travel where EVE falls down on the physics front is manoeuvrability. The ability to change direction is enabled by applying propulsive force in the direction you want to travel, so it’s all about acceleration again. The manoeuvrability of a body in space is defined by a) the ratio between it’s propulsive force and it’s mass and b) the ability of the body to apply that propulsive force in the desired direction. Probably the closest analogy we have to this in real life is the hovercraft, which is designed to negate most of the frictional effect of the surface over which it travels. If you’ve ever tried to steer one of these then you will have some idea of how difficult it is for our ground based understanding of manoeuvring to deal with.

So in reality, it is reasonable to assume that a fast nimble spaceship would not look anything like an interceptor in EVE. For starters it’s a fair guess that the engine would dominate such a ship. Without form drag there is no need to make a spaceship sleek and streamlined and it’s unlikely to have engine outlets that only point in one direction as this severely limits the direction in which you can apply force. Without an atmosphere there is no possibility of using planes, the movable surfaces on a contemporary aircraft’s wings, as these manipulate air pressure to make the plane turn. So your only options are to have directable thrust, such as what we can see today on the Harrier Jump Jet, or to have as many engine outlets as possible arranged around the ship even if those not pointing out of the back are small. Of course this looks weird, maybe stupid and isn’t as much fun or pretty as what we have in EVE and of course the ships in EVE don’t actually have to obey the laws of physics so what the hell!

So in the interests of aesthetics and playability we can understand why the game designers have opted for a more simplistic and atmospheric based system of manoeuvrability, and to be fair, given the nature of gameplay in EVE, it isn’t really important for our enjoyment.

The reason for limiting the speed of ships is all about balancing. In order to make the game balanced and therefore fair you have to place constraints and limitations on the factors that affect the balance otherwise the variables become too extreme and impossible to control. The reasons for the speed nerf happening in the first place highlight this well. Even with the very high, but still limited, speeds that some ships were attaining the balance of the game was seriously off. Imagine what this would be like if the speed of ships was unlimited as physics allows.

So, we can see why the physics of space have been adapted in the EVE universe, and to be fair this doesn’t really detract from our enjoyment, it adds to it in fact, nor do they seem particularly unreal to us because they adhere more to our atmospheric based understanding of physics.

However there are lots of seriously unrealistic things in EVE even within the constraints of our brain’s earth-bound comprehension.

Really Unreal!

1. Downtime.

The fact that the EVE universe ceases to exist for an hour every day and on occasion for as long as 24 hours is one of those things that we just have to live with and ignore as much as possible when it comes to gameplay. We are helped by our understanding that EVE is an extremely complex game environment that exists only in seriously powerful computers and all we can do is avoid our skills or research/manufacturing jobs finishing while the servers are down. Of course, since Apocrypha skills are no longer such an issue here.

2. The post-downtime re-spawn.

One of the real corkers when it comes to the unrealism of EVE is the re-spawning of asteroid belts after downtime. There is no possible way that this can be bent into any realistic argument, it just has to be accepted, again for purposes of balancing. I guess it would be possible to have much more vast asteroid belts that do not re-spawn but you have to take into account the fact that this is a game and new people join it every day. Newer players would have a smaller pool of mining material than people who started before them and whilst that might be more realistic it isn’t really fair. You can also imagine the field day that this would give to macro-miners who currently have to deal with a limited pool of asteroids in scattered locations during each 24 hour period. This system is just a practical compromise to a problem that is impossible to resolve in a realistic yet fair way.

The other unrealistic re-spawn is a mission that is unfinished at downtime. The universe disappears for an hour and when you come back all the wrecks you left behind have miraculously turned back into whole ships with crew intact. You can utilise this for your benefit of course, as if there are resources in the mission worth more than the time bonus as you can do the mission 6 or 7 days in a row before finally handing it in, but this only adds to the unrealism. There are a couple of ways this could be resolved. Firstly the server could remember the mission status at downtime and reinstate it after start-up. A more practical solution can already been seen in the mission Downing the Slavers part 2 in which the first area has many large omber asteroids. This mission is regularly allowed to re-spawn for omber farming purposes but if you enter the second area then you will find that the npcs and asteroids do not re-spawn after downtime.

There is also the even more unrealistic scenario of the re-spawning of buildings and npcs right in front of your eyes in static complexes. Several COSMOS missions call for specific items from these complexes, for example Okham’s Head which is literally a jar containing the head of an npc called Okham. The fact that you can hang around the complex and kill the guy several times an hour, collecting his head each time, is very unrealistic.

The flipside of the re-spawn is the de-spawn. When you hand in a completed mission all the buildings and asteroids in the deadspace area disappear. Where do they go?

These situations need to perpetuate in order to retain what is the backbone of most games like EVE, the mission. So this is something that again we just have to live with and these situations can be quite easily avoided if they are an issue to you.

3. NPC artificial intelligence.

This one is a favourite gripe of people who have little grasp of the complexity of programming artificial intelligence into non-player characters. It’s much more difficult than many of these people imagine although it is possible. The problem is the computing power required to simulate human intelligence quickly but I agree that this could and should be improved in EVE. The following chat posting by an EVE player taken from omgrawr.net highlights one of EVE’s AI failings in a very amusing way.

Heartstone > I mean missions. It’s like “Oh look Steve just got blown up! Let’s get him” “Now now John you can clearly see he’s 35km and we’re only meant to engage if he gets to 32km” “Dang you’re right… Wanna play poker?”

You can also wonder why the last frigate left in an area continues fighting to the death after you just destroyed the 10 battleships, 10 battlecruisers, 20 cruisers and 19 other frigates with ease right in front of him.

I am a supporter of the argument that it would be a great deal better to have 2 or 3 intelligent and difficult to kill npcs rather than 50 stupid ones. This would also in theory reduce lag, which can be quite bad in the bigger, more heavily populated missions such as Mordus Headhunters. It would also reduce the gulf between PvE and PvP and enable a mission runner to prepare himself a little better for what PvP is really like.

Well CCP have got round to sorting this one out. With Apocrypha the npcs we encounter in the new wormhole feature are much more intelligent. They approach you on an orbital trajectory increasing the transversal velocity, can assess targets based on threat level, lock multiple targets and if the threat levels change then change who they are shooting at. It has also been hinted that there may be “intelligence upgrades” for mission and asteroid belt rats in future expansions. Whether we will see things like using smartbombs to take out your drones or running away from a hopeless situation remains to be seen but these improvements have given me high hopes for the future.

4. Stationary orbital objects.

Here we are talking mainly about planets and moons. Generally speaking, moons will orbit a planet, which in turn will orbit a sun – except not in EVE. Look at the solar system map one day, go back a month later and they’ll be in the same place. In fairness, it’s no big deal in terms of gameplay and it would be complex thing for the servers to try to deal with so I am quite happy to forgive the EVE developers for brushing over this one.

5. Sound in space.

As we should all know, sound travels in reverberations through matter, whether it is solid, liquid or gaseous. The lack of any of these three types of matter in space means that sound does not travel. You would probably be able to hear the noise generated by your own ship’s engine or something striking the hull of your ship, but you sure as hell are not going to hear that battleship you’ve been shooting at blowing up! But this is nothing new of course, Star Wars had all kinds of sounds passing through the vacuum of space and sci-fi films through the ages have chosen to overlook this scientific fact that has been known since long before any of them were made. We ignore it because it adds to the atmosphere of the film or game and after all, does it really matter? No, of course not! We like it!

6. Substantial yet insubstantial objects.

What I mean here is that asteroid that your ship bounces off if you try to fly through it but that allows your opponents missiles and ammo to pass straight through and hit you. Maybe missiles and ammo can somehow temporarily go out of phase before they hit something they were not intended to!

First person shooters have for a long time let you hide from enemy fire behind walls or objects, which can even be destroyed making them useless to hide behind, so why not EVE? If they could sort this one out it would open a whole world of possibilities for avoiding your opponent’s fire. Imagine a fleet of cruisers and frigates hiding from a control tower’s weaponry in the lee of a well-tanked capital ship in order to get close enough to be effective or to allow shields or armour to repair!

7. Collision detection.

Most miners will know what I’m on about here. You go to warp out of an asteroid belt but there’s a roid in your way. You try to manoeuvre past it but there’s what appears to be empty space a kilometre wide stopping you! Again I think we have seen an improvement in this area with Apocrypha. The new asteroid renderings don’t seem to get in the way nearly as much as before. Cheers CCP!

8. Ship Crew

The backstory in EVE tells of our ships being crewed not just by us immortal pod-pilots but also having quite a large complement of staff on board, as many as 6,000 in a battleship. What happens to these people when you leave a ship in a hangar for months on end? Who feeds them? Wouldn’t we be faced with massive lawsuits from the relatives of all these crew if we needlessly lost the ship in a blatantly negligent act? Well personally this is one element of the story that I choose to ignore. It’s more immersive for me to believe I am the one and only living thing on board (apart from the exotic dancers in my hold) with automatic systems and robots performing all the dirty work.

There is no evidence of these people in the game so pretending they don’t exist is easy. It is less easy though to overlook the hundreds of people I have in my hangars such as exotic dancers, janitors, tourists and various military personnel. I try to make sure I leave them enough Frozen Food, Ice Cream and Long-limbed Roes to live on and even Quafe Ultra and Amarrian Spirits to party with but they never seem hungry or thirsty!

I don’t like to “Trash” them as this seems unnecessarily cruel and selling them amounts to slavery, which as a good Gallente I would never do, so how about a “Free Passenger” option CCP?

So there are some things that are not very real in the game. Some are unavoidable, some cause no problems at all, some are even desirable but a few could be improved.

Now we move on to the status of technology in EVE.

Technological Devolution

Sometimes you look at the interface or the way things work in EVE and wonder how future technology can be so backward!

1. Navigation Computers.

We already have computers in contemporary combat aircraft that can quite accurately plot an intercept course with another aircraft. Admittedly, ships in EVE travel considerably faster and can generally manoeuvre much better than what we have today, but you would also imagine that computers will be a great deal more advanced in the future of space travel. Yet, in EVE, attempting to intercept another ship travelling at sub-light speeds even in a straight line is a manual and awkward task. It could of course be the case that such functionality would require repeated communication with the server that would cause undue lag in which case that’s fair enough and I shall live with it as it is.

But worse than this is the fact that the ship’s navigation computers seem to be sometimes rather stupid! Try travelling in a straight line past a stationary object, for example a jet can, at 10kms then select orbit at 10kms. Nine times out of ten your ship will start travelling in another random direction rather than just turning around the can roughly maintaining it’s current direction of travel.

2. Tracking Computers.

Closely related to the problem with unintelligent navigation computers, it seems strange that with all the races in EVE using turret based weaponry to one degree or another that the computers that track opponents are not more intelligent. They will waste ammo firing away at an object that the turrets cannot keep up with.

We do of course have tracking computer modules in EVE but these actually increase tracking speed which would suggest more of an improvement in the turret movement mechanics than more intelligent predictions of a target’s trajectory.

I can accept that large turrets will move more slowly but what I have a bit more trouble with is that when a ship is orbiting you in a predictable course that the turrets don’t wait till the ship comes round again and shoot slightly ahead of it. This is something more like the behaviour I would expect from an advanced tracking computer.

I wouldn’t expect EVE to handle this accurately but how about a module that simulates it by decreasing rate of fire but making the turrets hit their target more often? Unfortunately I suspect that this would require a complete redesign of the whole turret system, which is probably too much to ask for.

3. Drone AI.

This one is a popular topic on the forums. Why, in such a technologically advanced age are drones so stupid and controllable in only very basic ways? Our modern robots are significantly more intelligent than this already and advancing ever faster every year. This has nothing to do with the difficulties of programming artificial intelligence as even the dumb npc pirates seem to be more intelligent than drones. It is probably down to the fact that drones are already considered over-powered in many quarters, particularly non-Gallentean ones.

The improvements in control we were granted a while ago have not really increased their intelligence only improved some of the areas in which their stupidity was extreme. The “memory upgrade” that stopped a drone from re-assessing its target when it passed from one “grid” onto another was probably the key improvement. It is a balancing issue again so I doubt we will see intelligent options, such as instructing drones to attack only one class of ship or to automatically return to the bay if under fire without a serious impairment of their effectiveness, for example damage dealt or speed. As a Gallentean I think I’ll stick with the status quo on this one!

4. POS weaponry.

POS weaponry itself is actually quite effective. The problem lies in the terrible way in which the tower uses it if there is not a player at the controls. You would imagine that a technologically advanced control tower costing hundreds of millions of ISK would be able to use its defences in an effective way. Unfortunately not! What you get is random locking of the available targets with the various weaponry divided up among them often resulting in one ship being warp scrambled and another being shot at. Add to that the fact that after a while the tower will drop it’s locks and make new ones.

This one I do find hard to understand. It’s not the same situation that we have with drones, which are more useable to pilots of Gallentean ships than, for example, Caldari ones. It’s something available to all races across the board and it would force a fleet to be better organised and prepared before it went off to try and take down a tower. There would still be room for even better control with pilots at the controls as they could pick and chose targets as they please but the tower should at least direct all the defences on one randomly chosen target until it blew up, left or clearly wasn’t going to blow up no matter how long the tower kept at it. It would put an end to the much more unrealistic practice of organising POS bashing operations at the time when you know most of your opposing players will be in bed!

There is the possibility to handle this with a new POS module that introduces more intelligent combat handling. It could require a hefty amount of CPU to balance it out and make using it a conscious choice.

5. The Market

Why is it regionally limited when contracts are not? If you are in a system at the edge of a region this basically means you can see the prices and place orders in a system 20 jumps away on the other edge of the region but not in the system next door which just happens to be in another region.

I appreciate that you probably do not want to wait while the server sends you the details of every tritanium order in the entire universe but why not allow you to select a specific region’s market to view like you can with contracts? Or even better would be range limited viewing and control, for example within 5 or 10 jumps. This type of functionality is already used extensively in EVE.

OK so I’ve had a bit of fun here poking holes in some of the areas where EVE falls down but for all it’s issues it’s still a truly amazing game. We cannot expect, and as I have indicated do not necessarily want, a game to achieve perfection on the realism front – the clue is in the fact that it is a game and not real life!

We must also take into account the fact that CCP’s resources are not unlimited. There is only so much they can achieve in any given timeframe and we all like new content in each expansion. The recent introduction of intelligent npcs shows that CCP do care about these things and are willing to address the areas where EVE players have legitimate desire for change. We just can’t have it all at once.

Despite all the issues I have highlighted here EVE has incredible realism in ways that blow all those concerns out of the water.

Really real in the ways that count!

Where EVE really scores is in it’s open-ended nature – the fact that you can do pretty much as you please just as in real life. For example, you are not obliged to ever make a single aggressive act. You can mine, trade or build things if that is what you enjoy doing. On the flipside of that there is nothing stopping you from making an unprovoked attack on an innocent person, you just have to accept the consequences of your actions just as you would in real life. This is real not only for the attacker but also for the victim. Other MMOs like WoW don’t allow this and usually have some kind of flagging system or battle arena for PvP.

There are many other factors that add realism into this game. One of the best of these is how highly it is driven by the player community. The market for example is almost completely player fed and consequently behaves very realistically to supply and demand factors. This player driven nature also allows events to occur that you could never see in other games. Take the “infiltration” and disbanding of BoB as a classic example of that. But it doesn’t have to be events of this scale that separate EVE from the rest of the pack.

Prior to players being granted the option to warp to zero, players created this by themselves by making bookmarks 15kms past the required destination and warping to 15kms of the bookmark instead. This created the opportunity for some players to made considerable amounts of ISK by creating folders of these bookmarks and selling them to other players.

There are many people who hire themselves out for various purposes, such as anchoring POSes in high security systems because they have high faction standings or mercenaries who for an appropriate fee will exact revenge on a corporation that crossed you. There are other people who take advantage of the innocence or gullibility of others by scamming them or fooling them into becoming a legitimate target just for the fun of destroying them. There are also people who run lotteries, PvP tournaments, races, poker games and even investment banks for the benefit of other players and maybe a little profit along the way too!

I have heard tales of an event that used to be run by EVE radio called “Lemming’s Leap.” The DJ would organise for a big crowd of first day characters to amass in rookie ships at a gate to a low security or 0.0 system which was known to be camped on the other side. They would all then jump through together and blob the unsuspecting campers. The fact that 30 or 40 of these ships could quite easily take out a battleship with an experienced and high skillpoint pilot at the helm is wonderfully realistic and something that is difficult or impossible to achieve in other games.

You also have the very real ability to use ships quite effectively outside of their intended purpose. Some examples are battleships than can outmine Retrievers, pirates using Orcas to evade the attention of CONCORD as reported by Jacob Mei in his EVE-Mag article The Orca is a double-edged Sword, jna’s Cruiser destroying Hulk, Chribba’s Veldnaught and the Marauder killing Rorqual.

It’s the possibility to think outside the box and act in ways that probably never occurred to the developers that makes EVE the most real game that ever existed. It’s that fact that sets EVE on a pedestal and has people still playing every day five years down the line.

Long may it last!

Tags: AI, physics, realism, technology