EVE-Online – Roles in a space MMO

EVE-Online is a massive multiplayer online space game.

The background story is that humans from earth found a natural wormhole leading to a different galaxy filled with planets that support life or could be terraformed (transformed to sustain life). They started colonizing those solar systems but then a catastrophe happened, destroying the wormhole and therefore the way back to earth. Stranded on those new worlds civilization and a new order of worlds had to be established. After centuries of war the remaining coalitions managed to hold peace and that’s where the game starts.

Roles

Before the player can participate in the game he has to create an avatar. In the process of creation he has to choose a general direction which his character will follow in the game. This can be a soldier, scientist, leader, mining and logistics expert amongst others. This choice will affect the time it takes for a player to learn a skill. If the skill falls within the skill set required by his chosen path then it will take much less time to learn than if it wasn’t.

It is the player’s personality and likes or dislikes of actions within the game that will ultimately decide the role of the player within the game.

Attack, Capture and Rescue

If he likes to play on his own most of the time and make money by hunting down NPC’s (non player characters) then a big warship with a balanced loadout of defenses and weapons systems will be his choice. In this case the player takes over the role of agressor, having to overpower the enemy while holding his own against large numbers of powerful enemies. His counter actors are the enemies spawned by the system, their role is to defend their fleet, position in space or their space stations. Sometimes a mission requires the player to capture items, recover kidnapped personnel or save a damsel in distress, however the role of the counter acting forces doesn’t change since the outcome of nearly every combat mission is that there won’t be anything left but bits and pieces of enemy ships floating in space.
If the player enjoys sharing his play time with other people he is free to include them in his battle against NPC’s.

Search and Capture

If the player likes to spend time chatting with others while running a mining and logistics operation in one of the many asteroid belts which are filled with valuable ore he would choose a mining vessel without any defensive or offensive capabilities. The motives of play here are to seek and capture the most valuable resources. Everything in EVE-Online is based on these resources. Since the player is interacting mainly with the system in this mode of play, the system also provides a counter actor in the form of attacking NPC groups that spawn at random intervals.
This is where another player comes in to protect the mining operation by drawing the enemy fire on him and destroying the attacking ships. He is counter acting the system.

EVE-Online is a game with a very strong and dynamic economy. The game development/management company even hired a full time economist to monitor it and make subtle changes if it steers off course (usually as a result of a game in-balance which usually gets fixed fairly quickly) or to introduce changes based on the progression of the game’s background story. Every usable (different from trade able) item is based on the basic resources gathered from mining. The rarest, most expensive ores and minerals can only be found on the fringes of the galaxy where there is no police, law and order. Everyone is on their own. After long mining operations there are convoys of transport ships heading towards the center of the galaxy to sell their ore. This is the perfect time for ambushes by other players which want to take that ore and sell it themselves.

The Chase

These kinds of ambushes can quickly become all-out fleet battles if the convoy is protected by a large enough escorting fleet. But in some cases it can turn into an exciting chase where the mineral transporter has to try to mislead the ones chasing him. He can choose odd routes, use cloaking technology or fit powerful booster rockets to his ship to be faster than the ones chasing him.
If he choses to hide in obscure places or in plain sight but remaining cloaked, the one that’s been doing the chasing will have to start searching. The game provides devices to perform this action and success of finding the hiding player is based on skill and chance.

Once the raw ore has reached the safe and policed solar systems it will be turned into minerals in one of the refineries. There are many refineries, but only a handful will have the highest output yield because of the player’s reputation with the corporations that own the refineries. Once turned into minerals they are sold on the market.

The Race

This is where the race for the transport professionals in the safe regions begins. They grab as many minerals as they can and race towards the space stations housing factories which will buy and use the minerals (both NPC’s and real players buy and produce). There is a system of supply and demand. If one factory station is low on minerals they will pay a higher price than the general market value, so the race is on to be the first to fulfill those extra orders and close the sale. Once that has happened, the demand is gone and prices fall, sometimes below the price at which the minerals have been originally bought. The transport players that lost the race will now have to spend much time moving their load to often very distant factories that pay the right price.