EVE-Online – Deciding to take Risks part 1

I have introduced EVE-Online in a previous post and will continue on, discussing decisions to take risks of different natures.

Whenever the player does something besides chatting to fellow players he has to make decisions that could have uncertain outcomes.

Lets identify one of the potentially most devastating outcomes of a risk taken within the game: player death in the worst case scenario.

Player Death

Death in the game is semi-permanent. If the player’s space ship gets blown up he loses it for good, including most if not all equipment and cargo that was held within. Depending on the type and size of ship this could mean that days, weeks or even months of play time have been wiped out. The second stage of death is the destruction of the ‘Pod’ which contains the actual avatar of the player. This can be extremely costly as well and can potentially set the player back months in play time by wiping out skill points to a certain degree and ‘implants’ that help the player gain skill points (experience points in other games). A quasi level-down if you compare it to mechanics of normal MMORPG’s.

The story of the ‘Pod’s is that a player is floating inside an egg-shaped vessel, hooked up to neural interfaces which allow him to control the space ships into which the pod is installed. The movie ‘The Matrix’ illustrates this very accurately when ‘Neo’ gets disconnected from the matrix for the first time and wakes up floating in that goo filled pod, hooked up to all sorts of cables and tubes.
So if a ship in the game is destroyed, the pod is whats left and can be destroyed as well if it doesn’t/can’t escape.

Taking Risks

It is up to the player to decide the amount of risk he is prepared to take when he plans to perform any action within the game. There are certain rules and safeguards that protect him from the worst case in some parts of the game world, but it is not always guaranteed that he will be protected by the system. Certain conditions such as being at war with another corporation can mean that going from one space station to another in otherwise safe, policed space can be as unsafe as in the outer, lawless (in the real sense of the word, least amount of rules imposed on players) regions of the galaxy.

Assuming the player wants to attempt a PVE mission (player versus environment quest in MMORPG’s), he requests a mission from an NPC agent, sees the requirements to complete the mission and the rewards promised by the agent. Based on the reward the player can usually get an idea on how difficult, or risky that mission will be. Additionally the mission text will give hints to the type of enemy that will be encountered.

It is now up to the player to decide on whether to take the risk or not before he accepts the mission. If he accepts it and finds himself in a position that is too risky then it is sometimes too late to abort if he didn’t come prepared to be able to run away from an engagement in combat (a practice which will decrease his firepower, thus lengthen the duration of the mission – another decision of risk acceptance), in which case death is a likely outcome. Failing the mission, he will also lose the ‘respect’ of the agent who issued the mission, resulting in crappier future missions with less payment.

Managing risk

Since loss of ship or avatar life are some of the biggest risks a player faces and can have a serious impact on his game play and game enjoyment there are ways to manage this risk.
The system provides ways in form of insurance policies covering the partial value of the ship for a limited amount of time and insurance for skill points of the avatar in form of ‘clones’ that retain the knowledge. Basically that means that the player will respawn at a certain space station with as many skill points left as he insured himself for.
The community provides ways to manage risks as well. If a corporation or alliance is at war and players lose ships in battle everyone chips in to help those players get new ships in a short amount of time. This can be voluntary or defined as corporation policy and enforced by the system in form of tax imposed on any transfer of property within the game, player to player, player to system market and rewards gained from killing NPC’s with a bounty on their heads (such as in kill missions). The tax goes into the corporation wallet and can there be allotted to different projects, such as ship funds by the CEO and Directors (yes, corporations in EVE work just as in the real world).
The community also helps players manage risk by people helping each other, protecting a convoy or asteroid mining operation for instance or patrolling alliance ‘owned’ space.

This risk management helps the player to take on tasks that would otherwise be too risky for him, but still, the outcome is never certain.

Choices lead to complexity

Choices offered by the game create complexity and require the player to make decisions which will have effects on him and in the case of EVE-Online, will very often also have a direct or indirect impact on other players. Conflicts, economics, politics and relationships make this game so complex, dynamic and enjoyable that players keep coming back to it. It is built in a way that even if a player decides to stop playing for a while – months or even years – he can return and integrate himself back into the community without feeling left behind in the grind for equipment or fortune unlike many other MMO’s.