I have been a regular listener of various MMO podcats for a while now, but for whatever reason, I’ve gotten behind on that. Last night I synched up the iPod with all the latest stuff, and gave the (relatively) new Drone Bay podcast – it’s excellent, and judging from the first episode, will deal with a number of topics relevant to EVE noobs or folks interested in but not yet participating in EVE. I have lots of Warp Drive Active to catch up on as well, along with the new WDA: Industry podcast, which I am eager to give a listen to. And VirginWorlds, and Voyages of Vanguard…

Thinking about the ore theivery situation over the weekend got me to understand at least a little bit better the mechanics behind object ownership, system security and how they can be exploited. I think I can see after some thought and research why the thieves did their evil work exactly the way they did it.

You can install WoW, start playing, and in ten minutes or less know everything you need to know about how the game works – everything else is progression and gravy. When you do need to learn something new, WoW gives you plenty of time to adjust to it; you generally have to get at least two more levels before there’s even the possibility of something else being thrown at you, and there are really very few really new techniques that need to be learned over the course of the 70-level progression, and then a couple more in the endgame.

EVE is not like that. You can learn slowly, but it’s more likely that even if you do, you’ll do it the hard way. The way things work is usually easy enough to grasp on a superficial level, and the tutorials (of which there are a bunch) help with this, but real understanding requires research and thought, and often at least a touch of practical experience – and you’ll never do really well at any aspect of EVE until you get more than a superficial understanding of it.

This is part of the reason the EVE community is so strong – people helping each other by teaching in corps or posting explanations on forums or writing guides to mining or exploration or invention or whatever – because it needs to be for the game, and the community, to survive. This could be thought of as a weakness in the game itself (game mechanics that aren’t neccessarily intuitive and tutorials that impart only a superficial understanding of those mechanics,) but I’m not really sure that’s true. It may simply be that EVE aims at a more motivated and dedicated audience, one more willing to be challenged than the teeming hordes that make up the subscriber base of some other games, only one of which starts with a W. And it at least implies great depth, such that someone can still be learning new things about the game years after starting, even without assuming that those new things have been updated in more recently.

It also tends to lend itself, I think, to a certain amount of elitism, which can be corrosive in the long term to many people. EVE has avoided this largely by keeping a steady flow of new people moving into the game, such that even if the guys in Big Alliance X look down their noses at the poor noobs just starting, there’s always some friendly corps around to offer rookies a hand up, and even corps comprised mostly or entirely of new people. This is why churn, so often thought of as a negative, is actually not – it’s a natural and inevitable indication of a healthy game, as long as it’s legitimate churn and not loss. No subscription service is ever going to retain 100% of its subscribers anyway, and to think that’s reasonable (or desirable) is a bit silly.

Incidentally, I didn’t get into EVE yesterday, but Caldari Frigate IV will be fully trained up at about 3 AM tonight, so I will hop in after work today to change in something else to time the Frigate skill to close out Wednesday morning. Beyond that, I may not get much time in today either, but I’ll be in every night from Wednesday through Friday, and most probably Saturday as well.