EvE Online: A Powergamer's Paradise

I've been playing computer games pretty much day in and day out for going on 8 years now. My first serious love was Starcraft -- probably the best game ever made in my opinion. The Koreans would agree. Extremely competitive, perfectly balanced, I spent a couple years pretty heavily engrossed in it, though I never tried to be a 'serious player'. Eventually I discovered Diablo II, a game I came to enjoy nearly as much as I had enjoyed Starcraft. I began to play them both pretty regularly, eventually shifting over to playing D2 exclusively. The fast-paced Player vs Player made for an attractive way to waste another couple of years, though the ever-increasing prevalence of hacks, the disillusionment at PvP being ultimately pointless (killing another player profited you nothing, dying to another player cost you nothing), and more importantly the feeling that I no longer had any competition left on my server eventually led to me quitting entirely.

I found EvE in February 2006. A game where getting blown up set you back significant time and money, killing an opponent gave you the opportunity to help yourself to the spoils of warfare, and massive alliances consisting of thousands of players fought battles that could last weeks, months, and years for the control of entire regions of space. I was hooked from the start.

Blowing up another player's spaceship could be mundane, their ship so cheap and their loss so small as to be considered irrelevant. On the other hand, blowing up another player's ship could represent the loss of thousands of hours of time spent earning money and the combined efforts of thousands of players. The largest ship class in EvE is the Titan. The cost of building a Titan comes out to something like $4,000-5,000 USD, when you factor in the value of EvE currency when converted from real life money. That's not taking into account the logistical efforts of procuring and transporting the absolutely enormous amounts of minerals and components to the remote location you are building it in. After such a significant investment of both time and money, the Titan still literally takes a matter of months to build.

It's easy to see why EvE attracts powergamers. People in EvE sit at the heads of space empires, command thousands of other players, and take part in the closest thing to real life politics you're likely to ever see in a video game. Some people take it pretty seriously. My personal goals over my time playing EvE have changed a few times, and these days I mostly take it pretty easy. Log on, go out with some friends, see how many people we can blow up and try to do so without getting blown up ourselves. A lot of people I know who enjoy MMORPGs don't find EvE appealing, most usually because of the setting. Most people want to have a warrior, or a wizard, or an elf, but to me it doesn't matter. It doesn't make any difference if I'm killing someone with a spaceship or a sword, as long as the PvP is rewarding.