GamerNode: Features - Exploring Space: EVE Online

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It's this player variety that makes EVE Online such a refreshing experience: to see someone brag on the forums about their life as a pirate, waiting for vulnerable players in slow, ponderous ships before striking, holding the pilot's life to ransom as they sit in their pod, drifting from the wreckage of a ship that can be salvaged for untold millions of ISK. It's a scary prospect for the new player: even though you'll start in 0.9 security space (1.0 being the highest, and with a zero or negative value as the obvious binary opposite), the prospect of being able to use stargates to thrust yourself through the galaxy at random will become addictive, and it may not be long before a pirate sees your first-time ship arrive in-system, warping in to destroy you and take you for all you're worth.

These player conflicts, these storylines created by the actions of pirates and new players alike are the driving force behind the procedural, player-generated narrative that makes EVE Online so popular. But why not just have NPCs drive the main experience and leave player interaction to chat rooms and PvP gameplay? "Rather than create a single player experience," explains Gonzales, "the ultimate idea in everyone's mind was to make real people the enablers of these activities by marrying virtual world technology to the internet. People will always be the best source of content for everyone else, so in this sense we knew we could create something new."

The internet has long been a forum of discussion, drama, and important events, from the first computer hacking to the latest in online scandals, from credit card theft to software piracy. However, EVE Online uses this idea to generate its own drama, its own events that take place on a colossal scale, both in economic and dramatic terms. In this instance, a long-term member of one of the richest, and definitely the most powerful groups of players (corporations, to use the correct in-game vernacular), decided to betray his friends, his co-workers in-game, and disbanded their corporation. Billions of ISK down the drain, and years of friendship shattered in the name of online betrayal. This is no stray accusation of needless aggression in a console war forum topic: this was betrayal on an economically damaging scale.

Space was invaded, taken from the corporation, whilst its members desperately tried to hold on to the huge area of the galaxy they had taken over and colonized. The two-faced pilot is now nowhere to be seen, hiding from the drama created by his wilful destruction. The thousands of forum threads and news post across the gaming internet are a testament to the impact events like these can have in EVE: this is more than a "world first kill" or a "first to level 100": this is a scandal.

It remains such because the game only takes place on a single server, an example of technology not, to any source of knowledge, yet bettered in the gaming industry. The server hub in Iceland is incredibly powerful, and its ability to have fifty-six thousand players or more online at one time, in the same instanced galaxy, is testament to this monumental technological achievement. It could be argued it then becomes simpler to maintain the gaming experience for all those who play EVE, that there will only ever be one server down for maintenance, or hit by bugs, not hundreds or thousands of servers at random intervals throughout the year.

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