EVE is nothing if not walking to the beat of it's own drum when it comes to the MMO market. In the gameplay realm this is seen in it's emergent gameplay and astounding levels of player freedom. In it's development it can be seen in how CCP is privately owned and answers to no publishers or stakeholders except the players themselves through the Council of Stellar Management. In it's business success this can definitely be seen through the game's subscription numbers.

Usual subscription numbers in an MMO tend to spike a bit after launch, rise for a while, and then sharply drop off. There are any number of ways this behavior can be explained. Maybe a lot of people bought subscriptions when the positive reviews and hype came rolling in and then decided they didn't like the game, or perhaps when players hit the endgame and have achieved everything that can be done they let their subscription lapse. EVE's subscription trend is different.

EVE Online has shown linear, positive subscription growth for over 9 straight years. Even with the huge drop in subscribers during summer of 2011, with the wildly successful 2011 winter expansion, Crucible, they managed to make it in just under the wire with a positive subscriber count at the new year.


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Resizing the image to fit in this site's 620px restriction makes it hard to make out, but EVE's line is the one with bright blue circles. Nearly every game on this graph shows exponential growth at some point, before a huge drop in active players.

The life cycle of an MMO is a vicious one unless you can keep delivering content to the players, which can be difficult with how efficiently they can consume it. WoW has managed to hang on longer than most, but you can clearly see that unless something drastic happens, WoW reached it's peak in the 2009-to-late-2010 time frame.

EVE succeeds in maintaining a solid player base with constant growth for a few simple reasons that aren't even directly related to the quality of the game, which is why it continues to thrive in spite of so many people finding it horrifically boring.

Firstly, EVE has no endgame, at least not in the traditional sense. There are no levels, so you can't 'max out', and there is no static endgame content. It's all player-driven, which means that as long as there are players, there will always be content for anyone who wants it. All of the stories you hear about epic battles and back-stabbing subterfuge were achieved and masterminded by players.

Secondly, improving character skills in EVE takes time, not effort, and you are not restricted by anything resembling a 'class'. You can choose one of 4 races to play as, but every race can train into every other race's ships with no penalty. There are enough skills in the game that training them all would take longer than the game's servers have been open, so it is impossible to learn everything. There are learning implants to make training go faster, but it's still time-dependent. This keeps players from madly grinding up through the ranks and then quitting after acquiring every skill.

EVE may not be the most successful MMO (WoW will probably always hold that title), but it has proven through it's unique game design and 9 years and 17 free expansions of consecutive growth that it is far and away the most consistent.

EVE online is an unbelievably intricate and complicated game. There are entire player organizations that exist just to teach new players how to survive in New Eden. There are layers to the complexity that make EVE a game that is very possible to never know everything about. One of these layers is the Meta Game.

Metagaming, as Wikipedia will tell you, in it's most basic form is: "the use of out-of-game information or resources to affect one's in-game decisions."

Over the years EVE has evolved and gameplay isn't restricted to within the game client anymore. I personally have 6 programs installed in addition to the game such as chat clients, skill planning apps, and ship fitting tools that I use on a near daily basis when playing EVE. These are considered the basics, and only technically fit within the realm of metagaming. Most EVE players would call these necessities before meta game tools. They allow for quick response time to incoming threats and ease of access to important information regarding your allies.

The real meta game can topple empires, and may not even involve logging into the game at all.

EVE is one of the few games where activities like national espionage, managing corporate finances, theft, scamming, diplomacy, propaganda, human resources and logistics, covert/black ops and detective work are not only allowed and encouraged, but entirely vital to the continued survival of player alliances. The emergent gameplay and alternative play styles are the lifeblood of player organization and structure. As the timeline of EVE has grown, history has proven that alliances who fail to adapt to the open-ended nature of the game and the freedom that the developers allow the players to have will eventually be destroyed.

Every single activity or job I listed above has a real example to go with it. These are not theoretical professions. There are hundreds of players in covert ops ships, sitting cloaked in hostile systems reporting intel on enemy movement right now. There are teams of people doing security checks on player applications to weed out potential spies. There are players reading an enemy's forums and reporting what they are discussing. People who work as digital forensic scientists in the real world are hunting for IP addresses of known spies on server logs and matching timestamps for forum posts. There are players who spend their game time resolving standings disputes and writing up complicated non-aggression-pacts with other organizations.

If you know nothing else about EVE online except what you read on gaming news sites, then you probably know about the meta game. Several of EVE's most widely-known events were driven by meta game actions. The Second Great EVE War culminated in the disbanding of one of the game's greatest alliances by a defector, followed by the subsequent invasion and purge of their former space.

EVE's greatest asset is it's players. CCP has admitted in the past that the EVE player base frightens them sometimes. The scale and intensity of the game's player-driven content has gone beyond anything they have ever anticipated. Given the freedom to find their own solutions to in-game problems, motivated players can and will achieve amazing things.

One of the principles on which EVE was built is the idea that actions have consequences, and that what you do and how you do it matters. This simple idea is how EVE has set itself apart from the rest of the MMO market (along with maintaining a player base even though it's literally the worst game ever).

It adds a unique dynamic to the game's PvP. In most MMOs, PvP has very little consequence for failure, and will result in not much more than a paltry EXP loss, or some money pulled from your wallet. If you get into a fight in EVE, you are fully committing, and putting your assets at risk. If you lose, the ship you were flying is gone forever. All that remains is a pile of wreckage that your enemies will probably loot for spare change.



For the people that play EVE this extra weight added to the combat is what makes it so worthwhile. If you win a battle, all of the wrecks that litter the field belonged to someone else. They had value because they were put at risk. By destroying something belonging to another player, you affected his game experience. He now has to replace that ship and all of the equipment installed on it.

This effect travels up the ladder too. Since most ships in nullsec are lost in the name of the corporation or alliance you are fighting for, many player organizations develop and fund massive ship reimbursement programs to help alleviate the cost of fighting a war for the average line member. This gives those organizations an incentive to become effective war machines, because loss in battle can mean loss in profit, and if profit dips too low, then players won't get reimbursed, or bills can't be paid, and then an organization's sovereignty becomes vulnerable to attack from other players.

All roads in EVE lead back to ISK. Everything in EVE is worth money, and everything in EVE can be destroyed.

At the end of April, The Mittani, CEO of Goonswarm Federation, head of the Clusterfuck Coalition, and incorrigible drama magnet, announced the formation of OTEC - the Organization of Technetium Exporting Corporations - on twitter. Initially OTEC was a joke, but when the price of Technetium, currently the most valuable and contested resource in the game, spiked to over 200 thousand ISK a unit from speculative purchasing, he decided to try making it a reality.



Some background information on Technetium for the less informed: Eve’s Dominion expansion changed some of the manufacturing requirements of advanced ships and modules in an attempt to open up a bottleneck for two moon minerals, Dysprosium and Promethium, that had existed for years. Until that point Technetium had been a moon mineral of very little importance, but the new requirements significantly increased the galaxy’s need for it. Once stockpiles ran out Technetium became a very valuable resource that is almost exclusively available in the northern regions of player-controlled nullsec space. This makes the people that control these moons very space rich, and they are currently one of the primary conflict drivers in the galaxy, acting both as a valuable strategic objective, and a method of bankrolling player combat.



Recently Goonswarm and it’s allies have come into possession of a majority share in the game’s Technetium moons through regional conquest, the remainder being primarily owned by player entities hostile towards them, such as Northern Coalition., Pandemic Legion, and Ev0ke.

The intention behind OTEC is to coordinate the sale and pricing of Technetium to the rest of the galaxy to ensure maximum profit for those involved, and to prevent player entities not interested in cooperating from controlling any significant amount of the Technetium moons available in the game. It is essentially a cartel, and The Mittani is not shy about admitting it. OTEC transcends personal or political agendas, existing only for profit; Several of the alliances involved have long standing grudges with each other, and have fought numerous protracted wars for comparatively petty reasons.

Truth is often stranger than fiction, and nowhere else is this truer in gaming than Eve Online. Known commonly as two things; An MMO set in a primarily player-driven world where the universe's narrative is determined by the actions of thousands of players; And "a really bad spaceship game". One of those two things is positive. I'll let you decide which one.

At the end of last month, the Clusterfuck Coalition (CFC), a huge player collective numbering over 15,000, hosted a weekend long event titled 'Burn Jita', against nearly everybody's will. The stated goal was to strike the heart of highsec commerce by ganking freighters coming in and going out of the game's primary trade hub, Jita. It was planned for the weekend after CCP released a patch altering some of the ways minerals used for manufacturing entered the game world in order to maximize the shock to the market.



The event ended up being large enough that CCP had to custom configure one of the massive server nodes hosting the game universe to handle all of the traffic and activity Jita was receiving. At the end of the weekend, the CFC managed to gank nearly 60 Freighters and 11 Jump Freighters, totalling over 338 billion ISK in damages before counting the loss of their ganking ships or all of the smaller ships destroyed in the chaos. That's roughly $13,500 in ISK. Aside from direct ISK loss, Burn Jita resulted in a 40% reduction of traded goods in the target system over the course of the weekend, and the CFC only managed to use up about 30% of the ships they had stocked for the event.

When someone mentions that Eve has a player-driven narrative they don't mean that the devs set up a poll asking which regions of the game should be attacked by NPC's in the next expansion. They mean that a group of players spent 5 months collecting and manufacturing over 16,000 ships to suicide against the game's NPC police force in a focused effort to attack merchants and derail trade on a galaxy-wide scale, simply because they wanted to.

I put a lot of weight on the quality of the D-pad when forming my opinion on a controller. Something that a surprising number of people can't wrap their head around. I know it may not be an integral part of the gameplay experience for Modern Warfare 2 or whatever, but believe it or not some games still forgo analog control and are made with with pads or joysticks in mind.

This is why I get so upset over controllers for modern-day consoles, with Microsoft taking the brunt of my hatred. Who approved that abomination? It feels bloated and mushy, and has no defined shape or decent tactile feedback. It's almost bad enough to believe it was made so intentionally, to encourage users into purchasing expensive things like arcade sticks or fighting pads, but I know that's not true because Nintendo already did that, and Microsoft is above recycling their shitty ideas. *cough*

Microsoft claims to be addressing this by releasing an updated controller with one of the most contrived and gimmicky improvements ever, Adding the ability to choose between a disc-pad or a cross-pad fixes nothing, and Microsoft should know that. Nintendo consoles have always used cross-pads, and the recent ones suck. Sony has that ridiculous broken cross D-pad and all it does is make diagonal inputs way harder than they need to be.

8-way D-pads have been around since the dawn of time, preceded only by 2 and 4-way joysticks, and spinner controls. Why can't anybody do it right? There are decades of previous examples to learn from, but the most prolific tech companies in the world that spend millions upon millions of dollars on research every single day and manufacture things that were beyond the imagination of science fiction only a few years ago, can't even create a piece of plastic that adequately manipulates 4 switches on a circuit board.