Thursday, October 25, 2007

Eve Online and other stuff

I am just killing some time, before my friend comes over with a copy of Ace Combat Six, and I figure what better use to fill in that void then with a post for a blog that nobody ever reads.

Things have been hectic for me lately, had two mid-terms this week, did pretty good on them. One of them is Old Church Slavonic, which is while not proto-Slav, is the first litearly langague of the Slavs. Its a pretty intresting learning this and comparining it to modern Russia to see what came from what.

However, I am not the greatest lingust in the world, and its tough learning.

In less serious pursuits I been playing Eve Online. Normal MMORPGS don't interest me that much because there is a serious lack of performance in response to what you do. For WoW which I hear is a great game, what you retain is just your character and its sort of a limited world.

Eve, is fun to me for a couple of reasons. First, its a wide persistent universe and second, players drive conflicts across hundreds of star systems that can be fought and controlled, and all share the same space. Or in other words, we are seeing a MMORPG that has in comparison to alot of MMORPGs, a persistent civil society and formations of micronations online that actually own and control their own space. This leads to interesting situations of fleets of hundreds of ships attacking each other, while giant super star destroyer ships lumber around.

Outside of space patrolled by the big NPC empires, is space controlled by the various players all fighting for power and control, and also their honor and grudges. It strikes me as a very feudal setup, in that corporations all rely on either personal contacts or promises of loot or protection to join, and these all build up on each other into a labyrinth of competing interests all fighting.

But its a fun game in which you can be anything from a captain of industry, to a miner, to a pirate to a full time merc, to just a dude whose ship keeps exploding looking for a hard isk.

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