1 Who is she cosplaying?

2 Power Girl

3 Jita is a major trade hub in Eve, and is "high security" space.  You are usually safe in such areas, due to powerful NPC "police" forces.  However, if your current warship is worth less than the cargo your friends can loot from the wreck of another player's ship, then you can profit from a "suicide gank" attack.

Eve if very much a wide-open PvP game, even if some areas are supposedly "safe".  Another new game that is trying to push the envelop of PvP (this time between three different factions) is Camelot Unchained, which is nearing the last week of their KickStarter.

4 It's a little worse than that, even. What Siergen describes is the everyday Jita, as it were.

EVE has a really fantastically complicated economic system, with spot prices set (mostly by players) across literally thousands of different stations. Jita is a particular NPC-controlled system along several high-traffic warp routes, and thus is the major hub for trading; "Jita price" is essentially the game-wide market price, with variations based on local demand and supply.

Trading in EVE is done in a variety of ships, but honestly if you're seriously doing it, you're flying around a freighter (an essentially defenseless ship with tough armor and a hold more than an order of magnitude bigger than its nearest competitors). It's vulnerable to attack but takes a while to kill, which means it's usually safe in "secure" space - if you attack another player there, lots of cops appear and blow you up (and then leave you alone, they're not that vindictive).

Some people do freighter attacks in high-security space because they've got a tip that the particular freighter is hauling lots of expensive loot, sure. In this case, though, it's not the expectation of profit that's driving these attacks - this is purely an attempt to discourage trade and alleviate boredom by doing something nominally crazy.

There are a LOT of players of EVE who get their jollies by ruining other peoples' day. Definitely figured in my decision to quit playing...

5

So they managed to roll up Occupy Wall Street (down with the rich capitalists because they're rich capitalists), modern terrorist methods (random commercial/personal targets), and Russia's WW2 tactics (we can win by sacrificing enough men and materiel) into one big ball of nihilism?

Yup, this is why I don't play PvP games in the first place...

6 I assume that the people doing this, who lose their attacking ships, really are taking a loss? The ships are gone and they have to replace them the hard way?

7 Yes, in EVE everything except the starter ships and non-combat shuttles are "built" by players using resources gathered in game.  Some of the big ships literally take hundreds of players working together to gather the materials, and weeks of construction time.

8 The sad part is that Ace is into this kind of vandalism. I can understand a college student or its equivalent after graduation with a liberal arts degree and living with his parents.

9 But the ships that they're using to do this are not the big expensive ones (though the freighters they're killing ARE big and expensive - it's probably less of a loss for the pirates than it is for the targets.) I could have financed and built the necessary destroyers -solo-.

EVE is not for nice people. The largest player corporation in the game, which had controlled a two-digit chunk of all space, was taken down by a two-year-long inside job involving what you could reasonably call a massive breach of fiduciary duty and which destroyed assets worth tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars (not game currency!)

10

I am not sure if Ace himself is involved in gaming (Though some of the primary posters at AoS are.), since the weekly gaming thread is always posted under the 'Gang of Gaming Morons!' moniker.

11 Part of the allure of PvP gaming is the risk and the unpredictability.  An AI-controlled enemy in a fixed dungeon I can avoid if I choose, and only face when I feel I am prepared.  In an "open world" PvP, once I leave the safe zone (and in EVE that is leaving the dock) I can never be sure when and where I will encounter hostile players.  The risk of losing hard-earned gear/ships only heightens the adrenalin rush of combat.

The last few years I have played non-PvP games almost exclusively.  I just haven't liked the way newer games have implemented it.  That's part of what is drawing me to Camelot Unchained - it will be "old school", factional PvP, where losing (and winning) have consequences.

12

In WoW, the factions are built into the game, right? One thing I find interesting about EVE is that the factions were self-organizing.

I'd expect things like guilds to show up, with as many as a hundred members. I find it astounding that some of the EVE factions have tens of thousands of members.

13 And EVE is now going to be linked to an FPS game called Dust 514, with space-based guilds "hiring" FPS guilds as mercenaries  to help them take control of resource-rich planets.

We may soon reach the level of MMO-game organizations seen in novels such as Reamde.

14 Eve Online is quite impressive, though sometimes far more for what happens around it than for the game itself.  Though the game was really well designed to last for a long while.

Perhaps the funniest bit is when the Icelandic currency collapsed and the main company suddenly has a huge bank account in foreign currency.  Makes for a weird few days when a game company probably had the most value in the entire country.

15 I don't play EVE, and almost certainly never will, but I think the gaming world is better for it existing.  Its *interesting*, in a sort of horrible but fascinating manner.  Its basically a giant cyberpunk anarcho-capitalism simulator, wherein almost all the gameplay is emergent behavior from the player-base.

16 Given that half a million people are willing to pay in order to be part of it, there must be something right about it.

17 There are other MMOs that let you build (and defend) stuff, but nobody else is anywhere near the same scale.

In a broader sense, it's a lot like the old Elite space game, with some Trade Wars mixed in - you're free to fly around space and make your own story, subject to what other players let you get away with. Wanna be a pirate? Sure. Wanna ride around in your battleship and pew-pew? Sure. Want to get in on a fleet battle with five hundred ships on a side? Nobody else's systems will even try that - and sure, sometimes EVE will fall over when you get a couple thousand combatants all in one spot, but they'll at least try it. Or maybe you just wanna play space trucker. Or round up a posse and go white-hat pirate hunting. Or just whistle and suck up ore from asteroids while you watch anime on the other monitor.

Is it a bit primitive? Sure. Is it repetitive? Oh yeah, not even "a bit" there. But it's also capable of producing white-knuckle reactions you're not going to get playing Warcraft - when you're out on a limb with most of your assets and someone has set fire to the tree, you're gonna sweat bullets.

All that said, nobody really gets to escape the underlying economic realities of the game. It's been said, and not unfairly, that EVE is a game in which you fly spreadsheets...

The only downside is that, as mature as the game is, just about all of space has already been claimed and settled. No real frontier left, so if you want to carve out your own pocket empire, it's going to be out of someone else's bleeding flank.

18 I recall there being a major war a while ago, shortly after a patch, when it sounded like the EVE meta-game was about to "discover" centralized nation-states, as an evolution from the corporate feudalism they currently have.  Sadly, I think it fell through ( probably because the system inherently and unavoidably undervalues safety and stability ).  It would have been neat if the social structure had continued to evolve.

19 I actually played Eve for a long time, until a nasty incident with a corp I was in. At the time player corporations could build their own space stations, and set them up in nullsec space to permanently claim a planet for their very own. They cost about twenty Titans worth of materials, and Titans were the most valuable ships in space at the time, as well as being the ultimate bragging rights target (not to mention being the player-owned equivalent of a interstellar warp gate and armed with bombs capable of obliterating entire fleets of any ships smaller than another Titan). It takes nearly the entire hold capacity of a Freighter to haul a station, and since they can only be set up in nullsec space (where the cops will NOT protect you, and are in fact more likely to shoot you if you ever return to high-sec space), actually getting them set up is an even greater undertaking than getting them built.

So our corp spent half a year toward this end, building up the infrastructure to gather the materials to construct the space station and the piloting skills to move it where we could profit the most. Unfortunately, the CEO got paranoid, and decided to haul it when there was little or no traffic, which of course was when nearly everyone in the corp (including me) was at a real-life job making some real-life money. He realized the pilots online at the time couldn't adequately protect the freighter from a serious attack, so he gathered up every ship he could, and sent them in one direction while sending the freighter into nullsec space in a different direction.

Unprotected. Unescorted, even.

The big fleet made it to the target system completely unchallenged, while the freighter was blown up by a couple wandering nullsec player frigates that found it helplessly trying to align itself to the warp gate, only to be bounced out of alignment and forced to repeatedly start aligning again by an attack from NPC pirate ships that happened to spawn on the gate. By the time they could get another freighter out there to scoop up the space station, every ganker in nullsec had arrived with their guns out and big grins on their faces, as they shot the wreckage and ship's hold to pieces just so nobody could have the contents.

Everyone who hadn't skipped work to contribute ships to the doomed plan was naturally blamed, and the drama resulted in some nasty digging into personal lives, including the acquisition of my real life work phone number, and phoned threats to my workplace. I've sometimes wondered if I should make another go at it, because there's truly no other MMOG like it, but once bitten twice shy, as they say.