This summer has seen the end of the lengthiest and most fulfilling gaming experience of my life: five years helping to run the Eve Online corporation, StateCorp. A five year plan? More like five years with no plan, but with endless drama. The corporation is currently in the process of moth-balling and disbanding, and so we took the opportunity to look back at what made those sixty months of Eve so fascinating, why we became so involved, and why it had to come to end. This retrospective comes to your courtesy of everyone who has been a member of StateCorp over the years.
In this first episode I want to set the scene and to touch on the most important themes. We’ll move onto some specifics about the game mechanics and how the influenced our play in the next episode. For now though, a beginning…
By mid 2004 I had been playing Eve Online on and off for a year. The game had been largely ignored by the PC gaming world up to that time, and yet the ideas it embodied were fascinating. The dynamic nature of player interaction, the intricacy of economics and combat, the emergent politics: it was heady stuff. I decided to write an eight page feature about my experiences for PC Gamer UK, assuming that this would be my final word on the subject. Needless to say, it was just the beginning. Members of the now defunct State gaming forum read the piece and raised the idea of starting up a corporation for its members. A handful of the forumites had already been playing the game, and were keen to team-up. Others would create characters from scratch and join in with the project. I would take the lead.
Our early days saw us undertaking typical beginner behaviour: messing about in the friendly areas of Caldari space, running the game’s very basic missions, and practising PvP combat in frigates. We had about a dozen people, and the corporation would never get beyond around twenty five active members in its history. A handful of those who were there at the start are still playing today. In these early days StateCorp trolled the nearby low-security systems for pirates, without much success. It was only when three of the beginners were out and about in their new cruisers that we were to encounter our first real enemy: a battleship pirate called Nekrosis. Having spotted the miscreant in space our newbies pootled about as bait. Myself and another older player, meanwhile, raced to the scene in our battleships, from our basis several systems distant. It was to be a process that we would repeat thousands of times in the following five years: finding a target, offering him a reason to engage, then lasering the crap out of him. He wasn’t happy.
Of course the only reason we had any firepower at all was that we’d begin to grasp how to fit ships to do proper damage. Knowing what types of modules to fit, how to fit them, and then what ranges to engage at once we had fitted them, was an arcane art, and one that even I was only beginning to get the hang of. My year headstart had given me money and skills, but my theorycraft was still weak. Early fights such as those against Nekrosis gave us a taste for blood and the confidence to leave the safety of Empire space.
Boosted by humble victories we explored nearby regions, rapidly losing our battleships to smarter, more experienced players. At this point the corporation was aimless, with little more to its ambition than allowing the members to have someone friendly to chat to. It was clear that Statecorp needed more of a challenge than this low-profile existence could provide. After a few weeks we migrated into the 0.0 (nullsec) space of Great Wildlands, where I had previously made friends via my player corporations from the from first year of the game. That first year would prove to be extremely useful to us in the five that followed, because success in Eve so often relies on contacts and personal relationships. Again and again the people I’d flown with in the first few months of the game would pop up to help with StateCorp’s evolution.
We spent several formative months in the Great Wildlands region, to which we would subsequently return many times. This was our first taste of the alliance game, in which large groups of corporations combined their powers to control, police, and exploit a region of space. Our alliance, the first Foundation, and soon found itself at war with a hostile alliance called Keiretsu. I spent weeks learning about long range battleship combat – one of the staples of Eve’s multi-layered PvP over the years – sniping enemy ships from a hundred kilometres or more distance. Many of the Foundation veterans had been fighting out here for months, and they took the lead in teaching us how it was done.
StateCorp found itself dragged into huge fleet fights featuring scores, sometimes hundreds, of ships. We learned the value of speed, and the thrill of interceptor duels. We learned how to take losses gracefully, and how to make money quickly and safely. All good lessons for the future, but we remained inexpert fighters. Months would pass before we would begin to feel confident as a collective.
Soon another alliance made a play for the region. As the war unfolded over the course of several weeks, it became clear that Foundation was to be defeated. The fleets began to diminish in size as support ebbed away. Eventually the conflict compelled us to move on from this starter home, and it was the first step in a tour of the galaxy that would last another five years.
We used our Foundation connections to find a second home. This time it was The Forsaken Empire, a couple of regions away in an area known as Tribute. The first few weeks were incredibly exciting. The new owners of Great Wildlands, Veritas Immortalis (-V-) Alliance, attacked, along with a series of pirate gangs, and the Forsaken Empire fleets found themselves embroiled in constant – although not serious – conflict. That was okay by us, because we got to make huge amounts of money from Tribute’s rich assets. Anything that was destroyed could easily be replaced. We began to learn how to scout out our enemies, configure to engage them, and to win fights against formidable foes. The trademark of StateCorp: a specific plan for small-scale combat, rapidly conceived and executed, began to germinate around this time, with some spectacular small engagements taking place – the height of which was probably my rescue from an enemy system by a small team of State pilots. At this point I also began to learn how to command fleets of dozens of players, swallowing intense humiliation as I lead a sixty-man gang to its death at the hands of a disciplined -V- fleet. Everyone knew I had fucked up. I swore not to let it happen again. Understanding how Eve’s solar-systems could be exploited for tactical advantage was something I would spend the coming years mastering.
Soon, however, The Forsaken Empire’s leadership was to make the misstep that would define the future of StateCorp. The alliance was dragged into a wider galactic conflict against a fierce PvP alliance known as The Five. Our excitement at being involved in a huge coalition of alliances soon faded into concern as The Five’s most militant corporations moved into stations close to our region. This concern became panic as these new, potent enemies began routine attacks on our systems, decimating the alliance’s less experienced members. By this time The Forsaken Empire was a populous, flabby target, and our enemies revelled in racking up hundreds of kills each day. The leadership was so desperate that they even implemented a “stupid tax” on those players who got killed because they had not paid attention to warnings. Morale was slipping, and our grip on the region was going with it.
Eventually the Forsaken Empire commanders pulled together the entire alliance, as well as their local allies, to besiege the enemy corporation in their main base of operations. The “siege of HPA” – a long, painful, series of sniper battles – probably only lasted a couple of weeks, but it seemed like a lifetime. It went on and on, with neither side able to win a convincing victory. Eventually a backroom deal was cut, and The Forsaken Empire’s bosses decided on an armistice with The Five, the terms of which meant we had to attack our former allies. It was a backstab that StateCorp could not stomach, and we decided, again, to move on. Politics was going to be something that we would generally avoid meddling in, but would always feel the influence of. In the years to come it would often be the political decisions of larger powers that often decided how our game played, and where we ended up residing.
For now though we wanted to avoid extended conflict with large powers, and had to look for something a little more downbeat. Options at the time were numerous, thanks to the large number of smaller alliances that the game supported. We read up on their agendas and manifestos, and decided that the tiny Frege Alliance sounded like it was aligned with our values. However, we were now ferociously independent, having flown and fought together for months. We elected not to throw our lot in entirely with this new alliance, and based ourselves at the nearby ISS Borealis.
This was one of the most fascinating projects of early Eve – a publicly funded space station – for which anyone could purchase shares. ISS had, in what was a huge logistical and security exercise – built their second station near Frege space, and was looking for tenants. As a neutral entity to all ISS allowed us to base there for a fee, and it meant that we were set apart, physically, from the rest of the Frege pilots. This decision had a social effect that would bond the corporation closer together than ever: when we left the surrounds of the station, we did so as a group. Even though we were part of another alliance, the most important thing was the cohesion of StateCorp itself. We became totally self-reliant, within the larger whole.
Possibly our finest moment in this theatre was in combating war targets in high-security space – pirates who had formally declared corporate war on Frege – when we once again baited and destroyed a high value target. This time, however, it was a faction battleship, called a machariel, which was equipped with the most expensive items the game had to offer. We could not believe our luck, and the outraged pirate took his rant to the official forums – understandably livid that his prize ship could be destroyed by a small fleet of a fraction of the value. As the years unfolded, the loot dropped by overconfident foes were to come to fund an astonishingly large amount of our activities, and cause bitter enmities.
Frege’s time was troubled. They attempted to merge with another alliance, with unhappy outcomes. Soon there was in-fighting, and then a civil war. We took the lead at this point, stomping the dissenters and earning a reputation as some of the most confident members of the small alliance. (One brutal stand-up fight against raiders from far away industrial megaplex Ascendant Frontier sticks in the memory of our pilots to this day, and the battle cry of Frege’s alliance leader was adopted as our own tongue-in-cheek response to ill-considered calls to combat: “Rapid Deployment!”) It was a formative time, although little more than skirmishing next to what the coming years would hold. StateCorp learned the kind of routines that would keep us alive in thousands of battles to come. We also learned to be distrustful of pilots we’d not got the measure of, now matter how friendly they might be: strangers didn’t always follow orders, and that could get you killed.
As the civil war sputtered out, and the region lapsed into nothing more than occasional pirate raids, we began to realise that we were rather more experienced than we’d thought. The months of war the Forsaken Empire had hardened and focused us. We decided we wanted another, wealthier region to operate in, while at the same time still working within an alliance that shared our values of fairness and anti-piracy. It turned out that this alliance was The Huzzah Federation, which was occupying a region on the far side of the galaxy. The move to Huzzah was to be the making of StateCorp, and set us on the road to the height of our powers.
Next: The “Zoom Zoom” Years, the joy of logistics, and the largest war machine ever assembled. Read part 2 here.
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Ha! I remeber seeing your corps name pop up in the ASCN forums Jim, along with with some very blunt orders.
I was in EDF back then, which was obviously part of the ASCN alliance.
Think I’m gonna leave Eve for another year before popping back in.
I’d be interested in knowing what the orders entailed ¬_¬
I did actually go to the effort of signing up on the ASCN forums to thank you guys for the ridiculous brawl Jim mentioned. Something like 35v30. I think pretty much everybody died, except around half a dozen of the ASCN cruisers.
(I do love what a small universe it can be sometimes. Always bumping into old friends and enemies)
@Noc:
Playing EvE requires from the player to be able to give himself objectives. It’s not WoW where you follow a strict linear progression in level, skills, areas, etc… it’s much more like “here you go: a ship, a ton of skills to choose from, hundreds of ships and modules to equip and a rich and evolving world. Have fun.”
As so it can be disconcerting for people used to “soft” EQ-like games. For those who have played prime time UO or even SWG (hell, maybe even Asheron’s Call 1, especially on Darktide), it’s probably easier.
Joining a corporation helps with the objectives, because as a group you got more potential and more projects in your reach. It also helps to climb up in skill, not in the “ingame skill” sense but in general, player skill.
Because I can tell you: after three years playing and PvPing in 0.0, put me in a t1 frigate with basic skills to equip it as I want to, even in pure tech 1 modules, and watch me kick some asses.
Not bragging, as prolly any old pvper out there will tell you the same, it’s just facts.
EvE PvP isn’t about “ingame skills”, those just allows you to fly other ships or equip different modules. Stats adjustments are great, sure, but past the basics of each ship size it’s bonus rather than necessity.
Player experience, fitting tactics and capacity to analyze an ongoing fight is what it’s all about.
Many PvP alliances often use tech 1 gangs to pvp for cheap or train newbies. You should watch a gang of Pandemic Legion tech 1 destroyers in motion, it’s one hell of a sight, and they cut into tech 2 like butter.
More than anything, EvE is what you make of it.
Good read, as is always the case with EVE.
Shame it’s so hard to get into.
Damn, I love this.
WEEE! another EvE article by JR !!
And at last I know the name of your corp, and your alliance. we moved recently and became next door neighbours with huzzah, not seen your boys though. When I get a chance, I’m going to shout some obscenely innapropriate thing in local about you to your boys. Shame you no longer play :(
Can’t wait for the 2nd part!
I just started getting into Eve a month ago, late to the party, but nonetheless sad to see Statecorp is being mothballed. I’d kind of hoped their welcoming arms would b there for me when I was ready to give corp play a go.
Still, if you survive, count on at least one (inexperienced) new member. I can probably rustle up another too.
Hell, with the amount of former statecorpers stating they want to go back in this comments thread maybe we’ll see a resurgence after all.
Thanks for sharing this with us, Jim. I enjoy reading and playing EVE, and I enjoy it even more when it’s someone sharing a piece of their own personal story from the game, their own piece of history.
I’m sure you’ll end up answering this in your coming installments, but are you really all done with EVE? Quitting cold turkey?
I agree Persh was a cock. It was a bit of a shock when it came through and tbh NBSI were stand up guys but i suppose by that point it was do anything to try and save us, which it didnt anyway. Ill always thank .5 (well ATUK) for teaching me how to PvP. What i want to know was where were RED, after all it was us helping them kick .5 out of their space that earned us their wrath…
@Nico: I had The Fear for ages. While most of Statecorp PvP’d I mission ran cos I was a horrible noob (nothing much has changed tbh). The greatest obstacle to becoming a succesful PvPer is ridding yourself of the fear of losing a fight. Once you realise that as soon as you undock you’re probably dead you become a better fighter :)
@The Great Wayne: There’s still that big, extremely statistically significant skill hump to get over, though.
Like, someone who’s not properly trained in a given niche is (by some quick maths, which I’ll post below so you can point out my inevitable errors) is about half as effective as someone who isn’t. And that’s just the straight skill bonus: actual effectiveness is probably quite a bit less, when you take into account synergizing skill and the differences in available modules.
So training into a single niche isn’t terribly hard. Hell, you can start a character pre-trained in a niche of your choice, if you know what you’re doing.
But finding a niche? Much harder. Especially because, as mentioned above, even simply on paper your performance in a given field is about half what it would be if you were properly trained in it. In practice, you’re half as effective as you should be and don’t really know what you’re doing.
The usual method of finding a niche is experimentation: fiddling around with different things until you find something you like, or that seems effective, or that you seem to be good at. Given the above, though, instead of returning a list of “fun/effective things to do and maybe practice at and get better at,” the experiments return a list of “things that might be fun/effective if I spent a few weeks getting the right skills.” As passe as it is to blame incompetence on poor stats, you are pretty gimped statistically in things you lack the basic skillset for. A competent skillset in any one niche is a few weeks (or a new character and any of your previous progress) away. General, unspecialized competence is a matter of months.
So yeah. You, as someone who’s been PvPing for years and already knows what you’re doing, can probably build a character with the skills you need to fill a given niche fairly effectively right off the bat. A new player, who’s casting about looking for something they can be good at? Constantly running into skill-based walls when they try and figure out what they want to be doing.
. . .
Contrast to, say, the way Planetside does things, or at least did things during that RPS even a bit back: newish characters tend to have enough skillpoints to decently specialize in any one field, and can respec essentially at will for the first handful of levels.
So you can experiment properly. Put all your skillpoints into tank driving, and tank drive properly in a non-gimped state and see if you like it. Do the same with stealth, or close combat, or piloting, or engineering, or whatever.
So if EVE ditched their arcane, template based character generation and gave you a ton of skillpoints to start with and let you assign then wherever and respec at will* for the first few weeks before settling into something you liked?
Then yeah. That’d be great. As you said, you can totally be competent with the tools a new character can get right out of the gate; the problem for newbies is that you can’t swap your tools about and figure out which ones you actually need, or enjoy using.
Which is why the time to train skills is so demoralizing, because EVE insists that you earn your basic competency in things you weren’t smart enough to start your character with. And it’s the whole being told “It’ll take you two and a half weeks to reach basic competency with [insert niche here] that’s demoralizing and made me go “screw this.”
(Also note that I tried and gave up on EVE before I played Planetside. So it wasn’t a case of “Waah, why didn’t the do things the way I’m used to!” And more of belatedly realizing that this other system I’m playing with now would have made a lot more sense for that game I played earlier.)
*Clearly with some restrictions on “At will.” And “points wherever,” to prevent ultraspecialized, broken builds and ninja-speccing shapeshifting PvPers. Limiting the number of skillpoints available per category and only letting you respec at specific stations would probably do the trick.
. . .
(The aforementioned maths, regarding that “half as effective” figure I threw out above:
If I remember right, basic skills tend to give you a 5% bonus to something. Advanced skills, which usually require Basic Skill V to train, tend to give you a 10% bonus.
So Basic Skill V gives you +25%, and Advanced Skill IV gives you +40%. Assuming they stack the way I think they do, (1+1*0.25) + (1+1*0.25)*.4 = 1.75. So training that makes you 175% as effective, with pure stat bonus from skills. If that math’s right, and I’m correct about how skill bonuses stack.
Since there are usually multiple skills involved, and higher skills unlock better modules too, I figured 200% effectiveness was a reasonable (low) estimate. Which leaves you twice as effective trained as you untrained. Which is a pretty big difference.)
. . .
And that’s a lot longer than I thought it would be. TL;DR QQ INDEED.
Been playing Eve for about 4 years now. At one point was running a small alliance of around 150 pilots, but as was mentioned here, this game has the ability to suck more and more of your time/energy. Once you start taking a management / command position with a group you really have to play -all the time.- I’ve burnt out on it many times, but always seem to come back a few months later. Right now I’m just goofing off solo for the most part, joining ad-hoc gangs with friends here and there.
But like the article mentioned, the sheer amount of positive memories are always going to be with me. This is one of the few games where the hard work makes the payoffs that much more amazing.
Although I haven’t played a minute of EVE in my life, I love reading those articles. Better than most science fiction epics written by authors.
@Noc
I agree the initial “skill hump” is incredibly annoying.
Also, I don’t know if it makes things better or worse, but character creation doesn’t work like that anymore. You get some uniform starter skills and then your first 1.6million skill points train twice as fast.
Very nice article, really looking forward to the next.
I really wonder how the game will evolve when they combine it with this Dust FPS they make for consoles. Ah, the possibilities. Afaik nobody has atemped something like this before. As with so many things on EvE.
Great game. Alas the time…
mpk says: The greatest obstacle to becoming a succesful PvPer is ridding yourself of the fear of losing a fight. Once you realise that as soon as you undock you’re probably dead you become a better fighter
The Way of the Samurai is found in death. Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day, when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by lasers, missiles, drones and chain guns, being carried away by surging fleet actions, being thrown into the midst of a great fire of doomsday devices, being struck by Judgement, being shaken to death by Oblivion, obliterated by smartbombs. And every day, without fail, one should consider himself as dead. This is the substance of the Way of the Samurai.
I’m glad I spent some time with State, Jim. Your FC’ing and Stategangs got my heart pumping again after 3 years in the game :)
I think I’m finally moving away from Eve, as I guess Jim is now too. It was a fantastic 4 years, and I wont forget it, but I don’t really want to go back. It’ll always come down to the people you play it with in the end, and as yet another group dissolves I realise I don’t really want to go through it again.
A lot of fun though. And always quite a lot to do. Ex-pirate, ex-scammer, ex-fleet soldier, ex-merc and probably quite a lot else. I’ll miss the giddy thrill of solo pvp, though. Hard to imagine anything matching Eve on that front.
Wow, awesome article! I’m speechless! This is sort of stuff that makes me love EVE all over again. I love the scale, the amibition, the way it takes over your life :) Looking forward to your next article.
A great read!
Also this seems fitting: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those … moments will be lost in time, like tears…in rain.” – Roy Batty
People are trying to start up an RPS fleet in the forums, maybe you can take over as the leader of this new fleet even if it is only to impart some experience and knowledge in the fleet before you end up quitting so they don’t go about Eve ruining RPS’s good name ;)
These stories of Eve always sound so awesome; so why exactly am I spending all my time shuttling Tracking Computers around to sell to fellow newbies? Its like I’m standing in a puddle instead of swimming the Channel, with no real idea of either what I’m doing, or what I need to do to get involved with all the good stuff.
@Noc:
As said earlier, the system now is much more newbie friendly than when you seems tp have tried it. Should try it again to see if it fits you better maybe.
Also, on your equation:
Basic skill in damage often gives you 5% (sometimes less or something non damage related). Advanced skill, if any, will give you 2% per level when using the advanced modules.
Considering that even a newbie will have a lvl 4 in the basic skill (lvl from 1 to 4 is always shorter to skill up than from 4 to 5, so it’s most of the time what separate a newbie from a veteran in terms of skills), and that 95% of the time the vet will have advanced skill to 4, it’s at most a 13% difference, when using advanced weapons (which costs more, ergo an increased risk for the added efficiency).
Obviously, you have to put that on the scale of a complete template, considering ship fitting skills, navigation, etc… So having more skills definitely is a bonus, but that’s quite logical isn’t it ?
My point is that, on the matter of PvP, the difference in numbers between a 3 years veteran and a one month beginner on the piloting of a given ship is quite small compared to some other titles around.
And for the remaining number gap, you can always outwit your enemy, no such thing as “I win button” in EvE, for anyone.
On the subject of the knowledge of the game and the difficulty of access for a new players I do agree however. EvE is a darn hard game to learn, but it’s far easier now than it was when I started.
Free stat point reset and skilling speed bonus at creation is nice. It’s a rich game, expecting to master it fast isn’t gonna work, and yet the skill system you criticize isn’t bad for everyone, as it lets you level up online or not, whatever you do.
For someone who do not play much or like to do what they please instead of grinding the skill they’re leveling, it’s in fact a real asset.
Anyway, I’m not here to defend EvE and I respect your right to dislike it. I think that it’s one of those “love it or hate it” game, there’s no in between. Just wanted to get some facts straight, EvE is indeed a hard game, yet for those who sticks to it and through the first times it will lend all its potential.
I know it still does for me after three years.
I want to like EVE, and despite my frustrations with it, no other MMO has come close to it…
It’s just…
GAH
Yes, I realize you don’t have to mine, or run missions, however, a newbies choices in money making are very, very limited. You want to build stuff? Well, you don’t have the money to buy the materials, so go mine it.
There’s always piracy, but I couldn’t bring myself to that, thank you very much.
Blowing up a bad pirates, who thought my mining ass was an easy target, however, never got old
Never underestimate a Vexor. Ever.
Two years of EVE and although I was happy to leave, I still miss it! Father Calistas was fun to play, and Antipodean Inc was the best damn group of Southern Hemisphere players in the world!
I wasn’t part of it near as long as many, but I will miss Statecorp. It’s what finally really got me into the game, and made it stop being a chore of mining and missions, and instead made it a joy of zoom zoom zoom pewpewdeath.
@The Great Wayne: Hmm, thanks.
I think the last time I rolled up a character was a touch after Trinity launched? They were still doing old-style generation, then, and the huge spots and gaps in my skillbase was the primary headache. The problem wasn’t the difference between someone who’s got the basic training in a skill and someone who’s got advanced training; the problem was that I had no training at all and needed to spend a week raising a large handful of skills to be able to perform a basic task with anything approaching reasonable efficiency.
(I’m glad to hear I was way off about the impact of advanced skills, though. Advanced Drone Interfacing must’ve been sticking in my head.)
Otherwise, though, I do like the skill system, especially because it means I can focus on actually doing interesting things instead of grinding out advancement. It’s just that hump required for basic competency that really bugged me.
And if they’ve fixed that, then I might have to have another go after all. There are a ton of things I like about EVE, and it was very specifically that “What the hell, it’ll be weeks before I can do anything effectively” thing that drove me away.
StateCorp was some of the best times I had in EVE. Both flying with you guys in a separate corp, and being in the corp itself.
Without StateCorp, I don’t know whether I would have hit 0.0. I certainly wouldn’t have hit it with as much confidence in my allies. Some truly good times were had in Syndicate, and Geminate, and everywhere we went inbetween.
I’m sad to see the Corporation go, but maybe it was time. Cheers for helping me into the 0.0 game, and cheers for teaching me to be less of a nood, and cheers for all the good experiences.
*salute*
Oh shit, I almost forgot that picture thing you guys and whisp made for me when I was down.
That was awesome. Good times :)
For anyone trying out the game, or for those of you who hate the “learning skill grind” (Noc! Your right on about the skill hump – but its not as bad as it used to be) –
Try Eve University Corp. “Eve University” has been around, I think, since 2004 to teach the basics. EXCELLENT group of people.
About the PvP thing – truely, that is about attitude and experience far more than “just” sp…
I had a carebear attitude on my main – until i made this guy -now I just grab a Rrupture whenever the urge hits me and I go hunting. Sometimes I win (rarely!), sometimes I lose (more often) but its all fun.
Excellent read – maybe one day I’ll find a 0.0 corp who’s goals I can get behind, until then, I’ve found 5 IRL friends…
We will see…
Loved the article, and also RoBurky’s posts about his Interceptor as well.
Anyone know of a good site where I can find more ripping yarns about the EVE universe?