Loss and Gain in EVE Online

Easy come - easy go!

This post is going to be about my experience with loss in the world of EVE Online. When you "die" in EVE Online (or rather, when your ship explodes), it does not respawn in a "galactic graveyard" where you are then free to warp out and continue your travels in New Eden. Instead, your ship is gone - forever. What's left behind is a little white triangle signifying the wreck, which other players can loot to acquire whatever modules and cargo you dropped. I've also learned that wrecks can be salvaged with the use of a special module which yields materials that are needed to build special starship components called "rigs". (If you play WoW or similar games, these are akin to "gems").

I'm new, and don't really have much to lose at this point. In my first days as a newbie, a player from reddit donated a full set of learning implants to me, + some skillbooks. I was really grateful - but I didn't appreciate what I had, because I didn't know it's value. Then I joined Factional Warfare and, while traveling in what I thought was the safety of HiSec, and lost those implants - but gained a bit of knowledge and experience.

I warped to dock to Jita to pick up a new ship after being destroyed by a fellow militia member. My pod came out of warp just outside of dock range, and while I was waiting to dock, boom. "Clone Activated", and there went all of my implants. The loss itself was frustrating, and I was really annoyed. Even more so when I discovered that this particular group of pilots regularly "camps" undocks and Stargates to catch easy targets. (I imagine people in other MMOs who camp spawn points all day, griefing newbies - much like the player I destroyed in an earlier blog. I'll never understand the mindset of these people, but it's a part of the game we have to live with.)

I didn't really understand the "loss" of it until I went to cash out the LP I had earned. An hour of farming Gallente plexes provided me with about 65 million ISK. Subtract the 45 million ISK my implants cost (even though they were free), and that leaves me with 20 million ISK. These implants are gone from the game forever - there is no way to ever get them back, and they must be replaced at a later date. It really put loss and gain in EVE Online into perspective. And it's a frustrating, terrible experience.

Understandably, many players in EVE Online become what is known as "carebears": Players who do everything they can to avoid any risk of losing their ships. They avoid LowSec, stay docked during declarations of war, and prefer to inhabit high security space where they are relatively safe from harm due to the actions of CONCORD; the omnipotent and omniscient NPC police forces. Loss in EVE Online is a very real thing, and for some players it can have strong psychological impacts. When a ship is destroyed, all the work that went into it is gone forever. As an example: One class of ships in particular, known as "Titans", take months of harvesting minerals and weeks of manufacturing components in order to build. They cost over 60 billion ISK at a minimum, just for the hull. To put 60 billion ISK in understandable terms: A PLEX (30 days of game time) sells for 500 million +/- on the market. A PLEX costs 19.95 USD. So a Titan hull is an investment of thousands of manhours and months of effort, representing a value of almost 2400 USD. And when a Titan is destroyed, that's it: It's all gone.

That some players would become terrified of loss is a natural consequence and on some level, forgivable. Some people are "Master Mouses". Many people are not; instead, they allow their environment to act upon them rather than bending the world around them to their will. As a new player, however, I feel that the risk of loss is what makes EVE Online so fun. It adds a new dimension of challenge and forces us to adapt and find new ways of doing things. It teaches us to value what we have and the work that went into it, but at that same time, not to become overly invested in our material possessions. It teaches us to take calculated risks, which is a very real skill with real world application. Loss and gain is what keeps the economy of EVE Online turning; it's what keeps the game healthy, and keeps us striving for more.

EVE Online is nothing short of an adventure, and should be played as thus: everything we do in the game is an enterprise.