Remember school? Sitting in Maths lessons, trying to force your brain to do all manner of complex and unnatural things with protractors, cosines and triangles. I don't know about you folks, but I distinctly remember thinking to myself, at the time, that this trigonometrical voodoo was all very interesting and all, but that I couldn't see any point in my life where I'd ever find a practical day-to-day application for it, beyond end-of-school exams.
Well, it turns out I was wrong, and the practical application, oddly enough, turned out to be Massively Multiplay Online Gaming. Who knew?
Anyone one who has ever played Elite or Privateer will be no stranger to the concept of Spreadsheets as an aid to Playing Games. Indeed, the underated 1996 space colonisation, empire management game Stars! was was actually written by two of the chaps responsible for MS Excel in the first place; Jeff Johnson and Jeff McBride, and is probably one of the few games you can get away with playing actually at work during company time, as the UI is so austere and serious that the casual observer would be hard put to tell it apart form any other late Nineties 'Office App'. So the idea that a progam essentially designed as an aid to basic accountancy can also aid in the running of a far-flung interstellar haulage empire isn't so far-fetched. Before Excel, we just used inumerable scraps of tatty paper with cryptic numbers smuged on in pencil. "Lux Gds +3 -456 b495 s932", it would say, and a month after writing it, I'd have no idea why.
Pages and pages of tables in meaningless shorthand. Now I have Excel, which not only stores lists, but also does the working out for me too. Progress is great!
So yes, playing EVE Online doesn't really require all that, but it does help for some of the finer aspects of the mercantile playstyle. Hardly surprising. What I was surprised by, was that I've just spent the last day or so using Excel to help me understand combat!
When EVE started, life was a lot simpler; you got a space ship, put big guns on it, and could then pretty much obilterate any spaceship much smaller than you. Then they added all sorts of complex maths involving Transversal Velocities, Turret Tracking Speeds, Signature Radii and so on, the upshot of which was that basically, you need small guns to hit small ships, and big guns will just miss lots. A fairly easily understood truth, quickly assimilated into the daily life of the typical EVE Min-Maxer. What isn't so easily understood, is why, which is what I've spent the last day figuring out. I shaln't bore you with longhand mathematical working-out, but here is the formula if you want to play along at home:
Maxmium Hitable Transversal Velocity = Target Range * ( Turret Tracking Speed / ( Turret Signature Resolution / Target Signature Radius ) )
Juggling this about in Excel, and feeding it numbers from various game equipment and ships shows, with some precision, the above commonly accepted truth. In terms of real-world physics, I suspect things aren't quite this simple, but what I can see is that using the above formula, CCP can create a fairly involved system which lets small 'X-Wing' types of ships survive against huge 'Star Destroyer' type ships, if they fly fast, and get close, instead of just being summarily swatted out of existence, and that the calculations required for this system aren't server crippling. Unusally in a MMO, this also means that actual player position and speed has a very strong bearing on the combat, as opposed to something like Everquest, where it's mostly just dicerolls.
In otherwords, piloting in EVE is a skill that can be learned and mastered. There are still dicerolls going on, of course, but being able to fly actually counts for more than I'd previously suspected. All in all, rather more elegant than i gave them credit for.
In other EVE News:
MMORPG.com: Q&A with EVE Producer, Nathan Richardsson
Interesting, if disjointed tit-bits. I just hope he's not really naive enough to image that in the future, all PvE content in the game can seriously be provided by players. We can't be trusted and only want to kill people and/or steal their stuff. Still, all in all, despite his notion that "in the end, the ultimate goal is group PvP," I'm somewhat reassured, as he seems to have a balanced and pragmatic view of the game's future, which seems to involve considerable non-PvP content.
(Incidentally, player provided content already exists in the form of a bounty system, which often requires you to break the law yourself to persue, and pays considerably less than the target is actually worth in terms of manpower and resources needed to kill, and a courier system, where if the job isn't actually a scam, or trap, pays much worse than any of the NPC driven alternatives. I wonder if the game could survive having all it's NPC market props being removed. Possibly, but I doubt it...not without a game-breaking era of hardship and poverty.)