EVE Online at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

There is a jagged fissure of insanity which runs through the heart of the EVE playerbase, a kind of feverish bad crazy that you simply don't find in other online games. Oh, sure, everyone knows a tale or two about the Starcraft player who stayed awake for 50 hours and died from exhaustion because he wouldn't stop gaming, or the legions of relatively mundane overweight basement-dwelling nerds that populate the other MMOs that have a lack of perspective that comes from playing in virtual worlds too much. Some people like to point to South Korea's Starcraft tournaments as a sign of abnormality, but sporting leagues are a 'healthy' expression of hobby activity by most standards. No, if you want utter madness, you have to look to EVE.

Humans, for all our pretensions, are monkeys, and monkeys are funny creatures. One or two of them might seem normal enough, but in isolation or small groups social animals aren't really their true selves. With their overdeveloped adrenal glands, numerous cognitive biases and a supreme faith in the rightness of that same flawed cognition, when you get them in groupings over a certain number hilarious things occur. What differentiates EVE from the other MMOs - and what creates the level of frothing madness - is the number of monkeys it manages to pack into one barrel.

In World of Warcraft, while there may be an obscene 11.5 million people running about as elves and orcs hitting monsters with swords and spells, those people are broken up into small groups of ten to twenty thousand per server. If you don't like your server, you can leave to another server, start anew, find a different social milieu. The game is also infamously newbie friendly, which is partly why it has gained such mainstream success; almost anyone can pick it up and play. The basic group unit in WoW is a guild between 20 and 100 people; the odd megaguild nonwithstanding, it's a grouping intimate enough that every monkey can get to know every other monkey, and the primary social activity involves groups of between five and 25. Even at this level, though, there's a blurring of perspective in the minds of people; sick days are called in from work to raid, personal hygiene is neglected, obsession with purple loot and intensely personal dramas around said loot occur.

By contrast, EVE takes a much smaller player base - perhaps 450,000 - but jams all these monkeys into one barrel, a barrel from which there is no escape - no 'other server' to flee to and begin anew. The learning curve in EVE might as well be vertical, despite all the efforts to make the game more newbie-friendly over the years; any sort of mistake usually results in you dying horribly and losing substantial assets, which are very limited when first playing the game. Additionally, more than any other MMO, EVE relies heavily on mathematics and spreadsheets in the player-run logistics and production aspects of the game. Given the violence, loss, and (horror of horrors) math, it is only a certain sort of of monkey who not only ascends the nightmarish and Darwinian learning curve, but finds the process entertaining enough to stick around and play for more than a week. So this is EVE, a galaxy filled with socially inept spreadsheet nerds on the one hand and obsessive, ambitious griefers on the other. Resources are limited and must be fought over, and the only way out is to quit entirely.

Unique in EVE, the number of people on one server puts the players far beyond the threshold of intimate friendship; your average social unit, the corporation, involves hundreds of people, while alliances made up of these corporations include thousands of people. Thus, instead of micro-level 'guild drama' over who gets what epic item, EVE suffers from 'alliance politics' which in many ways have come to mirror real world politics; the threshold of 'enough monkeys in one place' is crossed, and you find yourself contending with alliances based on ethnic and nationalistic identities, many of which carry their cultural quirks and baggage into the realm of internet spaceships. EVE has French alliances, Russian alliances, Polish alliances, German alliances, you name it.