DigitalCommunist
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Posted - 2005.11.06 13:32:00 -
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I think "serious" addiction cases in EVE are lower than other games, but thats just from my personal perspective. I've played other "grinding" games, and in those your progress is directly correlated to how much you play. People playing more is rewarded.
In EVE you can log in for a few hours a week, and if you know what you're doing, remain on top of both skill training and money-making. The only ones who get suckered into cycles of grinding (a la mining, npcing, missioning) are those who can't follow an unstructured gaming existance.
Things like agents are part of the reason EVE has grown so much, normally the kind of people who play like that wouldn't bother with EVE because they'd get bored waiting for the fun to be handed to them.
I can honestly say that the content in EVE is not something that would make me wanna stay up for hours on end. If theres one thing people do get attached to, its the social interaction. And is that really as bad as other games, where you're replacing real life friends and family for pixels, mobs, and items?
For example, I've known some people in this game for four years now, thats as much or more than some of my real life friends. I don't even feel pressured to log in just to interact with them, theres always forums, teamspeak, irc. To me its just another community I belong to, alongside my university one, my personal social network, and my religious and national ones. I can even have an intelligent conversation, and theres enough trust that I could hand them 50billion in assets on a whim.
Player content and relationships are the only saving grace of an online game. When that gets soured by the pressure of level caps, xp bars and ultra-rare pets, you kind of get into situations where people are forcing themselves through grinding just to "keep up" with their friends. I mean, have you ever signed up to world of warcraft with a friend, even rolled a char on the same shard at the same time, then logged in to find them ten levels above you? You don't care about your speed of progress but you're compelled to step up just to have fun with a friend. Eventually its one giant race.
You talk to any random WoW and EVE player, both will say they're having fun. But the guy from WoW will comment on how he's looking forward to completing some new instance, or doing a raid. The EVE guy will talk about how hes going to kick X_alliance's ass, because they podded his corp, or similar things.
In the end, if you're going to pin blame on people getting addicted, it has to be specific to a type of system. If a person logs in and does mission after mission, and gets hurt in the process, I would blame CCP, just like I would blame Blizzard for helping addiction in their new expansion's level cap being increased to 70. You reward players who play more and you can expect to be held responsible when people go overboard.
If someone gets addicted to EVE and plays a lot because they're having fun, then the responsibility lies with the player to regulate whether he is substituting productivity time with entertainment.
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