Shadow of Cerberus EVE Community Forum

Shakes

So, there's a new blog banter up and like all good ones, it has both a surface answer and a much deeper answer. Here's the subject:

EVE Online can be a game of heart-pounding, palm-sweating, adrenaline-fueled ecstasy or agony. Sometimes over the years those reactions dim and what was once a panic inducing situation becomes commonplace routine. For some, the shakes never go away.

From Druur Monakh (Twitter: @DruurMonakh) we get the topic of this banter: what was your most nail-biting experience in EVE Online so far? It could be PvP in a 1v1 or 1000v1000, your first fight or your latest one, a scam so close to being uncovered too soon, a trap almost sprung on an unsuspecting victim or the roles reversed and you desperately try to escape.

From the first time I taught basic PvP classes, I always taught people that PvP was one of the main reasons to play EVE Online. And I then taught that the main reason to do PvP in this game are the consequences. That's what makes PvP in EVE worth doing for me: the fact that no matter how things go, there are going to be significant lasting consequences to the fight. That's what causes the "shakes." So yeah, my most nail-biting experiences in EVE are going to be about the PvP.

But like any other drug, there are various levels to it.

Gene Ryack: Why don't you go home huh? Look at me, look at Neely, we're all a bunch of trouble junkies, we've been main-lining danger and adrenaline for so long, nothing else gets us off. It's kinda sick.

[pause]

Gene Ryack: Before you pick up the habit -- and you will pick up the habit -- go back to L.A. and be the weirdest guy in the room again. Whadaya think?

Air America. Another of my favorite bad movies. ;-)

DruurMonakh is dead right about one thing: your hardest shakes can come from a 1v1 or a fight with several hundred, or several thousand. And for every EVE player, the level of the shakes is different. For myself, I got a good case of the shakes the first time I went into a 1v1 between two frigates. Then I got the same level of shakes the first time I was in a 20v20 skirmish. But as the fights I was in got larger and the number of players increased, I found that the largest fights in EVE just left me cold. I've been in a fight with a couple of thousand in local, more than once. And I've found that for myself, the less my own player skill can make a difference in the fight, the less involved I am in the fight and the less I care about the outcome.

Put another way, this loss caused a bigger case of the shakes than this one. I was hardly invested in that second fight at all. The first one is one of my most memorable experiences in EVE.

But of course other players feel very differently about the matter and they want to be on the winning side of big epic fights with hundreds of players per side. That's what gets their juices flowing and I'm more than happy for them about it. That's one of the most important things for me about EVE Online is that there is room enough in this game for people who get the shakes from a big sov battle involving hundreds of players and for people who get the shakes from a 20v20 skirmish and people who get the shakes from a well-flown 1v1. Hopefully, CCP will never forget that.

Though from time to time I worry they already have.

Good question, Druur!
Source: Shakes