"Ripard Teg over at Jester's Trek wrote a post
called Don't Do Anything Stupid and offered it as the basis of a Blog Banter as
he is curious what others feel on the subject.
Is EVE too complex
for one person to know everything? Is it, in fact, too complex for one person
to know everything about one topic? How do you maintain any knowledge or skills
related to EVE over time with breaks and expansions? Does CCP do a sufficient job
documenting the features of the game, and if not, what could they do better?
How does one determine where the gaps in their knowledge even are?"
For this month's Blog Banter there are several questions
posed that all tie into each other and tend to relate to the knowledge about
Eve Online.
While Eve has a complex system and depth on various
topics the fact that one person can know everything can be kind of a
stretch. I'd consider that there are
several Eve players who know most of the things in Eve whether in-depth or
generalized they could give an accurate depiction of any one of the dozens of
subject matter available.
The key aspect with any knowledge which you have is
maintaining what you know. I tend to
play a lot of other games and sometimes I'll return to one I liked a year later
only to find my advancement halted by how complicated things seem. I had already figured the system out and was
advancing quite rapidly only to forget all of that a year later. The lack of use allowed me to forget simple
things, but a key difference is the ability to quickly review and adapt your
current ability of learning into an area which you know something about.
Knowledge is the key to everything, and what one knows
can either aid or destroy him. Just
because we play a game like Eve where video games have a stigma of being a
waste of time and not educational; how easily do we pick up new concepts and
mechanics in every game we play? Having
had to introduce a new game to people who have never had a background in
gaming, it can be quite difficult for them to grasp basic concepts which we
take for granted.
Eve Online is our world, and it is something we have
invested time and effort in. There is no
quick guide to understanding a concept, and most of the mechanics or functions
of modules are not documented very well in game. This requires one to "play the game, out
of game" to really learn how things work in a reasonable manner. While keeping proper documentation on a game
that is constantly evolving can be difficult and take up time, I think CCP
should put a little more effort into keeping key areas regularly updated. Since players spend more time figuring things
out and providing plenty of in-depth documentation on theories or methods on
how to accomplish something, all CCP really needs to do is keep a summary of
these mechanics or methods where a newer person won't have to wade through all
the jargon to find a simple answer.
For a more in-depth look at how things work, the internet
is full of guides and explanations. But
even for advanced "veteran" status players, they still will probably
have to look stuff up, and they have been playing the game for years. We really don't know where our knowledge is
lacking until something happens in which it pertains to us. I never bothered to learn missile mechanics
because it didn't concern me at the time.
Since I've joined Stay Frosty I've had to deal with players using
missiles and I decided to learn how they worked because the situation applied
to me. That is how things go in real
life, rarely do we say "I know nothing of quantum mechanics" and then
go out and look it up when it won't have any application to what we are
currently doing.
Whether in gaming or real life the only true constant is
not how much you know, but your ability to learn which will decide the end
result.
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