I started playing eve in early December 2012, and am keeping a journal of my daily activities.
Come in and make yourself some popcorn while you read about my silly newbie mistakes and palpitating adventures!

Friday 21 December 2012

Is there a failstate?

Since this is the 21st of December 2012, and by some accounts yet another end of the world date, I figured what would be a more appropriate time to speak about the dreaded failstate.

Dating back to text-based adventures of yore, videogames have had failstates, when the player has screwed up so badly that he can't recover from his mistakes and has to restart the game or load a save file.
Now of course in a multiplayer game, this is exceedingly rare. I'm sure there's a masochistic example somewhere out there but I can't think of one from the top of my head.
But in the freeform universe of Eve, is such a thing possible?

I was gushing over EVE to my non-capsuleer old pal RandyGandy, he asked me what happens when your ship gets blown up. I tried explaining to him that it's no big deal, no sensible player flies in a ship he can't afford to replace, you get an insurance payout to at least buy a cheaper ship, and if you get podded, you have a clone nearby. Even if you're stupid enough to not have any money in reserve, you get a rookie ship outfitted with a civilian mining laser and a civilian weapon...but it got me thinking...is there a way to lose so badly in EVE that you can't recover from it? is there a failstate?

I immediately made an alt-character, named her Testing Failstate, put as little effort as possible into her human appearance, disregarded the tutorial, and was on my way: jumping to nullsec as fast as I could, with one goal: get podded ASAP.
As a new character in the game, I didn't even have a rookie ship available to me, so this could only go horribly wrong, right?...or horribly right, depending on how you look at it.



After a few minutes of waiting  in my uncloaked pod at a warp-scrambled gate in nullsec, people weren't taking my bait, they weren't coming near me to brutally murder me, even after asking for it explicitly! They probably wisely figured that I was lying in ambush with a huge fleet, or something.
then I remember, oh right, I have a self-destruct on this thing!
(I did learn something very valuable for the future, though, warp disruptor fields don't stop you from jumping through gates)
80 seconds into my self-destruct, someone shot and killed me, bless his dark soul. My limp corpse was scattered around a nullsec gate, but who cares.



As expected, I get a new clone and a rookie ship...which I immediately undock and self-destruct... then self-destruct my pod. (Dammit, these are valuable minutes I could be spending training my main character's skills!). Again, a new clone and a rookie ship.
Bah! Even after scrapping the ship and donating all my money away to a stranger (5k ISK, whee, somebody's buying an ice-cream cone), still having a civilian mining laser and a civilian weapon makes it more than possible to rebound, making a bit of money mining while shooting rats, or even doing agent missions.



Well duh, you say, of course you always get a new clone and a new ship, and I was 99% sure too, but now I'm 100% sure. Even if you destroy all your possessions  and get murdered/commit suicide, a capsuleer is an immortal demigod, and insurance companies are run by idiots who give away free stuff to incompetent fools.

But maybe there's yet another way. Maybe one could act so damn annoying that he'd be ostracised by the entire player community, by harassing every single player until they all blocked him, and he'd be for all intents and purposes alone in all chat channels, forever. First of course he'd have to amass a fair sum of money to pay the default 2950 ISK anti-spam fee for every player he contacts, and the huge amount of time it'd take. That's not even counting all the new players that don't know how to block people...and the ever-growing playerbase.
Or one could simply get himself banned from the game altogether.
But, dear reader, please forgive me for not putting the time and effort into trying to prove those mathematical improbabilities.


2 comments:

  1. you know ur main char trains even if ur on an alt? :P And that you cant train 2 chars at the same time on the same account? :P

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    Replies
    1. Ah yes, good point, I'd forgotten about that. I just figured the character being played would be the one training.

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