How Many Licks?

As we all know, it takes exactly three licks to get to the center of a tootsie pop. Well more or less. But it’s easy.

So how about the juicy center of a space station? Well, as of last friday, I no longer need to worry about that one. It takes five hours with a fleet of roughly 50 battleships plus twice that in support. And let’s see, I undocked my maelstrom with 3500 shells and restocked on the first run with a thousand, then restocked the second run with 3500. And I hit the barn with about as many as I left with. So 4500 shells fired. Fifty ships. So 225,000 licks. I may be a dyke, but that’s pushing it even for me.

It was tedious. Of course part of the tedium is that we really weren’t planning on killing the entire station, we were there to draw a fleet out and get some good fights. But our opponents decided not to show up after several attempts to get a decent sized fleet going failed. They did a few bombing runs though. (Hint for the future, best to fly towards not away from your enemy when you launch a bomb. Really. It works better that way.)

But yeah, it was tedious and and that was just to temporarily disable the systems. It could be repaired. Fairly easily. If we wanted to take the station, we’d have to take the system and come back and more or less do it again. God only knows. Maybe more times. Tedious, but really don’t you want something to be really long and difficult when it’s something as vital as destroying a system’s infrastructure? And really, don’t you likewise want creating something that powerful and useful to take a long time with a lot of work in order to make it special? If only it was that tedious to forget to pay your SOV bill in Delve?

Most games today don’t have any tedium. Everyone’s got an E-Ticket. There’s no wait to get on the ride, the park is open just for you and you go straight to the head of the line. In WoW, you don’t even need a party, it randomly matches you with a crew of silent mouthbreathers. It really is hard to defend some of the idiocy done in, for example, EQ1 in the name of “the vision,” but I think at this point we have gone way too far to the other side. Part of what makes Eve work is that you can make long term plans. It’s not just building or taking control of a station or a POS, it’s also about bringing raw materials there and actually building something or whatever it is that you’re doing. You aren’t going to do that if it can all be blown up in 20 minutes at the attackers convenience. It just becomes a ping pong thing.

It may take two visits and 4 or 5 hours each time even unopposed. But if you take someone’s station, their entire solar system. You’ve done something.

Just my opinion, but I think Eve deals well with the tedious aspects. They are limited to high stakes things like sieges in nulsec. Those are things you want to count. That you want to slow down for the good of everyone. In your other copious time, Eve provides a large variety of things you can do if you only have an hour or two. Do a mission, kill some rats, move some stuff around, or do a quick roam.

If you’re taking some time. If it doesn’t feel big to you, it probably feels big to whomever you’re taking it away from.