EVE Blog Banter #5 - EVE is One Big Metagame

Welcome to the fifth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month’s topic comes to us from Mynxee of Life in Low Sec. She asks “Alts and Metagaming: Is playing two accounts who are logged in at the same time and work together (hauler/miner, explorer/combat associate, trade alts in trade hubs) a form of metagaming that is “ruining the game”?“

EVE is a complex game, with depths that are missing from other MMOs. The gameplay of EVE, because it involves real people and their interactions, necessarily extends outside the actual game universe. The Metagame is as important to the universe of New Eden as the actual in-game pew-pew and care-bearing, in fact alot of the in-game richness would not be there without it. This is not the question however. The question is: “Does having an alt account which you play alongside your main account count as metagaming?” I would contend that it doesn’t.

The way things work in EVE is that you can have up to three characters on a single account, but only one of them can be training at any one time, and you can only have one of those characters in game at any one time. Running two (or more) accounts at the same time and using the characters from them to compliment each other is a mechanic of the game, it also has the added benefit for CCP that its another subscription putting money in the bank.

So by the definition of metagaming from the font of all knowledge that is Wikipedia:

Metagaming is a broad term usually used to define any strategy, action or method used in a game which transcends a prescribed ruleset, uses external factors to affect the game, or goes beyond the supposed limits or environment set by the game.

Using a second account cannot be considered to be metagaming as it is allowed by the mechanics of the game itself. This is not to say that metagaming does not happen in EVE, it does and as stated above it is in some ways essential to the vibrant economic and political life of the game.

There are complaints that allowing the use of two accounts simultaneously is unfair on those players who can only afford one account. I would say that it balances out. A player using one account has only one game to worry about, a player running two may gain some benefits but they are balanced by the extra work required to play both those accounts at the same time. For many who run trading and manufacturing alts the use of two accounts is merely a time saver, and for those running two combat accounts simultaneously I say good luck to them. Controlling one pilot in a combat situation in EVE is hard enough, I would hazard the guess that running two is an order of magnitude harder.

I have to confess that I am guilty of having been a dual account player (though no longer, financial considerations put paid to that) and when I attempted to actually actively play both accounts even on a mining op, the level of multi tasking required was beyond me and I got terribly confused as to what each character was meant to be doing.

Metagaming has always been a contentious issue in EVE and it covers a broad spectrum of activities. From checking mission reports on EVE-Survival and market activity on EVE Central to infiltrating or hacking a competitor corp or alliance’s external forums or spreading propaganda on the web outside the game. Even using EVEMon could be considered metagaming.

From a certain point of view EVE could be said to be one giant metagame, the pretty visuals of the actual game engine are secondary to the game itself. It may be based on flying around in space, mining asteroids and shooting at other players but these mechanics are merely window dressing on the real game of EVE.

EVE is based on human interaction, it is based on the relationships and intrigues developed between real people. Not for nothing are players of EVE recommended to read Sun Tzu’s Art of War or Machiavelli’s The Prince. Knowing how to play EVE is about knowing how to co-operate with people, fight against people and, if necessary, manipulate people. Its not just about flying around in spaceships, at its highest levels its about diplomacy, espionage, politics, and the management of empires. There are no rules governing these interactions and no built in mechanic which calculates the results of your diplomatic overtures or how a player will react to having his can flipped. There are mechanics in place to make reacting to these things possible, but none which determine the outcome with the roll of a virtual dice. Everything rests on people, and people are all about metagaming.

Metagaming, though many see it as a blight (and in its more extreme forms I would agree with them, hacking a forum is bad form, infiltrating it on the other hand…), is an essential part of playing EVE, just as it is in the real world. To remove all possibility of metagaming from EVE would be to turn EVE into something smaller than it deserves to be and a mere shadow of the deep and vibrant world it is now.

Participants: