I watched The Pilot's interview with a 7SD slaver from February, and I saw many false comparisons drawn to Eve Online in the interview's discussion and comments by ED players. I'm a longtime veteran of Eve who's been drawn to ED to get their piloting and visuals fix, and I was really bothered by these Eve comparisons. Not only did it represent an ignorance of Eve Online, but it also represented an ignorance of ED itself among its own players.
In two key moments of the interview, The Pilot identifies the definition of slavery is exploitation coupled with a mode of captivity (this is an important recognition), and later says "this happens all the time in Eve". Scamming in Eve was prominently and accurately discussed, but The Pilot went on to characterize player slavery as something that happens all the time in Eve, which I want to talk about. I want to correct such impressions, and in doing so I meaningfully explore the slaver phenomenon as it uniquely relates to ED.
The whole slaver situation in ED could have only happened in ED and cannot exist in the same way in Eve Online, and it is just absolutely untrue to say "this happens all the time in Eve". The exploitation is mechanically possible in Eve: new pilots can be provided with utility ships to grind for ingame currency and then their corporation taxes their earnings significantly in an automated fashion, or there can be a policy in place that the new players deposit their productive output into a corporate storage. However the capacity for holding players captive is not possible in Eve in the way that it is for ED, and this capacity for captivity in ED is a unique outcome of decisions by ED developers to not include certain features and not address certain issues players face, unlike Eve where these matters are actually managed. There are two matters:
1) Navigation, as well as item storage. ED is a more granular game, so fuel is represented realistically - it is a finite material, whereas there is no fuel mechanic for ships in Eve. The FTL mechanic in ED also relies on a ship-board device, whereas Eve makes use of installations that propel you (stargates). So you can run out of fuel and get stuck in ED, but this is not possible in Eve and you can travel forever in Eve until something destroys you (potentially extremely frustrating but not catastrophic). Then, building on this, ED has a mechanic where another player can physically transport you a long distance in a way you can't yourself travel. So to recap, in Eve it is not possible in the game's navigation mechanic to be stuck in a particular region. And in ED where it is possible to be stuck, it is also possible to move somebody into a situation where they are stuck, trapping them. It's also the case that Eve allows you to infinitely store items you personally collect in a station, and you're not forced to sell your ship cargo to empty it. Nothing is forcing an Eve player to put what they produce into a corp hangar and they can always store it for themselves, although they could have trouble getting it to a market (which is just not the same as the strict game mechanic wall setup in ED).
2) Extreme reliance on esoteric knowledge. Jokes were often made about how hard it was to learn to play Eve online, with pictures of stick figures hanging themselves from the slope of the game's steep learning curve. But the reality is I would rate ED as 10 to 100 times worse than Eve in its reliance on esoteric knowledge and how that esoteric knowledge is managed right now. Eve manages the game's complexity in a more intuitive way, where its more straightforward to see what mechanics are going on and see what it is you need to figure out (much more information is presented to you in general, thanks to there being ingame windows whereas ED is restricted to a limited HOTAS-interactable ship and station menus). Moreover, Eve's new player experience is orders of magnitude more robust than ED's extremely limited tutorials. And Eve's development team understands the new player experience is a critical part of maintaining their game for the long-term and have invested significantly in making it robust. Eve also has more independent training organizations: the best equivalent to the fuel rats in ED is eve university, where the focus is on training pilots rather than performing rescues. The new player experience in Eve has been robustly managed to point new players into organizations like these and an overall broad marketplace of player corporations. New players in ED however are left to face a barren hellscape of unknown and frankly often difficult even identify esoteric knowledge, with no straightforward way to join any training group or even any ingame mechanic to support a organized player clan like Eve's corporations that allow players to actively communicate with each other independently of physical location. ED's slavers were able to exploit ED's extreme presence of esoteric knowledge and ED's extremely restricted flow of knowledge to new players to both captivate them and hold them them captive, whereas knowledge just not so esoteric and there is a much more free and accessible flow of information in Eve Online.
As a result, I can only restate that this slaver activity has been a unique product of ED's design and player experience shortcomings, and that this absolutely does not happen "all the time" in Eve because of the design decisions that were made in Eve and a developed flow of knowledge in Eve that is at least an order of magnitude better than the current state of ED.
In two key moments of the interview, The Pilot identifies the definition of slavery is exploitation coupled with a mode of captivity (this is an important recognition), and later says "this happens all the time in Eve". Scamming in Eve was prominently and accurately discussed, but The Pilot went on to characterize player slavery as something that happens all the time in Eve, which I want to talk about. I want to correct such impressions, and in doing so I meaningfully explore the slaver phenomenon as it uniquely relates to ED.
The whole slaver situation in ED could have only happened in ED and cannot exist in the same way in Eve Online, and it is just absolutely untrue to say "this happens all the time in Eve". The exploitation is mechanically possible in Eve: new pilots can be provided with utility ships to grind for ingame currency and then their corporation taxes their earnings significantly in an automated fashion, or there can be a policy in place that the new players deposit their productive output into a corporate storage. However the capacity for holding players captive is not possible in Eve in the way that it is for ED, and this capacity for captivity in ED is a unique outcome of decisions by ED developers to not include certain features and not address certain issues players face, unlike Eve where these matters are actually managed. There are two matters:
1) Navigation, as well as item storage. ED is a more granular game, so fuel is represented realistically - it is a finite material, whereas there is no fuel mechanic for ships in Eve. The FTL mechanic in ED also relies on a ship-board device, whereas Eve makes use of installations that propel you (stargates). So you can run out of fuel and get stuck in ED, but this is not possible in Eve and you can travel forever in Eve until something destroys you (potentially extremely frustrating but not catastrophic). Then, building on this, ED has a mechanic where another player can physically transport you a long distance in a way you can't yourself travel. So to recap, in Eve it is not possible in the game's navigation mechanic to be stuck in a particular region. And in ED where it is possible to be stuck, it is also possible to move somebody into a situation where they are stuck, trapping them. It's also the case that Eve allows you to infinitely store items you personally collect in a station, and you're not forced to sell your ship cargo to empty it. Nothing is forcing an Eve player to put what they produce into a corp hangar and they can always store it for themselves, although they could have trouble getting it to a market (which is just not the same as the strict game mechanic wall setup in ED).
2) Extreme reliance on esoteric knowledge. Jokes were often made about how hard it was to learn to play Eve online, with pictures of stick figures hanging themselves from the slope of the game's steep learning curve. But the reality is I would rate ED as 10 to 100 times worse than Eve in its reliance on esoteric knowledge and how that esoteric knowledge is managed right now. Eve manages the game's complexity in a more intuitive way, where its more straightforward to see what mechanics are going on and see what it is you need to figure out (much more information is presented to you in general, thanks to there being ingame windows whereas ED is restricted to a limited HOTAS-interactable ship and station menus). Moreover, Eve's new player experience is orders of magnitude more robust than ED's extremely limited tutorials. And Eve's development team understands the new player experience is a critical part of maintaining their game for the long-term and have invested significantly in making it robust. Eve also has more independent training organizations: the best equivalent to the fuel rats in ED is eve university, where the focus is on training pilots rather than performing rescues. The new player experience in Eve has been robustly managed to point new players into organizations like these and an overall broad marketplace of player corporations. New players in ED however are left to face a barren hellscape of unknown and frankly often difficult even identify esoteric knowledge, with no straightforward way to join any training group or even any ingame mechanic to support a organized player clan like Eve's corporations that allow players to actively communicate with each other independently of physical location. ED's slavers were able to exploit ED's extreme presence of esoteric knowledge and ED's extremely restricted flow of knowledge to new players to both captivate them and hold them them captive, whereas knowledge just not so esoteric and there is a much more free and accessible flow of information in Eve Online.
As a result, I can only restate that this slaver activity has been a unique product of ED's design and player experience shortcomings, and that this absolutely does not happen "all the time" in Eve because of the design decisions that were made in Eve and a developed flow of knowledge in Eve that is at least an order of magnitude better than the current state of ED.
Last edited:
I did start playing in 2012 though, so it's been a while. I imagine Elite's explanation of death and rebuy is as vague.
