Attention EVE Online Veterans… Mobile Gamers Might Be More Dedicated Than You Realize.

After our mobile gaming community was left in outrage over the flood of micro-transactions and loot boxes that destroyed a once treasured game to thousands of dedicated gamers… we were left feeling defeated. But as the old saying goes, when one door closes another opens. We had turned to another well-known gaming community. When CCP Games released the MMO RTS called “EVE Online” which literally translates to, “a night on the internet”, for PC gamers in 2003 – they created arguably one of the strongest and most dedicated gaming communities in the world.

Renowned for its scale and complexity, EVE Online is home to a variety of industrial and tech-savvy players. Not only was it recognized for hosting one of the largest and most expensive battles in gaming history, it was also featured at the Museum of Modern Art.

After demonstrating such long-term player retention and a solid track record of placing players before profit – it’s no surprise that our community was foaming at the mouths when we heard CCP Games and Netease were launching their first round of alpha tests for EVE Echoes (the mobile version of EVE Online). In the great effort to search for a new and well-crafted sandbox game where players can literally be anything they want to be, we not only flooded their site with requests for alphas, we started to study who this renowned community is. But after embarking on a mission to discover who the EVE Vets were and what their thoughts were on the anticipated release of the mobile version of their beloved game, I was shocked to hear such resistance and skepticism.

Whispers of undeniable doubt regarding the ability to bring the same complexity of EvE Online to EvE Echoes were among the top of the worries.

And we aren’t just limiting doubt to the game play itself, but to the entire mobile gaming community who was described as: fickle, less dedicated and blamed on one more than one occasion for the “pay to win mentality” that is destroying the authentic gaming experience.

If you google ”mobile gamer”, you’re likely to be flooded with a slew of comical stereotypes. And while some stereotypes do have a ring of truth, as an avid mobile gamer… I’m here to tell you that we aren’t all just crushing candies and throwing angry birds around to pass the time. As someone who downloaded a plethora of applications (such as discord, wechat, whatsapp, ect.) while learning how to type in the Cyrillic script on an emulator called Bluestacks (although now I use Nox for all my shameless multiboxing)… some would say I was pretty dedicated. But my intentions weren’t always to build a great empire of vast nationalities in a little virtual kingdom.

When I first downloaded Nova, I did so for a few reasons.

One, to settle my undying curiosity as to what the hell my life partner and best friend (NomX3) was spending so much time with (phone always sideways and on multiple platforms like discord). And two, I wanted to wage a war against him like a good game of chess, and prove that I too, had creative strategic tactics. So, I made my way through a lengthy tutorial, found server 167, joined a random team and built my station in pure secrecy. One fateful day the dreaded NomX3 and his team (MichaelJackYourSon… *rolls eyes*) faced the wrath of 3 alliances. In other words, his love of PVP caught up to him. In efforts to take advantage of the situation I revealed who I was and what my true purpose of joining the game was…

And like a ringing *Kill Me Beacon* I received the holy hell fire of hatred from the angry mob. Not only was NomX3 wanted as a high target of interest – upon revealing my true identity – I was wanted as choice number 2 from the outraged players who would settle for killing the girlfriend (should their mission to exact revenge against his station fail). I was banished from my current team and blacklisted from joining new ones (shield-less…*inhales deeply and shakes head* …the monsters).

Barred from all teams and zeroed (all ships and inventory destroyed) everyday for about 1 month left me with little options.

Banished into the wilderness of space, I saw one last empty and unassigned star, Iram, a sign of promise that I could survive this little hiccup and get back to my mission…

DESTROY NomX3 for eternal future bragging rights. I made a JJR Tolkien’s Finest LORD OF THE RINGS alliance and began heavily recruiting players. My first recruit was Gabrielsf31 who jumped to the vacant star with me and begun the build of our very own headquarters. Together we slowly built a small team in one small star next to very large and intimidating Russian alliance next door. Many alliances in the game organically gravitated towards teams that spoke the same language, but this was something I always found limiting. In efforts to gain more recruits and make an ally, I began to practice typing in Cyrillic script. Nova Empire was notorious for poor game translations and constant bugs that made translations unavailable altogether. By this time, I had installed an emulator called Bluestacks on my laptop.

I became a little less concerned about NomX3 and his teams destruction (they were completely obliterated) and begun focusing more on how I could align myself with one of the largest and least liked teams in the server. The teams in the server had begun to split into two major factions. Russians vs the UFA (United Federation Alliance – a collective of the rest of the teams, mainly French, German and English). Only 2 small teams in the server remained: TRX (Alpha Matrix) who neighbored the opposite side of JRR (our new and barely developed team). The leader of TRX, Kamakazikeza, reached out to me and we made an agreement to allow safe passage to scan and mine in one another’s territory.

I became SO invested in my team by this point that “destroying NomX3” had removed itself from the list of my in-game priorities. And, of course with his track record of politically unacceptable PVP, he wasn’t allowed to join my team… so he had fled into distant space, changed his name and went into hiding. I had recruited a few solid officers and I spent the extra effort to use and type out translations for team members who spoke different languages which created a unique team dynamic. I must admit – it was a unique source of entertainment that could move with me everywhere I went. I’ll never forget the day when I was out IRL (in real life) with NomX3 driving to the store for some groceries. I had logged on to review our team inventory but saw a massacre! A player named SpartanT had abandoned our team and was slaughtering the smaller players of JRR and looting all their resources.

That’s the first time I experienced…THE SHAKES. My breath was quick, and my hands were trembling. I was the leader of this team and most of my men were from different time zones. I couldn’t just sit idly by while some traitor just shot up their stations and they lost everything they worked for! So, I frantically told NomX3 to join my effing team and help me annihilate this ‘SpartanT’. Sitting in a parked car at a grocery parking lot – NomX3 helped guide me through the battle. I allowed him on my team with the condition that it would be temporary. Together, we scouted neighboring territories but saw no sign of reinforcements. With the element of surprise as our ally, we completely shocked him. We dropped heavy DPS on his station that wiped out every ship he had.

The shakes were a unique adrenaline rush that appeared… spur of the moment…when faced with the challenge of losing it all.

As soon as the battle was over and JRR was deemed safe, I booted NomX3 and he carried on…to hiding… A month or so passed and SpartanT was later discovered to be a UEP spy once he had joined UEP and began a campaign of hatred against our team. They seemed taken aback by JRR’s ability to withstand the first attack. Tensions were high as the UFA began to target my alliance since their hunt for NomX3 proved worthless. Kamakazikeza attempted a power grab by throwing our team under the bus. TRX betrayed our alliance and allowed UEP members to warp through space and line up on our gates.  UEP (which was an alliance 3 times our size) began killing everyone in the team.

The UFA was going to need a lot more to take me down. Through careful planning and placement of a spy, I had a source of intel in UEP that gave me evidence that the UFA had planned to exterminate the Russians from the server out of fear. I requested assistance from CVR, who went on to becoming one of our largest and most trusted Russian allies.

A few of the messages that were sent to CVR as evidence of the UFA plotting an attack.

The ARC was from an event called: Kraken where players had an opportunity to win a unique and powerful ship design.

I expressed interest in converting JRR into an additional branch of CVR known as CV4 which went on to become the servers first international team. That’s when I met Bablo$ (a Russian family man who had lead battalions in the Russian military and studied economics) who made me work for almost 5 months before he promoted me as the official leader of CV4 due to my unfavorable political status. Malsi, who was the direct leader of CVR, became like a brother to me. We often joked about how Bablo$ (who was the highest developed character in the server at the time) was our server dad and he was my battle brother.

The UFA wasn’t too pleased to discover that I had established a relationship with one of the server’s largest allies. Not only did we rebuild with an unstoppable momentum, I spoke to original JRR members who happily converted to CV4 under my leadership.

They felt that the betrayal of TRX and the massacre from UEP could NOT go unpunished. So…I hired a “guy”.

I allowed NomX3 (who later became known in the game as one of the most elite PVPer’s) on my team and commenced a series of attacks against TRX members that lasted a few months. Utilizing media as one of my main recruitment methods; I made videos, memes, infographs and powerpoints. I joined all the discords and all the social media groups. I found difficulties in recruiting and retaining members, but our team came up with a few different strategies to combat that hardship. We even made “how to” videos and posted them on youtube in attempts to help train and retain our players.

I made playlists for the stories I wrote and for team members to listen to while they played.

I frequently posted our videos in the Facebook community. Click the image to see the Great War of 167 video.

This was a “How To PVP” we made. We ended up recruiting Overlord

Here was the first recruitment video from the Kraken

CV4 went on to challenge and win the many battles until the game had its first server merge (a collection of servers smashed together in one cramped map with less resources). 

The story continues…endlessly. Our team grew and had incredible experiences which inspired me to write a fan fiction series about players in our game. I eventually went on to join other servers and chose 2 protégés (one leader and one warlord) named Yesman and Conqueror, whom I bestowed all my game knowledge upon.

The passion doesn’t stop with myself or my team (or even Nova Empire for that matter). There are many mobile games that hard core gamers invest quite a bit of time into. I shared my story with Jin’taan and Caleb Ayrania, two experienced EvE Veterans who have been faithfully playing EvE Online for over 10 years. After sharing our mobile communities’ frustrations and excitement - the two seem surprised. When I asked Jin'taan what his perception of what mobile gamers were, he responded:

"Well, I wasn't really aware there were games with this depth of politics…You know, I play mobile games too, but I just use them to pass the time on a bus/train/etc, I don't sit down and dive into them."

When Caleb Ayrania told me his story about how he built and lost numerous corps due to betrayal, I felt real sympathy for him. One of the times being when his closest friend ran away with entire corp of blueprints… it reminded myself of one of the times that I experienced a “friendly” betrayal. The two players mentioned to me that I really “sounded like an EvE player”. Caleb even expressed a hope that perhaps EvE Echoes could be used as "training wheels of sorts" or a channel for a new audience of gamers who are interested in learning more about EvE Online.

While the mobile gaming community is home to over 2.4 billion people, it’s clear that there is a distinct difference between “players” who are more casual and “gamers” who are more hardcore. And it will be interesting to see if the PC and Mobile gaming communities clash or work with one another.

"CCP can unlock a whole new lifeline of players - If they're brave enough to dare to." - Jin'taan

After experiencing the incredible alpha test, our mobile gaming community is excited more than ever for the next beta release scheduled to launch in 2019. It would be incredible to meet more progressive EvE vets who see us an untapped audience. We ARE in it for the long haul. The pay to win mentality is frustrating (the hell out of) us too. And some of us just can’t afford slick PC builds that will run a game like EvE online…

So don’t judge us by the size of our screens…but the size of our hearts! We’re excited. We’re curious and we’re ready to prove ourselves.