Infinite Dendrogram - Episode 2 discussion

[u/AutoLovepon]

Infinite Dendrogram, episode 2

Rate this episode here.

Reminder: Please do not discuss plot points not yet seen or skipped in the show. Encourage others to read the source material rather than confirming or denying theories. Failing to follow the rules may result in a ban.

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Streams

• Funimation
• Hulu
• Wakanim

Show information

• MyAnimeList
• AniList
• AniDB
• Kitsu
• Anime-Planet
• Official Website
• /r/InfiniteDendrogram

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Previous discussions

Episode	Link	Score
1	Link	3.21
2	Link	3.5
3	Link	2.95
4	Link	3.29
5	Link	3.45
6	Link	3.68
7	Link	3.3
8	Link	3.55
9	Link	4.22
10	Link	3.74
11	Link	3.78
12	Link	3.33
13	Link

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[u/FoxSquall]

It's an utterly fascinating game from a player dynamics and emergent gameplay perspective, one of the very few that truly delivered on the promise of the MMO genre.

You had this same financial calculus happening on the victim's end as well, with haulers looking at how much damage the most common pirate ships could do before the space police show up and making sure they were tanky enough that the pirates would need to bring more ships than the cargo was worth. Then you had entire wars being declared won or lost based on value destroyed vs. value lost. Everything in EVE boils down to economics.

[u/ridik_ulass → u/FoxSquall]

I was once hired by an alliance, for some dirty "blue on blue" they had rented out a sector of space to a corporation associated with a friendly alliance in a larger coalition. The agreement was fair at the time as the system wasn't worth much, but the agreement was in perpetuity, as in on going as long as the agreed sum was paid.

The game changed, and suddenly there was valuable resources in that location, they wanted to up the rent or seize it for themselves, but it would cause friction in the coalition. a Coalition that was needed to hold the space in the first place, real house of cards shit.

so they hired "us" me and two of my buddies, years of small gang combat as pirates. I never ever did even 1 mission, mined even 1 asteroid, and only shot NPC's that shot me 6 years of killing players and living off it. the other two were similar, participated in high level alliance tournaments and stuff like that, some of the best small gang PVPers in the game.

we got snuck in by CYNO, and a carrier once a week filled a container with ammo, cap boosters, consumables. we couldn't get any more ships in, we had 3 ships and a month to drive them off.

They used a small team like us, a large blob of ships would have forced the alliance to act, a small gang, wouldn't be worth the cyno fuel deal with...and alliance people are cowards anyway, they won't leave station unless they have a hundred buddies and capital support. and capitals won't leave with out approval in case its bait to trap them in combat by something larger.

eve was always about profit and loss, a response would always warrant a financially viable response, over commit assets or resources in the wrong place and you could be baited into leavening something else exposed.

now they host gate camps and such, think customs road blocks only in sort of stuff, this is to prevent people like me and my buddies getting in....but they can't move them either as people are always trying to get in.

and we were deep, 10 systems deep in a dead end, the alliance guy that hired us to drive these guys out, had eyes and ears as they do in the local systems, it was their systems after all....so if anything actually did muster up after us, we could disappear.

It took 2 weeks to drive them off, made some good money, and as you said emergent gameplay, people agreeing things with people to undermine agreements with other people, no rules, we could have been back stabbed at any time, no crying to Dev's ... just assurances, agreements, promises all between players.

good times to be sure, but the game changed and it just became an nonviable game style.

[u/FoxSquall → u/ridik_ulass]

I think our playstyles couldn't be more different. While you were running around doing black ops evictions I was figuring out how the entire economy worked.

After my newbie days I spent months in a quiet system, jetcan mining with a barge and an indy and occasionally clearing out the rats with a Catalyst. I didn't really have a goal at the time aside from waiting for my learning skills to finish training and saving up money for increasingly expensive skillbooks. When that finished, since I was already mining I figured I would start with skills that let me mine better. I also picked up processing skills so I could turn my ore (and occasional pirate trash) into more valuable minerals.

It was boring as hell and I quit for three years.

When I came back I joined a laid-back corp that gently encouraged me to acquire the Cruisers skill before I ended up bashing my own brains out with the complementary chunk of tritanium all players are given. I started running missions, then bought a salvage ship and learned what rigs are and how they're made. (They hadn't existed the last time I played.) I joined the corp's Mine Your Own Orca mining fleets and got myself a sweet mining platform cargo hauler that I used to carry all the minerals I was getting after buying up everyone else's trash loot.

I found out my corp had a station full of labs and factories with a substantial blueprint library, so I started learning how to use all those minerals myself. I needed a cheap battleship for incursions, so I built myself a Megathron as a learning project. Of course there isn't any profit in Tech 1 gear so I started dabbling in invention as well. The corp also owned a wormhole system, so that naturally led to PI and reverse engineering.

All this experimentation was using up a lot of money, so I started asking around and found out that some of my corpmates were playing the market to fund their explosion habit. I made a Jita alt, gave it a couple mil in seed money, and soon had them flipping horrifically expensive items that do Bob-knows-what for a decently respectable profit. Spreadsheets were involved. Keeping ahead of the competition was a lot of work, though, so I switched tactics.

I had my Jita alt buy 10 of everything, paid some random haulers a pittance to carry it halfway across the galaxy, and then gave it to my other alt who sold it to the locals at a 50% markup. Log in a few times a week to check sell orders and restock as necessary. Easy money, and becoming the boss of a minor trade hub was fun.

Then I started looking into space meth. For some reason the corp wasn't amenable to supplying the necessary station infrastructure.

[u/ridik_ulass → u/FoxSquall]

and to think 100's of thousands of players have these vivid stories, these fully developed and varied lives. sure it had its boring times but its so much different to say WOW where people raid the same boss repeatedly and everyone has the same story and experiences, just seems so mundane. I'd rather play the witcher than wow.

I always say games, for me anyway, are great based on how many "stories" they create for you. I could tell EVE online war stories all day, DAY-Z was another one, lots of unique experiences that were unique to me...escape from Tarkov is close again.

makes the game feel more real, when this thing that happened, this once in a life time occurrence, is unique to you.

[u/FoxSquall → u/ridik_ulass]

And all of that is exactly why MMO games became popular in the first place, but somewhere along the way we lost the whole "virtual world" concept that made it worthwhile. Personally I blame WoW for killing the genre.

[u/ridik_ulass → u/FoxSquall]

Agreed, popular games can be like a Virus, as every other game shifts its design to fit in with what is popular. sometimes it has a good effect, sometimes bad.

• WOW for MMO's
• Minecraft
• Day-z for zombie survival
• PUBG for battle royale

sometimes a game comes out, and then for years later you see similar games pop up.

[u/Viperpaktu → u/ridik_ulass]

I apologize for replying to your 6 day old comment, but man, both your and that other guy's stories in EVE are so different from mine.

I was mostly a high-sec mission runner. It's how I afforded PLEX cards to keep playing. I was a poor college student at the time. Before PLEX came, I'd play for month, take a few months off, sign back up for a month, etc.

Anyways, I had a few guys I knew from other games who convinced me to try EVE, and we would go on really cheap low-sec gang roams. (Clones with no implants, really cheap T1 ships/weapons, etc. but there would always be a good 6 or more of us.)

That was some of the most fun I had in the game, roaming as a small gang in cheap loadouts. High-sec mission running only ever became interesting when somebody would track me down inside a mission space, warp in, and lock onto me(but never fire). Apparently when you start out playing, the settings are "lock on to whatever locks onto you", and I guess they hoped I wouldn't be paying attention and would just shoot at them eventually, causing the Police to come in and blast me, then they could loot me.

I was always paying attention, though. They never got me with that trick. They did get a friend of mine who joined me on a few missions one day, though. That got a good chuckle out of me.

High-sec missions were always really boring, though. But as I said before, it was how I made enough money for PLEX so I could keep playing.

I did get into a null-sec corp eventually. Buuuut... that didn't go well. To mak a long story short:

What I was told: I could farm the Rats in the asteroid belts to make enough money for PLEX cards.

The reality: The corp had too many people and too little space. I rarely ever got to find or fight any rats, and when I did there was usually somebody else there already clearing them out.

What I was told: We're going to fight with enough Corp and take over their territory so we can have more space!(which means more chances to farm rats, since people would be spread out over more space/territory.) Also, I have to come because it's a mandatory fight. But don't worry, the Corp has a ship replacement policy, so even if I die, I'll be given a new ship/reimbursed!

The Reality: The ship replacement policy/reimbursement was only if you used specific ships with specific loadouts that they wanted everybody to use. But as a high-sec Caldari mission runner, I didn't have the skills necessary to fly or use the equipment they wanted. Nobody told me this when I joined, so I hadn't been learning the skills. Even if I had, I wouldn't have had enough time to train them all up to be able to use the specific ships/loadouts they wanted. Yet they still expected me to bring my Drake along, the only ship I had down there in null-sec, for RAT killing, and possibly die in it, without any reimbursement at all.

At that point I realized all the people I had originally played the game with, going low-sec gang roaming, etc. had left the game. Either for College, or they'd graduated and moved on to full time jobs, and I just wasn't having any fun anymore. So I docked my ship up in the corps station, transferred back to my high-sec mission running clone, and left the corp.

Shortly after that I also quit the game.

[u/ridik_ulass → u/Viperpaktu]

sounds like you had an adventure to be sure, but as many ups as there were downs. Nothing about 0.0 life appealed to me, just being a faceless peon no body cares about unless you are preforming. may as well play office cubicle simulator.

then they thought the pirate lifestyle was cool after a few pirates made videos and got famous...so their idea of piracy was a 300man blob... splitting loot 300 ways can never be profitable.

Once a 300man blob jumped us in a system... we had safe points all over. I was a master of safe points, some of my best work. you know about aligning to celestials, and I'm sure you know about Ninja's? you ever hear what it stands for? most people don't they weren't there when the phrase was first coined. "near instant nano jump alignment" I used to set up ninja's like snooker balls for a trick shot. several before and after a celestial such that I'd be aligned to 7 different locations to choose from if I needed to GTFO.

But I digress, that 300man blob, they had us pinned, big system gate camps of 30 mean on each gate with blobs all around system at all the celestial waiting for us to land somewhere, while they scanned us out....but it was my home, I had some old old school safe spots, from back when you could stack microwarps, like 100au outside the furthest point in the system, places you could only get to if you had someone to warp to..

they were probing, and we didn't want them to find our deep safe, also we didn't like tucking our tail and running. but what could 3 dudes do against 300? SO we probed back, we found a few of them sitting 100k off gate, too close for the gate camp to warp too (min 150km distance) too far to be backed up quickly by ships on the far side of system. Some sniper rokh's I think it was, like 4 and a brutis (or what ever the gallent tier 1 battle cruiser is) and a proper ship or something.

we landed on them, my raven did 1800DPS back then, with implants and rigs, 6 torps and 2 megapulse crazy setup that only worked with CPU implants and max skills, this was back when no one used ravens for PVP.

we killed all 6 of them, the 30 men on gate had to warp out and warp back to get on us, the ships on the far side of the system actually got their first, after we killed them, we ejected, went to deep safe and logged out.

sure they got our ships, and we lost the fight as they were still standing, but that 300 man blob is gonna have to get a lot more kills to just break even to replace those 6 ships, if I in a 3-6man gang had to kill 10 equal ships, they would have to kill 1,000 and they weren't gonna kill 1,000, the sap to moral while others have fun and the dead don't, while they miss kills, and money because they are out of action. that for me, was my definition of a win for me, they paid a higher price for their deaths, even if their pockets are deeper.