EVE Online moves to Python 3

Back when I was playing with my friends and the game was a little harder (BC & WotLK), there was a sense of shared accomplishment when overcoming difficult regions and raids.

It was amazing in the early days, it felt like nothing else. I had a background in Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot. I liked PVP and I wanted full loot drop on kill.

EVE online has many times been referred to as the spiritual successor of UO, what made it really special however was the one server architecture (until China shard).

My name was Dieter Rams—I ganked, scammed and griefed. I probably made a lot of people quit the game; this was the appeal. I wanted to play a game where I could be the villain (successfully).

This was the original trailer for the game, in my opinion the true vision: https://youtu.be/GwpgXFA3UQk

Over the years it lost its soul as the internet grew, social media became more prevalent and information disseminated more rapidly (watch madseasonshow on youtube for a great coverage on this topic) around the optimal ways to play etc.

All MMOs suffered for this, you could look everything up before doing anything and so the sense of discovery and adventure was lost. The frontier was no longer undiscovered, and once pay to win came into play everything came off the rails.

The developer made this video in 2014:

This is EVE - Uncensored https://youtu.be/AdfFnTt2UT0

This is when I quit for real or as the EVE players say "won EVE".

A better comedic version of the video is this one by Honorable Third Party (typical EVE humor): This is REALLY EvE https://youtu.be/LmS9vcVNr5A

I came back in 2020 for a month but it's like that saying you can't step into the same river twice. I was older but the game had also changed so much. Other players were pressuring me to multibox (play multiple accounts), it felt terrible.

I knew a guy who played 30 characters at the same time, his setup was a technical marvel but it made me sad what gaming had become. There was a similar issue with buffbots in Dark Age of Camelot.

The fact that EVE needs a new player tutorial says everything you need to know about the state of the game (and gaming in general). Everyone needs a lot of handholding these days, in 2004 you were just thrown into the universe with nothing but the chat and other players to help you out.

Figuring things out was part of the game.

There were no YouTube guides, no tutorial and no real money to make things easier. The playing field was equal no matter who you were.

The magic was lost because of money, it's always the money in the end.

Python is a fantastic "glue" programming language. A duct-tape language. It's awesome for little scripts, or for gluing together some AI scripts, where you're basically atomically gluing a series of calls to giant native C/C++ libraries like pytorch that are then doing a series of calls to giant native C/C++ libraries like CUDA. Where the overhead of python is negligible compared to some heavy lifting being done by a better language/system.

The simple fact that we're talking about a service that was stuck on Python 2 two decades after it was replaced, half a decade after it was fully deprecated, reveals this to be 100% just debt. The fact that they talk about millions of lines of Python code, and that Python 3 represents a big speedup for their operations, again betrays it to be nothing but debt. They have Python code in the critical flow, not just as a light glue over intensive code, and they have almost certainly spent untold dollars on extra hardware, delivering a worse experience for their users, because they had a "python enthusiast" in a critical position decades ago.