Eve Online fans cheer Microsoft Excel features at annual Fanfest

I played for a while in both large alliances and smaller niche corporations. It's a very flawed game that is completely unique and mesmerizing.

The bad:

- The dreaded "learning wall" is/was very real. Nothing is/was properly explained or introduced. Best tip is to join a new player friendly corporation ASAP to get some proper explaining.

- The combat is janky and a lot of the skill involved is/was learning how to abuse or sidestep technical limitations such as the one second server tick time and the quirky methods of manually controlling your ship.

- A lot of players prey on newbies to scam or troll them out of what little they have. There is a certain edgy attitude to a lot of pirate players that are attracted to the games "full loot" model.

- Most of the "missions" or "dungeons" feel really stale, and it's slow as molasses.

The good:

- Looks completely amazing. As in jawdroppingly beautiful if you like hard sci-fi.

- Everything that matters is run by players. This is the most unique aspect of the game. No other game has a constant ongoing player driven lore like Eve. The market, the social constellations and much of space itself is run by players. There have been huge market plays, alliance mutinies, assassinations, mineral cartels and colossal battles that has raged for days. All is talked about by players, and since everyone is playing on the same server, it's relevant for everyone.

- The setting is pretty good, and the atmosphere is great. The "races" all have very distinct motivations and character.

- It has a "full loot" PVP-model. If you fly something and it's destroyed, it's gone. Including everything you were carrying. Some of it is dropped so that other players can pick it up. This means that PVP combat can be incredibly sweaty, and I have never had actual adrenaline shakes the same way I've had from Eve. It also makes every kill incredibly satisfying. The rush of flying something relatively inexpensive and managing to kill someone flying a pimped out super expensive ship is quite incomparable.

I probably skipped a lot of stuff, but that's some scattered aspects atleast.

In around 2005 I had a pleasure of visiting a central office of a shipment company, and could see their setup for the whole country involved: 1. a hacked ISDN connection "borrowed" from the neighbor one floor below; 2. an entire shipment tracking done from a single Excel file kept on a Windows shared drive and edited simultaneously by different people. My respect for whatever dark magic Excel did back then was instilled deep into me, along with unending wonder about how didn't it all blow up spectacularly yet.

Eve is an example of what the whole "play to earn" thing could actually look like and not be micro-transaction fueled casino-psychology games, imo!

There are people who basically do play full-time, running a corporation or something, and even kinda roleplay a bit, and some of the best leverage that into what resembles a salary by doing Twitch shows or selling merch and such.

So in essence, the players are paying these people to effectively become NPCs in the game to better their enjoyment of it! And it's been going for 20 years now.

Eve Online is the prototype for the metaverse.

Factorio has been talked about a lot on HN for it's parallels to programming. I think it would be an excellent learning tool for people looking to get into programming, and I think this also extends to spreadsheeting too.

As you say, to start out the ratios are simple enough, but to a beginner it'd be a good exercise to plop the Red and Green science ratios into a spreadsheet for practice. Once you upgrade your assembly machines there is a modifier bonus applied across the board, now you need to account for that in your ratios. Not only can you pump out more product from the same footprint, but you potentially need to rebalance your ratios to account for the modifier.

Once you get into speed/efficiency/productivity modules complexity can really ramp up. In addition to getting the ratios correct for the machines, belt speeds need to be factored in, production rates need to be considered...

yeesh... office 365? the casual is coming from inside the stream!

everything past excel '03 was downhill imo