So it just occurred to me that the Minmatar, before the Amarrians showed up, where more or less living in the Cowboy Bebop setting, just with different geography (astrography?). They didn’t have on-ship FTL like the Caldari/Gallente, but they did have acceleration gates, which are more or less the same as the Astral Gates in the Bebop universe.
I mean that’s pretty much the only similarity, but it makes you think, right? Like are the Amarr a simile for Battlestar Galactica, since they both had jump drives and practiced religion?
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
The lore of EVE — the empires, CONCORD, Sansha’s Nation, the ancient Jove, and so on — is really just background flavor. It gives a setting and a style to the universe, but it doesn’t determine what actually happens. Players do.
What really matters in EVE — and what the game actually measures — is destruction. Ships lost, assets blown up, killmails generated. Every meaningful event in New Eden comes down to explosions: wars, betrayals, ganks, null-sec politics, high-sec mining ops that go wrong, massive fleet battles costing trillions.
ISK destroyed is the real scoreboard. CCP themselves post “Monthly Economic Reports” that track destruction as a key metric because it drives everything else — production, mining, hauling, even the economy’s balance. Without ships exploding, the market dies, and so does the game.
Lore might inspire ship designs or region names, but it doesn’t win wars or make ISK. The player-driven chaos — the constant churn of destruction and rebuilding — is what gives EVE life.
So yes, in EVE, the lore is a whisper in the background. The real story is written in wrecks and kill reports.
That gets bandied about a lot, but frankly, no @scoutin_on_empty.
A lot happens ‘in-space’ in the game itself and broadly what happens there is to a moderately large degree canon history, but this idea that the lore and other entities don’t determine outcomes in the setting and that’s demonstrably false.
The focus is often on the players but the setting continues to progress, expand, and push on even when players aren’t interacting with a particular thing.
Of course, what’s more interesting to me is when players help establish lore, precedent, and ongoing story WITHOUT the baggage of kill reports and wrecks.
That happens a fair bit, but many don’t recognize or notice it. Still, it’s important to some. There’s a lot that can be done with the game, and setting itself, that are not purely destruction metric based, and thankfully CCP actually does recognize that.
I was just reading the Enheduanni speculation thread yesterday and there was some interesting lore in there about pre-Republic (well, even well before Day of Darkness) Minmatar. Might be worth looking at.
EVE is fun because player interaction makes it fun, but the backstory colours the setting of those interactions, even to those who haven’t read any chronicles or kept up on the IC news. Like any older RPG EVE has a lot of backstory. Not all of it is good, and some of it is in fact quite bad, but there’s enough of it that you can still build a compelling narrative for your character if you want to just by picking and choosing. And unlike more grounded settings, you can actually be the king of a planet if you want to, New Eden has thousands of habitable planets, at least hundreds of them with their own unique civilisations you can choose to flesh out for yourself, and trillions of inhabitants. Picking a random lowsec temperate world for your Amarr character to be the Holder of is very unlikely to step on anyone’s toes. It’s a bit like Warhammer in that regard, the scale of the setting is such that there’s plenty of room to do your own thing.
If you control the POCO, who should dare your rule over the planet? 
Which is cool because it’s an ingame-mechanic that can be used as a narrative element as well.
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Except yesn’t not really, because of how POCOs are framed as working. They aren’t the sole point of orbital interface.
There are significant amounts of orbital and surface to orbit interface infrastructure that exists in setting but the game just doesn’t simulate.
Owning a POCO certainly could help with something like that, but it wouldn’t be a definitive determiner
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