I guess those "The long read" articles are not for me. That one is a very long article with almost no visible structure. It only has paragraphs, but no sections, summary, or anything like that.
It's a medium read at 5,000 words. Took me about 10 minutes to read, and even a slow reader should get through it in about 15-20 minutes.
It's an excellent review of the history, mechanics, people, and themes associated with Eve Online. Worth the 20 minutes of your time if you have interest in online communities, and aren't already well versed in Eve. Might be and interesting read for people who are well versed in Eve anyways.
I actually started reading it, but was rather bored with it quite quickly. It just didn't appeal to me.
I do however, greatly respect the HN community and if this was interesting enough to get to the front page, I found myself curious as to the reason it got a significant number of upvotes.
"Edge of Apocolypse" is VERY hyperbolic and meaningless, but the TLDR; that was eventually posted at the very least satisfied my "curiosity gap" I for one am thankful that the TLDR has been posted.
tl;dr: Someone got betrayed by an ingame friend and lost approximately 10K pounds (real money) worth of virtual assets. Players were pissed the developer didn't do anything, and 500 people left the game over it. The game almost collapsed. Then there was a news article about the incident, and 5000 people joined the game.
And, importantly: That incident was way back in 2005 and set a precedent for how the game would be played in future: espionage, counter-espionage, huge complex teams, and battles and sabotages that cause damage to in-game assets with real-world values estimated in the tens of thousands of dollars.
the metagame in Eve also happens way outside of the null sec areas, figuring out which character is a new incarnation of an old scammer by many hours of internet digging is an entertaining way to spend time while waiting for your wallet to blink, as well as digging deep to find links between people who are setting up loan and bond offerings.
Not as much impact on the game as the null sec meta-gaming, but nonetheless it is oddly satisfying when you have had a "feeling" about someone, and then after working with a few others with chat log cross-checking, internet digging, and generally being very suspicious of everything you end up finding the final pieces which put it all together, and (hopefully) put paid to their loan/bond/trading scams (until their next alt pops up).....at which point the whole thing starts over again.
Posts like this are always downvoted but they are very valid. Many people read at a 5 minute break at work. You can't spend 30 minutes on a full blown article in that time frame. So thanks for posting that so I didn't have to take the downvotes! ;)
Books do have structure. They have sections, although these are named chapters. They have a summary at the back. Also, many books provide an "Introduction" and/or "Abstract" section (frankly, novels don't have that, but there are more interesting books out there than just novels).
> I pity the "tl;dr"/buzzfeed generation
Me too. When deciding what to read, I think it's better to filter the article to read by their summary (if they had one), rather than merely by their short, link-baity titles.
I guess those "The long read" articles are not for me. That one is a very long article with almost no visible structure. It only has paragraphs, but no sections, summary, or anything like that.