Ask an EVE Player

[Meshakhad_v1legacy]

Complex? COMPLEX?! COMPLEX MY ASS!! how about you try to play X3 REUNION and then come talk to me about difficulty curves! i swear you need a PHD in computer science just to make heads and tails of that game!!!

Played both, and X3 is a pond to Eve's ocean. Depending on what you're doing, X3 will be as complex, if not more so, than Eve. However, the further you get into it, the deeper and more complex Eve will get. Player-created "publicly traded" corportaions returning dividends to shareholders? Yep, can do, and being done in Eve. Headache-inducing production chains? Check out the moon material -> Tech2 item production. Predatory market practices? Ship and module invention? Exploration? Ship loadouts/fitting? All of these are more complex in Eve.

The nice thing about all those complex things is that you really only need to get involved in them as much as you want. Hate mining? Don't. Tired of the missions? Find some trade routes. Need more action? Head to lowsec and join/fight player pirates. Want to conquer territory? Join a corp/alliance and head to the depths of lawless space.

 

[Indref]

EVE wasn't exactly hard for me, it just bored me to tears. I loved the 'levelling' approach, it's extremely well thought out, but with the samey missions and no drive to get into PvP, the game held nothing for me.

Recently I had my three only ships blown to hell, I got podded and realised I never wanted to log again.

Also, mining would be better replaced with paint drying.

 

[Femaref]

Haha, that's what eve is about. YOU make your target. That's the big difference.

And on the problem getting killed: you get a warning if you jump to lowsec.

 

[Meshakhad_v1legacy]

Also, mining would be better replaced with paint drying.

If you stick a mining laser on a transport and find a nice secure area of space to sit, you can make some easy cash while doing other things (studying, working, dealing with gf/wife aggro).

Mining ice, though, ugh. Profitable, but mindnumbing. At least it has the profitable aspect over gatecamping and watching warp disruption bubbles until you crack. I think some of the more colorful Eve personalities spent a little too long on one or both of these activities.

 

[BrainFreeze43]

One of the things to let people know about if your are going to get into the larger wars that take place in EvE is that forum and vent hacking are common place. Your opponent will try to get any advantage they can in order to know what ships your fielding and what tactics your using, just like you should be doing if you want any chance of winning the war your taking part of.

Some of the previous comments about wars being able to go on ad-infinitium are both true and false. Atleast in 0.0 you have alliance owned star bases and structures, these can be captured and/or destroyed by other players. As fighting goes on the members of the opposing alliance will continue losing ships, or be locked into their stations so they cannot leave to make more money to get new ships. As players get frustrated with the situtation they will start leaving the alliance in large groups prompting what has been dubbed cascade failure in EvE.

EvE in my opinion is a good game, where else are there large battles that actually change where you can and cant go as players. Resources are fought over for months on end and you are given more freedom to do what you want in the game then I have seen anywhere else. This can lead to some flaws as players hack each other's forums and vent servers also corp theives are rather common, the largest theft to date translated to around $13k of in game items stolen. All withen the game rules.

 

[renahzor]

EVE was fun for me for a couple months. I started out waning to be a trader and eventually took alot of PvP skills for self preservation purposes. My biggest eye opener came 10-12 days in, I had a shiny new terrible transport ship, and was running some NPC goods. I figure 1 jump through low sec cant be that bad, so I go through. As soon as I hit Low Sec im dead before everything finishes loading, podded, and had to literally start from scratch with nothing left money wise.

I played for another 2-3 months. After deciding to never enter low-sec again, I got in a corp/alliance working on their first low sec player station. Most of us were very noobish, very very few with over 1 year old characters. I started reaizing EVE wasnt the game for me while working in low sec. More numbers = win, unless theres one 3-4 year pvp player then you're just doomed.

I figured PvP would be fun, but it ammounted to nothing more than gathering the biggest squad you can and demolishing people who dont stand a chance. And finally, seeing an old player in a ship you could never touch, at all, wipe out most of what you worked 2 months for with absolutely no recourse other than "sorry, start over" just wasnt appealing. "If you cant afford to lose it dont fly it". The only way to play is to automatically assume what you are flying at the time is already gone. Always remember if you're flying the best thing you can, theres someone going to kill you, and he has 100x the resources and 100x the money making power as you, so he risks nothing to make you lose everything. If he loses a ship, he loses maybe 5 hours of gathering up a new one.

I spent the last 2 weeks trying to get back into the trading game, this time trading player comodities almost all in high sec space. On my last day hauling a measly 1M isk worth of goods through high sec space, I got jumped and killed/podded by a group of some alts with nothing to lose and more than enough firepower to kill me before the "police" showed up. I turned the game off with 2 weeks left on my subscription, and never looked back. Its one thing to have risk vs reward. This game is so heavy on risk, and the rewards are tilted heavily in the favor of those who already have the resources to trivialize any risk. This makes it very very difficult for a new player to get a foothold in the game world, especially as any non-combat oriented play.

 

[Cousin_IT]

If u wanna make isk trading. You can make much more with a newbalt in Jita playing the market than u ever would hauling NPC tradegoods around empire.

I been playing EVE since late 2005. Its changed alot, & mostly for the worst in my personal opinion. Im still playing because Factional Warfare is being launced next week. If it isnt as good as it sounds, I wont be renewing my subscription in July I dont think. Empire is boring, 0.0 is becoming a homogenous blob. ISK is too important to too many people.

 

[Icedrake402]

I was there when the very first Titan Judgement weapon went off, annihilating half our fleet. That was a fun time, except for all the lagging (have they fixed that to make the large 500 vs 500 fleet battles actually playable now by the way?)

Not really. Lag is more bearable in medium-sized engagements, but the big problem is that in the game engine, "more ships" is always a better tactic, and in a lot of situations, it's the only viable one. Plus mineral prices have slumped, so the number of dreadnoughts, carriers, motherships and the like is creeping inexorably upwards and raising the bar of what a fleet MUST have to survive. There's a big upgrade to the network that's coming "soon", which should alleviate it. I can say without a shadow of doubt that without lag, fleet battles would be beyond awesome, rather than frustrating exercises in predicting the future. That said, I have some big hopes for the next expansion, which is supposed to be promoting small team PVP.

How does it feel when you lose your first ship?

It's a bummer, but it is survivable. Just insure it and follow some basic safety guidelines (don't go to lowsec unless you need to, check the map for recent kills, don't use autopilot unless in a very fast ship, don't put all your money inside one hauler) and you should be okay.

 

[Gemini3333]

Complex? COMPLEX?! COMPLEX MY ASS!! how about you try to play X3 REUNION and then come talk to me about difficulty curves! i swear you need a PHD in computer science just to make heads and tails of that game!!!

Played both, and X3 is a pond to Eve's ocean. Depending on what you're doing, X3 will be as complex, if not more so, than Eve. However, the further you get into it, the deeper and more complex Eve will get. Player-created "publicly traded" corportaions returning dividends to shareholders? Yep, can do, and being done in Eve. Headache-inducing production chains? Check out the moon material -> Tech2 item production. Predatory market practices? Ship and module invention? Exploration? Ship loadouts/fitting? All of these are more complex in Eve.

The nice thing about all those complex things is that you really only need to get involved in them as much as you want. Hate mining? Don't. Tired of the missions? Find some trade routes. Need more action? Head to lowsec and join/fight player pirates. Want to conquer territory? Join a corp/alliance and head to the depths of lawless space.

well i suppose but considering i only played for a wekk i guess i can't complain. really the thing that i didn't like was well....just the hole game in general wasn't my cup of tea i didn't like the interface and while i like space shooters with spaceships and such ei: freelancer, i just don't like it in mmo form.

 

[Gemini3333]

Also, mining would be better replaced with paint drying.

If you stick a mining laser on a transport and find a nice secure area of space to sit, you can make some easy cash while doing other things (studying, working, dealing with gf/wife aggro).

Mining ice, though, ugh. Profitable, but mindnumbing. At least it has the profitable aspect over gatecamping and watching warp disruption bubbles until you crack. I think some of the more colorful Eve personalities spent a little too long on one or both of these activities.

well why would i want to pay 15 bucks a month just for the game to play itself and besides who wants to just sit there mining for several hours, thats why i liked Wow because your never doing one thing for to long and when going after resources you have to often have to fight one or more monsters in the way giving it a semi challenge

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Oh i bought an item but have to make 27 jumps to get it and thats going to take half an hour real time? NO THANK YOU! There are better games and better things i could be doing instead of waiting half an hour while some stupid autopilot plays the game for me.

Two things:

1) Check to see where the item is before you buy it- it doesn't get mailed to you; this isn't the Auction House. The information is a handful of clicks away.

2) The autopilot is deliberately set to drop you out of warp 15km away from each warpgate on your flight path. Want to get there faster? Manually warp to zero.

 

[Gemini3333]

Complex? COMPLEX?! COMPLEX MY ASS!! how about you try to play X3 REUNION and then come talk to me about difficulty curves! i swear you need a PHD in computer science just to make heads and tails of that game!!!

Played both, and X3 is a pond to Eve's ocean. Depending on what you're doing, X3 will be as complex, if not more so, than Eve. However, the further you get into it, the deeper and more complex Eve will get. Player-created "publicly traded" corportaions returning dividends to shareholders? Yep, can do, and being done in Eve. Headache-inducing production chains? Check out the moon material -> Tech2 item production. Predatory market practices? Ship and module invention? Exploration? Ship loadouts/fitting? All of these are more complex in Eve.

The nice thing about all those complex things is that you really only need to get involved in them as much as you want. Hate mining? Don't. Tired of the missions? Find some trade routes. Need more action? Head to lowsec and join/fight player pirates. Want to conquer territory? Join a corp/alliance and head to the depths of lawless space.

well at least in Eve i'd have an easy to use interface to learn all those things with, X3's interface sucked so badly

 

[Meshakhad_v1legacy]

And I have a solution to the boringness of mining - entertaining corpmates. I am a fighter, but I participate in corp mining missions occasionally just for the social activity.

 

[bluemarsman]

I would join, but I can't afford it. Too bad.

 

[elimob441]

This isn't WoW. It's not for carebears and thankfully never will be. There is always a risk of losing anything and everything. The best part of the game is the intrigue and backstabbing, and its converse, camaraderie. While they're trying to beef up the PvE that's not the game's strength by a long shot. Conquerable space and alliance warfare are the meat of the game.

I have to agree, in wow you die, meh nonthing, in eve you ship is gone, you have to know how to work, be smart, outsmart, eve is no "are you ok?" It is the smartest wins and the stupid die. Its fun, and fast and worth every pennie

 

[elimob441]

And I have a solution to the boringness of mining - entertaining corpmates. I am a fighter, but I participate in corp mining missions occasionally just for the social activity.

I meet a nice guy and ill go out and mine with him, we talk alot, eve brings alot of friends too

 

[smallharmlesskitten]

i just saw the trailer and realised

THATS MY SHIP

win

350 m/s booyah

200k though a bit much for my second day

 

[Meshakhad_v1legacy]

And I have a solution to the boringness of mining - entertaining corpmates. I am a fighter, but I participate in corp mining missions occasionally just for the social activity.

I meet a nice guy and ill go out and mine with him, we talk alot, eve brings alot of friends too

Eh, I'm in an industrial corp (though I'll be leaving for factional warfare). To me, mining means that we'll have a bunch of guys active in one area, so might as well join them.

Incidentally, a side effect of having a single server is that EVE is very international. There are many corps and alliances that have a common nationality or language (including Red Alliance (Russian) and Tau Ceti Federation (French), two of the most powerful alliances in the game), but most of the time, it's a mishmash of nationalities. Take my corporation, Gradient. There are three Americans I know of - myself, the CEO, and his RL wife. Many are Finns. At least one is German. And our alliance leader is British. I believe EVE is majority European, not American. The devs, of course, are Icelandic.

 

[Meshakhad_v1legacy]

Also, EVE Online's expansion is being implemented as we speak. Meanwhile, we are getting a load of news from within the game world, and things are going CRAZY.

http://www.eve-online.com/news/downtimenews.asp