Games I Own: EVE Online
Posted on 16th Apr 2009 at 11:34 by Mark Mackay with 41 comments
We’ve all got those games that we keep coming back to in life. You play for a few months, a year or maybe more until your attention and enthusiasm ends up elsewhere for a time. Eventually though, you get this burning desire, like a flame rekindled, to dig out and fire up that classic for some nostalgia gaming. With its recent re-release I thought I’d talk about one such a game that I always end up coming back to, EVE Online.
Over the years EVE has ended up in the news many times for everything from its incredible depth to its many scandals. I first activated my account in 2005 and immediately fell in love with the beautiful ships, incredible galactic scenery, ambient sound track and highly tactical gamely. Whether you’re into player vs. player (PVP) or player vs. environment (PVE), you’ll need to set up your ships with the right modules for the job and then pilot them skilfully if you want to come out on top.
The items in EVE are all produced by the players from the ground up, making an almost exclusively player-driven economy. This concept makes the market a brutally competitive place and means that you’ll need to be as cunning in your business ventures to make interstellar kredits (ISK) as you are in combat to win fights. Indeed, some people devote their entire EVE online careers to outwitting their competitors in the market place, amassing the wealth of kings, using it only for the satisfaction or further outwitting their fellow tycoons.
If that sounds boring, perhaps a life of piracy is more your cup of tea? Pirates roam the little-policed low security regions of space, hunting and scanning down unsuspecting haulers, miners, traders or other combatants to destroy their ships and take any gear that survives or, ransom them for large sums of cash. In the outer regions of space with absolutely no police whatsoever, full blown territorial wars rage for months on end with fleet engagements that can consist of hundreds of pilots.
EVE is arguably one of the most complex games ever made, a factor that leaves many gamers feeling bewildered, causing them to lose interest quickly. In most MMOs you can level up your character by hours of endless grinding, meaning that the more free time a person has the more powerful they can become. However, in EVE, skill points are gained in real time, meaning that even if you don’t have all the free time in the world you can still advance your pilot at the same rate as everyone else.
EVE Online can be somewhat intimidating when you first log on and yes, there is a lot to learn. But if you stick with it, you’ll be rewarded with some one of the most diverse and rich game worlds ever created and if you’re into PVP, there’s nothing else quite like it. With the relatively recent graphics overhaul and a two week free trial available at www.eve-online.com, there’s never been a better time to jump onboard.
Over the years EVE has ended up in the news many times for everything from its incredible depth to its many scandals. I first activated my account in 2005 and immediately fell in love with the beautiful ships, incredible galactic scenery, ambient sound track and highly tactical gamely. Whether you’re into player vs. player (PVP) or player vs. environment (PVE), you’ll need to set up your ships with the right modules for the job and then pilot them skilfully if you want to come out on top.
The items in EVE are all produced by the players from the ground up, making an almost exclusively player-driven economy. This concept makes the market a brutally competitive place and means that you’ll need to be as cunning in your business ventures to make interstellar kredits (ISK) as you are in combat to win fights. Indeed, some people devote their entire EVE online careers to outwitting their competitors in the market place, amassing the wealth of kings, using it only for the satisfaction or further outwitting their fellow tycoons.
If that sounds boring, perhaps a life of piracy is more your cup of tea? Pirates roam the little-policed low security regions of space, hunting and scanning down unsuspecting haulers, miners, traders or other combatants to destroy their ships and take any gear that survives or, ransom them for large sums of cash. In the outer regions of space with absolutely no police whatsoever, full blown territorial wars rage for months on end with fleet engagements that can consist of hundreds of pilots.
EVE is arguably one of the most complex games ever made, a factor that leaves many gamers feeling bewildered, causing them to lose interest quickly. In most MMOs you can level up your character by hours of endless grinding, meaning that the more free time a person has the more powerful they can become. However, in EVE, skill points are gained in real time, meaning that even if you don’t have all the free time in the world you can still advance your pilot at the same rate as everyone else.
EVE Online can be somewhat intimidating when you first log on and yes, there is a lot to learn. But if you stick with it, you’ll be rewarded with some one of the most diverse and rich game worlds ever created and if you’re into PVP, there’s nothing else quite like it. With the relatively recent graphics overhaul and a two week free trial available at www.eve-online.com, there’s never been a better time to jump onboard.
41 Comments
Discuss in the forums ReplyThey have resently overhauled the new player experience in an attemt to better help new players into the game. Especially the way you create a new character has been massively changed. Give it a try sometime :)
I like these huge space games, but all the same I want a dev to come out with another Freespace 2 or X-Wing Alliance... :(
bitter vet reporting in
I kept losing interest because I have no idea where I'd want to go. Ideally, manufacture/design, but doing that was so damned hard, costly, and well, time consuming, I often stopped before I started, really.
It's easily my favourite MMO, despite the fact that I rarely play it. Well, rarely try to play it.
..Pedant =P
Yeah Hyperions are awesome. I'll be cross-training to Gallente soon so I can be the other end of their guns.
Just skilled up and saved enough for my first cruiser, ugly as sin but decently specced Moa. Spend ages kitting it out with Missile launchers , projectile weapons, modules etc. Had yet to use it in a fight, the plastic wrap still on the seats.
I then go to the market to buy a skill, excellent its only 2 jumps away says I.
Only problem is, the last jump is in 0.4 security. I arrive and My ship is destroyed in under 5 seconds by 2 pirates( thats not an exageration). For no reason, and I had absolutely no way to defend or avoid it.
I fully understand thats part of the game. But it is just terribly frustrating to have that hard work erased in 5 seconds.
Yeah I was insured, yeah i had enough money for another. But it has sapped my desire to play. At least for now.
Looks like a few rainy days ahead of me though, and some free time, so i might give the trial another go ;)
When i just need to pick up skills and stuff smaller than 10.0m3 in size, i use my shuttle, they are cheap and fast... Saves you the frustration of loosing your ship, i currently fly a Maller with total gear worth at least 20mio, i would really hate to loose it, i can't afford to loose that ship, even though i know the eve mantra: "If you can't afford to loose it, don't fly it"
However, the steep learning curve really put me off. But if the intro and tutorial stuff has been re-worked, I might give it a go :D
P.s: If anyone has a full Eve account and wants to baby-sit me while I get my space legs, it would be most appreciated
Yeah your right. If i re-subscribe i'll do that....
Yeah sorry to hear that it got you so down. EVE is a school of hard knocks and there's many a lesson to be learned the hard way.
I'm a Pirate in the game and generally will kill anything that moves but if the person is new and gets very offended or upset about getting jumped in lowsec, I'll always lend some words of encouragement. because it's good for everyone to get new players into the game.
Stay out of lowsec space at all costs and you'll be fine and like Millusdk pointed out, if you need a skillbook or something small that is in a lowsec system, grab a shuttle.
Hope you get back into the game and enjoy its many wonders =)
I'll certainly see about getting back into it.
Very true. A few years ago they were uberlaggy. Fleet battles are MUCH better these days. I believe CCP spent a lot of money updating their server hardware including the use of SSDs to make things run smoother. Occasionally you get a laggy fight when something goes wrong but generally theyre fine, especially if you turn the effects down/off when you know you're in for a big engagement.
Oh, and Mister_X, don't feel so bad, I wrapped my faction CNR around a post a few nights back. Total Mods lost: 2 Navy Launchers (90M), Kaikkas XL Booster (390M), Caldari Navy Boost Amp (85M), a Caldari Navy BCU (45M), the ship and rigs itself (250M), and a few T2 Mods (they're so cheap that they don't matter. Really). So around 860M to some rats. Oh well, **** happens.
I have that burning desire also to return to Eve, but I just don't have the heart to advance a new character to the level my original one had (I sold my character :( ).
The best time I had was when I stayed up 2 days as part of a massive Fixian Defence force helping BOB out when a hostile alliance (Don't remember who) were putting heavy pressure on our borders.
The good days!
http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/64347
http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/65110
I've never seen EVE online besides on a few screenshots, but the 3 posts above do make it look awesome :D
Hah! That's pretty hilarious. I started playing EVE about 3 years ago and got bored of it when corp activity had slowed down (by this time I think it was my 3rd corp, first 2 had died). Same thing happened when I picked it up again last year (although time/money constraints were the main problems). Like most MMOs a good corp/guild will make the game so much better. I'd love to get into EVE again but I think I will get rather bored again, solo mining/missioning gets really boring after a while and I don't think I really have the skill to play in 0.0.
The only advice to you is keep your head up, and stick in there with it! Depending on the alliance/corp you join, it may take months for you to get a proper grasp of the game and be able to do things.
It's the politics of the game I love. Just one big Sandbox where the players make there own rules (Excluding Empire space that is :) ) and the player base generally is of a more mature nature!
just that by itself is a great thing. I don't think I would ever get into this kind of game however, but you never know !
You can always give it a try with the 14 days trial.
ouch! thats alot of credits !
Don't think it would be so bad If i had a regular income stream, but i don't as yet. and the Corp I was in dissolved :( Still to find a decent one)
:/
This is often a difficult pill to swallow, I was the same prior to my first MMO. Personally, I justify it by remembering that it pays a development team working full time on creating new content for game, updated server hardware for better performance and (in many cases) customer support.
MMO's are ludicrus time sinks.
Games like CS:Source are much better VFM IMO as the modding community keep it alive. All for a one off payment.
If you are still reading, drop whatever you are doing in EVE and find a 0.0 alliance that holds sov. You will learn and earn more there, do NOT under any circumstance sit in Empire/Low-sec, that is the path to the Zombie side.
Enjoy,
S*D
You need to be Jedi to play EVE i.e hold the deepest commitment.:D
There is a saying, if I recall correctly, from before Goon wiped the floor with BOB:
Being in BOB is not like a second job; it is a primary job supported by whatever your real-life job is.
As for anyone who tried it before but didn't bite, I don't blame you. My first try was back in the Exodus expansion ('06 I believe), and the tutorial was 6 FRIGGEN HOURS LONG. But I stuck to my guns and I did it, I was so hooked during that 14-day trial that my English grade took a noticeably steep nosedive. I decided not to buy in at that point.
Then came the summer of 2007, coming back from summer camo and meeting someone else who played EVE and got me back into it. It stuck for a couple months and then I stopped. By then, however, he tutorial was a SCANT 40 MIN. AT WORST. I haven't seen what the new rookie experience has to offer, but I've heard it is excellent at getting through the basics, starting shallow in character creation before getting deepno more choosing race, then bloodline, then profession then placing stats before even knowing what any of that even means. Plus, if you think later on that your stats would have been better distributed some way different, you can change them; you get to re-distribute stat-points once every year. Because a lot of people put stat points in Charisma because it must be awesome. No, it really isn't for most purposes. But you didn't know that when first putting your character together.
Then they introduced Epic Mission Arcs. These are long, multi-part mission arcs that you can start in as a noob, in all adding up to enough start-up cash to stop noobs from begging (how does 20-30 mil sound in 2 weeks after starting out clueless? My first trial account I only got up to 3 mil in that same time period!), but also gets them a lot of the experience they need to start having fun in the game. Plus, they now have tutorial agents in a "career funnel" to help you get started in one of the three primary profession categories: business, industry/manufacturing, and military. I always had wanted to get into manufacturing, but hadn't a clue how to get to that point. Now I'm working on improving my first blueprints and maxxing out relevant skills to start producing.
And, just because you were capable of flying a ship did not mean you were qualified for flying it well. Now there is a certificate planner, which helps in making decisions on what skills to train to make more effective use of that shiny new cruiser you just bought. Not only that, but no more babysitting low-level skills so you can maximize skill-learning potential: you can put together a queue of the skills you want to begin training within the next 24 hrs. so you can set it and forget it until tomorrow, or next week if you plan a long skill for last. It basically has only gotten more real-life friendly since the latest expansion.
OK, I'm done selling it, just download it and get started already!
P.S. If you have a Steam account, you can get an extended 30-day trial instead of the regular 14-day trial; plus, if you are invited to try it by another player, you can also get a 30-day trial this way instead. For existing players, if someone you introduce to the game signs up for a full paying account, you get 30 days of free game time.
And, if you do end up making lots of money in-game, you can even begin to play for free by buying pilot's license extensions (PLEX) in-game for ISK. People can buy PLEX for real money and have the option of using it themselves or selling it to another player for ISK. They started doing this to curb the incentive for lazy players to buy money from ISK/gold sellers who end up stealing accounts or scamming people in other nefarious ways (though it would serve them right in my opinion).
That reminds me of another saying in EVE:
When a player leaves EVE to return to WoW because EVE is "too difficult", the average IQ of both player bases goes up.
A bit childish and elitist to be sure, but none the less true to an extent. For one thing, it's pretty hard for someone under the age of 14 to grasp quite how deep EVE is. This helps keep many of the whiny snot-nosed brats away. There are still plenty of trolls and immature players, but they are generally of a higher caliberif such can be said of these peoplethan you will likely find in other MMO's.
Any corps with 0.0 access up for letting me in? :D