Any Eve players here? I've recently taken up Eve out of curiosity(21 day trial account). The one thing that intrigued me to play it was perhaps the games economic system, however I love and hate this game. I love the challenge and length it demands of you yet I hate it for the same reasons. It's hard to put time into the game especially for a college student.
Yeah, I'm only interested in it from a theoretical standpoint. The whole Goonsquad thing that happened last summer was riveting - and the fact that you had in game "war journalists" covering the battle and selling the news is pretty genius. But that's the thing. What makes it interesting is also what makes it pretty much unplayable for me... probably more so than any other MMO where you hit a clear level cap and can just quit if you don't care about grinding for loot.
I find EVE a game that you have to be serious about to actually get anywhere which makes this game oriented towards a niche market of hardcore players. I've been studying economics in college which is my main reason for trying the game out.
Yeah. Pretty much shows that a free market society will fail because people will always cheat other people.
I tried the free trial about a year ago and very quickly realized it was require far, far more time than I would ever have. Not a game one can just jump into and out of here and there.
Avid EVE player here. I have a nicely skilled main PVP character and a hulk/freighter/orca industrial alt. EVE is by far the best game I've ever played. It's so incredibly rich. Just yesterday in fact was a major event in the EVE universe, when its oldest space holding alliance (The Curatores Veritatis Alliance) was disbanded by a hack - CCP restored the alliance but it caused a major upset in Providence that had us all in our capital ships ready to defend sovereignty from a possible invasion of over a thousand people. Ultimately catastrophe was avoided when CCP restored CVA and its sov, but it's one of the great examples of how epic EVE can be. I recommend, if you're a new player, to join a player corp/alliance ASAP and stick with the game. I disagree that it's a game which requires some enormous time investment in order to enjoy. It has a HUGE learning curve, yes, but kills train persistently in real-world time, meaning you don't need to be logged in and playing to develop your character. Having said that, your character really needs to be more than a year old in order to be able to fly a wide variety of ships competently (PVP wise) - so you could argue it requires a long subscription, but technically you don't have to play the game at all (besides logging in to update your skill queue) in order to develop your character's skillpoints. Also, you can jump in a tackling frigate and be absolutely vital to a PVP fleet in less than four hours of training time. And a 10 million skillpoint character can easily solo kill a 60 million skillpoint character if the circumstances are right, so you don't NEED some uber skilled character to be great at PVP. Moreover, technically, a frigate can kill a battleship (if it only has a buffer tank) without the battleship ever once hitting the frigate, so again, you don't necessarily need to fly the biggest ships in the game in order to be great at PVP. BTW: have you seen the new planets on the test server (for the dominion patch in december? they're absolutely gorgeous. EVE is the best looking MMO out there, in my opinion).
I guess it's one of those things where if you want to be a part of the "big" stuff that happens in the game, you either have to know people or be ready to commit to be good enough so that the important people notice you. It's like that with any MMO I guess, but EVE depends so much on the player experience more than say WoW. You can't really solo EVE and hope to do anything important.
I've already joined up with a corp. I can't wait to start some co-op missions together. I haven't seen anything of the new Dominion patch yet but I am aware that ccp did overhaul the graphics awhile back. About the only major event I was aware of in EVE was the whole Goonswarm and BOB debacle.
I'm not currently involved in the game as much as I have been in the past, but recently been having great fun joining a group of alliance mates and suiciding BS into freighters in empire, then stealing the loot. Sharing the loot equally between us netted me 200mil yesterday, and I would have made another 300mil on top of that if I hadn't had connection problems and missed the second kill. Looking forward to the next expansion, which will be really shaking things up.
^Exactly why I have my alt haul everything valuable in an orca. Can't cargo scan corp hangars, so suicide gank squads will never attempt it as they risk losing loads of torp ravens for an empty Orca.
Well I have to say that these past few days have been interesting but I do not think EVE is really doing it for me. It is by no means a bad game but it just is not giving me any real entertainment value that I could not find in some cheaper alternative like a single player space sim. I'm personally holding out for Star Trek online to be my mmo or perhaps Stargate worlds depending on how close Star Trek Online comes to my ideal visions of what it should be.
Yeah, the game definitely has its own language. EVE is pretty much summed up in this learning curve plot: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3088/2335016192_6003c39c4c.jpg
I don't play Eve, but a lot of terminology is common across gaming. For example an "alt" is usually a secondary character than an individual plays. It's short for "alternate". They might be a banker for extra storage, a character they are in the process of levelling-up, someone who can carry out a particular profession, a hundred reasons. The primary character that is the focus or that they spend more time on is usually called their "main". To "gank" is essentially to ambush someone at a disadvantage. 2 vs 1, surprise attack, sucker punch. So a person playing in game might say he's going to "Go looking to gank some low-level characters" or people who are distracted by creatures they are currently engaged with that make easy targets. An orca must be a type of relatively inexpensive space ship I'd guess? And it sounds like it must have different compartment types than regular cargo ships have that can't be scanned (hangers can't be scanned?). Suicide torp ravens sound like kamikaze ships or torpedoes of some kind? So the bad guys don't as easily want to take the risk of destroying a bunch of expensive hardware for a ship that may or may not be empty. That's my guess anyway.
Right on about alt and ganking, that stuff is universal across MMOs. Close about the EVE related stuff, too! An Orca is actually a very expensive and highly specialized industrial command ship. It has a special kind of cargohold called a corp hangar array that members of your alliance can access from space, making it a kind of mobile command base. And correct, they can't be scanned by cargo scanners. About "suicide ganking": In EVE, each solar system has an associated security level. In space with a security level of 0.5-1.0, you can't simply attack anybody you see - doing so will get you "CONDORDed", which means that within 10-20 seconds you'll be killed by, well, Space Police (it's not as dumb as it sounds ). Sometimes it's worth losing your ship in suicide ganking a hauler in high sec, because the loot they drop may be worth far, far more than your ship is worth. "Suicide Torp Ravens" are very high "alpha-strike" (first volley) battleships that are used to sometimes suicide gank a freighter, if it's determined (by cargo scanners) that its cargo is worth billions. In 0.5 space it takes about 20 suicide ravens to destroy a freighter (before all of the ravens are destroyed by CONCORD ... it takes many more in higher security systems). After insurance payback however, you're talking about a loss of your fleet totaling slightly less than a billion ISK ... while that freighter you just destroyed may have dropped FAR FAR more than 5-10 billion isk in assets (and it probably did ... if you're going to sacrifice a 20 man battleship fleet for one freighter you've obviously scanned it beforehand to ensure that the juice was worth the squeeze). EVE is brutal that way.
Glad I saw this thread. Made me remember that I have a skill that will finish training today (in 5 mins actually), and I hadn't set another skill in the queue yet. Finished HACs a couple weeks ago. Going for recon cruisers next, and Heavy Dictors after that.