Eve Online

[Green1]

I know there are some space buffs here, so I thought I would share where I have been hiding lately.

I took out a 20 day trial to Eve Online.

It's pretty deep for a MMO and gorgeous. Unlike theme park style MMOs like the famous World of Warcraft, players create the content and story. Wars are epic and spying and backstabbing is common. You can mine asteroids, build ships and equiptment, scan down solar systems for wormholes and anomolies, place infrastructure on planets (which console FPS mercs will fight over later this year), be a prirate, a space trucker, am inventor, an investor, build space stations. A lot of possibilities. The game even has an elected "player council" called the CSM that forms a liason between the players and the game developers. Warning, though: Eve is full PvP in some areas and death penalties are a bit harsher than many MMOs. You can, if not careful, lose everything.

It is definately not a kiddie game either. The system is very complex. It is also a bit cheaper than some MMO titles in that the client is free and all expansions are free. Only a 15 USD/mo subscription. Other MMOs make you buy a retail box. Some, you have to pay for the expansions, too.

I have been having an okay time.

Anyone else tried this?

[Buster's Uncle]

Sounds like it gave you a decent case of one more turn...

[Green1]

Sounds like it gave you a decent case of one more turn...

Yeah, powerful stuff. I have not been able to get my mind off of it. Even at break at work, I am reading on my android phone about it. But Eve is so complex, entire books could be written. Plus, the universe is so huge it could take days (real time) to travel it all if you did not get blown up first.

Lately, I have teamed up with a partner in a corporation I joined salvaging wrecks of ships for profit. It really helped out because you are really cash poor as a new pilot. It helped me buy all the expensive equiptment for a newer ship and all the skills I needed. The tractor beams where 1.5 million apiece and I needed 4. The destroyer class ship was another 1.5 million and we will not go into all the cost of the other modules and such.

Once I finish training up more probing skills, I am going to start hunting down wormholes and other sites. The thing about Eve Online skills is, unlike other MMOs, they train in real time. For example, most MMOs, you have to "grind" or do the same thing over and over to get more skills or kill over and over to level up. However, Eve has no levels. You buy a skill book and select train. Each skill has 5 levels and trains in real time even while logged out. Some lower level skills take minutes. Others have prerequisite skills you have to train for before learnig that skill. Very advanced skills can take weeks and months. It has been said it would take 30 years real time to learn all the skills in Eve.

[Buster's Uncle]

It does sound like this crowd's kind of game.

[Green1]

A bit more of an update on my adventures in Eve.

It appears I am in a slight trap.

I joined a corporation that would would accept me. However, this corporation appears to be full of away from keyboard miners with just a few active folks to line the pockets of a CEO who never talks. In a MMO, I refuse to tolerate guilds/whatever that have silent chat. Hell, I would crank up SMAX if I wanted a one player deal.

Unfortunately, my character seems to be unemployable by other corporations that have better goals and are more active. The main reason is because i am on trial. In the past, it seems, establish players have created trial accounts for the soul purpous of endearing themselves to corps to spy and over months get promoted where they could rob corps blind to support a main. Some corps have even established a skill point minumum like 2 M skill points before recruiting.

With little help, I am going to be broke. After trial, I will be able to try again to be recruited by a better corp and thi be first priority. While there are one or two cool in my current corp, I need more folks. I also need folks that have access to areas I can make more money at.

Until I can do more about this, i have decided to direct skill training towards being able to fly a cruiser. It is a bigger ship and is a prereq for flying a battlecruiser which appears to be the "accepted" ship to be cool and be able to make more money. I will continue this path till off trial then resume the path to covops which will let me get to more dangerous areas less stressfully.

Money between now and being off trial is going to be an issue, though. A cov ops which would be needed if I was asked to relocate to lawless space is going to be 30 M. I may not have this. Plus, even a cheap cruiser will cost 5 to 10 M. I only have 10 M. So, this will be the major focus next week or two.

[Green1]

Well, it appears I let the trial lapse while I was in SMAX AAR land.

My post mortem of the trial.

One thing that really hurts you in an MMO is if you are in a silent guild. I just cannot handle it! I do not tolerate dead guild chat!  And, due to the community and nature of Eve Online, was unable to get into a more active guild. I have had more text chat here on a forum for a decade old game than my time in Eve! Sad. Now, some in the community mentioned Eve University, an alliance well known in the Eve Community for accepting and helping noobs. But, looking at thier app process is worse than some jobs I have applied to. Needless to say, many decent corps would balk at taking you in with a trial for fear you were a spy.

The PvE missions got pretty boring and in my opinion, too darn easy! Solo, it gets like a grind. The mining I guess would be okay as an afk solo thing to do while playing other games or lurking,

Another thing is Eve is an MMO, and a MMO really takes time to reveal it's sweet spots. Most of the community double and triple boxes with multiple accounts because one of thier pilots might be doing one thing boring that takes forever, so they semi-afk him and go active with another pilot on a seperate account. In fact, I think the corp I was in was a haven for miners that did this that were merely in corp for a low tax rate.

But still, for it's faults, Eve does not subscribe to the current WoW babyfication movement going on in modern MMOs. The system is very rich and complex. It just takes a month or two to unlock some of that complexity. I also LOVE reading the stories from Eve. No one matches Eve for drama and soap opera.

I may give it another shot. But for right now, I want to save the 15 USD/mo.

Dust 514, a MMOFPS is coming out where console kiddies will be fighting over planets while Eve pilots pay them or orbital nuke them is coming out later this year. That's groundbreaking. The marriage of the console kiddies to the ultra nerds of Eve. I may check back then to see how that is working out.

Also, the whole Incarna/ walking in stations avatar thing they need to work on. Right now, the captain quarters thing is kind of pointless.

[Green1]

Oh yeah, one more little rant concerning the MMO genre in general versus 4x.

Now I realize that most of my 4x time has been SP while MMOs are all MP. But, a 4x engages you. If Eve would have played to it's MP strength and helped facilitate newbie group activities, I do not think they would lose so many trials. Eve Online threads at Failheap and E-O official forums talk about this occasionally in dev blogs.

World of Warcraft, for instance, had this problem at one time. past the initial rush when the game was new and everyone was leveling, WoW used to be a solo game up until max level unless you sat for hours spamming chat channels. The Looking for Dungeon tool was groundbreaking and solved this issue.

However, that solution is a catch 22. For Eve, it would disrupt the sandbox and make most in the community very mad. Even in WoW, the LFD tool, while it helped folks to get together with others, destroyed the live feel of that world as no one would go out in the world anymore. An LFD of BG for Eve would destroy what makes Eve Eve. Still, when CCP talks about the "new player experience", they have GOT to figure out how to match these folks up with active main characters to hook them. Particularly trials. Who knows, maybe even a limited F2P like Rift or WoW?

A 4x game or even most FPS games do not have that issue. I can join in at any time and be engaged at an acceptable level. When MMOs solve this issue by balancing rewarding players for being long time vets versus not forcing newer players to grind endlessly just to be with "cool kids", the MMO genre will grow.

...and you know what? I am rooting for them. MMOs are the primitive prototype of the Star Trek Holodeck or SMAX's Virtual World. And, a MMO will always have an occasional place on my hard drive.