Anyone here play Eve Online?

[Murdoch]

I've gotten a bit tired of WoWarcraft, and have heard good things about Eve Online.

Anyone here play, and could give their impressions? I'm looking at it from an experienced Warcraft player's perspective, so if you have played both your input would be especially useful.

From what I've read the economy is entirely player generated, which sounds nice in theory although the practice may be less so. Is this ai nice system or are there drawbacks?

What is the ultimate goal? Is there a raid-type playstyle available, similar to that of Warcraft's?

I think it'd be fun to join some sort of trade federation, motivated by greed and capitalism. Or join The Rebels (whoever they are in Eve) and fight The Empire, as the archetype goes. Is this possible?

Your feedback is appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Matt Helm]

There are no raids at all, just missions (aka quests). The high end game is PvP.

There is no "Empire", just competing player run corporations (aka guilds). When you join the game you are automatically put in the newbie corp so you can get help and get started out (the newb corp is not player run).

The game is somewhat slow paced, it takes time to build up the skills and money to get into the main part of the game. Training skills is purely based on time, you are training skills when you are both online and offline, one skill at a time. While you can have up to 3 characters on the server only one can train at a time so there is little point to having alt characters.

The game is complex, you have to do a bit of research to know what you want to do and how to go about doing it.

The economy works pretty well.

 

[Nology5890]

It's a fun MMO, I've been thinking of retrieving my account. It's the one thing I've wanted to see in a game of the space exploration games 'genre'(as I named in my thread on the topic) , but it's online (I don't usually like to pay monthly subscriptions). That is the only thing that is making me shy away atm, but I may change my mind about it.

 

[Thrawn]

First off, Eve and WoW have nothing in common. I've played Eve quite a bit and I quit WoW just at the point where I had to start raiding all the time.

Seriously, nothing in common.

Someone once described it this way.

WoW is a theme park, where you are guided around taken on rides and given lots of things to do.

Eve is a sandbox where you have all the resources you need to build pretty much what ever you want.

The player driven economy works pretty well. It is extremely complicated to explain but it basicly boils down to this. Most of the resources you need to build the most expensive equipment is found in "0.0" or contested space where anyone can kill anyone and players can build their own stations.

Right now 0.0 space is split up by 10 or 15 alliances. Basicly a bunch of players have gone out there, setup stations and enforce their own laws through player might.

While they are out there they can build the biggest ship and mine the most valuable resouces but they are under constant threat from other players.

That is basicly Eve's "raids" is when two giant fleets go out and try and fight eachother for control of solar systems.

I hope that makes some sense because it always gives me a head ache trying to describe Eve to people who play MMOs. It is like trying to explain WoW to a Cheerleader... they just don't get it.

Anyway, my feelings towards eve are pretty mixed. It totaly kicks ass to have a fully player driven economy where every ship and almost every weapon were produced by players.

It is also cool that skills train while off line.

What sucks is that it takes a long time to make money and the activites you do can be pretty boring. Two examples are mining and agent missions.

To do an agent mission "Well" you have to spend roughly 5 minuets in prepartion to figure out what resistances and damage type you need to bring, between 1-10 minuets in travel to the mission site, 10-15 minuets of combat, 10 minuets of looting (no joke, it takes that long to loot, and that isn't even salvaging) 10 mins to travel back and turn in the mission.

And for all that you'll make about 3 million (level 3 missions) if you take into account your Loyality points which can be used to buy goods as well.

My ship and configuration cost me about 150 million.

And a side note here if I get blown up by players OR NPCs i'll only get back about 90 million of that total cost. Yea, ouch.

Mining on the other hand is a bit more of a team effor, usually you have a hand full of guys, sitting in space with mining lasers on a rock and every laser cycle (I think they last a minuet) they drag their cargo to a stationary contaier. Then someone in a high capacity ship comes by, grabs all the ore, and takes it to the station to refine it. Then after refining it they can turn the minerals it ships or weapons.

Literally those are two of the major ways to make money and neither are super fun.

If you decide to play this game really stop and think about what your goal is. See if you can't get into a 0.0 alliance and give the pvp a shot. If you want to make a trade federation and make billions good, go for it. But if you go into like I did, without an end goal chances are you'll end up quitting after your first couple ships are destroyed.

I keep comming back because I am in a cool mercenary Corporation. We'll see if it keeps my interest this time.

 

[Murdoch]

Thanks Thrawn. The theme park and sandbox analogy works well too.

Last night I extended my foray into Eve, and for some perverse reason I seem to enjoy mining.

My plan is to sit around in high security space until I can buy myself one of the ORE group mining vessels, then try to join a corporation out in contested space. I figure that the time cost of skills is really the biggest hurdle, making money doesn't seem all that hard.

I figure by then I'll have had spent enough time mining to know if I want to do it full time. The idea of building and maintaining a system as a cooperative sounds like fun. Then the idea of investing in research and manufacturing techs once I've gone far down the road mining sounds cool too.

 

[Thrawn]

My advise for you would be to get to the point where you feel you are an acceptable miner and then start training your learning skills, it will save you a ton of time in the long run. Also, if you have a spare couple million invest in some basic +1 implants.

Just so you know, the speed at which you train a skills is determined by your stats and the primary and secondary stats of a skill. For example if Memory is primary and int is secondary (like it is on learning skills) you will train the value of your memory every minuet and half the vaule of your int every minuet. So if they were 10 and 10 respectively, you would get 15 skillpoints a minuet when training learning.

Once your learning skills are up to par pick an advanced ship to get into. If you want to join a 0.0 corporation or any advanced corporation with a Player Own Structure, the best thing will probably be to work on Ice mining, since ice isotopes are the most important thing to keep the POS on line. Basic minerals are alot easier to come by than ice. I don't know what the required skils are.

While it will take you a long time to break the 10 million skill point mark, a nice thing about Eve is that with some good planning you can be useful pretty quick. I am sure you could find a corporation on the eve-online forums that is looking for a new miner focused player. The best thing you can do is join a corp so they can teach you the ropes and give you some direction.