EVE Experiences

[PennyAnte]

I've been trying out EVE tonight, and I generally like it. Two things: Getting to and from anywhere a few systems away is SLOOOW. Is that just a factor of the starting ship? If that goes away, and I can move around very rapidly in system, then I might consider the game. The other problem is sort of similar - seems like overall character development will take an incredibly long time given how slowly income comes in doing missions and mining etc. Any insights?

 

[GreenNight]

Travel is slow. In fact bigger ships are slower. There are some fast ships, and your ship can become faster with mods and increased skills.

Talking about skills, they do train at real time, but you can train them somewhat faster if you train the learning ones and/or plug in some implants. This pace is quite nice for a casual player like me, I can hardly make enough money to buy what I can use. But someone who plays more (or smarter) perhaps will have the oposite problem, too much money but not able to spend it all on yourself.

Specializing in something can handle this problem somewhat. Or you can take greater risks, as you can avoid most nasty consequences. After a few weeks you can be an excelent frigate pilot, and somewhat decent in cruiser. In six months who knows?

Have fun.

 

[feta]

travel can be significantly accelerated by using "instajumps".
These are bookmarks made 13km (+2km the size of the gate=15) behind the destination gate on a line from the source gate. So when you warp to the bookmark you land on the gate and you can instantly jump through.

But making them is very time consuming (unless you make them for a small but frequently route you take) or very expensive for new players to buy (an entire region should cost about 30-40mil ISK atm on escrow, ~100k per bookmark).

Later on in the game, when you venture into low security systems where people will try to kill you, insta's are a MUST, since they make you quite hard to kill.

Anyway, certainly the starter ship is totally worthless and you should be able to swap for a normal frigate within the first 1-2 days. If you have the skills and not the money, ask politely for the 50-100k the starter frigate costs in any major hub (are you close to jita?) and someone will give it to you (you will probably end up receiving multiple donations).

Then, train for the afterburner module and eventually for the microwarp module.


If you think that the newbie ship is slow, you should try to make a trip with an occator full of expanded cargoholds (or a hulk) with no insta's. It takes you over 3 minutes to reach the gate after exiting warp (and another ~20secs to enter warp).
Battleships are about 2-3x as fast as this, but it's stil a pain to move without insta's.

 

[Sovy Kurosei]

I wouldn't bother buying instas at their inflated prices now, especially if you are only a month old player. Apparently there is a fix for instas that will be talked about in one of the upcoming devblogs, or at least a devblog about the affairs of instas.

 

[Chork]

I played EVE for a few months, but it got to the point where I couldn't even bring myself to log on to set a new skill to learn. When I started out I wanted to be a big-time trader, but when I found out just what that entailed (it pretty much involves being the last person on before the server goes down so you can undercut other peoples sell orders), I gave up in disgust. Lame metagame tactics FTL.

I might give it a shot again, though, since I really liked the atmosphere and mechanics of the game itself.

 

[Sovy Kurosei]

The metagaming and rule bending is probably the worst thing about EVE. Well, that and the servers going up and down like an express elevator.

 

[Zomg]

I played the trial of this recently, with a guy I know playing mentor a bit. I like most of the fundamental design of the game, to start. However, I think there's a lot of garbage clogging it up in small quirks that have been puffed up into central features by player exploitation (exploitation in the sense of exploiting a diamond mine, not as in duping lewts). For example, the crafting of the Tech 2 items is relentlessly cartelized since the few copies of the blueprint items used to make them were given out years ago. The instant bookmarks are also pretty unpleasantly woven into the fabric of the game, dominating every aspect of tactics with an undesigned feature. The learning skills are obnoxious, also. It adds up into a system where the people on top got there by playing 24/7 three years ago and then pulled up the rope, leaving new players to associate with your typical MMORPG subhumans at the bottom or leave.

I think if I were really going to play it I'd shell out for some 20 million or so SP character with full bookmarks, run out into 0.0 space and dick around helping out some underdog corporation fighting over money farming turf, lose a lot of ships and then resell the character as a 21 mil SP character after a month.

 

[Sovy Kurosei]

The economy is pretty stupid since there is zero opportunity cost to producing modules or ships. So it is pretty easy to flood the market with ships and stuff. Which is what happened to the tech one market. Infact it got so ridiculous that people are selling ships so cheap that you could make money off buying the ship, refining it and selling the minerals.

 

[Zomg]

Yeah, I had another friend who was always bitching about moving his hauler around (slow ships with large cargoholds) when we wanted to go to some other part of the high security systems. I got him to work out the math and he figured out that insuring and then self-destructing the ship and rebuying it in the new system only had a small net cost.

 

[omg_laserz_pewpewpew]

I've been playing a few days, and over all I've enjoyed EVE. I'll probably keep playing until something better (perhaps Vanguard) comes along or I get bored with it.

 

[evilmonkey]

I played EVE for a few months, but it got to the point where I couldn't even bring myself to log on to set a new skill to learn. When I started out I wanted to be a big-time trader, but when I found out just what that entailed (it pretty much involves being the last person on before the server goes down so you can undercut other peoples sell orders), I gave up in disgust. Lame metagame tactics FTL.

I might give it a shot again, though, since I really liked the atmosphere and mechanics of the game itself.

WTF? you wanted to be a big game trader with NPCs? :shock:

rule 1 in EVE is generally that NPCing sucks, well it sucks in any MMO, but EVE is hardly better in that regard, probably worse.

EVE trading is good, EVE NPC trading is repetetive and boring - understood?

 

[evilmonkey]

I played the trial of this recently, with a guy I know playing mentor a bit. I like most of the fundamental design of the game, to start. However, I think there's a lot of garbage clogging it up in small quirks that have been puffed up into central features by player exploitation (exploitation in the sense of exploiting a diamond mine, not as in duping lewts). For example, the crafting of the Tech 2 items is relentlessly cartelized since the few copies of the blueprint items used to make them were given out years ago. The instant bookmarks are also pretty unpleasantly woven into the fabric of the game, dominating every aspect of tactics with an undesigned feature. The learning skills are obnoxious, also. It adds up into a system where the people on top got there by playing 24/7 three years ago and then pulled up the rope, leaving new players to associate with your typical MMORPG subhumans at the bottom or leave.

I think if I were really going to play it I'd shell out for some 20 million or so SP character with full bookmarks, run out into 0.0 space and dick around helping out some underdog corporation fighting over money farming turf, lose a lot of ships and then resell the character as a 21 mil SP character after a month.

The first ½ year is fairly slow, but after that you can be at the top with t2 frigs, and after a year you are at the top with the ship of your choosing.

As for cash most old players are poor, well if they PVP - if you PVP and just join an 0.0 alliance getting the cash for close to endless t1 frig action is cheap in time. I made 40mil ISK per hour in decent 0.0 systems after 4 months of playing and was able to loose two t2 geared ceptors for that hour in PVP later fighting against the best with no problem.

The people then that are close to unreachable are a few hi-end pvpers that are really good at what they do and have afford skillwise and isk wise to fly ships worth 6-8 bilion iskies.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

EVE would make a great single player game. As it is, it takes too long and is too painful to get anywhere. I gave up on it simply because I didn't have the time to commit to it to warrant the $30 a month. For the same price I can bang around in Freespace 2 and get the same "OMG space!" feel that I was looking for.

Also, no skill queue. Why? Because "it'd help the farmers". You work the logic behind that one out.