EVE General Discussion

And old players do their absolute best to exploit, harass and otherwise abuse the new players instead of getting them hooked. Kind of like slaughtering your chickens as soon as they hatch instead of waiting a few months.

It really depends on what you consider to be "depth". For example, combat in EVE is fairly cut and dry. Your setup is locked in the moment you undock. If you show up with scissors, and the other guy shows up with two machineguns, you die. Yes, there's a lot of numbers and equations that explain just how horrible your death will be in the grand scheme of horrible deaths, but the end is still the same.

EVE is "deep", but consider other games. Like a game with line of sight and collision detection. Suddenly, breaking line of sight (LoS) allows you to mitigate all but DoT (damage-over-time) damage. I remember being in a match that ended up in a 2v1 because my buddy disconnected. They had me dead to rights, but they got overconfident, overextended, and one of them broke line of sight to his own healer for a few seconds, which I exploited with a well-timed burst and dropped him. Suddenly a hopeless 2v1 became 1v1, with me nearly dead, and the other guy being a (very) survivable healer. What ensued was lots of kiting, and some cannibalism, until I recovered and took him on and won.

Now, let me ask you, can you do that in "deep" EVE? That is, you are fighting alone against a gank + logi. Can you get the gank ship to LoS his own logi? Well, no, you can't. At best you can perhaps lure the gank ship away, but if logi simply has a "keep at X km" set, he will automatically keep proper distance. How is that "deep"? Similarly, can you hide your ship behind an asteroid when you see a volley of missiles coming? Nope. In most other games, you can. Heck, in one recently released MMO many attacks have a parabolic trajectory, which grows with distance, and that sometimes means the attack can't be completed because the projectile will get blocked along the way. That is, you have clear line of sight to target, but because of the path the projectile must take, the target is protected.

That same game had an active roll mechanic, where your character would execute an evasive roll on command, avoiding all damage and control attacks. ALL of them. You could only do it twice in a short period, and if you got juked into it, you'd waste them on relatively harmless attacks and then the wrecking ball would come down and you'd lose. And it would all be about player skill - if you don't react fast enough and do just the right thing (roll in the right direction), you'd likely lose. Imagine in EVE being able to boost your ship's shields to absorb all in coming damage, but you'd have to do it the second you saw the attack coming, and you could only realistically do this twice per fight, maybe 3 times at most. But imagine what it would do to EVE combat, especially if turret fire wasn't instantaneous. Suddenly, alpha wouldn't be king any more. It would still kill distracted people, but someone paying attention would do an evasive roll or two and live with no damage taken! Suddenly, it's not clear-cut black-and-white.

Then, that same game had other interesting combat mechanic - various effects changed based on surroundings. An arrow, by itself, did damage but no burning. But an arrow passing through a wall of fire left by another class would become a fire arrow, and do more damage AND apply a burning DoT to the victim. Now, imagine in EVE a special ship type projecting a cone in front of itself, within which normal physics would be suspended. That is, if you get shot at, but you move, the projectiles and missiles would miss you, because they would continue flying to where you used to be (lose guidance/self-targeting/etc.) Suddenly, ship formations become very important.

Next, consider another MMO, such as Pirates of the Burning Sea. In many ways, it was similar to EVE. The difference was, different ammo types attacked different parts of the ship with different effects. Bar and chain against sails, grapeshot against crew, ball shot against hull, etc. You did not need to sink the enemy ship to win, if you killed all of the crew, it would be enough. The game also had melee combat. As in, you could board the enemy ship if it was slowed enough (either by forcing it to sail in the wrong direction depending on wind, by destroying its sails, by physically stopping it with another ship (collision detection, etc.), you could board it and duke it out with the enemy captain using swords and fighting techniques (three schools - dirty fighting, Florentine fencing and classical fencing, each with distinct abilities). And if you won that, you didn't even need to do anything else, you could even capture a ship without sinking it. Imagine losing a titan, but not actually having it destroyed, but taken by the enemy and used against you! In PotBS, that happened, a 1st class Ship-of-Line was captured by a pirate and sailed away. Also, the game had numerous other mechanics - weapons had specific arcs of fire, you could hide behind enemy and friendly ships to avoid taking damage from that ship (I once survived by hiding behind an 18 gun ship from a 43 gun ship, something you can't do in EVE). Depending on where you were shot, damage would be different - shots from the rear were most damaging, shots from the front mostly glancing. Again, doesn't exist in EVE.

Bottom line? Depth is in the eye of the beholder. In some ways, EVE is very deep. In other ways, it is childishly simplistic.

Lack of WiS.

When I've tried EVE for the first time and understood I have to roleplay a ship (which can be blown up) I closed game and didn't return for 5 years. Now it's a jail cell.

Topic title.
in your opinion what do you think draws players that first start out away from subbing their accounts ?

Topic title. in your opinion what do you think draws players that first start out away from subbing their accounts ?