EVE General Discussion

Just a question for you - how do you think EVE is for a casual player? And would you change it if you could, and in what ways?

In my experience EVE can be played casual, whenever I log on I can achieve something. But due to the inevitable grind of having to earn ISK for ships, implants etc a lot of a casual player's time is spent running missions etc. I just don't understand how people can run them all day lol, they're as bad as miners. Anyway, I digress. Casual-EVE can be daunting especially in regards to newer players. Whats your opinion?

This thread is sure to point out the wide range of peoples' opinions of what casual play is. You play a few hours a day. I play a few hours a week.

Eve can be played casually but you miss out on a lot of what the game is about. I don't really have time to fleet up with other players. The logistics of getting everyone together just eats up too much time with my severely limited play time and scheduled events I can rarely justify penciling in time to play a video game.

Most solo content in Eve is really, really bad. I ran missions for a while. Too repetitive and once I got into trading, the rewards seemed not worth the time. I tried mining. Even worse than missions in all respects with the added bonus of potentially getting a hulk suicide ganked that'll take a ridiculous amount of mining to replace. I tried exploration, slightly more interesting than missions but it got to the point where the rewards still weren't worth the time when compared to trading. I'd scan down the sites and then not bother running them. I could make vastly more money spending that time on trading activities and running sites wasn't exactly exciting. Being in low sec was really the only exciting part but even avoiding getting ganked gets stale after a while.

In short Eve's solo game is pretty pathetic. Solo is what you often get stuck with when you're a casual player because the logistics of working with others usually means lots of waiting on said other players. If I hadn't got hooked on trading, I wouldn't still be playing. I delude myself with the fairy tale that once I reach that mythical future time with copious amounts of time to play video games, I'll have tons of isk to have fun with. The reality is I'm probably amassing this huge pile of isk and skills and won't do anything with it but print more isk.

No you can't have my stuff. I like my fairy tale.

EDIT: Hey! So much for an interesting discussion I suppose.

No need to remove it. It is a interesting topic that does pertain to this section. Also its a lot better discussion then some of the other **** threads that populate GD.

There are a lot of opportunities for casual play.

For PVE: If you're solo, missions are obvious, and exploration is great for "I've got two hours to kill tonight". Group PVE is harder on a "casual" basis: it usually requires a time investment to put together a group and get where you need to be. However, if you've got a group of casual gamers and you make some plans ahead of time, it's certainly possible to field a fleet of casual gamers to spend a couple of hours running incursions.

For PVP: Lowsec is probably the most obvious way to go here. You can log in, prowl for a while, maybe get a few kills (or losses) and then log off. If any of your corpmates/friends in the area are active, you'd even have a fleet to work in. It's definitely harder to jump in and out of PVP quickly as you might hunt targets for longer than you have to play, but it can still be fun.

what kills the casual gamer is: Time sinks.

All the time sinks in the game that add nothing to the game at all.
1. Warping.. how much time have you wasted staring at the warp screen? Whats the point?
2. Fitting a ship with the current market. If I want to fit out a ship I have to run all over space finding the mods I need to fit out a ship. All the time traveling to 50 star gates and back to fit out a ship is a waste of time. Unless you only live in a trade-hub, you will need to travel to pick up some stupid mod for you're ship.

There are tons of little time sinks in the game that kill my ability to play the game cause I'm just not un-employed enough to play this game.

The time investment eve asks is ridiculous.

Confirming this.

Buying ships and modules in bulk and paying someone to ferry them to my staging systems eliminated 90% of my timesink woes.


Courier contracts are cheap to set up. Just make sure you set a high enough collateral.

a casual gamer doesn't have the isk to buy in bulk....

i joined RVB with an alt and moved 100 of 1 of each race frigates and all the t1/t2 mods needed to fit those frigates...well most of them.

I spent 800Million isk buying the T1 frigates and mods in Jita and moving them to the RVB system. I played for 2 weeks till I got bored and then forgot about the account for a year and a half. I just recently logged in and sold all the frigates/mods for 600Million isk.

I've got isk to blow in the game, I don't care, but the casual gamer doesn't have isk like that. Not everyone has tens of billions of isk to play with.

I don't see a casual gamer spending 500million on mods at a time. Where is he getting that kind of isk from?

We are talking casual gamer here, not veteran player with multi accounts.

I can casually make a billion or two a week in game logging in 1 hour or so a day but I know what I'm doing and have the account(s) and experience/skill points, to do so.

Of all the expansions since i've played this game, 1 change i noticed was the removal of the session change to change ships in the station. That was miserable for the longest time and adds nothing at all the the game what so ever...... You remember docking and staring at you're screen for ever waiting to change ships????? F-.

A Casual player really doesn't need 100 of each race's frigates with 100 set of fitting mods in one go either now does he?

also RvB is pretty high up there on ship attrition if the Dev blog was accurate so not a good baseline.

I'd guess that 20 ship hulls and fittings would still qualify as worth buying and getting freighted about.

PVE you'd probably be able to get away with 3-4 I'm guessing?

the point was there are other options beyond jumping for 20-30 minutes just to get the high slot fittings for your ship everytime it blows up.

This issue was a big deal to CCP for a while and they srated dumbing down the game in a quest to get more customers.

Then they realized that many people play EVE for the challenge and complexity and they were actually turning away the most involved players.

Now they are removing needless complexity when they can(like interface issues) but they have stopped trying to appeal to players who want brain dead game play.

Agreed. Casual doesn't necessarily mean a dumber crowd though. I can't play a lot because I have work etc, but the complexity of EVE is what attracted me to it instead of an MMO like WoW for example.