EVE General Discussion

The best description of the EVE new player experience I saw went something along the lines of "Being a new player in EVE is like being a fresh faced golden haired little kid released into an incredible funfair full of awesome rides and ruthless pedophiles. But if you stick with it and put the effort in, one day you too can become one of those pedophiles!"

In my opinion it is because of a few reasons:

1) Eve is made up of sociopaths and psychopaths, the large majority of people exist on it in order to cause the most pain possible to other people. Don't get me wrong I have also met some great guys on it, but the vast majority of my player interactions are people trying to hurt me in some way .

2) It has a very steep learning curve and slow progression. Yes you can be useful in a smaller ship but most eve newbies see the bigger ships and want one, and it may take forever to get to one.

3) The new player experience isn't all that great, I must of got ganked at least a few times before I met my corp and started learning the game.

4) When you are new it is surprisingly hard to make ISK, requiring a huge input of effort. Yes it gets easier after learning the game mechanics and all, but it takes a while to learn them.

5) It has very little in the way of a buffer against crushing loss. Imagine you are a newbie, save up for ages for a shiny new ship, and as you un-dock it you get blown up, its demoralizing. Yes you shouldn't un-dock in what you can't afford to lose, but who can honestly say they have never done that and then lost their ship.

6) In the end it is a point and click game. Yes there is a lot of strategy to it, and fitting is a seriously acquired skill, however many people don't realise you have usually won or lost the fight before you even un-dock.

Don't get me wrong, I love eve, and I love the social and fun aspect of it, yet it does have some pretty fundamental issues that make it very hard for beginners to get into it.

This couldn't be further from the truth. I've never met a single person in EVE who wanted to hurt me.

But I've met plenty of people who have wanted to blow up my internet spaceship.



I've never flown what I couldn't replace several times over. Why would you want to do that?

It has a higher population than its country of origin and is the only MMO I know of whose population is still increasing after like 8 years instead of almost dead after decreasing for about 6-7 of those years. Its only real competition in the PvP sandbox MMO genre is Darkfall now that Beyond Protocol closed and Eve has way more subscribers than DF, making Eve the most popular MMO in the genre. Sounds pretty successful to me.


Because Eve is hard and your actions can have consequences and the average person is pants-on-head ******** and fears risk. Contrast with WoW where I met a level 56 warrior who asked me when he gets defense stance, then insulted my intelligence when I told him level 10. For reference, the level cap was 60 at the time and I was playing a warlock. When you have to be told you missed one of your core abilities by 46 levels by someone who doesn't play your class, Eve is not a game your feeble, atrophied mind can grasp. Yet he managed to get almost to max level. In Eve he would never have made it out of his newbie ship from dying too often and that's assuming he didn't quit by the end of the tutorial because what's left of his brain hurt.

OK here is a question for everyone and this includes all the 'elite' players in the game.

How many of you play a stand alone game like say Skyrim and start up the game, play for 3 maybe 4 hours or more, without saving the game until you exit?

Or are you the type of gamer that saves before each 'I might be killed' encounter, before you open every door, before anything that might harm your character?

This is the problem for new players in Eve, there is no 'Save game' everything carries on playing whether you are playing or not. If you play WOW you know (unless there is a major update), that what you were doing when you logged out you will be doing when you log in again. With Eve anything could happen while you are away and what you discover when you log in may be totally different to when you left.

For some this is fun and part of the appeal of Eve, but for the instant gratification (and sometimes casual) player this can be hell.

I would say its because the gameplay and skill mechanics of the game itself doesn't match the standard action/play now for carrot that is prevalent in most multiplayer games today.

Because of this, it will remain a niche game, for better or worse. But I am thankful for our unique sandbox universe

It requires intelligence. Consequences have to be accounted for. Unlike other MMOs which have dilluted consequences over the years, Eve kept them and improved on them. Also, those consequences can be dealt by players which gives it another level.

Judging by this thread, most EVE-players know why non-EVE-players don't play EVE.
And it has something to do with how super incredibly amazing you have to be to play EVE.

Fixed.

People have been saying that for 9 years, but it seems that making realistic space simulations isn't as easy as one might assume, because no one else has even come close. I've lost count of the number of games that were supposed to "kill" EVE; Tor, Star Trek, Perpetuum, Darkfall... someone fill in the gaps for me here, they pop up about every 10-14 months or so.

The plain fact is that for all the minor things that we complain about in EVE, there are a number of very important major things that EVE gets right and no other game does, and we tend to take them for granted until we try those "EVE killers" that lack them.

Things like a genuine player economy sufficiently robust enough that it's actually worth protecting it from botting, PLEX, a lassiez-faire approach to player interactions, the hi/low/0.0 sec system, not having to grind xp, not having "character classes", not having "character levels", a dev community that actually directly communicates with and listens to the players and is allowed to have a sense of humour and talk like real human beings while they're doing it, ship balancing that's done well enough that only a third or so of the hundreds of available ships aren't popular, continual development even after 9 years, free expansions, single server.... it's a very big list of USPs.

Unfortunately the problem with Unique Selling Points is that they can be hard to market to people who don't understand why they're important because they've never experienced them because they're unique...



Also, EVE's PvE is terrible, come on guys, let's get with the program here.