EVE New Citizens Q&A

from http://poeticstanziel.blogspot.ca/2012/05/theme-parkers-guide-to-eve-online-part.html

So, you've been playing theme park MMOs (World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Everquest, Star Trek Online, Rifts, Final Fantasy, plus many more) for most of your online gaming career. You want a change of pace; tired of that endless grind for new gear, that singular path through the game.

You've installed and logged in to EVE and you're completely confused. So little seems to correlate to your every experience with MMOs.

While EVE Online is definitely very much different than the theme park MMOS, it also shares quite a bit on common with them too. There are certain gaming tropes that even EVE cannot escape, though it does a fair job of obfuscating them.

Let's start from the beginning. (I'll toss in links for additional reading. This will not be an in-depth tutorial, but rather an overview and guide.)

Character Creation
First you'll choose a race for your character. This is purely an aesthetic choice. The various races offer no in-game advantage, other than a few starting skills (a savings of maybe three or four hours.) Choose Caldari, you'll start with Caldari Frigate. Choose Gallente, you'll start with Gallente Frigate. There are other skills you'll receive depending on which sub-race and school/discipline you choose. But again, nothing more than a few hours advantage from skilling them from scratch.

Then it's on to the character creator. Spend some time here, for sure. It is definitely the best character creation system in any MMO currently on the market. The amount of customization you can do to your character is overwhelming; just fiddling with the different muscle groups alone will have you tweaking for quite awhile.

But there is an irony here. Create a gorgeous character, but it is likely the last time you'll see that character again, for at least the next year or two. There's the captain's quarters to be sure, but in a couple weeks you'll disable those and set your hangar to the default view while docked (I've only ever seen the Minmatar and Caldari quarters. I still have no idea what the Gallente and Amarr quarters look like.)

One day, CCP will get Walking in Stations right, and that beautiful character you created will see the light of a station.

Character Levelling
Unlike other MMOs, you don't gain experience points for killing stuff. You don't have points to expend on skills. You don't improve only while logged in and playing. EVE Online utilizes a very different system of character improvement. It revolves around the skill queue.

Basically, you add skills to your queue, and you learn them. The only function to learning is time, and you can affect the time it takes to learn a skill by altering your attribute scores. You alter your attributes by remapping them and through the use if implants.

The only use for attributes is to affect the time it takes to learn new skills.

The unique aspect of the skill queue is that you continue to learn, online or offline. Insert a skill onto the queue that takes 24 hours to learn. Log out. Log back into the game 24 hours later, the skill will have completed.

At this point, you're probably thinking, "If skill learning is all time based, then I can never catch up to the older players." That is true, but EVE Online is a game that goes well beyond the numbers. Being a successful player is more than just the skills you've learned, it's about experience, and tactics, and wherewithal. A player with 5M skill points, specialized in frigates, can quite easily beat a five year old player with 100M skill points who might be flying the same frigate. Whereas the skill points you have in various disciplines will play a factor, your personal aptitude playing the game, figuring out the weaknesses of your opponents, will play an even bigger factor.

Class Roles
You've come from the standard MMO field, where there are the classic roles: tank, damage dealer (DPS), healer, kiter, crowd control, and buffer. These tropes are not missing from EVE Online, though they are obfuscated and there is much bleed over between them.

Tanks are generally the big ships, like the battleships or the heavy assault ships, but these are also prime damage dealers. The true damage dealers are the ships with high alpha damage, such as the tier 3 battlecruisers, lots of fire power, not much defense. The healers are the logisitics cruisers, they specialize in remote armour and shield repping. Crowd control can be played with the fast frigates with their webifiers and warp scramblers, but also the destroyer-sized Interdictor with their warp disruption bubbles. Kiters are interceptors and Dramiels, though many other ships can be fit for speed. Buffers are usually the command ships, with gang link modules designed to boost certain statistics fleet wide, also leadership skills play another role in fleet buffing.

Other roles, perhaps more unique to EVE Online than other games are the scouts, played with the covert ops ships. And of course the bait, which are generally heavily armoured to survive long enough to get a warp in for your friendly fleet.

Character Classes
"Okay, " you're thinking. "You talked alot about class roles, but you never mentioned character classes only the ship we fly. What's up with that?" You're anxious to roll a Miner or a Bounty Hunter and start playing EVE Online. Keep reading, you're in for a bit of surprise.

Your standard theme park MMO is the log ride. You choose a class, and that's your role going forward. There is no deviation from that choice. You're on a single track. Once a tank, always a tank.

EVE Online offers no such limitations. There is nothing so strict as character classes in EVE ...

(continued at link above due to character limitations on these forums.)

Easier:

1.) Do you have played other MMO's before:

- Yes, go to Q2
- No, go to A1

2.) Do you expect safety, and GMs to hold your hand while you play:

- Yes, go to A2
- No, go to Q3

3.) Can you forget all stuff that is related to other MMO's you played before:

- Yes, go to A1
- No, go to A2


====

A1: Welcome to EVE Online, a total sandbox game where you can do whatever you want. Be open to new experiences and learn from anything you do (both good things and mistakes).

A2: EVE Online is not like other MMO's and from the looks of it you will have a hard time playing the game. You can try but don't expect you will like it a lot

There is a fundamental difference in the way Eve works compared to the way other MMOs work. Eve has no plot, questline, never-ending grind for XP/gear, and really no endgame at all (no, it doesn't have a PvP focused endgame). You are not able to spend any significant amount of time in Eve without interacting/affecting others (or them butting into you), which you are able to do in other MMOs. Eve is not "fair". Et cetera...

"Theme park MMO" refers to the sort of "classic" MMO formula that leads you through a sequence of events, possible repetitive grinding, then opens up an "end game" situation to you where you have limited competition with others. Eve has none of that. Eve is more about the sandbox, and thus about being offered a virtual universe and some tools, and making your own game out of it, instead of getting the things you can do given to you on a silver platter.

"Theme park MMO" deserves some explanation.

A theme park MMO is sort of what it sounds like. A guided tour. There is a clear path and progression for your character through a mostly static set of artifacts. Level to level cap, and progress to end game PvP usually PvE. This happens by a series of quest lines that take you through the game every step of the way. Thus you consume the game content. Typically, expansions, and even updates, obsolete previous content, and you never see it again in a meaningful way.

Compare to a "sandbox", like EVE, which is much more open-ended. After the tutorial missions, there is no indication as to what to do next. There is no level cap. There is no end game. Past the starter missions, EVE is a rather boring PvE game. You can mine. You can run missions. It gets boring very quickly. The point of the sandbox though is for the players to create their own content. Not literally, with actual in-game assets, but through interactions with other players. The game is by necessity PvP focused. Expansion and game updates ADD TO the game content providing more options. Add more toys to the sandbox, so to speak. Old toys are not thrown out in favour of the new ones.

The major consequence of the differences is that a sandbox MMO can easily consume all available time, whereas a theme park MMO content is quickly exhausted and becomes stale; you can't raid Dragon Soul every day for example, and even if you could it would only take an hour or two and it would always be the same. Even the PvP gets repetitive, with most opponents using a small set of "cookie cutter" setups and tactics. The sandbox content is always evolving, and you can directly influence it yourself with your participation, or create your own story over time that other players will participate in. In other words, what you do actually matters.

While EVE is not a unique snowflake (what is?), it is certainly one of the best and most popular examples of a sandbox MMO, contrasting with the more mainstream and approachable theme park MMOs.