EVE General Discussion

I've been playing Eve for about 2 and a half weeks now. I didn't even have to wait for the first week of my 14 day trial to finish before I bought time, as I fell in love with the concept and game play of Eve immediately. It is so unique in it's development and advancement...it is my favorite MMO to date, and I'm sure it will be for many years to come. Personally, I didn't have too much trouble picking up how the game works because I took things 1 step at a time and read every bit of information that came my way so I didn't miss anything. The training missions were very fun, and very rewarding in my opinion, and helped me get a good grasp of how I wanted my character to develop.

That being said, as far as skills go, skills aren't the game. Skills allow for expanding of the game experience, but they are by no means the game itself. I can't even use cruisers at this point, yet I find this game so fascinating and rewarding. Cruising around in my destroyer, frigates, industrial ship, it doesn't matter what ship, there is plenty of things to do in Eve to keep the fun flowing. And missioning and gaming with my corp is the most fun I've ever had on an online game. Personally, I find it wonderful that achieving the things I want in this game takes time and dedication. It adds a new element of strategy and planning, just laying out the skills that I want and acquiring them in the most effective, time-efficient manner.

The summary is:
1. This game is very unique - There are thousands of different MMOs out there, and hundreds of them are pretty much identical in concept and gameplay to hundreds other (especially your traditional fantasy games like Wow, Conquer, DDO, Runescape, Tibia, etc) Eve is set apart from these in nearly every way. Some people like it, some don't.
2. Skills aren't the game - Playing the game is the game. You can do pretty much any kind of activity in the game with lv 1 skills trained in the area of what you want to do. More skills just makes you more effective at doing what you want, and lets you take on more challenges. And while your skills are training, you can do anything you want. You don't have to drone on doing activities over and over that increase a specific skill to get better in that skill. You can go enjoy the game while your skills take care of themselves.
3. Eve is a game - If you find the game fun, good for you. If not, there are thousands of other MMOs to try. Not everyone who finds the level-up character, exp gaining, dungeon raiding, army commanding, spend all your time on the game in order to advance a lot game play, will enjoy Eve. Quite the contrary, I think, as Eve requires an actual lapse of time to move on to bigger and better things, spreading out the developing game play experience. Which leads me on to point 4...
4. Eve keeps it fresh. It's how the game is designed - As an example, I know a friend who can make a new WoW character and get it to lv 85 in a month. From there, there is nowhere to go except to dungeoning over and over and over and over and trying to acquire every single item in the game just because they already got the best stuff in that time. The way Eve makes you wait to actually achieve something worthwhile keeps an opportunity there to experience something new over a very long period of time.
And my last point, which may be the most significant to address this post with...
5. Eve is built to facilitate gradual and easy learning by new players - Eve offers so many opportunities for new players to take it slow and really absorb the game as they experience new things. You have your training missions (which can be accepted or passed over, allowing the veteran players to get right to what they like). The training missions provide a very good insight to many of the different options available to players, and how ships and modules work. You have corporations, which help out new players. Even if a player hasn't actively joined a corp, each player is always in one and the corp is there to answer question. Further, to that end, there is a specific channel dedicated completely to answering questions that players have. Given the fact that Eve has one of the smallest communities for an MMO, there are a surprisingly large number of players that help out and give answers in the help channel at any given time. AND LASTLY, the long skill times that you don't like and think does more harm that good to new players......those skill times allow new players to really learn what they're doing by making them wait to move on to bigger and better things! This allows players to really grasp and understand the little things before moving on to the complicated things. Imagine if a player had access to everything right off the bat. In that instance, a new player would be so overwhelmed that I would be surprised if any new player actually stayed longer than their first login to try Eve.

If a new player joins Eve and doesn't like it, it's because they don't like this kind of game, not because having hardly any skills to start with is no fun. And if you are pushing them to try and gain skills and items so that they can be powerful quickly, you're robbing them of their enjoyable Eve experience as a new player. In such a case, it is no surprise that a new player wouldn't want to play Eve again.

This guy, right here?

He gets it.

Exactly. I'm glad you understand. The rest of your post makes no sense though.

Didn't he also say, "Brevity is the soul of wit."?

This is not the MMO you are looking for *waves hand*

But seriously, it's not. This is an old skool MMO and one of the few around that has something of the feel of a virtual world about it. That's why the people that like it like it. It's not for everyone. Yes it's a timesink that makes money for CCP, but the other side of the coin is that in requiring more commitment than your average MMO, it becomes more of a virtual world where the players are committed to co-creating content for each other.

I understand that it seems like it could be a great game if it were streamlined in many ways, and to some extent there's always room for improvement, especially in easing players into the game. But the fundamental design is solid, and I doubt it's ever going to change.

It's also just about the only highly-developed s-f MMO out there at the moment, and it might be tempting to consider that it might get more players if it were streamlined.

But no. I love it the way it is, I love that it's got a steep learning curve, I love that it's got huge depth, I love that it takes time to develop skills, and I love that you don't have to endlessly grind in-game to get those skills.

Everyone who plays the game managed to get through the learning curve. If you like, it "separates the men from the boys", and it means that you get a somewhat more thoughtful level of player on average (although some numpties will always get through )

And anyway, it's not all that hard, just think, use your noddle, puzzle things out - it's not as if the EVE playerbase isn't one of the most helpful around (so long as they're not raping your ass or trying to con you ).

T1 blobber.

<3

And nothing you rant about makes skill points any more essential to EVE. It takes less than 2 months to be able to fly all 12 Tech one battle cruisers and everything below, fit and rig them. T2 adds at most 10% to your performance over the Meta 4 versions and when you are in a fleet you won't even notice.

I'm not going to waste my time trying to convince anyone it's a good system or a bad system. It's just a simple truth.
Zergs win in EVE and the glory of having a massive alliance is, you never have trouble finding a fleet. They aren't going to turn you down because you have a Meta 4 fit Oracle or even a Meta 1 fit hurricane. Your dps is 600, mine is 520. In a 100 man fleet, do you think it will matter?