EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hi all,

Well this is my first post and I have been playing Eve for a couple of weeks. Prior to my trial account I watched a bunch a video's, read a bunch of forum posts, geared up on my Eve lore and Eve history a bit. I knew I was going to love this game. I had been without a computer (living off of an iPad) for over a year and ended up splurging on a top of the line macbook pro retina.

All was great until my client started freezing, sometimes all the time. I wrote petitions but let's just say CCP wasn't that helpful. Made it to the Mac forum and found the thread about the dreaded mac client. I am so bummed, basically the CCP dev that was helping me told me not to get a years subscription which I was wanting to do because there was not big new mac patch coming. Seems it's a known issue that hits some mac users. Mine was getting so bad the last night I played it dropped like ten times in an hour. So basically I couldn't play.

So after hearing the disheartening news from the CCP dev I pretty much gave up stopped logging in, my training stopped and I began to buy a bunch of other games to fill the void and my need to play some cool video games on my new computer. So yeah Starcraft II is fun, Diablo is neat, Portal well is mostly for my wife and I can't' really find anyone to play Left 4 Dead with. Looked at WOW but I just can't. I want a sandbox, I want to play with and against people. I want Eve.

So after about a few days of not playing and with only 6 days left on my 21 day trial I log back on. I play a few glorious hours. Then I get the client freeze. I play again and finish my Epic arc mission and save the game and write this. I don't really want to do the bootcamp windows thing. There is no rhyme or reason to this darn mac client freeze. I really don't even know why I am writing this. I want to play and today I had what was for me was a good day with only one freeze but should I accept this? I just know if I pay for a subscription and have a horrible night where it's just one disconnect after another I will be resentful but oh how I do love to play this game. I haven't even gotten to fly around with people yet or do PVP. I really can't wait but worry this mac client thing might make my game unplayable.

If I buy the year subscription I get a discount so that is why I wanted to dive in, that and I know I like this game. Sucks because I totally maxed out my computer to play this game and see it in all it's glory and I didn't know about this mac client thing. Anyway I feel a bit cheated that CCP puts out a Mac client that they know has a bug but can't or won't fix. I am confused, I want the Eve community, the Eve experience but I don't know if today was just a fluke day or not.

I think I will play for a few more days, but I really want to buy a membership to join the Uni and begin to meet people and expand my game but who is going to want to go out and do things with me if they can't count on me being there due to the client freezes? How much will the fear of my game freezing change the way I play? Lord I am rambling, anybody have a magic wand?

Greetings

I have been playing on a Mac for awhile. A lot of the time a freeze is a Graphics card issue, I believe the new MBP scales the use of the onboard card and the discrete card. Just a thought, make sure the discrete card is running the game. EVE hates integrated cards. Although, I have never had major issues, I think I would Boot camp EVE, but then again I am addicted. Get out while you can...

Sry but with mac users being the minority in al ost every game out there mac clients tend to be low on the list for receiving bug fixes and eve is no differnt there.

Id do as mentioned above and use bootcamp to install a windows partition for when you want to play games

Which mac are you using? It could be a hardware/heat issue rather than the client, especially if the client seems to lock up after a few minutes of gameplay or so. See if you can get a hardware monitor for your CPU and video card temperatures it might provide a bit of a clue.

Thanks for all the replies. My last couple of game sessions have gone pretty well. I am always shutting down my computer before playing Eve and making sure nothing else is running. My client still freezes but noticeably less and mostly in station. I think I can live with this. I have 4 days left on my trial account and if I keep getting this kind of gameplay I will make the plunge.

I think I will be heading to boot camp and Windows though as the current state of the mac client really isn't acceptable. Sure sucks that they don't have a native Mac client and really CCP should be embarrassed by this product and do the right thing and fix it or write a native client. They only rub is I think I will wait until Windows 8 as I don't want to buy Windows 7 and then spend another $40 bucks to upgrade to 8. So I will just have to live with this for a few more months.

Thanks again.

I am not sure what you mean by wis and I haven't tried walking around, I will next time. Yeah I know the quarters puts more strain on the system but I kind of like it, the news on the wall and the look and all. I did try for a bit turning it off but not really testing if it would help and I only did it for a bit. I think I will try it again because tonight was a bad night with like 3 disconnects in a couple of hours 2 of them in station. This client should be shot.

Walking in stations / Captains Quarters is a really big strain on the mac. I use a macbook pro. I've experienced numerous issues over the years and it's a pain in the ***.

I have most graphic settings set to low/medium or switched off wich helps as well. Atm i'm experiencing client crashes when i jump through a gate or undock with a large gang. No crashes in station. But then again, i don't even try walking around.

Ship spinning FTW !!

The crash you're describing is caused by a memory leak in the Mac client introduced with Crucible. How much RAM do you have? The more you have, the less you'll crash.

I use Memory Free 2. It puts a little pie chart in your bar that shows you memory usage; yellow is in use, green is free, and blue is "inactive" aka memory leak. If you run out of green, EVE freezes. When you see the green part of the pie chart getting eaten up by blue, hit the "Free Now" button. (You sometimes have to reboot Memory Free to get the button to show up.) It purges your memory and keeps you running. Just don't hit that button mid-combat, it'll freeze up your system for about 10-15 seconds or so while it dumps the inactive memory. (Also, don't use auto-free as you'll randomly get that 15 second freeze whenever it dumps the memory.)