EVE General Discussion

It's all Fun and Games until you lose your favorite pawn.

Also to OP
I think your question is backwards.

Should Read "Is Harsh Fun?"

The fact that Eve has Consequences that can be harsh makes it engaging. When you are engaged by any activity it is fun.

Not to say Easy and without consequences is not also fun, just in different ways.

i was looking for something...new. something better and more engaging and exciting than WoW, rift, GW or AoC had given me.

so i came here.

...and found...mining.

jokes aside, i found that i enjoyed this game a lot. i met some really great people right off the bat and i found a solid use for my market playing skills i'd picked up powertrading the auction houses in the other MMO's i'd played. but it was different in EvE because i actually had to move these things i was buying cheap to sell them high. added a new element i'd never encountered before. potential danger. there was risk involved. the whole contract thing intrigued me as well.

Eve IS a harsh game. You have to work for your success, knowledge about complexe gamemechanics can give you a huge advantage and you can suffer (or deal) serious losses. But victorys also tastes much better. I think thats exactly what many, especially older players, like about this game. Most games released in the last years are far to easy to be a real challenge.

This video has a good point about that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ZtBCpo0eU

Unfortunately, that diversity has been deliberately whittled yet again away in this latest patch. The patch admits that it's goal was to make PvE look more like PvP, regardless of the desires of the PvE subscription base. The entire "nerf hisec" movement is just more of the same: An attempt to force people out of one corner of the sandbox and into another by pooping in it until it becomes unbearable to live in any more, thus shrinking the overall size of the sanebox and forcing everyone to play the exact same game, again whether they want to or not.

Future subscription rates will reflect the error of these decisions.

im pve subscription base,so there is such thing

i didnt start playing eve because of pvp,for the past year and a half i played many pvp games and quite frankly im fckin tired of it

so i wanted something different,because its easy to destroy,much harder is to build

EVE is a tough mistress, without it it would be some generic game, where if you f*k up you go back to a save with all your gear and try again.

But what brought me here where spaceships. And then the OMG finally no boundaries getting sick of linear gameplay.
And then I learned about the rest and got addicted.

Hook, line & sinker. Nice tarp CCP.

Eve has longevity which won't become stale after an expansion or two *WoW* just because of how it is. Unless something really terrible happens that we can't foresee *CCP headquarers geting hit by an asteroid*, I can see Eve lasting another 10 years.

*facepalm*

You could do like I did, create a feral druid or undead rogue and go crush them into a blood puddle directly in there

I am of the unpopular opinion that EVE is no harsher or more meaningful than most other MMOs on the market. In fact, in some areas I feel what you can accomplish in EVE is generally meaningless.

What I mean is, consider an epic warlock mount in vanilla WoW. That was an accomplishment. It was a long chain of quests, most of which had to be done solo, but the final stage required a 5-man run through a long dungeon, and doing a specific event where you as an individual must maintain a ritual to completion, while the rest of the group help fight off the demons. If you screw up, everyone dies. And if you, the human player, just don't have the skills to pull it all off, you will NOT get that mount. Ever.

Thus, getting one of those back in the day was a pretty big accomplishment. If you saw someone riding one, you knew they've been through hell to get it, not to mention the monetary expense required to complete that chain. Same goes for some titles in the game, for example the Gladiator title. Only about 4% of top-ranked Arena players got that title. So, if you saw someone with a Gladiator title, odds were very good he's a fantastic player. Because in a 2v2 or 3v3 scenario, a bad player wouldn't get into the top 4%. There were also unique (legendary) items that were readily recognizable and took a very long time to get - one of the guildies worked for 8 months to get just one. Things like that were an accomplishment, and had meaning. Because you KNEW that THAT player DID those things, and succeeded where many have failed. There was content in that game that less than 10% of the overall population ever got to see, that's how difficult it was.

Now, compare that to EVE. Suppose I want the "best" ship in the game, for PvE. Say a Marauder. What does this entail, for me as a player? Well, 6 months of training or so, and a couple of billion ISK. So, what does that mean? It means I can buy 20 PLEX from CCP, and buy a character capable of flying a marauder, and sell the rest of PLEX on the market and buy a Marauder. I can go from zero to having a fully trained character with a Marauder by the end of the day. As long as I have the $$$. As such, what possible attachment or meaning can there be to the character or the ship? Further, when I look at another character in the game, it tells me NOTHING about that person. Because I don't know if he bought the character or not, and because I don't know if any of the stuff he has was actually achieved by him, or simply bought.

As such, I find it very difficult to attach any meaning to anything in EVE. In many cases, it's not earned, and it wasn't achieved through player skill. More often than not it is simply the result of passive character training plus $$$. Or just $$$, since passive training is basically SP for $$$ spent. Which is a classic Pay2Win. Suppose I were a multi-billionaire and could spend a hundred thousand dollars a month on EVE. What would the challenge be? I would only fly multi-boxed T3s, with faction/officer fittings in every slot, with booster alts, and I'd slaughter most things that got in the way. And any ship loss would be meaningless, because I would be injecting so many dollars into the game I couldn't possibly lose more ships than I could afford to buy. As such, what meaning is there to the game? None.

Same goes for EVE's harshness. It's really not. Consider the mere existence of local. In no MMO I have ever played was there a tool that would let everyone (including the enemies) know how many people are in immediate vicinity, and who they were, instantly. That, by itself, is such a laughable mechanic that it renders any "hard" argument null and void. Even the most carebear games with world PvP don't have the equivalent of a local channel. Further, consider the mere existence of CONCORD. Where if you attack someone unlawfully in high sec, you WILL die, and avoiding that death is a bannable offense. Now compare that to "carebear" and "easy mode" WoW, where you totally could gank people in their own capital city, and if you were good enough a player you could avoid the guards and live and go and do it again and again.

So, if you're objective, all games are mostly the same. It's all virtual. It's just in some you achieve things through struggles and efforts of YOU, the player, by controlling a virtual character. And in others you achieve the same things as everyone else if you p(l)ay long enough and have enough spare cash to sell PLEX. It's just a question of personal preference. In EVE you can lose everything. in another game, you may never achieve it in the first place because you, the player, aren't good enough.