Out of Pod Experience

There was some Eve Online bashing on Slashdot and I had to come out of retirement to defend it. It was a rare moment of respectable journalism on my part and thought you guys might enjoy the read.

Quoted from SD: "The best review I ever heard of EvE Online was from a guy who said that he wasn't going to pay $15 a month to be chased down and killed by some teenager with daddy issues in the Battlestar Galactica."

My response:

I simply had to come out of Slashdot retirement, recover my password, and run with scissors in disagreement of your assessment of Eve Online.

Let me preface that I am a 39 year old working professional who has had at least one active Eve account since January of 2007. I am neither a teenager with daddy issues (nor was I) nor am I a "newb" and I feel that I am qualified to make an honest and pretty unbiased assessment of Eve Online.

My first real MMO was DAOC and after that I was hooked on them. As I got older though and my interests changed, I found that my time was more meaningfully spent on other, less repetitive and predictable games. However, during my Six years of playing DAOC, I discovered the "glow". That feeling you get while playing an MMO where you make it over the hump, enjoy what it has to offer, and have it figured out enough to be a crazy fun, exhilarating time. And I'm not just talking about the "glow" you get from many games or MMO's in the first month or so that quickly passes, I'm referring to the "glow" that settles in after playing a game with depth and substance for Six months, after which time it transcends from the "exciting new rush" that everyone likes into the warm "glow" that I'm referring to where you know your going to enjoy that game for years to come. And after finally leaving that game, having experienced that contented "glow" for several years, you can look back and reflect on it and always reminisce on it in appreciative reflection.

Eve Online is that game

I'm afraid Eve Online has broke me. Eve Online dragged me, sometimes kicking and screaming, through all of those emotions I felt growing up, those very emotions that forged me into becoming the person I am today. Excitement, anger, anxiety, and the rush of adrenaline that sets your heart racing. The sense of great success that can only be enjoyed with a heavy sigh, a crisp grin and that feeling of comfort that can only be fully attained by leaning heavily back in your chair and the comfort it provides. That devastating loss which forces your teeth to clench, your vision to blur, and renders all unfastened objects in arms reach as potential projectiles

Eve Online is that game

As with life though, Eve Online requires immersion. Unlike other, shallow MMO's, Eve Online will reward your immersion. It's often been said that Eve Online is the most fun game you've never played. Do you think the people that those very stories are about said that? Certainly not, they wanted to be that story, they wanted to write the story and they wanted to be that person. At the end of the day, I realized that those stories were not about the game. . . those stories were about the people, and those people made a difference.

I met some of the most upstanding, honest, mature, and responsible people in Eve Online that I still keep in touch with today. And you know what, when we did fly together, sometimes we just wanted to go out and shoot pixels in space. And we killed that guy, the one who quit the game and wrote about the teenager with daddy issues. That was us. And you know what? We won, he quit. But don't let him fool you, he was never a victim. Eve provided him with all of the tools he needed to turn the tables on us, to thwart our pixel hunting fervor. He simply asked to have himself written out of the story with little fanfare, to give up.

So go ahead and write or relay your stories about being chased down and killed by some teenager with daddy issues. You have shown your mettle, you have allowed yourself to be written into the story as the red shirt ensign, doomed to failure, and written out just as quickly. You could have been great, you could have been the hero, you could have written your own story. You could have been the leader of men. You could have toppled empires. You could have earned the respect of the greatest pilots in Eve.

You could have been any of those things. . . . . . because Eve Online is ALL of those things

Moved thread to OOPE.

Epic write up

needs link

Great way of describing my all time favorite addiction.

I suppose links are good. It was a convo about which MMO to play.

http://ask.slashdot.org/story/13/11/22/2017218/ask-slashdot-mmorpg-recommendations

This one bears repeating.

I don't particular care for the EVE community so I'll take this time to point out how bad EVE is and you should feel bad for liking it.

Really its a great game, but the other people who play it are just horrible.

I suppose EVE would make a great single player game in that regards.

Eve over 2 years now.

Any other MMO like a Week tops. nuf said ^_^

In some of the other posts, those people on slashdot said some horrible things about us EVE players. "Sociopaths." "No one at all can be trusted." "Scammers." "Use vile and filthy language." "Juveniles fixated on ruining somebody's day." Somewhat true, but it's not the whole picture of course. Looking back, I can remember when I was new to EVE and saw it the same way. I took things more seriously. Disgusting things in people's bios offended me more. Now it's all just water off of a duck's back. Interesting to see the perspective of MMOers outside of EVE.

That's deep.