EVE General Discussion

2009 was the year I started:

Ships: T1 ships were a lot cheaper than today, my first atron was like 40k isk. Faction and deadspace modules were a lot more expensive and almost only fitted on supercarriers and titans. They were rarely fitted on subcapitals. Also, pirate battleships used to cost over 1 bil and today they go for 300mil. I also remember the days when Pithum C-type boosters went for 400 mil and invuls for 600-700 mil. Today they go for 50 mil and 250 mil. So exploration and ratting was much more profitable.

pve: Ships were mostly fitted for max tank and cap stability. Weapon upgrades were rare on pve ships, exept T3 cruisers and pirate battleships. This changed over the years, maybe rats were stronger back then, I dont remember. Carrier ratting wasnt a thing, since drone damage amplifiers came out later and so a carrier with 15 fighters only did 1500dps, while Blaster vindis still dealt the same. Missions were full cleared, blitzing was discovered later. Burner missions didnt exist.
It was common that Hi end ded sites were ran in groups, however, most sites didnt exist at that time. I remember that everyone back then said, that you cant solo ded 10 or C3 wormhole sites, and today, A t2 fitted T1 battleship can easly do 10/10 and even C4 wormholes, C5 are doable in Tengus and blinged out rattlesnakes. C6 in pimped marauders. Daytripping in wormholes wasn't possibile back then due to the lack of mobile depots and Mtu's.

pvp: Wardecing half ov eve wasnt a thing, there were still merc alliances like privateers or the orphanage, but not as many as today. and even their fights were a bit more funny than today. Now it is just gate/station camping 24/7/365. I dont think that there was a difference in Low and Nullsec. Suicide ganking was much more easier, as you received insurance when concord killed you and you were able to run from concord. Suicide gank Battleships were the most common ships. You also lost much more security status back then as today. Killrights were only available to the owner.

generally, players had one, maybe two accounts, not more and today it is common to have 10 or more alts. There were also much more players online, like 40-50k. Plexes went for 300mil in these days and creating throw away alts was very usual since you had plex for plex buddyprogramm.

Eve before 2008!? Eve was amazing...

Thorax could launch 8 Hvy Drones. There was no warp to 0, everyone needed bookmarks and there was a giant bookmark underground market. Titans were rare and had an area effect doomsday that killed everything on the grid. Torps would hit frigs for full damage.

Egghelende and HED-GP were killing fields...

A lot has changed my friend.

Yea Pirate Coalition ran that place.

Been playing this game off and on since 2006 and anyone that says it was better back then is wearing rose colored glasses.

Logging in at all hours of the day and night to queue up another skill because there was no skill queue to pre-load. You basically trained short skills while you were logged in and switched over to a 1D+ skill at night so you didn't waste time...and God forbid if the server went down while a skill completed...more lost skill time.

This game has come a long way from where it was in many aspects and has stayed the same in others. I haven't seen anything that made me believe it was going down, much less backwards. I still see many pilots online and active chats in even basic NPC corps.

The game is really what you want to make of it though. If you are convinced it is dying and spend more time on these forums than you do in game...then yes, it's dying...to you. Check out the recruitment forums at all the active corps, alliances and returning players and log in to trash talk some scammers in a trade hub and you'll see there are still plenty of folks that are enjoying themselves.

No faction warfare low sec, so large tracts of low sec weren't complexes or arenas or whatever it is these days, you could roam in a gang and meet other gangs that would actually fight you.

battleships were 60 mil, you could go and welp a bunch of geddons and domis and it was no thang

There was a lot less HP, you could put an XL on a cyclone and boost most of your shields in one cycle, there was no hurricane, harb, drake or myrm until mid-2007 so tier 1 BCs were flown plenty.

The myrm could launch 5 heavies and have 6 guns and could pretty much kill everything it encountered. The Eos had 5 heavies and 7 blasters and could kill everything and then kill it all again without breaking a sweat.

Nobody knew about gang links and leadership stuff, so only big alliances really used command ships, people didn't realise how powerful this stuff was in small gangs.

webs were 90% strength and if a mega got in close enough to web you it was game over man, game over

Nobody used afterburners except mission runners

Ginger magician made all mad in his sniper mega with stabs for years, stabs had no sensor drawbacks, most people fit stabs on pvp vagabonds

Assault ships were used about as much as they are today (hint: they weren't)

There was no mael, abaddon, rokh or hyper, neutralizer ECM domis were the greatest nightmare to face. People fit ECM on random ships because it was so powerful.

Falcons could jam to 150km and would usually just uncloak and end a lot of fights before they even began, everyone had falcon alts.

Bob vs ASCN was the big war at the time, before that the great northern war. After CCP T20 was outed as giving bob t2 bpos there began the great war, which lasted a few years and ended with bob being disbanded by an unhappy director who was bought by goons

People actually flew sniper muninns sometimes

Huginn / Rapier was the most valuable gang member usually, and keeping your rapier alive was mega important

pre-2005 damage mods didn't stack, you could fit 7 heat sinks and 7 mega pulse on a geddon and melt everything everywhere all the time with about a bajillion dps

There were large french, german, british, russian and spanish alliances. I don't think that happens much anymore.

Frigs sucked except for rifter and punisher

Sometimes missions happened on stargates or planets, so you'd be travelling along and some dude would be fighting BS rats on a gate with his raven

Machariel was massive and Chimera was tiny (Chim was about half the size of a Mach), Nightmare was a 4/4 split of torps and lasers.

Typhoon was amazing if you had the high SP for it, they ruined it by turning it into an armour raven

The old graphics were great, when they released the new graphics they released a boot.ini error which prevented windows from booting, many people got mad on the forums because they installed eve on work PCs and then got fired for it.

edit: here's some screenshots from 2006
http://imgur.com/a/123cp

edit2: some political maps from the time, and backdoor bandit's stupid face
http://imgur.com/a/obhH0

Could fly around in a Nos fitted Vexor and solo the world, opening up private chats with your targets and extract isk without the need to blow them up. You'd be fairly safe from being ambushed while pirating so there was no rush.

People would be given access rites to mining in lowsec in exchange for isk and actually be safe in the knowledge us pirates would uphold our bargain and defend them from invaders to our turf.

Solo Gate camping in a blaster Thorax was fun and profitable endeavour as people could not warp to zero. PvE was boring, mining was dull but had a good community. Pirates were evil but played smart, less need to just kill all the things.

Bounties were put on people by their alts, Titans were terrifying to fight and lag killed many during the warp cycling to avoid doomsdays. Mercanaries were celebrities up until Mercenary Coalitions betrayal....

And many other rose tinted views, I do miss living in Delve. But the game is actually really good right now. I miss some of the things but they've been replaced by new community doctrines. Which are probably more fun, people have less time than pre-2008 i guess.

How far do you want to go back?

No gate guns
No overview
No bubbles
No warp to 0
No cloaking timer after jumping
No POS
No Sov
No Cloaks
No sig radius so a BS could insta kill a Frig every time
No T2 anything
Dual MWD Ravens causing tears
40 in 'fleet' was HUGE
No fleet, bonuses, links
More fun

When i started playing in 2007, 30 mil per hour running lvl 4 missions was "good isk", and going out to null sec and ratting belts making less than 30 mil per hour but occasionally getting faction commander and hauler spawns was worth it.

Everything just seems way more "worth it" back then, and I'm not being nostalgic because things are ok today. But man, getting a Rattlesnake Blueprint as a drop in 2007-8 was like winning the freaking lottery. I got one last night and I was like "yay, a BPC that sells for 200 mil, that's slightly better than 1/5th of a plex!!! 4 more Snake BPCs and I can play EVE free for a month!!!" lol.

CCP made making isk/generating wealth WAY too easy and that has dampened some very important things about the game. They did things with the best of intentions, and the game needed to progress (things that don't progress die), and EVE is still fun to play in many ways, but they took away a lot of the exhilaration that used to exist when you acquired some item that changed the whole game for you.

Ah yes, the first decade of Eve.

The days when there was no drone bandwidth and the Eos was king. Trit. was 1 isk per unit. T2 bpo's only used minerals. Halcyon. I lived in the drone regions and my alt pulled in more minerals shooting drones than I did, abc mining. Gold sellers outstrpped scammers 10 - 1.

Back then null sec was a ghost town, except for chokepoints or transitions like null/low and low/high. High Sec ganking was a viable long-term goal, but happened less frequently than it was talked about. Pvp was fast and ugly.

Honestly, I prefer Eve now and I wouldn't read to much into the player numbers. A large number of pilots have been handed their cigar and been invited to leave null by an even larger number of pilots. That kind of operation will cause a (temporary) burn out on both sides, same thing happened when BoB died. It wasn't so obvious then because the purge of goldsellers hadn't really started in earnest.

If you really want to know what it was like to live in pre 2008 New Eden. Move into wormhole.

I might even know a man that could help.