My EVE

I first played EVE back in 2008 with the 15 day trial. I played it solidly for a few days mostly because I loved the ambience of the music and visuals of space and the general scale of it all so it was very hard for me to come to the conclusion that I shouldn't sign up and continue. I was at university at the time and couldn't realistically afford to spend the time or money on it. WOW had been somewhat of an addiction a couple years earlier and I could see EVE going the same way.

Every time I saw adverts or something about EVE after that though I contemplated going back to it. A Steam recommendation for it almost brought me back a couple months back but I didn't want to pay for a subscription only to give up after a few days.

So today after seeing the BBC news post about the free Alpha clones I finally came back to it. I just played through the new Inception tutorial campaign which is a massive improvement over the old experience I remember (even if the end battle is kind of amusing and underwhelming when an entire fleet is apparently relying on a recruit to do everything). Then I turned to google to work out just what the hell happened to the mining ship blueprint Aura said I had been given as a reward but which never showed up in my inventory and after failing to find a wiki about it or any mention of the campaign at all and concluding the entire event may have been some kind of hour long tea induced hallucination... here I am.

Since the cost of Omega is so reasonable I'd happily sign up despite a large part of my brain telling me that as I am self employed I shouldn't be wasting time on EVE that could be spent working. So the idea of playing casually for a while as an Alpha and maybe buying it when I have more time is appealing.

However the first thing that really made me question if I should continue playing was when I read the infamous 'Station atmosphere not yet decontaminated for Capsuleer consumption' message. Prior to finishing the quest I assumed the station would be unlocked when I had become a Capsuleer or else why would the game have such a detailed character creator that it never had before. Then I read all about Incarna and now I am frankly disappointed to find that the game is nowhere near as expansive and detailed as I thought it had become since I first played eight years ago.

After reaching level 60 in WOW easily 90% of the time between raids was just spent doing weird stuff for the hell of it like soloing low level instances, summoning and releasing Infernals in Ironforge, climbing things, riding the blimp to Orgrimmar and hiding on the roof to shoot firebolts at people checking their mail, glitching out the battlemasters with an enemy character and making them AOE kill everyone in the room, grinding insanely rare items and mostly pointless items for no reason, making alts on RP servers and roleplaying as a group of thieves mugging people in Stormwind (surprisingly profitable)... and general trolling now that I think about it. That or just sitting around in cities talking and duelling whilst looking for something to do.

One of the things that always put me off EVE is that since death actually carries a significant penalty doing fun stuff like that just isn't worth the risk so if you want a break from playing seriously for a bit your choice is either log off or sit in a station doing nothing. I was therefore very excited when I thought the game had addressed that with actual content in the space stations... and then seriously disappointed when I found it was just one room.

I was picturing being able to walk around the station and look at other players ships in the docks, pick up side quests in person, gambling minigames, ship combat simulators for duelling and practising without risk, NPCs that added to the atmosphere and story and generally just stuff to do casually between missions. I love the immersion of EVEs in game ads, news and recruitment videos give but beyond that the stations still feel as bland as they used to.

After playing for a few hours on a server that says it has 20,000 people online I've interacted with no one either by chance or need but those kind of interactions even in the early days of playing are what have always made MMOs so appealing to me (that I physically have to restrain myself and avoid them so I don't waste all my time). I'm sure if I went out to mine in an asteroid field in the starting zones I'd find people for better or worse (probably the latter given my experience last time) but the profits from Project Discovery have made bothering to do that feel a little worthless. I earned more in half an hour getting frustrated and entirely failing to correctly identify images than I did through the entire tutorial campaign. The idea behind Project Discovery is brilliant but it does seem that maybe it shouldn't be unlocked from day one... I quickly amassed a small noob fortune which I have almost no use for since I had forgotten that I should have been training skills whilst playing the campaign (probably something the campaign should have reminded me to do at some point).

So now I'm not even sure if I want to continue playing as Alpha let alone upgrading to Omega or if I might just revisit the game in another 8 years when there is more to do. I daresay my experience here represents the thoughts of a lot of the new players who started today.

Oh & before you slam me calling me an "elitist prick"

I am the biggest producer of eve online guides on youtube for new players

EvocationzAdhera on YouTube

You need to realise what eve is, not what you want it to be.

"like every single mmo has"

"exactly the kind of narrow mindness ive come to expect"

This speaks volumes

You expect Eve Online to be like every "other mmo"

It's not, that is what makes it unique

End of story

Sorry you didnt enjoy your time with EVE. EvE is not for everyone.

Quiting post should be posted in Out of Pod Experience