EVE New Citizens Q&A

Check your cargohold. If they are not there, go buy some more. If you don't want to buy anymore. You could try wasting a very busy GM's time and file a support ticket.

But please don't. Just go buy a few more probes. Eve is a game, its meant to be fun. If you get this annoyed over a few lost probes you are going to give yourself a heart attack when you lose something of real value. Which you will do sooner or later.

Eve is based around the concept of meaningful loss. Meaningful rewards come from the potential of meaningful loss. You might be used to theme park games that protect the player from loss. But this actually limits the depth of feeling when you accomplish something difficult.

I don't know how else to put it. But you shouldn't base your decision to play a game or not based on such a shallow feeling of loss. Probes are basically Ammo for your probe launcher and the loss should be viewed as such. Sometimes you can recover them, but often not. Eve rewards player effort, taking manual control will generally always be better than anything automatic, such as autopilot. When you make the effort, when you suffer the loss, when you succeed against the odds, then the feeling of accomplishment will overshadow any feeling of victory you've had with other games. Because in Eve winning is not a simple matter of skill vs. skill but so much more.

In the end, Eve is a game for people that enjoy solving problems. People who don't like problems, or people who think the game should solve their problems the way a theme-park game does will not enjoy playing Eve. Because Eve is not a game that entertains you. Eve provides players the tools to entertain themselves.

Other games provide rides, attractions, interesting stories. GMs protect players from other players.

Eve provides Sand, a shovel, a bucket. Then dumps a bucket of ants in the mix to make things interesting. If other players come and start stomping on your castle, GMs will laugh at you and post your experience on #EveisReal.