EVE General Discussion

I'm Australian, have been playing EVE since the Mac client was a public beta of Transgaming's Cider, have lived through periods of time where expansion releases meant multiple days of the servers being unavailable during Australian Eastern peak times while they (a) patched the game, then (b) patched the bugs the patch introduced. Downtimes were an hour, sometimes more.

I had actually shifted my dinner time to fit EVE Online's daily downtime. During Summer, I'd have dinner early and thank CCP for shutting the game down so that I could get to bed at 10pm like a sensible person.

Then CCP changed the downtimes, so now they're 4-15 minutes long! The bastards! When am I supposed to get any sleep, or eat my dinner? Downtime is so short that I get a couple of forum posts in, then I see the "Tranquility: ONLINE" message appear, and bam I'm sucked into another four hours of Internet spaceships.

And all that entirely evades any mention of shuffling skill training so that I'd always go to bed with a longer-than-8-hours skill training, and wake up to turn on EVE before I even had a shower or ate breakfast, so I could then shuffle skills to have one training that would last until I got home from work. All my "less than 8 hour" skills got trained in that two hour period between waking up and heading to work, or the four hour period between arriving home from work and downtime.

So as an Australian, I acknowledge that it's a right royal pain in the bum to have downtime at 9pm/10pm. On the other hand, you can plan around it. And as an old fart, let me tell you that you don't know just how good you've got it!

I go read that EULA again