EVE New Citizens Q&A

Unique Stories
Your EVE experience is yours.

In Star Wars: The Old Republic, for example, your Jedi experience is basically the same as tens of thousands of others before, alongside, and after you. The stories that you run through via the quest system are all basically the same. There might be minor differences, but the number of stories and paths within those stories are limited.

Once you reach max level, there might be some differences between you and the next guy, depending on what raids each you have done, but there will be many people that have killed the same bosses as you, many people who have the same general experiences as you.

EVE is different. There are no raids, no quest and level systems. It's the players that create the stories. The experiences of the six-month old Test Alliance player are is going to be radically different than the six-month old EVE University player. Every player in EVE has a vastly different story to tell.

Free-to-Play
A lot of games allow players to play for free. There are different models. Some games will gate areas for paying players only. Some will place many inconveniences in the way of the non-paying player, selling convenience to those that don't want to put up with the inconvenience.

EVE does things a bit differently. There's no gating. There's no built-in inconvenience for non-paying players.

EVE has the PLEX. A PLEX is an item that is purchased for real-money, and then can be sold for in-game currency. Activating a PLEX gives an account another 30 days of play time. It is possible for players to play for free, the caveat is that someone paid for that time. CCP gets their money, no matter what.

Many players purchase PLEX to sell on the in-game market. Many players purchase PLEX from the in-game market to fund their play time. A PLEX, at the time of writing, sells for around 600M ISK. Players that tend to make a lot of money, more than they spend in a month, will buy PLEX off the market to fund their play time.

Every PLEX that is in-game is a PLEX that was purchased from CCP. (A small percentage of PLEX are gifts and rewards from CCP, but they write these off on their books as promotional expenses.)

Microtransactions
Many MMOs sell items for small dollar amounts. These can be purely fluff (vanity) items that have zero impact upon the game (such as pets and clothing), or they can be items that give an in-game advantage (ammo that does more damage, or guns with better range.)

EVE, currently, only sells vanity items. The NEX store sells a wide range of clothing items for your character.

There is No Score
In most MMOs "money" and "bling" are your score. There comes a point in most theme park MMOs where you don't need to spend money to survive. Since you don't lose items, and since these games have little in the way of gold sinks (mechanics that remove gold from the game), you constantly amass monetary wealth. Since the requirement to spend money is so low, money itself becomes one of your gauges for success.

Equally true with loot. You never lose the armour and weapons you amass, so those items become a diary, of sorts, of your experiences in the game. The stuff you collected from Boss X is proof that you defeated Boss X. (Since in most MMOs, raid loot is soulbound, the only way to have loot from Boss X is to have been there when Boss X was brought down.)

EVE is different. The stuff you buy is constantly being destroyed. You need to amass wealth so that you can spend it. Thus money is not an accurate gauge of your success at the game. The same goes for loot, since all of it can be lost and destroyed. Make yourself the blingiest of ships, you're going to eventually lose that ship.

Since EVE is a PvP game, one of the most popular gauges of success and failure are killboards. The most popular of which is eve-kill.net. If you're in a corporation or alliance, they likely have their own killboard for its members.

If your an industry person, you probably have profit-loss spreadsheets that show earnings over time. These are likely your own personal scorecards for success.

Final Thoughts
If you're coming to EVE from a Theme Park MMO such as World of Warcraft or Everquest or Lord of the Rings Online, I hope this five-part series has helped you to understand the major differences from the mechanics you're used to, to the play style and mechanics that make EVE Online what it is. I hope you now more fully understand the differences between theme park and sandbox play.

Enjoy EVE.

Of course. But there are analogous concepts and the series is meant to ease theme parkers into EVE.

That is true too. I'm not very good at short blog posts.