EVE General Discussion

I'd like to point you towards the goon ice interdiction last year. They increased isotope prices 50-100% for months.

Also before the alchemy re-balance, technetium was controlled and manipulated hard by the coalitions in the north.

Also various events like hulkaggeden can cause spikes that last weeks if not months.

Actually, I have a lot of foresight in games and game balance. The entitled folks here are the PvPers who only see the game from their tiny corner, then try to project it's everything and the only thing that matters.

You can't exist without PvE.

Ratting = PvE.

Your ships and fittings = PvE.

The materials to make them all = PvE.

PvP could not exist without PvE. They go hand-in-hand.

And it's you who live in denial when you refuse to acknowledge this fact.

That's influencing the market, but that's not controlling it, as there's other sources in nullsec.

For what Goons could do, another block could do the same with another commodity.

The market balances itself out, as it's inter-dependent. No block is an island, they all need each other for what they have.

This is why null has ABC ore; high-sec has trit/scordite. Null could influence the null ore prices, but high-sec can then fight back with their own influence. In the end, the price wars can't go on forever as it gets to be too expensive for everyone. The market evens out for survival.

Good going in managing to get everything I said out of context and switch it on to a different subject. I wasn't talking about PVE or PVP. Of course PVE activities are valuable and essential part of the game and I do both PVP and PVE.

I was talking about the attitude which you and the OP and many other whiny babies seem to display when things aren't instantly handed to them on a platter and they have to actually work out what to do for themselves.

Luckily the OP seems to have changed their attitude somewhat, so I wish them the best of luck and hope they follow some of the advice in this thread. I think once you get into Eve uni then things will open up, as Eve uni is literally built for players like you and is a great way of easing people into the game who are having a little trouble.

He seems to excel at that. Take something out of context, nitpick points that weren't even made, all in relevance to something else he thought up in his head.

SOME pve is harder than pvp. Making JUST ONE t2 item is literally months and months of reading, skill training, grinding (if you want your own research pos) and spreadsheets. It's about 100x more work and more complex than pvp in my opinion.

errrm...where are all these people? so like 50-60k original accounts and 499,940,000 alt accounts? because i rarely see over 60k players on at once in peak time. maybe i'm missing something?

over half the fun of eve is the community. remember if your not with crew your mostly wasting your time. some of the peeps in this game you'll end up hanging with for the next several yrs.

Well Leia, I suppose EVE isn't for everyone.

I for one am a patient person, always have been and I love the training in EVE. In EVE, when someone kills you. You KNOW that they trained their ass off to even scratch you, you know that that player has dedicated his time to the game.

This is important in an MMO if you ask me, dedication. Too many MMOs are short and feel like you can just accomplish everything too soon.

I plan to play this for years if I get the possibility. It's a harsh universe where people are agressive, yes. But that's what I love about it.

Hi. I don't know if the OP is still reading this or playing EVE. I am also a completely new player (second week) and I would like to offer my POV as alternative. That said I do not feel that either criticizing or attempting to persuade the OP of something is likely to be fruitful.

This is how I have categorized 'things to do' for myself thus far.

1- Market: Nothing happens without ISK, even if you have that through PLEX or proxy values from things like coroporate association and ship provision, replacement, etc. Includes all the choices about vertical integration from rocks to territorial ambition and kill count.
2- Skills: Progression is more or less constant and fixed. Value comes from strategic choices about skill architecture in order to achieve player driven aims in the sandbox. No amount of effort will make my skills go faster (except Implants and remaps). Whether the way I architect my skills is leveraged in game or not is another matter.
3- PvP/PvE: I can see from reading that some people seem to play the game as PvE and enjoy that. It seems to me though that the overall context of the game is PvP, whether ship to ship, market place, or territorial. I think the addition DUST and the ability to interact with an entirely different sort of player base is going to be an amazing addition to the game, fraught with conflict and disagreement. Cool
4- Sociopolitical: Of course... and particularly since it is sandbox. Might be considered the PvP end game.
5- Meta: Includes communities and collateral materials such as this Forum, but for the most part I am still trying to figure out where the game is bounded and the meta starts. Clueless at the moment beyond the general structural theory and my past experience associated with meta gaming in general.

EVE is much more like Second Life with more shared structure. This means that the game is primarily relational, but with more of a structure around possible goals and means to goals than Second Life. That structure might not be immediately apparent it seems to me, but it is there. It is not really a 'sandbox'. It is a structured sandbox. If it were truly a sandbox then the programming level would be the structure, rather than in-game artifacts and process.

The difficulty with point #3 above is that the feedback loops for progress are not fast enough. In order to detect positive progress a shift in expectation and perspective is required. On the other hand I have found that initially negative 'fail' based feedback is quite easy to acquire by merely venturing into the wrong part of the game alone. Over time this will become the basis for a positive feedback loop when it becomes possible to do so without losing all one's possessions in the process. Initially then it is not exactly an acquisitive game, though it seems like it would be. It is a merely survive game.

The 'end game' seems to me massively strategic and territorial. Also very difficult for the single beginning player to detect. This is all mostly meta game and difficult for the new player to access. Everything else, including people who just want to go 'pew pew pew' in a cool space ship are in support of and contextualized by that meta game. The game would have gone out of existence long ago, in part because of the things the OP is saying, a long time ago without this.

That said there are ways to shortcut the entry into the meta game, it seems to me. They are completely relational in nature. not my first interest at the moment, but if I wanted to I would begin by creating relationship with people outside the context of the game through forums and such. I may be confused, but as far as I can tell the whole Goon thing is contextualized by Something Awful, for instance. BTW, buying a fully skilled character as a first move is probably not any sort of entrance into the meta game and in fact may inhibit that. It might give the impression of some immediate gratification I suppose, but is almost certainly not sustainable.

I was sent this link which I found to be helpful:
http://swiftandbitter.com/eve/wtd/

It is not that there nothing to do. It is that there is too much to do such that what to do becomes lost. To the OP I would suggest that if what you are doing is not working then do something else, which might include simply not playing. You suggested that you were posting because you wanted the developers to know. I think they know. I suspect you posted for another reason. I suspect that you see the relational possibility of the medium and want something about that, but perhaps want it faster than the structure of the game supports in some ways. Posting 2 weeks into the game in the way you did created plenty of relationship, though perhaps not of the sort you wanted. Hard to say. I don't mean to make uninformed or unfair attributions. Just how it seems to me.

It is not hard to say that EVE has a very steep, long learning curve compared to the modern milieu of gaming. Though the OP does in fact have that attentional capacity, not only claimed, but demonstrated by generating this entire thread, for the most part industrialized culture has eroded this. The 'learning' is not something you must do in order to play the game. For a very long time it is the game, it seems to me. If we imagine that all the out of game learning and research is so we can then play the game, only forcing ourselves to endure that for some big payoff, I think we might be missing the actual game. We will be in the condition of continually feeling like "When will the game start? When will I get to the good stuff?" If the learning curve itself is not the good stuff it seems to me you might not enjoy the game, unless you are able to quickly create a meaningful, or at least amusing relational context in which you play.