EVE New Citizens Q&A

I love Pvp and gameplay but also roleplay. Roleplaying is challenging and theatrical and it took me alot of years to perfect the style. Imo, it's more difficult to stay IC than maximize stats, so I get why people choose not to do it - it is tougher than just talking about football teams and gear and stats. At end game, for me, the only thing left is roleplay. I see you have a tightknit rp community in your chats and the board Intergalactic Summit, but the problem I am seeing is with the populace at large and how CCP seems to handle disrespectful and disruptive behavior that is outright OOC

My True Amarr character said something stupid in local militia, like "If God wants us to win we will win". Obnoxious, I know, but instead of roleplaying with it I got a huge hostile response from the Caldari and Gallente who were fighting for Amarr. Now saying you should pray or talking about God is perfectly IC for a noob Amarr militia capsuleer. (Not this character, my other one) And saying you are annoyed because you don't believe in God is perfectly IC for Gallente or Caldari.

I got a wall of spam of criticism about "roleplayers" and "Omg LARP is alive" (seriously its not LARPing) and one went so far as to spam "ROLEPLAYING IC" about 3 dozen times creating a wall of text in the chatroom along with some expletives.

In previous games I've played a person would get banned for being blatantly ooc like that, and in World of Warcraft, the servers I played on were RP friendly and everyone who wasnt that good at roleplaying didnt bother roleplayers at all, they just played along with it and had fun. It seemed like the people playing Wow actually liked the lore and the characters.

What's up roleplayers, how do you deal with this hate and is this a bad roleplaying community?

Yeah. Pretty much.

The thing is, I'm not sure why. RP = immersion and immersion makes the game better, in my opinion.

While I don't RP in public, I'm sure doing it quietly to myself. Have been since the first day I logged in.

Mr Epeen

This is strictly my opinion... the reason that roleplayers are "not taken seriously" is because....

- past "well known" role players were... ummm... "special snowflakes" that got really "intense" and either ran their communities like evil despots (not in a role playing sense) or outright attacked CCP Developers.

- a lot of role players have asked for mechanics changes so the game "make sense" from their RP perspective... overall gameplay be damned.

- role players tend to take their game WAY too seriously... which is funny for some of us.

- some of us care more about "winning" than we do about "purity"

Great roleplayers are simply a delight to watch, especially when doing warping and mining. Never had so much twiddling thumb time in a game, ever.

I have to say you have some amazing roleplayers. I was having a lot of fun reading the board and listening to people in the IS chat. You have a lot to be proud of in the rp community you have but the behavior in the rest of the game is something to be ashamed of. I don't care about the excuses of RPer's being nasty, because mechanics people can be just as nasty to game developers (I am not one of those people im pretty easy)

I have to say I have never encountered this sort of hostility towards RP though. I mean even WoW players would just have fun with you if you were on a RP server. Most games do not have a huge community of awesome roleplayers. It takes years to develop the storytelling and acting skills (and typing wpm) to be a great roleplayer.

Before I purchased a subscription I knew that Eve has a bit of a reputation as a male game but im hoping that doesn't mean it's also a neckbeard game.

Ive also noticed a lot of homophobia in the game, like a corp owner REALLY needed to know if I was really a woman. He just kept badgering me about it so I finally said "Yeah I am a female irl but my character might be a tranny I havnt decided yet"

Im a very attractive straight woman in real life and successful and happily married.

What woman wants another player crawling up her ass about what sex she is? I get that enough irl. This is why the game has such a shameful genitalia ratio imo...

No, it has the ratio because it doesn't appeal to the majority of women. It's not like initially it was 50/50 and then the "bad behavior" drove women away; it's always been 95% - 5%. There used to be some women-only corps., including PVP ones, but I'm not sure whether they're still active.

As far as the RP, I think it's blocked by the meta nature of the game; all the politics and backstabbing and posturing on forums and blogs outside the game, the fact that alts and multiple accounts are useful and often used, and the necessity of voice comms for fights pretty much make typing text in-character somewhat pointless.

There are roleplayers; look into Curatores Veritatis Alliance, Ushra'Khan, and others.

You need to remember that for a certain sort of player to get sufficient epeen in order to avoid depression and killing kittens they have to believe they're having an effect on a real person at the other end. Having a positive effect is too hard so generally the effect they are after is tears, though some deluded souls think they will find the love of their life through gratuitous comments in an online spaceship game.

Regardless, if the intention is to get a response from a real person role-play interferes with that exercise. Even if thir purpose is to get off on some sort of "OMG look at my awesome leet PvP skillz, i rule and you sux bigtime" monent roleplay does not do it for them.



I have some female friends that are serious gamers including a couple of them that run major guilds in other games and they have all seemed interested until they realized the entire game is played from a 3D outside view of the stations and spaceships (with the exception of the useless CQ) .

People get annoyed when there is a discrepancy between the alleged nature of a character and what that character actually does in game.

For example I used to know a guy who liked to roleplay a smuggler. He actually never smuggled a thing in-game in any way whatsoever. As limited as it may be there is a cargo legality system and people do move prohibited goods around space. If he wanted to he could have gone and got involved in drug production and engaged in gameplay that would have validated the character he pretended to be but he didn't. That kind of thing really bothers me.

This is a role playing game, one with an unprecedented level of freedom. You can actually go out and do any of the things that you might want to do if you were an immortal space pilot. But there are a bunch of people who just plain don't, but then pretended that they do via roleplay.

For another example these days I am a mercenary. People pay me and me and the rest of my bros do space violence, but I regularly encounter people who have bios and corp descriptions that expound on how they are rugged, no-nonsense guns for hire, but they've actually never accepted money for their services outside of agent missions and cower in station at the sight of a single flashy red assault frigate when they have 10:1 numerical superiority and average double your SP.

These kinds of folks are common too, I've been encountering them since I originally started playing in 2005 and they boggle my mind. I don't understand how you can play a role playing game and then not play your character in the same way you roleplay your character, the disassociation between gameplay and roleplay people have makes no sense in EVE.

Subsequently whenever I find a group of people that roleplay mercenaries but aren't mercenaries I declare war on them.

Exxxtreme roleplayer checking in.


Basically CCP provide us with an incredible environment to RP and I believe they heavily encourage it with a lot of lore related content.

The problem is though that, at a very generous guess, only 5->10% of the players here are in anyway involved in some form of active roleplay. So whatever way you look at it if you speak IC in almost any local chat in EVE you'll get funny looks or hostile/trolly responses. We just have to deal with it, and if you have a bit of style in the way you post it's easy enough to deflect people like that. RP-critisism is often generic comments that you've likely heard a thousand times before. Just stay in-character, it drives people nuts and sometimes creeps them right out.

I love seeing people like that squirm.


As above, it's simply a numbers thing. While EVE's world is tailored to roleplayers it's gameplay generally attracts another kind of player in greater numbers.

Don't be put off though, I've been RPing here for over four years and EVE has a fantastic RP community full of great writers and roleplayers, interesting (or just downright crazy) characters. There are a lot of ways and places here where you can comfortably indulge in roleplay (local chat not being one of them usually), numerous ingame channels including the summit you've mentioned, the IGS forum, countless private channels, or private chats with other like-minded RPers. There's also some good venues off-site, and you can always express your character's views and experiences in an IC blog (like my own).

You'll also find there are a lot of dedicated roleplay corps. Want to pvp, pve, get into wormholes, fly in null? You'll find RP corps who do all these things while also enjoying heavy roleplay. Get involved in the RP community, get chatting to some other RPers, and you'll soon find yourself being convo'd, dragged into channels, or asked to join a corp.


Not quite sure what you're talking about there unless you mean DUST troopers who're highlighted in a shade of blue in chats by default. The Intergalactic Summit is CCPs roleplay channel, and supposedly moderated by them though I've never seen examples of that. If you haven't already seen it there's also the player-run version called simply The Summit along with it's OOC sister channel called OOC.

Welcome to EVE anyway and don't be put off. Trust me, there's a ton of fun here for us roleplayers.

I've been a fairly heavy RPer in pretty much every other MMORPG I've played over the years (and that's quite a few). However, Eve has been the one that I've never really had the urge to do so in. As others have alluded, the game is so meta that practically anything you do can be considered IC in some way or another. It's also not a fantasy setting, which eases many of the normal considerations you have to make when RPing.