EVE General Discussion

If you enjoy most/all the things that there are to do in EVE, rather than seeking to experience only a minority of the content, then it is very casual friendly, as the game never forces you to grind or group up with people.


Dude, you need to take a chill pill. EVE has always been very supportive of casual and solo players.

I'm not sure that is very hard. CCP never tried and seems to try to do the opposite. "Incursions" is an example. If you do not have large blocks of time to fleet up then you are going to make about 1/3 the income for the same amount of time.

Other examples are all the pvp mechanics tend to be blob for the win. There is no reason CCP couldn't take say faction war and spread the plexes out over those 4 regions and make it so solo players get decent pvp. They just seem to have some sort of animosity toward casual or solo and build that animosity into their mechanics.

It seems they think that an mmo = team play. But team play has existed long before mmos. Even atari had team play in the early 1980s.

MMO just means you are interacting in a world with large numbers of human beings instead of just with/against a computer ai. But you should still be able to experience that world solo or with others. If anything a npcs are the opposite of the spirit of mmos. Solo play does not cut against it at all.

Most Casual MMO EVAR:

http://progressquest.com/

First off, thanks OP for posting a good question thread. Lots of redundant threads on GD these days. Also, it's something that directly addresses my game play so, yeah.

I solo mined and manufactured in high sec for about 2 years. Right there would make many EVE players feel a small part of their soul die. I did pretty well and got about a dozen other people started in EVE while I was doing all this. Out of those people, only one person is still playing.

I think it's all about personal goals. What kind of things you want to do and what kind of things you can do. EVE can’t build a system for that and it’s a real challenge for any player, no matter what they try to do. It’s a sandbox and nobody will hold your hand all the way through. It’s all you.

You can't do everything casually. That has to be made very clear. If someone thinks they can log in for an hour or two every other week and still be all 1337 at everything, they’re wrong. First, understanding limitations is important. Then finding things you want to achieve within those limitations is a kind of challenge, but can be done. Solo mining/manufacturing/market is not going to make a ton but its okay since I wasn't able to fit a lot of corp./alliance needs. Casual play can be tough but it's all about what you want to achieve.

The problem in EVE is that there isn't a great deal that casual players can try for. It really isn't a big problem and other systems shouldn't be dumbed down to accommodate such play styles. However, there’s always room for improvement.
Some improvements can be good for any player. Take exploration for example. Exploration should have the potential to find anything regardless of the system level. That makes any system potentially interesting. If needed, the difficulty level can be played with for game balance. People who really build their skills up should be rewarded with interesting finds. Not everything needs to be a loot drop either.

I don’t know how to make mining interesting. It’s a necessary evil, but not the end of the world. Market could use better tools. The best I’ve seen was EVE Metrics. Manufacturing could use some love, but it’s not terrible. Research is just a pain. The rules are fuzzy, the process is not very polished and the process itself is kind of clunky. I don’t have any answers for that though. Remember, casual player (would love a reason to log in more though).
Like all of EVE, casual play could use some work. I don’t see it as a very high priority, but it could be addressed better. It could be a real boon to players who are bored or have been playing for a long time too.

I think EVE scales well with the time available to play. You can get very involved and sink hours and hours everyday or log in occasionally to change skills and make some isk or roam around for a kill.

However by limiting your time available in game you will limit some of the available things you can get involved with. Many 0.0 roams for instance will take an hour to form and 3 hours or more to go out and come back.

Not everything in the game is easily accessible to the casual gamer. I don't think this is a problem though.

I don't think Eve is supportive of anything, really.

POS Forum ate my reply. Seems to happen alot.

In any event, the answer is yes, EVE is the best MMO for casuals IMO, and I've played MMO/MUD's for a long time now (20 years+).

But since teh forum ate my long reply, I can't be assed to explain why again. But as a casual, no game is better than EVE IMO.

I find this very strange, to be honest. I've played other MMOs where casual folks could schedule things in advance. Say, PVP is 6pm to 8pm every Friday and Saturday (or whatever). I guess that's hard in EVE because PVP is difficult to instigate when you actually want it to happen. It's too bad, since PVP is certainly where the setting and mechanics shine.

I think so, yes. I consider myself casual because I play a few hours a week. But with offline training and the ability to fund your "fun" casual play with PLEX it is easier than in theme-park games. The difficulty though is in setting a realistic enough goal that you are actually doing something in the sandbox other than running mission.