EVE online impressions

[Incubus]

So my Officers Edition came in the mail, and I’ve spent the past two days playing the tutorials. The game is unlike any MMO I’ve played, I mean, I made a thread earlier this week asking about it, and many people were very helpful, but I really needed to play the game to see just what they are talking about. Here are my impressions-

What I like:

-Much of the game is an anti ‘poopsock’ game. Poopsocking i.e. having to spend hours and hours grinding/leveling/etc to progress to the next benchmark. Since the skills build in realtime, its actually easy for me to turn the game off and go do other stuff. The skill queue system lets me theoretically only have to fiddle with the game 5 minutes every day or so. When I’m busy, that’s going to be nice.

-The nature of game balance. A newer player that specializes in his task is going to be much more effective than a more generalist player who has played for years. Again, it takes play time out of the equation and makes the game fun for casual players who might only have a few hours on the weekends to play the game.

-The economy and being able to play the market. Working the auction house in WoW was always fun, and it was enjoyable learning about price trends and profiting off of them. Also, being able to be totally self-sufficient (making your ship, weapons, modules, etc from scratch if you want) is cool too.

-THere are a great variety of weapons/ships/places. The universe is gigantic!

-Drones are neat! I picked Gallente because they were the ‘drone’ nation I think. They’re useful because you can have ‘attack’ drones but have the high slots/turret hardpoints suited for something else (like mining) and you’re not totally screwed if some little red pirate blip (rats? is that what they call them?) comes out of the woodwork. What about the other types, like mining or repair drones? Worth it? Does specializing in drone skills offset other weapon/support skills (since the drones can perform similar tasks)?

What I don’t like about it

-The tutorial missions helped familiarize myself with the game, but once I started on the different career path missions I hit a few snags. First, some missions require you to use a module/ability/etc that you may not have the skills to use, so it creates bottlenecks if you are lacking in some of the prerequisites to those skills. Second, I wasted a lot of ISK buying skillbooks that the mission giver ended up giving me (salvaging, for example).

-You can’t freely control your ship! This was probably my biggest disappointment. I was looking forward to flying around, doing loops, maneuvering around space pirates, etc. But instead, you click, and the ship goes/orbits there. While nice for long distances (thank god for autopilot!) for smaller engagements being able to manually control the ship would be nice. Using little menus is clunky and I actually lost a ship in a combat mission because I couldn’t right click, warp, station, dock before they chewed through my structure HP. Wish there was just a hotkey for ‘bug out’ instead of all the drop down menus.

-Mining was, disappointingly, as boring as everyone said it would be. My main gripe about it is that it feels like its set up in such a way to be too tedious to be worth sitting there watching the lazer lick rocks, but your cargo hold fills up too fast to leave it going while you do something for 10-20 mins. At least in the frigates I have at this point, I’m topped up after about 2 and a half mining cycles. I understand more dedicated ships can hold more, but ugh!

-The universe is a nasty, brutal place. I haven’t gotten ganked yet, but I know its just a matter of time. The game seems like an excersise in investment, ie what can I afford to lose doing X action. Unfortunately this seems to result in very lopsided kinds of griefing. Now if there was some sort of profit to be made suicide ganking an expensive ship with a cheap frigate I could understand, but the motivation here seems to be pure assholery. Yeah I sound like a carebear for saying that, but it kind of follows the steep learning curve of the game. I guess the other half of that is that I assumed these big mining/support ships would be pretty durable, but from what I read many of them are very fragile.

-A lot about the interface is awkward. I’m still new so much of this may be out of ignorance, but…
*Can’t sell items from a docked ships cargo bay, gotta move them into the ‘items’ hangar
*Haven’t figured out how to ‘strip’ a ship clean of modules/drones/cargo
*No ‘engage at optimum range’ for equipped weapons
*Items stay in the hangar you left them in. Meaning stuff can be all over the place. I understand this is particularly a problem for people getting back into the game after a long hiatus.

Funny thing I noticed was the number of people that played years ago, stopped, then got back into it. Also, I’m grateful I started after they nixed learning skills, probably helped me save time.

Question, when I started, my pilot has two remaps. Right now his attributes are almost completely even across the board. Should I use one remap now? I’m not sure what exactly I want to do. Just how much do attributes reduce the time to learn skills?

[FinnAgain]

@Incubus

Wish there was just a hotkey for ‘bug out’ instead of all the drop down menus.

There is. Just have the station selected in your overview and spam “warp” or “dock”, either/or.

@Incubus

-The universe is a nasty, brutal place.

That’s the whole point of the game. To be honest, if you don’t like that then you’ll probably find that EVE isn’t for you. If you do like it though, there’s no better PvP game out there.

@Incubus

*Haven’t figured out how to ‘strip’ a ship clean of modules/drones/cargo

There’s a button labeled, IIRC, "strip’.

@Incubus

*No ‘engage at optimum range’ for equipped weapons

You choose when to activate your guns. It’d make no sense to have your guns decide to engage when it was ‘optimal’. If you’re not in optimal, don’t activate your guns.

@Incubus

*Items stay in the hangar you left them in. Meaning stuff can be all over the place. I understand this is particularly a problem for people getting back into the game after a long hiatus.

This is absolutely essential. There’d be a far different economy if you didn’t have to worry about actually moving things and could get at your stuff half way across the galaxy.

@Incubus

Question, when I started, my pilot has two remaps. Right now his attributes are almost completely even across the board. Should I use one remap now? I’m not sure what exactly I want to do. Just how much do attributes reduce the time to learn skills?

Download EveMon. Set a training plan for a year or so (or half a year, whatever) and see what its advice is on remapping attributes.

[aruvqan]

@Incubus

-The nature of game balance. A newer player that specializes in his task is going to be much more effective than a more generalist player who has played for years. Again, it takes play time out of the equation and makes the game fun for casual players who might only have a few hours on the weekends to play the game.

And even if you specialize, there is always stuff you can do. I do industry, mining, planetary interaction and manufacture but I can always go back to empire for a vacation and run missions, or I can get a cheap assed little frigate, set it up and go on roaming killspree fleets with guys in my alliance, or I can go with guys in my corp and run plexes.

@Incubus

-The economy and being able to play the market. Working the auction house in WoW was always fun, and it was enjoyable learning about price trends and profiting off of them. Also, being able to be totally self-sufficient (making your ship, weapons, modules, etc from scratch if you want) is cool too.

Eve-Central is a great tool for checking prices. You can set it up so that if you have excel, you can grab data off of it and dump it into your spreadsheet, so you can do stuff like calculate exact cost of production for cap ships [or whatever you are building] to determine the best sale price. My corp uses dropbox to share spreadsheets, makes inventory and job assignments much easier. Nice thing is that it is free.

@Incubus

-There are a great variety of weapons/ships/places. The universe is gigantic!

I know, isn’t it great? And they are always developing new ships =)

@Incubus

-Drones are neat! I picked Gallente because they were the ‘drone’ nation I think. They’re useful because you can have ‘attack’ drones but have the high slots/turret hardpoints suited for something else (like mining) and you’re not totally screwed if some little red pirate blip (rats? is that what they call them?) comes out of the woodwork. What about the other types, like mining or repair drones? Worth it? Does specializing in drone skills offset other weapon/support skills (since the drones can perform similar tasks)?

Yes, there are repair, both armor and shield, mining drones, and specialized drones that can do various other combat logistics roles.

I personally do not like mining drones, the tiny amount they can mine at your level is not worth the trouble of not having drones either fighting the rats/repping you so you tank the rats that show up in the belts. Once you can get into larger protected mining fleets, where you are jet can mining, and have others around or a dedicated tank then you can play with mining drones. They can be great for getting the special asteroids like golden omber while you mine the huge veldspar roids. It may benefit you to get a second character and just train it to haul, a pilot in an iteron V fully rigged and cargo expanded can carry about 10 000 m3 more than a full jet can.

@Incubus

-The tutorial missions helped familiarize myself with the game, but once I started on the different career path missions I hit a few snags. First, some missions require you to use a module/ability/etc that you may not have the skills to use, so it creates bottlenecks if you are lacking in some of the prerequisites to those skills. Second, I wasted a lot of ISK buying skillbooks that the mission giver ended up giving me (salvaging, for example).

Yup, and you can never resell the books and get what you paid for them. If nothing else, you can always make a second character and give the spare books to them =)

@Incubus

-You can’t freely control your ship! This was probably my biggest disappointment. I was looking forward to flying around, doing loops, maneuvering around space pirates, etc. But instead, you click, and the ship goes/orbits there. While nice for long distances (thank god for autopilot!) for smaller engagements being able to manually control the ship would be nice. .

I was heartily disappointed to not have a first person view for flying =( You can sort of manually control the ship by clicking in empty space, with practice I can fly a hulk around in an asteroid belt fairly comfortably. I can even maneuver an orca in a belt, but I prefer not to - I prefer using tractor beams to haul cans towards me.

@Incubus

-Mining was, disappointingly, as boring as everyone said it would be. My main gripe about it is that it feels like its set up in such a way to be too tedious to be worth sitting there watching the lazer lick rocks, but your cargo hold fills up too fast to leave it going while you do something for 10-20 mins. At least in the frigates I have at this point, I’m topped up after about 2 and a half mining cycles. I understand more dedicated ships can hold more, but ugh!

As I said before, jetcan mine and use a second person to haul. Just need to be careful to see that nobody in the belt flips your can.

You can actually avoid this if you leave a single unit of something in the jetcan, have both characters in a fleet, and both of them can have the jetcan open as well as their respective cargos. You can drag out of the jetcan and into your haulers cargo as your miner puts it in. That way if someone comes and grabs the contents of your can they only get 100 rounds of ammo or a single cheap afterburner that a rat dropped when you killed it.

-The universe is a nasty, brutal place. I haven’t gotten ganked yet, but I know its just a matter of time. The game seems like an excersise in investment, ie what can I afford to lose doing X action. Unfortunately this seems to result in very lopsided kinds of griefing. Now if there was some sort of profit to be made suicide ganking an expensive ship with a cheap frigate I could understand, but the motivation here seems to be pure assholery. Yeah I sound like a carebear for saying that, but it kind of follows the steep learning curve of the game. I guess the other half of that is that I assumed these big mining/support ships would be pretty durable, but from what I read many of them are very fragile.
[/QUOTE]

They can be fragile, but you can set them up to be very tanky. I have a hulk fit for null sec where I can sit and tank up to 4 frigates or a couple cruisers and a frigate or two for a fairly long time. I prefer to kill rats for the isk and loot personally =) but tanking them is valid. A word to the wise, hulkageddon is coming in Feb, so mining will become worlds more dangerous soon.

@Incubus

*Items stay in the hangar you left them in. Meaning stuff can be all over the place. I understand this is particularly a problem for people getting back into the game after a long hiatus.

I periodically wander around in a freighter collecting stuff my characters seem to strew throughout the known universe sign

Like I said, feel free to add me to your friends list if you have any questions, or I hang out in [LEECH]

[enigmatic]

Pointless ganking in high sec is actually very rare, as the person involved is guaranteed to lose a (significantly more powerful) ship. I’ve certainly never lost a ship to another player in high sec. You just need to remember to watch out for circumstances when it becomes worth their while to kill you.

If you are carting much more than 100 million around then you need to start worrying or invest in a tougher transport ship, until that point you are probably fine (obviously you are never completely safe, but that’s why you aren’t flying a ship you can’t afford to lose right?). Occasionally you do get organised campaigns of industrial ship destruction though, so watch out for those.

Low sec is very dangerous and is generally best avoided unless you absolutely have to go through, that short cut might look tempting but the more jumps it shaves off people’s route the more lucrative it is for someone else to camp it out. If you want to try and find solo pvp this is where it might be found, but you need to read up on the flagging and sec status rules, and you will lose your ship :D. High sec is safer only if you have blue status with whoever owns that patch and best avoided until you actually have a reason to be there.

[enigmatic]

That last bit should read “null sec is safer…”. Sorry for the confusion.

[Whack-a-Mole]

@Incubus

-You can’t freely control your ship! This was probably my biggest disappointment. I was looking forward to flying around, doing loops, maneuvering around space pirates, etc. But instead, you click, and the ship goes/orbits there. While nice for long distances (thank god for autopilot!) for smaller engagements being able to manually control the ship would be nice. Using little menus is clunky and I actually lost a ship in a combat mission because I couldn’t right click, warp, station, dock before they chewed through my structure HP. Wish there was just a hotkey for ‘bug out’ instead of all the drop down menus.

What FinnAgain mentioned or, while warping to your destination that you will fight at, set your autopilot to another destination. Does not matter where. If you get in trouble turn on your autopilot…your ship will endeavor to escape on its own (doesn’t mean you will).

-Mining was, disappointingly, as boring as everyone said it would be. My main gripe about it is that it feels like its set up in such a way to be too tedious to be worth sitting there watching the lazer lick rocks, but your cargo hold fills up too fast to leave it going while you do something for 10-20 mins. At least in the frigates I have at this point, I’m topped up after about 2 and a half mining cycles. I understand more dedicated ships can hold more, but ugh!

It does get a little better when using Barges (specifically the Hulk) but not a whole lot. The trick to “enjoying” mining is to be doing something else. Personally I clean my room, do laundry, read a book or watch streaming TV/movies with the viewer taking up some of the screen. Every few minutes I transfer ore or target a new roid. These are things I would be doing anyway so mining and making some money is just gravy.

The one other thing is if you have fun chatting with your corpmates. There have been times I station spun for two hours while chatting. Could be mining and doing the same thing.

-The universe is a nasty, brutal place. I haven’t gotten ganked yet, but I know its just a matter of time. The game seems like an excersise in investment, ie what can I afford to lose doing X action. Unfortunately this seems to result in very lopsided kinds of griefing. Now if there was some sort of profit to be made suicide ganking an expensive ship with a cheap frigate I could understand, but the motivation here seems to be pure assholery. Yeah I sound like a carebear for saying that, but it kind of follows the steep learning curve of the game. I guess the other half of that is that I assumed these big mining/support ships would be pretty durable, but from what I read many of them are very fragile.

Few people will suicide gank in hi sec because it quite simply is expensive and ruins their sec status so they cannot do much of it. It does happen for the sheer assholery of it (I think another Hulkageddon is coming up) but usually a hi sec gank is a very rational choice. They scan your cargo and determine it is worth killing you for what will drop out. As long as you keep your cargo values low and/or fly in hard to kill ships you are fine (although even freighter ganks occur so nothing is “safe”).

And yeah, EVE is a rough and tumble place…or can be. You’ll figure out how to stay safe and when to go look for trouble but if you want a WOW like experience where death is about a 5 minute inconvenience then EVE is not for you.

It is this risk of real loss that gets your blood pumping.

*Can’t sell items from a docked ships cargo bay, gotta move them into the ‘items’ hangar
*Haven’t figured out how to ‘strip’ a ship clean of modules/drones/cargo

There is a “strip” fitting button on the Fitting screen. Takes all modules off your ship (except rigs of course). You can also save favored setups so, if you have the right mods in your hangar, selecting that setup will autofit your ship.

As for cargo CTRL-A selects all (or right-click and select all) then drag into your hangar. Sort things as you like. For a home base (the place you tend to base out of) consider buying station containers to help sort your stuff (note stuff in cans is not “searchable” from your assets screen).

*No ‘engage at optimum range’ for equipped weapons

Nope but there is an overlay which will show your optimal. Use that and it will give you a visual cue when you are in range.

*Items stay in the hangar you left them in. Meaning stuff can be all over the place. I understand this is particularly a problem for people getting back into the game after a long hiatus.

Yep…you end up with shit all over the place. About once or twice a year I spend a day driving all over gathering that crap up.

Annoying but part of the point.

[aruvqan]

sigh

i wish I had a couple spare billion to hire a few assassins … turns out that one of the leaders of the damned alliance is paying merc corps to wardec us just to fuck with indys trying to conduct any sort of business in high sec. Jackass figures anything except PVP should not be allowed in MH.

Funny how his corp seems to have a fair number of carebear indys …

Oh well, I told some of the guys in my corp that I have been on his shit list for so long he thinks I paint my ships brown.

[FinnAgain]

There’s a reason they’re Mostly Harmless. There are a bunch of NC entities which have earned a heck of a lot more respect than MH. You can probably transfer rather easily.

[Whack-a-Mole]

@aruvqan

sigh

i wish I had a couple spare billion to hire a few assassins … turns out that one of the leaders of the damned alliance is paying merc corps to wardec us just to fuck with indys trying to conduct any sort of business in high sec. Jackass figures anything except PVP should not be allowed in MH.

Funny how his corp seems to have a fair number of carebear indys …

Oh well, I told some of the guys in my corp that I have been on his shit list for so long he thinks I paint my ships brown.

Why are the indies that haul to market in your corp? They should be in NPC corps (or at least unaffiliated corps).

Personally I have moved all my industry to Wormholes. My nice C2 always has a link to hi sec and most times I can easily access stuff I need wherever it is (a few times I have to wait a day for a better one or collapse it on purpose but not often).

My industrial stuff has never been safer. Sure, someone could try and blow up my POS but in a WH that is a serious hassle for them. I also have a few other long time friendly corps in here and two carriers in system. If someone wanted to kill it all it’d be a very serious effort on their part which, frankly, no one to date has even bothered to try.

The logistics of getting my freighter to the WH system is a pain sometimes but all-in-all it is a good tradeoff.

[aruvqan]

@FinnAgain

There’s a reason they’re Mostly Harmless. There are a bunch of NC entities which have earned a heck of a lot more respect than MH. You can probably transfer rather easily.

well, I go where my corp goes, I am really not interested in leaving my friends. Although MH did just kill 6 titans yesterday.

@Whack-a-Mole

Why are the indies that haul to market in your corp? They should be in NPC corps (or at least unaffiliated corps).

Personally I have moved all my industry to Wormholes. My nice C2 always has a link to hi sec and most times I can easily access stuff I need wherever it is (a few times I have to wait a day for a better one or collapse it on purpose but not often).

My industrial stuff has never been safer. Sure, someone could try and blow up my POS but in a WH that is a serious hassle for them. I also have a few other long time friendly corps in here and two carriers in system. If someone wanted to kill it all it’d be a very serious effort on their part which, frankly, no one to date has even bothered to try.

The logistics of getting my freighter to the WH system is a pain sometimes but all-in-all it is a good tradeoff.

We do have a couple people who live down a wormhole. I don’t like WH, but I am not everybody =) They pop out once a week to sell stuff and resupply and are very happy.

And we do have non-corp haulers in my corp, but not everybody has more than one account, or has enough time playing that they can let an alt on their account soak up skillpoints enough to run a secondary freighter pilot. Not everybody wants to live where they have to worry about being popped if they go afk briefly or whatever. Not everybody wants to live in nullsec.

I just think that deliberately getting mercenaries to terrorize members of your alliance sucks ass. If some people want to be safe in hi sec, as part of a corps support system, they should be able to do so.

[FinnAgain]

@aruvqan

Although MH did just kill 6 titans yesterday.

Oh come on. There were, what, a dozen major alliances on those killmails? MH had something like a titan or two, a half dozen supercarriers, a handfull of regular carriers and reads and then subcap stuff… MH participated, but let’s not blow it out of proportion. Heck, Yaay was the FC leading the roam that got dropped by PL in any case.

The NC killed those titans. MH was part of the group.

[aruvqan]

@FinnAgain

Oh come on. There were, what, a dozen major alliances on those killmails? MH had something like a titan or two, a half dozen supercarriers, a handfull of regular carriers and reads and then subcap stuff… MH participated, but let’s not blow it out of proportion. Heck, Yaay was the FC leading the roam that got dropped by PL in any case.

The NC killed those titans. MH was part of the group.

And a coalition is made up of all its groups. Your point?

Even little old me with all of 3 killmails to my name participates. You suggesting that because I can’t solo a titan in my chickengeddon I am somehow not part of a killing fleet? Because that is absurd. A coalition is made of different alliances because a single alliance probably is like me in my chickengeddon - they can’t do it all alone so they get people to join them. They become a fleet that kills. That is what is important, the fleet kills.

Ever seen our posters? Northern Coalition, Best Friends Forever … and a listing of all the alliances in the coalition - MH as well as Razor. [it is cute whether it is on carebear tummies or tattooed on the asses of half naked women]

[FinnAgain]

@aruvqan

And a coalition is made up of all its groups. Your point?

Really? My point is that claiming that “MH killed thus and such” is silly, they didn’t set up the fight, they didn’t land the tackle, they didn’t provide a significant number of supercaps, they didn’t organize the battle. Etc, etc, etc.
Hell, by your own statements you have alliance leadership that’s paying mercs to gank their own membership.

@aruvqan

You suggesting that because I can’t solo a titan in my chickengeddon I am somehow not part of a killing fleet?

There is a substantial difference between ninjaing onto a killmail or adding .02% total damage if you stuck around, and actually being responsible for killing something. There’s a massive difference between MH “killing six PL titans” and what actually happened.

MH participated in killing the eight PL titans, yes. Pretty sure that Voltron guys were there too. Of coruse MH did more, but to claim that MH killed them is a bit much. And does nothing to address the fact that your alliance will, as a policy, attempt to have you ganked if you’re in Empire.

[FinnAgain]

Motherfuck!!! Just got home with burgers, ate them with my wife and logged on to find out that we were killing another PL supercap fleet. Two titans dead and I just barely got my Nyx logged on in time to be told that the battle was already over.

Gah.

[aruvqan]

@FinnAgain

Motherfuck!!! Just got home with burgers, ate them with my wife and logged on to find out that we were killing another PL supercap fleet. Two titans dead and I just barely got my Nyx logged on in time to be told that the battle was already over.

Gah.

Sometimes real world interferes=)

[FinnAgain]

Titans > Real Life

I’ve also heard conflicting stories, not clear if we killed two titans or one. My corpies said that a second had gone down, but there’s only one up on the killboards. Might be like what happened to the other PL titans where a couple of them self destructed rather than give up killmails.

[Shooby]

For some reason, I find reading EVE threads utterly fascinating despite never having played it. I don’t know half of what y’all are talking about, either (MH, PL?). Seems more importance is attached to every action, probably because it takes a lot more time/effort to accomplish anything significant than in games like WoW?

[glowacks]

@Shooby

For some reason, I find reading EVE threads utterly fascinating despite never having played it. I don’t know half of what y’all are talking about, either (MH, PL?). Seems more importance is attached to every action, probably because it takes a lot more time/effort to accomplish anything significant than in games like WoW?

Titan class ships cost the equivalent of thousands of dollars and take 2 months to build. There’s a huge amount of time and effort invested in the game, and quite possibly a lot of real money if some articles are to be believed.

Additionally, the guidelines generally are that the bigger and more expensive a ship is, the more ships you need in total to justify deploying it. A lone titan is generally dead meat to swarms of ships worth a fraction of the value, and much of the game involving these huge ships involves baiting the other side to bring in more ships and then dropping your huge stack of ships on to them.

[FinnAgain]

@Shooby

(MH, PL?)

Two alliances. Mostly Harmless is an alliance with a generally poor reputation and it’s a part of the coalition (group of alliances) known as the Northern Coalition. The second is Pandemic Legion. They’re generally considered to be the best group of combat pilots in the game and have probably the best network of spies and dirty tricks out there (said with respect). They’ve been generally beating up on the NC even when they were fighting outnumbered, and have managed to gank quite a few NC supercapital class ships.

These recent battles, however, were the first real deployments where both sides had supercapitals on the field.

@Shooby

Seems more importance is attached to every action, probably because it takes a lot more time/effort to accomplish anything significant than in games like WoW?

There’s a lot to that. In 0.0 space (lawless space, outside of NPC territory), virtually all the content is player-created and/or player-driven. Minerals are harvested and/or brought into the region by players. They’re assembled into ships by players, at structures owned by the players, etc…

For a comparison, you can play the game for in-game currency instead of real-world money. It costs, roughly, 700 million ISK per every two months to play the game. A titan’s ISK value, before you even talk about putting rare gear on it, is roughly equal to 8 years of game time.

[FinnAgain]

And another…
I at least made the fight this time.