EVE online, my questions...

The Game Room
1

I am not a hardcore MMORPG gamer. In fact, if I do take up EVE in the next few months, it will be my one and only. I have perused all the EVE threads I could find, but I still have some questions…

1- I hate (HATE) the idea of grinding. One of the draws of EVE for me is apaprently you can set up training schedules, log off, go away, and come back later and the character has continued to do the training while you were away. Real time, sort of. Is this the case, or am I totally misunderstanding this?

2- If I am not on regularly enough to be a benefit to a “Guild” or Corp or whatever they are called, am I still going to enjoy the game?*

3- If I can only log in every few days, but can play for hours at time when I do log on, will I still get enjoyment out of the game?*
*- I am aware that is subjective. Enjoyment means, in this instance, progress and grow, get more gear, etc.

2

[QUOTE=Tristan]

1- I hate (HATE) the idea of grinding. One of the draws of EVE for me is apaprently you can set up training schedules, log off, go away, and come back later and the character has continued to do the training while you were away. Real time, sort of. Is this the case, or am I totally misunderstanding this?
[/quote]

100% correct.
I’m currently away visiting my family and I’m typing this on a shitty old laptop that couldn’t handle EVE anyways. Before I left, I set my main to a 20 day skill, and my alt to an 18.5 day skill.

They’ll have a few days left once I get back home, but they’ll keep training while I’m gone.

Edit: with that being said, you will have to grind ISK.

[QUOTE=Tristan]

2- If I am not on regularly enough to be a benefit to a “Guild” or Corp or whatever they are called, am I still going to enjoy the game?*
[/quote]

Depends on the coalition (group of alliances), on the alliance (group of corps),and on the corps themselves. Generally, however, the corp level is the most important. If you find a bunch of people who are okay with your playstyle, you can certainly log on when you’re able and go on a roam, or gank stuff in high sec, or what have you.

You could always run missions or mine on your own if you can just log in every now and again, and you’ll earn loot and isk and such… but it’s kind boring.

There’s also the possibility of joining a good alliance. It’s easy enough to find enough people to roam 0.0, for instance, in any decent PvP based alliance, even if the rest of your corp is asleep.

[QUOTE=Tristan]

3- If I can only log in every few days, but can play for hours at time when I do log son, will I still get enjoyment out of the game?*
[/quote]

I do.

3

[QUOTE=Tristan]
I am not a hardcore MMORPG gamer. In fact, if I do take up EVE in the next few months, it will be my one and only. I have perused all the EVE threads I could find, but I still have some questions…

1- I hate (HATE) the idea of grinding. One of the draws of EVE for me is apaprently you can set up training schedules, log off, go away, and come back later and the character has continued to do the training while you were away. Real time, sort of. Is this the case, or am I totally misunderstanding this?

2- If I am not on regularly enough to be a benefit to a “Guild” or Corp or whatever they are called, am I still going to enjoy the game?*

3- If I can only log in every few days, but can play for hours at time when I do log on, will I still get enjoyment out of the game?*
*- I am aware that is subjective. Enjoyment means, in this instance, progress and grow, get more gear, etc.
[/QUOTE]

  1. Yes, except there’s no training queue. You must be online to set a new skill to training when the previous one finishes. This can be a bit of a pain at the beginning since many of the skills take only a few hours to train, but after a while isn’t a big deal. Plus there’s 3rd party apps that will alert you to your skill being done.

  2. Being on infrequently is really no reason not to join a corp. You just have to find a corp that suits that style of play. Given that there are thousands of corps, this shouldn’t be a problem.

  3. Sure. What grinding there is in Eve is for ISK (money). But isks just aren’t that hard to come by, and there’s no reason you won’t be able to equip yourself well enough to have fun playing that sort of schedule.

A lot is going to come down to what sort of activities you want to pursue. If you want to log in sporadically to run a few agent missions (largely solo activity vs NPCs) then your sporadicness isn’t going to be any issue at all. If you want to participate in the territorial wars and ongoing soap opera that is 0.0 politics at the highest level, then you need to be online all the time. Small group pvp will be somewhere in between. Basically, the more your play style requires other people to play with, the more a sporadic schedule will be an issue (I suspect you knew this). But even if you play mostly solo (NPCing, market games, industrialist, lots of avenues open here) I’d recommend finding a corp just for the opportunity to get out of the newb corp chat channel.

4

Thank you for the input.

Is it really necessary to have all the different charts, graphs, and other stand alone apps to get the full EVE experience? I have read of folks having databases full of info just to get the maximum potential out of what they do… not being a particularly organized guy, that worries me. Hehe

5

[QUOTE=Tristan]
Thank you for the input.

Is it really necessary to have all the different charts, graphs, and other stand alone apps to get the full EVE experience?
[/quote]

Sorta. It helps to have programs like EVEMon for planning our your skills, and Gripen’s EFT for figuring out ship fittings. Past that… it helps to know, for instance,
what type of agents give the most combat missions, or what damage various rats do/are weak to.

Although, with that being said, if you get heavily into trading or industry, you really will need to make use of spreadsheets.

6

P.S. When it comes to EVE, knowledge really is power. You’ll find that in many circumstances, actual player experience matters more than equipment or skillpoints. Part of that knowledge, for instance, is which ships can most-generally-and-most-successfully, engage which other ships. And in what order. Etc…

Tables, and mission guides and such if you’re in highsec, but there’s also a lot more to learn about the difference between PvP and PvE combat that, to be honest, many PvE’ers don’t find out for quite some time. Ultimately, EVE is deep and very well put together, but it’s got a steep learning curve.

Or, in a nutshell

7

EvE is one of those games where you can spend as much time on it offline as you do online :smiley:

Playing around in EFT - “well, what about if I try this set up or change this module here?”…“hey, where did two hours just go?”.

8

And as always, if you join, get into the chat channel “Teeming Millions”.

9

[QUOTE=FinnAgain]
Or, in a nutshell
[/QUOTE]
I’ve seen that before, but I still giggled for two minutes straight. It’s so damn true, too.

10

Ok, one last question:

One of the things that first caught my attention about this game was the ability for the players to create a rather heavy duty amount of interplay. Specifically, I read the tale of the guy who managed to boost a couple BILLION Isk (if I remember correctly) from a player corp that he had spent a year infiltrating. Looted their treasury, and then skedaddled.

Is this sort of thing still possible? I loved that idea, and it’s what first got me into the idea of EVE.

Note: I am aware that my earlier statement about not being able to play every day for hours at a time is inconsistent with my interest in this aspect. I’m just curious…

11

Sure. I could boost several billion worth from my corp, were I so inclined. If you trust the player behind a character and give him/her the permissions required to access corp assets, the it’s always possible for that trust to be betrayed. There really isn’t any way around that.

At this point there have been several corp thefts that outstrip the raw isk value of the infamous GHSC caper. Course there’s a lot more raw isk value floating around out in space these days, too.

12

[QUOTE=Tristan]
Ok, one last question:

One of the things that first caught my attention about this game was the ability for the players to create a rather heavy duty amount of interplay. Specifically, I read the tale of the guy who managed to boost a couple BILLION Isk (if I remember correctly) from a player corp that he had spent a year infiltrating. Looted their treasury, and then skedaddled.

Is this sort of thing still possible? I loved that idea, and it’s what first got me into the idea of EVE.

Note: I am aware that my earlier statement about not being able to play every day for hours at a time is inconsistent with my interest in this aspect. I’m just curious…
[/QUOTE]

Sure, I suppose …

I know in my corp I have access to a couple parts of the corporate hangars in 2 different stations, and I theoretically could empty out and sell off a serious amount of minerals, ores and ship fittings [as well as a couple of ships stored in the corp hangar] and scarper. I wouldn’t actually do it, mind you but it is possible to do a scarper depending on how your individual corp is set up.

13

You know Aru, if we were people of lower morals, between my access to the 300 million or so in the corp wallets, and your access to the corp hangers…

:smiley: Oh fine, we’ll play nice. Can’t give us dopers a bad name, now can we?

14

[QUOTE=Tristan]
Ok, one last question:

One of the things that first caught my attention about this game was the ability for the players to create a rather heavy duty amount of interplay. Specifically, I read the tale of the guy who managed to boost a couple BILLION Isk (if I remember correctly) from a player corp that he had spent a year infiltrating. Looted their treasury, and then skedaddled.

[/QUOTE]

Take a look here for some info. A bit more than a couple of billion ISK where stolen. :slight_smile:

15

[QUOTE=Captain_C]
You know Aru, if we were people of lower morals, between my access to the 300 million or so in the corp wallets, and your access to the corp hangers…

:smiley: Oh fine, we’ll play nice. Can’t give us dopers a bad name, now can we?
[/QUOTE]

Actually, I don’t find it difficult to make decent kredits playing nice - I just made a couple million in rat bounties on a string of level 4 missions last night, and all I did was be there to salvage the wrecks for my corpie. When I am mining in Stegette, I regularly can haul in a million a day between bounties and loot/salvage from the rats that pop in to kill me, and the mineral value of the ores I am after [if I were to sell them]

Although my mining technique tends to be mine a ‘named’ ore for myself, and mine a generic ore for the corp and toss it in the corp hangar. I have 3 mining 2 lasers, so I use 2 for the named ore and 1 for the generic ore. Works out nicely, and it keeps trickling in the materials for the corp to build stuff to sell.

16

[QUOTE=Tristan]
Ok, one last question:

One of the things that first caught my attention about this game was the ability for the players to create a rather heavy duty amount of interplay. Specifically, I read the tale of the guy who managed to boost a couple BILLION Isk (if I remember correctly) from a player corp that he had spent a year infiltrating. Looted their treasury, and then skedaddled.
[/quote]

Scams in the hundreds of billions are possible, but more unlikely now as everybody thinks everything is a scam.

Still, you have to understand that what the GHSC pulled off, even though its ISK value was low, is pretty much a singular event. Not only did it take an insane amount of time and coordination, there (hopefully) aren’t too many people who are that clueless these days. Pulling off something of that magnitude should be impossible in most cases.

However, I have a staffer who was a director in LV before they fell, and he stole 70 bil out of the corp wallet before he got caught. Billions in assets/isk were also stolen from BRUCE before it fell. In general, if you want the long track, stick with a large alliance, work your way up, and boost as much as you can when/if the chance arises.

Heck, a recently ex-BoB pilot took one of their corps for roughly 300 mil in theft, while a BoB corp itself stole a Titan from a member after claiming that they’d give it back.

17

I wasn’t scammed, but I “loaned” BRUCE 550 million a few months before they evaporated. I sure could use that ISK right about now…

18

Heh, yep.
Instaplode. (v). To vanish suddenly through failure “BRUCE dun instaploded.”

P.S. The ex-BoB pilot stole billions, with a B. Not millions. Blargh.

19

[QUOTE=FinnAgain]
Scams in the hundreds of billions are possible, but more unlikely now as everybody thinks everything is a scam.

Still, you have to understand that what the GHSC pulled off, even though its ISK value was low, is pretty much a singular event. Not only did it take an insane amount of time and coordination, there (hopefully) aren’t too many people who are that clueless these days. Pulling off something of that magnitude should be impossible in most cases.

[/QUOTE]

Pretty much this. After the GHSC scam CCP implemented better controls to allow corps to secure their assets. In general any corp worth its salt will be exceptionally restrictive in its access. Frankly the mechanics of it all are rather kludgy and obscure to get your head around but the controls exist and once set can be forgotten by the CEO.

Most corps maintain a “General” hangar which is sort of a grab bag for the players. Low level mods and such for newer players to nab as needed or to get melted en masse every so often for a quick mineral infusion. While all that may add up to a few hundred million in stuff in some corps these days that is small potatoes. In general it is not worth wrecking your reputation to grab junk like that even if it looks like a lot to a new player.

In EVE your rep really counts for something and it is worth protecting. You can still be a pirate ganking people and have a good rep…more it is about loyalty to your corp mates, fair play and all around being a decent person to hang around with.

All that said scams still occur and a few, particularly some IPO scams, netted large amounts. As in life if it looks too good to be true it probably is. Everything is there to keep yourself and your stuff safe if you pay a bit of attention.