I did the free trial thing last fall. Being free, there really isn’t anything to lose except time. I enjoyed the game at first, but the enjoyment didn’t last the length of the free trial.
One big killer for me was the space travel. Sure it would take time to travel in space, but is it fun to play that in a game? I don’t think so. Let’s put it this way. By the end of my trial, I was traveling about 6-8 systems for various missions. How? Well, you set the auto pilot (when it doesn’t get buggy and fail to find you the path), click go, and sit back and watch. After 10 minutes or so, you arrive at your destination. How exactly did I play anything there? I just watched the screen. It gets better. Sometimes the mission is to kill a few things. Sometimes it’s a delivery. A delivery takes about 30 seconds to finish. A kill mission may take 5 minutes. After you finish, you get to watch the screen for another 10 minutes flying back. After a while I ended up reading a book while I was playing. That’s when I realized that Eve wasn’t for me.
I didn’t mind reading during the travel time at first, but then I started losing track of what I was supposed to be doing in game.
Yes, I’ve played a lot of MMORPGs (EQ 1 & 2, SWG, CoH, WoW, DAoC, AC, etc.). The travel down time can be a problem in all of them. I realize that travel helps make the world (or galaxy) seem large. It just gets old.
Orginally in EQ you could wait 15 minutes for a boat trip. It was bad then too. The griffin/bat rides in WoW are the same way. Going back to EQ though, there was an alternative to the boats. Druids and wizards could group port people. Later they created The Nexus and then the portal stones in Plane of Knowledge. Another thing about EQ was that a lot of the travel was intense. I’m sure some people here would remember trying to make it through Kithicor as a lowbie after the undead took over. Brrrr!
I will give the makers of Eve a lot of credit though. They have a no strings attached trial. It turns out the game wasn’t for me, but others mileage may vary.
I was just curious :). Eve definitely doesn’t have a universal appeal, and I think that’s why their 14 day trial is brilliant. If they weren’t based out of Iceland I’d love to go work for them. Apparently the company is a mini google with a lot of amenities in their small offices. They have a free lunch room and stuff
No problem. I guess I never actually answered your question anyway. I currently have an active subscription to WoW, but I haven’t actually played it for about 3 months. I’ve been trying to decide what to play next. Eve actually did cross my mind, but only briefly. It’s kind of a toss up between trying CoV or giving EQ 2 another try. I’ve been hearing some good things about that recently.
In the 3 months since I quietly dropped out of WoW, I’ve been playing various single player games. I’ve finished Stubbs the Zombie and Doom 3 (finally). Then I went on a C&C Generals kick which morphed into Civ 4. Lately I’ve been playing Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin and CM:Afrika Corps. They are hard core turn based strategy games with a WW 2 setting. Which reminds me, I need to start a thread one of these days to see if anyone is up for some games.
There, I went from not really answering to telling you way more than you wanted to know.
I’m used to it by now. He was addicted to EverCrack for a while, and then SWG. He’s already ordered Dungeons and Dragons Online, and I anticipate all I’ll see of him for a while is the back of his head.
He’s a good guy, though, and thoughtfully included in the order enough books to keep me busy until the new Morrowind game comes out for the 360.
Don’t do courier missions. They suck. If you pick an agent in the right department of a corp, you won’t get any.
Kill missions are rarely more than three systems away, and once you’re doing lvl 3 missions, usually take a while to complete.
It’s easy to make instajump bookmarks which allow you to come out of warp right on top of a jump gate, drastically cutting down on your travel time on routes you travel often.
For long trips without instajump bookmarks, one can set up one of the faster frigates with a microwarp drive and other speed modules and it’ll do over 3km/s, making that 15km trip to the jump gate after coming out of warp pretty quick.
I’m not saying that you’re wrong about EVE not being for you, but the travel time thing that people always mention needn’t be nearly as bad as a lot of people think.
Never heard of instajump bookmarks. How do you do that? I mostly stayed away from delivery once I got going. I was having a problem finding agents to give me kill missions though.
I do think that the game really wasn’t a good fit for me.
Well, there is certainly no reason to play something you don’t enjoy, but since you asked here is a description of an insta.
Normally your ship drops out of warp 15km from your destination. So, if you warp to a gate, you stop 15km away from it and have to cover the remaining distance.
To create an insta you warp to the gate as normal and fly towards it then continue flying past it until you are about 12-13km on the far side. Set a bookmark there. Then, the next time you go to that gate, instead of warping to the gate you warp to the bookmark. You drop out of warp 15km from the bookmark, which lands you directly on top of the gate allowing you to jump instantly.
The optimal way to use them is to set your destination as normal then manually warp to your insta. As soon as you hear the “warp drive active”, enable the autopilot. This will cause you to jump as soon as you leave warp.
When you hear the “jumping to stargate” message, disable the autopilot. When the jump is complete you activate your next insta and repeat the process.
Yes, instas do take time to set up but will save you time in the long run. You can also usually find instas on sale in the market and most corps have a set of them for the areas where they are active.
After reading that Eve Online takeover by the “Guided Hand” or whatever, I think I could never play that game. Call me a carebear, but the hundreds of hours spent making something, totally blown away by some callous interloper… well… I don’t think I could manage that. I play games to de-stress, you know, not to work myself up.
Might be why CoH appeals to me so much, there’s no loot, no real penalties for PvP, barely any griefers…
I’m the exact opposite. I love the aspect of the mighty brought low. The problem with many online games(to me anyway) is that the super players who spend 10 - 12 hours a day on the game gain such a lead that casual gamers can’t compete.
Well… that’s true. But you’re never going to be able to compete with the top players in Eve Online, either. Actually, even more so on Eve Online, since you don’t have to be logged in to train, if you subscribe earlier, you’re already automatically at an advantage… And if you piss off the wrong people, you might as well cancel your account.
Maybe it’s just me. shrug I’ll hit 50 in CoH someday, I guess… but I don’t really care, as long as my SG mates are around.
Umm. Not really. True, you’ll never catch top players in total skillpoints, but total skillpoints don’t matter in a fight. All that matters are skillpoints that are directly relevant to your ship. If my 6 million SP character is dualing some 25 million SP character in assault frigates, the fact that the older character has millions of skillpoints tied up in Minmatar Battleship V and Large Artillery Specialization make precisely zero difference to the fight. If a young character specializes, it’s not difficult to reach a point where skills relevant to a particular ship class (Interceptors, for example) are at or near max in a tiny fraction of the age of older characters. Plus there’s a lot more involved in a fight than relative skillpoints. Ship setup is crucial, as is skill at playing the game (particularly in the aforementioned interceptors). And finally, it’s not very difficult for multiple noob characters to gang up on a veteran and blow him away. Tech 1 frigates aren’t very flashy, but a dozen of them can blow pretty much anything out of the sky at a tiny fraction of the cost of even a single battleship. Though of course showing up with friends works both ways.
However, I’m hard-pressed to think of a scenario where pissing off the “wrong people” would mean you may as well cancel an account. Hypothetically possible, I guess, but seriously harrassing a noob character who takes basic preventative measures is next to impossible without resorting to actions that result in a spanking from the GMs. Characters in NPC corps in high sec space are pretty much untouchable unless you’re willing to lose a ship to CONCORD at every engagement, and are willing to devote hours and hours to constantly repairing the hits to your sec status.
You get me all excited about trying out this damn thing, and then I find out that there is no such thing as a working copy and apparently everyone who’s making noises about how great it is is lying out their ass…
I have downloaded this thing four times tonight. Three times the installer says it’s corrupted. I’m downloading from the official freaking site! Fourth time (now remember, it’s almost an hour download…so I’ve been doing this for (counting attempts at fixes) at least five hours) it installs. Yay! So I open the game up. And. It. HANGS! “I’m having a small issue…” No freaking duh! I CANNOT OPEN THIS GAME!!!
The software has its share of issues. That’s why I quit for a while, after a patch I couldn’t get it working. But the tech support got me straightened out eventually.
I’m still playing WoW too, but one of my non-WoW playing guildmates (we’re a multi-game guild) talked me into restarting my EQ2 subscription a couple weeks ago. It’s alot better than it used to be, imo. I beta-tested EQ2, and played it for the first month of release, but just couldn’t get past how unfun it really was to play.
They really have, imo, removed alot of the suck. Definitely worth another try at this point, imo.
Don’t worry about getting any of the expansions unless you have a higher level char though, until you’re sure if you like it. The expansions are all for higher-lvl chars, except the newest one, which doesn’t have any content for <50 chars, but after 20 allows you to accumulate “AA” type points.
