No, travel is very real and your items have a real permanence. Unlike in WoW where placing items in your bank at Stormwind lets you pull them out in Darnassus, your items stay where you put them. If you end up venturing 20 systems out from your home base, you’d better have supplies or it’ll be a long journey back to get what you need.
No, thank god, but there is a capacitor. Certain actions use capacitor energy, and if you don’t have enough you’re floating until your cap recharges. But you can never be totally stranded.
Depends on what you do. Most every way you can engage in combat in EVE requires consumable resources, which you then have to repurchase, but hauling or mining typically doesn’t cost a dime.
Thick armor and shields, plus bodyguards. Be ready to run if you get jumped. But mining operations take a few hours to do correctly; grabbing a load and running is seriously inefficient.
If you jettison your cargo, it winds up in a floating can that has a ton of storage space, usually more than your ship can carry. A typical tactic while mining is to store all your mined ore in this jettisoned can while using a high-rate mining vessel, then go back to base, get a hauling vessel with a large cargo hold, and start hauling stuff back. It’s risky in that someone can open the can and take your stuff, but in high-sec space the police will get them, so it’s usually not worth stealing.
How group dependent is the game? Are there professions suited to soloing, or does the game get impossible if youre not in a corp? Also, is mining automatic- or do you have to keep clicking? I’ve heard people “afk” mine which suggests you can just leave the game on mining till youre cargo hold gets full, our is that botting? How much isk do you have to make to cover the monthly fee to play ? What about other professions, what are their pros and cons?
Lots of people solo in EVE but as with many MMOs certain content can only be done in groups.
There are solo pirates but it is easier in groups.
There are solo miners but it is easier in groups (or have at least a second account of your own which makes a huge difference when mining).
There are solo mission runner, solo industrialists and so on.
EVE is expansive though and no matter what you do it can be done better in a group. Some things like holding 0.0 space or running L5 missions or some plexes simply must be done in a group.
“AFK” mining is usually a hauler that has the ability to fit a mining laser. Park it in a belt, turn on laser and go to the pub.
Frankly it is not worth the electricity to run your computer. The best you can do is mine one rock and even a big one (which most aren’t) is not a whole lot.
Mining needs only a modicum of attention. Depending on skill and ship a miner will fill their cargo hold every 6-7 minutes or so (there is a lot of variance…some ships will do it in less than a minute which is annoying). At this point you have to either return to base and unload, unload to a jet can or unload to a waiting hauler/Orca.
With hauling support and a Tech-2 mining ship (Hulk) you cannot stay away for long but only need to pay a modicum of attention if you are in hi sec. This is why it is good to do while studying or reading or watching a movie or cleaning your room or doing laundry or surfing for porn or whatever.
You can do pretty much anything in high-sec on your own, mine, mission, rat, build, all can be solo activities. If you want to move to null sec/ low sec/ wormhole space you will be very dependent on the other members of your alliance, as they are the only ones there to help you if you get attacked.
Mining lasers (for regular ships) have a 60 second cycle time. Strip miners (for mining barges/ exhumers) have a 180 second cycle time. With strip miners you will frequently “pop” asteroids when you mine out all the ore they contain, so you have to check back every 3 minutes to restart your lasers on a new roid. It has been a long time since I’ve used regular mining lasers, but IIRC you are going to fill up your hold many times before you pop even one roid.
Right now one PLEX (which is worth 30 days of game time) costs about 370 million ISK. Like everything in EVE though, PLEX are subject to market forces and may rise or fall in the future.
Missioning is more profitable than mining in the long run, and is the only way to build NPC standings, which are useful for various other game play aspects, but missions aren’t much more exciting than mining and quickly become a grind for most people.
Manufacturing things profitably really requires a passion for Excel to do right, but if you find a niche and exploit it you can make good isk.
Moving out to null sec and ratting (killing npc pirates) is probably the fastest and most secure way to make ISK, but you will need to be able to fly at least a battle cruiser to survive.
For you experienced players, what were some of your bigger mistakes starting out? Are there non sketchy ways to make isk offline? How time intensive is the game compared to other mmos?
Bosstone: Maybe most secure wasn’t the best choice of words. What I meant was ratting gets you guaranteed income from bounties, versus say manufacturing, where you are subject to the whims of the market. Of course your losses are far from certain, but I found that even factoring in a new Raven every week I made damn good money running Havens in null sec.
Biggest mistakes starting out? It’s been so long I have probably forgotten most of them, but I would say mining without looking at the alternatives properly. I find mission running slightly less boring than mining, and make twice as much per hour at it, but it took me years to realize that. Another thing; you should read the forums. You will learn a lot about you fellow players.
There are some passive income sources, but they take a while to develop. As I mentioned eventually you can invest. Manufacturing is pretty passive, you just set it and forget it until the job is finished. The other big passive income source is R&D, which is fairly skill and standing intensive, but will allow you to make about 150 million a month per character (in ideal circumstances). The EVElopedia can tell you all you need to know about research agents.
I haven’t really played any other MMOs for a long time, but I would say EVE is as time intensive as you make it. Starting out the more you play, the more money you will make. On the other hand I’ll be making 150 mil this month in interest alone off 1.5 billion in investments. (assuming they aren’t scams)
I should add that a second account in EVE grants a great advantage. Hard to overstate that.
Many players have more than one account and EVE lets you play them simultaneously (assuming your PC is up to snuff…I know of some that play 4 accounts at one time but that is pushing things for most PCs…two is not much trouble for a PC these days though).
One thing worth noting, if you start between now and new yearish (I’m not sure of the exact dates) you will receive the annual “unique ship” that they hand out to all active accounts.
On no account should you attempt to fly it, because the stats on them are pretty unmemorable and they are a favoured target for high sec suicide gankers, but you will easily be able to sell it for 15-25 million via contracts which is an extremely nice ISK nest egg to be starting with.
EvE allows you to trade money for isk, indirectly. You can use real money to purchase PLEX, which are sort of like game time cards, directly from the eve website. I’ve never dealt with this aspect of the game so I could be mistaken on some of the details.
PLEX are also objects in-game and can be traded, or looted, or stolen like any other item. Not too long ago someone ganked thousands of dollars worth of PLEX by attacking and destroying another player’s ship that was transporting a bunch of PLEX in high security space. It was awesome. (Don’t be an idiot like that victim: Leave valuables in the safety of your hangar!)
Anyway you can buy plex from CCP,for $$$ and trade it in-game for isk. I’m pretty sure one month of game-time is $15, and going by the rate quoted up-thread, you can trade that for about 370 mil isk.
I don’t think it’s worth the money but YMMV. It is a legitimate way to buy isk because all the actual real-life money is going to CCP, the developers of EvE.
It’s way more fun making isk through honest piracy and old-fashioned theft. I really need to reactivate my accounts
I much prefer nullsec, I can’t say when I have had a cal flipped, though in my corp when we run a mining operation we use one of the Orcas to haul, so your cans may vanish periodically to be taken to the Rorqual for compressing.
I lost Mining Director 5 once … I didn’t realize that I forgot to upgrade my clone and I got popped in one of the corp Orcas, lost a 5 of 6 set of Snake implants too [I am more peeved at forgetting to update my clone than losing over a billion ISK in implants … ]
In null sec space, the people in your system will only be members of your corporation, alliance and allies. You all tend to cooperate - if I am not into setting up someone to tank the NPC rats that pop into the system [sit there and let them shoot at the ship to keep them busy and away from the miners] there is generally someone wandering around ratting = specifically hunting these NPC pirates. Usually just an asteroid belt or so away. One mention in local chat that the rats are in whichever belt gets one or more people responding to kill them. And again, when it is all people you know in system, if someone that is neutral or red [enemy] to you pops into system, it is pretty obvious that you need to get to the POS and to safety until the threat is gone, or a fleet pops up to kill them. I got 2 killmails yesterday going after reds in the system. And again, an ally is not going to flip your can or kill you, if you kill someone in your alliance or a friendly player [someone that has a reciprocal friendship agreement with your alliance and corp] your own corporation is probably going to slam you pretty good as reparations need to be paid [unless you are goonswarm, they may randomly pop anybody. I was in a system when a couple wandered in and popped a couple guys in my corp. The whole matter was ignored and we were pretty peeved about it. We rarely fleet with them to do anything now.]
I have 4 accounts …
That guy lost 73 PLEX cards … I heard a figure of roughly $1300 US in real money. Sucks to be him.
And again, I like that you can pay for your game with in game money, that is how I pay for my accounts now that I am unemployed.
There was apparently a big deal with “learning skills” being removed from the game today. Does that refer to stuff you can train that make you faster at training new skills?
When starting out training those skills sooner rather than later was a good idea but it sucked training them because they were boring. You couldn’t fly a new ship or use a new module, they just sped up other training. For that you had to spend a couple weeks training them up.
So, they removed those skills and bumped everyone’s base stats up so it is (mostly) a wash for those who had trained them up. For new players they are now on the same page with all other players from the get-go when it comes to that.
You can still use implants to buff your training times.
It’s not at all a wash for those of us who trained them up. We’ve gotten the benefit for years and now we have a skill pool of millions of sp’s to invest as we want.
It is pretty close to a wash. From the Dev Blog on this:
As for giving us the SP back we invested that only seems fair when it is taken away and if not fair at least stops a lot of lengthy rants. Don’t see it as unfair at all though myself.
It’s not a wash at all. Old players have a massive advantage. We’ve had faster training for years that, yes, now is equal to noobs, but we get millions of SP’s that we can and will invest in off-spec skills. The choice is only what to invest in. New players are as far behind old players as ever, except now older players get to invest those extra skillpoints into anything they want.
Just turned Charles Dealy into a bomber pilot … and got a whole bunch of indy skills for him to finish training up here and there =) And added some more combat skills to Aruvqan
They actually give the point values of those learning skills you learned and let you instantly transfer those into other skills? Yeah, that seems kinda strange - unless you just trained all your learning skills very recently, it seems like they would’ve already paid for themselves in increased speed learning other skills, so to have used them to your advantage for years and get a refund just widens the gulf.
What I meant was ratting gets you guaranteed income from bounties, versus say manufacturing, where you are subject to the whims of the market. Of course your losses are far from certain, but I found that even factoring in a new Raven every week I made damn good money running Havens in null sec.