Teras had the market in Sing Liason cornered for 2 or 3 different items, and actually cornered most of the trit one very busy week … absolutely amazing. I think it was 2 different missiles, and hammerhead 1 drones …
This is one of the benefits of having an Orca fleet. If you can have a couple BS’s that can take on the ore thieves you can have combat ships in the Orca and have players switch from their mining ships to their combat ships in the field.
That being said, I LOVE the word Carebear. It made me laugh out loud when I first heard it and even back when I WAS a Carebear I loved it.
Carefish In Eve you are relatively safe in high security space because the Imperial fleets will kill any PKer that tries to take you on. There are financial and gaming incentives to leave Empires space so even Carebears will go into PK territory, and you CAN be PKed in Empire, but it’s never a costless endeavor.
Right, I have dominated certain markets for short periods of time to great effect.
When I was a noob in the game for about a month, I took 10,000,000 and bought every Stasis webifier in the region Sinq Laison for less than 18,000, then I set buy orders in mission systems where people would be getting Stasis webifiers from rat loot drops for 15 -16000. There is always a price point where there is a significant gap between the competitive sell orders and the uncompetitive ones. This is a natural occurence that happens between people who are real traders and who are not. The reason it occurs is that some people will set a high price and leave it up for three months and forget about it. People like me make sure those guys never make money at all. So by buying Stasis Webifiers (The slow down other ships) at 18k I hit that price point where the next lowest price was like 23k in the market hub Dodixie. So what I did effectively was set the price for a while. I put my buy order price higher than the melt value (you can recycle things for their molecular constituents) which at the time was around 13k. I did this for about a week stabilized the market, then went on vacation to Wyoming. Basically I had almost no competition during that time because everyone just sold their webbers to me rather than on the market. So I was making like a 20-40% profit while I was on vacation. Eventually I moved up a scale in market manipulation and moved on to higher ticket items, and I just went around collected all my surplus webifiers and either sold them off at a cut rate or melted them because I didn’t want to manage the stock.
But that was my first experiment with the market, and it was very informative. I have the requisite skills that I can manipulate the market from 10 jumps away, and regular play with market prices while in combat or mining. I get a charge out of messing with the market while killing rats. 
The market is really where you make your money, because you have your money working for you while you do something else. If you have the remote trade skill like I do it’s a matter of spending two minutes every few hours or at least once a day and you can bank millions. When I am actively pursuing it and am not broke because I spent profligately on fancy ships, I am generally logging around 100m +/- 30m in transactions per day between selling for the corp and selling for myself.
One of my favorite things about Eve is that the logistical infrastructure is meaningful. There are reasons to to take high risks for high reward. Captain_C, Sturmhawke and I have managed a small little ammo manufacturing operation that turned an initial investment of 40m a piece spread over four toons into a corp with assets in the couple of billion in just a couple of months.
If anyone on the SDMB wants people to fly with, the SDMB has its fingers in pretty much every type of game you might want to try on Eve. At varying levels too. So you can come into Eve and be immediately connected into the game at a level it would take a long time to build up if you went in alone. Our corp will always welcome Dopers into our ranks as our core is made up of dopers in addition to some other really cool people. Also 80% of the people posting in this thread have at one time or another been in a corp/alliance together and still play together periodically. Just yesterday Whack-a-Mole, Donovan and I sat in the ‘Teeming Millions’ chat channel and watched the live tournament together.
Yeah cruise missiles and hammerheads. We still deal in those.
When we started aruvqan, sturmhawke, Captain_C and I all joined the same corp, then we split now we’re coming back together. Aru has built a mighty impressive mining fleet in the meantime.
LOL, and I am now formulating rules for the miners in the corp - on the gronds that we are very actively recruiting newbies and specifically training them up as miners for fleet operations. I think I am probably the only mining director in the game that is actually putting my newbie miners on hourly wage and providing skill books to get them into hulks.
We are in a good place, we have 2 orcas, another member has an orca of his own, we now have a freighter and one currently being manufactured so we can shift around ore, minerals and finished product.
We have been tossing around various ideas for the past couple of months, and when the orca went live, I grabbed one of the first orcas in game and ran with the idea. Ultimately we are looking to have a fleet mining operation every weekend for 4 to 6 hours, which will provide a major amount of the materials we need for our manufacturing interests. Basing the fleet structure on the orca is going to work out well - each wing will have an orca and 5 hulks, and we will have an entire wing of fighter craft to provide protection from the random rats, allowing us miners to use mining drones. I ultimately want a minimum of 2 orcas, 10 hulks and 5 fighter craft, with a third orca as fleet commander not providing bonuses but hauling to a station or player owned station and transferring it to the freighter.
No corporation based on an internet message board can possibly amount to anything in EVE. 
lol. SDMB membership isn’t required to work with us, but it helps.
I’m disappointed that Pixilated is the only one to mention DDO. I know it gets a bad rap, but it’s one of the very few MMOs that actually does things a bit differently. In pretty much every WoW clone, you run around killing mobs and can fully recharge in only a few moments. In DDO, you pretty much only get XP for completing dungeons, and during each one you only have a limited amount of resources. That twist made things a lot more interesting to me. The problem, of course, is that most players have gone through the dungeons several times before so if you join a group you’re just following along as quickly as possible. However, if you get some friends together and play through without knowing what’s coming ahead of time, it’s pretty fun. Certainly not for everyone but great for certain types.
Well EVE has a completely different XP model, but the limited resources are similar. Most weapons other than lasers and smartbombs (which have their own limitations) have finite ammo that you have to carry in your ship hold. You only get paid money and Loyalty Points (used to buy special items) upon finishing a mission, although you may also get bounties per kill, and loot and salvage are worth a lot too.
When I buy a board game, I should not be taking a risk that the game isn’t inside the box. Oops, you bought a copy of Monopoly with no dice in it! Darn the luck. Try again?
Similarly, if I buy a video game, if I am paying a certain subscription fee, I expect that I’ll be able to come back the next night and find my stuff is still there. Call me crazy, but I don’t want to shovel money into a dark pit. Maybe it’s just me.
Now I admit that other people may enjoy such gaming. More power to them. It doesn’t seem to be the norm.
There’s no point in talking to you.
Wow, ok. I didn’t mean to offend. Just teasin’.
If your stuff is in a station it will still be there. If you have stations built they can be armed to the teeth and have millions of hit points.
Okay, if I can get back to the OP, and ask a similar question? I’m looking for something with semi-casual play, and… Well, what I really like is interresting combat. I’m no twitch-reflexer, but just hammering the same 2-3 buttons over and over again gets kinda… Boring. I loved City of Heroes (especially the customizable-ness of appearance) until the missions seemed to all be exactly the same, I loved 9dragons for the Martial Arts Movie [tm] feel, and I currently play WoW, although mainly for the social aspect. Anyone suggestions?
Tabula Rasa is still running and is free, but I don’t know when they plan to shut down. It’s got gameplay that’s more like an FPS without so much of the twitchiness. I found it fun to play, but I’m apparently in the minority view since they’re discontinuing it.
I’ve heard Exteel is interesting, but you may want to steer clear of Asia-based games, as GameGuard is used for many of them. Rootkits are even worse than the usual DRM.
LotRO or AoC might fit the bill. LotRO offers several different playstyles, depending on class selection:
- Hunter and Champion require using specific abilities to build up “combo-points” to “unlock” more powerful abilities during a battle (similar to a WoW Rogue, with more abilities).
- Minstrel requires a certain amount of “twisting” (similar to the Everquest Bard) where abilities have short duration damage or buff effects; figure out which you want to use (usually up to four) and rotate through them during combat, of course being on your toes for situational changeups.
- Most other classes have some ability chains where you’ll need to use ability A to unlock B to unlock C sort of deal (similar to DAoC).
- Runekeeper and Warden, introduced with the Mines of Moria expansion, each have unique playstyles. Although I’m not familiar with them yet, they sound as if they’re different than the existing classes.
- Player groups also have the option of doing conjunctions which require certain colour player abilities to be used in a specific order, so there’s a new level of group coordination in ensuring the correct abilities get used for the type of conjunction the group needs (damage, debuff, buff, etc.).
AoC, although lacking in some ways, has a more involved combat system than WoW or EQ: when the player activates an ability, they must then use a series of trigger buttons to fire the ability. The combo sequences become increasingly more complex as the character levels and abilities become more powerful, so there’s always something new to learn/keep an eye on. Since the trigger buttons represent the angle of attack used in the combo, and NPC’s defensive attention will be focused on particular areas of their bodies (which frequently changes throughout the fight in response to the player’s angle of attack), there is a strategic element in choosing abilities based on their attack direction.
Between the two, my personal recommendation would be LotRO since there are more playstyle options and AoC has a couple major issues. AoC offers a falloff in gameplay quality after the first 20 levels and a frustrating tradeskill system combined with recent massive server merges making it clear the game is not doing well in North America… one year in, to go from something like 18 servers to 2, is unfortunately not a good sign for longevity or a stable player base. AoC is good for a while, I just wouldn’t recommend it if you’re looking for something to really sink your teeth into with a long-term time investment.
I may look into LotR. I know my compy can’t handle AoC. As for Tabula Rasa… I was under the impression that it was closing shop? I played a free trial of it for a bit and kinda liked it, although the unsteady camerawork gave me headaches after short periods of play.
You may have been under that impression because I said as much in my post. 
Last I heard they were closing down, but as of the end of January they were still putting out patches and updates, despite it being free. I’m not sure what the current status is. I just pointed it out as something different, if short-lived.
I always think that people who likes PvP are usually competitive in nature, or have a mundane boring day job or a combination of both.
For me, when I come back home from a day of politics at work, work-related stress, all I want is to have some casual fun. I already had enough of real life in my day job. I don’t need any of those when I am back home.
LOTRO is cool because the dev team has fleshed up the world so and open up new areas so you aren’t just exploring areas detailed in the book. The North Lands, Lone Downs, Angmar, Forchel (which net just about a page in the appendix) are fleshed out and feels authentic. It’s mostly PvE with some emphasis on raiding, though 10 times less intensive than WoW. It’s a good game to chill out and fight evil at the same time.
Some PvPers I know jeer at LORTO for being carebear and all that; well, go to Eve for your daily drama.
TR is dead. Closing shop soon. Lord British has left the castle.