I’m sure this has been done before, but I’m having a hell of a time trying to search for it. So I’ll just do it this way:
I’m a pretty avid gamer, though I’ve never even laid eyes on a MMO(RPG?). I know that WoW is immensely popular, and SWG has quite the following. However, EVE Online has caught my eye. Looks kinda like a massively multiplayer Freelancer.
1)Any good? Game review sites run the range of meh to wow!
2)Since I’ll just be starting out now, and the game’s been on for like 3 years, will I be horribly inexperienced and just get my ass whooped all over the place? The EVE Online FAQ addresses this question, but I’d kind of prefer a SDMB-style answer.
3)I’ve heard that EVE particularly takes a long time to build up a good character. I’m probably looking at maybe 5-6 hours/week of play time. Is it even worth it? I mean really. I’ve heard of “grinding” in SWG and it sounds bad.
4)I don’t really have any MMO friends to join a clan or guild or corporation or whatever with. This gonna be a problem? Is it fun running around by yourself?
5)And then of course the catchall – anything else I should play instead?
It is true that most people who’ve been there longer will have advantages, but it’s perfectly possible to stay away from PvP until you’re ready. There’s more than enough room for a new player to grow. Also, since the economy is as real as you can get on a computer game, it’s not as if everything’s inflated to the point of ridiculousness, as it is in EQ and other such games.
Here’s the funny part about character building. Yes, it takes a long time, but skills train while you’re offline. See, depending on your stats, skills take a certain amount of time to train. The lower level skills may take only 20 minutes to an hour, but the higher level skills may take days, weeks, and sometimes months. However, you don’t have to be logged in to train. I recently trained a 29 day skill, and barely logged into the game during that time as I was preoccupied with other things. The only requirement is that you have to be online to switch which skill is training; you can’t queue them up, leave for half a year, and come back to be a badass.
Soloing is perfectly possible in EVE; gaining money just tends to take longer, and the more dangerous areas of space aren’t good to go to even if you have the strongest ship in the game. But I mostly play alone, myself, and I haven’t had any trouble.
There really is nothing like EVE on the market today. Everquest, World of Warcraft, and City of Heroes are just RPGs in the D&D sense, and none of them capture the spirit of a virtual world as cleanly as EVE does. Star Wars Galaxies does more or less the same thing, but not as well, I believe.
Any suggestions on how to start/proceed? I’ll probably install it later on tonight. MMOs kind of scare me a little because it feels like the characters are so permanent and it takes so long to grow them up, that I don’t want to make a mistake in their creation at the beginning.
I’ve looked at this game recently with intense interest as well, but a couple of things are holding me back.
First off, I’m still a World of Warcraft player. I don’t want to give that up. I don’t mind having another computer game to play, but I don’t want it to consume all my free time
Secondly, and actually more troublesome, is that I’ve heard the best way to generate income in Eve is to mine asteroids which is a slow and boring task. I’m not likely to devote enough time in the game to become a valued guild member, so I fear that I would likely be on my own, breaking up rocks. And after I finally get enough cash to buy something interesting, my pretty new ship would get blown up and I’d have to go back to mining rocks.
EVE, for all its depth, requires very little actual time investment, unlike a lot of RPG games where if you log in, you’d best be prepared to spend several hours in one sitting to make it worth your while. The bulk of the investment lies in skills, and as I mentioned those train in the background. Frequently I’ll log on, spend half an hour checking up on my skills and finances, maybe do some quick mining or fighting, then pop off. Missions, while they do pay very little, can be done in 5-10 minutes if your combat skills are ship are decent. “Decent” in this case means “not the beginner ship”; there are combat ships readily attainable near the start of the game that are vastly more powerful than the newb ship.
It’s the safest way, to be sure. I don’t deny it’s boring, either. But it’s really only the best way if your mining skills are heavily trained and/or you have a 3+ person operation going on.
Currently (after having played for about three months), I can make 1 million credits in two hours by mining, or 100,000 credits in one hour by fighting NPC pirates. Mining makes more, but guess which one’s more fun? Of course, I started as a combat pilot and am now more or less a miner/hauler. Someone focusing on combat can get to the point where they can destroy NPCs worth 1 million credits each pretty quickly.
There’s also trade routes you can run where, if you find a good route, you can make millions very fast. I’m working my way toward this currently.
As for losing your ship…it’s part of life, really. You can buy insurance, which is always recommended, and it’ll reimburse a good chunk of change if you lose your ship. By the time you get to where you have really pretty and awesome ships, though, you’d be much more confident of your combat abilities.
I played EVE for a couple of months, but my friend got bored and we switched to WoW. I had no big issue on moving over.
The main points (not issues, really, just points) of EVE are as such:
The best ways to make money are to either farm piddling missions or to mine asteroids. You can also, apparently, make some very good money by trading things around. Regardless, none of these requries a lot of mental energy. And all of space looks a lot the same, so moving around doesn’t really buy you any other flavors of experience.
Skills come to you on a timer and you can’t get them any faster than that. So regardless of anything, it is going to take several months (probably at least 4) to get to a point where you can do anything with anyone else.
Personally, I was lukewarm on the game, but I feel that that was mostly a matter that my friend had attached us to a small guild of nice, but normal people. To me it felt like the game was not intended to really be played as a nice and merry, get on after work and play a bit type game. If you do that, essentially it becomes like MSN Messenger or such–you’re just sitting about chatting with everyone for the most part. True, while you’re chatting you’re also mining or looking over the market for cheap prices or whatever, but for the most part the game is just a very large addon to the chat channel.
It seemed to me like to really get the value that is there out of the game, you have to approach it with a serious roleplaying mentallity. The truly cool parts of the game are the huge gallactic wars between guilds to take over quadrants and such. But to do that, everyone in those guilds has to accept a hierarchy, plan together, make scouting runs, build up bank accounts, school new recruits, etc. With that, it becomes a game. But all that is a product of the players utilising the high level of control capable in the UI. What “game” the game itself provides, is really fairly boring (Kill 7 scorpid invaders. Kill 8 scorpid invaders. Kill 6 scorpid invaders and Zazzamataz. Etc.)
So, pretty much, dependent on who you are, I either would or wouldn’t recommend EVE. So, if you want something laid back where you can just mine asteroids while chatting and telling off-color jokes to guildies for hours on end, then it is good. Or if you want something really in-depth where you can get involved and really approach it like it is a real world with real-world consequences and story, then I heartily recommend it. But for anything anywhere between those two extremes, WoW is quite nice (though I personally preferred City of Heroes up through level 30 over WoW.)
Been playing now for a little over a month, and enjoying it more than any other MMROP I’ve played.
I’m still very much a newbie (been in frigates, and now trying out my new destroyer) but am able to do a huge variety of missions.
Mining runs bore me, so I’ve been doing some trading runs, a lot of agent missions, and pirate hunting.
Combat is much more tactical and varied, especially in pvp areas. I’ve been sneaking into pvp space a little to hunt the stronger pirates, and have been crushed once by another player, but if careful it is doable for the solo newbie to venture quite broadly. You are very active while, selecting targets, weapons, postion velocity, etc, and positioning and tactics can allow you to kill others that are much stronger than you, instead of the EQ method of click and watch the fight.
Training the skills is an excellent system (instead of repeatedly spending hours smacking monsters to earn xp) that can run while not logged on, so the game isn’t a huge time sink. I can log on for an hour or less, and only get 5 or 6 hours a week in, and actually accomplish a lot of game work.
Interestingly, since I got back into the game I can’t get it to run in full screen mode, which is driving me away from it. So anyone who has any ideas…
Hubby found a free 14-day trial, I don’t know where. To actually play the game longer-term, though, I think you need to purchase a key for the client (which you download from the site) which then gives you 30 days of game time, and after that you pay per month.
I’m really enjoying what I’ve seen of Eve so far. Well, except for when I was doing the tut and some buttmunch came in after I’d killed the pirates in the first area, zipped through the gate and then grabbed all of the keys from the second area. But I’m liking it aside from that.
Just to reply to add to the answer of my own question. You can still get some boxed copies from a secondary vendor on Amazon for $25. Otherwise you can download a 500M client from the vendor. It then costs $20 to create an account. I haven’t created an account at this point. Does anyone happen to have any trial keys laying around?
When I signed up for my trial, it was directly through EVE Online’s website. Unfortunately I can’t find the page now, as it’s not publicly advertised. However, you can get a trial key through MMORPG.com. It does require an MMORPG.com account, but it’s a free registration.
I did go ahead and download the trial version, haven’t had a chance to try it yet.
Another game that has caught my interest is X3 Reunion.
It’s not being released till October, but it seems to offer a lot of what I’m looking for in Eve. It’s single player, which has benefits and drawbacks. I won’t have to worry about veteran players griefing me, but I miss out on meeting some cool people. But the main beneift to me right now is that I won’t have to add another monthly fee.
I don’t know, we’ll see if I end up hooked on the Eve trial anyway.
So, I skimmed the first few entries and thought I should poke my head in as a new player for Eve. I’ve been playing for 3 days now and can’t get enough. As a new player I just upgraded my ship from the beginner default ship to what is called an “Incursus.” It’s nothing super fancy but it’s twice as fast as my original ship (okay, so I upgraded the 'cursus a little…)
Since there is a bit of a learning curve, the player base seems to be fairly, well, intelligent. Not that it bars kids from playing, but this isn’t a start the game and go PvP. To be able to even hold your own you’ll need days, or weeks of skill learning. I had to wait 23 hours after purchasing my ship before I was even able to climb in it because I needed a level 3 of Frigate pilot. Sure, this is frustrating and it left me sitting at home in my old ship mining and running missions to try and pass the time.
Since the game has a LOT of travelling, there is a lot of “down” time. When I have to make a mission and make 7 jumps, I pull out a book and sit back to let the autopilot make the trip. Or better yet, I actually do HOMEWORK while playing the game. Now this isn’t a game you can walk away from and know you’ll be alive when you come back, shit happens, but it is a game where you don’t have to lock the door and tell no one to bother you.
Yeah I’m rather enjoying it too. Have you joined a corporation yet?
After completing the tutorial and a couple of the tut-missions I started poking around in the recruitment channels. I ended up joining a small (only 5 members, but growing) corp that’s looking specifically for new players to help raise up. I had to do about 8 jumps to get to the headquarters, but once there and I joined, I was given 500,000isk to help me up. Also, since this corp manufactures Frigates, I was given an upgraded Frigate (though I don’t quite have the skill to use it yet). I was also coached by the boss to focus all my training on the Learning skillset first to get it all the way up. Essentially an investment in the future I believe.
On first impressions, I’m really digging the idea of corporations. I know that most of these types of games have guilds or clans or whatever, but my sense is that they all require a fairly high time committment. Doesn’t seem to be the case here.
