I am getting a demo for Eve Online. Please let me know what you think of this game if you’ve played it.
It’s the first MMORPG that I’ll have played.
This is about as hardcore of an MMO as you’ll find. It’s notoriously grueling and cruel. People play for hours, mining asteroids just to get a bigger ship capable of hauling in more asteroids.
It’s a serious time commitment and very brutal. For some people, that’s what they’re looking for - it raises the stakes. For others (like me, if you can’t already tell), it just isn’t terribly fun.
It sure is pretty, though.
It’s the ultimate sandbox MMO. It’s one of very, very few games where advancement is not solely done through combat, and in fact combat is one of the less exciting things about the game.
The learning curve is very high, since it is so open-ended, but the trials and demos usually last for a couple weeks, which gives you enough time to determine if you’re hooked or not.
Honestly, you’ll find it more fun if you’re a numbers person than an action person, as most of the game is driven by numbers. Thankfully only a few numbers are the arbitrary “You did X damage!” sorts you find in most MMOs. The economy works, to the point that ISK has a real monetary value. Playing the market is one of the strongest points of the game. There’s also trading goods from one system to the next; I spent as much time as some truckers do working on a cargo ship and trying to eke the most money out of it.
Here are a couple more threads on EVE, and the first link has links to previous threads. That should get you a lot of information quickly.
Yeah, there are even market fluctuations, one day the mineral Veldspar (or its processed form, tritanium) is “the shiznit” the next day it’s Omber. And the value can vary by system.
The thing you have to know though is that almost everyone is out to get you. Learn this as quickly as possible. EvE isn’t an MMO so much as a psychology experiment on business level ruthlessness behind an anonymous face. If you find that some weird good is being sold for low with a high profit three systems away in low sec space there’s a good chance you’re going to get pirated with a quick warp jam kill, looted, and… well… just remember to insure your ships and buy clones. If you PM me in game (Jsor Aladis is my name) I can send you a handy beginners guide someone I know on there gave me (I’m broke right now though so no donations, I only have like 18k ISK because of an unfortunate event with a combat mission after buying a bunch of training books… which T luckily stowed away had to refit my ship and lost a LOT of money).
If you need any help just ask, I’m kind of a newbie myself, but I may (stress on may) be able to get you into a nice channel my real life friend got me in with some helpful people. If I can’t I’ll still try to get you any info you need.
One thing I reccomend is googling and downloading the application Evemon. It will help you sort out your long term goals and monitor your skill training offline (you still have to log in to start training a new skill though, afaik). It’s good to have a goal (i.e. pilot a hulk, which is one of, if not THE best mining ship there is), even if you abandon it later, for example you decide you like combat more than mining a lot of the skills you trained (i.e. ship command) will still help your new focus.
Brilliant.
One of the devs once said “Eve isn’t designed to look like a cold, harsh, brutal world. It’s designed to be a cold, harsh, brutal world.”
So I’ve been playing for a few hours. I feel like I may have made a mistake with my initial character setup. I gave myself a high rank in all the corporation management skills, so I should be good at business, but none of that stuff is coming in handy for me at all. My mining skill is low. I’m raising it now. It’s amazing that a game with this high of a learning curve actually has as many players as it does.
My name is Teras Menac
How do I whitelist people?
The beauty of EvE is that, for a price, anyone can learn any skill. I rolled industrial, my long term goal is mining in a hulk (so I can make items with it, as well as make some cash) but I’m working on basic combat because combat missions are waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay better than courier for getting money and standing (from what I’ve been told at least).
I just bought a new ship. It was a long way away so I am en route to go pick it up. Can you hire NPCs to pilot ships for you? Do you need to roll with a corporation to do that? How does all that work?
You can set up contracts to have stuff moved, and another pilot would then transport it in a larger ship like an indy or a freighter. I am assuming that you are relatively new, I don’t know if you could make a payment large enough to make the contract worthwhile for an indy pilot looking for cash. To the best of my knowledge, you can’t hire NPCs to move ships; in fact, I think that anything in the contract would have to be packaged (and therefore ‘unflyable’). One piece of advice for you if you are traveling, if you haven’t already done this, is check your autopilot settings (under map settings) and make sure your autopilot is using safest route. Moving into low sec areas from hi sec areas is generally dangerous as the pirates like to hang at those gates and blow up unwary travelers. Most long trips through hi-sec tend to cut through lowsec areas if you don’t set it to avoid them.
Another point, touching on your question about did you make a ‘broken’ character - most corp management skills are much more useful to the player who is actively managing a player corp or playing a role in a corp - as a noob, you will find little use for skills like that unless you start your own corp (frustrating as hell, I wouldn’t recommend it for a new player - I could go into details, but just trust me on this) or find a corp dumb enough to let a new character with no corp history or in game references to have a position of trust. Sorry to say it, but I would mess about a bit to get a good handle on what you really want to do, then make a new character. If you show any interest, I could probably point you at a couple of good places that discuss good character creation. If you’ve been playing long enough though, it might just be worth it to keep learning other skills; like Jragon said, there is no skill closed off to your character if you can train up the prereq skills and can come up with the money to buy a skillbook, and most new characters don’t really have enough skillpoints to specialize (or handicap) themselves too severely.
As you might gather, I like the game, been playing it on and off for 2 years, and stopped playing city of heroes when I started playing Eve. I kind of disagree with woodentaco’s assessment; One of the nice things is there is no ‘skill grinding’ - you always will advance in skill (as long as you have set a skill to train), whether you are logged off, or playing, or just logged in doing nothing. Some people do spend hours mining asteroids for cash, but if you have to do this day in and day out to get the money you are looking for, you are doing it wrong. There are also lot of other ways to make the money you need too - even conning people is ‘OK’ as long as it is not done by abusing game mechanics. I will agree that there are some people who spend hour and hour doing stuff online, but that is the curse of any mmorpg. I will agree that there is a steep learning curve on the game though. If you are a details orientated person, you might like it.
Any further questions you might have that want immediate response, you can try me ingame, I go by the name of ‘Victor Han’ and I’m generally good for a little advice or some assistance with some things.
The problem here is that it charges a hefty penny to message someone in game. I message Jragon and it cost me over 2000 ISK.
O.o
I’ll pay you back for that, didn’t know it would be THAT expensive (okay, so “that” is a relative term, I got my first mil in about two days 'cos I’m cool like that). Anyway, if you add someone to your friends list (“People and Places”) You can open a private conversation if they’re online, saves you the mail fee.
word to the wise - you can turn the cost off under settings - choose the email tab, right click (‘somewhere’, I’m not logged in now, so can’t tell you exactly what to right click) and set the cost to 0. If you work with alliances and you don’t have it set to zero, you will be pounded in chat by pissed off fleet commanders who have to pay up every time they invite you to the warfleet. The cost is there for a reason though, it was to keep spammers from sending in-game emails about in game money sales on third party websites (a violation of the EULA).
Well in a few hours of playing I’ve made probably close to half a mill. I’m not doing too bad on money I guess, except that the gun upgrade I want is like 25 mill. 
Eve’s an interesting place. To be honest I find a lot of the stupid posturing about how awesome people are because ‘X’ to be deeply deeply irritating, but at least you get to go punch them in the face over it (for example BoB, one of the larger power blocks lost a large proportion of their space cos their arrogance rubbed too many of the others the wrong way).
My perspective may be skewed (my characters live solely in lawless 0.0 space) but I can’t stand the pacing of empire life, I suggest getting into a combat cruiser and getting some real pvp done. I took the ‘join a pre-existing forum community corp’ route (Merch Industrial in my case) and would recommend to new players doing the same (find a corp that takes new players, roll with them). Eve is nothing without a bunch of friends to fly with. If you don’t have any connections in the big 0.0 alliances try Eve university if they’re still around, or one of the roleplaying corps (CVA are good people). Be prepared to have people look down on you because you’ve just started (theres a lot of snobbery and elitism in eve) and just maintain a list for future revenge.
I’m not actually playing atm (large rail grind +Euro 2008) but I can log in if you want some isk (isk is another reason to be in 0.0, I can make 15m isk an hour with a character of maybe 6 weeks old)
A few more things occur to me.
Firstly, the advice about restarting your character once you have an idea what you want to do in the game is a good one.
Secondly, once you know you’re going to stick with a character, train learning skills first, the payback is delayed, but substantial.
Thirdly get Evemon, its not even close to optional, you basically need it to play eve
Fourthly get some implants to up your attributes. They don’t cost a whole lot (50m for a set of +3s) and will get you to the fun skills faster. (also, learn to update your clone, how to use jump clones, and if you live in 0.0 how not to get podded)
Fifthly pick a goal (I want to run level 4 combat missions, I want to mine, I want to supply the market with tech II lasers, whatever) and make a skill plan in evemon that allows you to do that and stick to it. Generalist characters are normally not a good idea. If you want a pvp pilot and an industrialist, get a second account (multiple accounts is the norm in eve, 17 being the record I’m aware of). You can pay for subscriptions with in game currency and a good industrialist will have a lot of cash to spend on pvp characters.
I’ve been playing off-and-on for over three years.
http://ineve.net/skills/character.php?charID=NjUwODE2ODcy
I’ve TWICE started characters that were intended to be industrial/manufacturing-focused. And TWICE I ended up spending a lot of training time learning ship skills, even to do the mining and hauling.
I agree 100% with other advice in this thread, and add IMO: when rolling a new character, focus on basic ship skills attributes, such as Intelligence, Perception, and Willpower. Intelligence will help with a lot of things (including Learning skills). Unless you absolutely, positively will be in-station 95+% of the time, you’ll find that basic ship skills are important. And whether you’re a miner or a hauler or a fighter (NPC or PVP), you’ll always want to fit a new gizmo to your ship that requires some of the advanced core skills (Mechanic, Engineering, etc).
Been playing for near five years here (Khalima).
EVE is so hard to summarize but I’ll try and answer some things brought up here.
First, character creation. Unless this is an Alternate (2nd, 3rd account) character you are well advised to keep your attributes roughly equal. It is ok to lean a bit one way or another but do not gimp one attribute seriously to favor another. In EVE your attributes do not help you when playing (e.g. chance to hit and such). They merely dictate the speed with which you learn new skills. Willpower/Perception go towards combat related skills and Memory/Intelligence go towards industrial type skills. Charisma helps with Leadership skills and stuff that helps you relate to NPCs (for missions and such).
Know that whatever race you choose and whatever your attributes you are never barred from anything in the game. Any skill is learnable no matter what. It is just a matter of time. At first that may not seem so bad as most skills at the outset only take minutes to a few hours or a day or two to learn. Trust me when I say that changes down the road with more advanced skills. Some skills can easily take over 60 days to train and if you have lousy attributes that regulate that skill it could climb into 75+ days or more. That is realtime. FWIW those uber hefty skills are not overly common and necessary but the continuum exists all the way to that. In short, balance your skills or you WILL feel the pain! IIRC someone once calculated how long it would take to learn every skill in EVE to the maximum level and it came out to something like 25 years (real years).
As for EVE being an evil, harsh place it certainly can be but do not think this is like some PvP servers in other MMOs. You can get along fine as a noob in EVE. And I whole heartedly disagree with some others who say EVE is populated by snobs. I have never seen an MMO where the older players will be downright helpful to noobs. There are always a few of course but don’t act like an ass and you will get good responses. Joint the in-game Help channel where numerous older players lurk just to help newbs out.
But yeah, once you get in to EVE it can be an unforgiving place. There is no hand holding like in WoW where you die you keep everything and just run back to your corpse. You can work weeks for something in EVE and lose it in 2 minutes…all of it. First rule in EVE is Never fly what you cannot afford to lose! Repeat that mantra often.
There are simply too many things in EVE to detail here. As noted above with that now famous (in EVE) learning curve diagram it can be rough. There are still aspects I am fuzzy on. It is a sandbox though. Combat can be awesome to frustrating. You can carve out whole empires for yourself (with the help of a few hundred other people). You can play the rather deep and fully operational markets (almost every item in game can be made by players…ALL ships are save noob ships).
Ordinarily I am a solo kind of guy and resisted joining a player run Corp (EVE version of guilds). All I can say is join a corp! It makes the game a world more fun. Finding the right corp for you can be a bit of a grind as not all will be right for you but I guarantee there will be a few that fit you fine…whatever your playstyle.
EVE has a LARGE European contingent. Most corps you will be chatting away with people from Sweden and Germany and Iceland and so on (and they usually speak more fluently in English than most Americans I know). The average age of an EVE player is, IIRC, 27 years old. Due to the nature of the game they tend to be more intelligent and interesting than what you usually find on other MMOs (of course there are always some asshats too).
They are also instituting a new upgrade tomorrow (always free) called Faction Warfare. They are jump starting role play and allowing players to join one of the four faction NPCs groups to go beat up on their opposites. It is PvP centered and meant to spur small gang PvP (the most fun kind of PvP) as well as allowing for a simpler step into PvP than it had been previously. If you hate PvP then not for you. If you like PvP then worth a shot.
Already went on too long but if you have other questions let me know! Look forward to podding you in-game! 
(kidding…much more the industrialist type although I can pew pew in a pinch)
Geez I can’t wait to get into this. A friend and I are currently researching the game before we start playing so we can hit the ground running. This thread makes me excited. I’ll have to look up some of you when I start.