UpInSmoke:
Will you please draw a picture in MS Paint that perfectly sums up the EVE experience?

I'm no artist, sadly. However, I have posted a thread on the EVE Online forums asking for this. Once it gets some decent replies, I'll post the link.

I played from beta through the collapse of my Corp, MoO. I just kinda stopped playing, and I'd love to pick it up again but at this point in time I'm probably so far behind the curve that I couldn't really enjoy it the way I used to again.

Ultrajoe:
I have a question

Are the waiting times really that bad

It sounds like automated grinding at the rate it is said to be, a bit like; "why take part in the point of MMO's when we can do it for you!?!"

also, if you get blown up enough can you really lose your entire character? if thats the case why not hunt some poor fool until he's a dead man for good?

No, Yes.

People over exaggerate. Anyone who claims you have to spend a year skilling up before you can do anything is talking out of their arse. I have quite happily reached a level of solo PvP on a free trial. The fact is, because it's time based, there will ALWAYS be someone who's just better than you. That doesn't mean you can't kill them. It means you should never get cocky, which in my mind is a good thing. Besides, its not like you're the only noob in the universe when you start out. If you wanna pvp, hunt other noobs!

And Yes, you can lose all your character's progress if you die. All of it. All those skills, gone! The character itself won't die, but you're a noob again. Basically, when you die, you inhabit a clone you've prepared at a medical bay. You always have a clone that can keep the noob amount of skill points, but you have to pay to upgrade the amount of skill points you'll keep when you die. It isn't that expensive though, it's just important to make sure your clone is at a station with a med bay so you can buy a new clone without having to undock.

Ok! And to clarify!

Ok, that's your UI ingame. The ship onscreen is yours, in this case a Punisher. On the left hand side is the NeoCom, where all your nifty buttons are, but I won't cover that here. The combat stuff is the overview on the right, and the Module interface at the bottom. The blue bar at the bottom of the circle is your speed. The yellows bars in the centre show your capacitor levels. The three white bars show, top to bottom, shields, armour, and hull. To the right are the modules. Top row are high power slots, your guns, tractor beams, remote shield repairers, and so on. Middle are shield devices and general toys- Afterburner, Warp Scrambler, Tracking Disruptor. Low slots are mostly armour tanking.

Combat:
The overview on the right hand side shows all objects in your vicinity. In combat hostiles will be shown in red. General combat procedure is to select a hostile from the overview, then lock on. What you do next depends on your ship, but I'll base it on a short-ranged frigate. You'd then send your ship into an orbit around your target, generally about 2km or less away. Once in range you click the weapon buttons at the bottom to set them firing. Each of these actions only requires one click, then your ship takes over. So on the surface, it's not massively engaging combat. But in a difficult fight, you're having to balance speed, transverse velocity in relation to your target, capacitor levels, Shield/armour levels and the amount of damage you're kicking out. In PvP you're also monitoring the overview for any new targets, as well as the local chat channel so you know how many people are in system. It's the most mentally testing combat I've known, honestly.

So in answer to your question Sask, somewhere between Flight Sim and Homeworld.

And incidentally, all those boxes with purple or blue stars are his team-mates. That's what we're talking for a corp-operation.

EDIT: hmmmn. The piccies broke. Assuming its a site kink and not the work of a mod, I'll try and fix it. Sorry in advance if a mod got rid of it!

Ultrajoe:
also, if you get blown up enough can you really lose your entire character? if thats the case why not hunt some poor fool until he's a dead man for good?

Gotta get to work, but I can answer this.

Your character sits in a "pod" inside the ship. If the ship is destroyed, the pod is ejected. It has no weapons and barely any armor, and can be destroyed; enemy NPCs won't bother, but players might (though this is somewhat frowned upon). If the pod is destroyed, your character dies and returns in a clone bay in whatever station you have a clone in. You lose whatever implants (they increase stats and skills) you had, and if you don't have a good enough clone, you can lose a number of skill points.

Fortunately clones are fairly inexpensive (in comparison to ships) and not at all difficult to acquire. The difficult part is remembering to upgrade it as you gain more skill points, as the cheaper clones can only "remember" so many.

You don't lose that much comparatively any more. You lose something like half of your highest SP skill. So if you've trained some unimportant skill like the second tier of learning skills to 5, you may lose a month of training off of that.

Or you can lose a point on one of your ship flying skills (like Battleship 5 down to Battleship 4), which can hurt a lot. It's painful enough so you don't want to forget, but not so painful that you'd want to quit the game over it.

This isn't WoW. It's not for carebears and thankfully never will be. There is always a risk of losing anything and everything. The best part of the game is the intrigue and backstabbing, and its converse, camaraderie. While they're trying to beef up the PvE that's not the game's strength by a long shot. Conquerable space and alliance warfare are the meat of the game.

Kross:
You don't lose that much comparatively any more. You lose something like half of your highest SP skill. So if you've trained some unimportant skill like the second tier of learning skills to 5, you may lose a month of training off of that.

Or you can lose a point on one of your ship flying skills (like Battleship 5 down to Battleship 4), which can hurt a lot. It's painful enough so you don't want to forget, but not so painful that you'd want to quit the game over it.

Really? oh, hadn't noticed that.

How does combat work in EvE? Pure maths. You actually need to calculate the amount of damage your ship can deal out compared to its damage regeneration capabilities to understand the massive amount of only very slightly different set ups you can have. I'm talking like 30 different products which appear to be virtually the same.

In combat itself its comparable to a sports management game. You can influence the tactics but its the choices you've made beforehand which make the difference.

Which is a large reason I quit. Vendetta Online has great combat, its just a shame its such a small development team. EvE with a bit of cutting down of almost identical items and proper combat a la Vendetta (as much as I don't like the phrase its what's commonly known as 'twitch') would be divine.

Sounds like a love or hate it game.

Damn, you guys are selling me on this thing. Stop it! I don't have the time or money for a new obsession!

Saskwach:
Damn, you guys are selling me on this thing. Stop it! I don't have the time or money for a new obsession!

I was just about to say the same! I REALLY wish I had the commitment for this.

Alright Sask, let me go over the bad things for you.

If you don't have any player-driven activities to do, it's pretty much dull as hell. Many times I logged on only to sit staring at a station wall for half an hour.

It's hard to make money out of pvp. It IS possible, with pirating (which involves finding another ship in low sec, warp scrambling them, and ordering the pilot to pay you money or you'll blow em up. Sorry! Good thing! Bad Gremlin!), and even the looting from anti-pirating (hunting pie-rats.), but generally, unless you're very clever and careful, or have a big group, you'll lose more often than you win, so pvp is usually interspersed with long periods of the pve grind, I'm afraid.

Of course, the big group thing was always going to lead to a single outcome.

If you wanna win pvp, have the biggest gank squad.

That isn't entirely true, a very well built team can beat a larger blob, but generally its just a battle to have more numbers.

I've seen the ads and stuff for this game, but never actually looked it up...but from this it seems pretty awesome. Especially how it seems all the people in it, because you have to stick with it, due to the apparently steep learning curve(and therefore get really into it), are taking it as an online reality, and using propaganda and stuff.

I am now actually seriously considering joining the game :D

Oh, yes, the propaganda.

Take my advice. Stay the hell away from the COAD (Corporations, Organizations and Alliances) sub-forum.

Meshakhad:
If you haven't heard of EVE Online, you're probably blind, given how it is advertised on this site.

Oh and, just want to add this...

I have adblock plus :P so my browser is blind, not me >_>

In short, should I try the free demo just to fly spacey things, or must I commit way more than the jovialities of space adventures and must attend to many many complex tasks?

Eve. It works for some but its really kinda like one of those little Scion cars you hate it or you love it and sometimes I'm not all that sure which side I'm on really. The longer I play and the deeper I get the more I like it but when i was first starting out i\I only continued to play because I decided to go straight for the one year membership. Suppose I should be thankful in the end though because now its my only MMORPG. I've heard some people say that carebears are not needed but I always remind myself that theres a good chance i built the ship that just podded me.

It's all in good fun.

They ran a story on the BBC Technology website a couple of months back about how popular Eve is amongst ambitious young men working in the banking sector. Kind of said it all, I thought. I never really got entrenched in the game's (*snore*) financial aspects anyway, because, given the fact that I was only obliged to click the mouse once every ten minutes and my 'skills' trained automatically, I felt kind of obsolete. Lots of windows, tutorials, obsidian frames and statistics - less of a game, more of an operating system.

Meshakhad:
If you haven't heard of EVE Online, you're probably blind, given how it is advertised on this site. You may have tried it, but been intimidated by the notorious difficulty curve. So you never really got to experience the game.

Well, this is your chance to find out about the spacefaring MMO you've heard so little about.

Complex? COMPLEX?! COMPLEX MY ASS!! how about you try to play X3 REUNION and then come talk to me about difficulty curves! i swear you need a PHD in computer science just to make heads and tails of that game!!!

I played Eve for about a month and didnt like it. Let me be clear why:

It wasnt the difficulty or learning curve, it was that in my opinion a game (or for that matter any fictional setting) requires a certain ammount of believability.

There is a certain ammount I can suspend my disbelief before the world comes crashing down, the ammount varies depending on genre and style of game and so in a sci-fi its a very thin line. I expect a sci-fi to be based off science. at least partially. it should have some basic grounding in real physics. you can slap on hyperspace, lasers and bug-eyed aliens and im fine with that, but the basic rules should remain the same.

Thus I was immediately put off by the rediculusly slow speeds the ships travel, the ship you start with flies at roughly Mach 3, we have jet aircraft that go that fast. people try to convince me that you can get faster, but they still only go at something like Mach 6 or 7.

Lets be clear: In order for a Nasa space shuttle to stay in a low earth orbit it must maintain a constant speed of about Mach 23!
This game is supposed to be set in the future with highly advanced ships that travel between stars and yet they fly at Mach 3?

Furthermore they fly like aircraft in an atmosphere, what i wouldnt give for a game with realistic space physics, and all that aside, lets face it, the ammount of time it takes to get anywhere is NOT FUN!

Oh i bought an item but have to make 27 jumps to get it and thats going to take half an hour real time? NO THANK YOU! There are better games and better things i could be doing instead of waiting half an hour while some stupid autopilot plays the game for me.

Mloren:
I played Eve for about a month and didnt like it. Let me be clear why:

It wasnt the difficulty or learning curve, it was that in my opinion a game (or for that matter any fictional setting) requires a certain ammount of believability.

There is a certain ammount I can suspend my disbelief before the world comes crashing down, the ammount varies depending on genre and style of game and so in a sci-fi its a very thin line. I expect a sci-fi to be based off science. at least partially. it should have some basic grounding in real physics. you can slap on hyperspace, lasers and bug-eyed aliens and im fine with that, but the basic rules should remain the same.

Thus I was immediately put off by the rediculusly slow speeds the ships travel, the ship you start with flies at roughly Mach 3, we have jet aircraft that go that fast. people try to convince me that you can get faster, but they still only go at something like Mach 6 or 7.

Lets be clear: In order for a Nasa space shuttle to stay in a low earth orbit it must maintain a constant speed of about Mach 23!
This game is supposed to be set in the future with highly advanced ships that travel between stars and yet they fly at Mach 3?

Furthermore they fly like aircraft in an atmosphere, what i wouldnt give for a game with realistic space physics, and all that aside, lets face it, the ammount of time it takes to get anywhere is NOT FUN!

Oh i bought an item but have to make 27 jumps to get it and thats going to take half an hour real time? NO THANK YOU! There are better games and better things i could be doing instead of waiting half an hour while some stupid autopilot plays the game for me.

ok this isn't a realistic game so stop treating it like one but you are right that travveling takes forever pretty much plays itself but hey gives you a chance to enjoy the enviroment

Mloren:
I played Eve for about a month and didnt like it. Let me be clear why:

It wasnt the difficulty or learning curve, it was that in my opinion a game (or for that matter any fictional setting) requires a certain ammount of believability.

There is a certain ammount I can suspend my disbelief before the world comes crashing down, the ammount varies depending on genre and style of game and so in a sci-fi its a very thin line. I expect a sci-fi to be based off science. at least partially. it should have some basic grounding in real physics. you can slap on hyperspace, lasers and bug-eyed aliens and im fine with that, but the basic rules should remain the same.

Thus I was immediately put off by the rediculusly slow speeds the ships travel, the ship you start with flies at roughly Mach 3, we have jet aircraft that go that fast. people try to convince me that you can get faster, but they still only go at something like Mach 6 or 7.

Lets be clear: In order for a Nasa space shuttle to stay in a low earth orbit it must maintain a constant speed of about Mach 23!
This game is supposed to be set in the future with highly advanced ships that travel between stars and yet they fly at Mach 3?

Furthermore they fly like aircraft in an atmosphere, what i wouldnt give for a game with realistic space physics, and all that aside, lets face it, the ammount of time it takes to get anywhere is NOT FUN!

Oh i bought an item but have to make 27 jumps to get it and thats going to take half an hour real time? NO THANK YOU! There are better games and better things i could be doing instead of waiting half an hour while some stupid autopilot plays the game for me.

Just to clarify, you are there complaining about it not being realistic enough and then too realistic in the same post. Everything isn't always going to be right at hand. That's why traders make money.

And yes, you are right about speeds. Sizes also are an issue. But frankly it's just both size and speed have been scaled down. Regardless, you can't compare the in-game ships to a NASA one. In game ships do not need to escape and atmosphere - they are built in space. That and expecting CCP to factor in high level physics of 0G may be demanding a little much.

Personally, I would've thought if you're going to moan about unrealism, you'd have picked up on your ability to warp through solid objects. That happens. First time it happened to me the house reverberated with the scream "NOOO! WE'RE GOING TO CRASH!"

EDIT: Though, to those of you trying to persuade yourselves out of it. He's right. Takes yonks to get anywhere, especially in big ships.

Gemini3333:
Complex? COMPLEX?! COMPLEX MY ASS!! how about you try to play X3 REUNION and then come talk to me about difficulty curves! i swear you need a PHD in computer science just to make heads and tails of that game!!!

Played both, and X3 is a pond to Eve's ocean. Depending on what you're doing, X3 will be as complex, if not more so, than Eve. However, the further you get into it, the deeper and more complex Eve will get. Player-created "publicly traded" corportaions returning dividends to shareholders? Yep, can do, and being done in Eve. Headache-inducing production chains? Check out the moon material -> Tech2 item production. Predatory market practices? Ship and module invention? Exploration? Ship loadouts/fitting? All of these are more complex in Eve.

The nice thing about all those complex things is that you really only need to get involved in them as much as you want. Hate mining? Don't. Tired of the missions? Find some trade routes. Need more action? Head to lowsec and join/fight player pirates. Want to conquer territory? Join a corp/alliance and head to the depths of lawless space.

EVE wasn't exactly hard for me, it just bored me to tears. I loved the 'levelling' approach, it's extremely well thought out, but with the samey missions and no drive to get into PvP, the game held nothing for me.

Recently I had my three only ships blown to hell, I got podded and realised I never wanted to log again.

Also, mining would be better replaced with paint drying.

Haha, that's what eve is about. YOU make your target. That's the big difference.

And on the problem getting killed: you get a warning if you jump to lowsec.

Indref:
Also, mining would be better replaced with paint drying.

If you stick a mining laser on a transport and find a nice secure area of space to sit, you can make some easy cash while doing other things (studying, working, dealing with gf/wife aggro).

Mining ice, though, ugh. Profitable, but mindnumbing. At least it has the profitable aspect over gatecamping and watching warp disruption bubbles until you crack. I think some of the more colorful Eve personalities spent a little too long on one or both of these activities.

One of the things to let people know about if your are going to get into the larger wars that take place in EvE is that forum and vent hacking are common place. Your opponent will try to get any advantage they can in order to know what ships your fielding and what tactics your using, just like you should be doing if you want any chance of winning the war your taking part of.

Some of the previous comments about wars being able to go on ad-infinitium are both true and false. Atleast in 0.0 you have alliance owned star bases and structures, these can be captured and/or destroyed by other players. As fighting goes on the members of the opposing alliance will continue losing ships, or be locked into their stations so they cannot leave to make more money to get new ships. As players get frustrated with the situtation they will start leaving the alliance in large groups prompting what has been dubbed cascade failure in EvE.

EvE in my opinion is a good game, where else are there large battles that actually change where you can and cant go as players. Resources are fought over for months on end and you are given more freedom to do what you want in the game then I have seen anywhere else. This can lead to some flaws as players hack each other's forums and vent servers also corp theives are rather common, the largest theft to date translated to around $13k of in game items stolen. All withen the game rules.

EVE was fun for me for a couple months. I started out waning to be a trader and eventually took alot of PvP skills for self preservation purposes. My biggest eye opener came 10-12 days in, I had a shiny new terrible transport ship, and was running some NPC goods. I figure 1 jump through low sec cant be that bad, so I go through. As soon as I hit Low Sec im dead before everything finishes loading, podded, and had to literally start from scratch with nothing left money wise.

I played for another 2-3 months. After deciding to never enter low-sec again, I got in a corp/alliance working on their first low sec player station. Most of us were very noobish, very very few with over 1 year old characters. I started reaizing EVE wasnt the game for me while working in low sec. More numbers = win, unless theres one 3-4 year pvp player then you're just doomed.

I figured PvP would be fun, but it ammounted to nothing more than gathering the biggest squad you can and demolishing people who dont stand a chance. And finally, seeing an old player in a ship you could never touch, at all, wipe out most of what you worked 2 months for with absolutely no recourse other than "sorry, start over" just wasnt appealing. "If you cant afford to lose it dont fly it". The only way to play is to automatically assume what you are flying at the time is already gone. Always remember if you're flying the best thing you can, theres someone going to kill you, and he has 100x the resources and 100x the money making power as you, so he risks nothing to make you lose everything. If he loses a ship, he loses maybe 5 hours of gathering up a new one.

I spent the last 2 weeks trying to get back into the trading game, this time trading player comodities almost all in high sec space. On my last day hauling a measly 1M isk worth of goods through high sec space, I got jumped and killed/podded by a group of some alts with nothing to lose and more than enough firepower to kill me before the "police" showed up. I turned the game off with 2 weeks left on my subscription, and never looked back. Its one thing to have risk vs reward. This game is so heavy on risk, and the rewards are tilted heavily in the favor of those who already have the resources to trivialize any risk. This makes it very very difficult for a new player to get a foothold in the game world, especially as any non-combat oriented play.

If u wanna make isk trading. You can make much more with a newbalt in Jita playing the market than u ever would hauling NPC tradegoods around empire.

I been playing EVE since late 2005. Its changed alot, & mostly for the worst in my personal opinion. Im still playing because Factional Warfare is being launced next week. If it isnt as good as it sounds, I wont be renewing my subscription in July I dont think. Empire is boring, 0.0 is becoming a homogenous blob. ISK is too important to too many people.

Eye Spider:

I was there when the very first Titan Judgement weapon went off, annihilating half our fleet. That was a fun time, except for all the lagging (have they fixed that to make the large 500 vs 500 fleet battles actually playable now by the way?)

Not really. Lag is more bearable in medium-sized engagements, but the big problem is that in the game engine, "more ships" is always a better tactic, and in a lot of situations, it's the only viable one. Plus mineral prices have slumped, so the number of dreadnoughts, carriers, motherships and the like is creeping inexorably upwards and raising the bar of what a fleet MUST have to survive. There's a big upgrade to the network that's coming "soon", which should alleviate it. I can say without a shadow of doubt that without lag, fleet battles would be beyond awesome, rather than frustrating exercises in predicting the future. That said, I have some big hopes for the next expansion, which is supposed to be promoting small team PVP.

EittilDratsab:
How does it feel when you lose your first ship? :(

It's a bummer, but it is survivable. Just insure it and follow some basic safety guidelines (don't go to lowsec unless you need to, check the map for recent kills, don't use autopilot unless in a very fast ship, don't put all your money inside one hauler) and you should be okay.

paulgruberman:

Gemini3333:
Complex? COMPLEX?! COMPLEX MY ASS!! how about you try to play X3 REUNION and then come talk to me about difficulty curves! i swear you need a PHD in computer science just to make heads and tails of that game!!!

Played both, and X3 is a pond to Eve's ocean. Depending on what you're doing, X3 will be as complex, if not more so, than Eve. However, the further you get into it, the deeper and more complex Eve will get. Player-created "publicly traded" corportaions returning dividends to shareholders? Yep, can do, and being done in Eve. Headache-inducing production chains? Check out the moon material -> Tech2 item production. Predatory market practices? Ship and module invention? Exploration? Ship loadouts/fitting? All of these are more complex in Eve.

The nice thing about all those complex things is that you really only need to get involved in them as much as you want. Hate mining? Don't. Tired of the missions? Find some trade routes. Need more action? Head to lowsec and join/fight player pirates. Want to conquer territory? Join a corp/alliance and head to the depths of lawless space.

well i suppose but considering i only played for a wekk i guess i can't complain. really the thing that i didn't like was well....just the hole game in general wasn't my cup of tea i didn't like the interface and while i like space shooters with spaceships and such ei: freelancer, i just don't like it in mmo form.