How good is EVE?

Well, Nequa, Eve is a cut-throat exercise in fun & frustration. I've been playing for 2 years now, and its usually a lot of fun. It's been going since 2003, and show's no sign of ending or dying. It's actually growing the older it gets, which is just about backwards from every other MMO. It has a very high learning curve, and the cost of stupidity is high. It can take weeks or months to save enough to buy a ship and outfit it properly, and if you are overconfident in your abilities, it can be gone in a flash.

There are very few rules; scammers & con men abound, and are not punished by GM's, unless they break the EULA (selling isk for in game cash, hacking accounts, making real life threats, etc...) Trust no one. There is no such thing as consentual PVP; there is no truely safe place, only relatively safe and really unsafe. There are 3 security levels of space: High Security, where NPC cops patrol and administer punishment after an unprovoked attack. note, AFTER. so, someone shoots you. You blow up. Concord shows up and blows them away in punishment. your ship is still gone... (they take a security rating hit.) Low Sec space is .04 - .01, and there are no NPC Cops to punish aggressors (minor security rating hit). 0.0 is Zero Security. No standings loss at all - free for all. 0.0 is guarded by corporations (Eve version of Guilds) who own sovereignty. most operate on NBSI (not blue (alliance) shoot it). If you venture there without permission, you will be shot down.

It has the closest thing to a real player economy you'll find in a game. most of the goods available are being sold &/or manufactured by players - very few NPC items of note or worth.

Its worth going over the tutorial a couple of times. Do not skip the tutorial. if you do, you will have to ask stupid questions. You will ask the questions, and everyone will tell you to do the tutorial. Do it again. It's very comprehensive. There are bits that will seem self - evident. Don't give up - do the tutorial.

Eve is the only game I know where you improve based on length of subscription. You don't have to play - you just have to set skills, and you will become potentially better. Your available skills will add up over time. If you get bored, you can set a long (30 day) skill to train, and go play something else for a bit, and come back in a couple of weeks trained up. Potentially, because use of skills is still up to the player. You can qualify to fly a battleship, but that doesn't mean you can fly it well. and flying it poorly is a fast way to lose a lot of isk.

Its free to try (14 day trial accounts available). When rolling up a character, don't fret about race - keep your stats pretty balanced, and choose the race whose appearance you like. You can learn any skill with any character; you do start with certain skills, but they're pretty basic, and if you start Calderi, you can switch to Gallante skills fairly quickly if you decide drones are your cuppa.

Do the tutorial.

I've been playing EVE on and off since its beta (usually in 5-6 month chunks, then break :P) and for the most part I agree with Jeslik. But I'd like to add a few things.

- It's not at its core a very fast paced game. There will be a lot of flying around without much happening. If you played something like X3, it's fairly similar in that solar systems are connected by stargates and you have to fly through these to get around. Likewise, the majority of the NPC-controlled space has many stations in each system, so there's no shortage of where to dock.

- You can do pretty much anything you want, but to be good at it you'll need to invest a lot of training. As Jeslik mentioned, all training is done in real-time and continues when you're logged off, and the number of skills is huge. I always joke around that you need a skill for breathing. Pretty much everything in EVE requires some sort of skill. Because of this, it can sometimes be daunting to see that something you really want will require 6-7 months of training and you can't do anything other than sit and wait.

- As for what exactly you can do: NPC missioning (randomly generated missions), mining/refining, manufacturing (ammo, ships, equipment, you name it), PvP (pirating, bounty hunting, mercenary, 0.0 Alliance wars), research & development (inventing higher tech blueprints for $$$), exploration (focusing on scanner probes to find hidden things that have their own rewards). As in most MMOs, most of these things go hand in hand so that everyone is needed. Tech 2 manufacturing not only needs an invented blueprint through R&D, but also materials from moon mining, and R&D tends to need some things from exploration...

- It's not without its issues, though. The biggest draw for me was 0.0 Alliance wars. And sure enough, I got into one and a month later I quit EVE once again because the servers simply cannot handle large fleet engagements. It sounds awesome on paper when you have a fleet of 150 battleships and you decide to commit your capital ship fleet, and your enemy does the same... and then you sit for over 30 minutes waiting for the area of space to load and when it finally does (with those numbers, you're very lucky to be out in 30 minutes) you usually find that you've somehow been blown up. This makes large fleet battles very unfun, though there's still room for small engagements in 0.0.

Really, the best thing you can do though is to give the 14 day trial a shot. It's a very unique game and there's usually something for everyone to like.

Social Skills are pretty important in this game as well. I'm sure some may argue you can solo but IMHO no-you-can't. You really need to be a part of a corp and be fairly active in a social way. Kind of the way WoW you need to be on 4-5 days a week and be active in your guild.

If you're content with just running NPC missions or doing small-time exploration, you can solo fairly well. Everything else is not very easy. Solo PvP I always found boring because it can take so long to find a target, and you waste so much money without secure access to low-sec/0.0 space when you have to buy everything.

The NPC missions keep improving, but yeah like with all MMOs the options really open up with a group rather than solo.

I just finished my own 14 day trial, and to just pass on some wonderful newbie advice: There are certain skills a trial account cannot train, so try and learn a skill, (such as "Min Industrial 1") BEFORE buying the respective ship...(mammoth...)

I was one sad trial account baby

But for the most part, I found Eve to be rather fun and enjoyable. A great change of pace for an On-again, Off-again WoW player.

Last I heard there were close to 125,000 active accounts, usually with about 30,000 players logged at once during weekdays, about 35,000 during weekends

To really experience all EVE has to offer, i say you need to spend at least 2 years, because of the time it takes to train the advance skills, about 10 months to really learn all the advanced and finer details (and poorly documented, sadly) of the features of the game.

If you want to get involved in politics, i say about 1 year before you can start taking an active part in the politics of the game, 2 or more years to really start influencing the monster, so to speak.



Yep, EVE is team based game, the real "meat" of the game lies in joining a group of players. Most activities revolves around teams. So you will definately have the most fun for the longest time if you join a good group of players.

Thats not saying you wont have fun soloing, but after 6 months or less, soloing becomes rather boring. Where as if you join a group players, you can do many diferents things which will extend the life of the game greatly for you.

One last thing, notice i said "GOOD group of players", eve if full of people who will scam you, betray you, steal, kill you, extort (all in game of course) simply because they can. You will have to have a lot of patience and learn to adapt. To have fun in EVE you need to ADAPT.

EVE is hard and ruthless, but fun

Personally i played for about 3 straight years, great game, but for me, after three years, the rough egdes of the game really caught up to me, and having already done so much, things started getting a little dull, not to mention that the politics and administrative things i did took much time and werent much fun, so i decided to take a break and play other games, yet still havent decided to go back, first im gonna give Age of Conan a chance