EVE online

[ethaninja]

I'd play it, but there are better games that are free =(

 

[vongola_mist_daemon]

like diablo and guild wars but wouldnt call them better just addictive

 

[Ranorak]

I played it for a good long time, then I deleted my character.
Sometimes I got that itching feeling that I want to get back in, but the stupid long time it takes to get useful puts me off.

Damn you learning skills!

 

[Henrik Moeller]

the bases of this game is you start of with a space craft and you have to do missions (quests) and get cash so you can upgrade your ship and get new ones. it might take alot of time but when you start getting good ships u just cant stop lol

The base of the game is to act in such a manner that you put yourself higher in a hierarchy and won't have to perform any actions, aside from those you want to do.
Whether you gain standings with an R&D firm and earn passive isk from that, steal massive amounts from other people or one of the hundreds of other ways to earn isk is up to you.
The game certainly isn't based around missions though.

 

[kristy01]

I played it for a while and stopped. I'm definitely buying in again soon.

that's what i wanna say about the game. It's an interesting game play but i don't more wanna play it.

 

[kristy01]

I played it for a while and stopped. I'm definitely buying in again soon.

that's what i wanna say about the game. It's an interesting game play but i don't more wanna play it.

 

[vongola_mist_daemon]

the missions is what most people do for standing and ISK so thats why i said it lmao

 

[Amplify]

Damn you learning skills!

Learning skills were removed from the game a month ago, and were replaced by everyone getting 12 extra points for all attributes free of charge. No learning skills needed.

*edit*
Just while I'm here:
http://swiftandbitter.com/eve/wtd/
http://www.mediafire.com/?e26s686a5r5mq5d

 

[vongola_mist_daemon]

no they warn t im currently learning level 5 ship command lol

 

[Marowit]

I couldn't stand it, but then again I hate the thought of my avatar being just a space ship - plus I watched my roomie play it for a while in college and he literally had menus open the entire time he played...which made me beg the question...what was he playing exactly?

Don't get me wrong I know several people who really enjoy it, and I hear the community is really fun, but gah, I couldn't stand the game.

 

[Ranorak]

Damn you learning skills!

Learning skills were removed from the game a month ago, and were replaced by everyone getting 12 extra points for all attributes free of charge. No learning skills needed.

*edit*
Just while I'm here:
http://swiftandbitter.com/eve/wtd/
http://www.mediafire.com/?e26s686a5r5mq5d

Wait.... so the Learning skills are gone, and you can jump in the fun right away!?
DON'T TEMPT ME, FRODO!

Slightly off topic maybe, but you seem like a experienced player;
I'm not to big on that social, mandatory 2 times a week activity kinda corp. What exactly is there to do in EVE that is solo'able.
I'm more of the kinda guy that hops online for a hour or 2, do some stuff and log off again.
I've been in a corp before, but they demanded weekly skype meetings and stuff.

Any advice?

 

[rupyTN]

As another 'career' option, there is also Planetary Interaction (PI), you populate a planet (up to 6) and set up extractors of a particular type, extract and process raw ore or gases into processed materials to sell or then combine and reprocess/refine until you have quite valuable market items, or POS fuel items.

Hi sec returns the least of course, but is 'safer'. It's a variation of mining I guess, the benefit being that you can set your mining to run for up to 14 days (it may be longer, but definitely 14 can be set), during your chosen period of time you can just leave the extractors/reactors to do their thing and earn you some 'isk'. Set up your learning queue and you can have a part time playing career if that's your bag.

If you want to play more frequently just set the extractors for an hour or upwards, this increases the return but requires more monitoring. Then you can take your material (which you have to collect from just out of close orbit) and sell it close or transport it to a more profitable region.

Definitely the most 'extreme' game I've ever played, can be extremely aggressive, extremely tedious, extremely engaging. It's as bland or cut throat as you want it to be.

RTN

 

[mooncalf]

I'm currently on a trial account. A friend who plays WoW (A game I will not play) thought it'd be fun to try it out together and I'm very cautiously sticking my toe in the waters, though I'm extremely skeptical about MMOs in general, more of an arcade/FPS gamer. That being said, I liked Privateer 2 and Freelancer, and while I haven't had much player interaction so far, the game is gradually inviting me in...

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

Damn you learning skills!

Learning skills were removed from the game a month ago, and were replaced by everyone getting 12 extra points for all attributes free of charge. No learning skills needed.

*edit*
Just while I'm here:
http://swiftandbitter.com/eve/wtd/
http://www.mediafire.com/?e26s686a5r5mq5d

Bah. I want my 4.5 million SP I invested in the damn things to be reallocated then. If I ever started to play again. Which is unlikely.

I felt the same. My opinion is the same as yahtzee's. I wanted to love it; a proper space opera mmo that my machine could (then) handle. But what do you do in the game?

While the interface (I snipped the person who talked about it) is awful (and I played off and on for four years), it actually "works" once you figure things out. As far as what you do in the game, well that depends. Sure one can grind for loot and treasures and slowly construct a fantastically powerful multi billion ISK (the game's currency) battleship, but such a thing is a sucker's game. Sure that Gistii XL Shield Booster might be the single best part in the game for the purpose (double the effect of a normal shield booster, half the energy consumption, easier to fit to boot!) but the fact that the part can only be found by shooting the rarest of pirate spawns (of that faction) means they easily fetch a price tag of ten times the worth of the ship it's mounted on.

I suppose I should simply state that, if Eve had a motto it would undoubtedly be "Don't fly what you can't afford to lose". When a player first starts, they will eventually acquire a decent frigate (the smallest class of ship). A few weeks of play and they can fly a cruiser but most could only actually afford to lose a frigate. Even after four years of play with my very own Carrier (a capital ship. There are two larger and more expensive classes (the mother ship (a super carrier) and a Titan (an anti-capital ship murder factory)) but even then I could only really afford to lose a battleship. I could very nearly endlessly purchase, equip and then self destruct a frigate.

This motto goes against the normal urge to bring the biggest and best thing in your hanger everywhere you go. Sure, I could bring my incredibly expensive billion ISK battleship to fight other players but such a thing has the effect of drawing even more fire. Just because I have the ability to absorb staggering punishment in my carrier does not make it invincible (It could withstand the assault of any 4 battleships simultaneously until time stopped but add a fifth and eventually it would explode).

The draw of Eve is, really, in the fact that death has a cost associated with it. The ship and some (all in the case of PVP generally) of it's parts are lost forever and the player is rewarded with an insurance payout that will, in some cases (if they were smart) not quite cover their losses. If they flew something really fancy (A Heavy Assault Ship for example), they payout wouldn't even cover the cost of the ship (my cerberus' insurance was worth about 1/40th the market value of the ship).

Eve is, all considered, a slow game. This means that, even when a player stumbles into a trap, they have a fair amount of time to realize a problem has occurred. The excitement inherent to this realization is a big part of the fun. But the problem is that, after enough experience, a player is no longer in any real danger when doing PVE activities. Sure, they could do something boneheaded (accepting a mission in low security space for example), but for the most part losses become incredibly uncommon.

For most that stick around in the game for years, the draw is the PVP. I won't go into exhaustive detail but suffice it to say that the pace of combat allows the game to reward tactical acumen as often as financial backing. Sure, there are still cases where a ship clearly outclasses another (A cerberus will, unless the player is an idiot, always destroy a Caracal for example), but the game is designed in such a way that combat is generally of one of two forms: either the parties are, relatively evenly matched or an unlucky group is caught in an ambush of some kind.

Unfortunately, the most damning thing about the game is that the fun part (as far as I was concerned) required me to take enormous risk in order to learn how to play in the first place! As in most games, the skills gained in PVE were insufficient for PVP action. Players often attempted to fill the void of course and most decent corporations would stock "throw away" ships for noobs to fly to learn the ropes.

Sure, Eve is a game with a bad interface and a learning curve best graphed on semi-log paper, but it offers a game of such depth and complexity that it manages to keep a dedicated crowd. From the economy based almost entirely on player action (from parts farmed by PVE players to the ships and components manufactured by other players (the vast majority of parts on the market are constructed by players)), to vast interstellar wars for resource rich systems to the fact that the danger of low security of space being provided by players who decided they wanted to live the life of a pirate, Eve is a game where you can pick a path and follow it.

Want to build an industrial empire? You can start right out the gate with your very own mining frigate. Want to eventually captain a battleship in large scale fleet combat? The path is available. Want to support your friends and confound your enemies with sophisticated electronic warfare packages? You can do that. Do you just want to explore the vast expanse of space (the game has ~5,000 unique Star Systems and hundreds of thousands of planets and moons (if not millions))? You can even do that.

 

[beniki]

Aww, a newbie has discovered Eve

I play it on and off. Every year the game just calls to me, and I pay out the monthly fee to get my fix of space gamey goodness.

But inevitably, the repetitiveness of the missions gets to me, and the random acts of piracy wear me down. My dreams of a unique MMO experience are dashed against efficient money income. Battleships just aren't fun for me next to the dog fights of frigate combat, but sadly that leads to slow overall progression.

And still every year, the stars call to me.

My Stabber beckons me, it's long elegant neck and swift engines yearning for the exploration of worm holes and 0.0 space, dodging the foolish corporations that try to impose boundaries to my endless vacuous sea.

Ahh... they're calling again...

 

[colourblind]

Im on the fence between starting up EVE or WOW I don't know which one to choose but on reading these comments im edging more towards EVE now.

 

[Marowit]

I felt the same. My opinion is the same as yahtzee's. I wanted to love it; a proper space opera mmo that my machine could (then) handle. But what do you do in the game?

Exactly - you level while you're off-line or something, and then when he was actually flying around he was too scared to leave HiSec(?) space until he joined a zerg guild cause he didn't want to lose his ship...so he just flew around mining asteroids...

Like you/yahtzee said - I really wanted to enjoy the epic feeling, but when you 'play' the game it feels a lot more like creating a spreadsheet at work, while trying to plan your escape route so you can leave work 15mins early without running into your boss...

 

[Marowit]

Im on the fence between starting up EVE or WOW I don't know which one to choose but on reading these comments im edging more towards EVE now.

Definitely get the Trial if you try EvE - I am so glad I did...I was able to put it down and walk away forever and never feel like I was missing something.

Same goes for WoW though, definitely get the trial before you buy it.

 

[vongola_mist_daemon]

Im on the fence between starting up EVE or WOW I don't know which one to choose but on reading these comments im edging more towards EVE now.

Definitely get the Trial if you try EvE - I am so glad I did...I was able to put it down and walk away forever and never feel like I was missing something.

Same goes for WoW though, definitely get the trial before you buy it.

yea the best thing to do is try it before buying it or you can get a friend that already plays it to recruit you