Well... Time to give my two cents on Eve, so here goes... *steps onto soapbox*
Right off I'll say that Eve is a very 'niche' game to the people that will enjoy it. The most obvious one being that it requires patience, for it has a different approach than most games this age in that it is more delayed gratification, which is the exact opposite of what the vast majority of people nowadays want, hence the need of patience. Beyond that it is just breaking it down into the subcategories, such as pvp, mining, manufacturing, logistics, politics, and whatever else you can nail down.
As for myself, I have been heavy on the pvp front since my first weeks of play, getting into a corp(guild) after my trial and journeying into 0.0 with them the next day. Quite simply, for anyone to enjoy the game you need to find a corp that fits you, otherwise it becomes that much more diffucult, as well as beat the point in playing an mmo. (unless doing everything alone is your thing, which it is for some people.)
As for the substance to pvp, it can be lacking, but it can be great. First off, blob warfare - think someone else put it as bringing enough ships to crash the servers - is obviously gonna be a rock paper scissors of who brings the most and lags the least, obviously low substance, but beyond that is where it truly shines. You get into small fleet battles, roaming groups, all that, tactics do play a part, and unlike games where your gear simply takes damage, you will lose your stuff when you die, leaving a small wreck of a few remaining items that are free to grab by all, making it much more interesting. It's in these instances where the gang commander has to decide what actions the group takes, if a retreat is necessary, who to attack first, and how to distribute our attacks. I'll add a small engagement below to illustrate this...
It was a small gang, 9 of us all together, 6 cruisers, 2 interceptors, and a covert ops ship for cloaked scouting. 3 Cruisers had electronic warfare items(ecm), allowing them to jam enemy ships - 5 at most each if they got it timed right. We found a 19 man gang of mixed ships, none bigger than battlecruiser class, and the commander decided for a go at it. The ecm fitted cruisers went in first, soon followed by the rest, and the scout sitting in a neighboring system.
The ecm ships call over ts which ships they have jammed, and the commander organizes the attack order on the non-jammed ships, based on current distance from us. The fight goes on, we lose 1 inty who got stuck in an asteroid belt and swarmed by drones, but the enemy has lost 8 ships so far. Now the scout shouts that a hostile 30+ man gang has entered the neighboring system and is enroute to us. The commander orders us to loot what we can, blow up the hostile wrecks that we cant, and evac towards friendly space. While doing this he alerted our intel channel in game to warm our home system that we may have hostiles coming with us, who start to organize reinforcements.
So now we're fleeing, and several systems later we meet up with our own reinforcement group, just in time to set a quick trap for our chasing enemy. A moment later,our enemies jumped in their entire gang into our trap, having forgotten to send a scout in first. End result was the destruction of their whole fleet, with only two more losses on our side. Not what I'd call rock paper scissors.
Joshing said:
Whoever said, "Eve doesn't make me think, it makes my brain DIE." is getting quoted in my signature! That made my day, because its so true.
To all the people who claim you just have to "get it" or "understand Eve" or "wait 2 months" or "Eve has Depth"...
1st off, any game that you have to play for months and months to "get" is NOT designed well. Also if you need some philisophical "understanding" in order to "get it" before you can even have fun, thats also BAD design. 2nd off, depth and scope doesn't mean taking FOREVER to accomplish anything. Its called artifical depth, quite similar to what EQ had. Taking 24 hours to kill a mob because it only spawns once a day and you have to wait in line for a week, doesn't make the act of killing the mob have any more depth.
Much like trading and crafting in EVE doesn't have any more depth than WOW. The process is identical, only in WOW you gather the ingriedients and press the buttons and the game moves on along at a nice pace. No aritificial impediments thrown in to slow you down. In Eve, it can take a long time just to gather the components, buy this and that then wait while the game puts it together for you. The process does NOT have any more depth. It just takes forever to accomplish each step. Its not harder. It just takes a long time. People confuse taking a long time with depth. It ain't the same. Does flying from FL to LA have more depth than flying from NY to NJ? Nope. One just takes a lot longer.
Eh, well its not bad designing, it works for those that enjoy it, and I do believe that you have to understand a game to really be able to play it much less enjoy it. One could say that they just don't understand WoW or Halo, and would likely be told that they have to in order to like playing them, but it still means they won't play them because they don't understand it.
As for the depth and scope, it doesn't always mean taking forever, but Eve takes that approach, and there's nothing wrong with it, just different, not wrong, and every once in awhile I like having something to do that takes time, not something with great 'depth' that I can finish within a day, that just seems more hollow to me.
As for the claim against the Eve economy...well, yes by pure basic process it is just the same as WoW's economy, but breaking it down to such a point becomes near pointless as it can be compared to any game economy. But, it is how the system above that harvest-produce-sell-repeat that makes it what it is. The system follows a realistic fashion, ranging from buy order, sellers, contracts of varying types, stocks, you name it. It also includes artificial extension of taking time to do things. This itself does not make it deeper, but doesn't taking a long while to build a carrier while near instantly making ammo add the depth of realism, much less stabilize the market by preventing an instant flood of top end gear? It is not the delay in time itself that makes it deep, but the implemented effect of it. To this it creates a market that economists themselves compare to being a real world economy simulator - even CCP hired an economist to monitor and give reports on the in-game economy. And several econ students have used Eve as a topic and research point in their works for getting their doctorates. Now can this all seem somewhat pointless? Maybe, but the fact that such things are said and done about the eve economy - and no other game to date - speaks volumes of how truly it does have depth. In the end it still depends on your viewpoint and what you take into consideration, but nobody can truly say that the Eve economy is exactly like any other mmo's thus far.
Leading off of that, the realism in the game is plainly built in elsewhere as well, with the long skill train times, going from one place to another, undocking delay, reload times, actual death with only some gear remaining for anyone to grab, etc. Even in the ugly UI and the 'spreadsheets' that people complain about. Well, if its the future and your a spaceship pilot, do you want data listed for you in a straightforward manner, or adapt a wow-ish style, put all the sections into tabs, with a skill tree that has lines connecting skills to the prerequisites and random goofy colored images? In a matter of speaking such a setup would detract from the game as it would just stand out, and very badly. In short, Eve holds to its design style and is a rather realistic view of how things would be in the future, which just doesn't click well with most people.
In a last bit before I wrap this up, another complaint I hear is the lack of a decent story. It's true, CCP says they're working on it for the players that really want that, but for the most part, a great deal of the content in the game is the politics between corps and alliances, which one might be able to compare to the real world. Suffice it to say beyond the public stuff and any major spy actions I don't hear to much on it, but it still keeps the action going between the alliances. After all, following the realism that CCP goes with Eve, shouldn't a majority of the content and action in the game be created by the players? Not once have I heard someone grumble waiting on a GM event or somesuch to do something. Instead, we gather the grumblers and go out hunting.
...whew, a bit longer than I intended, and probably some holes... but I can return later if it sparks interest.
*steps off the soapbox*
