Eve Online - Please explain to a noob

[ThinClient]

Spreadsheet with a fancy GUI

Spreadsheet Wars

 

[clok1966]

Hi - I downloaded Eve Online and really, really, really, really, really wanted to like it

I'm a huge RTS, sim, fantasy, space, any game you name it, loyal soldier ofr the last 25 years.

But I just couldn't get Eve Online. I found myself completely confused and unable to do anything.

Is there something I'm missing? Is there a very good online guide that explains it?

Are there others like me who felt totally confused and just gave it up too?

Is there some easy way to pick it up and will I reach some kind of gaming nirvana when I do, or is it actually overhyped?

Thanks for help

asian grind (neg #1), large guilds way more equal then others (neg#2), players with the most time can do anything (neg#3, positive if you poor player, you can beat that with time).. not much to look at (neg#4)..

awesome character creation.. for a game about star ships and your character is hardly used..

sorry EVE is not good.. PURELY an OPINION.. its got a good player base so many do find it appealing, and many will point out why. Much like music.. we all dont like the same thing, I do not like, dont mean you wont.

 

[Keeper]

Way to nitpick a completely pointless portion of the picture and miss the entire purpose of the image. Good job, buddy. I'm clappin for ya.

Totally agree with you. I read the stupid comment ad shock my head for 2 minutes.

Really.... Sad......... I cant even clap for him.

 

[Red Storm]

not much to look at (neg#4)..

On the contrary, EVE is perhaps the best looking MMO out there, and has been for a long time. 3rd person avatar MMOs look terrible, from the poor graphics to the bad animations. Not seeing a humanoid character running around (along with everyone else's characters running and jumping like clowns) is one of the initial things that drew me to EVE.

 

[SunnyD]

There is a saying in Eve , HTFU.

Eve is not Wow, its not ToR, its a brutal ground where the weak die en masse and you need to learn to be good in order to be accepted into eve.

Even brand new players, if they are willing to learn, can become predators very fast. Its when people don't interact with others, and somehow think they are safe by not interacting the playerbase that they learn extremely quickly what Eve is about.

This is my favorite thing to laugh about when it comes to the proponents of EVE...

In one breath they'll say, "In EVE you literally can do anything you want to do!" And in that same breath they'll tell you, "In EVE you can't do anything if you go it alone."

EVE, the one game where everybody says you can be anything you want to be, except an individual.

 

[crownjules]

asian grind (neg #1), large guilds way more equal then others (neg#2), players with the most time can do anything (neg#3, positive if you poor player, you can beat that with time).. not much to look at (neg#4)..

awesome character creation.. for a game about star ships and your character is hardly used..

sorry EVE is not good.. PURELY an OPINION.. its got a good player base so many do find it appealing, and many will point out why. Much like music.. we all dont like the same thing, I do not like, dont mean you wont.

WTF is "asian grind"? Eve is made by CCP who are in Iceland.

The thing with #2 is that the smaller corps can all ally with one another to take on a larger corp. I was a member of Goonfleet back in its starting days when one of the largest and most feared/respected corps of the time thought they'd kick us when we were already down (having just lost a war with a neighbor) because they thought we were an up and coming threat to them. They locked down our home system for a week or two and destroyed every ship they could.

Did we bitch and complain that they were OP or some such nonsense? No. We got revenge by allying ourselves with other corps and taking the fight to them. The funny thing was that we had no designs against them until they did that. Their actions with their own undoing.

And that's why EVE is great. There is some great history and amazing PVP wars going on. I just got sick of the grind and interface. EVE would be 10000% better if they could make it into a space sim control interface a la X-Wing/Wing Commander.

 

[NikolaeVarius]

This is my favorite thing to laugh about when it comes to the proponents of EVE...

In one breath they'll say, "In EVE you literally can do anything you want to do!" And in that same breath they'll tell you, "In EVE you can't do anything if you go it alone."

EVE, the one game where everybody says you can be anything you want to be, except an individual.

No, I didn't say you couldn't do anything alone.

I said, don't complain if people who team up with each other do MUCH better than you alone.

People can literally make billions of isk a day sitting inside a station and doing NOTHING but trading. Margin trading, Price action trading, etc etc etc.

All that means nothing when you undock and 30 guys gank your uber expensive ship because you were stupid enough to think that you were safe.

Don't complain if people who bothered to team up are able to vastly outstrip your abilities as one guy. You can do anything you want, but groups can do it better.

 

[ImpulsE69]

No, I didn't say you couldn't do anything alone.

I said, don't complain if people who team up with each other do MUCH better than you alone.

People can literally make billions of isk a day sitting inside a station and doing NOTHING but trading. Margin trading, Price action trading, etc etc etc.

All that means nothing when you undock and 30 guys gank your uber expensive ship because you were stupid enough to think that you were safe.

Don't complain if people who bothered to team up are able to vastly outstrip your abilities as one guy. You can do anything you want, but groups can do it better.

This. The game is not designed to be 100% solo. You can do a lot alone, it just will take longer, and defending your hard earned things can be tough if you have no backup.

Of course...at some point you realize that it is just like working a second job and you say..I could have been doing something else.

 

[clok1966]

WTF is "asian grind"? Eve is made by CCP who are in Iceland.

The thing with #2 is that the smaller corps can all ally with one another to take on a larger corp. I was a member of Goonfleet back in its starting days when one of the largest and most feared/respected corps of the time thought they'd kick us when we were already down (having just lost a war with a neighbor) because they thought we were an up and coming threat to them. They locked down our home system for a week or two and destroyed every ship they could.

Did we bitch and complain that they were OP or some such nonsense? No. We got revenge by allying ourselves with other corps and taking the fight to them. The funny thing was that we had no designs against them until they did that. Their actions with their own undoing.

And that's why EVE is great. There is some great history and amazing PVP wars going on. I just got sick of the grind and interface. EVE would be 10000% better if they could make it into a space sim control interface a la X-Wing/Wing Commander.

asian grind= Asian MMO games typically require more hours of grinding to level then American MMO's.. Example Linage2 at level 20 would take 500 even level kills to level 1 time, Everquest would take 300 even level kills.. Its just a play style, not a RACE thing. ANYBODY can make a grindy game.

don't get me wrong, they are changing for the market.. players like easy now days. it was not a racist comment, just a different play style. The Asian player typically values hard work and time to get ahead in a game. Hence the games from those developers take more time grinding/killing to level.

I am sorry I offended you with an opinion.. it was only that. I find Eve repetitive and the Might makes right play style no fun.. I don't believe just because you invited the most people to your clan you should be able to dictate how the game goes. I already have that in real life.. I don't need it in my fantasy worlds.. I prefer being able to do what i want without Big brother watching out for me. Simple don't enjoy PvP that has no balance.

i am glad you enjoy it, and want to defend it from my opinion.. it fits your idea of fun game play style. Please point out to the poster the reason you like it (your alley and take out other guild story was a good reason for somebody to like it if they like that type of stuff).

 

[AstroManLuca]

EVE is a terrible non-game that you can only enjoy if you've already been "playing" it for years or you have serious autism. It is objectively impossible to enjoy yourself while in the game.

 

[dighn]

Of course...at some point you realize that it is just like working a second job and you say..I could have been doing something else.

That about sums up why I quit the game. It's an awesome game, and I really enjoyed it when I played. Then I realized, it's more work than I'm willing to put into a game. It's more of a hobby actually (Eve instead of gaming in general), which is cool, just not for me.

 

[Fallen Kell]

I find Eve repetitive and the Might makes right play style no fun.. I don't believe just because you invited the most people to your clan you should be able to dictate how the game goes. I already have that in real life.. I don't need it in my fantasy worlds.. I prefer being able to do what i want without Big brother watching out for me. Simple don't enjoy PvP that has no balance.

But that is just it, Eve has shown time and time again that it ISN'T about the group who invited the most people dictating how things go. It is about the group who has the best leadership, who devised a tactic and planned ahead that dictates how things go. Case and point, Solar Fleet. They are/were a 1000+ pilot corporation/alliance which owned a vast region of null sec space (for those that do not know, null sec means there is no in-game mechanic for enforcing any kind of rules, in other words no police are coming to your rescue, the only backup are people you have made friends with in the game). Well, Solar Fleet decided they had enough of null sec and were starting to stage a planned exit. However, they screwed up in the coordination and protection, and intel slipped which allowed others to realize Solar Fleet was leaving, and exactly where they were staging all their assets for the planned move. Solar Fleet also didn't understand the tactic that was deployed against them which allowed for them to lose control of the modules which prevented others from jumping into that system (allowing for fleets to arrive and lay siege).

So the result was that someone didn't know the tactics involved in such a move, and made a boneheaded plan. Another group took advantage of this fact and executed a beautiful offensive exploiting this weakness. Solar Fleet had 2-3 times the assets and people than the group that saw that Solar Fleet didn't have a proper defense setup protecting them. Numbers in this case failed miserably.

I myself in my posts of battles I have been involved in also show that number mean very little. We utterly destroyed fleets which outnumbered us 2-1 or more, by out smarting them. We beat a fleet which had 11 logistics ships (healers)+dps+capital carriers with just our 5 logis+dps. How might you ask? We all fit remote sensor damp+scripts and aimed them at all their logistic ships. This caused their logistic ships to need much longer amount of time to lock onto a target so they could heal them. We then exploited this weakness by quickly shifting targets and killed that person before their logistic ships could lock on and heal. They brought in the carrier support to attempt to combat our sensor damping (as a carrier going into siege mode would not suffer the same effects), however, they didn't have enough support for the carrier to prevent us from killing the carrier (they would have needed 2 carriers so that the carriers could rep each other), as we used energy neuts to disable the carrier. The reason this all worked was because we had planned for it. We had ships fit up with neuts and sensor damps for the fight. The neuts would have equally helped in removing their logistic ships as well, but we knew they had a carrier in system which might join the fight. And this is how a group that was outnumbered 2 to 1 as well as outclassed in terms of ship types still won the battle. Eve is about outsmarting the enemy. Sure numbers can overwhelm, but a properly planned operation is setup specifically to handle that fact, with fallback plans (we had 3-4 stealth bombers fit with anti-lock bombs in case they had fit remote sensor boosts on enough ships to counter out sensor damps, but they didn't have them fit and thus we didn't need to use the bombers to execute a retreat).

 

[Martimus]

EVE is a terrible non-game that you can only enjoy if you've already been "playing" it for years or you have serious autism. It is objectively impossible to enjoy yourself while in the game.

I completely disagree. Eve is best by far to a new player. Because at that point everything is new and all things are fun and interesting. Once you have specialized your character and build to do a few things well, the game becomes less fun.

 

[skeedo]

I gotta say my experiences with Eve lead me to have quiet a bi-polar view of the game just because theres so many things I love about it, and so many things I hate about it.

Hands down it's the best space combat game out there. The ships and weapons are just amazing. Another thing I really enjoy is the music, for me good music really makes a game. Graphics are pretty sweet all around. Yes, theres an extremely high learning curve...you're never going to learn everything about the game so it's best to just find your niche and focus on learning about that.

When I first started, I got into a small corp that would War dec random other small corps and we'd chase them around the universe, ganking them while mining, etc. Was pretty fun for awhile, until the Corp disbanded. Shortly after that, I got suckered into getting my ship destroyed by offering to help someone out on a mission. Person says they need help on a mission, you group with them and warp to the supposed mission location, turns out that they have some buddies from another corp waiting for you that put a Wardec on the corp of the guy you offered to help, so you are fair game. This is a common exploit that people use on newer players. After losing 400 mill ship with another 200 mill worth of mods/equip I rage quit for about 2 years.

After that I re-subscribed but never really found a corporation that was that worth while. Joined up some random corps and did some PVPing, but not having a lot of skill points I wasn't of much help and never got any of the loot from killing other players. Furthermore, a lot of times going into low sec I'd get ganked at a gate camp, thus losing more 400+ mill ships. I really never got very well trained in PVP either, I just simply didn't know the typical strategies when going into a fight.

I unsubscribed shortly after, however CCP would send me e-mails every 5 months or so offering free re-activation for 5 days, so I did that while they offered it. It was nice to play it again when I got the free reactivations, was great to get out in an interceptor and just cruise around asteroid belts. They don't send me e-mails for free 5 day activations anymore which is kind of discouraging.

I really wanted to just carebear/ PVE in the game, killing NPC pirates in asteroid belts was fun. The problem with this is, you're not going to get jack for loot in high sec asteroid belts because all the good stuff is in low sec asteroid belts. So if you want the good loot, you gotta risk getting your ship sploded in low sec. This happened practically everytime I tried going to a low sec belt. Was smart enough to not bring a very expensive ship however, but they didn't do too well at killing higher level NPC pirates.

I enjoyed missioning as well, for awhile anyway. The problem with this is that they haven't really incorporated new missions into the game since I started playing, so it was kind of monotonous doing the same missions over and over again. Also, some missions were a real PITA and you're at risk at getting your ship sploded if you mess up, so if you skip those you have to wait awhile before you can get a new mission or you take a standing penalty. I really think the game would attract a lot more players if they made it more PVE friendly.

Things I really hate about the game...first of course being the monetary devastation from being killed. You're easily out $1 billion ISK if you get your ship sploded and then podded...it's not like you just res in a graveyard and start over. Have buy a whole new ship, mods to re-fit the entire thing, and augments as well if you get podded. Not to mention you have to have the money to buy everything back. If you are fortunate enough to be in a good corp, other corp mates are normally willing to help you out with kredits after you lose a ship, however this wasn't the case in the latter corps that I was in.

Secondly, the whole real time training of skill points makes the game extremely unbalanced. This means the players with the most SP will always have the most SP, and theres no way of ever catching up. It'd be impossible for any new players to even dream of ever having the SP near the level of players that originally started when the game came out, unless of course they bought a character on the market. The best will always be the best because of their high SP.

If I do ever subscribe again, I'd probably just want to find a wormhole, hang out there and make it my home. Probably won't be possible though seeing how I don't have a ton of SP nor PVP experience because someone will eventually come in and hunt me down

 

[Kalmah]

I've played Eve on and off for many years now. I always get bored at about the 6-9 month mark and cancel my subscription. At about this time you are done skilling up to be minimally competitive and start to feel the need to do more dangerous things which ends up with a lot of lost ships which then leads you into a circle of grinding for isk.

At this time I also start to feel like I'm paying money to do something that feels more like work. Trying to meet corp obligations, having to worry about a girlfriend calling while going out on an operation, having to explain to friends and family that I can't go right now because I'm in the middle of a HUGE thing that is not even mildly amusing.

If you have mad skill you can solo, this requires knowledge of everything Eve. But with that aside, to me it feels like you are paying for SP so that you stand a chance to match up with another person who has +- what you have and in the end you aren't necessarily winning or losing because of much that you do, but more if you've spent enough money to skill up long enough.

If I win a pvp it's kind of like, "wow, I beat that guy because I've spent more money to play Eve longer than he has..."

Obviously there are more angles to the game than just that, but the whole thing just begins to feel ridiculous to me after a while.

 

[Chaotic42]

I'm on day 3 of the 21 day trial and it's a very neat game. I'm impressed and I tip my hat to the developers. Still, it's not for me. I'd rather grind for money in real life.

 

[Fallen Kell]

The beginning grind can be horrible. It is probably one of the hardest things in EVE to do. Making that first 100million is extremely hard because in EVE, you need isk to make isk, and when you start, you have no isk. Running level 1 and level 2 missions also gives you next to nothing, and by level 3 missions, you will need a ship that costs upwards of 50-70mill, even though your missions have only been getting you like 1-2mill each (and take upwards of an hour).

It is a vicious grind to start. Really I would say use 2 trials. The first time, just do a little of everything. Try and figure out what you like/want to do in the game. Your first character will almost always have to be a combat pilot so you can run missions to make money in the beginning. After you have 50-100 million saved up, you can then start looking at other money making methods, such as market trading (buy items low, and sell high (possibly moving them to another region to sell higher, just be careful not to put all your isk in one thing, look/study the market as well before doing it)). Safe bets in the beginning is faction ammo, just pay spend some time looking at the price history on the items at jita and other market hubs before buying to make sure you are not buying into an inflated market. Mission running also makes some decent isk for a while, and you get more efficient at doing them over the first 1-2 years of playing as your skills train up (just pay attention to your standings with all the 4 major factions so that you don't become a criminal of one or more of them and can no longer fly through their space/territories without getting attacked).

 

[ImpulsE69]

I once had a char named Santa Pod. Every Christmas I would roam 0.0 yelling Merry Christmas to everyone. I never once got attacked, even by enemies.

The community isn't ALL bad.

 

[SunnyD]

I completely disagree. Eve is best by far to a new player. Because at that point everything is new and all things are fun and interesting. Once you have specialized your character and build to do a few things well, the game becomes less fun.

That design holds true for pretty much any MMO. Problem is in EVE, given the "wide open sandbox" nature of the game, being new in EVE is even more frustrating than being experienced because in reality there's really no where safe for a new person to go and learn the game. Should a group of asshats want to make life miserable for every new player from this day forward, they easily could, leaving new players with little recourse to learn the game.

Double edged sword. EVE is inherently designed to "reward the rich and keep the powerful in power".

 

[Red Storm]

Double edged sword. EVE is inherently designed to "reward the rich and keep the powerful in power".

And unfortunately in EVE that basically means who can use the most characters/alts at once. It's the number one aspect of EVE I don't like. They advertise cooperation with other players to do things when in reality players just play with multiple characters.

 

[clok1966]

But that is just it, Eve has shown time and time again that it ISN'T about the group who invited the most people dictating how things go. It is about the group who has the best leadership, who devised a tactic and planned ahead that dictates how things go. Case and point, Solar Fleet. They are/were a 1000+ pilot corporation/alliance which owned a vast region of null sec space (for those that do not know, null sec means there is no in-game mechanic for enforcing any kind of rules, in other words no police are coming to your rescue, the only backup are people you have made friends with in the game). Well, Solar Fleet decided they had enough of null sec and were starting to stage a planned exit. However, they screwed up in the coordination and protection, and intel slipped which allowed others to realize Solar Fleet was leaving, and exactly where they were staging all their assets for the planned move. Solar Fleet also didn't understand the tactic that was deployed against them which allowed for them to lose control of the modules which prevented others from jumping into that system (allowing for fleets to arrive and lay siege).

So the result was that someone didn't know the tactics involved in such a move, and made a boneheaded plan. Another group took advantage of this fact and executed a beautiful offensive exploiting this weakness. Solar Fleet had 2-3 times the assets and people than the group that saw that Solar Fleet didn't have a proper defense setup protecting them. Numbers in this case failed miserably.

I myself in my posts of battles I have been involved in also show that number mean very little. We utterly destroyed fleets which outnumbered us 2-1 or more, by out smarting them. We beat a fleet which had 11 logistics ships (healers)+dps+capital carriers with just our 5 logis+dps. How might you ask? We all fit remote sensor damp+scripts and aimed them at all their logistic ships. This caused their logistic ships to need much longer amount of time to lock onto a target so they could heal them. We then exploited this weakness by quickly shifting targets and killed that person before their logistic ships could lock on and heal. They brought in the carrier support to attempt to combat our sensor damping (as a carrier going into siege mode would not suffer the same effects), however, they didn't have enough support for the carrier to prevent us from killing the carrier (they would have needed 2 carriers so that the carriers could rep each other), as we used energy neuts to disable the carrier. The reason this all worked was because we had planned for it. We had ships fit up with neuts and sensor damps for the fight. The neuts would have equally helped in removing their logistic ships as well, but we knew they had a carrier in system which might join the fight. And this is how a group that was outnumbered 2 to 1 as well as outclassed in terms of ship types still won the battle. Eve is about outsmarting the enemy. Sure numbers can overwhelm, but a properly planned operation is setup specifically to handle that fact, with fallback plans (we had 3-4 stealth bombers fit with anti-lock bombs in case they had fit remote sensor boosts on enough ships to counter out sensor damps, but they didn't have them fit and thus we didn't need to use the bombers to execute a retreat).

or (if you read EVE tragedy story's on the net, there are a few) somebody from the other team made an ALT, joined the guild and told his guild all their plans.. then after beating them said they used superior tactics.. you know, shooting fish in a bucket.. having the answers to a test before you take it.. (this is sarcasm, but i ahve no doubts it happnes far to often in EvE)

look up greifer on google.. about half the post are about EVE.. I did my year of Eve to see what it was about.. like most, enjoyed some, hated some.. not a game for me..

Eve is ok as a PvP game, but while some smart thinking can win the day. 90% of all the battles are "more wins", at least when i was playing, it may have changed.

again no problem with people liking it.. I don't.. i don't like rap either.. but quite a few do..

 

[SunnyD]

"Superior tactics" usually means whichever alliance happens to have more people awake and in the same general timezones at any given time in EVE.

 

[NikolaeVarius]

"Superior tactics" usually means whichever alliance happens to have more people awake and in the same general timezones at any given time in EVE.

Uh huh. Sounds like you've never actually played Eve.

00 super alliances and corp combat are entirely different thigns.

That being sad, tactics also work extremely well in giant alliance fights.

 

[ImpulsE69]

Tactics are what made the game fun. It wasn't ALWAYS about numbers. The thing said about peoples alts though and how they are used is one thing I always found annoying. I don't know how some people did it, I knew one that had 4 chars going at once and he'd roam around ganking like that. Crazy.

 

[Enigmoid]

Hi - I downloaded Eve Online and really, really, really, really, really wanted to like it

I'm a huge RTS, sim, fantasy, space, any game you name it, loyal soldier ofr the last 25 years.

But I just couldn't get Eve Online. I found myself completely confused and unable to do anything.

Is there something I'm missing? Is there a very good online guide that explains it?

Are there others like me who felt totally confused and just gave it up too?

Is there some easy way to pick it up and will I reach some kind of gaming nirvana when I do, or is it actually overhyped?

Thanks for help

I tried eve (demo). I was really excited to play a Sci-fi based games as opposed to the tons of fantasy/magic/swords/wizards games out there. I was really excited too about the prospect of fights in space (with three dimensions).

However, eve falls flat on its face in that I didn't get the experience I wanted. Eve is not a space battle. Its an air battle. Utterly disappointing in how a game with so much attention to detail (mass, volume, cpu power, energy grids, missile this, etc) could so completely get the space battle wrong.

Eve space battle is more similar to an aerial dogfight than anything in space.

Why do ships have max speeds? (hello this is space no air resistance/gravity as long as the engine is supplying thrust I should be accelerating). And hello, why are these speeds so fricking low? Couple hundred meters a second max speed. Nice. The international space station orbits at 7,700 meters per second but all that these guys can do with their engines is a measly couple hundred (yes there are faster ships but the idea of a max speed of 400 m/s is absolutely stupid).

Why do ships slow down when no longer applying power?

Why do ships require the engines to be firing when not accelerating?

I could go on and on but for a game with so much attention to detail its immensely disappointing to see how eve doesn't follow basic laws of physics.