The alliance I was involved in kept almost winning battles, when the server would crash, then the devs would come in and reset the node, undoing all the enemy damage we'd caused. I think there were some shenanigans going on.
EVE can actually be played very casually. The grind is for money, but you can supplement that with real money. I know that sounds really bad in a world where every mobile game is a P2W nightmare, but it works for EVE. You cannot P2W EVE. Most people don't use real money, once you get to a point where you understand most of the game it's not really required. The only significant time sink Eve requires is learning how it works because it's an extremely complex game.
EVE has a really good Free to Play system in place and I definitely recommend checking it out.
I would not suggest getting an account then trying to throw a bunch of money at it until you really understand what that money is used for. We once killed a new 15 day old player who was flying high end implants that buffed their shields, in a ship that was armor tanked. In real money terms we probably blew up $40 that they were using completely incorrectly. There were 3 of us flying a total of less than $5 worth of real money ships. It's a very unforgiving game, but most players are nice to new players and we ended up giving that person a lot of advice on what they did wrong, what they can do to fix it, and which direction they needed to go to get better. We throw money at newbies often if we kill them, but since this one was flying several times more than our entire fleet we figured it was pointless. To put it into perspective, I've been playing for about 4yrs total spread across 14 and the most expensive thing I've flown cost about half as much as what this person was flying.
For the other payers: it was a full High-Grade crystal set in a blingy Apoc we found ratting in a Haven, so you know he was injected too. Almost 7b total on zkill.
It's a lot of fun to just mess around with a few people in some cheap frigates (basic small ships), sometimes more so than the actual "expensive" areas of the game.
I haven't played Eve in years but now I'm suddenly back to wanting to play.
Unless you become a lackey of a powerful group, you can't set out for a new frontier without the expectation that another powerful outside group will come along and wreck and/or steal what you've spent time and treasure to build. Wormhole space was designed to break this pattern. However, people have recently figured out how to invade and break those places as well.
The only way there could be unlimited freedom and unlimited possibilities, is if the in-game world were truly unlimited. I've been thinking about how to build that. (Basically, Eve with a No Man's Sky sized universe, and an equally vast forest of procedural tech trees. Throw in in-game coding of player-owned assets.)
A literal real life year worth. Not kidding.
Skills level up in EvE even while offline, and there's not way to increase them other than the passage of time (except by leveling up other skills that decrease the learning points needed for new skills, but still).
I remember when I was a noob in Eve. There was a caper involving some billions of ISK in the official magazine, and I was in low-sec and saw one of the characters from the article. We hid out in the station in fear. After awhile, one of us asked one of them, if we ran for it, if they'd try and kill us, and they were like, nah, you're good.
Later in corp chat, we were telling about our run in with characters so infamous, people wrote articles about them printed on actual paper!
Eve is really hard to play alone, it's mesmerizing and it's a great experience to try.
But once you get addicted to some feeling it creates, I urge to join a corporation with well experienced and active people which will be able to let you earn more in a shorter and more social way.
My Eve reality is that I mostly tchat on Discord with my friends while killing some stuff to buy ships / licence / whatever and watch to fight for other people.
There are plenty of activity to do and it's a very unique and awesome piece of experience I never was able to really leave for good.
I think I still have around 3B in faction drones and random loot from a couple of weeks of jumping around exploring. Super fun game, you just need to find your niche.
Most of the newbie friendly corporations recruit players from day 1, but in doing so they kill off casual gameplay for these players.
The best approach is to first learn the basics by playing solo or with some close friends, and only after join a null sec corporation.
Absolutely this ^^^
After a couple of months learning the basics I joined a mostly UK based corp who's members had been around since the inception of Eve back in the early 2000's. This was around the time Eve introduced the faction war update (Empyrean Age - 2008) and these guys wanted to encourage new players to do PVP but in safer non-null sec space, which the faction warfare update was sort of intended to do.
Being in my early 40's at the time I wasn't a hugely "social gamer", however it turns out many committed Eve players are in that older demographic (30's or older I'd reckon) and many of us had the same interests and senses of humour.
To cut a long story short, I had an absolute whale of a time with these folks (Dark Rising - who're still around operating back out in null-sec again) for a year or so. I don't think I've laughed so hard such as at the times we had spies...on TeamSpeak...in opposing faction corps and they had no clue we'd infiltrated them. The game really took over my life for a while and was amazing fun, and the way to have that kinda fun is to join a corp.
It's either spend the little free time I have coding and sharpening my skills, or goofing off in a virtual reality. To be fair I do play games now and then, but it's not the same as when I was 17 and out of high school.
also the balance tends to suck in these games - how do you balance for someone who can basically put 8 hours a day every day in the game and someone who can log on for maybe 2 hours a week(if they're lucky)
also i may be nitpicking at this point but eve hasn't really evolved their tech stack for how popular they are(practically household names at this point). consequently the game shits the bed and is pretty unplayable when actually fun exciting events like a huge corporation being cannibalised happen...
The last I heard (~10 years ago), they were heavily into Stackless Python. And I believe they did things since then (micro-sharding zones and global time dilation?).
There's only so many things you can do with a real-time single world with arbitrary 3D positioning.
But if you have the time, I do think it's quite rewarding. o/
Never actually played it but I was always fascinated by the the extent to which the devs went to capture real life interactions inside the game. Now I'm fascinated by the extent to which the article's author went to capture game interactions in real life.
However, generally the name originates in the game's backstory with the "EVE Gate" which was a now-expired wormhole that appeared somewhere in Earth's proximity and lead to "New Eden" which is the cluster where the game takes place.
The game has a serious amount of lore behind it and it's been years since I played so I may be over generalising