Anyone on here plays this game? Is it worth it?
Dropping everything in life for that one perfect game will always be a temptation... ;)
Dropping everything in life for that one perfect game will always be a temptation... ;)
Is it worth it? No. Is there a good alternative? No. EVE Online always had an element of spreadsheets to it. It was designed that way. The original game design was done inside excel.
Personally I find it fascinating that CCP didn’t build their own spreadsheet functionality into the game considering how many players used spreadsheets to calculate mining yield returns, industrial runs, research and BP copying. The only area of EVE where spreadsheets go out the window is war.
I have probably 20,000 hours in the game. I lived on EVE from 2003-2010 and then would log on every once in a while to get my space fix.
The one thing I will say about the game, it inspired me to try to create my own back in the day. It was too much work for me but I did manage to get a demo of flying around from Star system to star system using an EVE-Online like warp and scene management.
The artwork of EVE is fantastic. The space environments are A+. The actual gameplay though is a bit stale to todays gamers. It’s more a kin to old school rpg’s where you target something and let the auto attack do it’s thing.
That is very real-life-like then... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment is a very real issue in wars.
In reality the game is more an economics simulator where war is the instrument that engages with your numbers.
Stopped playing when the game became P2W, I miss it probably the same way a nicotine addict miss the cigarette.
I tried to describe what it's like to be so involved in a game and then not. This analogy is perfect!
What makes Eve interesting is that all star systems except for those in the very middle of the map are controllable by players, and actually provide value to those holding them. So that's why you have these gigantic, drawn out conflicts and large battles where player blocs with thousands of players each are fighting for territory.
There are some built-in 'NPC Corporations' that you start on, and default back to if you get kicked out of a Corp, but they're basically just placeholders.
The big alliances are empires that control many aspects of the game. The downside is that if you want to play casually and don’t like all the boot-licking and drama that comes with player corporations you miss out on a lot of the game.
Not if you include all of the ship setup calculations, POS and Capitals efficiency, etc.
Check out Astrox Imperium. It's been described as "Eve Offline". It's made by just one developer, but it's really impressive for that.
I've never played Eve myself, so I can't personally say how they compare, but I enjoyed the hell out of AI.
(PS: I have no association with AI. I'm just a very satisfied fan.)
I liked the stealth game as well. Work your way in a stealthy ship deep into Nullsec and do your thing - whether that thing is a bunny rabbit of a frigate designed to find and steal cookies and outwit the fox, or a stealth bomber that hides near the cookie jar to squash the unsuspecting. And both of these have to find a way to get back to civilization with the lootz.
The bad:
- The dreaded "learning wall" is/was very real. Nothing is/was properly explained or introduced. Best tip is to join a new player friendly corporation ASAP to get some proper explaining.
- The combat is janky and a lot of the skill involved is/was learning how to abuse or sidestep technical limitations such as the one second server tick time and the quirky methods of manually controlling your ship.
- A lot of players prey on newbies to scam or troll them out of what little they have. There is a certain edgy attitude to a lot of pirate players that are attracted to the games "full loot" model.
- Most of the "missions" or "dungeons" feel really stale, and it's slow as molasses.
The good:
- Looks completely amazing. As in jawdroppingly beautiful if you like hard sci-fi.
- Everything that matters is run by players. This is the most unique aspect of the game. No other game has a constant ongoing player driven lore like Eve. The market, the social constellations and much of space itself is run by players. There have been huge market plays, alliance mutinies, assassinations, mineral cartels and colossal battles that has raged for days. All is talked about by players, and since everyone is playing on the same server, it's relevant for everyone.
- The setting is pretty good, and the atmosphere is great. The "races" all have very distinct motivations and character.
- It has a "full loot" PVP-model. If you fly something and it's destroyed, it's gone. Including everything you were carrying. Some of it is dropped so that other players can pick it up. This means that PVP combat can be incredibly sweaty, and I have never had actual adrenaline shakes the same way I've had from Eve. It also makes every kill incredibly satisfying. The rush of flying something relatively inexpensive and managing to kill someone flying a pimped out super expensive ship is quite incomparable.
I probably skipped a lot of stuff, but that's some scattered aspects atleast.
I don't know if this is true, but it would tell a lot about this world we are living in.
I mean that's what you get from a bunch of eve-playing nerds committing to a labor of love. Best projects I've ever had.
[0] Real time updating mining & trading boards by location, 100bn+ ISK inventory tracking down to the cent across many corps, characters, inventories & contracts, ... Killboard & market data feeds, risk evaluation, resource allocation optimisers... Absolutely impeccable archives & backups going back 5+ years, on top of postgres & flask iirc.
edit: And audit logs EVERYWHERE. Seriously, I've seen better CYA/KYC/chain of responsabilities from eve recruitment corps than some actual for profit entities.
There are still your average gamers, but EVE had a much more adept playerbase (in terms of real world skills) than any other MMORPG I've played.
The real world is generally a lot messier than EVE data, but it's definitely true.
EVE released an update today (as it does most Tuesdays, and also often the next day or two in the week if there are issues). Part of that update included significant changes to a number of blueprints, which are the plans needed to manufacture items in game. Blueprints come in two varieties: originals and copies, and you can perform various activities on them (manufacturing, research to improve efficiency, copying of originals to make copies, etc.). I wrote a tool which imports the game's Static Data Export (SDE) and makes various calculations about all of blueprints in the game (profitability, etc.), so I ran it on the SDE from the new update. Each 'activity' has a set of fields, like what it outputs, etc. But, the 'copying' activity is hard-coded to output blueprint copies. There is a field to say what it outputs (and that field is sometimes present in the data), but the value is always empty. Except today it was not always empty. A relatively obscure blueprint for a Taipan (a kind of upgraded rookie ship given away as a one-off in a past special event) apparently had the information for its 'manufacturing' activity listed as 'copying' instead. So now it claims that if you copy an original, you get the actual manufactured ship, and not a blueprint copy. This broke my tool, because I had put in a check to see if this field was ever non-empty, because if it was it might mean the game had changed in a way that meant something in my tool needed to be updated.
If you look at the information for the blueprint in game, it still claims that the copying activity outputs a blueprint copy. They hard-coded it, too. It now takes as input all of the materials required to manufacture the ship, though. In this case, there are no blueprint originals for a Taipan (if there were you could make an infinite supply of these one-off event items), and any copies that might exist can no longer produce the ship, because you cannot copy a copy. The only valid activites for a copy are 'manufacturing' and 'invention', except a Taipan blueprint no longer has a manufacturing activity and never had an invention one. So I updated my check to ignore this type, and moved on. Needless to say, this change was unrelated to any of the actual announced changes for the update, not mentioned in patch notes, etc. Just another Tuesday in EVE.
Other comments have covered many aspects of the game, so I'll just point one thing out: the players are super friendly!
It's funny because Eve is a game where you can -- and WILL -- get destroyed by anyone, any time. It's dog-eat-dog, it's cut-throat, it's merciless. I remember the first time I lost a 250m ISK Astero to a hunter. The cost was equivalent to hours of gameplay for me at the time. Brutal.
And yet, you know what happened next? The guy who destroyed me sent me a message and asked if I was new (he could tell). He congratulated me on what I did right and gave me tips on what I could've done better. He sent me 200m ISK because that's just not a lot for a seasoned player. He helped me refit my ship so that I could escape future hunters more quickly.
This guy went above and beyond, but that type of friendliness is very common in Eve. I'm sure there are jerks, but I haven't come across one yet.
Ended up joining a newbie corp as the return trip to sell stuff often wasn't worth it. They had a hauling corp that offered buyback for most items. Still played solo for the most part.
People kept telling me that I'm playing the game wrong FWIW but not participating in the social aspects freed me up to boot up the game for an hour whenever I wanted. Haven't played for a few years but I did enjoy it.
Luckily, CCP screwed things up quite badly, and I lost interest. If they hadn't, I'd probably be stuck playing EvE rather than living in the real world. :D
EvE Online is a deeply interesting game, and I think it's a testament to how long the game has been relevant. But while I love reading about the economics, wars, scams (EvE allows player scams in game), I could never see myself actually playing the game. It would suck up far too much of my time and money.
It used to be that the game was really harsh when you screwed up, which made the adrenaline pump when you did something you knew was dangerous. For me as a hardcore gamer at the time, that was the initial kick. Now a days I believe they have lessened the harshness a bit, but it should still be one of the few games where you can lose literally hundreds of hours in investment by losing everything you own in the game.
But somehow this pile of crap mechanics by the sheer mass of them makes for an emergent sandbox. It feels not designed, like so many other video games. Systems that are not meant to interact with each other do in unexpected ways. Don't go in expecting every career path in EVE to have thought behind it. You have to figure that out.
Haven't played the game since, but it is pretty damn comfy and I'd recommend anyone to try it out.
EVE absolutely has the potential for incredible experiences but that tainted the authenticity for me in a way I could never shake off.
It's weird how that made you feel worse than grinding for $0
I played probably 8-10k hours across three characters and 8 years. So not that much ;)
The world used to be much harder to get into, requiring a ton of RW time, RW skill and grinding to really progress. Then each seperate workflow (PvP, PvE, industry, extraction, scanning, ...) became safer as well as easier to grok and master as a single user.
Then there was somewhat of an eternal september amongst a dwindling population as the old guard finished dropping out.
fortunately CCP managed to ruin it with P2W so I was able to stop my addiction.
it was one of the best games out there ,imo.
Here's a short showcase showing what some of the mechanics are like: https://youtu.be/S8vRgG9LrIg
[1] https://github.com/PathOfBuildingCommunity/PathOfBuilding
By continually dumbing the game down to "make it more accessible", the constant lying by the devs and them going back on their words and it more and more becoming a microtransaction hellhole, CCP managed to destroy the one single thing that made EVE successful: The community.
I greatly enjoyed the decade and a half I played it (beta until 2018'ish), but truth be told, it's only ever been going downhill pretty much since the Incarna expansion with 60$ monocles (2011).
CCP fucked their loyal player base over and over and over again until most of us simply didn't want to take it anymore. The playerbase these days mostly consists of bots and instant gratification people expecting everything on a silver platter, constantly whining if they don't get what they want, only to inevitably leave again after 3-6 months even if they do get what they want.
I remember my first decade in EVE with great fondness and made some terrific friends there. Regarding the 5 years that followed, I seriously regret not quitting sooner. I'm still somewhat active in the EVE forums, though. After all, that's where the real PvP happens. ;)
- A very bitter vet
Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6xHlPki-jE
Let's Play:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0xTNF7fPJg
Dyson Sphere Program | Advanced Belt Tips and Tricks
In terms of the spreadsheets in space that's only one aspect. I bought a little package for £5.99 which has skill boosts and some plex. All in all that setup my FTP character to be able to do whatever I want. So you can ignore this entirely and just play the game the way you want tbh.
I do wish we could get more games in a similar vein. I wonder if there is an opportunity out there for an MMO that lives somewhere in between the hardcore player driven sandbox of Eve and the more common, mainstream theme-park MMOs like WoW, if such a game is even possible.
The community is the real deal. It can be awesome or real shitty, just like at work :)). It features great politics, economy, social structures and everything above and beyond to make it, for me, the best game I ever played.
I quit because real life has to take priority for a while, not for anything negative about the game.
Is it? How bad does your life have to be, that you'd settle for a game instead?
I tried Eve a couple of years ago. I spent more time puzzling out why anyone plays it, rather than actually playing it. You have to do boring tasks, to get money, to do what? Oh, to get to do more boring tasks, to get more money. Ok, but to do what? Oh, to get to do more boring tasks, to get more money.
Hm... what am I missing? Oh, you get to run around stomping random people once you have a lot of money. Oh, okay, so, you get to be an asshole or do more boring tasks to get to be more of an asshole? Yes.
Ok... that's extremely addictive and enticing for some people? Yes. Wow... What fucking losers some people are. That's the conclusion I came away with.