An introduction to EVE Online

EVE Online is one of those games that has no tolerance for people who don't understand it. The playerbase, as a whole, are bastards, scammers and unpleasant people. The corporation mechanics are seemingly designed to allow people to pilfer and steal from, and generally wreak havoc amongst, their own corporation.

Flying the ships is easy enough.

Understanding the game is an artform.

Most other games, especially in the MMORPG market, set out to try and snare you in with short-term rewards, gratuitious play, and grind-fest tactics to get you to spend the maximum possible time on their servers.

EVE tells you, on day 1, that you have a training queue and, thoughtfully, provides you with a list of skills that you might consider training. About 200 of them. The shortest ones take about 7 days to max out, using base stats, and the longest ones take several months. That's several months REAL TIME. EVE Online doesn't do the short-term planning idea.

Those times are set in stone, you can't change them. It's not that you have to spend time in the game to train. Quite the opposite. Your character trains 24/7 whether your online or offline, whether the servers are working or completely and utterly fucked up. So long as a skill is in the queue, it's training. And you can only queue skills to start within 24 hours, meaning that you have to log on every so often to set new skills in the queue.

If all that isn't confusing enough, then it's worth noting that no one in the game has maxed out all the skills in the game yet. It's just not possible.

It would take several decades of 24/7 training to accomplish this, by which point CCP would have brought out some new skills. The idea of 'level' doesn't really apply (the closest you get is your SP total, which goes up at the rate of about 1m/month if you're training).

Everyone in EVE eventually specialises, which brings me onto the second peculiarity of EVE.

In other MMORPG's, multi-boxing (logging in multiple accounts) is frowned upon. That's great. In EVE, I estimate that there's about 2 accounts per player. On average. I have between 2 and 4, depending on whether or not I can afford the subscription fees (which are high) for all of them each month. Everyone in my corporation has at least two accounts, some have three, a few have four and one guy has nine.

Why?

EVE is addictive. You discover, as fast as you play it, that it wants you to carry on playing, and it's only another 2 weeks till you can fly that new ship, and only another 2 weeks after that till you can fit it with the right equipment, and only another 2 weeks after that until you are able to...

You get the general gist.

I'm nearly a year into this game and I'm still playing it. For someone who got tired of WoW within a month and bored of Runescape after a pitiful 12 months - remembering that I was of the generation where everyone had an account, even the 'cool' kids - this is quite remarkable. Especially when you consider that it's £11/month/account. I try not to think too hard about the amount of my money that's landing in some else's pocket.



This post has gone on too long without pictures.

Here's one of my new shiny, an Interdictor, which is essentially a ship designed to piss off people by stopping them from warping (hyper-speed drive!) off.

If you can't see it, it's that tiny speck in the middle of the screen. It's quite small...

And here's one of my corporation POS, essentially a giant floating structure in space where we can store items, ships and hide from enemy fleets (unless they blow it up, which has happened to our things before)

More pictures and less text will be winging it's way onto this blog whenever I actually get around to logging into my EVE accounts (I have some VERY long skills training at the moment, so I barely log in)