Anyone here play Eve Online?

[Subvet]

I'm just curious to find out if anyone on here plays Eve Online. I downloaded the trial and have been playing over the past couple of days. I may end up paying for an account when the trial is over. If you play, what do you think of the game?

Edit: how the hell do you edit the title of a post? I'm not sure if I meant anyone, or anybody, but it didn't come out the way I wanted.

Edit2: Thanks Moon!

[Moon]

Click Edit, then click "Go Advanced" and you can edit the title I think.

[Ssiissuu]

I played last year about this time, for a couple of months. I joined a corporation, had a war, and then got bored. I loved it. BUT, and here it is, it felt too much like a second job. While the leveling system is quite excellent as I'm not forced to play constantly in order to raise my characters skills, there is still money, and you need lots of it to outfit your ship competitively. So the grind is still ever present, just not so much with skills. The grind is all about money, though it’s fairly enjoyable for the first while.

I only played three or four months, and I really loved the concepts behind the game, the markets, which are the best I've seen in a MMOG, and the player factions and such. But earning money required you to grind, more than I was willing, in order to succeed in the game. So you don't have to log five hours a day in order to raise your skills, great, you do however have to log many hours in order to make some cash in the game.

The only routes I took was to create a mission runner who salvaged the wrecks of his vanquished foe as my primary to earn cash while my corporation wasn't doing anything spectacular and I also ran a merchant secondary on the side. The mission runner was pretty much just like every other character in every other MMOG, he could PvP but wasn’t specialised to it so he was more of a support role in PvP. The merchant was interesting, but was literally a job. Playing the merchant was like playing a spreadsheet: checking market prices, checking through histories, attempting to predict trends, hauling cargo, setting up transfers, buy low, sell high, etc. It was fascinating and extremely engrossing. Every morning I would grab my coffee, skim over any and all EVE news to see if there were any notable trends or events nearby in my corner of the galaxy that might allow me to exploit the near markets. Then I would login to EVE and check to see what I had bought and sold with my automated orders. Depending on the area, I might be maintaining supplies of mining droids in a sector or such like, so I’d restock and refill any orders that I had active.

Then I would check out any new buy orders in my areas of operations, see if anyone was desperate enough that they’d be offering to buy up goods at reasonable prices, if so, I might fill an order or two. Then I’d comb the sell orders to see if I could pick any cheap product up for reselling at higher prices. At this point, I would likely also be running cargo between areas, between my own hangars, redistributing goods and such like. It was fascinating, and very involving. I was competing with other merchants constantly, price wars, you name it. Often, I would have my merchant sell the very expensive salvage from my mission runner. Tidy profits. I played my merchant no more than an hour or two each day, and I was able to remain competitive with those who played long into the night. At some point though I realised that while my merchant was the most interesting to play due to the wealth of tactics and strategies available to him, I was ‘working’ for two hours a day, and I was paying someone else so that I could work those hours away. So I quit.

My mission runner, well, it was like playing a game. I had a very nicely outfitted Typhoon battlecruiser that I used as an artillery boat in missions and as a sniper during times of war. Worked well and I had fun. But the combat portion of the game never quite impressed me the way the trade system did. So once the trade system lost its allure, I quite and gave away all my stuff to the nicer members of my corp.

Great game, different from many others, but at the end of the day you’re still paying monthly to grind. The grind just isn’t the typical one.

[ParaBellum]

I played it twice, both times for about 1-2 months until I realized I just don't have the time for MMORPGs. It's a great geame with amazing depth that only really starts once you've joined a decent corporation. Ah, and the initial learning curve isn't actually a curve but rather a solid wall obviously designed to keep the weak out...

[Elmar Bijlsma]

I think PeterNZ was pretty heavily into EVE Online. Was in Anzac Alliance or sumfink.

[Meach]

I have an account on EvE and was heavily involved in PVP. Was fun but gets dull very quickly.

[howardb]

I see a few of you think EVE gets dull rather quickly. I couldn't disagree more. I've been playing the game for several years, although on and off at times. Any game gets boring after a while, but not every game manage to suck you in again. That's exactly how EVE works on me. I always end up playing the game again. I have a gallente pilot with well over 20 million SP.

I rate games on duration played or how long they manage to keep my interest. That means games like Civilization, Pirates, Diablo, Fallout and the likes is rated as great games by me. Oh yeah and Combat Mission as it kept my interest for years. EVE Online is also one of those games - among a few more.

Like in any MMO how fun the game will become is directly linked to the community you belong to. This mechanism is not different in EVE. So my tip is try to find out what you like about the game and post an application for a fitting corporation on the EVE forums. There's always corps looking for pilots. I'm sure none of you will have any difficulties finding a good corp as you're all well spoken and intelligent - well most of you anyway

I'm in a small communist PvP corporation with a +90% tax. When corp funds are getting low we usually take a week off to mine resources. This will keep us going for quite some time depening on our war luck in the coming weeks/months. We got rules for what we can commandeer and there's some red-tape involved to replace lost ships to justify the ISK loss. You need to meet a minimum req to be able to commandeer certain ships. We seldom or never fly expensive ships unless we're on alliance maneuvers or flying with Band of Brothers. We do have Rorqs and Carriers in the corp although we almost never use them in anything but mining ops. This might not be for everyone but I like it. Besides there's all sorts of corps you can join.

A typical roaming gang in my corp consist of fast ships like tech 2 frigates and a few support ships one or two jumps behind. Maybe one or two heavy assault cruisers or force recons and an interdictor on call. This is great fun. If the **** hits the fan the fast ships will have a great chance of escaping and if we loose a few the cost is minimal. Besides no one should underestimate a tech 2 frig. A blaster fitted Taranis which I usually flies deals 212dps while going well over 700m/s without a MWD. Good luck trying to track it with a battleship! If we find something really interesting we hold them down until our alliance - AXIOM - or BoB arrives with the big guns.

Before I joined my corp I didn't play EVE as it should've been played. EVE is best in 0.0 space where you have to look over your shoulders all the time. Granted we might have one of the best flight commanders in the game. He's got a sixth sense of when to break off or how to find targets and you always know what to do when he's running the show. I just love crashing mining operations or commiting enemy gangs on 20-30 ships in battle, thinking we're easy frigate kills, while we have big guns incoming.

Eve might not be for everyone I agree to that. It's got a very high learning curve, but because of that it's virtually teen and smack talk free. It's the thinking mans MMO. It's very realistic compared to other games. If you want to become 'all that you can be' you have to learn the complex combat mechanics like tracking, falloff, scanner usage, ship types and much much more. This game is very tense and I could probably write several essays of single encounters in low-sec space where I both have dealt and been given hell. The minute you venture below 0.5 security you'd better start looking over your shoulder. I love it!

Ehh.. this post got a bit long but I was interrupted a few times while writing it so it got a bit longer than I first anticipated.

[Guest Guest]

deleted per user request

[orwell]

The game sounds like training for when you're deployed to Africa to do this stuff for real.

[Subvet]

Thanks for the replies guys. I decided to sign up for 3 months. We'll see how I think about it at the end of my 3 months. So far I'm loving it. Now I need to see if I can find a good corp to join up with.

[Wildman]

If you want go to www.frugalsworld.com a bunch of sim heads there are in a friendly corporation that would probably help you out.

[Canuck]

I got a chuckle out of this even though I've never played the game. This seems like as good as place as any to make my first appearance on the forums in a dogs age.

[Subvet]

LOL!!! Nice one Canuck! It has felt like at times.

[jonnyraj]

Thanks for the information.