Also, I never thought of EvE's expansions as an expansion at all, just a big patch. Nothing really new, just a few ships, modules.
No wonder they are free.
so, you are saying the trinity graphics up grade was just a patch?
So they updated 3d models. Nothing special, many games did that.
Also EvE's graphical engine was updated like 3 times, even after that it's still crappy (technically), it still uses 90%-80% of CPU, not GPU. So even if you have some uber GTX295 or something else this game lags (visually) as hell.
Well except this patch, other patches was tiny and never felt like Expansion at all.
Ermm... So? I don't know if you know this but many many MMO games use the CPU more then the GPU. The only two that I know that do not really use the CPU is AOC and LOTRO. Yet even then they are probably using 40% or maybe even 50% of the CPU. I am sorry it is a common thing and not really a valid statement for you to say.
Originally posted by Noan Originally posted by nurgles
Originally posted by Noan Also, I never thought of EvE's expansions as an expansion at all, just a big patch. Nothing really new, just a few ships, modules. No wonder they are free.
so, you are saying the trinity graphics up grade was just a patch?
So they updated 3d models. Nothing special, many games did that. Also EvE's graphical engine was updated like 3 times, even after that it's still crappy (technically), it still uses 90%-80% of CPU, not GPU. So even if you have some uber GTX295 or something else this game lags (visually) as hell. Well except this patch, other patches was tiny and never felt like Expansion at all.
hah...i remember them saying its a hole engine they made cause the old one was too reliant on cpu.
Congrats to CCP. Eve is a goregeous and dangerous game. The ammount of work that goes into this game is outstanding! keep it up CCp!!!
(AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH cant raise enough plungers to salute CCP!)
All my opinions are just that..opinions. If you like my opinions..coolness.If you dont like my opinion....I really dont care. Playing: ESO, WOT, Smite, and Marvel Heroes
As I said above, and I repeat often in threads like this, if the game is fun for you, that’s great, I don’t wanna rain on your parade, it’s none of my business. I’m happy if you’re happy with it.
I’m just saying that when you take away the fanboy goggles Eve is deeply flawed, so badly that there’s no way it’d get GotY unless it was a major advertiser on this site, would never get GotY without non-game shenanigans going on.
Anyway, flame away… here come a bunch of comments.
CyberWiz you’re 10x more reasonable and logical than the average fanboy, but still, obviously, way, way, way off the mark. What is true though is that CCP and the game Eve, are, objectively, or as close as a person can come to objectivity, deeply flawed when it comes to easily isolated categories to compare with other mmos. The people in this thread are either CCP plants, or they are f’ing crazy fanboys because the nonsense here is almost overwhelming.
Examples of where your’re paragraphs were off,
CyberWiz on free expansions: Again, the way CCP does expansions is for me the example of how ALL other MMO companies should do it.
Me: Impossible. You missed the point entirely. CCP isn’t a good company giving something away for free. They’re a sandbox game that CAN’T charge for expansions because they don’t have enough content to charge for.
CyberWiz: Some features got postponed, big deal
Me: The big deal is that for the Dominion ‘expansion’ a senior CCP dev scrapped weeks of test server work, he did so based on obviously flawed thinking, so badly flawed that he did what in WoW terms would be telling end game players that warriors should use greater heal, mages should use backstab, and paladins should use bear form. That’s not excellence, that’s just plain awful. That’s a big deal.
Of course, as was mentioned, on top of that, the Dominion patch increased lag, and the change in sov mechanics was way way late getting rid of something people hated for years, the POS warfare. That’s not excellence, that’s lame by any objective measurement. Dominion contributed to getting Game of the Year, what the heck did you even like about it? It was a non-patch for you it seems. I would also bet good money that you don’t spend much time in wormholes or see much or use T3 stuff yourself. Again, Aprocrypha I’m guessing was a non-patch for you, just guessing from what you’ve written already. That’s speculation with regard to you, but true of many Eve players. Those ‘expansions’ were actually non-patches, as in really didn’t change much.
CyberWiz on multiple accounts: Nah, if you join a good corp, there is really no need for multiple accounts, it is your own choice to do so. And there is not that much more multi accounting going on than in other MMO's. Last figure was 20% I believe, not far off from other MMO's I am sure. ( DAoC, WoW, all had it )
Me: /facepalm, just absolutely awful fanboy thinking, just dead wrong. You might as well say that Africa a country, or say that genes are proteins, or say that people speak Australian in Austria.
In WoW and other games, people make 10 alts if they feel like it, but the vast majority do NOT ever want to pay for more than one subscription. Some do, but the VAST MAJORITY do NOT. Do 1 out of 5 WoW players pay for more than one subscription? Absolutely laughable, NO, NO, NO.
Whereas, in stark contrast, in Eve, players talk about having multiple accounts like families in real life talk about having multiple cars. Sure, nobody is forcing people in real life to get more than one automobile but most families do. No, Eve multiple accounts aren’t as prevalent as multiple cars per household, but Eve players take having multiple accounts as casually, and talk about it as much, and take it for granted just as easily, as real life people do multiple cars.
Eve game mechanics, like only having three character slots, only having one skilling up at a time, the fact that it takes years to mature one character, the fact that you can NOT just bounce between pirating, to Faction warfare, to 0.0 end game alliance play without making major moves and changes to your character,… those and other game mechanics push people who want to explore lots of the game to get multiple accounts. Yes, if you have only one account in Eve, you are living under a rock as a casual player without ‘doing it right’.
Liranan: The trolls whining about EVE being so old and cry that WoW wasn't chosen are ignorant to the fact that WoW is younger than EVE by a few months only, making WoW a 2003 game, as well. Irony is delicious.
Me: I don’t care if WoW won or not, and I know WoW players could care less about Eve, if they’ve even heard of it, but I write because it boggles the mind how bad fanboys are at math. Eve was released in May 2003. WoW was released in November 2004, a year and a half after Eve.
(Also, just a snipe, Eve my seem old because it is old school. WoW changed everything, and Eve is one of those games that just never revamped to adjust. Eve appeals to a niche crowd that will put up with CCP’s abuse. Eve isn’t made well, it is not excellent, it is not appealing to more people because of its flaws. Example: CCP, after Eve was more than six years old still didn’t allow players to remap the keyboard any way they want. That’s the first thing I do in a game, is map the keys to where my hand is comfortable.
Eve’s key commands are somewhat, but not fully reprogrammable. Fully reprogrammable key commands is simple, easy, basic, user friendly, and CCP fails at it. That’s what I call ‘old school’, or just plain ‘bad’.
Also ‘old’ is clicking in space to have your ship move. No direction keys. No joystick. No mouse movement fluid movement. You click in space, and most ships lumber slowly around turning to face and then accelerate in that direction. That’s awkward, cumbersome, frustrating, user UN-friendly movement. I don’t care if Eve were ‘younger’ than WoW, which is isn’t, but if it were, it’d still FEEL older because the UI and other features are so ill conceived.
Zzulu: I was also glad to hear it has over 300.000 subscribers now. Pretty remarkable for a game released as a buggy piece of indie crap in 2003.
Me: More math errors by fanboys. Around 300,000 subscribers isn’t correct. That’s a myth perpetrated by CCP who doesn’t want to draw more attention to the fact that so many people use multiple accounts. They have around 300,000 subscriptions, not subscribers. The big deal is that it’s a broken game f’ing over the customer, relative to all the other games where one account works just fine.
And no, it’s not that amazing. Eve is a Coke without a Pepsi, it’s unique, it just doesn’t have much competition. Eve is like the red headed girl who has a horrible personality, but that red headed girl has a following, because despite her awful personality, red heads are rare, and for some people, red heads are just the bomb, just gorgeous. That’s why Eve has a following. CCP is cheap and makes all sorts of mistakes, but if you like spaceship fleet battles, there’s nowhere else to go.
To the idea that ‘sandbox’ games have endless possibilities, while ‘amusement park’ games are all about restrictions: When you boil it down, a sandbox game doesn’t have endless possibilities. Eve is just a bunch of people all shooting at each other and trying to scam gold (isk) off each other. You join the fight, or scratch for money, or you don’t.
It’s not some magical wonderland where the imagination runs wild. It’s a big big playground where people go to fight at lunch and afterschool or after work. That might be super fun for some people, I’m not denying that, but it’s not so friggin special we gotta pretend ‘player based content’ is something magical. Half of that ‘player based content’ is sitting on your butt doing nothing because nobody really wants to fight unless a) they think they’ll win a fight, or b) they’re so bored of sitting around doing nothing that they jump into suicide fights just to break up that boredom.
Nobody said you HAD to have multiple accounts in EVE, please show us where it's stated that without multiple accounts you can't play the game.
Your problem is that you just didn't know what to do. You need a game in which everything is linear and thought out for you. You can't make choices and, so, EVE isn't a game for you.
Mining, manufacturing, PVP, exploration, market manipulation, scamming etc. all require research by mature people who take the time and effort. EVE is an immitation of life, to a certain extent, and life isn't easy. Nobody is going to hold your hand and show you how to do your job, you are expected to learn things on your own. Clicking on an NPC, clicking on two skills, going to its corpse, looting it and moving on to the next one, are as relevant as sitting behind a desk stapling documents all day. While it may be your job and you may enjoy it it won't make you stand out. What will make you stand out is creativity and innitiative.
If you don't have those things then you can't play in a sandbox game, whether it be MMO or not.
WoW-like games is all about a bunch of immature 30 year olds showing off their epic gear they earned through endless hours of grinding just to grind more raids and dungeons. Well done to them, at least in EVE you have something to show for it: kills and victory. Pilots paint their kills on their planes, we post ours on websites for all to see.
To the myth that it’s easy to make money in Eve and play for free with game time cards: Lol. Eve fanboys always bring this up. /facepalm. Here’s the math you just don’t understand. Again, just mind boggling how wrong fanboys get things. If you, fanboy, can make enough isk in one day or a few hours, to pay for one month of game time, if it’s so easy, then everyone would do it, and everyone would be paying gold for game time. CCP doesn’t live on gold (isk) they want money, real life money.
Easy money in a game like Eve is a logical impossibility, because prices adjust to the value of the money, the value being how long or with what effort or talent it takes to get that money. For the befuddled fanboy: If it were easy to earn one million dollars per year irl, then the price of hamburgers will go up to like 100 dollars each. You can’t have a system where it’s both super easy to make money, AND have prices so low that everyone can get valuable products cheaply. Just absolutely retarded the way fanboys say that it’s super easy to earn gold for anything and everything at the drop of a hat, when the reality is that all but the richest players regularly have to go out and farm it up as the ‘grind’ in Eve.
To the myth that new players can do well against older players regardless, because it’s talent that matters, not the ship you’re in: Talent wins when almost all other factors are equal or near equal, and that’s almost never the case in Eve. The game doesn’t have Arenas or Battleground or Scenarios or whatever other instanced fights with even numbers dictated by the game. It’s a free for all. Older players have a HUGE advantage with regard to hps, dps, speed, experience, against newbs. A newb has no chance against an older player. What newbs are good for are blobs. Nobody wants to fight fair. Everyone blobs, brings as many buddies as possible, because numbers win. Even those people who hate blobs, end up blobbing, by necessity.
Sure, newbs can jump right into the game, but they do so as blob cannon fodder, not as glorified potential talent. Being cannon fodder can be fun, lots of fun for some people, but omg are fanboys dead wrong then they lie to themselves and lie to new players about new vs old players being even remotely in the same universe with regard to power and influence in the game as individuals.
If they manage to release Dust AND Incarna (walking in stations) Eve will just become the most sick mmo.
Sure, its not to everyones taste.. and even I get bored of it and leave it for a few months. But what they've done with eve, and what they plan to do makes it very deserving of this title.. and possible be awarded it a few more times to come.
Please name a game in which you become rich without doing anything. Money in EVE isn't easy but then it isn't in any other game either. At least in EVE we have a live economy, unlike other games. In fact, EVE's economy is alive to such an extent that CCP have hired an economist to review it and help them adjust things, if necessary. That's the difference between EVE and other games: money matters. In most MMO's money is meaningless, so what you have so much money, what you going to do with it, other than hoard it?
wow, you've really got an axe to grind with CCP/EvE...
Just a quick response though:
Easy Money/Prices adjust: this would indicate that the game has an economy that is constantly adjusting to market demand. What's wrong with this? It's a supply and demand economy. As long as people pay real money for PLEX there will be some supply. Otherwise, EvE gets a monthly sub fee. Either way, EvE isn't "living on isk", but hasn't this conversation been had before? As far as the overall ease of income, sure it's easy to make ISK. It's also really easy to spend it.
New Players: On day one, you might go out and get your pod handed to you. On day 14, thanks to the skill training bonuses for new players, you can be competitive in some areas. Naturally, given the mechanics of the skill system, the longer the play, the more options you have that can assist you in specific scenarios. I gather I am not saying anything new to you though. Just a different point of view as to whether we see it as a huge issue or not.
Fair fights: wrong game. I think even the most vocal fan of the game doesn't go around expecting 1-vs-1 fights. That said, any World PvP game would have this same issue. Again, this doesn't seem like news to you, but you really go to a lot of effort to make that look like a bad thing. Again, different point of view i suppose.
-mklinic
"Do something right, no one remembers. Do something wrong, no one forgets" -from No One Remembers by In Strict Confidence
Walking in stations is not all that big of a deal, you can do that in Earth and Beyond which is a old mmo from years ago. Eve needs a total gameplay overhaul so its not just clicking spreadsheets over and over to do everything. I want actual control of my ship like in Takiodom. Pvp be alot harder if your fighting someone that can actually try to dodge with their ship, insted of leaving it up to the dumb game engine to move your ship for you. I've played Eve and it bored me to death. There isin't really anything in the game thats fun to do, whoooo I can mine.. *yawn* the game also seems utterly pointless. The skill system is horrible and seems to be 100% based on sucking people in to keep their accounts open as a stall tactic. Perpetuum does something simmlar but it'll be free to play(with an option to sub for more bonuses) and actually has far better control than eve does even in a very early beta. A month irl to train a skill is a little much for a videogame. maybe a few days but a month is just a major stall tactic on Eve's dev teams part.
I want actual control of my ship like in Takiodom. Pvp be alot harder if your fighting someone that can actually try to dodge with their ship
This will never make it into EVE because you need a ping of below 100 to fight in such shooters. Having a high ping is already a detriment in MMORPG's but in EVE, when you're fighting 500 people it's pointless. EVE is about working with the other 249 people in your fleet, not a game you play on your own. This is why the game is hard for people who can't make social connections.
Fanboy nonsense about multiple accounts: “You don’t need multiple accounts, nobody is forcing you.”
Me: Correct, nobody is forcing you to have multiple accounts any more than anyone is forcing anyone in other games to have alts, but players DO, and THAT is what’s important.
To explore different aspects in the game, and people do want to explore various aspects of the game, in any other game they’d make alts, alternative characters, a bunch of characters, on ONE account.
I don’t care what the game mechanics are, the fanboy and layman just have to understand that players in Eve DO get multiple accounts, and CCP knows it, and CCP doesn’t fix the game to change that, because those multiple accounts bleeds more money out of the niche player base.
CCP brazenly advertises a hook to get you into more accounts with a promotion called ‘The Power of Two’ where they give you a price break on the first 6 months of your first multiple account, so you get hooked and just keep going with more than one.
If you’re still reading and want to go into what game mechanics might push people into getting multiple accounts…
Three character slots only, per account. Absolutely ridiculous. 3? Are you kidding me? That alone is deal breaker, and should be, for all but Eve fanboys. Even 1 week old characters can be useful, and if you have 1 main character, and two 2 week old mules or cyno alts or whatever, that leaves you no room for more. That’s just f’ing over the top, beyond bad, and it’s beyond mind boggling that Eve fanboys just bury their heads in the sand about it.
Here’s where it gets tricky for fanboys and non-Eve players alike. It’s not necessarily so easy to understand at first.
I’m sorry if I am not explaining it well but, here goes…
You ‘skill’ up by a real time clock, you don’t get experience, you get skill points, by that clock.
The skill points run slowly, that’s key also. It’s slow, so you as a customer will have to pay for a looong time, to get anywhere.
Ok, stick with me,… you could take one character and skill up abilities in all the various areas of gameplay, if you had decades to do it. You can max out all skills in all areas on one character, theoretically. But the clock runs so slowly that it’s just not the way the math works, you can’t do it all on one character in any reasonable amount of time.
Here’s another area where fanboys fail at math. They lie to themselves and other people about how long it takes to train various career paths, even though they daily stare right at the numbers. All you have to do is get out Evemon, an Eve mod, and make a bunch of skill plans, to see that it takes a looong time, to go down particular career paths.
So… it takes a long time to go down a career path, and you can only ‘skill up’ one character per account at a time, so if you want to follow a few different career paths without waiting half a decade, then ya, you get multiple accounts so that multiple characters are skilling up simultaneously.
It takes multiple accounts in Eve to simulate what people in other games do by making alts.
That’s not all…
Other game mechanics push you to have multiple accounts.
Faction warfare. Piracy. 0.0 end game coalition warfare. Rating. Mission running in Empire. Industry. People don’t just bounce between those and other activities on one character. People either buy a character, or skill others up on other accounts.
Your 0.0 Alliance has a call to arms for defending a POS. You gonna say you’re busy, you just wanna quit and play Faction Warfare for a day or two? NO.
You wanna help out as a member of Eve University to teach new players. Can you just hop over to faction warfare, or piracy, or 0.0 end game? NO, you have to stay ‘neutral’, sort of, so the Uni doesn’t become a target for everyone with a grudge. The Uni doesn’t allow any of those other activities while you’re a member.
You’re a pirate in low sec, but your carebear buddies from real life are running missions in high-sec, can you join them? Heck no, your sec status is too low from blowing up ‘innocents’.
Talk about restrictions.
It all makes complete sense in Eve when you play it, but it all also adds up to multiple accounts.
Player based content in the ‘sandbox’ is NOT do as you like without limits, absolutely not. Characters in Eve have very strict limitations on where they can go and what they can do based on their sec status, their reputations, their history with various political coalitions, their skill/wallet profile.
Hey DavidLemke, please show us on this very lifelike doll, where CCP has touched you.
You don't like EvE Online? That's fine.
Now go away troll.
EDIT: I'm a gamer by heart, and I try out and play tons of MMOs for the last 10 years, and there's simply no other MMO outthere, that is even remotely a competition for EvE Online atm.
So the complaint is that the game's "leveling" mechanics promote specialization? In an online game, how is this bad? This creates an interdependence between players. Might be part of the reason EvE won best community too . I can go to another game and make dozens of alts and, should I be a total ass on one of them, just delete it and make a new one without any worry. In EvE, there is some investment in my character and I am encouraged to maintain a reputation that suits my play style.
It might just be a preference thing, but I see no issue with a game that encourages you to think about your actions.
-mklinic
"Do something right, no one remembers. Do something wrong, no one forgets" -from No One Remembers by In Strict Confidence
I think its important to offer an alternate view point regarding some key issues raised by others in this thread. RMT On the subject of RMT, yes, EVE has ISK farmers and sellers, and CCP does a good job fighting them on a daily basis. The war will never be won, but CCP does manage to keep them in check. Regarding their own sales of ISK, they don't do it. Players within the game can trade extra ISK that they've earned to other players for GTC's, which of course are purchased by others from CCP. This does make a profit for CCP, but does not introduce any new ISK into the economy. Real Time Skill Point Training I'm not going to lie, you either love this or hate it, normally directly related on how much free time you have to play MMORPG's. In my own case, I think its the greatest thing to ever come along, finally a mechanic that doesn't reward people just because they have more free time than me. I probably will never stop playing this game just because of this mechanic. As others have pointed out though, this does not mean that a person can never "catch" up and be competitive per sec. All ships and professions have a finite number of skills that affect them, and they all can be maximized in about a year or less. (Titans not included) The only advantage a long term veteran has is he (or she) will be able to fly a wider variety of ships or perform well in more professions, (exploration, mining, trading etc) A person does not need to excel in every ship or profession to enjoy playing EVE, though of course, in the first 6 months your choices will seem to be a bit limited. IMO, resets are not necessary (not that I've seen all that many games do them) and though I've only been playing 2.5 years now, I don't feel disadvantaged in any way to those who have played from beta. In fact, in my corp we have a number of beta players and I exceed them in total wealth and can fight better than them because they chose the way of the industrialist. (but boy can they build a great capital ship) Multiple Accounts Its true, I have three, so I guess people have them. I also had 5 DAOC accounts, 3 WOW accounts, and 3 Lineage 2 accounts. I'm a multi-boxer and enjoy playing this way. Do I need 3 accounts? No, as another person mentioned, you can work collectively with other players to accomplish what I do solo on my own. (I tend to be anti-social somewhat) But in the end, what is wrong if a game is so enjoyable that you want to purchase more than 1 account? I call it a bonus rather than view it negatively as others do. But a nice feature is that you can pay for your extra accounts by trading ISK for GTC's, something a new player won't do but right now I earn enough ISK in a single night's WH OP to purchase a months time. (and yes, WH's did add a lot to the game, from T3 ships to an excellent way for casual players to earn ISK hand over fist, which was another great bonus for me)
RMT
Eve certainly has RMT and that is from account transferring. It costs 20 euro/transfer and a quick look at the transfer forum one can see that this is a significant income for CCP.
Also conclusion that CCP does not make money from GTC is flawed. ISK is hard to get in game so alot of people buy GTC, from CCP, and sell it for ISK. So CCP certainly earns money for this as well. One could argue that those people that buys the GTC, for ISK, would have instead paid the subscription themselves but that is in no way certain. I know alot of people who have several accounts, some of which are paid by GTC bought by ISK and there is no telling if those accounts would still be active if they could not support them by buying GTC for ISK.
Real Time Skill training
One side of the coin is that you dont need to be online to advance your character so you save time in that regard. The other side of the coin is that it takes atleast a year of training to get to the high end ships/modules. A year, sitting on your ass and grinding ISK just waiting fly the best ships is not a good thing for most. Most people want to advance their characters, not sit offline and wait for it to advance.
Then add capital ships into the equation and you have several RL YEARS to get into one. And that is where this game passes from being a game to becoming a project, spanning over several years.
Multiple Accounts
Eve is probably the game that needs several accounts most. The reason lies within the skill advancement where you can only have ONE character per account that can be advancing his skills. That means that if you want to have several characters with different focus areas, like logistics, mining, production, research, combat etc you need to either train them sequentelly (which means you have to spend years to have characters that can do all those) or have multiple accounts. In other games this is not as big of an issue since leveling is something that you self actively affect and is much faster than in Eve. In most MMORPGs you can max a class in a couple of months, which means that within a year you can have maxes out characters from most classes. Not so in Eve.
To make matters worse Eve is designed in a way that combat does not earn you much money. Running level 4 missions or ratting in 0.0 space, which is what is available for the majority of combat pilots, earns you maybe 20-30 million ISK per hour. And considering that death in one high end ship (such as BS or T2 command ship or even worse, T3 ship) costs anywhere from 100 million to 500 million (depending on ship and fitting) one can quickly deduce that PvE combat is not a worthwhile way to sustain your PvP fun.
So that means you need another character that is doing high end research/invention/production to support your PvP character or you need to use the RMT and buy ISK through GTCs.
So Eve, even though is probably the best games for hardcore gamers who has either alot of money or alot of cash, is certainly not for the casual gamer and definetely not for a PvE player as its focus is hardcore PvP.
Therefore the game should get 2009 Hardcore PvP game of the year but certainly not PvE or casual MMORPG of the year. WoW, WAR, LoTR or Aion is much more suitable for those types of gamers.
David you have explained you view quite well. I basically agree with you but i still appretiate the game.
Are you going to derisively call me a fanboy so that you can feel superior instead of considering or allowing that not everyone wants the same thing as you?
Part of what I like about EVE is the harsh penalties and the single server structure. You say that not being able to create multiple useful alts without having to pick up an extra account is a deal breaker for you. For this, I am glad.
The meta game of alts in a persistent universe like this should be discouraged. If you want to make a high sec suicide ganker then you will need to carefully work out when the sec status/vs/training time + implants to get it to function. The Game needs penalties so that there is a consequence to your actions.
If you could create an infinite amount of cyno alts deployment/movement of caps would be much more trivial.
These kind of limitations require you to think more strategically about what you do with your character slots. It is this kind of game that I enjoy.
Now i don't think CCP is beyond criticism and you have raised some good points. At the moment, the dominion expansion has taken fleet fights back a few years with respect to lag. I am not sure i like the sov mechanics yet but have had some interesting and good fights anyway. Bouncing a snipe BS fleet from between the territorial claim unit that needs to be knocked into reinforced to the gates to protect the system blockade units was a lot more dynamic that the POS spam/POS bash mechanic. Although, there is a lot to be improved on.
You criticism regarding faction standings in faction warfare for example. I dabbled a bit but almost immediately found the faction hits to be a deal breaker for me. I will not take part in that aspect of the game until the there is some mechanism to recover standings with a faction. I don't want such a recovery to be easy, but at the moment is completely irreversible once you get beyond a certain point. That is too much of a disincentive to take part.For readily available PvP you are better off joining red vs blue. At the last fanfest, in the round table for faction warfare it was clear that the developers are aware of this problem and are are on the lookout for a good solution, it was also clear that a solution had not yet presented itself.
You may see this as incomplete, poor development or exploiting people for their subscriptions. The way I see it is that the developer are developing their game, a sandbox game that will always be incomplete, always have a new challenge and a new solution where the player can take part in the creation not just consume. An imperfect world for imperfect people to struggle in.
im gonna respond anyhow, but i just realized you are a troll. you come here and post baits for fanbois to bite on and post in anger. how i know this? well what you say in your posts is simply not true. admittedly this might be because you tried the game, didn't get the mechanics, got aggravated and left the game. still what you say, simply is not true.
Originally posted by DavidLemke Eve game mechanics, like only having three character slots, only having one skilling up at a time, the fact that it takes years to mature one character, the fact that you can NOT just bounce between pirating, to Faction warfare, to 0.0 end game alliance play without making major moves and changes to your character, those and other game mechanics push people who want to explore lots of the game to get multiple accounts. Yes, if you have only one account in Eve, you are living under a rock as a casual player without doing it right.
why are you obsessed in the standard MMO thinking? it doesn't take years to mature a character. you cant train all the skills. there is no end to get to. it is a sandbox. i am not sure you get this term. means CCP only provides the sand and the tools, we, the players, create the actual game. so there is no end game, and it does not take years to mature a character. so you can only train one character at a time? can you lvl more then one character at a time in wow? of course you can bounce between different things and you dont have to do any changes at all to you character? where did you get that? thats just stupid. the only reasoning i can see is if you are e pirate and you become an outlaw, then it takes some time to get your standings back. but i fought in 0.0 for a long time, then i got bored and left for factional-warfare, then i became a wormhole pirate, now i am in rvb. might go back to fac war, or 0.0 when i get bored of this. and i didnt have to do any changes to my character. i just decided, and left. i had two accounts at one time, but didn't see the point so i didn't resubscribe on my alt. playing with corp members is a lot more fun.
Originally posted by DavidLemke Also old is clicking in space to have your ship move. No direction keys. No joystick. No mouse movement fluid movement. You click in space, and most ships lumber slowly around turning to face and then accelerate in that direction. Thats awkward, cumbersome, frustrating, user UN-friendly movement.
again, read what others have posted before you post. its not about twitch based mechanics, and its not about fighter pilots flying small agile ships. its about huge 20 kilometers long behemoths. you cant really fly those with a joystick now can you? no, those are more about direction, speed, orbits, electronic warfare, shielding, armor, energy and a shitload of other stuff that eve combat has. again, ship sizes in eve: http://go-dl1.eve-files.com/media/corp/SFC/EVE-ships_large.jpg
some of those are over 20km in size. you don't fly those with a joystick. not that kind of game. i admit some poeple want fast paced fighters with joystick, but eve is not that. its about huge ships, with whole cities and crews on them. and some people like that. it doesent mean its as you say "CCP and the game Eve, are, objectively, or as close as a person can come to objectivity, deeply flawed". or "Thats awkward, cumbersome, frustrating, user UN-friendly movement." might be for you, but then again that is not objective. its just not a fighter pilot game. and some of us like that.
Originally posted by DavidLemke To the myth that its easy to make money in Eve and play for free with game time cards: Lol. Eve fanboys always bring this up. /facepalm. Heres the math you just dont understand. Again, just mind boggling how wrong fanboys get things. If you, fanboy, can make enough isk in one day or a few hours, to pay for one month of game time, if its so easy, then everyone would do it, and everyone would be paying gold for game time. CCP doesnt live on gold (isk) they want money, real life money.
i see you dont understand how the system works. there are people with loads of money ingame, and there are people with loads of money out of game. what CCP allows is to sell game time codes for isk (ingame currency). how this works is that a player with a lot of money out of game, does not have the time to grinds isk in game. so he buys a GTC and puts on the eve market for x isk. somebody with loads of money ingame decides to buy that gtc as x isk means nothing to him. in that way he added a gtc to his account and expanded his playing time. while the dude who bought the gtc got isk, which is what was after, as the 15$ for the gtc mean nothing to him (since he is, as we said, reach in real life). demand and supply options still play, if there are a lot of people buying GTCs and selling them on the eve market the price for one drops, and they become cheap and easy to buy. if there arent enough people selling them, and there are a lot of people trying to buy them in game with isk, then the demand goes up and the prices rise. this way no new money is put into the game. CCP does not sell isk for real cash as someone put it. players trade for it, and no new isk is put into the game, and there is no inflation because of it. as for how hard it is to make money? to be able to buy GTCs? well some people make a lot of money in RL and have no interest in sitting behind a screen grinding isk. they go and buy a gtc and sell it on the market. that is why there will always be a supply of GTCs, unlike what you said, that if it really were easy, everyone would do it. on the other hand we have people who don't mind grinding isk for 5 hours (which is how much it would take for one GTC if you have no talent at all and just do the most basic thing you can). but again, you are stuck not understanding what eve is. those 300.000 subscriptions are on one world. the record was broken a few days ago where there were more then 56000 accounts logged in. have you got any idea what kind of economy runs behind all of this? jita, which is a central trade hub, has houndreds of people in it at an give time. and they trade. there is so much trading going on that the server handling jita had to be reinforced. i have a friend who started playing years after me, and its mind boggling to me how much money he has. he wouldn't even consider paying RL money for a subscription cause GTCs are so cheap. and what he does is trade. he just sits in a station all day and buys and sells stuff. but there is so much trading going on he makes tons and tons of money. i tried it and couldn't do it. i am just not the trading type. to me GTCs are expensive, and no way in hell am i gonna grind for 5 hours to buy one. id much rather pay the normal subscription. but some would. then there are people inventing stuff, doing reaction towers, moving stuff in freighters between regions and so on and so on. but if you dont want to do any of this "complicated stuff", but just do the regular lvl 4 missions (admitedly it can take a month or two to get to them). you can grind them for 5 hours and make enough to buy 1 month. if you are smarter, and can do trading or reacting or inventing or manufacture or whatever, then its even easier. but even now, when the prices of GTCs are so low, there are still people selling them, cause some people have enough RL money to do it. and no matter how easy it gets, they wont be caught grinding in game. so you are the one who fails to understand basic math, as you put it, and the complexity of the eve economy.
lets see, what else... ahh, newbs being useless!?
a long time ago there was an elite mercenary force in eve. it only accepted pilots with a lot of skill-points and they only flew t2 ships with t2 fittings. those ships were worth more then 200mil a piece, 300 easily. they were hired to fight a bunch of newbs in syndicate. turns out newbs had some good leaders who knew how to play. they had little to no skill-points and flew cruisers worth 10 mil a pop. and the mercenary corp would come down with 10 ships and attack 30 newbs, 1 to 3 ods, and kill all of them while only loosing three. thing is eve is all bout attrition wars, so they still lost. all those 30 ships barely came to what one of those three was worth. so newbs can do a lot against older players. specially now when big ships cant hit small fast moving frigates, and a pack of newb frigates can take down a battleship with ease. just look at fac war.
Originally posted by DavidLemke To the myth that new players can do well against older players regardless, because its talent that matters, not the ship youre in: Talent wins when almost all other factors are equal or near equal, and thats almost never the case in Eve. The game doesnt have Arenas or Battleground or Scenarios or whatever other instanced fights with even numbers dictated by the game. Its a free for all. Older players have a HUGE advantage with regard to hps, dps, speed, experience, against newbs. A newb has no chance against an older player.
that's just it. its for players who don't want instanced fights. instanced fights suck. we want world pvp. sure, an occasional tournament with rules is fun, but no instancing bullshit. when you die, the instance doesn't end, and its just as it was before. you lost stuff. and that's what gives meaning to it. that's why you get adrenalin while pvping in eve, stuff is on the line!
and why in gods name would talent win when almost all factors are equal or near equal? ive seen rifters take down interceptors. thats t1 low skill intensive ships kill t2 high skill intensive ships. cause the dude in the rifter was good. there are idiots who buy accounts and the bithc on the forums, why his huge slow moving battleship with its huge slow moving cannons cant hit a small fast moving frigate. and why a couple of those frigates in a pack can take him down. well you might have a lot of skillpoints, but if you don't know how to play it doesn't help. now if a newb doesn't kill a vet, well that is to be expected. they can be completely equal, but the vet has experience and therefore wins. its like that in every game. it should be like that. but the newb learns and defeats the vet. and this is most possible in eve, where you can get a good idea and pewn.
like remote repping. people used to fit their ships with shield or armor repairers to repair their shields or armor. thing is in a fleet fight with 200 people shooting at you one repairer isn't going to do much. then somebody got the idea of remote rep. and believe it or not it was conceived in a newb alliance and ridiculed at the beginning, it is now a norm. he said, why don't we put remote repairer (a module to repair a friend instead of yourself), on every ship and stop putting on normal repairers to repair ourselves. so when 200 people start shooting at you in a fleet fight, 200 fleet-mates start repairing you.
conceived by a newb, who was not afraid to think differently. so its the ideas and the talent that counts in eve. like the sniper tactics, or the nano fleets, back in the day.
sounds to me like you were in a 0.0 campaign and got blobbed by a bigger powerblock and killed. well try fac war, or rvb, or piracy. theres lots of small scale fights in eve if you want. but don't expect a ride. its a sandbox!
So mister Davidlemke... Where do I fit in in your grand scheme...
I have one character that I play... for going on 5 years. Sure I have 2 more accounts but the play time on them is 99% done by friends who play using them to try out some later things. I keep those 2 out for demoing the game.
Now my main has jumped between several different professions (Nicoli Voldkif) and its always been far faster for me to train into a new profession with my main then to run up a second account. I don't need the other accounts and frankly shortly they may be going inactive due to RL concerns. Funny thing about EVE is that you don't need the required alts on an account like pretty much every other MMO. I'm not limited by my class. I don't have to re-roll another character from lvl 1 just so I can try out healing instead of being a tank. I just train a skill or two and I'm already there. Where as you have to start from scratch, in EVE you can cross train and start at what would be equivlant to 75-80% of your level cap.
No there isn't much my main can't do... and since you are so knowledgable about EVE feel free to crack down on that character sheet and explain to me what I can't do. I can tell you I can't fly titans(60days out), Jump Freighters (1hour out need to buy the skill), Can't fly a rorqual ( again just need the skill). And I'm not decades old, Try 5 years. Be honest I haven't done half of what my character can do because I either haven't had the desire to really get into it or just plain haven't had the time. Neither of those problems would be solved by changing the way the games training progresses. In fact if it went to the standard fair as other MMOs I'd probably be lucky to hit level cap yet(I tend to switch back and forth between different character in those games).
0.0, Factional warfare, piracy... be honest none of those have ever forced me to have an alt. 0.0 I had jump clones. Factional warfare I had an alt on the same account(no reason to have multi-million SP characters in FW for just messing arround). Piracy I just watched my sec status and Recovered it by running missions with my friends in high sec when ever it go too low. Amazingly piracy with out podding and diving more into 0.0 you don't lose that much sec status. Like most of EVE planning and knowledge allows you to do so much. Even with EVE-Uni you can teach on an alt, since the main part of teaching is knowing how it works not nessicarily being able to do it. Just because on say a new account I have I can't fly a Nighthawk, doesn't mean I can't teach some one how to fit and fly it. The knowledge is still there. So if I wanted to teach in EVE-Uni, just make a quick alt spend a month giving him some decient skills to go out with some people and thats all you need. Same for Factional warfare or even piracy.
Trying not be dead insulting DavidLemke, but your looking at EVE from the typical shallow view that people have been trained to look at MMOs now. EVE rewards a little thinking with significantly less isk, Real Cash, and real time investment. However as you have successfully pointed out it specfically cost players more isk, real cash, and time investment if you don't want to put any thought into it.
Originally posted by Yamota RMT Eve certainly has RMT and that is from account transferring. It costs 20 euro/transfer and a quick look at the transfer forum one can see that this is a significant income for CCP. Also conclusion that CCP does not make money from GTC is flawed. ISK is hard to get in game so alot of people buy GTC, from CCP, and sell it for ISK. So CCP certainly earns money for this as well. One could argue that those people that buys the GTC, for ISK, would have instead paid the subscription themselves but that is in no way certain. I know alot of people who have several accounts, some of which are paid by GTC bought by ISK and there is no telling if those accounts would still be active if they could not support them by buying GTC for ISK. I would be surprised if transfer came close to even a tenth of a month worth of income for a month in a year. I highly doubt that there is over 30k character transfer a year. There simply isn't 100 characters put up for sale in a day on that board. Is it income, sure but not significant in the grand scheme of things. now that is a rough math but I haven't seen 50 characters put up on that board in one day. Real Time Skill training One side of the coin is that you dont need to be online to advance your character so you save time in that regard. The other side of the coin is that it takes atleast a year of training to get to the high end ships/modules. A year, sitting on your ass and grinding ISK just waiting fly the best ships is not a good thing for most. Most people want to advance their characters, not sit offline and wait for it to advance. Then add capital ships into the equation and you have several RL YEARS to get into one. And that is where this game passes from being a game to becoming a project, spanning over several years. As certain people have shown in EVE, you probably should not be in those high end ships so fast. That article shows you what happens to the character buyers... basically nothing pretty. That said most of the high end ships takes a few months, if that, to get into and those should be spent on learning the game so you don't lose them to dumb stuff like the linked story. Do you seriously think I would even remotely let a new player have a 500million isk ship assuming he had the skills to fly it. Multiple Accounts Eve is probably the game that needs several accounts most. The reason lies within the skill advancement where you can only have ONE character per account that can be advancing his skills. That means that if you want to have several characters with different focus areas, like logistics, mining, production, research, combat etc you need to either train them sequentelly (which means you have to spend years to have characters that can do all those) or have multiple accounts. In other games this is not as big of an issue since leveling is something that you self actively affect and is much faster than in Eve. In most MMORPGs you can max a class in a couple of months, which means that within a year you can have maxes out characters from most classes. Not so in Eve. My main is five years old and has the equivalent skill set of having every WoW class/race combo at or near max level with every character having its crafting skill at or near max level. I also have or can quickly have the equivlant of all of them having the best gear possible(in EVE this means I have multiple backups of ships). I would guess this is about an equal time scale for doing that in WoW if not actually shorter considering a playing time of little more then a 12 hours a week if that. Remeber as I pointed out in another post unlike most MMOs I don't have to start from scratch to do a new job/class. Currently on my Character in 17days I can Suddenly be at or near max level on an entire races cruiser sized advanced ships. To make matters worse Eve is designed in a way that combat does not earn you much money. Running level 4 missions or ratting in 0.0 space, which is what is available for the majority of combat pilots, earns you maybe 20-30 million ISK per hour. And considering that death in one high end ship (such as BS or T2 command ship or even worse, T3 ship) costs anywhere from 100 million to 500 million (depending on ship and fitting) one can quickly deduce that PvE combat is not a worthwhile way to sustain your PvP fun. So that means you need another character that is doing high end research/invention/production to support your PvP character or you need to use the RMT and buy ISK through GTCs. So Eve, even though is probably the best games for hardcore gamers who has either alot of money or alot of cash, is certainly not for the casual gamer and definetely not for a PvE player as its focus is hardcore PvP. Therefore the game should get 2009 Hardcore PvP game of the year but certainly not PvE or casual MMORPG of the year. WoW, WAR, LoTR or Aion is much more suitable for those types of gamers.
I can fly pretty much all the Pretties for PVP... no titan yet, but that is more for personal reasons. Losses from pvp are not supposed to be sustainable easily. Its so that you can actually win a war through attrition. If expensive things could be replaced easily then that would mean ships should end up respawning with you when you die. Now that said I have used a single account for pretty much everything I do and have been able to finace all the PVP I have done. Going out in a Massive fleet where alpha strike deaths are going to be prevelant I don't bring my billion isk+ maruader I bring my selective T2/Rigged Rohk that I have about 10 of sitting in station. Its the common EVE mantra " Fly what you can afford to lose". I also like to add "that is appropriate to the job at hand."
I've always been very calculating about what I fly and what is on it and with the exception of a few stupid moments on my part. never had a issue with cash or ships. I have never been short of fighting when I want it either.
Comments
so, you are saying the trinity graphics up grade was just a patch?
So they updated 3d models. Nothing special, many games did that.
Also EvE's graphical engine was updated like 3 times, even after that it's still crappy (technically), it still uses 90%-80% of CPU, not GPU. So even if you have some uber GTX295 or something else this game lags (visually) as hell.
Well except this patch, other patches was tiny and never felt like Expansion at all.
Ermm... So? I don't know if you know this but many many MMO games use the CPU more then the GPU. The only two that I know that do not really use the CPU is AOC and LOTRO. Yet even then they are probably using 40% or maybe even 50% of the CPU. I am sorry it is a common thing and not really a valid statement for you to say.
so, you are saying the trinity graphics up grade was just a patch?
So they updated 3d models. Nothing special, many games did that.
Also EvE's graphical engine was updated like 3 times, even after that it's still crappy (technically), it still uses 90%-80% of CPU, not GPU. So even if you have some uber GTX295 or something else this game lags (visually) as hell.
Well except this patch, other patches was tiny and never felt like Expansion at all.
hah...i remember them saying its a hole engine they made cause the old one was too reliant on cpu.
could be wrong though...
Congrats to CCP. Eve is a goregeous and dangerous game. The ammount of work that goes into this game is outstanding! keep it up CCp!!!
(AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH cant raise enough plungers to salute CCP!)
All my opinions are just that..opinions. If you like my opinions..coolness.If you dont like my opinion....I really dont care.
Playing: ESO, WOT, Smite, and Marvel Heroes
As I said above, and I repeat often in threads like this, if the game is fun for you, that’s great, I don’t wanna rain on your parade, it’s none of my business. I’m happy if you’re happy with it.
I’m just saying that when you take away the fanboy goggles Eve is deeply flawed, so badly that there’s no way it’d get GotY unless it was a major advertiser on this site, would never get GotY without non-game shenanigans going on.
Anyway, flame away… here come a bunch of comments.
CyberWiz you’re 10x more reasonable and logical than the average fanboy, but still, obviously, way, way, way off the mark. What is true though is that CCP and the game Eve, are, objectively, or as close as a person can come to objectivity, deeply flawed when it comes to easily isolated categories to compare with other mmos. The people in this thread are either CCP plants, or they are f’ing crazy fanboys because the nonsense here is almost overwhelming.
Examples of where your’re paragraphs were off,
CyberWiz on free expansions: Again, the way CCP does expansions is for me the example of how ALL other MMO companies should do it.
Me: Impossible. You missed the point entirely. CCP isn’t a good company giving something away for free. They’re a sandbox game that CAN’T charge for expansions because they don’t have enough content to charge for.
CyberWiz: Some features got postponed, big deal
Me: The big deal is that for the Dominion ‘expansion’ a senior CCP dev scrapped weeks of test server work, he did so based on obviously flawed thinking, so badly flawed that he did what in WoW terms would be telling end game players that warriors should use greater heal, mages should use backstab, and paladins should use bear form. That’s not excellence, that’s just plain awful. That’s a big deal.
Of course, as was mentioned, on top of that, the Dominion patch increased lag, and the change in sov mechanics was way way late getting rid of something people hated for years, the POS warfare. That’s not excellence, that’s lame by any objective measurement. Dominion contributed to getting Game of the Year, what the heck did you even like about it? It was a non-patch for you it seems. I would also bet good money that you don’t spend much time in wormholes or see much or use T3 stuff yourself. Again, Aprocrypha I’m guessing was a non-patch for you, just guessing from what you’ve written already. That’s speculation with regard to you, but true of many Eve players. Those ‘expansions’ were actually non-patches, as in really didn’t change much.
CyberWiz on multiple accounts: Nah, if you join a good corp, there is really no need for multiple accounts, it is your own choice to do so. And there is not that much more multi accounting going on than in other MMO's. Last figure was 20% I believe, not far off from other MMO's I am sure. ( DAoC, WoW, all had it )
Me: /facepalm, just absolutely awful fanboy thinking, just dead wrong. You might as well say that Africa a country, or say that genes are proteins, or say that people speak Australian in Austria.
In WoW and other games, people make 10 alts if they feel like it, but the vast majority do NOT ever want to pay for more than one subscription. Some do, but the VAST MAJORITY do NOT. Do 1 out of 5 WoW players pay for more than one subscription? Absolutely laughable, NO, NO, NO.
Whereas, in stark contrast, in Eve, players talk about having multiple accounts like families in real life talk about having multiple cars. Sure, nobody is forcing people in real life to get more than one automobile but most families do. No, Eve multiple accounts aren’t as prevalent as multiple cars per household, but Eve players take having multiple accounts as casually, and talk about it as much, and take it for granted just as easily, as real life people do multiple cars.
Eve game mechanics, like only having three character slots, only having one skilling up at a time, the fact that it takes years to mature one character, the fact that you can NOT just bounce between pirating, to Faction warfare, to 0.0 end game alliance play without making major moves and changes to your character,… those and other game mechanics push people who want to explore lots of the game to get multiple accounts. Yes, if you have only one account in Eve, you are living under a rock as a casual player without ‘doing it right’.
Liranan: The trolls whining about EVE being so old and cry that WoW wasn't chosen are ignorant to the fact that WoW is younger than EVE by a few months only, making WoW a 2003 game, as well. Irony is delicious.
Me: I don’t care if WoW won or not, and I know WoW players could care less about Eve, if they’ve even heard of it, but I write because it boggles the mind how bad fanboys are at math. Eve was released in May 2003. WoW was released in November 2004, a year and a half after Eve.
(Also, just a snipe, Eve my seem old because it is old school. WoW changed everything, and Eve is one of those games that just never revamped to adjust. Eve appeals to a niche crowd that will put up with CCP’s abuse. Eve isn’t made well, it is not excellent, it is not appealing to more people because of its flaws. Example: CCP, after Eve was more than six years old still didn’t allow players to remap the keyboard any way they want. That’s the first thing I do in a game, is map the keys to where my hand is comfortable.
Eve’s key commands are somewhat, but not fully reprogrammable. Fully reprogrammable key commands is simple, easy, basic, user friendly, and CCP fails at it. That’s what I call ‘old school’, or just plain ‘bad’.
Also ‘old’ is clicking in space to have your ship move. No direction keys. No joystick. No mouse movement fluid movement. You click in space, and most ships lumber slowly around turning to face and then accelerate in that direction. That’s awkward, cumbersome, frustrating, user UN-friendly movement. I don’t care if Eve were ‘younger’ than WoW, which is isn’t, but if it were, it’d still FEEL older because the UI and other features are so ill conceived.
Zzulu: I was also glad to hear it has over 300.000 subscribers now. Pretty remarkable for a game released as a buggy piece of indie crap in 2003.
Me: More math errors by fanboys. Around 300,000 subscribers isn’t correct. That’s a myth perpetrated by CCP who doesn’t want to draw more attention to the fact that so many people use multiple accounts. They have around 300,000 subscriptions, not subscribers. The big deal is that it’s a broken game f’ing over the customer, relative to all the other games where one account works just fine.
And no, it’s not that amazing. Eve is a Coke without a Pepsi, it’s unique, it just doesn’t have much competition. Eve is like the red headed girl who has a horrible personality, but that red headed girl has a following, because despite her awful personality, red heads are rare, and for some people, red heads are just the bomb, just gorgeous. That’s why Eve has a following. CCP is cheap and makes all sorts of mistakes, but if you like spaceship fleet battles, there’s nowhere else to go.
To the idea that ‘sandbox’ games have endless possibilities, while ‘amusement park’ games are all about restrictions: When you boil it down, a sandbox game doesn’t have endless possibilities. Eve is just a bunch of people all shooting at each other and trying to scam gold (isk) off each other. You join the fight, or scratch for money, or you don’t.
It’s not some magical wonderland where the imagination runs wild. It’s a big big playground where people go to fight at lunch and afterschool or after work. That might be super fun for some people, I’m not denying that, but it’s not so friggin special we gotta pretend ‘player based content’ is something magical. Half of that ‘player based content’ is sitting on your butt doing nothing because nobody really wants to fight unless a) they think they’ll win a fight, or b) they’re so bored of sitting around doing nothing that they jump into suicide fights just to break up that boredom.
Nobody said you HAD to have multiple accounts in EVE, please show us where it's stated that without multiple accounts you can't play the game.
Your problem is that you just didn't know what to do. You need a game in which everything is linear and thought out for you. You can't make choices and, so, EVE isn't a game for you.
Mining, manufacturing, PVP, exploration, market manipulation, scamming etc. all require research by mature people who take the time and effort. EVE is an immitation of life, to a certain extent, and life isn't easy. Nobody is going to hold your hand and show you how to do your job, you are expected to learn things on your own. Clicking on an NPC, clicking on two skills, going to its corpse, looting it and moving on to the next one, are as relevant as sitting behind a desk stapling documents all day. While it may be your job and you may enjoy it it won't make you stand out. What will make you stand out is creativity and innitiative.
If you don't have those things then you can't play in a sandbox game, whether it be MMO or not.
WoW-like games is all about a bunch of immature 30 year olds showing off their epic gear they earned through endless hours of grinding just to grind more raids and dungeons. Well done to them, at least in EVE you have something to show for it: kills and victory. Pilots paint their kills on their planes, we post ours on websites for all to see.
I'm no EVE lover or hater, not my cup of tea, but good luck to it. However this does seem to sum up how utterly rubbish 2009 was for MMOs.
Ascension - EU Mature, Friendly, Laid Back SW:TOR Guild now recruiting.
To the myth that it’s easy to make money in Eve and play for free with game time cards: Lol. Eve fanboys always bring this up. /facepalm. Here’s the math you just don’t understand. Again, just mind boggling how wrong fanboys get things. If you, fanboy, can make enough isk in one day or a few hours, to pay for one month of game time, if it’s so easy, then everyone would do it, and everyone would be paying gold for game time. CCP doesn’t live on gold (isk) they want money, real life money.
Easy money in a game like Eve is a logical impossibility, because prices adjust to the value of the money, the value being how long or with what effort or talent it takes to get that money. For the befuddled fanboy: If it were easy to earn one million dollars per year irl, then the price of hamburgers will go up to like 100 dollars each. You can’t have a system where it’s both super easy to make money, AND have prices so low that everyone can get valuable products cheaply. Just absolutely retarded the way fanboys say that it’s super easy to earn gold for anything and everything at the drop of a hat, when the reality is that all but the richest players regularly have to go out and farm it up as the ‘grind’ in Eve.
To the myth that new players can do well against older players regardless, because it’s talent that matters, not the ship you’re in: Talent wins when almost all other factors are equal or near equal, and that’s almost never the case in Eve. The game doesn’t have Arenas or Battleground or Scenarios or whatever other instanced fights with even numbers dictated by the game. It’s a free for all. Older players have a HUGE advantage with regard to hps, dps, speed, experience, against newbs. A newb has no chance against an older player. What newbs are good for are blobs. Nobody wants to fight fair. Everyone blobs, brings as many buddies as possible, because numbers win. Even those people who hate blobs, end up blobbing, by necessity.
Sure, newbs can jump right into the game, but they do so as blob cannon fodder, not as glorified potential talent. Being cannon fodder can be fun, lots of fun for some people, but omg are fanboys dead wrong then they lie to themselves and lie to new players about new vs old players being even remotely in the same universe with regard to power and influence in the game as individuals.
I suspect 2010 will be even more IMBA for Eve.
If they manage to release Dust AND Incarna (walking in stations) Eve will just become the most sick mmo.
Sure, its not to everyones taste.. and even I get bored of it and leave it for a few months. But what they've done with eve, and what they plan to do makes it very deserving of this title.. and possible be awarded it a few more times to come.
Please name a game in which you become rich without doing anything. Money in EVE isn't easy but then it isn't in any other game either. At least in EVE we have a live economy, unlike other games. In fact, EVE's economy is alive to such an extent that CCP have hired an economist to review it and help them adjust things, if necessary. That's the difference between EVE and other games: money matters. In most MMO's money is meaningless, so what you have so much money, what you going to do with it, other than hoard it?
wow, you've really got an axe to grind with CCP/EvE...
Just a quick response though:
Easy Money/Prices adjust: this would indicate that the game has an economy that is constantly adjusting to market demand. What's wrong with this? It's a supply and demand economy. As long as people pay real money for PLEX there will be some supply. Otherwise, EvE gets a monthly sub fee. Either way, EvE isn't "living on isk", but hasn't this conversation been had before? As far as the overall ease of income, sure it's easy to make ISK. It's also really easy to spend it.
New Players: On day one, you might go out and get your pod handed to you. On day 14, thanks to the skill training bonuses for new players, you can be competitive in some areas. Naturally, given the mechanics of the skill system, the longer the play, the more options you have that can assist you in specific scenarios. I gather I am not saying anything new to you though. Just a different point of view as to whether we see it as a huge issue or not.
Fair fights: wrong game. I think even the most vocal fan of the game doesn't go around expecting 1-vs-1 fights. That said, any World PvP game would have this same issue. Again, this doesn't seem like news to you, but you really go to a lot of effort to make that look like a bad thing. Again, different point of view i suppose.
-mklinic
"Do something right, no one remembers.
Do something wrong, no one forgets"
-from No One Remembers by In Strict Confidence
Walking in stations is not all that big of a deal, you can do that in Earth and Beyond which is a old mmo from years ago. Eve needs a total gameplay overhaul so its not just clicking spreadsheets over and over to do everything. I want actual control of my ship like in Takiodom. Pvp be alot harder if your fighting someone that can actually try to dodge with their ship, insted of leaving it up to the dumb game engine to move your ship for you. I've played Eve and it bored me to death. There isin't really anything in the game thats fun to do, whoooo I can mine.. *yawn* the game also seems utterly pointless. The skill system is horrible and seems to be 100% based on sucking people in to keep their accounts open as a stall tactic. Perpetuum does something simmlar but it'll be free to play(with an option to sub for more bonuses) and actually has far better control than eve does even in a very early beta. A month irl to train a skill is a little much for a videogame. maybe a few days but a month is just a major stall tactic on Eve's dev teams part.
This will never make it into EVE because you need a ping of below 100 to fight in such shooters. Having a high ping is already a detriment in MMORPG's but in EVE, when you're fighting 500 people it's pointless. EVE is about working with the other 249 people in your fleet, not a game you play on your own. This is why the game is hard for people who can't make social connections.
Eve game of the year? This is a sad comment on the state of the mmo industry if you agree.
Personally, I would've picked Fallen Earth.
Why would Wizard 101 even be on this list? You can't be serious.
The Clever Legion is Recruiting! www.clever-legion.com
Fanboy nonsense about multiple accounts: “You don’t need multiple accounts, nobody is forcing you.”
Me: Correct, nobody is forcing you to have multiple accounts any more than anyone is forcing anyone in other games to have alts, but players DO, and THAT is what’s important.
To explore different aspects in the game, and people do want to explore various aspects of the game, in any other game they’d make alts, alternative characters, a bunch of characters, on ONE account.
I don’t care what the game mechanics are, the fanboy and layman just have to understand that players in Eve DO get multiple accounts, and CCP knows it, and CCP doesn’t fix the game to change that, because those multiple accounts bleeds more money out of the niche player base.
CCP brazenly advertises a hook to get you into more accounts with a promotion called ‘The Power of Two’ where they give you a price break on the first 6 months of your first multiple account, so you get hooked and just keep going with more than one.
If you’re still reading and want to go into what game mechanics might push people into getting multiple accounts…
Three character slots only, per account. Absolutely ridiculous. 3? Are you kidding me? That alone is deal breaker, and should be, for all but Eve fanboys. Even 1 week old characters can be useful, and if you have 1 main character, and two 2 week old mules or cyno alts or whatever, that leaves you no room for more. That’s just f’ing over the top, beyond bad, and it’s beyond mind boggling that Eve fanboys just bury their heads in the sand about it.
Only one character skilling up at once.
Here’s where it gets tricky for fanboys and non-Eve players alike. It’s not necessarily so easy to understand at first.
I’m sorry if I am not explaining it well but, here goes…
You ‘skill’ up by a real time clock, you don’t get experience, you get skill points, by that clock.
The skill points run slowly, that’s key also. It’s slow, so you as a customer will have to pay for a looong time, to get anywhere.
Ok, stick with me,… you could take one character and skill up abilities in all the various areas of gameplay, if you had decades to do it. You can max out all skills in all areas on one character, theoretically. But the clock runs so slowly that it’s just not the way the math works, you can’t do it all on one character in any reasonable amount of time.
Here’s another area where fanboys fail at math. They lie to themselves and other people about how long it takes to train various career paths, even though they daily stare right at the numbers. All you have to do is get out Evemon, an Eve mod, and make a bunch of skill plans, to see that it takes a looong time, to go down particular career paths.
So… it takes a long time to go down a career path, and you can only ‘skill up’ one character per account at a time, so if you want to follow a few different career paths without waiting half a decade, then ya, you get multiple accounts so that multiple characters are skilling up simultaneously.
It takes multiple accounts in Eve to simulate what people in other games do by making alts.
That’s not all…
Other game mechanics push you to have multiple accounts.
Faction warfare. Piracy. 0.0 end game coalition warfare. Rating. Mission running in Empire. Industry. People don’t just bounce between those and other activities on one character. People either buy a character, or skill others up on other accounts.
Your 0.0 Alliance has a call to arms for defending a POS. You gonna say you’re busy, you just wanna quit and play Faction Warfare for a day or two? NO.
You wanna help out as a member of Eve University to teach new players. Can you just hop over to faction warfare, or piracy, or 0.0 end game? NO, you have to stay ‘neutral’, sort of, so the Uni doesn’t become a target for everyone with a grudge. The Uni doesn’t allow any of those other activities while you’re a member.
You’re a pirate in low sec, but your carebear buddies from real life are running missions in high-sec, can you join them? Heck no, your sec status is too low from blowing up ‘innocents’.
Talk about restrictions.
It all makes complete sense in Eve when you play it, but it all also adds up to multiple accounts.
Player based content in the ‘sandbox’ is NOT do as you like without limits, absolutely not. Characters in Eve have very strict limitations on where they can go and what they can do based on their sec status, their reputations, their history with various political coalitions, their skill/wallet profile.
Hey DavidLemke, please show us on this very lifelike doll, where CCP has touched you.
You don't like EvE Online? That's fine.
Now go away troll.
EDIT: I'm a gamer by heart, and I try out and play tons of MMOs for the last 10 years, and there's simply no other MMO outthere, that is even remotely a competition for EvE Online atm.
So the complaint is that the game's "leveling" mechanics promote specialization? In an online game, how is this bad? This creates an interdependence between players. Might be part of the reason EvE won best community too
. I can go to another game and make dozens of alts and, should I be a total ass on one of them, just delete it and make a new one without any worry. In EvE, there is some investment in my character and I am encouraged to maintain a reputation that suits my play style.
It might just be a preference thing, but I see no issue with a game that encourages you to think about your actions.
-mklinic
"Do something right, no one remembers.
Do something wrong, no one forgets"
-from No One Remembers by In Strict Confidence
RMT
Eve certainly has RMT and that is from account transferring. It costs 20 euro/transfer and a quick look at the transfer forum one can see that this is a significant income for CCP.
Also conclusion that CCP does not make money from GTC is flawed. ISK is hard to get in game so alot of people buy GTC, from CCP, and sell it for ISK. So CCP certainly earns money for this as well. One could argue that those people that buys the GTC, for ISK, would have instead paid the subscription themselves but that is in no way certain. I know alot of people who have several accounts, some of which are paid by GTC bought by ISK and there is no telling if those accounts would still be active if they could not support them by buying GTC for ISK.
Real Time Skill training
One side of the coin is that you dont need to be online to advance your character so you save time in that regard. The other side of the coin is that it takes atleast a year of training to get to the high end ships/modules. A year, sitting on your ass and grinding ISK just waiting fly the best ships is not a good thing for most. Most people want to advance their characters, not sit offline and wait for it to advance.
Then add capital ships into the equation and you have several RL YEARS to get into one. And that is where this game passes from being a game to becoming a project, spanning over several years.
Multiple Accounts
Eve is probably the game that needs several accounts most. The reason lies within the skill advancement where you can only have ONE character per account that can be advancing his skills. That means that if you want to have several characters with different focus areas, like logistics, mining, production, research, combat etc you need to either train them sequentelly (which means you have to spend years to have characters that can do all those) or have multiple accounts. In other games this is not as big of an issue since leveling is something that you self actively affect and is much faster than in Eve. In most MMORPGs you can max a class in a couple of months, which means that within a year you can have maxes out characters from most classes. Not so in Eve.
To make matters worse Eve is designed in a way that combat does not earn you much money. Running level 4 missions or ratting in 0.0 space, which is what is available for the majority of combat pilots, earns you maybe 20-30 million ISK per hour. And considering that death in one high end ship (such as BS or T2 command ship or even worse, T3 ship) costs anywhere from 100 million to 500 million (depending on ship and fitting) one can quickly deduce that PvE combat is not a worthwhile way to sustain your PvP fun.
So that means you need another character that is doing high end research/invention/production to support your PvP character or you need to use the RMT and buy ISK through GTCs.
So Eve, even though is probably the best games for hardcore gamers who has either alot of money or alot of cash, is certainly not for the casual gamer and definetely not for a PvE player as its focus is hardcore PvP.
Therefore the game should get 2009 Hardcore PvP game of the year but certainly not PvE or casual MMORPG of the year. WoW, WAR, LoTR or Aion is much more suitable for those types of gamers.
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David you have explained you view quite well. I basically agree with you but i still appretiate the game.
Are you going to derisively call me a fanboy so that you can feel superior instead of considering or allowing that not everyone wants the same thing as you?
Part of what I like about EVE is the harsh penalties and the single server structure. You say that not being able to create multiple useful alts without having to pick up an extra account is a deal breaker for you. For this, I am glad.
The meta game of alts in a persistent universe like this should be discouraged. If you want to make a high sec suicide ganker then you will need to carefully work out when the sec status/vs/training time + implants to get it to function. The Game needs penalties so that there is a consequence to your actions.
If you could create an infinite amount of cyno alts deployment/movement of caps would be much more trivial.
These kind of limitations require you to think more strategically about what you do with your character slots. It is this kind of game that I enjoy.
Now i don't think CCP is beyond criticism and you have raised some good points. At the moment, the dominion expansion has taken fleet fights back a few years with respect to lag. I am not sure i like the sov mechanics yet but have had some interesting and good fights anyway. Bouncing a snipe BS fleet from between the territorial claim unit that needs to be knocked into reinforced to the gates to protect the system blockade units was a lot more dynamic that the POS spam/POS bash mechanic. Although, there is a lot to be improved on.
You criticism regarding faction standings in faction warfare for example. I dabbled a bit but almost immediately found the faction hits to be a deal breaker for me. I will not take part in that aspect of the game until the there is some mechanism to recover standings with a faction. I don't want such a recovery to be easy, but at the moment is completely irreversible once you get beyond a certain point. That is too much of a disincentive to take part.For readily available PvP you are better off joining red vs blue. At the last fanfest, in the round table for faction warfare it was clear that the developers are aware of this problem and are are on the lookout for a good solution, it was also clear that a solution had not yet presented itself.
You may see this as incomplete, poor development or exploiting people for their subscriptions. The way I see it is that the developer are developing their game, a sandbox game that will always be incomplete, always have a new challenge and a new solution where the player can take part in the creation not just consume. An imperfect world for imperfect people to struggle in.
at DavidLemke
im gonna respond anyhow, but i just realized you are a troll. you come here and post baits for fanbois to bite on and post in anger. how i know this? well what you say in your posts is simply not true.
admittedly this might be because you tried the game, didn't get the mechanics, got aggravated and left the game. still what you say, simply is not true.
why are you obsessed in the standard MMO thinking? it doesn't take years to mature a character. you cant train all the skills. there is no end to get to. it is a sandbox. i am not sure you get this term. means CCP only provides the sand and the tools, we, the players, create the actual game. so there is no end game, and it does not take years to mature a character.
again, read what others have posted before you post. its not about twitch based mechanics, and its not about fighter pilots flying small agile ships. its about huge 20 kilometers long behemoths. you cant really fly those with a joystick now can you? no, those are more about direction, speed, orbits, electronic warfare, shielding, armor, energy and a shitload of other stuff that eve combat has.so you can only train one character at a time? can you lvl more then one character at a time in wow?
of course you can bounce between different things and you dont have to do any changes at all to you character? where did you get that? thats just stupid. the only reasoning i can see is if you are e pirate and you become an outlaw, then it takes some time to get your standings back. but i fought in 0.0 for a long time, then i got bored and left for factional-warfare, then i became a wormhole pirate, now i am in rvb. might go back to fac war, or 0.0 when i get bored of this. and i didnt have to do any changes to my character. i just decided, and left.
i had two accounts at one time, but didn't see the point so i didn't resubscribe on my alt. playing with corp members is a lot more fun.
again, ship sizes in eve: http://go-dl1.eve-files.com/media/corp/SFC/EVE-ships_large.jpg
some of those are over 20km in size. you don't fly those with a joystick. not that kind of game. i admit some poeple want fast paced fighters with joystick, but eve is not that. its about huge ships, with whole cities and crews on them. and some people like that. it doesent mean its as you say "CCP and the game Eve, are, objectively, or as close as a person can come to objectivity, deeply flawed". or "Thats awkward, cumbersome, frustrating, user UN-friendly movement."
i see you dont understand how the system works. there are people with loads of money ingame, and there are people with loads of money out of game. what CCP allows is to sell game time codes for isk (ingame currency). how this works is that a player with a lot of money out of game, does not have the time to grinds isk in game. so he buys a GTC and puts on the eve market for x isk. somebody with loads of money ingame decides to buy that gtc as x isk means nothing to him.might be for you, but then again that is not objective. its just not a fighter pilot game. and some of us like that.
in that way he added a gtc to his account and expanded his playing time. while the dude who bought the gtc got isk, which is what was after, as the 15$ for the gtc mean nothing to him (since he is, as we said, reach in real life). demand and supply options still play, if there are a lot of people buying GTCs and selling them on the eve market the price for one drops, and they become cheap and easy to buy. if there arent enough people selling them, and there are a lot of people trying to buy them in game with isk, then the demand goes up and the prices rise.
this way no new money is put into the game. CCP does not sell isk for real cash as someone put it. players trade for it, and no new isk is put into the game, and there is no inflation because of it.
as for how hard it is to make money? to be able to buy GTCs? well some people make a lot of money in RL and have no interest in sitting behind a screen grinding isk. they go and buy a gtc and sell it on the market. that is why there will always be a supply of GTCs, unlike what you said, that if it really were easy, everyone would do it.
on the other hand we have people who don't mind grinding isk for 5 hours (which is how much it would take for one GTC if you have no talent at all and just do the most basic thing you can).
but again, you are stuck not understanding what eve is. those 300.000 subscriptions are on one world. the record was broken a few days ago where there were more then 56000 accounts logged in. have you got any idea what kind of economy runs behind all of this? jita, which is a central trade hub, has houndreds of people in it at an give time. and they trade. there is so much trading going on that the server handling jita had to be reinforced. i have a friend who started playing years after me, and its mind boggling to me how much money he has. he wouldn't even consider paying RL money for a subscription cause GTCs are so cheap. and what he does is trade. he just sits in a station all day and buys and sells stuff. but there is so much trading going on he makes tons and tons of money. i tried it and couldn't do it. i am just not the trading type. to me GTCs are expensive, and no way in hell am i gonna grind for 5 hours to buy one. id much rather pay the normal subscription. but some would.
then there are people inventing stuff, doing reaction towers, moving stuff in freighters between regions and so on and so on. but if you dont want to do any of this "complicated stuff", but just do the regular lvl 4 missions (admitedly it can take a month or two to get to them). you can grind them for 5 hours and make enough to buy 1 month.
if you are smarter, and can do trading or reacting or inventing or manufacture or whatever, then its even easier.
but even now, when the prices of GTCs are so low, there are still people selling them, cause some people have enough RL money to do it. and no matter how easy it gets, they wont be caught grinding in game. so you are the one who fails to understand basic math, as you put it, and the complexity of the eve economy.
lets see, what else...
ahh, newbs being useless!?
a long time ago there was an elite mercenary force in eve. it only accepted pilots with a lot of skill-points and they only flew t2 ships with t2 fittings. those ships were worth more then 200mil a piece, 300 easily.
that's just it. its for players who don't want instanced fights. instanced fights suck. we want world pvp. sure, an occasional tournament with rules is fun, but no instancing bullshit. when you die, the instance doesn't end, and its just as it was before. you lost stuff. and that's what gives meaning to it. that's why you get adrenalin while pvping in eve, stuff is on the line!they were hired to fight a bunch of newbs in syndicate. turns out newbs had some good leaders who knew how to play. they had little to no skill-points and flew cruisers worth 10 mil a pop. and the mercenary corp would come down with 10 ships and attack 30 newbs, 1 to 3 ods, and kill all of them while only loosing three. thing is eve is all bout attrition wars, so they still lost. all those 30 ships barely came to what one of those three was worth. so newbs can do a lot against older players. specially now when big ships cant hit small fast moving frigates, and a pack of newb frigates can take down a battleship with ease. just look at fac war.
and why in gods name would talent win when almost all factors are equal or near equal? ive seen rifters take down interceptors. thats t1 low skill intensive ships kill t2 high skill intensive ships. cause the dude in the rifter was good. there are idiots who buy accounts and the bithc on the forums, why his huge slow moving battleship with its huge slow moving cannons cant hit a small fast moving frigate. and why a couple of those frigates in a pack can take him down. well you might have a lot of skillpoints, but if you don't know how to play it doesn't help. now if a newb doesn't kill a vet, well that is to be expected. they can be completely equal, but the vet has experience and therefore wins. its like that in every game. it should be like that. but the newb learns and defeats the vet. and this is most possible in eve, where you can get a good idea and pewn.
like remote repping. people used to fit their ships with shield or armor repairers to repair their shields or armor. thing is in a fleet fight with 200 people shooting at you one repairer isn't going to do much. then somebody got the idea of remote rep. and believe it or not it was conceived in a newb alliance and ridiculed at the beginning, it is now a norm. he said, why don't we put remote repairer (a module to repair a friend instead of yourself), on every ship and stop putting on normal repairers to repair ourselves. so when 200 people start shooting at you in a fleet fight, 200 fleet-mates start repairing you.
conceived by a newb, who was not afraid to think differently. so its the ideas and the talent that counts in eve. like the sniper tactics, or the nano fleets, back in the day.
sounds to me like you were in a 0.0 campaign and got blobbed by a bigger powerblock and killed. well try fac war, or rvb, or piracy. theres lots of small scale fights in eve if you want.
but don't expect a ride. its a sandbox!
So mister Davidlemke... Where do I fit in in your grand scheme...
I have one character that I play... for going on 5 years. Sure I have 2 more accounts but the play time on them is 99% done by friends who play using them to try out some later things. I keep those 2 out for demoing the game.
Now my main has jumped between several different professions (Nicoli Voldkif) and its always been far faster for me to train into a new profession with my main then to run up a second account. I don't need the other accounts and frankly shortly they may be going inactive due to RL concerns. Funny thing about EVE is that you don't need the required alts on an account like pretty much every other MMO. I'm not limited by my class. I don't have to re-roll another character from lvl 1 just so I can try out healing instead of being a tank. I just train a skill or two and I'm already there. Where as you have to start from scratch, in EVE you can cross train and start at what would be equivlant to 75-80% of your level cap.
No there isn't much my main can't do... and since you are so knowledgable about EVE feel free to crack down on that character sheet and explain to me what I can't do. I can tell you I can't fly titans(60days out), Jump Freighters (1hour out need to buy the skill), Can't fly a rorqual ( again just need the skill). And I'm not decades old, Try 5 years. Be honest I haven't done half of what my character can do because I either haven't had the desire to really get into it or just plain haven't had the time. Neither of those problems would be solved by changing the way the games training progresses. In fact if it went to the standard fair as other MMOs I'd probably be lucky to hit level cap yet(I tend to switch back and forth between different character in those games).
0.0, Factional warfare, piracy... be honest none of those have ever forced me to have an alt. 0.0 I had jump clones. Factional warfare I had an alt on the same account(no reason to have multi-million SP characters in FW for just messing arround). Piracy I just watched my sec status and Recovered it by running missions with my friends in high sec when ever it go too low. Amazingly piracy with out podding and diving more into 0.0 you don't lose that much sec status. Like most of EVE planning and knowledge allows you to do so much. Even with EVE-Uni you can teach on an alt, since the main part of teaching is knowing how it works not nessicarily being able to do it. Just because on say a new account I have I can't fly a Nighthawk, doesn't mean I can't teach some one how to fit and fly it. The knowledge is still there. So if I wanted to teach in EVE-Uni, just make a quick alt spend a month giving him some decient skills to go out with some people and thats all you need. Same for Factional warfare or even piracy.
Trying not be dead insulting DavidLemke, but your looking at EVE from the typical shallow view that people have been trained to look at MMOs now. EVE rewards a little thinking with significantly less isk, Real Cash, and real time investment. However as you have successfully pointed out it specfically cost players more isk, real cash, and time investment if you don't want to put any thought into it.
I can fly pretty much all the Pretties for PVP... no titan yet, but that is more for personal reasons. Losses from pvp are not supposed to be sustainable easily. Its so that you can actually win a war through attrition. If expensive things could be replaced easily then that would mean ships should end up respawning with you when you die. Now that said I have used a single account for pretty much everything I do and have been able to finace all the PVP I have done. Going out in a Massive fleet where alpha strike deaths are going to be prevelant I don't bring my billion isk+ maruader I bring my selective T2/Rigged Rohk that I have about 10 of sitting in station. Its the common EVE mantra " Fly what you can afford to lose". I also like to add "that is appropriate to the job at hand."
I've always been very calculating about what I fly and what is on it and with the exception of a few stupid moments on my part. never had a issue with cash or ships. I have never been short of fighting when I want it either.