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The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: EVE Online
DarkLugia459
Member Posts: 8
OK, let's face it. EVERY game has its ups and downs. Post them here. Here's my list.
The Good:
--Intuitive Training System: I mean, come on. If you're going away for a 2 week vacation, you aren't screwed, unlike games like WoW and EQ2. Start training a new skill, probably one that will take you about 2 or 3 weeks. It's quite freeing to know that even if you're not playing, you're still accomplishing SOMETHING.
--Player Based Economy: Buying things from other players makes you feel more like a community. WoW has this in its intuitive Auction House system, and EVE is basically like a giant auction house. Well, not really, but you get the picture. Escrow is there if you feel like it, official market, taxes, corporation taxes, etc.
--Team Based Gameplay: Yes, I know you can solo if you want, but EVE isn't quite EVE if you're not part of a close knit corporation. Playing solo, yes, there are no goals. Playing in a corp, a good corp, you'll have goals. You'll set them yourself. Get into deep space (contested territory), raid this complex (run an instance), clear out the pirates from this area.
--PVP System: WoW is a much more "global" scale. Two factions, join one or the other. Fight and die. In EVE, it's not that simple. You can be a solo bounty hunter; find players with bounties and kill them. You can join mass battles; get in corporation wars. In EVE, you have WoW on a miniature scale, every day.
--Settlement: Although recently added with the expansion pack 'Exodus,' it's possible to create "starbases." In essence, you can create small villages for you and your friends. Be wary though; your enemies might attack, and who knows what would happen then? As I said, WoW on a miniature scale.
--"Political System": OK, so no game has real good politics, but really, can you BACKSTAB in WoW? No, I don't mean the rogue's skill...I mean other PLAYERS. Can you gain their utmost trust, and then betray them? Not really. Can you play two, three, or four different sides of a war? No, not if you can't even understand half of the other players.
--One Server: Which of the 30+ servers are your WoW friends playing on? Don't like the server they're on? EVE's only got one server. Join & know that your friends are on the same server.
--"Evolving Storyline": Yes, EVE doesn't really have an overarching goal in mind. It's not Alliance VS. Horde, but the small things evolve on a daily basis. If you immerse youself in it, you got yourself one hell of a storyline.
--Unlocked Characters: WoW does indeed suffer from "character" syndrome. You pick a race and a class, and boom, that's it. Hit the game. In EVE, your race doesn't really matter other than story purposes. Don't like the ships you're supposed to start with? Train some new ones.
--Information Accessibility & Grinding: All you WoW-ers know about Thottbot, right? EVE's got it built right in. Detailed agent mission information on all your quests, accessible in game. Check the auction house during your long travel times, or while mining. Yes, things take a long time, but at least you can be checking or looking at information on almost anything.
The Bad:
--"Long Travel Time": Yetch. However, I have two things to say about this. One; in WoW, it's not much better. Two; you can go AFK for as long as your jump takes. Start up EVE, minimize it, and then go do your homework. You'll be at your destination right when you finish up your algebra problem, and you can go kill pirates or mine. If you're travelling through secure space, especially higher space from faction center to faction center, the journey could be a safe 30 minutes. In insecure space, you might want to watch your ship, as player pirates and NPC pirates begin to patrol the gates.
--Mining Syndrome: Yes, the best way to make money in the game is the most boring. Sad really, but I guess there are some downsides to the mining itself. If you dedicate yourself to mining, then that means you can't kill anybody. But then again, maybe "grinding," pun intended, is what you like to do.
--Lack of Overarching Story: OK. I admit. Alliance VS. Horde gives WoW some direction. Hell with that, a LOT of direction. PvP is very straightforward in WoW; kill the other guys. EVE doesn't have that overarching conflict that makes MMORPGs fun.
--Large Learning Curve: Large doesn't do this learning curve any freaking justice. EVE is a complex world; so complex that most people look around and wonder, "Oh my god...what is all this?!" Give the game a chance if you feel so desired; WoW is, at its base, a simpler game that grows more complex while easing you into it. EVE throws it all at you in the beginning.
--Grief Play: Death sucks in EVE. Avoiding it is one of the highest priorities, and some players take great effort to do everything they can to make your life a living hell, for...well, no reason at all. It sucks, but it's something that happens in every kind of game.
--Don't Solo: Soloing once in a while is good. In EVE, soloing is bad news. You need to join a group. Fast. It's not that hard to find a group of friends that you like, especially since you see all the same people all the time in the same channels as your starting corp. Knotting off into your own special group of friends is actually quite easy, and it makes the world of EVE somewhat more fun to play as in a group.
The Ugly:
--Exodus has recently been released. With the release of any new expansion comes bugs. Lots of them. EVE is constantly changing, as is any MMORPG. The developers are constantly changing the game mechanics so that the games are meant to be played like they are. Fleet battles will last more than a minute, ships will last longer, but these changes can throw gameplay into your favor, or against it. Something that players need to live with. This isn't unique to EVE; WoW is indeed in need of some patching.
Best sites to go to to get more information on EVE-Online:
http://www.eve-online.com
http://www.eve-i.com (Database Section)
http://www.eveguardian.net (Player News)
Updated 1/1/2005
Comments
Nice list. I somewhat agree with plusses, one server, the skill system, economy and the beautiful, complete lack of XP grinding and leveling really makes EVE *the* game for me.
Just some comments about the bad sides.
Yuh, travelling can be a pain indeed at times. You don't need to hold onto your mouse when travelling (unless you're travelling the fast way, through insecure space,..) but it's still time. Then again, I don't think the EVE world would really feel the way it does if you could teleport from the other end of the galaxy to the other in seconds.
Easiest, not necessarily the best. More profitable and faster means of making money exist for both solo and team effort, they just require more imagination and knowledge. I haven't mined either for a good while, but I still consider mining for cash in EVE more fun than xp grinding in any other game. In every other game the xp grind is a superficial means of keeping the players in the game. In EVE mining is just one way of making money.
The fact that quite a few people consider mining a forced grind of course should be a pointer to CCP to make it easier for the new players to find other means of making cash in EVE. It's not good for anyone that players think they have to do something they don't like in the game.
True. Then again I don't such a simple überconflict would really fit into EVE very well. Such conflicts just aren't realistic, nor interesting for long. They don't lead anywhere, you can't achieve anything in the long run since the conflict must always remain.
In EVE all the good conflicts are player generated, as you mention. Just the fact that those conflicts happen for good reasons in the game, and will end in a way that is completely and only dependant on player effort makes me want to send flowers to CCP designers. This isn't a lack. This is where all the games should be. Alliance vs. Horde is a bit like Counterstrike teams - you need a clear enemy to have fast fun and you can have that fun. But it's not stuff for a good, persistant, consistant and mutable game.
Griefing? I very rarely see actual griefing in EVE. I do see player ships shot down, pirates camping and corps doing raids against other corps. It's not griefing. It's integral to the setting, it's means of making money, the EVE world would be a dull place without it.
Do note the difference. For me Lineage 2 for instance is a game where PvP is only designed to let griefers, PKers and noob killers to have fun and other players lose. In EVE if a player kills me, there's usually a good reason. Very, very rarely the reason is "because I can" but I'll take that any day to EQII artificial non-pvp environment or to AO "pvp only happens in these small fenced areas for no good reason whatsoever". I like the fact that if some fucker goes and shoots down my friend for whatever reason, I can go and hunt the fucker down.
I've seem my share of little, annoying bugs in EVE and don't agree with all the design changes that have been made.
Then again, I've never seen a game where the devs would so openly explain and discuss the changes planned and being made. The dev blog is just fabulous and the devs work the forums pretty nicely. Also, I haven't seen even a tenth of the amount of nerfs and wild balance changes I saw when I was playing AO, for instance.
I don't quite intend to sound like a fanboi here, but after a small break and coming back for Exodus, with small bugs or not, the new expansions is a really, really well-made one. I can easily imagine the results had any other company try and add so much new content and especially new game mechanics into their game in one go. It would've been a disaster. CCP instead is fixing only pretty minor bugs atm.
How long is the grind for newbies?
Like if I need to mine for 15 hours to buy something (& be usefull to a corporation) / How much "leeching" off a corporation is necessary?
Travel, how long is "just go afk" & how dangerous is contested space/zones (with & without corporation).
Was following EVE a little when it was in beta ,but my connection/ISP was messed up so I couldnt play. Is there still a problem with getting nuked by missiles worth ten times more than your ship?
)
(Some has been mentioned but I need a couple more oppinions
[Edit: Need some good info/newbie sites, google goes only on words not quality]
grind for a newbie is not that bad. I started playing the game, and never mined. Did npc hunting and agent running.
Within 2 weeks i was in a cruiser and in an alliance corp. The only time i mined was to get the money to get into a battleship, which was in 0.0 space and took about a week. The key in this game is to join the right corp, money making is easy
Best sites to go to to get more information on EVE-Online:
http://www.eve-online.com
http://www.eve-i.com (Database Section)
http://www.eveguardian.net (Player News)
I found the grind tolerable as a new player. I read a book while mining, that's probably why. However, now with the new market that's accessible in-game, you can basically watch the stock market as you play.
I'm going to update my list up there. Here's another good thing; build in Thottbot. For non WoW-ers, Thottbot is like a full online database for all items, quests, agent missions, marketplaces, ingame trading, etc. Oh waith, did I accidently mix WoW and EVE terms in there? Maybe because Thottbot & the ingame EVE system are that similar.
The longer you play this game the more you relise that there r 100s of ways of pulling in the isk... I personaly have saved enough isk to buy and sell battleships... I make a very nice profit, and dont have to mine, or do any work for that matter.
see u in eve
Please tell me that u are joking......define big conflicts.....or did u meant npc hunting?
Players fight in fleet battles for that great feeling of being together and working together, but every1 who has been in a fleet battle has that bad taste of not knowing for sure what was the thing that brought victory : good tactics and quality of the pvp-ers involved or outlagging the enemy.
The most wonderfull thing in any mmorpg is fighting in an epic battle together with hundreds of players, but when lag is so bad that u need 2 mins to activate ur weapons, when u can't actualy use any tactic beside calling target and silently wait for the server to respond to ur commands of opening fire and when u have to wait 15mins to tell if u have inflicted bigger losses to the enemy or was the other way arround, then u will realise that nothing was changed with Exodus.
it's hit and miss..
In the last 2 weeks I've been in 3 major battles- first 1 involving 100+ vs 100+ and another 2 that were 57 vs 150+.
In one of the first battles- the lag was fine, and it was great fight.
In one of the latter ones- it was horrible because drones were used.
In every battle, the node, or server died shortly afterwards, or the lag got so bad that one side had to log off.
I think I agree- that lag is generally better in major battles than it was in castor.
Keep in mind, it's not all golden.
To reduce lag, you've gotta do all kinds of crazy stuff to your client.
The biggest current problems are module lag and missiles.
In big battles, you can line up with a planet and warp, and finally warp 2-4 minutes later.
You can see yourself being targetted (know you're lagged) and kick in the armour repairer, only to see the armor repairer finally kick in when you're half way through hull
It's like fighting via snail mail. You're dead- you just dont know it yet because it's still in the mail.
They are the least fun parts of eve, but consider for a fact, that they have 12,000 people playing at the same time. It is quite extroadinary considering the fact that with each expansion- more data is being sent and shared between clients than ever before.
I think they've done a good job- and I hope they keep working on it.
THE BUMP BUG MUST BE FIXED ASAP!
We've had to find all kinds of insane work arounds to avoid this happening- and even with these it still happens.
The bump bug - is where one ship collides with another- it causes a "bounce" where the other ship is thrown into space.
The furthest I've bounced was in a Typhoon battleship, I hit a stargate at full speed- bounced into a planet then bounced 18.1 AU into space.
It's an interesting way to make a safe spot
Monkiboy
Supremacy
I was trying it again until about 5 minutes ago. First time I tried, I focused on mining and just found it boring. I reconsidered and came back to try the combat a little more and see if that would hook me. I just lost my second ship in a week ( one rifter, one destroyer) to lagging as pirates blasted through my ship as I waited for it to come back.
I was enjoying the combat a lot more but if the game itself is going to stop me from enjoying it then why should I bother. I expect more from a game thats been out 6 months let alone as long as Eve has been out.
Postives: Community, Community, offline training although I think they should allow people to set up a string of trains as this would help new players out more, market system is top notch, graphics
Negatives: You can find yourself very bored doing the necessary tasks to earn isk and of course the aforementioned performace issue was what ultimately has prompted me to just give up on this game.
Well, my question to you is the following
1. What computer do you have
2. What Internet Connection do you have?
3. How well are your TCP/IP Protocols tuned?
I just got a 0.5Mbit line and a kinda crapy computer but it still dont lagg. Iv been playing the game for over a year and i still love the game
Couldn't said it any better myself, but this part where i must consider the number of players involved at the same time in eve doesn't relly aply to me....Do u consider that playing with 12k players is a favour ccp is doing u?.....I sure don't ..... if they can't handle the stress of 12k players then it's better to stop thinking only at their wallets and actualy do something for the game....
When u go in fleet battles u HAVE to change ur client (changing overwiev settings so that u can see only bad standings and war standings, putting ur graphics to minimum playable settings, turning off the sound in eve, and the list can go on..) to a point that u start asking urself what exactely is the pleasure in fighting those battles.
On a second note...did u ever noticed that these days movies are hard to find?...One reason is that u don't have anything more to show...besides 30 vs 1 ganks and fleet battles; but fraps with fleet battles are next to impossible to make and will only show a verry laggy battle from wich even old pvp-ers can't understand a thing.
It's a normal thing to expect from a patch to improve the quality of the game -and Exodus did that (i can tolerate 20 more ships now in battle) - but for a game wich is driven towards big conflicts i can only express my sadness about not been able to enjoy those large engagements.
Q1). just out of curiosity is there any game out there that would not have lag with that many objects?
Q2). why knowing that every single time that many people get into combat would a gang leader order an attack knowing that the result is purely a lag fest. in eve time is the be all abd end of strategy, a blockading fleet will only last as long as it can sustain its numbers, which in my experience is never a long period of time, 4-6 hours tops. even if this is done day after day it leaves loads of time to move your needed people, ships, goods etc.. through. During the rest of the time the blockade will be smaller and allow for regualr sized lag fests to occur .. 15v20 or what have you. i know that not kicking the enemies ass can be an assult to one's ego, but i would pick leaving my enemy to rule the choke point for a few hours rather than risk my fleet in a battle i know i have no control over, and is so frustrating that i could permanently lose pilots due to negative outcomes.
The problem here is.. fleets get bigger over time- not smaller.
Which is odd- considering some of the fleets I've been in- that from the time the fleet formed to the time the battle started people actually left the group and logged off due to RL stuff eg. sleep, work etc.
Only 1 commander I know of ever downsized his fleet and that was Duke Droklar, and he did it because he knew the enemy would run away if he threw his full fleet at them- but that was at a time when the element of surprise was possible (dual microwarpdrived ravens). This isnt the case now.
Commanders need all the numbers they can get because the enemy is amassing multiple alliances against 4-5 corporations for the purposes of extermination.
It's not about playing nice anymore and having fun. It's survival.
I remember fondly flying against SA, they always gave a good fight and there was no need for smacktalk- I'm sure both sides have their odd dickhead that just needs to smack but generally it was very good high quality fun. Now, I look at SA as being more like friends than adversaries because as fighters I respect them so much more compared to the rest of the galaxy.
I've mailed CCP notifying them about the battles happening in syndicate and appealed to them to increase server bandwidth, be it network or CPU to the node in the hope that it can handle 100+ vs 100+ better over the next couple of months.
Monkiboy
Supremacy
Eve has some problems conceptually, such as the rampant warpgate camping.
But the REAL problems are not conceptual, they are technical. Even just going through a warpgate takes a few seconds, killing NPC's with 1 other person was somewhat laggy for both of us. My missiles were showing up a few feet away from where I was launching them. Fleet battle lag is horrendous.
Maybe its different for the European players closer to the server, but from here on the East Coast, I have roadrunner cable and the lag is just horrible. There's lag and waiting to EVERYTHING.
You have to wait 10 or 15 seconds just to undock. You have to wait minutes/hours to travel. You lag a few seconds at each warpgate. You lag while docking. You lag while fighting.
If I had to describe Eve in one word, that word would be "Wait."
Wait for everything. Wait for skills. Wait for the enemy. Wait for your shield booster to kick in. Wait to travel 20 jumps. Just wait. Anything you do, the first thing you do is wait.
Okay look, I understand it's not Doom 3, there is some maturity involved, but there comes a point where even the Pope would fall asleep at the computer chair. I've actually had corpmates fall asleep while playing.
I'm a gamer. I love games. I play to PLAY. I want ACTION. Fast fast fast fast move move move move shoot shoot shoot. Not just sit there and sip coffee and wait for something to happen. Basically the design philosophy of Eve is, they took everything that was bad in Everquest (camping and waiting) and concentrated it all into a space game.
I recall someone saying his wife listened to Enya while playing Eve and thinking "well I hope she has a bed next to her computer for when she passes out."
I remember people from BNC claiming to have passed out from "being drunk" but now I realize they probably just fell asleep.
You know...now that I think about it...moo broke up right around the time WoW came out LOL
EVE is designed as an "open ended" game. Basically (and I think this goes for alot of MMORPGs) the game is what you make of it. It is definitly not for everyone, but I mean, if you want action, is FFXI the place to look? There are a host of new features being released this year - new ship types, atmosphereic flight, etc. EVE is really the smart person's game - What the hell is the point of just constantly killing things? EVE is a game where you BUILD a character, a fleet, an empire even. It takes patients, so for gamers who want instant gratification, the fruits of eve may seem far off.
On the other hand, EVE has plenty to do, yes travel times can be tedius, but playing FFXI or WoW I'd argue its comparible, the only difference being you have autopilot to take care of it for you.
This game is DEFINITELY not for everyone, and I think a certain type of player will appreciate this game for everything it has to offer.
EVE - the smart man's game.
Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day - set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Alll MMORPGS I have every played (Everquest, Ashrons Call, Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft) all have the same lag issues with big battles. With the type of graphics we whine for there is just not a company willing to spend the money for the servers and bandwidtch required for mass battles.
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Bazaab
I'd like to note that playing EVE with two monitors is absolutely awesome. For example, I'm writing this post right now with EVE in the other window. I'd be playing it except I'm travelling halfway across the galaxy, so in the meantime I can browse the internet and do pretty much whatever I want. I actually had the trial account for 2 weeks and just bought my membership yesterday. It's definitely worth it for me.
FYI - you don't even need 2 monitors.... You can play Eve in a window so that you can be doing other stuff at the same time as playing the game. I usually play in 1280 x 1024 full screen but when on a long trip or mining or whatever I change to a 1024 x 768 window and just leave it running in the back ground. Whilst this doesn't pertain to gameplay it's an excellent feature when you want to check something or kill so time when on auto pilot.