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EVE = repetitive grind.
Souldrainer
Member Posts: 1,857
It seems to me that no one else has actually picked up on this. I played Eve for about a month, after whiche time, I realized I was grinding. I wasn't grinding for exp's or items. I was grinding for ISK (money) so I could upgrade things. There are dozens of ways to gain ISK's in Eve, but the bottom line is that missions are the fastest way. Not only that, but no matter which method you choose, each task gets very repetitive as you grind for money.
Skill advancement is a joke. Why does it take a month to train some skills? Umm, because the developers said so, that's why. This is an arbitrary system which boils down to nothing more than a poorly masked time sink. Bounty hunting is encouraged, but is not a plausible profession. PVP comes down to who has the most and best ships, which hearkens back to the ISK grind. Skill based game? Not hardly. It's just as much of a grind as WoW or Everquest, if not more.
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Disclaimer: I played Eve for about 1 1/2 years, but don't anymore. Left after I started to get bored of it and realized I didn't have the time anymore to be successful in the game the way I wanted.
To your post now...money a grind? Definitely. Money is the most important factor of the game, and is a hell of a grind for most people, as it comes down to doing endless missions or mining. Some lucky pirates or PvPers can sustain themselves on loot or ransom, but that's rare.
To your point about combat, oh so wrong. The best ship does not equal a win in a fight. Two players with two 7 million ISK cruisers can easily take down a 25 million ISK Battlecruiser. A small group of Assault Frigates or Interceptors can take down a Battleship, which would be many times their price after insurance, mods, etc.
Whether or not you realized it in your short time with Eve (and you apparent didn't), combat is all about skill. You can be flying a Battleship, but if you don't know how to use it, or fit it well, then you'll get destroyed by people in smaller ships, easily, if they know how to fight you and you don't know what to do. It's about knowing how to act and react, and knowing what your ship can and can't do.
The entire game though certainly does relate back to the ISK grind...Eve is a game thats not based on loot, which means almost everything is player made and bought from players for players. That's how a player economy works, it's all about money. Most games are, Eve just moreso because you can't go out and kill Generic Mob XXX for 3 hours to get Uber Piece of Damage +1.
The ISK grind in EVE is horrible, especially if you don't want to be a miner. Staring at rocks for hours and hours while mining didn't appeal to me at all, so I decided to run missions for ISK. Then I realized that traveling sometimes up to 30 minutes for a mission didn't really appeal to me either. Finally, I figured out that although I really wanted to like EVE, I didn't like it, and left after playing for about half a year.
EVE is in my opinion the biggest timesink of any MMO I've ever played. Far too much time in that game is spent traveling, mining, and mission grinding. I do like some aspects of the game.. the UI is fantastic, the player driven economy is amazing, the crafting system is the best I've *ever* seen (I mean, you can make *space stations*.. how cool is that?!), and PvP can be a lot of fun. However, the game forced me to invest FAR too much time doing mind numbing, repetitive tasks to hold my interest.
One, grinding wasn't flatly forced. Yes, you need money, but not a set amount, like xp to level. You could strive to be wealthy or accept being poor, just getting by with as little as possible, or anywhere in between. It's not like xp, where you play for set increments of xp, and it's as simple as that. The need to grind for cash is a more indirect motivation, in that you use that cash for any number
of things, and therein lies the flexibility to focus on it as little or
as much as the player prefers.
Two, there are a variety of different ways to earn it, and it's not all there is to do in the game. It's not all about earning money. It's not all there is to do. Compare to your average MMO, where the only motivation to play at all is to earn xp, and there's only one way to do that. That seems a lot more simplistic to me.
I'm not saying EVE is all that great, but it does seem like a step above most other MMOs to me. Grinding for cash does tend to have some key differences, compared to grinding xp/skills/levels. It frees up the game environment so that both the devs and the players can focus on the gameplay in a variety of ways, rather than just funnelling all content into the mob-hunting treadmill.
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
Watch out man, I predict you are going to get flamed hard.
I also agree with you. It can be a grind, and a player can grind anything.
Then again, I also believe what Raph Koster when he said, "grind is a state of mind." Levelling, earning currency, gaining skills, gaining items, etc. can make someone miserable if they rush through it.
Learning skills are a real grind too in EVE, but ISK can be pretty "grind heavy" too.
We have a lot of type A personalities though who feel compelled to "keep up with the Joneses." They grind the measures and benchmarks of game achievement to the point of misery and boredom. And because they had to waste so much time doing miserable things, it is natural to feel that this great misery deserves a great reward for having done it.
I think we'd be a lot more happy and have better games if we just slow played it and not take things so seriously. That will never happen though when we can live the "good virtual life" ahead of our peers with a healthy dose of miserable XP and ISK maximization calculations.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
you guys new or something?
- The most effective way to make money in EVE is *not* missions. As many others will gleefully point out. There are numerous ways within EVE to make a fortune MUCH faster than Missions. Missions are, however, the "path of least resistance" to making money. They are also, however, extremely repetitive and will QUICKLY become a grind if that's the only way you go about making money.
- Doing trade runs for other players (Get an Indie)
- Mining and refining ores (Play Caldari and get the Cruiser suited for mining, and use cans, especially now that they're secured by default. Get an Indie to haul your ore once you're done mining.
- Playing the market (Buy low, sell high). Learn where things are cheap and where you can sell them for a profit. This involves a lot of travel. You'll need that time though, to research what to buy where and what to sell where. If you enjoyed Elite this is Elite at it's finest.
- Pirating.... It will take you 1-2 months to get skills to where you can do this effectively. I recommend joining a pirate corp if you plan to try, they will help you learn the ropes.
- Crafting, making items and selling them on the market.... this takes a bit of time but eventually crafters can make a bloody fortune...
- The skill system is anything but arbitrary. How long it takes to learn one type of skill or another is dependant upon your learning ability in that area, which is based upon the base statistics you picked up. It is also based upon the difficulty of the item you are trying to learn. Some level 1 skills are harder to learn than others. This is compounded if you have a low primary or secondary stat for that skill. The skill system in EVE takes a lot of time to learn to understand. My recommendation for ANY new player is this:
- DO THE RESEARCH BEFORE CREATING YOUR CHARACTER..... Go to online forums, the EVE forums are VERY helpful, and ask questions, learn how best to set your character up BEFORE logging into the game. This will save you a LOT of frustration (I wish I had) initially. There are ways to spec your character so that right out the gate you can upgrade to a cruiser as soon as you finish the tutorial. This allows you to spend all your time in game on LEARNING SKILLS!!! Which brings me to the 2nd recommendation:
- TRAIN IN LEARNING FIRST!!! Get all the core learning skills to at LEAST 4 before training anything else. It'll take a couple weeks but having all of them at 4 is a HUGE help. Some advocate going all the way to 5 but that IS a painful process and one I don't recommend for the faint of heart
- PVP is not just who has the 'most and best' ships. There are a lot of tactics involved. Some battles will boil down to numerical advantage but usually the side with the better balance of ship types will win, almost regardless of size of fleet. A fleet of all frigates will get oblitterated by a well coordinated fleet of mixed ship types. A fleet with no tacklers will quickly get outflanked, out gunned and die horribly. A fleet with no jammers, tanks or what have you will die just as fast as a fleet that's massively outnumbered, even if they outnumber their opponent. It's not just about who has the most ships. it's who has the best plan, execution and, most importantly, the best pieces to fit their fleet together into a killing machine.
I don't like EVE, don't get me wrong. But you obviously haven't played it very long because your opinion of it looks pretty shallow. I took 3 months to learn the game before deciding whether it was for me or not. In that time I learned enough about the various systems to know how the game works, what works and doesn't and how best to do certain things in the game. EVE isn't one of those games you will pick up and master in a week or two. Even after 3 months I was still learning new things every time I turned around. The game is EXTREMELY complex and the learning curve is dauntingly steep. I'll also state that it's so complex and such a steep learning curve that many people get turned off before they even scratch the surface (as you did).Alternative methods of making money include:
Those are just a few off the top of my head, and I don't even like EVE.
It's not a game for everyone.... the vast majority of gamers will not like it. It's a sandbox... and a VERY complex one at that. I respect EVE... but I do not like it. I find it rather boring. But to say it's a "grind" is unfair. EVE is.... what you make of it.... It's not a race... there's no reason to HAVE to get 40billion ISK... you only need a little to start... and a cruiser is all you ever need ok a cruiser, maybe an indie if you're into hauling cargo or ore, a frigate or two for tackling in PVP.... you don't ever HAVE to buy a bigger ship... If you're into mining you'll eventually want a mining ship... But the bottom line is all things come in time. EVE is only a 'grind' if you make it a grind. It's not like you have to reach X level in order to compete. You just need about 1-2 months worth of skill training, in which time you will make MORE Than enough to equip a frigate adequately for PVP. In 3 months you can have your own fleet. After 5-6 months you'll be in a battlecruiser.... there's no rush... EVE isn't about instant gratification... it's about the journey...
That said... again... I don't enjoy EVE. I agree that it's a pretty boring game (for me). But to say it's a grind? The only way EVE is a grind is if you make it one. Personally... I just find EVE too slow paced for my style of game play.
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Yes it is...
And I am sorry to admit that EVE is a ISK grind ...
Yes it is, but it also provides many ways to get the ISK to do things
You can pirate and sell the drops, you can mine, you can trade (trading is a hard way to make money). The big thing in EVE is the CORPS,, they are the backbone of you well being, if you have a good corp that works at helping you and training you then you probably find EVE fun...if you are solo or have a sucky corp then it is really hard.
I have seen a very good player in a battleship get taken down by a dozen so-so players that at least halfway knew what they was doing it was hard but they did it with almost all frigates.
BTW: Name me one game where you do not grind for one thing or another.....
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I pretty much agree with you here... especially your statement that you respect EVE but don't like it. I certainly played long enough to see many of the very cool and groundbreaking ideas they've implemented, and that they've created one of the most dynamic MMO settings in existence so far, as far as how much impact players can have on things.
The problem is, it just takes too freaking long to go anywhere or do anything, and I don't have the free time that EVE requires, and even if I did, I wouldn't want to spend that much time playing a game, especially when a lot of the time you spend in EVE is time spent waiting to be able to do something.
I'm currently playing City of Villains, and having a lot more fun than I did when I played EVE. Is this because CoV is a "better" game? That's pretty subjective, especially with two games as far apart in goals as CoV and EVE. CoV is a better game for *me*, and fits into my life better.
As far as all the posts about how the EVE fans are going to "flame" everyone... one of the things I liked about EVE more than -anything- else in the game was it's community, whose members on average seemed to be more thoughtful and more well spoken than the communities, on average, of many other MMOs. If anyone on MMORPG is going to flame me for not enjoying EVE, then I would say that such an action is not representative of the EVE community as a whole... I found it to be a wonderful community that was hard to leave when I realized I wasn't enjoying the game and that I should cancel.
Eve has lots of grinding. Not only for isk but also for travel time.
well, it depends. why do you want the money for? in my corp, we give new players their first ship of every category for free. this means they only need to pay for the insurance, and if they get killed, they receive enough money from the insurance as to buy a new ship.
so i never grinded for isks. i just play and have fun. i found it quite boring to mine, so i dont do it, even though it is probably the quickest way to make money. but since i dont need money i dont do it.
i just do some missions, or pvp, or work for my corp (convoys for the POS, scorting of new players that want to come to 0.0, pvp gangs to defend from hostiles...)
i have been playing for 11 months, and i never had more than 120 million isk (which is now), and i only do one or two missions every week, usually when we dont have any corp activity and i want some action. so it is not much of a grind, for two things, first because it is a short time, and second because i choose to and i enjoy doing some missions once in a while. and anyhow, when i have more than 80 or 90 million i usually spend it on BPOs.
so i dont have to grind for money. and of course, the game doesnt forces me to do so. if you are doing it, it is because you want, not because the game is meant to.
if you want to have faction ships with faction gear, then yes, you will probably have to grind money to afford them, but no one is forcing you to use those expensive things.
why does it take 1 month to get some skills? well, of course it is the devs decission. also it is a dev decission that the first 4 levels of each skill take only 1/4 of the time it takes to raise the last level. and it is also a dev decission that the raven is a caldary ship, and that jita is a safe system. they have to take decissions. 1 months seems too much for you, ok. what would it be good? 2 weeks? 5 days? it doesnt matter how long it is, there is always going to be some people complaining.
also, on any other MMORPG the devs decide how many xp you need for your next level, so i dont see any difference. only that on EVE you can not grind xp, which i happen to like.
about pvp, some people already answered. no, pvp does not boil to who has most and expensive ships. tech 2 industrials are more expensive than tech 1 cruisers, yet on a fight the cruiser would win. 5 interceptors will destroy any HAC, even though the HAC can cost 3 times more than the 5 interceptors. the same can be said about skill points. all the points i have to use on my raven serve me nothing when i fly a rupture.
if you didnt enjoy the game, good. there are many others. but there is no reason to come here and complain about things that arent even the way you say they are. nobody is forcing you to play, so enjoy whatever you like, and leave us alone with our repetitive grind game.
Right, because all those ships, the ship equipment, and skills are free, right? Oh wait, they aren't. You aren't grinding for money, because other people gave you the things you needed. So, according to your own logic, you don't *have* to grind for money in any MMO... you just need to find someone else to give it to you
Eve has lots of grinding. Not only for isk but also for travel time.
You don't HAVE to travel all over the galaxy, it just escapes my why people always make the statement that they HAD to jump 30 jumps here and 20 jumps there and blah blah blah.
You don't. And if you say that it IS necessary you are full of shit. With little bit of planning you can find a nice corner of the galaxy that is close enough to a hub and has everything you need to survive in EVE within 5 or 6 jumps of you home base. If your agent is giving you missions to the ass end of nowhere find a new one FFS, don't stomp your feet and throw a tantrum about it.
This is one of the biggest misconceptions about EVE in my opinion, and it's a totaly player created problem.
Thought:
The freedom and open endedness of an MMO should not be defined by what you don't have to do, as many in this thread are arguing. Arguing that there is more content in EVE that you can choose not to do than in WoW is a ridiculous argument, because in the end, that reduces to "you don't have to play the game at all", which is true of any game.
The freedom and open endedness of an MMO is defined by all of the things you *can* do, that are within the realm of the games mechanics itself. We should assume for this argument that players *do* want to advance their characters, otherwise they are not actually playing the game. We should also ignore the things you can do in the games that are not strictly governed by game mechanics. For instance, in WoW and in EVE both, I could if I wanted use the chat functionality of the game to play "20 questions" with people instead of actually playing the game. This has nothing to do with the open endedness of the games themselves.
EVE *is* more open than WoW... but it is because of everything you can do to make progress with your character, not because of everything you can ignore and not do. In EVE, you can advance a character along more paths than WoW, and you can choose non combat paths for advancement. You can be a trader, playing the economic markets, or you can do research and development work, or specialize in corporate management skills, or you can be a combat pilot, etc. That's why EVE is more open than WoW.
Sorry, just felt like this argument was going in the wrong direction and wanted to try to steer it back on course
Eve has lots of grinding. Not only for isk but also for travel time.
You don't HAVE to travel all over the galaxy, it just escapes my why people always make the statement that they HAD to jump 30 jumps here and 20 jumps there and blah blah blah.
You don't. And if you say that it IS necessary you are full of shit. With little bit of planning you can find a nice corner of the galaxy that is close enough to a hub and has everything you need to survive in EVE within 5 or 6 jumps of you home base. If your agent is giving you missions to the ass end of nowhere find a new one FFS, don't stomp your feet and throw a tantrum about it.
This is one of the biggest misconceptions about EVE in my opinion, and it's a totaly player created problem.
It's one of those things that the Tutorial is REALLY bad about explaining. They need to work on that. The new tutorial is way better than the old one but it still leaves players feeling very lost when it ends so abruptly.... And typically it leaves them 'finished' in a relatively remote system rather than taking them to a regional hub where they could find missions that keep them closer to home. Thus the impression that they always have to travel.
The only time, in EVE, that you have to travel great distances is:
- If you join a Corp, you'll probably need/want to move to their region of space
- If you are playing the market, this will take a lot of travel.
- If you are doing cargo runs for other players/corps
- If you decide to move to a new system/area.
- SOMETIMES you will have to travel if you buy a new ship, to get it. In those cases: Get a shuttle for the trip, they're fast and you can leave them behind, and they only cost like 8k. Or you can do like I used to do and just re-package them and haul them back to your home base in your cargo bay.
That's about it. Unless you need to do one of the above the vast majority of your time will be spent within 6 hops of your 'home' system.Currently Playing: Dungeons and Dragons Online.
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bah, didnt you read? i am doing one or two missions a week, and with that i have enough to fit my battleship with anything i want.
of course, my first BS was a gift of my corp. that is the great thing about this game. veteran players have it very easy to get lots of money. 80 or 90 million dont mean too much for those players, yet for me it meant a lot. i could have made it without that help though, just it would have taken more time. still, i dont take it as a grind, because i know i dont need a BS. i could fly a cruiser until i got enough money to fly a battlecruiser, without having to grind, just playing and having fun, and slowly the wallet gets bigget. and then the same with the battlecruiser. just play and have fun, forget about the money. in the end, you will have enough money to buy a BS. if you wan to make it a grind its your decision.
but can someone give you xp on any other game? cause on EVE veteran players can give all the isk they want, so if you think you have to grind, you can join a corp and get that grind to a incredible low level. can you do that in EQ2? can you join a guild and instantly raise from level 1 to level 35?
anyway, everybody that has played EVE knows that fitting a ship with basic gear is very very easy. you dont need to grind at all to do that. if you want faction gear, then you have 2 options, but it (which if you want can become a grind) or go to complexes (which again, if you want can become a grind), but there is no need to do any of those things, since you can go along perfectly with tech 2 modules, most of which are relatively cheap.
as i said, for me (and many other people i know) this game is not a grind, neither for skills nor for money. so it seems quite clear that you can survive, be succesful and have fun without grinding. if you are grinding is totally your decission.
Actually, in games other than EVE, people can "give" you exp, and in EVE, they *can't*. Your argument is severely flawed. Advancement in EVE is via skill training. Skill training, for each level of each skill, takes a set amount of time, and there is absolutely *nothing* you can do to speed that process up (other than training the learning skills, which also take a set amount of time to learn). There is almost nothing anyone can do to help you train faster (I say almost nothing because implants help somewhat, and people can give you implants.. of course you have to train to be able to use them, too).
Yes, a corporation can give you a big fancy battleship the very first day you start. You won't be able to fly it until you spend the set amount of time required to train up to be able to use it. You won't be able to outfit it with higher end weapons and tech 2 equipment for weeks, if not months. You will get destroyed in PvP by pilots with higher trained / more skills until you spend the alloted amount of time to train your own skills up, and that's just the way it is.
In other MMOs, there are various ways to "powerlevel" lower level players in order to help them advance in experience faster. In some MMOs it is easier and faster than others, but in most there is still some way to do it.
What you are stating is the exact opposite of the reality of the situation.
so, you are saying that on most games you can grind (powerlevel) but on EVE you cant? isnt that what i have been saying all this time? you can not do anything to make your character advance faster, other than learning skills and implants. after that, is just waiting, and enjoying the game, which is the opposite of grinding your way to the max level like the rest of the games
since it doesnt matter how many missions or rats you do, you dont have to grind to advance
I hate that about EVE. I like to feel like I've EARNED my skills through use. (Like in UO, and to a lesser extent, SWG). I DO like that it's a skill (and not a level) system though. But I don't like that it's time gated. That's my biggest complaint about EVE.
But ISK "Grind"??? I just don't see it. Long before you have the skill to fly a battleship you'll have made the ISK to fly one 4 or 5 times over. Money really isn't hard to get in EVE. There are soooooo many ways to make money that if you're doing a "repetitive grind" to get it you're not exploring enough of the game's options.
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Eve is about corporate control and belonging to a corporation
the game isnt as much fun when you're a freelancer, unless your a solo pirate which can be lucrative..but you'll be broke very very quick
guess my point is you dont have to grind anything in the game..but if you are then you're missing the biggest mechanics in the game and thats a solid corp.
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a robot foot stomping on a human face -- forever."
And, using your very own logic, when I'm running missions in City of Villains in order to advance my character, I am not grinding in it either. I am simply playing the game content, and enjoying it.
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As long as you're enjoying it, what does it matter? The bottom line is that in an RPG <--- note the name, you must work to advance your character's abilities. Whether it be by buying equipment, getting experience to level or by using skills to improve them... all of these are forms of character advancement and it's a core mechanic of any RPG. If you don't want to have to advance your character then there are a number of good FPS games out there that will allow you to play with other people and not have to worry about the tedium of character building / advancement.
I don't like EVE... but it's no more, or less, of a grind than any other MMO in existence. Any RPG can become a "grind" if all you care about is becoming as powerful as you can as quickly as you can.
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when did i say that? i am really sorry for you. if all you see is a grind, then it is your fault. i am playing EVE and not grinding, and so far i have been very succesful. i know many people ingame that feel the same way i do.
if you are not able to play without grinding, then i feel pity for you
Having played EVE, it is a constant grind for more money to buy ships
wich you have to train skills for ungodly amounts of time for. If you
want anything worth a damn you have to spend years training the skills.
Which in most cases means buying a superoverpriced skill to train it.
To buy the skill to get the ship you have to have more skillz.
So you have to have a really big skill in one thing and a boatload of
money to buy the skill you need to get a good ship. then you gotta
constantly train the skill 2+ times to get the ship. Overall you're
just making money to buy skills to watch them train for months just so
you can get a ship.
That equals no fun.
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