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EVE for the casual player?
morellomre
Member Posts: 7
in EVE Online
I did the 14 day trial for EVE over winter break while waiting for a job. It didnt grab me, but left just enough intrigue to leave me wanting more. However, i now have a full time job, so im limited to about an hour or two (if that) per day during the week. Is EVE a feasible game for someone with a limited time schedule? I know the skills fit right in with my lack of time but i can envision having lots of skills built up but a noob ship and no isk.
Comments
It can be hard to make money if you have a limited time to play. On the other hand there are corporations willing to supply you with stuff (like modules and ships) if you make those few hours a day count.
This may not necessarily be a bad thing. It's painlessly easy to get out of the basic starter ship right out of the gate, as even the good frigates are super cheap and obtainable with a trivial investment. Having more skills than you need to fly that frigate will only allow you to complete missions faster and more easily, and get you into the larger ships more quickly. The only problem I could see would be spending the next eternity trying to get into the better missions, if you are so inclined, as they do require "rep grinding" with the corporation(s) of your choice to get beyond level 1 missions.
Big guils need scouts. (peoples who go with ghetto ships ahead of the fleet and get killed) I am sure they all need many more scouts. Scouts also carry a device to block escape from the enemy, so as soon as an enemy see your fleet, they target you...usually you died before even noticing the fight starts. So they need a LOT more scouts.
I also heard that they need lab rats, but that isn't confirmed.
- "If I understand you well, you are telling me until next time. " - Ren
There is a bit of grinding necessary at the beginning such as getting the money to get a missioning / ratting battleship and getting the reputation needed for level 3s / 4s. Once you have a good way to make isk, though, you can play EVE pretty casually. I have a trade character that makes nearly all of my money and I only need to play him maybe 30 minutes every day or two.
The downside is PvP, if that's what you're looking to do, doesn't always happen when you want it to. There's a lot of waiting and sometimes it may take an hour or two to finally force the enemy into an engagement. Just finding a target often takes awhile. That said, there's quite a few times I've logged on right in time for a fleet engagement and logged off an hour later very entertained!
Not sure what the exchange rate is right now, but check the EVE website/foruns for details on how to take advantage of the system.
Who the hell are you, and why should I care?
Congrats! You are a victim of Trollstar!
unfortunately and fortunately EVE is both:
it demands more time than any other game I know and it demands almost no time at all...
the good thing is that you can choose which part you want.
it would take a long time to explain and despite my history of ultra long postings I am going to pass on this one...
my advice: join a big alliance that does not really need you, but is happy for some casual support.
PvE and missioning can be too time intensive
It depends on how you define casual.
If you are looking for a game you can just pick up, log in dive into some PvP for 40 minutes and then go to work, no.
You can't do this in Eve, you need hours to do anything even the most trivial stuff. This game is the market leader in timesinking. In this repsect Eve is the least casual game on the market. Even running a simple delivery mission could take an hour.
However if you are looking for a game that you don't have to play 20 hours a day to be competative, Eve is the most casual one.
You can advance you character without playing. You could log in for only 2 or three minutes once in while to update you skill training and then ignore the game. in a months time, even though your mate who started at the same time as you had been grinding 20 hours a day, you would be at the same level as him.
Actually he would still have more cash than you, but you can buy cash for real money from the games producers CCP. So you can compete without grinding. So hardcore unemployed players won;t own you by nature of their superior free time to play..
I'd like to correct this, as it sounds a "bit" silly.
You can buy a gametimecard, then sell that gtc for ingame money via a secure and controlled platform to someone who wants to buy it. It is the only legal way for rmt, and does not have a negative impact on the economy. (Those players are normally not farmers who use macros to farm the hell out of the systems and generate too much money from nowhere)
You buy the money from players, not ccp. Ccp does not spawn some millions of isk for you when you pay cash.
If the game is such a timesink then how do most people play it? the only people who i think would have the enormous amount of free time to sink into the game would be college students (i speak from experience) and people without full time jobs. i get the whole "cant log in for 30 mins, instantly start pvping, and at the end of the 30 mins have a worthwhile session" thing. but i cant imagine the game's entire subscriber base is all people with little else in their life besides eve. there is always the minority who devote every waking hour to whatever their game of choice, but they are, as i said a minority. i would like to think a majority of people in eve have other things in life and eve is just a game to distract them, whether it be an hour or two after work, or a lazy sunday. am i wrong to think this?
i think im still gonna give this a try. the depth and complexity as well as the maturity of eve versus that of wow (or LOTRO, which i was leaning towards) is well worth a try.
Because you don't need to concentrate on the game to play it. It's a no brainer.
As you say, you have other things in your life besides Eve. While you play you are reading a book, or talking to the kids and wife. watching movies etc.
It is not a demanding game. It might take hours or even years to get things done, but it's only background entertainment. you can watch a lot of great TV during those hours.
Eve is such a massive time sink that it is impossible to play it like other more traditional Video games. You can't just sit there constantly reacting and interfacing like you do in a driving game or a shooting game, instead you make a very limited number of interactions per hour.
Eve is an AFK game, sure it's a time sink, but unlike high stimulus games it isn't time you spend solely with Eve.
This isn't a life eater game like WoW or Unreal. you don't actually have to be at your computer every second you play.
I usually have Civilisation running on another PC, so I just make a move in Eve every so often between turns while I wait for the computer to respond to my latest move in Civ.
Baff, you are funny. Yes Eve has some activities that can be done AFK.. I did much of my studying in grad school burning roids in the background. But to call it an "AFK game" and a "no brainer"... dude, you really made me laugh out loud. I told my wife what you wrote and she laughed too.
The parts of the game that are rewarding and interesting require incredible focus and attention. Any type of PvP in Eve requires great situational awareness, teamwork, and constant adaptation. ANYTHING in lowsec (particularly "good 0.0 space, " i.e. low truesec) requires constant vigilance. Learning how to run/ skirt/ fight your way through gatecamps... hitting really valuable exploration sites deep in enemy territory while a roaming gang and probers try to catch you.. the list goes on and on and on... Basically after you leave the nest and get out of empire there are really smart, talented people trying to kill you all the time. And that is FUN.
Also, once you have any type of leadership position in a corp/ alliance, you get to deal with many of the same human resources/ public relations/ logistics/ politics that you deal with in any real life organization.
I retired from Eve because my characters grew to the point where playing them the way I wanted to took far too much time. My wife wanted me to stop because the entire time I was in Eve she said I was so completely focused on what I was doing that I ignored everything else. You can't just stop paying attention to Eve, say, in the middle of a 0.0 mining op or in the middle of a fight.. if you bail on your gang at a critical juncture you could lose very expensive assets and cause your friends to lose the same. And your assets in Eve, while virtual, still represent real effort, caution, innovation, perserverence, and most importantly TIME.
So anyway, I told my wife that this guy said Eve was a game that you play afk and she laughed. That's kinda like sitting in the cockpit of a 747 while it flies on autopilot and saying "wow, flying is easy!" Good luck on the landing.
deviliscious: (PS. I have been told that when I use scientific language, it does not make me sound more intelligent, it only makes me sound like a jackass. It makes me appear that I am not knowledgable enough in the subject I am discussing to be able to translate it for people outside the field to understand. Some advice you might consider as well)
Eve is a great game because you can choose how involved you want to be as well as how much you play it.
you can be sitting on the edge of your seat, sweating, worrying about if you'll die and losing your precious cargo at the next gate because of a pirate camp or hands shaking and heart pounding as you try to chase down a war target
also you could go AFK alot of the time while mining or click the auto-pilot button as you haul cargo several jumps to another system
the choices are there and so many in fact that you can have trouble deciding what you want to do next
The thing to remember is when your not online your not incurring expenses via ammo or buying and loosing ships. You can log in do some stuff and log out but as long as you don't expect to be able to buy a battleship after 30 minutes of missioning your fine.
You can even make ISK when your not online by farming datacores from research agents and this can give a steady income and all you do is once a week or fortnight collect all the datacores and sell them. You can also manufacture and all that needs is a small amount of micro management by placing and buying orders and materials and then putting them and the blueprints into bake and then collect them and place sale orders up when they are done, same goes for trading items you just study the market and buy and sell via orders.
Of course these methods do reflect the time and effort placed into them and it would rewards the player who puts a lot more effort in more than the casual player who just logs in to maintain everything but even casually you can make a modest AFK profit and its always nice to login and see your wallet balance has raised with a big bunch of green transactions in the log.
Currently playing:
EVE online (Ruining low sec one hotdrop at a time)
Gravity Rush,
Dishonoured: The Knife of Dunwall.
(Waiting for) Metro: Last Light,
Company of Heroes II.