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How is EVE for the casual player?
Aceundor
Member Posts: 482
in EVE Online
I can play casually. Maybe 5 hours a week. Therefore i mostly enjoy PVE elements and trading, crafting etc instead of instance runs and raids.
Does EVE have content for such players as myself or is it only for the medium to hard core players?
A
Originally posted by BishopB:
Are a lot of the trolls just angry kids with old gaming hardware?
Comments
yes eve is great for all types of players. In your case it (casual player) you still can do anything you like or any carreer over time whether making things, trading missions (pve) or out right pvp in those 5 hours you are on. And best of all is you can skill up while off line so in time you can play anything the game has to offer..
bobm111
you probably would only get limited fun out of the game on just 5 hours a week. Its achievable but EVE does require time if you want to actually play the game and not just log in to check on your skill queue.
Eve is more of a sandbox style than thempark. Which simply means that a single play session will usually take a minimum of 1 hour and for the casual player usually ends up being 2 hours when in game. This is unlike newer themeparks which put you right into the action with a instances and a LFG system.
That being said, I play about 6 hours a week, with 1-2 hour play sessions. I don't do 0.0 ops anymore with an alliance simply because they usually end up being about 4 hours. But, as long as you have an idea of what you want to do before you sit down and play, you can play casually.
As a new player, the tutorials will plan out your play sessions for the first few sessions - so, go through them and get to know the game. Then afterwards, plan and play.
I think EVE is great for casual players, especially if you want to focus on pve elements like trading, crafting or mission running.
PVP not so much only because you tend to get ships blown up and Im not sure 5 hr a week can bring in enough income to replace losses.
Of course, of you are willing to sell a PLEX or two the money issue goes away and you can even lose a few ships now and then.
Also, the offline skill training is terrific for the casual player because time spent does not equal progression in EVE.
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Thanks for your answer guys
Originally posted by BishopB:
Are a lot of the trolls just angry kids with old gaming hardware?
EVE is casual friendly, the corps you might join might be not.
One corp might "demand" that you are VERY active, others are very lenient towards activity.
You can earn money in many ways, by either grinding it doing trading, all can be done casual or very actively unlike certain games where they encourage you to go grind daily quests and dungeons every single day.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
While I always try my best to convice people that Eve is something worth sticking at and playing, I cant honestly say that Eve is a 'Casual' game.
However, with only 5 hours a week, I would struggle to imagine ANY mmo that would suit.
With Eve, you would definatly need to get into it in a BIG way for 3 o4 months... once you have the knowledge, friends and understanding, only then could you go 'casual'
You just cant deny the steep learning curve Im afraid.
all depends on what you want and expect how to do it.
There are enough corporations with casual playstyle who get along just fine ingame. Other side of such communities is that players who do play more feel like they are left alone.
I know a player who trades, is not much ingame and does a few missions every now and then, a bit of lowsec pvp combat and he enjoys himself just fine.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
all depends on what you want and expect how to do it.
There are enough corporations with casual playstyle who get along just fine ingame. Other side of such communities is that players who do play more feel like they are left alone.
I know a player who trades, is not much ingame and does a few missions every now and then, a bit of lowsec pvp combat and he enjoys himself just fine.
yes, but even those things you mention take a considerable amount of time, patience and research in order to them in a way that is remotly enjoyable.
I dont disagree that Eve CAN be Casual, but if you've never played it before then you kinda need to spend a sustained amount of time climbing the learning cliff
If you only played in 1 hour sessions... you'd quickly forget what you learned, and you would quickly get bored and frustrated that you can't really acheive anything.
eve cannot be casual past a certain point. it all depends on what ships you like to fly. if you're ok with grinding an odd pve mission and pvp'ing in cheap ships, game can be quite casual. if you want to progress and actually compete with others, you have to waste your life away. this is from someone who's been playing it for 2 years. i played the game for the pvp, and i got to a point where i got fed up grinding pve content to pay off my pvp bills. i quit a few months back, mostly because i realized life is too short and if i wanna game i wanna do so efficiently.
it is very very unlikely you will get much enjoyment out of the game playin 5 hours a week. well, if you did just pve missions i guess you could get some fun out of it. for pvp you have to be on for hours at a time to organize fleets and find suitable engagements.
youve also got to remember that Eve has one of the highest subscription costs out of all the MMO's, so it would be a very expensive 'casual' game.
you'd probably have more enjoyment renting a few more DVD's each week xD
Boring. Getting ISK in Eve is timeconsuming for newbies (and if you are casual even worse) and the low end PvE content of Eve is boring as hell.
PvP and organised PvP is what is fun in Eve and as a casual player your choices will be very limited there. Basically you have to train for months (and gain quite a few million ISK) to have many options in PvP.
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Whenever I've tried to play other MMOs with old, now more casual, gaming buddies, the same thing always happens. We have different amounts of time to play and everyone progresses faster or slower to the point that grouping together becomes a chore for those who have had the playtime to advance further. EVE does not have this problem. in EVE, you can advance in some ways while offline. And even a two week old noobie can be extremely useful to a 5 year old vet, assisting with whatever PVP or PVE content the more experienced player would normally partake in.
EVE is a very odd game in many respects. Training in the game (which is the core to doing anything in it) is time based -- real time style. You can't "grind to max level" in EVE and skill building takes real time but you do hit "caps" as you progress. (gunnery 5, hull upgrades 5, trading 5, etc...) This training occurs even if you're offline. You can queue up skills to train for 24 hours (1 day) -- as in skills can take longer than that, so "hang off the end" but cannot be queued up beyond the 24th hour.
There are off-line tools available (EVEMon) to check the information on your character without logging in the game.
So at 5 hours a week, you'd need to log in about every day for the first few weeks to train up "fast learning" skills. After that they'll start taking longer and longer to train so you can log in less frequently and still keep up. You can also play "very well" some portions of this game.
Example: You can get into trading. This can become a consuming thing but a good portion of your tracking and monitoring can be done offline with an hour or so every couple of days.
Trading isn't "making things". It's where you buy items low in one area to then sell for higher prices in other areas. What you do is train up skills to sell items and you end up moving items between locations where players perform activities and there are "tricks" to pulling of trades that many don't think about or do very often that even a starter type person can pull off fairly early on.
Examples:
Create a "same account" alt. Move that alt, without any training, to a low security system that borders between highsec and nullsec. Whenever you wish to stock up the local bases with supplies, you log on that char, fly out to a gate point and see if it's camped. If it is, you don't try it at that time. If it isn't, you log on your main character and bring a batch of supplies to 1 or more stations in that system and charge a small surplus for having it more conveniently located to nullsec/lowsec types.
In other words, you drastically reduce your chances of losing a transport ship full of equipment and can charge a bit more for those who don't like trying to get into highsec (a 'trade hub' can be 20+ system jumps from some of these points. Saving someone mass jump distances... they'll often pay a bit more to avoid the headaches and the like...)
----
So yes, there are aspects of the game you can get into and build from if you figure out some tricks to them (such as the above trick)
There's a lot of strategy to all aspects of this game and strategy doesn't require you to be online playing it 10+ hours a day. It takes thinking as much, or more, than actually doing.
"The core"..uhm. I'd say the money grind is the actual core, not the skilling.
If someone asked me right now what I was skilling, it'd take me a short while to answer, since I'd have to start Evemon and look it up. (I just looked. Tactical Logistics Reconfiguration IV, still takes several days..)
If you asked my about my wallet balance and how my isk making and pvp activity was, I could answer you immediately. Even now as I'm writing this (and I'm not logged into Eve and haven't been for hours) I know precisely what's on my wallet, how my market orders are doing, and when something important happens I get a message via IM.
Imo, that's the real casual aspect of Eve. Even as a player in 0.0 in an alliance permanently at war somewhere, I can live a normal life outside of Eve and do stuff in game.
(Although, to be fair, getting a "Titan tackled log in NAOW"-broadcast in the middle of the night, jumping into the game, rushing to the fight, then back home and back to bed IS both batshit crazy and completely surreal)
"The core"..uhm. I'd say the money grind is the actual core, not the skilling.
If someone asked me right now what I was skilling, it'd take me a short while to answer, since I'd have to start Evemon and look it up. (I just looked. Tactical Logistics Reconfiguration IV, still takes several days..)
If you asked my about my wallet balance and how my isk making and pvp activity was, I could answer you immediately. Even now as I'm writing this (and I'm not logged into Eve and haven't been for hours) I know precisely what's on my wallet, how my market orders are doing, and when something important happens I get a message via IM.
Imo, that's the real casual aspect of Eve. Even as a player in 0.0 in an alliance permanently at war somewhere, I can live a normal life outside of Eve and do stuff in game.
(Although, to be fair, getting a "Titan tackled log in NAOW"-broadcast in the middle of the night, jumping into the game, rushing to the fight, then back home and back to bed IS both batshit crazy and completely surreal)
We're looking at it from opposite ends of the spectrum is all. I've been playing about 4 months now so I still see the uphill side of training. You've been playing a hell of a lot longer so you already have 'mastered' most of the fundamental skills needed to fly what you chose to fly -- from the assortment of ships you have as options.
No doubt that the ISK grind will be a focus later on but early on...
PvP in EVE: 25% skills, 25% ship, 50% tactics based upon experience.
The above is accurate AFTER you have the fundamental skills to fly at least 1 craft decently. Evasive Maneuvers? How about Navigation? What about Hull Upgrades or Shield Operations? Gunnery 5 trained? How about Controlled Burst?
All skills you'd probably have to dig through your memory on when you first learned them LONG ago but 4+ days here, 8+days there, etc... for the level 5's on them... All important no matter if you're a frigate or a titan pilot.
So we really don't have any disagreement, just a difference in perspective. For the same 5 hours play time a week in EVE, a player here will get far more than they can from a game like WoW. In WoW, 5 hours a week will see them MONTHS out before they'll get to "max level" but in EVE? They'll see far higher returns for the amount of time they can actually spend playing.
The above, coupled with the huge complexity of the game makes this both one of the most casual friendly as well as one of the least forgiving to "idiots". If someone is intelligent and only has 5 hours a week, they can do better than someone who has 10 hours a day but no concept of analysis and planning.
EVE is wicked but also wicked cool for those that think.
There's countless miners, merchants, couriers and other industrialists that progress and advance through casual play of a few hours a week.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
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Whether or not EVE is an enjoyable game for casual players really depends on the person playing, but I have to call BS on this post.
EVE costs $14.95 a month for the 1 month sub and they offer 3, 6, or 12 month specials as cheap as $10.95 a month which is actually a few cents cheaper compared to WoW. I think most people today would consider $15 very cheap entertainment for a month.
Yes, imho EvE is the most casual MMORPG for these kind of acitvities. What you want to do can not only be done casual, it can be done casual even at the very highend of the game. Most people here dont grasp the mechanics of the game and only see the mining/missions side of the game and think thats it, which couldnt be more false.
I think your list should be broadened a bit for eve to Manufactoring/Laboratory thingys/Trading. You can do nothing but that, and your income will increase as your skills do.
Most people dont even realize that you can play EVE perfectly fine without any combat related skills at all. Combat is time consuming, combat is risky, combat cant happen and benifit you while your offline, combat requires loads of skills that wont pay off with low time, the activities i mentioned before all can/do.
1. Trading. Its not just buying in some region and selling for more in another, that involves hauling, and and is actually a mix of two professions. To understand the concept of trading in eve you must understand the market. There are two forms of orders on the market, sell and buy orders.
A sell order simply is someone listing something he has and wants to sell, it includes price, time and amount. The time goes from one day to 90 days, amount is obviously limited to the amount you have.
A buy order, is someone listing something he does not have, but wants to aquire. It consists of price, time, amount, min amount and range. Range is how far away someone may be from you and still sell something to you. If you limited it to station he must bring the item to your station to sell it to you, if you limit it to system he needs to be at any station in the same system and if you limit it to region he can sell the item to you at any station in the region(there are more intermediate steps).
So what a trader could do would be looking for cheap sell orders, aquire the items, move them to somewhere else with a good buyorder and liquidate them. Thats what most people here mean by trading.
However more advanced would be you, placing a buyorder(which are basicly always below sellorders, otherwise people would just buy the item and immediatly sell it again and make a profit), and then listing the item again for a markup by a sellorder. Its exactly the other way around, and doesnt even involve moving the stuff.
What my example takes is RL time, something a casual player has as much of as a hardcore player. The orders are active up to 3 months, require next to no time setting up, and will do their magic while your offline. You only need to check them every few days to adjust them.
2. Manufactoring. Forget about mining now, mining is risky, mining cant happen and benifit you while your offline, mining takes time out of your playtime that you dont have. The very basic of manufactoring is you take ressources and combine them to make a item. It takes mostly RL time, starting the job is actually very fast. It costs you this to produce a item(simplyfied):
value of ressources + cost of blueprint(onetime investment or copys) + cost of renting factory slot + cost of setting up market order = total cost.
Dont forget you are your own boss, you dont get a wage, you get whats left over(like a one man company in real life). With trading you already aquired a way to get minerals cheaper than sell orders, its quite easy to aquire minerals 20% below market average, which means you easily can sell your endproduct 5-10% below market. Most people are impatient, they dont want to build their own ship even if it saves them a few mil. Likewise with selling items, if you offer someone 12mil for item now, or 14 mil maybe a couple of days later if he lists it most will take the instant money.
Also there is Refining, basicly you buy badly underpriced T1 stuff and just refine it down to minerals which you use to build stuff that has more demand. Buyorders again are your friend here, you can get anything between 10-95% cuts with them.
3. Laboratory sheningans. Most people just call it research, which is misleading.
Research is making a blueprint original(you can use this to build something unlimited times, copys are limited run, they get used up after some uses) better, BPOs get bought from npcs and have a very wide pricerange. You can improve the PE(production efficency, the time it takes to build a item using this BP) and ME(Material Effeicency, the amount of resources it takes to build something using this BP). This research has diminishing returns like skills.
Copying is making a limited run version from a BPO you own. Only players aquire and sell BPCs(Blue print copy). The BPCs is identical in all aspects to the BPO used safe two things, it has a run limitation(sensible, so its low for ships, high for ammo) and it cant be copied or improved.
Inventing is using a existing T1 item and some extra stuff(aquired by trusty old trading) to create a T2 BPC, which you can either use for Manufactoring yourself or sell.
All of the above can be done with low playtime by a casual, obviously the start is hart due to lacking knowledge and money, so i advise to do all the new tutorials which give you free BPs and skillbooks and other assorted stuff while teaching you how to do it.
Obviously you will be low on funds to get started, so dont try to build a battleship just now, start with producing ammo in lowsec for example. Screw pirates, your a new player and go there by frig with warp core stabs, you literally have nothing bar maybe 200k in BPCs to loose. Check before that your choosen station has a reprocessing plant, maybe a agent(both not for you, but for your customers) and obviously a factory. Its a big bonus if its part of a large part of lowsec, you see those nasty pirates cant go easily to highsec to buy their ammo, and wont bother to use a alt to get freaking t1 ammo from highsec just cause its 50% overpriced by you. They will pay you, and pay you glady.
You will learn to love these standing impaired high at risk customers just as much as those crazy low sec missionrunners that collect all their shiny mission loot, refine it, only to realize its far to much to move, and sell it to you for a bargain.
Obviously being in a corp will ease things along, why not start your own corp? Maybe look for one or two likeminded low skill players and help each other out(you can lock your shiny BPs so they can use but not steal them). Who says you have to know shit to lead a corp? EvE is like RL in that regard.
Yeah you wont make alot of money until you start with the BP copying and inventing part, but you wont need alot of money either and its a fun mini game which will make you laugh at all the people who think eve is harsh and dangerous. I mean it is ... for your customers.