Is it worth it? No. Is there a good alternative? No. EVE Online always had an element of spreadsheets to it. It was designed that way. The original game design was done inside excel.
Personally I find it fascinating that CCP didn’t build their own spreadsheet functionality into the game considering how many players used spreadsheets to calculate mining yield returns, industrial runs, research and BP copying. The only area of EVE where spreadsheets go out the window is war.
I have probably 20,000 hours in the game. I lived on EVE from 2003-2010 and then would log on every once in a while to get my space fix.
The one thing I will say about the game, it inspired me to try to create my own back in the day. It was too much work for me but I did manage to get a demo of flying around from Star system to star system using an EVE-Online like warp and scene management.
The artwork of EVE is fantastic. The space environments are A+. The actual gameplay though is a bit stale to todays gamers. It’s more a kin to old school rpg’s where you target something and let the auto attack do it’s thing.
So one thing I've always wondered about EVE. We all know about the "corporations" in the game and they seem to be ingrained in the culture of EVE. Were those "corporations" started by the creators (like the Alliance and Horde in WoW), or are they purely player created?
There are both, but the NPC ones are largely holding players that are very casual or new. Most of what you read about are probably not corporations though, but alliances. Alliances are groups of player owned corporations that work together. The massive battles are mostly fought between these.
What makes Eve interesting is that all star systems except for those in the very middle of the map are controllable by players, and actually provide value to those holding them. So that's why you have these gigantic, drawn out conflicts and large battles where player blocs with thousands of players each are fighting for territory.
Purely player created. They're basically guilds in other games.
There are some built-in 'NPC Corporations' that you start on, and default back to if you get kicked out of a Corp, but they're basically just placeholders.
It's also important to acknowledge that these NPC corporations have a high tax rate so there's a financial incentive for players to leave these NPC corporations for Player driven ones. Most player corporations have a lower tax rate, less than 10% or matching if there's a war on. Sometimes a corp will increase taxes to recoup war bonds but it's only temporary.
The player corporations and alliances are one of the game’s greatest strengths, and weaknesses.
The big alliances are empires that control many aspects of the game. The downside is that if you want to play casually and don’t like all the boot-licking and drama that comes with player corporations you miss out on a lot of the game.
Correct. The multiplayer aspect of EVE is unmatched, even to this day. X4 (really the series) is a good alternative if you want a SP experience. The AI wasn't that good though.
Unfortunately, there's no comparison. AI doesn't come close to the breath of Eve. It's cool. It's a good game especially for a solo-dev (very impressive!) but Eve Online has so many avenues to gameplay.
I know I was practically useless in my stealth bomber, but I had great fun futzing around deep in enemy space scaring their miners and leading response teams on wild goose chases.
This is the beauty of Eve. Suck rocks for ore while watching movies. Solo/team hunting pvp. Venture capitalist. Space Trucker. Honest Questor or other PVE solo/team player. Absolute troll who creates a roleplay justification to being the worst of bastards to newbies (but just inside the rules). So many playstyles.
I liked the stealth game as well. Work your way in a stealthy ship deep into Nullsec and do your thing - whether that thing is a bunny rabbit of a frigate designed to find and steal cookies and outwit the fox, or a stealth bomber that hides near the cookie jar to squash the unsuspecting. And both of these have to find a way to get back to civilization with the lootz.
Don’t keep your eye on local in WH space, that won’t work! Eyes on DSCAN, I quit Eve almost a year ago, and the key I used for DSCAN still doesn’t work, I’ve pressed it so many times.
shhhhh, the learning curve gods curse you for teaching fresh meat what not to do instead of teaching them with pew pew. The cruel harsh world of nullsec.
I've read the entire ISK 3.0 before creating my first character. One sentence wouldn't help new players because of data overload and shaky hands anyway.
I played for a while in both large alliances and smaller niche corporations. It's a very flawed game that is completely unique and mesmerizing.
The bad:
- The dreaded "learning wall" is/was very real. Nothing is/was properly explained or introduced. Best tip is to join a new player friendly corporation ASAP to get some proper explaining.
- The combat is janky and a lot of the skill involved is/was learning how to abuse or sidestep technical limitations such as the one second server tick time and the quirky methods of manually controlling your ship.
- A lot of players prey on newbies to scam or troll them out of what little they have. There is a certain edgy attitude to a lot of pirate players that are attracted to the games "full loot" model.
- Most of the "missions" or "dungeons" feel really stale, and it's slow as molasses.
The good:
- Looks completely amazing. As in jawdroppingly beautiful if you like hard sci-fi.
- Everything that matters is run by players. This is the most unique aspect of the game. No other game has a constant ongoing player driven lore like Eve. The market, the social constellations and much of space itself is run by players. There have been huge market plays, alliance mutinies, assassinations, mineral cartels and colossal battles that has raged for days. All is talked about by players, and since everyone is playing on the same server, it's relevant for everyone.
- The setting is pretty good, and the atmosphere is great. The "races" all have very distinct motivations and character.
- It has a "full loot" PVP-model. If you fly something and it's destroyed, it's gone. Including everything you were carrying. Some of it is dropped so that other players can pick it up. This means that PVP combat can be incredibly sweaty, and I have never had actual adrenaline shakes the same way I've had from Eve. It also makes every kill incredibly satisfying. The rush of flying something relatively inexpensive and managing to kill someone flying a pimped out super expensive ship is quite incomparable.
I probably skipped a lot of stuff, but that's some scattered aspects atleast.
It’s absolutely worth it for the people you’ll meet playing the game. I’m in Iceland right now for the annual player meeting and it’s been a blast. Many alliances have internal tools which interface with the game and external crowdsourced market data, and it’s common knowledge that those tools are better than real world logistics software, so working on them is a great way to learn how to build relevant products.
I actually got into software/systems engineering working on internal software for "minor" player groups in EVE. The level of integration[0] those orgs had 10+ years ago outranks 80% of my current real-world clients in terms of discoverability, documentation and depth.
I mean that's what you get from a bunch of eve-playing nerds committing to a labor of love. Best projects I've ever had.
[0] Real time updating mining & trading boards by location, 100bn+ ISK inventory tracking down to the cent across many corps, characters, inventories & contracts, ... Killboard & market data feeds, risk evaluation, resource allocation optimisers... Absolutely impeccable archives & backups going back 5+ years, on top of postgres & flask iirc.
edit: And audit logs EVERYWHERE. Seriously, I've seen better CYA/KYC/chain of responsabilities from eve recruitment corps than some actual for profit entities.
Also, the combination of (mostly) player-run economy + substantial no-consequence PvP zones + large player organizations seems to attract a different sort of person.
There are still your average gamers, but EVE had a much more adept playerbase (in terms of real world skills) than any other MMORPG I've played.
As the saying goes: “When an Eve Player quits Eve and moves to Wow, the average IQ of both games goes up”. Incredible game, took up far to much of my time.
In around 2005 I had a pleasure of visiting a central office of a shipment company, and could see their setup for the whole country involved: 1. a hacked ISDN connection "borrowed" from the neighbor one floor below; 2. an entire shipment tracking done from a single Excel file kept on a Windows shared drive and edited simultaneously by different people. My respect for whatever dark magic Excel did back then was instilled deep into me, along with unending wonder about how didn't it all blow up spectacularly yet.
I think the most tangibly fun bit of tooling was a forum plugin that generated a unique, slightly reworded version of sensitive forum posts that, if screenshotted and shared by a spy, could be traced back to the forum user.
EVE released an update today (as it does most Tuesdays, and also often the next day or two in the week if there are issues). Part of that update included significant changes to a number of blueprints, which are the plans needed to manufacture items in game. Blueprints come in two varieties: originals and copies, and you can perform various activities on them (manufacturing, research to improve efficiency, copying of originals to make copies, etc.). I wrote a tool which imports the game's Static Data Export (SDE) and makes various calculations about all of blueprints in the game (profitability, etc.), so I ran it on the SDE from the new update. Each 'activity' has a set of fields, like what it outputs, etc. But, the 'copying' activity is hard-coded to output blueprint copies. There is a field to say what it outputs (and that field is sometimes present in the data), but the value is always empty. Except today it was not always empty. A relatively obscure blueprint for a Taipan (a kind of upgraded rookie ship given away as a one-off in a past special event) apparently had the information for its 'manufacturing' activity listed as 'copying' instead. So now it claims that if you copy an original, you get the actual manufactured ship, and not a blueprint copy. This broke my tool, because I had put in a check to see if this field was ever non-empty, because if it was it might mean the game had changed in a way that meant something in my tool needed to be updated.
If you look at the information for the blueprint in game, it still claims that the copying activity outputs a blueprint copy. They hard-coded it, too. It now takes as input all of the materials required to manufacture the ship, though. In this case, there are no blueprint originals for a Taipan (if there were you could make an infinite supply of these one-off event items), and any copies that might exist can no longer produce the ship, because you cannot copy a copy. The only valid activites for a copy are 'manufacturing' and 'invention', except a Taipan blueprint no longer has a manufacturing activity and never had an invention one. So I updated my check to ignore this type, and moved on. Needless to say, this change was unrelated to any of the actual announced changes for the update, not mentioned in patch notes, etc. Just another Tuesday in EVE.
I'm a current player, and I think it's absolutely worth it to get started.
Other comments have covered many aspects of the game, so I'll just point one thing out: the players are super friendly!
It's funny because Eve is a game where you can -- and WILL -- get destroyed by anyone, any time. It's dog-eat-dog, it's cut-throat, it's merciless. I remember the first time I lost a 250m ISK Astero to a hunter. The cost was equivalent to hours of gameplay for me at the time. Brutal.
And yet, you know what happened next? The guy who destroyed me sent me a message and asked if I was new (he could tell). He congratulated me on what I did right and gave me tips on what I could've done better. He sent me 200m ISK because that's just not a lot for a seasoned player. He helped me refit my ship so that I could escape future hunters more quickly.
This guy went above and beyond, but that type of friendliness is very common in Eve. I'm sure there are jerks, but I haven't come across one yet.
He played the meta game. Get more new players to play more and longer gives him more and bigger targets later. The same reason I wouldn't totally whoop my friends at smash brothers back in the day. If you just barely win, you may win more games, because newbies aren't discouraged.
I used to just solo explore nullsec. Found something very zen about planning routes, scanning and sneaking past players to not get blown up (still happened a lot).
Ended up joining a newbie corp as the return trip to sell stuff often wasn't worth it. They had a hauling corp that offered buyback for most items. Still played solo for the most part.
People kept telling me that I'm playing the game wrong FWIW but not participating in the social aspects freed me up to boot up the game for an hour whenever I wanted. Haven't played for a few years but I did enjoy it.
I was mainly attracted to the game for the economic simulation but also thought I would enjoy solo exploration based on watching such gameplay on Youtube. I wanted to do PvE and interact with the community in other ways than fighting, but EVE Online is a PvP game at heart. I left because all I found while exploring were other players eager to murder me.
When the game peaked around 2011 ,EvE felt more of an unpaid second job without pay. But what a job it was! Once you get sucked in, you could spend several months per year playing EvE.
Luckily, CCP screwed things up quite badly, and I lost interest. If they hadn't, I'd probably be stuck playing EvE rather than living in the real world. :D
Interestingly, I've also seen a lot of EVE friends that have gotten jobs because of their EVE connections (logistics, computer security, state dept, ...)
One of the diplomats killed in Benghazi 10 years ago was also a diplomat for one of the major EVE alliances (and a moderator on the forums from which they draw their members) and was on alliance comms the night when it happened. Very nice guy who led an interesting life.
Yes, he's the reason I listed state department. Sean's influence on the EVE alliances' diplomacy is still felt today. Diplomacy is really seriously and is a legitimate career in EVE.
The best thing about eve is reading the stories about the politics and intrigue in the game that come out every few years.
Participating from a grunt level is more a 5 hour standoff with a enemy fleet that refuses to fully commit or running spreadsheets to see what commodity you need to haul from where to where as a space trucker or where you need to set up your manufacturing base and where you need to buy your minerals.
Another commenter put it best: "I've never had so much fun just reading about a game while never having the desire to actually play it".
EvE Online is a deeply interesting game, and I think it's a testament to how long the game has been relevant. But while I love reading about the economics, wars, scams (EvE allows player scams in game), I could never see myself actually playing the game. It would suck up far too much of my time and money.
Used to play EVE a long time ago in a known alliance. The game mechanics were not that good. What made the game shine was that it's an extremely complex sandbox game, where almost anything goes. This leads to a very complex game that is almost entirely governed by how the other players react to your interactions with them. The drama, dreams, hopes and despair that comes with playing the game is the real reward.
It used to be that the game was really harsh when you screwed up, which made the adrenaline pump when you did something you knew was dangerous. For me as a hardcore gamer at the time, that was the initial kick. Now a days I believe they have lessened the harshness a bit, but it should still be one of the few games where you can lose literally hundreds of hours in investment by losing everything you own in the game.
This is a really important part of figuring out if you want to get into EVE. CCP are terrible game designers. They're a "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" kind of game design studio. The market is a graveyard of items and associated mechanics that are design failures and are never to rarely relevant. They keep adding new mechanics that are broken, in balance and intended purpose. Their ship balancing team is two people.
But somehow this pile of crap mechanics by the sheer mass of them makes for an emergent sandbox. It feels not designed, like so many other video games. Systems that are not meant to interact with each other do in unexpected ways. Don't go in expecting every career path in EVE to have thought behind it. You have to figure that out.
I have to imagine that the social element is what makes it addicting, since I found it to be a rather constricted slog particularly if you aren't sociable. DF/Rimworld sort of accomplishes the complex-sandbox thing for solo players, minus the drama.
I spent a summer or so playing Eve maybe 10 years ago. I eventually joined EVE University to get a taste of the social aspects. One of my most cherished gaming related memories is still going with them into nullsec space for the first time and the moment where our scouts reports that we've just run into Test (which was like the biggest alliance back then?). Obviously we got shot to shreds. :)
Haven't played the game since, but it is pretty damn comfy and I'd recommend anyone to try it out.
In my opinion it was until it became easy and "legal" to exchange dollars for in-game currency via Plex Passes. It not only creates the constant temptation to just buy your losses back rather than playing but lets you assign a dollar value to everything you do. I played for five years but I quit after I calculated I was grinding for $1.72/hr.
EVE absolutely has the potential for incredible experiences but that tainted the authenticity for me in a way I could never shake off.
It's not that weird. Before PLEX, it wasn't "grinding for $0", but it was "grinding to get the Ishtar heavy assault cruiser". Making the monetary value visible the way that MTX does sort of kills the allure.
I played probably 8-10k hours across three characters and 8 years. So not that much ;)
The world used to be much harder to get into, requiring a ton of RW time, RW skill and grinding to really progress. Then each seperate workflow (PvP, PvE, industry, extraction, scanning, ...) became safer as well as easier to grok and master as a single user.
Then there was somewhat of an eternal september amongst a dwindling population as the old guard finished dropping out.
A bit different but I've been spending a lot of time playing Path of Exile recently. I would recommend ignoring any meta or the economy and treat the game like a roguelike instead. The shear amount of items/abilities/passives/mechanics make for insane build diversity. Learning stuff and planning builds is as satisfying as the gameplay. I spend about as much time ingame as Path of Building (a build planner)[1].
Don't bother. EVE used to be absolutely great (community-wise, gameplay-wise the game always was more "lipstick on a pig"-like), but these days it's just a shadow of what it once was.
By continually dumbing the game down to "make it more accessible", the constant lying by the devs and them going back on their words and it more and more becoming a microtransaction hellhole, CCP managed to destroy the one single thing that made EVE successful: The community.
I greatly enjoyed the decade and a half I played it (beta until 2018'ish), but truth be told, it's only ever been going downhill pretty much since the Incarna expansion with 60$ monocles (2011).
CCP fucked their loyal player base over and over and over again until most of us simply didn't want to take it anymore. The playerbase these days mostly consists of bots and instant gratification people expecting everything on a silver platter, constantly whining if they don't get what they want, only to inevitably leave again after 3-6 months even if they do get what they want.
I remember my first decade in EVE with great fondness and made some terrific friends there. Regarding the 5 years that followed, I seriously regret not quitting sooner. I'm still somewhat active in the EVE forums, though. After all, that's where the real PvP happens. ;)
I have recently. It's OK not a brilliant game but good.
In terms of the spreadsheets in space that's only one aspect. I bought a little package for £5.99 which has skill boosts and some plex. All in all that setup my FTP character to be able to do whatever I want. So you can ignore this entirely and just play the game the way you want tbh.
The answer is highly variable and depends on what you want out of a game. In my opinion, it is essentially the pinnacle of the MMO genre, largely because the economy and content are all player driven, which is what in my opinion makes it continually relevant and fascinating while also very inaccessible to most people. It is interesting and appealing to a large number of people in the abstract, but of that group only a small number will be able to get much enjoyment out of playing it.
I do wish we could get more games in a similar vein. I wonder if there is an opportunity out there for an MMO that lives somewhere in between the hardcore player driven sandbox of Eve and the more common, mainstream theme-park MMOs like WoW, if such a game is even possible.
It is, I play it on and off since 2006 [1] (don't laugh at that username, was done as a joke by a friend to get me into the game). You can do A LOT of things and pretty much NOTHING 80% of the time. It really feels like a permanent grind/work type of thing that's why I take such huge breaks from it.
The community is the real deal. It can be awesome or real shitty, just like at work :)). It features great politics, economy, social structures and everything above and beyond to make it, for me, the best game I ever played.
Not really, eventually you either turn into a carebear (highsec or nullsec aka nullbear) or you wind up pulling odd hours to cover vulnerable systems until their invul status returns. And the rare time you get into a huge fleet battle you're basically pressing buttons when your fleet commander says so and there's little to see since it'll be in time dilation if it's a sizable fleet battle.
I played one hour. If you're stuck in some embassy like the noted Benghazi-based Eve player whose real life interfered, it may help keep real-life connections alive. Otherwise I would strongly advise to be your own Sim, bench press and all that. Maybe a VR version hooked to a treadmill? Anti-Cheat on these is kind of unexplored territory though...
I’m not sure how you define “worth” it. I had a load of fun once I felt like I had control over how to play and what to do with my time there. I even had fun when I was losing/dying.
I quit because real life has to take priority for a while, not for anything negative about the game.
> Dropping everything in life for that one perfect game will always be a temptation
Is it? How bad does your life have to be, that you'd settle for a game instead?
I tried Eve a couple of years ago. I spent more time puzzling out why anyone plays it, rather than actually playing it. You have to do boring tasks, to get money, to do what? Oh, to get to do more boring tasks, to get more money. Ok, but to do what? Oh, to get to do more boring tasks, to get more money.
Hm... what am I missing? Oh, you get to run around stomping random people once you have a lot of money. Oh, okay, so, you get to be an asshole or do more boring tasks to get to be more of an asshole? Yes.
Ok... that's extremely addictive and enticing for some people? Yes. Wow... What fucking losers some people are. That's the conclusion I came away with.
Dropping everything in life for that one perfect game will always be a temptation... ;)