[Eve Online] So, what do you do exactly?

[Balbinus]

I'm a few days into the trial of Eve Online, which is very pretty, and so far I have mixed views.

It captures the vastness of space very well indeed, it feels futuristic and huge and all.

The clipping is wierd, I routinely seem to fly through planets and space stations.

The totally OOC nature of all communications is jarring, nobody at all seems to post in character.

But most of all, I'm just not quite sure yet what you do in it. Any Eve players here care to share what they like about the game and what they get up to?

[sorting hat]

The totally OOC nature of all communications is jarring, nobody at all seems to post in character.

Welcome to the world of the MMORPG. No one ever plays IC, there are always people who call themselves something stupid (SWG was full of characters from LotR) and behave like clowns. That's why I don't play them. My friend plays CoH and encoutnered a character called 'upthebum69' (well, so he says). Funny, but pathetic.

[bubbles]

At the moment I'm a member of Critical Mass Enterprises, one of the very first corporations to be created in the EVE Universe. Most of the players have been away from the game for some time which means the corporation is not as powerful as it was. We currently own a station in a contested region of space, however we can't get to it as a rival alliance now controls that region of space. At the moment we're doing agent missions to increase standing with the Gallente Federation and mining to raise cash and hoard minerals. We've also recruited a lot of new players who we are now training to become pilots so that eventually we will be able to march on our old system and reclaim the station. Once we have that we'll be setting up new alliances and wiping out our enemies once and for all.

EVE Online rocks.

[RabidBunny]

One of the reasons I like Eve is because there are so many options for you to explore, and despite it being quiet intensive in terms of commitment at times it does lend itself to various types of play.

Myself, it depends how much time on a given night I've got to and who else in the Corp' I'm with is online. Loads of time, no one on ~ that'll be mission based work to increase my standing. Loads of time, quiet a few people on ~ either the same or mining operations if we feel like it. If I've only got an hour to spare then it will be off 'ratting in the lowest sec system I can handle, get the bounties and hopefully some nice equipment drops, slowly save up for the next ship I've got my eye on.

I've been laying for about five months now and I still feel that I've only just scratched the surface of what you can do. I've been targetted by pirates for example but still haven't tried PvP.

Oh, and one thing I will say, make sure that you join a Corp that is interested in what you want to do, although that's a fairly obvious statement.

[Black Isis]

There are RP corps out there -- at least one for every race, and usually one for every aspect of the game you might like to try. There's a few places you can look -- "The Summit" channel in game usually has a presence by at least one member of the biggest RP corps. You can also ask about an RP corporation on the Eve forums in the Corporate Recruitment section.

Off the top of my head, the major RP organizations are:

CVA and Aegis Militia (both Amarr Empire loyalist alliances)
Kimotoro Directive (Caldari loyalist alliance -- my corporation is a member of this rather newly-formed alliance)
Ushra'Khan (Minmatar privateers)
Cyrene Initiative (Gallente loyalist alliance)
Placid Reborn (Intaki nationalists)
Coreli Corporation (Serpentis-owned drug manufacturers)
Jericho Fraction (anarchist/free space alliance)
Blood Inquisition (Blood Raider auxiliaries)
True Core (Sansha's Nation loyalists)

There's more than those, but those are the big ones I can think of. Most of those have a place for industrialists, miners, combat pilots, and traders within their ranks; others (like the Blood Inquisition, for instance) tend to be combat-focused. My corporation just finished a six-week war against a pirate corporation that claims to be RP but really just uses it as an excuse attack weak corporations (it's a bunch of alts for a 0.0 alliance, we're pretty sure. :rolleyes: )

As for what you can do, Eve definitely puts the onus on the player to find his own niche. During my time in Eve, I've:

- fought in PvP wars and anti-pirate actions
- run PvE and courier missions for various corporations; probably the best way to earn money, at least at the start
- mined ore
- run a player-owned station
- made a significant amount of cash from mineral speculation and other trade
- built and sold spacecraft
- begun research for tech 2 items

There's a lot of different stuff you can do out there; the trick is finding out what you like and then finding out the best way to go about it. There's a lot of guides to the best ways to do various things on the web (and the forums, especially the ships and Modules forum, are a great resource).

[Durandal]

The most important thing about playing Eve is finding a goal. It's rather important as Eve doesn't have any built in goals for the player (There is no max level you can achieve). Goals could be something relatively simple like finding a new corp or getting into a certain ship class but they are none the less important as they keep you focused on doing something.

As for me I'm currently looking for a new employer as my last corporation collapsed in on itself after a few months. I'm also training up to hop into my first assault ship, this marks my first leap into tech 2 gear and it's feeling great so far. In the long term I hope to be in a fully armed battleship in a few months at which point I will look into getting into a 0.0 alliance.

And also on the topic of RP in the chat lines, for the most part people don't tend to post IC some of the faction channels can get a good few RP people in them. Last night I listened in on a debate between a few Minmatar and what seemed to be an Amarr idealist who didn't condone slavery but thought that there wasn't much of a chance for change. SO there is always room for roleplay in Eve. Try heading over to the Corporation and Alliance summit on the forums to take a look at some examples of RP in Eve.

I hope you stick with it, it's a great game for those that are looking for something a little off the beaten path.

PS - Join the RPGNet chat room, it needs some love.

[Daniel]

Hi there.

Although this thread has been dead for a while, maybe somebody is still interested in Eve Online. I have been playing it for longer than I'm ready to admit. I'm one of the founders of one of the quoted RP corps, first of all thanks for counting us in with the big players that are admittedly mostly of the Amarr/Minmatar sort (slavery and all that are easy entries into RP).

Eve has an incredible long term motivation factor, if you get to the point of actually getting into it, since the learning curve is rather steep at times. This motivation is in no small part due to the regular content patches (every couple months) that introduce new stuff™ that players can play around with. Some time during the next 6-12 months, among other smaller things, the infrastructure will be created for player-run Alliances to replace the big NPC factions that make up "safe space" where newbies start. Territorial conquest is currently only a big part of "low sec" space, where pirating player alliances roam freely. The really interesting point is, the wolrd of Eve isn't sharded, meaning all characters are on the same server (currently 100k+ subscribers, routinely 20k characters online in the euro/american afternoon/evening), so there is a _lot_ of room for interaction.

Skills are raised via real-time training, even when you're offline. Ie, in order to get a skill in the first place you buy a "skill book" off the market from NPCs saying for example "Caldari Frigate". You can then choose to train this skill (only one skill can be trained at a time), and depending on your attributes (chosen at char generation) it takes a certain amount of real time to learn it to the next level. Skills have 5 levels, with each level taking about 4 times as long as the prior one. Typical starter skills can be trained to lvl 2 in a matter of 1 or 2 hours, while getting something to lvl 5 (sometimes required for advanced skills) can take upwards of a week, or in the case of the (current) end game stuff up to two months. (This would be for Titans, the current biggest ass ships in the game, can be seen in the newest trailer. The biggest alliance - almost 5k characters - recently completed the first Titan ever after a logistic effort spanning 8 months.)


One more thing I need to mention is, it is absolutely brilliantly beautiful in the eye candy department. Check out the trailers in eve-online.com's video section, seriously. Although Eve is a bit aged by now (released 2003), they're working on an updated optional graphics engine that will support DX 10 from what I gather. Even without DX10, we will soon get all the up-to-date eye candy that is HDR and stuff like that.


To address the OP with "What do you you exactly?":
Eve is one of the "free" RPGs, where you do not have a main storyline to follow or something similar, you can really do whatever you feel like doing. This approach of course has strengths and weaknesses, but that's another story. So what do you do? First, you never leave your ship in the game. Everything you do is connected to flying around and doing stuff with your ship. So the quesiton can be rephrased, what do you do with your ship? The answer to that is easy on first glance, you fly around, blow up stuff, harvest ore from asteroids or transport goodies from here to there.

These basic ingredients can be used to do various missions for one of the NPC factions, improving your standing and working your way up to more difficult missions and more rewarding rewards. Alternatively, you can focus on an industrial/scientific career, harvesting or buying building materials and using those to create more complex items, ships, or advanced building blocks for even more advanced stuff. Some of the richest people in Eve are industrialists, for sure. The player driven economy is a thing of beauty, I should add. A third "profession" is pirate, or PvPer. Blow up other people and live off the stuff you loot from them. Another career choice, explorer, will be made more viable in the next content patch, which is scheduled for some time this november I think. Scan remote solar systems in the hopes of finding something nice, to use your archeology or hacking skills on, or to possibly just sell a bookmark to the location to someone else. Combinations of all of the above are viable.


Concerning RP, which is somewhere high on my list, too, depending on how much time you spend online with what sort of people, it gets somewhat tiresome to always be IC. We solved this by having our corporation chat OOC, and having another channel that people not in the corporation can join (moderated by us) that is almost exclusively IC. The main point for inter-corporation RP is a segment of eve-online.com's official forum, called the "Intergalactic Summit", or IGS for short. It's a nice environment, because only the people interested in RP hang out there, and you are not bothered by the masses not interested in RP, or actively trying to disrupt RP. Yes, there are idiots like that.

Depending on what angle you're coming from, Eve might or might not be for you. I can only urge you to try the 14 day trial, which is completely free of charge, doesn't extend automatically or other crap like that. If you decide you want to play on, you can even keep your trial character(s). In order to stop certain exploits, trial accounts have recently been limited to starter equipment and skills, but seriously, when you're new into the game you will hardly hit that border within 2 weeks.



P.S.: Oh yeah, my main character name is "Kakita Jalaan", in case you want an in-game contact for some info and newbie help. My corp is also recruiting decent people who can speak english sufficiently well to read and understand the above post :D

P.P.S: Yes, I was playing L5R when I created him, blame me.

[Stormbull]

Hey Daniel (and everyone else :cool: ),

I am seriously getting the impression that EvE is very difficult for the usual MMORG crowd to get into....just witness the constantly funny forum whining at eve-online!
Not a game at all for those who crave quick "end-game" (as if there is such a thing in EvE), don't like getting spanked PvP anytime/anywhere, and who think they can solo around the galaxy without help.

I'll hijack the thread briefly as the big EvE thread is buried amoung the WoW stuff. In terms of EvE time I am now almost 60 days old and have experienced significant PvP, turned into quite the sneaky EW support type who also happens to be a nasty hand with a Rupture (In WoW terms my racial class would best be defined as an orc :D ), and generally have had a blast.

Yeah...I was a bit lost for the first few days but with a little guidance from the good folks on the rpg.net ingame channel I was able to quickly get my bearings and move off in the right direction. I also joined the right corp (errr...guild for the WoW types) with like minded folks who I suppose would be classified as sort of "carebears with VERY large fangs"....and to top it off we have been war decc'ed as part of our 0.0 alliance with loads of combat daily both in Empire and losec. Hmmm...lets see...I participate in corp mining ops, gang up to hunt PvP pirates and NPC rats, do a bit of solo mission running (missions are...TBH..a total snore), mine for myself or with a couple corp-mates for personal profit etc etc etc. In other words...there is loads to do. As I like making things go boom....or...strangely enough...I quite enjoy the manic role of hauler in mining ops-I have not even touched the buisiness side of the game which is a monster to understand. I leave that to the corp accountancy experts :rolleyes:....

Yeah...it is RP-lite. But-at least in my corp the non-combat Ventrillo channel is frequently spammed with Red Dwarf outtakes and all sorts of funny stuff along with the usual in-game convos. Mining ops are usually pretty funny too (mining is pretty dull....I'd rather haul as at least I am flying). But...in serious ops like combat (several different channels) it is down to business and the RP IS there (My ingame name is RuleoftheBone and usually like to announce "target BONED" when i have them locked/scrammed/nos'd/jammed for my corpmates with the heavy guns to make go boom :D ).

Best PC game I have EVER played (and I NEVER thought I would say that after Fallout :D ).

Bottom line...if you need spoon feeding, are not personable, don't like getting killed sometimes (ok...maybe a lot), and play poorly with adults stay away from EvE. The old saying "you get out of it what you put into it" holds VERY true.

And Daniel....great post! Shame most folks just don't seem to get it :rolleyes:

[Black Isis]

Hey there Daniel....good to see another RP stalwart from Eve on RPGnet. :cool: I sort of miss the days of flying down in Placid now, but if you're ever in Mito don't forget to say hi.

[Daniel]

Hm... who the hell are you? :D

If you recognized me by name alone, you must have been active in the same RP corner as me, or you looked up my character. I've never been to Mito, where is that?

[Black Isis]

Hm... who the hell are you? :D

If you recognized me by name alone, you must have been active in the same RP corner as me, or you looked up my character. I've never been to Mito, where is that?
I admit I did have to look up your character -- the name was familiar, but I couldn't quite place it. I'm Svetlana Scarlet, of the Caldari Independent Navy Reserve. Spent some time down in Placid a few months ago helping out Placid Reborn with their local pirate problem. Mito's a constellation up in Lonetrek, near Obe and Jan, where we're based now.