EVE online

[creamcorn]

thinking about getting into it. heard its a great time-killer, which is exaclty what i need right now

anyone here play it?

[cipher]

I have some vague memory of Sinitron saying he does, but I forget.

[Sinitron]

46+ mil sp clocking in

eve online is pretty cool if you have a lot of friends to play with

you can run it in windowed mode and do shit semi-afk all day to make money (mining, shitty missions, NPC farming, trading) and then spend the nights doing organized stuff with the people you play with

you can piss in anyones porridge and the GMs won't give a shitty unless you spout abusive language in public channels or gank people in noob systems

that being said there are a few drawbacks

first of all, while the tutorials have been greatly improved since I started playing, the game is still REALLY FUCKING COMPLEX and IT WILL TAKE TIME TO GET USED TO IT i cannot stress this enough

it does NOT give you instant gratification, and the only way you can advance your character is by sticking with it for a LONG FUCKING TIME

i've played on/off since 2008 and I'm not even close to being able to pilot the largest capital ships, though these usually require considerable skills and pilot experience to utilize properly anyway, and are generally only useful to larger alliances

it's also important to note that while you can fuck around with other people, they can also fuck around with YOU, and it is NOT a single-player game
if you fly around looking for trouble by yourself, chances are you will die a lot, while if you fly in a larger gang, a 'blob', your chances of dying are significantly decreased, but people are also more likely to call you a fucking coward (the same people who would relentlessly gank you while undocking from a station from hours on end)

when i first started out, i started out just AFK mining and shit to make money, dropping it in cargo containers in space, the fetching it with a cargo ship
of course i didn't know it, but people could take shit from your containers with no repercussions aside from you being allowed o fire on them, so some 2-year veteran came along in a fancy genocide ship and canflipped me, ie put all my stuff in his own can and if i were to take it back he would kill me
after some dancing back and forth i got my stupid asteroid ore back and the other fag didn't get to murder my ass so i just said FUCK U in the local chat and ever since i've generally tried to kill people from his alliance (they're hardcore fags so it doesn't work out too well)

so yeah if you know someone who play it actively you can ask them for help getting started, i have an active sub atm but i'm just in my own alt corp right now and not playing a lot and most of my friends seem to be playing less or have moved on to world of tanks or something

IF YOU DECIDE TO START OUT
- mining is boring as fuck
- industry is complex as shit
- trading is competetive like no tomorrow
- mission-running is retarded
- shooting real people is a lot of fun (but you can't do it AFK)

You can choose from 4 races, at first it really doesn't fucking matter because you will be shitty at everything anyway and you can crosstrain for any race later, however the best thing you can do is focus on one race, their skillset and supporting skills and take it from there. Basically, specialization is good at first, then later you can branch out.

EVERY RACE HAS USEFUL SHIPS, BUT SOME ARE MORE COMPLEX THAN OTHERS.

Generally, Minmatar is the best race to start out with, by virtue of their low-end ships being generally the best and fairly easy to use. They rely on speed, so they're good for catching/'tackling' other assholes and ensuring they cannot flee. 'Tacklers' are generally very valuable in fleets, as experienced players prefer their shitty expensive spacedildos for ships, leaving noobs and nutcases to do this sometimes utterly suicidal task.

However, it doesn't fucking matter, because tackling ships are usually cheap and if you're a noob you can generally get free ships from older players or just the corporation as a whole for this specific role (so they may continue flying their spacedildotrophies). It's also probably the most exciting role you can have in a fleet, as by comparison you can be in a slow battleships drudging manually from point A to point B, or you can sit on standby in a capital ship for hours listening to comms and waiting for the go signal (which never happens because nobody wants to lose their capitals so fuck you) you can tell by this point that I think tackling is gr8!!

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The game is a massive timesink, and a lot of time is spent waiting around. Some basic skills only take like 5-10 minutes to complete, while the advanced ones for, say, Titan ships take about 2 MONTHS. Not days, or weeks, but MONTHS, NOT including the prerequisites to even start on the skills or the supporting skills needed to be able to halfway decently fly the fucking things - DON'T TRY TO RUSH TO LARGER SHIPS, YOU WILL JUST BE SHIT AT FLYING THEM - SPEND TIME DEVELOPING YOUR SKILLS AND THE TRANSITION WILL BE MUCH MORE PLEASANT.

also

THE SOCIAL ASPECT IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN WAITING FOR FUCKING SKILLS!
You need friends to enjoy this game. You need to tolerate shitty drunk brits on teamspeak, and you need to accept that command might screw up royally sometimes and get you killed.

Basically, you can't be too fucking elitist. You're starting from scratch, so find someone nice through some recruitment ads or whatever, and get some help learning the ropes. EVE University is a good start, or some faction warfare corp possibly. Most serious corps won't accept you if you're on a trial account - if you quit, you won't be worth their investment, and usually they want to prevent spies from getting in. This is another aspect of the game, with espionage, sabotage and theft. This double-dealing is pretty cool, but it takes a considerable amount of time to pull off. Even though they advertise it as something you CAN do, you shouldn't FOCUS on it from the start, so just be nice to people you meet at first.



this is a mess ok?? i wrote a bunch of shit but idk how to summarize and make it more easily readable but ok here is a summary

- you can be an asshole
- don't be an asshole (until you know what you are doing)
- don't rush to the next tier of ships
- get some friends
^ i'm not your friend i don't even KNOW you (but i could probably play with you maybe i guess)

i think i can still give out 21-day buddy trials so if you're interested you can just PM me the e-mail you want me to send it to.

[Sinitron]

my post is a good simulation of eve online (lots of text)

[Ashington]

i played a couple of times the most recent time with sin for a bit it was good and i'd definately emphesise the playing with friends and finding a corp points

[W.A.S.I.M.]

i was considering to play eve in early '10 but i didn't do it cuz it was real timed(?) and like sinitron said it would seriously take a long time,

[creamcorn]

that sounds pretty fuckin cool sinitron. however, ive been doing some research and ive heard people say its just spreadsheets in space. what can you tell me about that?
pm'd my email btw

any other people play this game?

[Sinitron]

It's called 'spreadsheets online' because you don't directly control your ship with a joystick or keyboard, and rely more on the mouse to click around with a few hotkeys. There is a lot of information to process, and a lot of it is presented through what are essentially spreadsheets, like market data and the targeting overview. When you're doing actual combat and not just snoozing through some stupid NPCs, it provides invaluable tactical information with at a glance, such as shiptypes, distance and even speed. Put another way, if it weren't for those 'spreadsheets', there would be no efficient way to gain the necessary data to react in a larger battle. When you have 500+ people duking it out, it's hard to keep track of things through visual input alone.

A lot of people are incredibly let down at first, because they expect a game more like Freelancer or DarkStar One, but that's not what EVE Online is about. The game itself can be pretty damn boring unless you love staring at a mining laser all day, though this applies to the vast majority of MMO games. What makes it exciting is the fact that there are consequences to every action, and you can be punished hard for screwing up. If you die, your ship is gone forever. If your escape capsule is shot up, YOU die, and if you haven't paid for an up-to-date clone of yourself, you lose skillpoints, which can be a pretty serious blow as skillpoints are gained passively over time - a lot of people make skill plans to decrease/increase their own attributes at points and accumulate more skillpoints faster and more orderly to reach a goal using third party applications like EVEmon.

That's also where the timesink thing comes in, and also the reason why you find a lot of successful real-life people in EVE, like lawyers, doctors, and people who run their own businesses, but not a lot of kids - you need to pay attention to every little detail if you want to do something coherently and efficiently with rewards over time. It's not like World of Warcraft which gives you achievements, experience points and money for just kissing your own ass and doing dumb, tedious shit.

During your first week you might be able to upgrade to a destroyer, week two will could see you in a cruiser and within a month or so you might be able to fly a battlecruiser with the most basic equipment. Over the same time period, you should also be developing a basic understanding of the game, as neither skillpoints or advanced ships will save you if you're fucking stupid. I remember a while ago 2 veteran players started up a couple trial characters, and on day 2 they were out killing a LOT of people, because they already knew what they were doing and used their limited funds and skillsets to great effect.

Also, there's nothing more exciting than flying around alone or as a scout in hostile territory knowing that with each jump into another system you can be jumping into a trap, having to rely on data from the star map, intelligence channels and plain common sense, and then finally catching some unattentive prick, locking him down and yell at your buddies to come help you kill him before his buddies arrive to kill YOU.