All things EVE

[MrHat]

Cerrano Pax.

If I ever finish the tuturial, I'll come play.

[HRose]

FWIW, this is as good a time as any to get in, they just rolled out a major content patch (Red Moon Rising) that will change a lot of the fundamentals in ship balance and PvE activity, so the veterans don't have as much of an advantage.

Imho it's better to wait January, when they are supposed to add the new asian bloodlines. This would also help the patch to settle down and some of the bugs fixed.

[Hoax]

Fuckers, all of yous.

I guess I'll turn on my account and start CruiserV then come back and see whether anyone of you are actually playing a month from now (fucking V skills take sooo long!).

[Cheddar]

I am currently mining and working skills.  Got me an ol' fashioned slaver ship retrofitted for expanded cargo space with a lil mining laser mounted on top.  I think next town run I am gonna toss a booster on there.  Any suggestions for a quicker way to make money?  I basically fly out to a 'roid, mine Scordite, and sell the raw ore.  Round trip runs around 3-4 hours and nets me 430k+.  I did buy me one of them fancy ass frigates, but I figure twas best to work me skills and whatnot for now.

[HRose]

I think I could possibly make 400k in 4 hours by just blowing up NPCs, loot, refine the loot into minerals and selling it.

[Cheddar]

I think I could possibly make 400k in 4 hours by just blowing up NPCs, loot, refine the loot into minerals and selling it.

Well that makes me feel better!  Hopefully I can add a hundred or two thousand credits to that once I figure out the best method for selling ore.  Boring as shit, but things will get better once I can work a real mining vessel.  Which is a bit off, but that is ok.

[fnddf2]

EVE Online -- "It's the only game to play when you need to get other stuff done"

I really identify with this quote.  It's the reason that I liked EVE.

I used to be in the newbie zones mining asteroids, and while I was doing it I would eat, chat with people, lift weights, surf the web, etc.  All the while, not only is your character doing something, but he's training his skills at the same time.  It's kind of like an MMOG that you can play in a way in which it doesn't dictate your life.

Man, all this talk has really got me tempted to resubscribe, but I'm in the middle of Vampire: Bloodlines right now, and then I have to finish BG2. :(

[Yoru]

I can be located in Eve as Yaeru. Drop me a line if anyone wants to trade stuff. Or something. My little noobcorp is currently working on getting a Kestrel manufacturing outfit together while we slowly scrape towards being able to run a small moon-mining operation.

[Reg]

Cheddar, mining isn't the only way to make your initial money in EVE. In fact, I think mining in your newbie ship with your newbie laser is almost guaranteed to bore you and burn you out on the game. Do the tutorial and then run missions for the agent your tutorial guy sends you to.

Those early missions often give implants as rewards that you can sell for 500k up to as much as a million or two. That'll keep you in frigates until you get your skills up high enough to make mining a worthwhile endeavour.

Note: Since the patch I hear missions are much harder than they were. My advice may be totally out of date and guaranteed to get you killed now. :)

[Venkman]

Played this with a few Corp/F13 folks in January '04, I think it was Hellfire who was running things. Every comment about reading books, catching up on finances, and hitting Refresh at forums was straight on back then. I don't know who first coined 'interactive screensaver', but it fit. I hear they've sped up travel a bit, but "a bit" to me sounds like nowhere near enough.

That's what killed the game for me. The travel time. I can't play something I'm merely watching for 30 minutes at a time. Even raiding doesn't get that boring. Nothing against Eve of course. I had this problem in EQ, DAoC, and CoH too. As cool as some of the features were, too much downtime's a game killer for me. Sure it may be required to build social ties. But after a while, boredom gives way to drama, and I've got a life to live.

I'd love to hear Eve got so fast it takes no more than 10 minutes to make 20 hops. Then I'd check it out.

Odd you need 2bil to gets that much cash though. Incidentally, that's about what you'd need in SWG creds to get that much cash too :) But seriously, I'd have thought you'd need a bit less given the arduous time sink involved in getting that much Isk in Eve.

[Akkori]

Well, money farmers are flourishing in Eve, so money is available to be bought. I wish game companies would focus on solving problems like this. It destroys economies.

[Numtini]

The travel time is a major irritant. They were going to do some changes to travel in the last patch, having you warp closer to the gate, but introducing an error. However, it slowed down people who already have complete bookmarks and it left people insanely vulnerable to pirates. And anything as good as bookmarks would leave the pirates without easy marks (ie, the people who don't have bookmarks), so they screamed up a storm about making the warps more accurate.

Eventually they will have to fix the system because the BMs are causing enormous lag, but no matter how they do it, someone's going to get screwed and ccp really does try not to break things that are working.

[Tige]

Meh, travel times are a nuisance but I rarely travel more than 3 or 4 jumps 90% of the time.  I have all my stuff in one system (Nonni) and then set up shop for agent mission/pirate hunting runs in the surrounding systems.  Once I move on I take out my cargo hauler and move everything back to my home base.

I did go back to run the tutorial to get the free implant after I resubscribed and found most players refuse to strike out beyond a couple of systems from theit home empire. 

Find a 0.5 or even 0.4 system with agents nearby and travel times are minimized significantly unless you decide to relocate.

[Soukyan]

Heh. Pretty funny how there are all these folks playing Eve and not having mentioned it. Must be the pace. But allow me to admit that I re-activated my sub a couple months ago and have been playing as well. I manage to have some fun, get some other work done during travel and all-around having a pretty fun time of it. Yada yada yada. Got a couple characters, but have been concentrating on just one that I created new at resub. Silas Fennec.

[Merusk]

Damnit.  First the Corp guys were going on about it now all you are.

I'm really trying hard to not resubscribe.  I'm enjoying WoW still and can only afford 1 MMO right now.

 Curse you all, I miss my Battlecruiser.

[MahrinSkel]

Then I'll make it even worse: RMR improved all the BC's, they have 10% more hull, armor, shield, powergrid, and CPU, and they seem to have picked up more slots (at least my Cyclone got a med slot, but then a lot of Minn ships did).  You can actually fit a full set of cruiser-grade guns on them now, which makes them a real threat.  They also added destroyer equivalents to interceptors with built-in warp bubble generators, and *cloaking* cruisers with huge bonuses to webifier range (both to act as counters to the interceptor frigates).

Missions got harder from what I have heard, but the bounties and loot tables have been improved across the boards and especially for the level 4 missions.  And rats seem to be easier in general, people have been killing NPC battleships in interceptors and I took one out in my Cyclone, something I never could have done before RMR (took way too damned long and too much ammo, though).  It looks like CCP was trying to deliberately inflate the cash and module economies to increase people's willingness to risk ships in PvP.  As a side effect, they'll probably cause a increase in mineral prices (less crap loot to be recycled and more cash), which should make mining more lucrative.  Especially as the new Titan and Carrier ships have *insane* mineral requirements, and all the alliances are scrambling to build them.

--Dave

[bhodikhan]

Mineral prices won't go up anytime soon. Every, and I mean every system has chinese farmers stripping every belt so the mineral prices have dropped through the floor. It's pretty obvious when each group has characters that were created within minutes of each other and are about 4 months old.

I cancelled my 24 mil skillpoint char when I couldn't find enough ore to make any ships.  When CCP added content that was priced in the billions they must have known the sale of ISK on EBay was going to go through the roof.

It seems in every MMO that farming has become pretty blatent and ruins my fun. That's what I get for creating a mining corp. I knew I should have focused on PvP skills and let the chinese do the mining. Hell. I bet 3-4K of the people online are 24/7 farmers.

[Righ]

It looks like CCP was trying to deliberately inflate the cash and module economies to increase people's willingness to risk ships in PvP.

I cancelled my 24 mil skillpoint char when I couldn't find enough ore to make any ships.

What's wrong here? Is it actually possible to make ships in this game and PvP with them without fear of setting yourself back ages of mining time or loads of IGE dollars, or is this game even more of an uphill struggle than Shadowbane such that losers become quitters?

[Merusk]

It sounds like bhodikhan was a crafter.  His problem wasn't that he was losing ships, but that he couldn't find enough resources to make ships to sell.  His 24 mil skill points are likely in Mining/ Crafting/ Research rather than Flying/ Gunning.   Probably not something you'd want to do unless you have access to an Uber Corp and the vast network of resources/ quarrantined low-sec systems they control.

As I understand it, Farmers are only a problem in Empire space. (Security .5 and up) where the NPC Uber cops will blow you up if you fire on anyone.  In stretches of space controlled by players, they just let the farmers mine then blow them up and take their stuff.

What Mahrin is referring to is the fact that if you lose a fight in EvE you lose your ship.  While there's insurance at a reasonable cost, it only covers the price of your hull, not the modules you added-on or the stuff in your cargo hold.  That means if I were to get blown-up in my 30mil Battlecruiser I'll get my 30-mil back, but still have to have the cash/ resources to reinstall the other 5-mil+ of guns/ ammo/ fittings I'd installed.. and I had some cheap shit on my ship. (Not even Tech 2 beyond Guns.)   

This cost makes a lot of folks very risk-averse.  You're not going to be willing to PvP if your PvE or trade-route income can't support losing that cool ship and replacing everything on it.  If I remember right, Dawn Falcon over at Corp said he lost about 5 very expensive ships in one particular engagement his corp was involved in.  He'd been playing a LONG time, and had the funds to absorb it, however.  To someone like me where 30 mil was a significant investment I was flabbergasted. 

The first unwritten rule of Eve is: Do not Fly what you can't afford to replace.. often.  For new players this means sticking with Frigates for quite a while, because they're cheap.  The upshot is that a well-flown and well-equipped Frigate has a chance against that 24-million skillpoint pilot in his 300 million dollar ship, unlike the level 1 vs a level 60 scenario in most RPGs.  So while you may FEEL gimpy, you're not really as gimpy as you feel.

Edit:

I am weak, but CCP is making me strong. I tried resubbing just now but their server puked when I hit 'reactivate my account.'  I will take this as a sign and just play Civs4 again instead.

[Strazos]

For the first time, I'm trying this out.

Got myself a Griffin frigate with some launchers and a nice laser on it. I think I'm leaning more towards combat than anything else. Acting as a miner escort for some of you and trying to blow up interlopers might be cool.

But really, I have no idea what's going on. I just run missions and use autopilot.

[Hoax]

Fuck my resolve is weakening past the breaking point, I'm doomed if I ever bother to have my account name and password sent to me...

[Strazos]

I seriously think it would be cool if we could get a whole mess of people playing together for the next couple of months. Some of us have tried before with WoW, but it never quite works.

Make it work, damnit.

[Merusk]

Attention span the size o...

Kitty!

[bhodikhan]

I'm not really a crafter anymore. I've got most gunnery and missle skills trained to 5. I also own and fly Interceptor, Battleships, BattleCruisers, and well fitted Cruisers. Most Nav, Engineering, and Spacecraft are also almost all level 5 skilled. I've got Cloaking trained to 5 so I can sneak past most blockades. I can run level 4 missions solo with my Raven ( even with the missle nerf ). After the last patch I'm still not sure if my Thorax is that strong anymore due to the cut in drone capacity.

Just sucks to have trained my mining, manufacturing, and refining skills so high only to have them basically negated by the huge influx of chinese ISK farmers. If you haven't noticed they're everywhere.

[Strazos]

I'm just wondering at which point I become...relevant.

[Venkman]

I seriously think it would be cool if we could get a whole mess of people playing together for the next couple of months. Some of us have tried before with WoW, but it never quite works.

With this group, think in terms of weeks. That's what happened with us in PS, SWG, CoH, and Eve. I actually had a great time with folks here in these games. The jaded hate stuff really doesn't come out in the games :) But we're all victims of ADHD or something because we get bored quickly.

When posting becomes more fun than playing, you know the game's interest fu was just not there. And being a group of people who know each other for awhile, when more than three people quit at once, most others either scatter to other ingame guilds, friends they knew, or out also.

Only in SWG did we survive that, but mostly because by the time the people started quiting, they had already introduced their friends to our guild, and some forum lurkers showed up too.

Finally, it's Eve. As different as it is, if it's not engaging in real time, it's going to be hard to hold attention. And offline advancement is not a feature. It's an excuse.

Just want to manage your expectations :)

[Strazos]

Oh, I know. But I have no real commitments for at least 9 months, so I can afford to do stuff like this.

If someone wants to show me the ropes, that'd be fine and dandy.

[Venkman]

Yea, and sorry if I was coming off dismissive. Gaming with this group is worth it, no matter for how long.

Something I forgot to comment on earlier:

I wonder if EVE will be the first MMOG to start off niche and move to wider audience.

I'd say UO and EQ were there first, and then WoW.

UO because it really blew the lid off of MUDs going graphical and all. EQ because it tripled that, and WoW because, for the most part, the talking heads thought the genre was fairly saturated and would forever be relegated to a slow trickle of players.

If Eve ever retrofits some form of combat people could do fulltime, and for it to be fun from the moment a newbie enters the game, then I can see it really exploding. But right now it feels more like a "mature player's" MMORPG, requiring vastly different preferences and ways to play than your average grind-to-Raid. It's also a good respite from the out-in-front AAA titles gaining all the newbies, if someone wants to avoid them.

[MrHat]

Stopped playing.

Realized it wasn't an X amount of turns per day game.

[Strazos]

Oh yeah, forgot to mention that the name is Strazos Strovanov.

[squirrel]

I should really be a tester for MMOGS. Not that i'd do that job. This is the result of me trying to get anything done on EVE's account creation site - after multiple errors concerning an apparent inability to validate my CC info (on 2 cards):

Fatal error: Unable to open /cgi-bin/eve_online.cfg/scripts/enduser/asknew.php in Unknown on line 0

sigh

[Venkman]

I should really be a tester for MMOGS.

We already all are. We just do it for free.

[Yegolev]

I had some cc trouble until I put spaces between every four numbers.  I don't know if that fixed it, but it worked after that.

Longest.  Tutorial.  Ever.

[Viin]

I should really be a tester for MMOGS.

We already all are. We just do it for free.

You mean: we pay for the priveledge. Screw a job, we'll pay *you* to test *your* game!

Edit:

Oh, my main char is Irek Dabry, but you can find me with Viin Seeven as well.

[Jamiko]

I've been playing for a few months now, just passed the 4 million skill point mark. I'm now turning towards some 0.0 or pvp action but really have no idea where to turn. I'm aware of many larger corps and alliances, but which one is the one for me? It's really quite hard to know what type of corps they are and what they do day in and day out. If I join up with one alliance, will other alliances forever ban me from joining if I don't like the first one? Plus many aren't even recruiting.

Regardless, even though I don't play a lot, I'm still enjoying my time in EVE. I think the realtime/offline skill training does more to keep me subscibed than anything else does.