General Discussion

At A Glance articles are designed to give readers an accurate overview of an MMO's free trial. For two weeks, Laura Genender has been playing in EVE Online and today, she shares her experiences with us.

Starting off on my first day in EVE I felt like a 7th grader who, by some error of the education system, had been transferred into senior year of high school. I was alone, very small, and quite unprepared for my future – all I had to my name was a lonely little pod, a handful of skills, and a very stubborn nature.

14 days ago, I downloaded EVE Online and registered for the trial. All the feedback and activity on our forums about this somewhat eccentric Sci-Fi game eventually ate away at my curiosity, and brought me to the game’s official website. I jumped into the game with a fairly casual attitude, choosing my race more by flavor text and appearance than anything practical – the EVE website has a (perhaps overly) thorough starter’s guide, but with only 14 days to explore, I wanted to shoot, not read! I decided that the in-game tutorial by my helpful electronic assistant Aura would be more than enough. Of course, at this point, I didn’t understand how important my somewhat hastily made character decisions were – I didn’t even know that different races piloted different ships!

That’s how I found myself sitting in my Ibis (the Caldari starter frigate) somewhere near Kisogo. I had some general knowledge of how to progress my character and how to pilot my ship, plus a courier mission sending me on to my first NPC agent, but not much else. I was a strawberry blond, and looked sort of like the girl from Spiderman. My cargo bay was full of Veldspar, one of the most common unrefined ores.

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i am glad you liked it. i hope you are patient enough to get through the first weeks of not knowing exactly what the game is about and build a great career.

Laura, I am glad you enjoyed the game and gave it a fair shot.  Eve is very complex, and only getting moreso with each patch.  While it may seem impossible to catch up with those who have played for years, do not despair, you can be almost as good skillwise and get even better with practice handling your ship.

Each skill has 2 numbers, the skill level, and the skill rank (multiplier).  Each level takes 5 times longer to progress than the one before it, and the multiplier is applied to the number of skillpoints.  A rank 1 skill requires 250 skillpoints to reach Level 1 from 0, a rank 5 skill will require 1250 skillpoints to get to the same point.  Rank 1 L2 will take 1250 to reach, but Rank 5 L2 will take 6250 points.  Each level might only add a 2-20% increase in ability, and if you just train a bunch of skills to L4 you will get very good in a fraction of the time someone aiming for L5 will.

In this way, you can become very effective with veterans, good enough to compete and overcome them assuming equal gear.

It's when you get to advanced ships and skills that you have to max skills at L5.  If you train up Learning skills, you will raise your attributes and gain more skillpoints in less time.  It's highly recommended that you pick a path to specialize on, and train for it.  You can always change your mind later.  I also recommend training up the core skills for each category.  These are rank 1 skills that take little time to train up, but will benefit all ships that you fly.

I'll agree that EVE has to be approached from a different perspective. As the saying goes "EVE is la a sand box with land mines, deal with it". But if you give yourself time, engage the community and  keep at it, the reward is truly great.

All in all, a great review Laura!  

Really good and cool game..

you can get a 2 weeks  free  playing pass at www.eve-offline.nl

also more then 100 guides tools and other things..

I lovvve this game

Also, for the carebears among us (carebear pride!) Eve provides an arbitrarily deep economic game.  You can specialize in things like trading on the open markets, with skills that allow you larger numbers of open trades and larger ranges of those trades being available.  Some people seem never to do anything but mine ore, refine ore, and haul ore -- others get into manufacturing, inventing (developing elite technology items), or even odd little niches like salvager or archaeologist.

As you note, in the PvP game (which is really almost RvR, with huge alliances of corporations [like guilds] struggling over vast areas of fringe space) has many roles also.  Tanks, electronic warfare, fast harrier ships,  you name it.

But one of the joys of this game for me, in addition to the wide-open skill system is the graphics.  If you love the Hubble, you will peace out on the graphics, even as you pod your enemies! :)

There's just not enough time in 14 days to really get to know the game, but maybe that's enough time to get the barest taste for it.  I think when I'd been playing 14 days, I'd barely figured out which parts of the game were NPC based and which were player created -- which is a lot.

Eve can be a thinking person's game.  The women I meet who play are tough (you have to be to deal with the largely testosterone-dominated chat), smart, savvy, solution-oriented -- and can make fairly complex calculations jump hoops in their heads, often enough.  This is a game where I tend to meet more folks who are engineers and such in real life than any game I've played.

The economy is so complex that CCP actually has a full time economist on staff.

It's worth noting, btw, if you are thinking of making the commitment, that since you can only train one character per account at any one time, CCP is encouraging people to get 2nd accounts.  "The Power of 2" gets  you a 2nd account for $49.95 for 6 months.

If you'd like more info, a 14 day pass (fishing for referrals, so shoot me...:), pointers to some great sites for more information (eve-online.com being not the be-all-end-all of sites -- there's *far* more info on the fansites, and not the usual constellation of 10tonhammer et al), drop me a message on this board and I'll hook you up.

Yrs,

Shava

That was a good review!

Good article, but I feel the need to clarify the one big misconception about "how can a new player ever catch up to a veteran since skill points train in real time".  Well, of course you never will, but what few fail to realize is... you don't need to.

For every ship in EVE, be it a Cruiser, Battleship Stealth Bomber or Dreadnaught, there is a finite number of skills that you need to fly it from a basic, effective and maximum perspective.

Let's make up an arbitrary example for a Stealth Bomber (A ship I fly effectively now, after 5 months of gameplay)

Your typical Stealth Bomber probably needs about 20 skills to fly in a most basic manner, 30 skills to fly effectively and 40 skills would cover every possible skill you'd ever need to fly one as total expert.

As mentioned previously, skills have 5 levels to them........and due to the fact that training between levels 4 and 5 always takes a long time (anywhere from 3 days to 60 days) no one (not even the vets) trains them to level 5 unless its a requirement to get another skill.  (i.e to fly Stealth Bombers you must have Frigates 5)

The skill bonuses between levels is usually quite small, anywhere from 2% to 5%.... so even if you were to run into someone who went nuts and became the supreme SB pilot of all time....his skills would only be 5% better overall than anyone else who only trained to level 4.   And trust me....5% better does not outweigh the fact that in most fights, he who shoots first and hardest, wins.....

Right now, after 5 months of play, I can fly a SB almost as well (from strictly a skill point perspective) as the leader of my Corp...and in another month... I'll have him matched almost skill for skill, level for level...and he's been playing EVE for almost 2.5 years.

Difference is... I can only fly Caldari Stealth Bombers...while he can fly both Caldari and Mimitar SB's.  He can also fly a Dreadnaught, 2 races of Battleships, recon ships (something I'll start flying at the end of my 6 month) and Heavy Assault cruisers.

With my skills I'm limited right now to one race of Stealth Bomber, Ratting (PVE) Battleships (not fitted for PVP yet, but I have an alt that will be flying those within a month)

To sum up this long post.... right now my corporation needs me to fly Stealth Bombers...and I'm am fully capable of doing so in only 6 months of gameplay.  If you were to specialize more you can get to this point even quicker, however if you are new to EVE and don't plan on trading timecards for ISK than you will have to do the same as I did and train to fly a PvE ratting ship, or train up some mining or trading skills as well.

While it is true my Corp CEO can fly many more ships than I can, neither they nor I need me to be able to do the same to be effective in 0.0 PVP raids and I'm getting my share of kills and killmails... ..

A bigger issue for me now is that my ship is more skilled than I am.....there is a real trick to flying one well in every situation, and I made some mistakes last evening while camping a station that got me caught by a couple of interceptors as I tried to take flight....... and boom..... back to the station in my pod I went.

Wait till next time.... 

Oh yes, and to those who say, "I'm not waiting 6 months to get to the fun"...... while its true EVE requires a level of patience  not seen in many newer games today, I assure you, I've been having a great time getting to this point....the journey does matter......