Great post, and a very important point in EVE. I'm not exactly a big corporation but I've lost nearly erverything more than once, best thing to do is keep trooping on and become better than you were before :)

very good article.

All very, very true points for playing EVE.  Sometimes it's easy to lose sight of the bigger picture and I know I've gotten pissed plenty of times, but I try to keep things in perspective. :)

One thing I like to do if I lose a ship to someone in a one on one encounter - assuming it's not just a smack talking kid - is convo the guy and talk about how he beat me so I can learn from it.  Yeah it means I have to swallow my pride, but it lets me salvage something from the fiasco by gaining knowledge.

I agree with the broad strokes of this article, but I for one strongly disagree that staying in Empire Space Hi-Sec is a boring waste of my money.  I think there are alot of Industrialists and Mission Runners that would argue that point.  Also if it is so great in low and no sec space why do 80% of the players online usually are in high-sec?
 

I am also a little tired of people saying you can't solo in EVE.  If you are willing to go and learn the game on your own as you go it may take longer, but it is very do able.  I started playing with a group of friends, but we chose to go it without joining other corps.  We did learn from each other, but a couple of us, including me, were doing such the oposite of what everyone else was doing, that was almost no help at all.  We were so seaperated by playtimes and locations in game, were were esentially soloing it... and wee had a ball.

Its now 3 years later and we are still playing and often we help new players as we go, and for some of them, a corp is the thing they need, but we help them out... I even helped a certain gaming podcatester with a loose guide and some advice now and then.  He is taking the EVE University route and sounds like he wants to solo untill he finds fellow players he fits in with fairly later on in his gaming.

Then again I wanted to start manufacturing and researching right away, that didn't work out so well.

Good article.

I just recently re-activated my Eve account.  I've taken three seperate breaks... all due to different issues, but I've had an account since 2004.  I always reactivate for each major expansion to see if the game has more of what I'm looking for in a Space-based MMO.  I have to say I've been more impressed with the latest expansion than any of the previous.  A friend of mine was asking me about the game and what it was like to play and that's when it dawned on me at how best to explain the mindset you require to play Eve.  Eve ends up being just like any other strategy game that you sit down with your friends to play when you take it in it's entirety.  However, it's on a MUCH grander scale.  The BEST example I can compare it to is an old game called Diplomacy (http://www.diplom.org/~diparch/resources/god/intro.htm I don't want to go into much detail on the game, but read if interested).  This dawned on me last night when searching for a new "home" in Empire space for missions and manufacturing.  It can be extremely intimidating when you open the in-game map for the first time... it was my very first "wow" moment.  I've opened that map countless times in the past and last night with the amount of alliance activity displayed to me it hit me like a ton of bricks.  I firmly believe if you enjoy strategy games and you go into Eve playing with this mindset, you are guaranteed to have a good time.  Eve is not your second life... it is THE grand strategy game, have fun with it.

If you are not discouraged and still interested in playing this game that obviously does something right considering the number of players it has, then I will try to give you a few pointers.

Really.. how many players does it actually have?

last guess was around 250-300k. Concurrently it can have 25k to 53k players on (least the numbers i have seen)

Im logging in now actually and the numer is currently at 37,701 currently playing in game right now.

Yep and primetime weekends it's generally in the 40-45k player count.  That's good and bad.  If you're trying to run missions outta hub systems like my in Dodixie (godo Gallente level 4 mission agent) then it's a pain as there's usually 400+ players in that system alone.  That means lag and ninja looters galore.  The upside is it's *easy* to buy and sell items in such systems.

Once again I find myself in the contrarian position. I couldn't disagree more with jlan26 and Stradden's one sided point of view.  I am not saying they are incorrect that that is the way the game is for them, but it isn't that way for everybody.

As a businessman in EVE I find that the more people screw other people over and try to one up over others, especially their friends and allies, the worse they do in the long run.  Don't get me wrong it does happen, and I have had to turn on people, but never with plans and malice of forethought.  I have been the victim of it and in all but one occasion I have seen them lose out on magnatudes more than they have gained.

EVE is a game that is complex and diffrent from one place in the EVE Universe to the next.

I have friends who ran in Mining Ops in Lo-Sec Space and if they left their drones out all the time their own fellow fleet members would destroy them and then shoot the miners ship into its hull leaving an expensive or time consuming result.  Having never done one with me, he took his character to a place a group of players that I would often chat with started forming pick up mining ops.  I left my drones out after a pirate attack, and when he blew up the first drone every gun in the op shot him until he was floating in his pod, even though they lost several ships.  Later they all moved to other areas, and so did I.  In the new place I was mining I had to watch the chat because they would ask a funny question every 20 minutes and if you didn't answer they would come in and mine all the nearby asteroids around you and steal from your jetisoned can as a test to locate macro miners in secure space.

Some places are hostle and some places are benign. I once was given a 2-3 million ISK Blueprint Original just because I was friendly and they never used it for anything.  I was given 2 ships for basicly runing a shuttle 2 systems over. I have also had war declared on my corp because I shot at an ore thief before he blew me up when I got stuck on a station

So isn't that 30-40-50k accounts, not players? How do they measure that again?

Anyway, when I played, I didn't meet many players who kept less than 2-3 accounts. In the corp I was in, most of the "serious" players had multiple accounts. Logistics and the fact that it takes many months to train a single character to a decent skill level in a single field of expertice, makes this decision easy for most dedicated EvE players.

In a ideal world, one player would play a miner and then another would haul for that miner and a third would guard the operation and a fourth would trade for them all and so on, and it woud be a wonderful social experience. In reality, mostly it doesn't work like that. The guard would be off ratting or PvP'ing instead and the afk miner would be directed to conduct his business in highsec and do the hauling and everything else himself and since that is pretty much mindnumbingly boring, he'd also want a PvP character and so on and so forth.

The attention EvE gets compared to the size of it's player base has always been out of proportion. This is due to some elements that certainly are to the benefit of CCP and the qualities of the game they have made, but somehow I could never quite shake the feeling that what EvE does best is myth making.

The idea of EvE is much grander than it's actual everyday gameplay.

Originally posted by Quale

The idea of EvE is much grander than it's actual everyday gameplay.

Ummmmmm...says you. I play "The Idea of Eve" everyday. Nice article by the way, keep em coming.

I enjoyed this write up, and think its spot on in alot of ways.

Much of Eve is how you handle loss, how you react, and how you learn from it to become stronger.

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Originally posted by Quale
So isn't that 30-40-50k accounts, not players? How do they measure that again?
Anyway, when I played, I didn't meet many players who kept less than 2-3 accounts. In the corp I was in, most of the "serious" players had multiple accounts. Logistics and the fact that it takes many months to train a single character to a decent skill level in a single field of expertice, makes this decision easy for most dedicated EvE players.

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That would be concurrently active accounts. Total subscriptions are around 250k according to mmogchart.com (There are no apparent updates since end of 2008. I think an unofficial report somewhere put total number of subscriptions near 300k now.)

According to Dr. Enyo, the resident economist, only about 10% of the player base actually use multiple accounts. Then again, the average length of a subscription in EVE or any mmo is only about 6 months. Those 10% are probably also the same ones that have been playing for a year plus. It also goes along with the 50 or 60 people I know in game, and we're some of the 'exceptions' of multiple accounting and time playing. There might be a dozen with multiple accounts.

Allright Magicman thnx for the facts.

10% seems awfully low to me, but then I did most of my playing in nosec practically right from the start so maybe I was mixed up in that kind of crowd I dunno.

I also think it's fair to modify my previous statement about attention, cuz 300k is a substantial number, especially when it's long term.

very very very important. a good guild that matches you changes everything