Just out of curiosity, do you enjoy the process of figuring out game mechanics and ship tweaking for pve and pvp or do you prefer reading a guide and not really having to think about it?
I enjoy the problem solving aspect
I would rather read a guide
0voters
I do enjoy problem solving but its too expensive loosing ships for science.
My time is worth more and would rather read a guide.
0voters
For Above but couldn’t add it in:
I like to problem solve and money isn’t an issue.
I like to problem solve and money is an issue but SCIENCE anyways!
0voters
I don’t look at guides as it reduces my own enjoyment.
I start on my own but like to look at guides to see how different other peoples solutions are.
I start on my own but look at guides when I get stuck.
I use guides to cross reference and get information and then problem solve from there.
I use a guide as a starting point and tweak things afterwards to suit my playstyle.
I use a guide and don’t deviate as it often costs me time and money to change it.
0voters
No judgement here, just had a guy telling me on avg 86% of people would rather just follow a guide and I am trying to break that down to see if its accurate.
I think there may be a negative correlation between people on a game forum and people who want to play the game casually following guides to not think about it too much.
It depends. When it comes to fittings I enjoy just tinkering around…though one has to have some knowledge in the first place to do that. But I also often look stuff up, for example which drones to use. One of the most useful things can be ‘how to’ videos.
The trouble with some guides is that the people who produce them are not always good at writing educational material. The second problem is that, as their interest in EVE wains, so too does their commitment to keeping their work up to date.
With that said, they are sometimes better than nothing, particularly in giving a broad overview of a topic. If you want detail, best do the maths yourself. Or go to YouTube - where, alas the same problems may apply which I referred to, above.
Not everyone who produces a YouTube video has taken the trouble to write a script, so lots of ‘umm’, ‘ah…’, ‘O yes, I forgot to mention…’, and dodgy screen recording. In their defence, I have to say that, in general, EVE the game does not make easy the guide-writer’s task. Good luck to them, I say.
We all know that mastering a subject does not make you qualified to teach it.
So, my maths abilities being very basic, I do what I can and Google the rest.
I don’t subscribe to those gurus selling online courses on getting rich.
As a person who loves bigger ships (fancy destroyers and above) losing them can really hurt my wallet. I don’t have 100+bil to blow on science to see how many golems I can lose to gate camps and just sheer experience of that.
I find myself often looking at Killboard for other people’s fits. Especially when a really good lowsec player loses a ship now and then, and you can see what they fitted and work out why. I agree about the wallet thing…and its scary undocking an expensive ship in a system full of people with 10,000 solo kills.
I thought this is an interesting poll, one input, there’s a time threshold for most folks at which point they’re likely to either give up or go searching for a guide. Maybe you could call it difficulty, or persistence but its a bit hard to draw the conclusion of either I won’t ever problem solve or and prefer starting with a guide, I suspect most have a threshold somewhere in the middle.
Needs a “check several guides to cross reference the information and get as much info as you can. To then use that info to make your own plan from scratch”.
We loved the working things out part , we made some very strange setups to fight gankers , many worked great. Passive targeters to e-war burst, even a fleet of energy neuts armageddon’s to stop a gank fleet of talos.
When I started we had a great bunch of guys and we helped each other out doing various things and with fits and ideas and had a really robust discussions about game theory in terms of fitting and usages and such. So it wasnt a guide it was other peoples ideas and theory crafting. From there I fell in love with figuring things out and now that is one of my main pleasures in Eve.
I hardly ever go to guides though I have sometimes for things like cosmos agents or standings issues.
We used stabbers to bump gank target away from gank balls , works really well but hard to time right
Indeed, when ever we came up with something the gankers would counter it , we work on jamming they increased ECCM.
We e-war burst they target our characters doing the burst before they get to the gank ball. So many times I almost got on target to set off the burst and I was in a pod.
We even worked on pulling them out of a traveling gank fleet , with instant lock ships , worked great for a bit untill the 1st fitted warp core stabs, we took the piss out of that so they then avoided our camps
Unfortunately they are not idiots and so counted our counter and so it went on .
Essentially this. I’m happy to figure out my own ship builds, for instance, especially because my priorities often won’t be the same as many guide-writers. But there’s no way I’m ever going to try work out the math on how angular velocity affects turret accuracy, or lose 50 ships trying to find out if something like slingshotting will even work.
For stuff that’s fairly well documented or presented in the game, or that can be learned/tested in a reasonable amount of time, I prefer to test myself. Once something looks like it’s going to take hours to determine, I start looking for guides.
Also, even after checking something out on my own, I’ll usually end up googling to see what other people learned that I may have missed. So “start on your own, follow with a guide/other people’s knowledge” would be the most accurate reply for me. (Lots of EVE info isn’t in “a guide” but can be found by searching.)
and just sheer experience of that.