Good evening! This post is mostly some of the thoughts I’ve gathered since I started playing. First I got a bit sad about it but then I told myself that EVE is a long game and reputation matters more than a zkill board. So since I feel better about it, I present…
EVE Online has a reputation for being brutally difficult, but the longer I play, the more that reputation feels inflated. Most “difficulty” in EVE doesn’t come from execution, reflexes, or decision-making under pressure — it comes from time. Skill points accumulate whether you log in or not, standings grind upward through repetition, and access to ships, fits, and income streams is largely locked behind how long you’ve been around. A new player can understand mechanics perfectly and still lose simply because they haven’t waited long enough.
What often gets labeled as “player skill” is really just long-term accumulation of advantages: trained alts, stockpiles, bookmarks, intel channels, and institutional knowledge passed down through corps. None of that is learned in the moment; it’s inherited or accrued over months and years. When veterans talk about “earning” their edge, it’s rarely about outperforming someone in a fair situation — it’s about having more layers of preparation already in place before the fight even starts.
That doesn’t make EVE bad, but it does challenge the myth that it’s uniquely hard. It’s more accurate to say EVE is slow. The primary filter isn’t competence, it’s patience. If difficulty were really the defining feature, newer players with better understanding and adaptability would have more room to compete. Instead, the universe quietly rewards whoever has simply been here the longest. I’m genuinely curious whether people disagree — and if so, where the actual “hard” part begins once time is removed from the equation.
EVE isn’t difficult indeed. It is complex. That’s why experience wins. Knowing how to use alts, knowing people, knowing places to get the right info at the right time, having failed a dozen times and learned from each iteration… this IS skill. It is acquired over time if you are clever enough. There are people in EVE, quite a lot sadly (or luckily, depending on perspective), who get outsmarted by someone new but quick learning and collecting experience while the old ones stagnated in habits they learned in their first few month and never developed beyond that, never actually built up that experience. Ten year old noob chars. All that crap content: mining, missions… all this stupid grind is just the thin oil layer on an ocean. The real game is taking a deep breath and finding out how deep you can dive while others stay up there on their boat scanning the horizon for an island.
I agree, but let’s not forget about the casual players who don’t have the time or the inclination to sacrifice 8h a day on gaming. They have 2-3 hours at most, enough to mine, rat or do some missions.
I never started EVE thinking I’m going to conquer a constellation, be lord of a wormhole or CEO of a corporation. I knew I was just going to do low-hanging fruits because
I’m not a real gamer, I’m super-duper casual.
And I don’t have 8h a day to spend on my PC.
That makes a lot of sense but again, some players don’t care about diving deep, they just want to play a space game for a few hours.
It’s not about how much time you (can) sink into EVE really. It is how you spend it. You can decide to stagnate at the grind and be a forever-HighSec-miner/ratter for 3 hours a day who gets ganked once a month. Or you can decide to jump over that fence and spend 3 hours a day somewhere else. In the latter case, you’ll be experienced after three month on a level the former will not reach in 10 years. You can spend 3 hours in Faction Warfare, in a Wormhole, in a group that does Nullsec raids… or you can spend 3 hours looking at rocks disappearing while hitting F-keys every 10 minutes. It’s really a matter of choice and personality traits. You can admire a bodybuilder, then realize you can’t lift for 6 hours each day and decide to instead lift for one hour - or go to the kitchen and eat a pound of ice cream. Be a sheep or be a wolf, no matter for how long.
Player skill is learning the mechanics of the game.
No amount of ISK invested into buying trained alts off the bazaar, mass buying resources, injecting SP, or blinging out fancy hulls will ever replace the skill and knowledge you acquire while training those alts, gathering those resources, and building those fancy hulls. Yes, you can literally buy your way into a Titan, but if you don’t know what you’re doing with it you’re just going to lose it to the first people that have the knowledge to lock it down and kill it.
I can and have lost T2 hulls to week old PvPers, because they were better at flying their ships than I was at flying mine.
IMO youre really changing your tune in later posts. In your initial post you say its about time invested and then later on you say you do not have the time to invest and that you are a “super-duper casual”. Other posters have said it is about where you sink your time in into this game and what you dream of. You admitted that you didnt think of doing X, Y or Z when you started. Yet what is to stop you, or anyone of doing so? No matter how early on in game. The end result is you have chosen to play a game in a certain way where your progression is limited by you and you alone ( PEBKAC) and if you are okay with that then what is your actual argument?
Yes, Eve takes time, as all skills do, truthfully, to get better at and master, and what you choose to go after is really how you will rise or fall in Eve Online. But saying it’s a flawed system because you won’t put the time into it, and that it’s a horrendous time requirement to “get gud,” then that’s simply a choice you are making, and others are not. (PEBKAC)
Now if you want to use those few hours into diving deep into the game I think youll enjoy it a lot more as you will eventually run into people. And those people will frustrate your gameplay more than NPCs will. And then you will get your difficulty level ramped up considerably. If you are only bumping up against the upper levels of yourself then you need to get out of the kiddie pool.
In a game like chess, time invested certainly helps. I wouldn’t want to play EvE Online if it didn’t reward effort and thought. However, time alone is not a sufficient explanation for success or failure. Just like in real-life, attitude is the most important factor.
Then there isnt much to argue about is there? If you are good with where youre at then your initial post is highly irrelevant to anything. That people get better with more time invested is a certainty and that is all you have argued here. You are saying the sky is blue or the grass is green and then saying that because you have played it longer and longer that your sky is more blue and that its easy to say its blue. To people learning something it is always hard, to those who have been around and done it longer it is not so anymore.
And as per our OP ‘time’ can never be removed from anything as long as you are on this side of life. So your argument for removing it is invalid.
I read the entire thread btw. What again is your argument? I dont see one. Just a rant at how Eve isnt hard because you have put time into it.
I don’t think that my O.P is so complicated. Sorry you don’t get it it.
Unless you were expecting a squabble? Sorry for disappointing you.
Right… now that we didn’t squabble you characterize my O.P as a “rant”.
Sure, Sherlock
Thank you for telling me to ignore you without telling me to ignore you.
There are lots of objectionable statements in the other threads too. It doesn’t prevent anyone from posting. Whatever the reason, there is hardly any conversation going on about the topic so I think this thread is a waste of space on the server and needs to be closed.
This post is mostly some of the thoughts I’ve gathered since I started playing. First I got a bit sad about it but then I told myself that EVE is a long game and reputation matters more than a zkill board. So since I feel better about it, I present…