Eve Online from a old/new player

Communications Center General Discussion
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I’m someone who tries Eve for like a few days and take years break. To give you a idea…I been doing that for years. I just got back into the game, and I was like…where is the media player? That is how old/new I am.

All I really did is mining, Why the most boring thing? Because it was steady money and lower risk.

I have a friend who is playing, and keeps telling me about the war stories. How he is allied with goon and expects me to know what that even means. So, I sigh and started back playing. Got the newbie pack on sale right now steam for 2.50 cents and that gives me some omega for 7 days. You can’t really beat that right? I log on, and notice my char still around Almost 8 years old, and at the skill cap 5 mil for alpha. So all I know is how to mine in this game, so that number means nothing lol.

So what have I learn? This community I really can’t get a feel on. I play other mmos with my wife and you can get a sense of what type of community is in the game. From Final Fantasy to Wow, and many others. You can kinda get a sense of the community.

Eve community vibe is crazy. I tried wormhole for the first time, got ganked. I told the guy congrats, he was the first person to kill me. He smiled, and gave me some tips to protect myself. New overlay and all. I was like dang I really needed that. It was worth the mils I lost. Thank you.

Tried it again, and ended up at null space. At the time I did not know about null space. I just thought it was low sec. So as I traveled, warp to a gate in my probe. I got into a bubble. Someone linked my probe and people decloak blew me like it was straight out of star trek. It had to be 5+ people. I did not even know that you can be stopped out of warp like that.

One of them whispers me. New? And I explained ya, and he said sorry don’t understand. But here you go sent me 10mil and said I should not be at that area.

This game has some of the kindest people when it comes to new players, but I also seen the bad side. Was in my station chilling, and saw someone linking and laughing of kills he was doing to miners, telling them to get good. I was like, nope staying in my station for awhile lol.

So what is the point of this thread besides looking like a blog post? I want to explain why I have not got deeper into eve besides the basic of mining, as someone who enjoys crafting and making money in mmos, but also played tons of pvp mmos. Shadowbane to mortal online so the pvp and ganking is not really my problem, as dying in a game I don’t take personal, and don’t mind losing stuff, as the number 1 rule in a open world pvp game. Never lose something you can’t afford to lose.

What holds me back from going deeper is the combat feels all or nothing, Like my pilot skills matter, but not like in x4 and other space games. So I come to find out that many players just use cloaking and try to avoid combat in null sec. I was like, well that does not seem fun…So I wanted to learn combat fighting some rats. (yes I know not going to learn how to pvp, but I needed to learn basics since i just let drones kill things.) On that drone note, what happen to aggressive drones? I get attack and drones just sit around doing nothing. Could not find the aggressive command anymore. Made mining a little more tedious, but still ok.

So what did I learn killing rats? I…don’t know. The game does not teach me through failure, and I think that is my main problem. It might, and I just don’t know where to look. But with so many damage types. So many weapon types, so many ways to play. If someone kills me in something, I have to google what it is and how to counter it. Oh i got to train in that skill. Ok that is 8 days, wait I don’t got enough cpu ok…got to fix that. Oh god, to be decent protected, I need to spend major isk. Ok…so I can’t afford that. So what should I do? Answer? use cloaking.

As you can tell from my typing, I’m not the brightest guy, but my god this game and community I like, has a mix of everything. Just getting into the combat of this game? For someone who likes to learn from failures. It is hard.

That is all I wanted to say. Thanks for reading.

3 Likes
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Feaping creaturism. They keep adding and changing “function points”, hoping the bored folks will get excited. There are only so many things we mere mortals can hold in our heads. Think about chess. The rules and operation of the pieces are very old and stable. Probably the last interesting change was when someone invented the en passant rule to ensure the principle that a pawn can’t pass another pawn without the option of combat. I personally wish they’d slow down the incessant buffing, nerfing, “tuning” so a person can invest some brain cells in knowing something that stays true for a while. Yes, yes. Y’all can have some cheese with this.

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I have noticed on quite a few occasions that if one launches the drones after one has already been targetted…the drones do not respond even if set on aggressive mode.

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You can thank the AFK bears.

Peeps used to farm 4s AFK in domis.

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Click a target in the overview and hit “f”. That’s the sic 'em key.

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On many an occasion I’ve found it irritating that the targeted icons at the top of the screen do not contain an ‘engage enemy’ option. That would surely be the ideal place to have that.

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“F” or any other key you want to assign. That being said, drones don’t work worth a $hit now. Even if you tick “focus fire” they will spread out in a matter of seconds. CCP wants to make us CONSTANTLY click on something. They’re trying to take a page out of Facebook’s playbook.

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They always had that problem, these days it’s slightly better than what it used to be but they still do it indeed.

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Eve Wiki simply says ‘all drones engage’. Engage what ?

Does engaging actually go through the items on the icons list from right to left ? It appears to…or maybe simply in the order you targeted them ( which is effectively the same thing ). What if I want to engage a different vessel or drone because it has since moved closer ?

It would make infinite sense for the icons in the target display to themselves have the ‘engage’ option…as that is where you see the shield, armour status of enemy vessels…as there is no way of knowing which item in overview corresponds to which targeted item at the top of the screen.

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They engage the locked target which you have selected when you press f.

Once the target is dead, they will pick a new random target, or might spread out to multiple targets if focus fire is not ticked.

You can make them attack another target by selecting that target and pressing f again, like with other weapon systems.

1 Like
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Drones usually go after the next target that’s closest to them. CCP has made it require much more attention. You have to click on the target you want them to focus on and hit “F”. CCP made drones worse because they wanted it that way. We’re supposed to be so far in the future and soooooo advanced…but we can’t set a destination to a structure and have our ship dock when it gets there? Isn’t it logical for your ship to dock after traveling to a structure? Again, it’s all about CCP making us sit and click.

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If everything that could be automated in EVE would be automated, we would be looking at a pretty screensaver rather than playing a game.

Yes, you as player will have to provide input for the sake of having gameplay.

1 Like
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That should read, “even if” focus fire is ticked.

2 Likes
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Not in my experience, but I haven’t been killing NPCs with drones in a while. Focus fire makes them attack the same target while without focus fire they can attack different targets which is useful against small stuff like drones.

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They do, all the time.

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Does not work anymore. I promise.

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Ah…I see. And this presumably applies also if I select the target via the icons at the top. I’d been selecting the target, going to my list of drones, and right clicking ‘engage target’…a lengthier process.

As always, the problem with Eve is that nothing is obvious. The single biggest problem is that very often one does not know what questions to ask, or even that there is a different ( and better ) way of doing things.

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In my ( shorter ) experience I can’t say I’ve ever noticed any difference. Certainly not when all the drones are the same type. Maybe there is a certain enemy range it applies to, but I’ve never seen 3 drones go off in one direction and 2 in another.

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I’ll repeat: it never worked well.

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I’ve run a million level IV missions. The drones split up constantly. Just go run a mission.

True, but worse now. :beetle: