Eve is as fair as anything else.
If anything EVE is by far the most fair game I have ever played. Yeah you can run into ships that make up for the players lack of skill with bling fit isk sinks. But that doesnt always work out well for them. Outside game enhancements really dont work in EVE, and its not like an Aimbot is going to make you better at this game.
So EVE is about as fair as real life. Which isnt fair at all. But that is what makes it fun.
I donât think Eve is a fair game, hereâs an actual example:
My ship was destroyed. To be clear, I had no reason to be in the system, I just wanted to see what would happen.
Everything above was my own fault, yet the game gave me an insurance payout (which I didnât buy), a free replacement corvette (which I didnât deserve), and a completely unit of Tritanium. If Eve was truly fair, I wouldnât get anything for making those intentionally poor decisions.
EVE prides itself on being a sandbox simulation/virtual world as much as it does a game. This means that there will be plenty of situations where things arenât balanced or âfairâ for all involved. And thatâs exactly how I like it.
Thereâs alot of things that break the so called fairness of the game exploits and advanced warning of game changes fed to some players by CSM members and CCP devs the most successful groups in game didnât make it there entirely without special help.
Being a new player in EVE is so easy, you forgot to mention it comes with a gun and a mining laser.
A gun that doesnât even use ammo, it just shoots forever.
Hmmm, Civilian Entropic Disintegrator�
To answer the OP: Yes, absolutely EVE is a fair game. Everybody starts at the same stage in character development, itâs this thing called EQUALITY, which is great for starting with a level playing field. How you proceed is entirely up to you. You can spend three days and $30,000 skilling your character to V across the board, and another couple thousand fitting him out with the blingiest Titan you can put together. Only to find that a mega-coalition with hordes and hordes of subcaps will see it and turn it into space glitter.
-OR-
You can spend all of four hours running through some tutorials and learning the basic mechanics of the game, how to engage in combat against AI enemies, then fit a cheap frigate and go out on public roams, ending the day with ridiculous ISK efficiency and a kill/death ratio that would in any other game earn you a place in some world championship tournament.
Just because you can fly a ship, doesnât follow that you should. UNLESS youâve taken the time to LEARN how to fly it. Actually fly it.
People sometimes confuse EQUALITY with EQUITY. Hereâs an example of the difference:
Equity would not work in EVE. Otherwise PVP would consist entirely of fields of Titans flown by half hour old characters who donât have a clue what theyâre doing.
Let us give it a boost
No.
But there is a place for fairness.
Because of the time-based learning skills, EVE is a bit of a Pyramid scheme. Itâs harsh on new people.
That can be said of any game. One needs to learn the game first, in order to do good at it.
And no, the skills are not so much a barrier of entry anymore as it used to be, because of skill injectors.
Itâs not about the player learning, it is about the character learning. While a player can get up to speed in a relatively reasonable amount of time, a character can take a very long time to get skilled up in order to be able to compete with a veteran. Skill injectors obviously cut this down somewhat, but they cost money. Again, if you tell someone it will be years or hundreds of dollars before they can be somewhat at a veteran level, they arenât likely to want to bother. I know people that wonât play for this reason.
There is a specific max skill for every possible activity out there. The maximum skill for a single activity is actually not that high, so it is not completely true when you say it takes years for new characters to compete with vets.
Sure vets can do more varied stuff. For example, I can fly several different frigates with perfect skills, but it doesnât take too much to skill perfect skills for a Kestrel (or at least to the point of relevancy).
Anyway, another point is that skills rarely matter in such a strict comparison. You make it sound like a newbie cannot have fun in the game just because they will never âcompeteâ with vets. This game does not follow some arbitrary gear progression system, where the only way to get âstrongerâ is to pump up those rookie equipment levels.
There are many ways to contribute to corps and earn respectable amounts of ISK as a newbie.
For an on-topic postâŚ
Yes, eve is fair in the sense that it gives the same opportunities to every player.
However, donât expect eve players to fight fairly. A win is a win after all.
No.
WellâŚmaybe.
I suppose if you were a master social engineer, you could make it a fair game against the other cultsâŚerâŚcorps entrenched in the meta of the game. But if you are just Joe Schmo the soloist, you are pretty much â â â â â â .
Well, maybe itâs just me, but you donât see too many veterans flying Tier 1 Frigates. But how long would it take to skill up to max?
Anyway, this isnât necessarily my personal feeling, Iâm just telling you the perception that is out there that people who start now âwonât ever catch upâ.
Plenty of vets fly T1 stuff out there. You fly the ship that best suits the task. Sometimes that is a T1 ship.
And Iâm only trying to tell you that, that perception is wrong and should be something we as a collective try to combat. There is no way to actually âwinâ eve, so there it no need to âcatch upâ. Itâs a sandbox, there is no progression system.
And it can take years to skill up for some specific activities.
I wish people would stop minimizing the learning (skill) curve. It can be a serious deterrent if you are not a CC warrior.