I’ve been playing every day for 12+ hours a day for nearly a month now, and here are some thoughts i’ve come up with regarding this game and the reputation that eve has from an outside perspective.
Generally, if you ask gamers about eve, they will tell you they wont even try the game out because it has a reputation of being toxic and hard to learn. I had made a trial account in 2006 and quit because it is true that this game has a steep learning curve, and I just didn’t have the mentality or time to deal with it. Then I forgot this game even existed.
Last month, youtube put a random video about eve into my playlist. No idea why, but I watched it and I decided to try this game out for the first time… or so i thought. I later remembered that I had made a trial account, and per isd advice, I asked ccp to recover it. They did. I had 0 basic skills, and another isd suggested I make a ticket to ask for the base skills new players get. The GM that answered that ticket asked what I was even talking about and did nothing. So I spent nearly 40 million isk, from selling plex, to buy the basic skills and start learning.
While I was doing that, I explored this game on this character. I found that I like running missions, and I found some really cool people in a corporation that taught me a lot. However, at this point I also discovered that nearly everything I had been told in rookie help chat was BS.
A lot of people in there will say nullsec is the end all and be all of eve online. nothing else matters, nothing else compares.
Turns out, they are completely and utterly wrong. They said you can’t make isk in highsec, they said learn the “magic 14” skills before anything else. They said certain ships were basically the best for wide swaths of the game but also that there is no best in eve.
Here is what I have learned.
Mining as alpha is BS. a full venture is less than half a million isk, and you need multiple millions of isk to do basically anything. So mining as an alpha is a complete waste of time. If mining is what you find entertaining, you can’t make enough to even afford an alpha skill injector every day. You make roughly 2 million isk an hour, and alpha skill injectors are nearly 50 million. Still a much better deal than the small skill injectors, which are triple the cost but only double the reward. Less once you hit 5 million skill points.
On top of that, you quickly learn that multiple accounts are necessary if you ever want to compete in any section of the market. Established players with 10+ accounts are already producing at the best margins, so good luck getting anywhere with 1 account.
Missions are easy and the payout is better than mining. I took a caracal through level 3 missions, and did hundreds of those level 3 missions with no problems. It’s easy content, and to get anything better you have to pay. However, even if you do missions for a so called neutral corporation like sisters of eve, it will make amarr want to kill you on sight. Nobody warned me and there is shockingly little information about that on any of the youtube videos I have seen.
Exploration is a crapshoot. Not only are you gambling on any reward, but players are actively hunting you every second that you’re out there. You have to keep multiple web pages open to even try to tip the gamble in your favor slightly.
I did incursions with 0 isk input and very low skills, and made hundreds of millions of isk. Doing just public incursion fleets, it is very easy to plex from alpha to omega in less than 2 weeks, with less than a month of skills. That was made possible entirely due to one player and a public group called EVE Rookies. He is the only person I have ever seen even mention EVE Rookies. Even rookie help chat wont mention them.
PVP for a new player is a waste of time and isk. You do not have the skills to stand a chance against anyone except other new players. Alpha players are always at a distinct disadvantage since you can’t keep up with fitting, dps or utility in any way. You’re hard capped out of the fight. Anyone that says otherwise wants to use you as a meatshield distraction only. From watching videos and speaking to dozens of people, the concept of a 1v1 fight is laughable. I have been repeatedly told that if you’re in a fair fight, you both did something wrong.
For a pvp oriented game, there is shockingly little actual pvp. It is purely a numbers game. Overwhelm and erase, or run away. It took 27 days for me to lose my first ship to a player. A Broadsword was camping the gate that I warped through into lowsec. They couldn’t break through my shield rep, but i was wasting them… at least until the 35 second reload for my rapid light missiles. Because of that though, a second person jumped in with a gnosis and together they overwhelmed my ship. It took all of 3 minutes, and quite frankly I am proud of myself. Because of me, a corp mate with a loaded porpoise got through with no harm.
The reputation of toxicity is mostly unwarranted. Nearly everyone I have encountered has been very nice and welcoming. However, there is a lot of arrogance. No matter how much you read and simulate to come up with a fit, someone will be there to tell you that you’re doing it wrong. Amazingly though, when you ask for their recommended fit, it is complete junk. Usually very low resists and way too many modules for a specific thing at the expensive of everything else. Then you might learn about diminishing returns from stacking similar modules. This happens a lot in rookie help.
So called “newbro” public fleets like to demand you use 100 million+ isk ships that take months of training to use.
A lot of the advice from rookie help comes from the perspective of people that have not been new in more than a decade, and they like to link videos and web pages that has such outdated information that in some cases the buttons they say to push don’t even exist anymore.
Outside of career missions and plex, it is fairly difficult to build any level of wealth for a new player, though I have noticed that some kind souls hand out isk to new players. Then you have Mike and the magic bus handing out ships to new players. So there is definitely hope for a new player, but the game its self does not keep up with the game economy.
I found some twitch streams, where certain people will repeatedly say that all highsec players need to die. I have no idea why they arent banned since that violates a lot of rules. Maybe they get away with it by claiming they mean the characters and not the people, even though they are specifically directing their comments at the people and not the characters.
I see on these forums that a lot of people will flame others that complain about or suggest changes to any aspect of the game, and they do so with years of experience with the game and almost always talking down to new players. It’s like people forget what it’s like to be new and not have hundreds of billions of isk and hundreds of millions of skill points.
There are entire groups dedicated to pushing new players out of eve and they brag about it openly. In many cases, the same people that flame new players on these forums or on reddit will admit that they’d rather see eve dead and gone than have new players. This is why I said the reputation of toxicity is mostly unwarranted. There is definitely some in this game.
Outside of the community, this game does also have some problems that probably should be addressed at some point.
I play on an older computer, because I am disabled and by definition poor. The only money I have spent on this game came from doing surveys for an app and getting paid through paypal. I can’t afford a new computer, and one of the things that drew me to this game is how so many people say it takes almost no resources to run. That’s a lie.
Not even mentioning the directX problems even people with new computers are having, this game in the lowest possible settings is clunky and laggy. I have noticed that on this character that is forced into rookie help chat every time i log in, my computer struggles for several minutes. I have to close rookie help multiple times before it’s finally closed. The first couple of times it will pop right back up and attempt to reload the thousands of players and chat. The second time it’s usually not loading everyone, just a few people and no motd. However, on my alt account that was a trial over 15 years ago, I don’t get forced into rookie help and I log in much faster and lag a lot less. There is no way to opt out of rookie help chat during the first month.
Zoning, especially around trade hubs only sometimes works. I crash a lot. Docking or undocking from jita, even with the lowest possible settings takes more than 5 minutes. That was before the updates.
I see a lot of the ccp videos talking about player retention and new player experience, but they don’t ever seem to broach the subject of skill points, or how the player driven market excludes new players from just about everything. For example, to upgrade from a venture is a minimum of 20 million isk, and a month of training. That is for an expedition frigate. If you go to a barge, a minimum of 50 million isk and a month of training. Or some people will get a limited time omega deal that gives them the basic skills for a barge, and a retriever. I never got such an offer so I’m not sure how the game decides who gets what offers.
For pve combat ships it is a little easier, as there are multiple levels between a frigate and a battlecruiser. However, if you choose to learn one weapon/ship set, you almost can’t learn any others as an alpha. I know that alpha is considered an extended trial and a lot of people hate that alpha even exists. There is so much to dip your toes into with eve that is impossible for an alpha to skill into to stand half a chance. In order to try out everything, you have to dilute your skill training to the point of being next to useless in everything, especially with all of the forced rookie help chat telling you to learn the “magic 14”. This game rewards specialization, but new players arent going to know what they want to specialize into for a while. For me, almost a month. For others it might be faster, or it might be even longer.
That also means that perspective new players will feel stonewalled out of trying everything. So if they don’t guess correctly at what they might enjoy the most to keep them playing, they hit a wall of futility.
Reading the skills, you get to notice pretty quickly that they make no sense. What am I possibly learning that makes the structure of my ship stronger and takes 19 days to learn? My character isn’t controlling the atomic structure or design of the ships while flying them. They are built uniformly and with the same exact materials.
What am I learning that makes my capacitor work better? What am I learning that makes me fly faster? What am I learning that makes my ship cpu more effective, or the power grid? These are basic functions of the ship. Knowing the intricate details of how a car is built does not make it more fuel efficient when you drive it, nor does it make the vehicle survive a crash better.
Do jet pilots learn the fuel ratios for their afterburners? The answer is no, they do not.
Simply put, the skill system is designed to take as much time as possible in an effort to make us pay for subscriptions longer. It’s a pay and time gate to any activity in eve. I understand the business perspective and needing paying customers to keep the company and game alive. I am willing to pay the subscription cost and will do so for years to come. So then why does my character have to spend weeks and months to operate basic ship functions?
The lore of this game claims that we are the best and brightest that humanity has to offer, and every ship is built and operates the exact same way but we can’t figure out how to do anything without extended periods of training? So what is it we’re learning before we become immortal capsuleers? Regular human pirates are operating the same ships all day every day. The same ships we spend a lot of time to learn to even sit in and turn on. I learned how to drive in a dodge ram, and I guarantee I can go drive any other vehicle on the road without spending weeks learning how. Standardized controls exist in modern time so why don’t they in the future?
In summery, I really enjoy this game and I think the reputation of toxicity is mostly due to a minority of loud people. This game is old and has flaws that push a lot of new players away, but I look forward to the announced changes and what might come after. The community of this game seems to have some very weird ideas about new players that stem from spending years learning skills to do what they want, and building wealth through years of much easier times. The gaming industry has moved away from the super grind style for a reason.
** inb4 potato computer comments - I already know.
AMD E2-1800 APU with Radeon™ HD Graphics 1.70 GHz
4.00 GB (3.61 GB usable).
