DescentBB

Wow, you guys are still going pretty strong! I haven't touched Descent in about 5 years, but still have awesome memories. This was my first online community and I've never gotten highly involved with any others since.

Besides saying hi, I'm looking for anyone currently playing Eve. Would be fun to hook up in New Eden, so let me know here or else look me up in Eve as \"ROXGenghis\"

- G

P.S. I'm crossposting this verbatim to dbb.com

I've been playing Eve going on 5 years year, Look me up as \"Lrrp\"

Unfortunately my computer doesn't have the system requirements for EVE Online.

i have a few characters i play

battlebot1077 and cal abunga

Wow, G, How you been? What are you doing these days?

RC

Woody and Battlebot, I'll look you guys up. I'm in the remnants of the SYS-K alliance in the south, having been one of the few to survive our failcascade.

Richard, I'm good! I've been in Ithaca for 5.5 years. I got married in February (just to prove to Stresstest that I'm not gay). Been working in software R&D the whole time. Got to travel a lot, including Japan, Belgium, Iceland, and Ireland.

- G

For some reason I wrote this giant introduction to Eve document. Then I realized nobody would want to read all of it. So I'm posting it anyway. Maybe someone with too much time on their hands will get curious.

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Eve is the most elite of MMOs; it is to other MMOs as Descent is to other FPS. We Eve players take our Intenet Spaceships very seriously!

Well populated. Eve has over 300,000 subscribers, and usually about 25,000 to 50,000 are online in the same universe simultaneously. The size of the playerbase is respectable, but not as huge as a game like WOW. This is partially because of Eve's inherent nature: brutal, competitive, risky, and open-ended. It's also because Eve has the biggest learning curve of any game I've ever played. I'm still learning new things after two years.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3088/233 ... c39c4c.jpg

Sandbox game. A game like WOW is like an amusement park: a bunch of rides are set up for players to enjoy (quests), and prizes at game booths (items). Eve is another type of game: a sandbox. You are given a universe and the tools to explore and shape it. You make your own fun, which requires patience and creativity. Rides aren't provided for you (well, they are, but they're boring rides). And your prizes in Eve are ephemeral and disposable: accumulation of wealth is not the goal. WOW and Eve appeal to different personality types. I personally find Eve more rewarding. Certainly Eve's model provides for more longevity of enjoyment. Read on to learn what makes Eve so special. Eve's \"butterfly effect\" video really captures a lot of what Eve is about:
http://www.youtube.com/CCPGames#p/c/F61 ... 8hmqyejCYU

No grind: gain XP offline. You gain your skillpoints while you're offline, so there is no grind for \"xp.\" Just put some skills in your character's skill queue and log off until they're done. There can, however, be a grind for in-game currency: ISK (InterSteallar Kredits; i.e., gold). You need ISK to fund all activities in Eve. Fortunately, there are a variety of ways you can acquire ISK, and the amount of ISK you have doesn't determine how much fun you have. The meager rewards of a pirate's life of combat can yield enough to keep on yarring with joy, and the billions earned by a market tycoon may be just as pleasing to him even though he never undocks from station. A newbie can get a big boost in their ISK-making potential by joining a corp (guild).

Free game time, or ISK for cash. In another novel move, CCP provides a means for subscribers to pay their monthly subscription fee using in-game currency (ISK)! The way it works is that players can buy a Game Time Code (GTC) from CCP for real life cash, and sell it to another player in-game for ISK. So players with plenty of real-life cash are effectively paying the subscription costs for other players, and in return they get ISK which they would otherwise have to grind for (the other guy had to grind for it, but hey, it got him a month of free game time). This has a few benefits. First, it is a way for CCP to combat the EULA-breaking Real Money Trading (RMT) that goes on at places like Ebay. Second, it lets cash-poor players continue to subscribe, making the Eve universe richer for all. Third, it lets cash-rich players enjoy Eve with nearly zero grind. The whole situation is a win-win for all three parties.

No level caps. It's impossible to fully \"level up\" in Eve. It would take 18 years to max out all the skills. Nobody even tries; instead they choose a path and follow it, specializing in a few areas at first. When you stop having fun, choose a different path and train up different skills. There is no such thing as power leveling. You can never get as many skills as maxed out as an older player, but by specializing you can become competitive with them in your chosen areas. Player skill matters more than skill points after about 6 months. I've known some long-time players who are awful at PVP, and some veterans who are deadly with their re-rolled new characters.

Slow start. You'll suck for the first few months. Some people train up key skills for the first few months without even playing! But that's not necessary. If you make it past the first few months of active playing you'll probably be hooked for life. Here's a couple of humorous and frighteningly accurate portrayals of newbie life:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMSjd6HNQdY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkzv-3vJn4w

Eve is not a twitch game. The combat PVP requires that you be quick and alert, but not to the level of an FPS. It's more about smarts. In fact, some people call Eve \"spreadsheets online\" since almost any career path requires a lot of research and calculation if you want to \"maximize\". If you're not a maximizer, you don't have to spend a ton of time doing this, though. I personally enjoy doing some spreadsheets, but I don't go nuts. You can also glean wisdom from your corp buddies or the forums instead of doing the research yourself.

MMO means multiplayer. It's almost mandatory to join a corp to have much fun. It will boost your ISK so you can make more progress early on. You'll get help overcoming the huge learning curve. Yes, you can play solo, and successfully, but the game is designed to require cooperation to achieve goals. Much more so than WOW. Some goals, like building capital ships, or claiming regional sovereignty, require alliances of dozens of corporations and thousands of players. A few of us ROX guys are all playing together and run our own \"corp\" (guild).

Multiple accounts. The game is so multiplayer-oriented that most serious players have at least one additional \"alt\" acount; some players have over a dozen accounts. I'm happy with two accounts, but three might be nice. The nice thing about alts is you can use each account to specialize in a different area, so you make faster progress, and they can be used to support each other. For example, you mine with your main character, and haul the ore away with your alt. Or kill \"rats\" (NPCs) with your main and salvage their wrecks with your alt. Or light a cyno with your alt so you main can jump his cap ship to it. The possiblities are manifold.

International. Eve is played around the world, and space is never empty. The game company, CCP, is based in Iceland, and the servers are in London. Subscribers are about 40% North America,15% UK, lots of Europeans (Germany, Netherlands, Scandanavia), and a surpisingly large number of Russians. Many nationalities have created their own alliances and represent major powerblocks in the game. The Chinese have their own server because of their silly government.

Non-consentual PVP. Eve is a PVP-focused game. Other players can and will ruin your day. This will happen less and less as you get more knowledgeable (note: I didn't way you have to be more powerful to avoid PVP, just smarter). There are two extremes of players: carebears and PVP'ers. Carebears avoid PVP as much as they can, but are always at risk. Carebears engage instead in PVE (Player vs. Environment): running missions, mining, etc. PVPers on the other hand love to fight. They thrive on competing against other humans rather than the weak game AI. In general, many Carebears get bored of Eve eventually, while PVPers tend to stay active for years.

Full loss PVP. You lose your ship and its fittings every time you die. If your escape pod gets killed, you will lose your implants, and some skill points if you didn't remember to update your clone. Don't worry, after enough losses you learn to see all your property as temporary and enjoy the game play more than the aqcuisition of \"stuff\". Insurance covers part of your losses, if you remembered to buy coverage. Oh, and when someone destroys your ship they get whatever loot drops, plus they can salvage it for parts.

Suicide ganking is a natural result of both non-consentual PVP and full loss PVP. In high-security space, anybody who shoots at you will be killed by the police. Some carebears think this makes them safe, and run around in freighters full of an irresistable amount of loot. Clever pirates have discovered a way to sneak into highsec space (despite their low sec status) and kill the freighter in one \"alpha\" volley from a fleet of ships. These ships are all destroyed immediately thereafter by the police, but the freighter is dead and another pirate, who didn't do any shooting, swoops in to pick up the loot and divide it up back in station. Don't let this practice scare you. As with everything in Eve, there is a counter-move. You can use alternative hauling routes, employ a scout ship, divide your loot into smaller shipments, use a cloaky hauler, or contract the job to someone else (who would have to pay collateral). Nobody in Eve has to be a victim, caution and experience are key.

Single shard shared universe. Unlike WOW, which is divided into shards, all Eve players are hosted on a single, massive server cluster. You can interact with any and every other subscriber in the game. Due to this, space is large. There are over 7500 star systems connected by stargates, wormholes, and jump bridges. Territory broken down into areas of high security (safest, but not fully safe), low security (less safe) and zero-sec (lawless). As alluded to earlier, you can be attacked anywhere in space; it's just that protection mechanisms vary in the different security zones.

No Instancing. There are no privately spawned areas for you to enjoy in peace. Any player can use probes to find you while you're running your mission (quest) in deadspace (dungeon) and crash your party.

Free expansions. Every 6 months CCP issues a free expansion with new content and game balancing tweaks. Recent expansions added wormholes and wormhole systems, planetary mining and production, modular ships, and epic story arcs. An upcoming expansion includes \"walking-in-stations\" so you will actually have a humanesque avatar. An FPS game is also in the works. Unlike games like WOW, you pay nothing extra for expansions and just keep paying your monthly subscription fee.

Player driven economy. More than any other game, the economy is almost entirely player-driven. CCP has hired an economist to track it and nudge it much like the Federal Reserve does. The Eve market database is studied by university economists. Players produce every item in the game, using blueprints researched by other players and materials produced by other players. These materials were created using raw materials mined by yet other players. Market trading is a type of PVP and can make you rich in-game. There are price graphs and market manipulation, inflation and deflation, and IPOs for player corporations. There are banks and insurance. There is money laundering to support EULA-breaking Real Money Trading (RMT).

Annual alliance tournament. There have been 8 of these, sponsored by CCP. Huge amounts of ISK and unique ships are given as awards. The entire tournament is broadcast live online in ESPN-like fashion. CCP choses PVP experts from the playerbase and flies them to Iceland to act as tournement commentators.
Funny tournament promo:

Sample match with commentary:
http://at.eve-ic.net/8/index.php?view=match&id=2

Scamming of other players is allowed at nearly evey level. The only scamming not allowed is in the transfer of characters and the buying of game time for real life cash. Scamming is always avoidable if you're careful, so scammers prey on newbies or people in a hurry. Of course there are more elaborate scams (actually cons) that take days or months to pull off, but they can result in billions of ISK in return. Caveat Emptor.

Metagaming is often employed to gain a combat or financial advantage over an opponent. This means you have to be careful both in-game and out-of-game. The only limit on metagaming is breaking real life laws.

Scandals. Eve is famous for it's in-game and out-of-game scandals. The most powerful alliance in the game, Band of Brothers, could not be defeated militarily but when one of their directors turned traitor, he used his privileges to disband the alliance and hand its assets and territory over to the second most powerful alliance, Goonswarm. This unprecedented shift in the status quo affected thousands of players, changed the political and territorial face of Eve, and caused not a few ragequits. During the 7th Alliance Tournmanent, one team sold their slot to another team who didn't make the cut. That's like the Lakers selling their spot to the Knicks in exchange for top draft choice next season. In the 8th Alliance Tournament, a team took a dive after beating their opponents to an inch of their lives. A couple of years ago, one of the directors of Eve Bank corp imbezzled hundreds of billions of ISK and then sold it on Ebay for $5,000 to pay his mortgage. He was banned from the game for life, but, hey, mortgage. Last year one of the CSM delegates made some market trades using inside information he gained from being on the council and was kicked. Just a couple of weeks ago, another CSM member was banned for breaking an NDA she had signed with CCP. The in-game scandals are all within game rules and none were reversed by the game masters. The out-of-game scandals resulted in bans from the game. All scandals are the source of much entertainment, rage, hilarity, and tears within the Eve community. Many scandals make headlines outside of the game industry (WSJ, slashdot, BBC, the register), which makes Eve more famous and infamous.

Sovereignty and Alliance warfare. In 0.0-security space, player corporations band together into large alliances sieze and hold territory. The resources in 0.0 space are very valuable and highly contested. (Remember, with a player-driven economy, the supply chain starts with raw materials.) So alliances are constantly at war over territory. 0.0 politics is a huge part of the game, and it is what spawns thousand-ship fleet battles and massive use of capital ships:



The territory of all alliances is constantly tracked. Recently, my alliance, Systematic-Chaos, was recently gangraped by the C0ven and Stain Empire alliances, and kicked out of the Esotaria region. We nearly failcascaded out of existence, but after losing 2500 members we regrouped in the Period Basis region to rebuild ourselves, under patronage of the powerful IT alliance. We would now be considered a \"pet\" alliance of IT. An up to date map of Eve alliance territory can be found here:
http://go-dl1.eve-files.com/media/corp/ ... luence.png

Game balance. Balance is ever evolving but is generally very good, while allowing for variety. Bigger does not equal better. Small ships are faster, get target lock quicker, and take less damage from heavy guns due to their traversal and speed. Ships have different roles and excel in those roles. An example follows.

You have to work together in a mixed fleet to maximize effectiveness. Cloaked covert ops ships act as scouts and can sneak through enemy gate camps and hide behind enemy lines, relaying intel. Heavy armor and shield ships act as bait to draw in unwary enemy fleets. Super fast, light interceptors act as skirmishers to tackle enemy ships (prevent them from escaping) while the rest of your fleet catches up. Assault frigates come in next to provide heavy tackle (i.e., before the interceptors blow up or have to run). If the enemy fleet has heavy, slow ships, a light or heavy interdictor will drop a warp disruption bubble on them to tackle them en masse. Fleet commanders fly command ships, which provide bonuses to the gang. Battleships provide huge DPS (damage per second) and tank, but are cumbersome and slow. Heavy Assault Cruisers provide mobile sniping abilities. Logistics ships support the fleet by remotely repairing armor and shields, therefore acting as a force multiplier. Electronic Warfare (Ewar) ships can jam enemies; acting as yet another force multiplier. Of course, being tackle, logistics, or ewar will often get you primaried (the enemy will focus their fire on you).

Then there are the capital ships, which require at least a year of training to be effective. Dreadnoughts provide huge DPS and tank, especially in siege mode. Carriers have fighters for DPS, but are primarily used as super-logistics, especially in triage mode where they can keep a fleet alive for a long time against a superior force. Supercarriers and Titans are completely insane ships but cost so much that a single player typically can't afford them. Titans can one-shot nearly any ship in the game. But all caps are very, very juicy targets and it's always a risk to put them on the field. Usually they are only used with a full support fleet and with good regional intel. However, traps can and do happen, causing embarassing and expensive cap losses.

Player representation. A group of players is periodically elected to the Council of Stellar Management (CSM), which is a body that interacts directly with CCP devs to represent player interestes. CCP recently granted the CSM \"stakeholder\" status in dev. cycle, meaning they would have a say in the course of game development. CCP flies the CSM representatives to Iceland every year to discuss gameplay and direction. The CSM is unique in the gaming industry and has gotten CCP a lot of positive press. Recently, however, CCP has been largely ignoring CSM's requests, causing massive playerbase dissatisfaction with the whole idea. Time will tell how this novel apporach to customer interaction works out.

Hugely active community. Much of Eve's playerbase can be described as fanatical. There are hundreds of blogs, hugely active forums, tons of player-made movies (both dramatic and PVP footage), and plentiful fan fiction and fan art. There are also essential tools written by players that pretty much the entire playerbase uses.
http://www.youtube.com/CCPGames#p/c/F614A7A6461E61E1

http://www.youtube.com/CCPGames#p/c/F61 ... DVEHE10nHc


Risk vs. reward is one of the central tenants to Eve. You can play forever and never achieve huge success in PVP or PVE. You need to take risks to make your mark, and the game is designed and balanced with this in mind.

No endgame. You can take any path you like as far as you want. When it becomes too boring or stressful or time consuming, seek a new challenge. Switch corps, gameplay styles, or careers. Not only are these ways to have fun, they are also ways to make ISK to further fund your in-game activities. Here is a sampling of what you can do in Eve (call 'em careers, roles, activities, whatever):

Pirate PVP - gank others in lowsec with your pirate corp buddies. This will erode your personal security status so you'll become a target even in highsec. You keep what you kill. Alternatively, many pirates ransom thier targets, and will let their prey go free after the ransom is paid. Other pirates will demand ransoms then kill you anyway. It helps to know what the \"reputable\" pirate corps are. (No, \"reputable pirate\" is not an oxymoron in Eve.)

Solo PVP a dying but not dead art due to encoutering blobs of enemies. But if you can isolate someone, or kill someone quickly, you can do it. A successful solo pilot can make a nice reputation for himself.

CEO or Alliance Leader. You'll spend more time managing your corp or alliance than flying your space ships, but some people love bossing around 3000 other people. It's quite rewarding if you're successful. In a CEO position you can achieve goals that would be impossible for a regular player on his own. Be prepared to deal with or else delegate responsibilities such as diplomat, recruitment, infrastructure, logistics, accounting, and admiral.

Fleet Commander - a rare breed indeed can competently lead a PVP group. Command a small gang or a fleet of hundreds. Must become a master of tactics and strategies, have amazing situational awareness, and other decisive leadership abilities. Real time intel and experience are the keys to success.

Provide services (both in-game and real-life) to other players for ISK. For example, host killboards, do art for forum sigs, act as a trusted third party for unusual transactions, hold lotteries, run training classes, etc. Be creative. For example, Eve Bank corp is an emergent entity in Eve; it was not designed by CCP to be part of the game.

Role Player. Yes, as with most MMORPGs very few players actually assume the personas of their in-game avatars. But some do. For example, the formerly glorious CVA alliance pretended they were truly of the Amarrian race. Therefore, they professed belief in their deity, extolled the virtues of slavery, expressed racial dislike for the Minmatar people, and embarked on a campaign to claim expanses of 0.0 security space for their emperor. I find all that thing kind of trite, except the last thing mentioned. CVA did something unique: after successfully claiming the Providence region, they established a region-wide policy of NRDS (Not Red, Don't Shoot). This is in contrast to every other 0.0-holding alliance, who use NBSI (Not Blue, Shoot It). The objective of NBSI is to keep your territory free of any potential threats, whether they be neutral or hostile. Therefore, with NBSI, anyone who is not friendly (blue) to your alliance will be killed on sight. CVA's NRDS policy, on the other hand, left neutrals alone, and only allowed their members to attack known hostile players. The NRDS policy was a headache for their diplomats to run, and was more difficult to police, but it did offer an area of normally dangerous 0.0 space as a haven for newbies and non-affiliated players.

And a bevy of other activities/professions I don't want to describe in detail:
Faction warfare
Mission runner
Miner
Trader
Hauler
Research/Production
Ninja salvager
Explorer
Spy

Clearly Eve is a unique, challenging, and rewarding experience. Of course, it's not perfect. Players always complain about something, and usually it blows over. Currently they're complaining about lag, which makes giant fleet battles rather un-fun. CCP is working on fixing the lag problem; meanwhile I'm sticking to smaller-scale PVP, which is more fun to me anyway.

Too much to read.. Glad to hear you're doing well tho !

Yeah, I'm working on a TL; DR for the thread on dbb.com



Oh, and I bolded the topic statements at the beginning of each paragraph. So you can just read those to get the general idea in about a minute.

The multiple accounts thing sounds like DAoC. Anyone who was serious about PvP had a second account with a buffbot.

Here's my biggest question: what kind of time blocks are required to make decent progress? I'll explain:

I played DAoC. They had an expansion come out where you needed literally hundreds of people to all participate in encounters to defeat them. I guess they were conceivably doable in a couple of hours, but as a practical matter (getting hundreds of people to work together) it took ~8+ hours to get through an encounter, most of the time wasted standing there waiting for something to happen. I quit because I just didn't have that kind of time.

Similarly, in WoW, if you wanted to raid, you needed to get 25 people coordinated... and to really make progress you needed 25 people who were serious about it, which meant committing 3-4 hour blocks 2-3 nights a week.

So here's the question: Can you log on for 1/2 hr to 1 hr, say 5 days a week, and still get some sort of enjoyment out of the game?

Are you forced to coordinate large groups of people to accomplish the more \"difficult\" of tasks, or can they be accomplished by small groups of people (say, 5 or less) in small blocks of time?

Snoopy, I'm in one of the major alliances. If our assets are attacked we will get a fleet of 150 pilots together in 15 minutes. If we have a planned attack against the enemy, a notice will be given as to when and where to meet up and we will have 500 or more show up.

In smaller blocks of time you can join up with smaller groups that will gate camp entry points into your space or just look for info in intel channels as to where some action may be. You will still have to go out and earn isk to buy ships as, unlike other games, if you lose it, the ship and items won't respawn somewhere else.

Just starting out though, you will be playing in high sec where you can run missions to learn how different ships and modules of the game work. Try it out. Download of game is free and first 2 weeks are free.

Woodchip's answer is correct, for his large 0.0 alliance. You have a lot of other options with much lower expectations on your time. Pirate corps go hunting with whoever is logged in at the time; could be 3 to 20 people. You can form your own 1-man corp, or just stay in the newbie corp (in which you're pretty much anonymous). In those cases, you can set your own schedule and either mission on your own for gold or go solo hunting (or hunting with your alt as backup) in lowsec. You can also declare war on a highsec corp and hunt them at your leisure.

Anyway, larger blocks of time are required for larger goals. But 95% of the player base doesn't go for those goals because fun can be had in so many other ways.

As to your specific question, it's hard to get much done in under an hour. I usually try to get a few 2-3 hour blocks in each week. This is definitely a \"take the long term view\" type of game.

And here I thought WoW was a giant waste of time.

ThunderBunny wrote:And here I thought WoW was a giant waste of time.

There's also webforums that repeat the same agruments every six months.

We all who play or play'd Descent had a certain smugness that Descent was a superior game due to it's complexities. The same holds true for Eve. Here is a little dissertation about fleets and fleet fits for ships from a well know alliance leader. I'm sure many here will be baffled but if you played Eve the following is more than just geek speak:

Armor HACs ('Brofists'): These first turned up on the Sons of Tangra forums and leaked to PL and the NC, who have been tearing ★■◆● up with them. They rely on heavily plated HACs with afterburners and Halo implants (which are pretty cheap, oddly), Guardians for reps, a Damnation for massive armor bonuses, and the completely insane bonuses to signature radius/skirmish from a mindlinked Loki. This gets you a fleet of high-EHP ships with signature radiuses below 70m, meaning that if a battleship may be lucky to do 20 damage per shot. These are slow fleets and have trouble escaping from a fight, but since the strategy is to drop them on the enemy at facefuck range, that doesn't matter so much as long as the reps keep flowing. An example video of Imperian's brofists can be found here. Note that his HACs appear to provide remote ECCM help for their Logi pilots with a spare midslot.

Drake/Scimitars: It's one thing to take some Drakes and some Scimitars and giggle as your cheap, tough ships alpha strike everything. It's quite another thing when you do what Darkside has done, which this thread is cribbed from. You layer the Drake/Scimitar gang with command bonuses from the vulture and a mix of Lachesis and Huginns for tackling and antisupport. It's less effective than an Armor HAC gang, but it can still murder just about everything else on the battlefield that doesn't have a 'tight' composition.

Regardless of what sort of fleet you might prefer, there is absolutely no question that the most important ship in EVE right now is Logistics. They are overpowered to hell and back, and the easiest determinant of who will win any given engagement is who has the most Logi pilots - and who keeps their Logis alive the longest.

Since 2006, we have told our newbies to train for Fleet BS, which allowed us to fight and win pre-Dominion sov contests. Sov war has essentially stalled across EVE, and we may need to have an alliance-wide debate as to what to focus our training on - Logistics (shield or armor?), HACs, Drakes, what. HACs and Logis are expensive, but we have actual finances now enough to reimburse such things once we settle on a program; these ships also take less time to train for than the dreaded T2 Large Guns grind.\"

Explanations offered upon request

I'm interested, please send me the info...

Yes, Eve can be as much of a waste of time as WoW! I've had to tone it down though since I got married.

Woodchip, I've been the victim of a Pandemic Legion Fist. (heh) They killed 4 of our dreads and we got only 3 of their T2 cruiser hulls. Very effective. But not originally invented by them from what I've read.

- G

P.S. Descent 3 fist best fist.

Whoops were those dreads

Gengis, I've been both on the recieving end of PL love and we have given them the same love in return. When I was in the old Brutally Clever Alliance, PL pretty much drove us out of Fountain and caused the collapse of the Alliance (well perhaps Friedrich was more of the cause). In Morsus Mihi we have sunk a number of PL gangs that came roaming thru Tribute. In all PL will give a good fight. In consolation of your dread losses just remember, IT destroyed 3 of PL's Titans tho that was more of a lag issue than real fighting and IT kicked them out of Fountain.

7 Years in EVE for me. I'm currently CEO a corp of about 60 members, and part of a 0.0 alliance. (Blue to sys-k at that..) I've got a couple of ex-sys-k in corp too, btw.

I play as Ticondrius. Look me up sometime.

EVE is to modern games what Descent was in its time. That said, there's a lot of fail going on with the developers atm. Nothing that threatens the life of the game seriously, but CCP has woken up to discover that we're mad at them and they don't understand why.

I think they were caught a bit off guard when people responded to CCP's request to vote Eve as best Euro MMO. The sheer audacity of the request after the Dominion lag debacle and nothing done to fix lag, on top of CCP's response to the CSM's that lag would be taking a second seat to Incarna, ignited a powder keg.
Unfortunately for CCP, the now 29 page response is getting attention from outside news sources and has CCP scrambling like Tiger Woods between mistresses and the wife.

I played eve pretty much hardcore for a few years. I was big into the business and industry part of the game. At my peak I was pulling down a good 5 billion or so a week.

PVP is also a lot of fun. I was involved in a corp that tried to keep its list of blues to a minimum and operated on an NBSI policy.

Unfortunately, EVE was going downhill when I started to lose interest. The Developers dont know how the game is played, and they seem to take offense when players engineer new ways to play that they didnt, such as the nano-ship craze that got nerfed to hell and back a while ago.

One developer that stood out to me as simply not knowing anything about what he was doing was Chronatis. He dealt mostly with science and industry, so youd think he would work on improving that side of the game right? No, he mostly devoted himself to dealing as many death blows as possible to an ingenious little industry called reprocessing that was responsible for a very large portion of the raw materials in the game, as well as making certain logistical challenges easier.

For instance, it takes a LOT of materials to build the biggest ships in the game: Titans and Motherships (I think theyre called supercarriers now? whatever). Uncompressed, it takes over 50 freighters to move the materials needed to build one Titan. But using reprocessing and the mineral compression of many common modules, it was possible to get that down to 2 or even one freighter. Chronatis took offense to that, and instead of refining and streamlining the game mechanic that the players had discovered, he set out to destroy it. First he increased the size of the most compressed modules several times, then he almost got away with drastically reducing the efficiency of reprocessing itself. Last I heard, he had dramatically cut the drop rate of a lot of the items that get reprocessd and sold for minerals, so I have no idea at this point if thats still a viable way to make money or not.

Also, the CSM is a complete joke, with the candidates basically running popularity contests such that the makeup of the council is decided pretty much by the games biggest alliances. And if that wasnt enough, the developers dont listen to the CSM anyway, so whatever input they have is practically discarded.

EVE is still a very good game. I'm just burnt out of it, so I'm venting a lot of the negative aspects I remember. There is indeed a drastic gap between what the players want and what the developers think the players SHOULD want. The developers need to start catering to the people that actually play the game, rather than keep trying to shoehorn everyone into playing the game the way they want it played. Its supposed to be a sandbox, so creativity should be rewarded and encouraged. Instead it seemed like if you discovered something new and exciting, you kept it to yourself because the devs would probably nerf it if they found out.

...

Hrm..

Potato

IT has 5000 members, PL was outnumbered 6 to 1 (usually about 10 to 1 due to inactive members) so outta Fountain they went.

Good to hear from you G and congrats on your wedding.

Valin, I'll convo you in game soon. Nice to see a blue, since Woodchip is red to me

Woodchip, it's funny how the CSM seems to have backfired on CCP. Man, the community is riled up. Of course, it's just the 5% of eve players active on the forums and blogs who are riled up, so CCP is probably still sitting pretty with the 95% of players who prefer to remain clueless. I personally am not too mad; I'm patient and am taking the long view. Small scale PVP is still fun ATM.

Avder, can I have your stuff? Seriously, the nerf bat hits everyone at some point; sorry it hit your industry! But, man, I'd love to make 5b a month. Any tips or is it just a lot of hard work, organization, and capital?

I disagree about the CSM being dominated by the games biggest alliances. The two candidates with the most votes were certainly not from giant alliances. Neither was TeaDaze, Korvin, or Meissa Anunthiel. So just 4 of the 9 who were voted in had massive alliance backing.

PJB, do you play Eve, or just follow the news?

Vulcan, Hi! And thanks!

Makes me wonder -- if you put all that energy into learning the fine details of Wall Street, would you become a millionaire ??

Tried the demo expecting a REAL Space Sim Battle... NOT the mouse trash.

Eve didn't last long on my OLD PC.