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Role Playing (Games)

Eve Online Hits 100K Subscribers 129

CCP Games' Massive Title, Eve Online, now boasts 100,000 subscribers. Though there are many games with more users Eve Online is a very different title, set inside ships in the depths of space. They currently hold the record for most concurrent users, set at 23,178 simultaneous users on a single server. From the article: "To help accommodate its growing population, CCP will complete a hardware overhaul, allowing the game to handle more users, expand its universe, and run smoother." Ethic, over at Kill Ten Rats, has been writing about Eve a lot lately. His posts cover intergalactic war and courier missions, and might give you a sense of what gameplay is like. If you're interested in that sort of thing.
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Eve Online Hits 100K Subscribers

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  • Hopefully this wonderful community does not succumb to the disease known as 'Poplaritis'

    I remember the days before Counter Strike was sold on store shelves... way more mature.
    • by Corbu Mulak ( 931063 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @12:08AM (#14667039)
      I don't think it will. EVE takes a lot of patience, preparation, and time (not necessarily in-game time, just time to build skills up), whereas the more popular games with the annoying communities (CS, WoW) are pretty much "pick up and play" type games. They have their rewards mostly at the beginning of the games, and as you continue playing them you start running out of new options and your fun decreases. What I've found with EVE is that the more I play, the more fun I have, because there are actually MORE things to do.
      The people who make up the majority of the community are people who stay with the game. There may be a few hundred accounts or so that are 14-day trial people that act like they are still in WoW, but the majority of the gamers will be players who have been playing the game for a while. It just happens that those people tend to be less annoying and "OMG I PWNED J00 N00BZ0RZ LOLOLOLOL."
      • How do you get one of these 14 day trials? I've looked over EVE and it looks interesting but I don't want to pay for a game that I'll never play.
      • More things to do? When I played, there was very little you could do.

        Mine shit. Boring.

        Run supply missions (and the occasional NPC fight mission). Boring. And repetative- bad random mission generator.

        PvP. Might be real fun, but you can't actually do it (due to skills) for weeks.

        Craft. If you have the skills to. THat takes weeks again.

        On top of that, the universe is huge but absolutely empty. Noone around anywhere.

        Overall- very little to do, and nothing fun that doesn't require weeks of rl time befo
        • You pretty much proved my point. As I said, it takes time. Some people don't watn to spend that much time to get into the meat of the game. That's fine. And I agree with you, mining is boring as hell.
        • Yup (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Andy Dodd ( 701 )
          Unless you liked EVE's PvP, it was BORING AS HELL.

          And many people didn't like EVE's 3-hours-of-boredom/jumping-for-ten-seconds-of-comb at PvP system. (I didn't.)

          I had my account for a year starting at release, so in terms of skill points I wasn't far behind most other people. (I was deficient in combat skill points, given that I intentionally planned to be a commerce/production/science guy and my main character was Gallente because of that.)

          For those not familiar with EVE, your character's stats affected
      • TW2002 anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by jchenx ( 267053 )
        Wow, reading about the game makes it seem a lot like my favorite BBS door game of all time, TradeWars 2002 [wikipedia.org]. That was another slow-paced, space-based game. Every day you only had a limited number of turns. The primarily way of making money was via trading from one port to another (buy low, sell high). Only after a long period of time, could you truly amass a fortune (buying planets, bigger ships, etc.). There was also the notion of corporations with shared assets that could be plundered, if left unguarded (o
        • I played TW2002, and I played Eve. The comparison is quite accurate. However, the trading is much more complex as it's a player driven market, and NPC supply and demand is VERY secondary.

          I played Eve for about 2 years. Now I play WoW. Honestly, Eve is the better game, but you can only stay in the thick of alliance politics, wars, etc for so long before going slightly insane. It's nice to just log on and kill orcs for an hour or two without having to worry about anything.
        • http://bbs.memphistw.org/poison [memphistw.org]

          Click on BBS, which will connect you to an old skool BBS.

          There, you can play a bunch of doors including TW :)
    • Hopefully this wonderful community does not succumb to the disease known as 'Poplaritis'

      I don't think that's very likely, given that the game is set in deep space.

      ;)

      --
      Sig nell

  • by Tallon29 ( 821994 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @12:01AM (#14666996)
    Read an article in a gaming magazine a few months ago about a massive coordinated effort to assasinate and rob blind a large guild in the game. That a game could have a universe that allowed such treachery quite frankly shocked me. Most MMOs these days are all about babying the player through the game. No lasting consequences for mistakes, etc. I'll have to see if I can find a link to it.
    • Um, ANY MMO allows people to get "robbed". There are many ways to dupe and trick people into giving you in-game money or items. There is no safeguard against human intelligence (or lack of).

      And if you're talking about the two guys who tricked a bunch of "investors" looking to split costs on the blueprints for some big ship, I'd hardly call it a "massive" effort.

      • Does tricking investors have anything to do with assasination? "After a months-long infiltration operation, the Eve Online corporation Guiding Hand Social Club managed to work its agents high into the ranks of the Ubiqua Seraph corp (corps are Eve's version of guilds), from whence they pulled off what is being called the biggest heist/coup/assassination in Eve history, making away with $16,500 worth of virtual goods-and all within the letter of Eve law. The PC Gamer article linked above is a fantastic nar
    • Ugh. If I want consequences, I'll do something stupid in real life. Gaming is supposed to be fun. Consequences aren't.
      • There is a Twilight Zone episode where this guy ends up dying and finds himself in the afterlife. He was a big gambler in life, so his after life has him in a Casino. In his afterlife, he always winds. Every single hand, every roll of the dice, every spin of the wheel is a win. After a while he asks his after life guide what kind of heaven this is. He complains that winning is meaningless if you never lose. The guide responds with, "What makes you think you are in heaven?"
    • by Yst ( 936212 )
      The perpetrator was a corp called the Guiding Hand Social Club, the victim was another corp, Ubiqua Seraph and its CEO, Mirial. It got coverage in PC Gamer. The relevant thread chronicling the heist is here. [eve-online.com]
  • 23k a record? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Onuma ( 947856 )
    Do they mean 23000+ people on one server? I know there were more people than that on at one time during the height of Diablo II, for example. I'm not sure how that game or others are faring now, but I guess it's gotta be ignoring multiple servered games.
    • Re:23k a record? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      In EVE, there is only one universe that everyone inhabits. It'd be more like imagining 23k people in a single game of Diablo II.
    • Yeah, EVE prides itself on a single world with everyone in it, versus a bunch of different game worlds like WoW etc.
    • when i played that game for a little while through the free trial in some of newb zones i hardly saw other players, ever. and the in game universe is so huge taht travel times are enormous and taht many players are spread out over a huge area. the game's learning curve was too steep for me, since i was just a casual player.
    • If you've not played, I think the close-ness of the community that comes from just the one server is part of the charm of the game. Wow is imo let down by having many identical realms, wheras if you play eve your in the same universe as everyone else. Also, i remember the lag when they 1st hit 12k... 23k and stable is BIG news :)
      • at 23k, some of the regions get a bit laggy, but they are planning a big server upgrade soon, so hopefully those issues will go away.
      • Yeah SWG and EQ2 left me kind of jaded with the whole MMO genre. I've gotten more out of MUDs than anything else, and those can host a lot of people at once.
        I might have to take a look into the free trial, I almost did right before I deployed here to Iraq, but I figured if I wanted to check it out I would save it for when I get back.
        Thanks for the update. I didn't know about all of that stuff, as I'd only briefly looked over how the game is before deciding not to engross myself in another venture.
    • Re:23k a record? (Score:5, Informative)

      by TopSpin ( 753 ) * on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @12:27AM (#14667148) Journal
      Do they mean 23000+ people on one server?

      Yes. EVE has only one "server", which is a cluster of IBM hardware with a large Texas Memory Systems solid state disk. I'm not certain what operating system is running on the cluster nodes, but I know the database is MS SQL Server.

      The game is implemented in so-called "stackless" Python. I believe they are using a now rather obsolete version of stackless. I continue to wonder when and how they will address that problem. Perhaps they have been maintaining an internal stackless Python fork...

      • Re:23k a record? (Score:5, Informative)

        by inquis ( 143542 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @07:03AM (#14668489)
        This post is mostly correct. The IBM cluster forms the proxy layer. The Texas Memory Systems box is a cache between these systems and the SQL servers. The hardware upgrade is on the proxy layer -- basically, they are replacing 1U SP 32-bit boxes with blade DP 64-bit Opteron boxes.

        As far as Stackless goes, they aren't doing the coding themselves -- last I heard, they have the creator of Stackless at CCP doing the work. Going to 64-bit is a huge win though -- systems like Jita and Lagsulert (whose real name is Oursalert, but you get the idea) are now approaching 500 people in that system in prime time. Considering the number of agent missions they are running, and all the market activity that goes on, you've got to start getting close to your 32-bit architecture memory limit.
      • I continue to wonder when and how they will address that problem. Perhaps they have been maintaining an internal stackless Python fork...
        With 23,000 simultaneous users, I don't think they've got much of a problem with their version of Python. Maybe WoW should upgrade their version of C++.

        *chuckle*

  • the great eve scam (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wirm ( 190901 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @12:19AM (#14667109) Homepage
    www.thegreatscam.com if your an eve online fan, or just interested in weird stuff on the internet check that out, i bought the domain and host it cause its such a good story.
    • that is funny - funny enough that i scrolled down to read each page and then scrolled all the way back up to hit the link for the next page. any chance of a 'next' or something at the bottom-- so i can complain to people who read it after me that they didn't do it the 'hard way'?
       
      If not it is hilarious-- i've never played the game but laughed quite a bit as i read this tale of mischief- and i picked up a new sig.
    • I've read this before somewhere else. Very entertaining, no argument there. However, there are many doubters as to the truthfulness of this story. Many people have pointed out that such an event would have been recorded and talked about within Eve and other Eve-related communities, yet it is not. Also, none of the characters can be proven to exist or have existed in Eve. Some of the technical details are wrong as well.

      I'm not saying it's bollocks or anything, but many Eve veterans do say so. Either way,
    • No idea if this story is true, but it sure is interesting. I read the whole thing over the past 45 minutes. It certainly got me interested in Eve, anyway. I'm downloading it now.

      Though, somehow, I suspect I won't be investing in any battleships blueprints.

    • This is a story of deception, intrigue, and doublecrossing. It is a story of liars, bandits, and greed. It is a story of the worst of the human condition, and how the motive for profit will drive a normally nice guy to the deepest depths of evil and betrayal. This is the story of my life in Eve Online.

      This is a story about a COMPUTER GAME. Jesus christ.

  • Loved this game... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rocjoe71 ( 545053 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @12:25AM (#14667140) Homepage
    I really really liked EVE, I started playing it about 3 months after beta. Fairly regular game updates, an extremely large playing area with vast stretches of solar systems to explore that really added an element of mystery to it all. I enjoyed it so much it's the yardstick by which I measure all MMOGs.

    The only downside to it was the proliferation of griefers on the system, who would attack when you were at your most vulnerable state, often exploiting the flaws in the software leaving you feeling freshly fucked, but not in a good way. I left it when PvP was too big an obstacle to play the game the way I wanted to.

    That being said, if I ever find a game of the same scale and ambition again, I could easily part with $15-$20 a month to join in, as long as the griefing was under control.

    • An open PvP system like EVE's will always be open to the griefer. That is how the system works. Ships and ship fitting have specific roles. In EVE no amount of player skill will get a weak ship through a fight.

      What you call an exploitation of the game is actually what makes EVE's end-game so damn satisfying. You want to move that high price blue print original accross low security space? Then you better bring friends. You want to transport an assload of high price cargo? Bring friends.

      Pirates e
      • by coolGuyZak ( 844482 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @01:33AM (#14667444)
        I find the political maneuverings between alliances and corporations to be one of the most satisfying elements of the game myself. So far, I've been 100% carebear (miner/refiner). However, my corp is finally beginning to move into 0.0, and so I am picking up some combat skills. I am looking forward to the change in gameplay :)
        • ... I've been 100% carebear (miner/refiner) ...

          How is the player to player market in EVE? I really enjoyed playing a Master Chef in SWG, is there a comparable experience in EVE?
          • No game has a more advanced market economy than Eve. None.
          • The market system is incredibly advanced. It is possible to make a living just by playing the market--and skills exist to allow you to do so. The basic skill is called "trade" and increases the amount of orders (buy and/or sell) you can place on the market. Additional skills exist to increase this even further. There are skills that allow you to modify your orders remotely, buy and sell remotely, and more.

            Eve also sports an intricate system for creating items. To make an item you need to acquire a bluepri

            • ... blueprint originals (BPOs) and blueprint copies (BPCs) ...

              Interesting... and can players affect the quality and characteristics of the items they craft?
              • No - the market and trading is the most sophisticated, but the crafting (called manufacturing in Eve Online) is somewhat simplistic and comparable to WoW. Once you have the materials and the blueprint (either an original or a copy) the end product is the same as every other producer. You can control (via your toon's skills or material or time research on the blueprint) how much material or time it will take, but the end result is the same. If you enjoyed SWG crafting, trying to match materials and innovatio
            • Oops, pressed submit a bit early...

              Getting to the point where manufacturing or trading will make you millions takes between 2 weeks and a month, depending on your strategy for making money.

              This presents no problem at all, after all in SWG to become a Master Chef you had to bake millions of cakes and acquire hundreds of tons of all kinds of raw materials from energy to water to wheat, just to grind on. We had an outfit called Intergalactic Outfitters on the Tempest server, specializing on the most advanced c
              • This presents no problem at all, after all in SWG to become a Master Chef you had to bake millions of cakes and acquire hundreds of tons of all kinds of raw materials from energy to water to wheat, just to grind on.

                Well, Eve's gonna be a little different then. There's no grinding. You gain your skills after a specified amount of real-time passes (the time is different for each skill, and goes up for more advanced skills, and has a bunch of complexity I'm gonna ignore here.) It's sort of like in the mov

      • I agree with you 100%... My comment about exploitations were things like the lag-fragging, there was a time in EVE when users could launch enough drones that anyone entering the same star system would suffer from severe lag, so you'd pop out of a jump and you couldn't defend yourself.

        Eventually the EVE developers fixed that problem, but there were others and it always seems like when you needed the best response time you'd always be incapable of responding due to lag. I quit EVE almost 2 years ago, so many

    • by coolGuyZak ( 844482 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @01:37AM (#14667456)
      Most if not all of the flaws in the PvP system have been removed at this time. With the release of Red Moon Rising, CCP finally got around to implementing a system for ore rats as well. If someone steals ore out of your can, you get kill rights. :)

      Of course, the podkill zones are still infested by griefers... but that is the entire point of those areas. CCP engineered that mechanic into their game specifically to increase the risk of traversing those systems.

  • "To help accommodate its growing population, CCP will complete a hardware overhaul, allowing the game to handle more users, expand its universe, and run smoother."

    Think you could spare some staff for Blizzard? They seem to have problems implementing this idea.
    • I don't think Blizzard can fix its problems simply by adding more hardware. I think they have simply fracked their design, and fracked it hard.
      • Agreed. It doesn't matter how much hardware you throw at something if the design doesn't scale or is flawed.

        It would appear that Blizzard was beat pretty hard by their own unexpected success. I don't think they ever anticipated the load they now have to deal with.
  • Maybe one day I'll be able to play a space sim where you can actually walk around on your ship, do EVAs in zero G, hijack other ships, etc.
  • I subscribed last month, played it for a couple of days, didn't like it, and unsubscribed, but the unsubscription only occurs at the end of the month that you paid for upfront.

    So they only have 99,999 users!
  • "They currently hold the record for most concurrent users, set at 23,178 simultaneous users."

    I think they meant to say that the CURRENT record for concurrent users is 23,178 for EVE Online - not a record for All MMOs. I'm sure that Lineage has had a higher concurrency and WoW's concurrency is reported to exceed the population of Chicago.
    • They meant on one server. WoW may have a MUCH larger population, but not nearly that many people can play on one server at a time.
    • Re:No way. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Quaoar ( 614366 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @01:05AM (#14667351)
      Except that EVE is one server. Let's see you get 2,000 concurrent users on a WoW server and have it run smoothly, let alone 20,000.
    • Eve is played on a single server. WoW, even though they have way more users online at any one time, is played over a large number of servers. I'm not sure how many players can be on a server at one time in WoW, but it's nowhere near 23178.
      • Re:No way. (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        still agree with the start of this piece, 23k on one server doesnt mean anything,
        how many cpus is that?

        sure many MMO games like linage and COH can do 5k per server but they are tiny
        inexpensive boxes.

        you need to clearly define what this server is so that apple to apple comparisions
        can be made.
  • by Organic_Info ( 208739 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @02:40AM (#14667680)
    For all the WoW fans having trouble understanding what is so special about this, the EVE Universe is one big single realm (hosted on a cluster of servers).

    So where as a single WoW realm (hosted on a cluster of servers?) can accommodate about 2000 concurrent online players the EVE Universe(realm) has now supported over 23000 concurrent online players.

    Now that is something special.
  • Big Deal? (Score:1, Insightful)

    Its much easier to host 23,000 people when you dont have to render terrain. I know that Anarchy Online initially had hopes that they'd be able to support up to 50,000 people on a single server; their opening day showed them how fruitless that idea was. Had their servers been able to allow everyone who was trying to login and play together, they could have surpassed this. Not to take away from the technical achievement of concurrently serving 23,000 clients in a mmporg, this is simply a measurement which
    • Re:Big Deal? (Score:3, Informative)

      by AntiDragon ( 930097 )
      I'd have to disagree.

      Rendering terrain (or not) is a function of the game client and has no effect server-side.

      Everything in the game is merely a list of data - object type, stats, position, vector, state/animation etc. How that looks graphically is down to the client.
      EVE's concurency *is* impressive since it implies they have a server farm capable enough to access a single database at high speed .

      In contrast, the idea behind seperate "realms" (like WoW) is to limit the size of each database for speed purp
      • Not that I disagree, but you have to do stuff like server side collision detection which probably is a great deal more difficult in WOW than it is in EVE, although of course EVE also has solids flying through space.
      • Rendering terrain (or not) is a function of the game client and has no effect server-side.

        Object collision? Pathing issues? I prefer not falling through the terrain, and having the NPCs navigate properly.

        Ground-based MMOs are generally more dense. In any arbitrary scene there will be more objects, more NPCs, and more players with more doodads (armor pieces, weapon models, etc.)
        • Ground-based MMOs are generally more dense. In any arbitrary scene there will be more objects, more NPCs, and more players with more doodads (armor pieces, weapon models, etc.)

          Eve has a wide variety of ships, and each ship has a different number of slots, which can be filled by a dizzying array of objects, and there are several variations of each object. We're not talking "small laser, big laser", but about 10-15 of variations each of "small laser", "small projectile cannon", "small missile launcher", "s

  • by Aceticon ( 140883 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @05:45AM (#14668267)
    I've played the game for almost a year, and from my experience the biggest single problem with EVE online is the enormous amount of time you waste doing boring things in between the fun things:

    • Travelling takes enormous amounts of time. Going through any single start system takes several minutes and common trips via the highway systems (a group of important solar systems which are relativelly far from each other but have direct connections - the fastest way to cross the EVE universe) take at least 15 minutes. Traveling from a far from the highway system in one area to another in a different area can take up to 1h. Going all the way to deep 0.0 space will take several hours. When i was doing trading, i would wake up in the morning, fire up EVE on my PC and send my ship to pick-up some goods in a far system. While in real life i would shower, dress and eat breakfast the ship would be traveling. With a bit of luck the ship would've arrived when i was ready to go to work. I would then pick-up the goods and start the ship on the journey back and then would leave the EVE client on and go to work.
    • The base of the EVE economy is mining asteroids. In order to have the means to buy the most basic ship (newbie ships are free but they suck bigtime) you have to mine ore from asteroids. Mining asteroids is an incredibly boring activity - hours and hours looking at your lasers hitting some asteroids and your cargohold filling with ore. Since cargo holds aren't that big, one has to periodicaly (about once a minute) MANUALLY move the ore to an external cargo container. This hour after hour after hour. After you filled enough external containers you go a pick a different ship (transport ship, big cargohold, few mountpoints for mining lasers) and spend the next 30m moving ore from containers in space to a local starbase. On top of this, if you're not mining near a main system (where typically ore buyers and sellers meet - note that asteroids at main systems only have the worse quality ore), you will have another (multi-hour) session of transporting ore from the out-of-way system to a main system.


    If you don't believe me, just trail the EVE online forums. You will see many people casualy talking about how they read a book or watch television while their ship travels/mines-ore.

    In the end, even though I was quite wealthy for EVE standards (i stumbled early upon a mixed trading/manufacturing market arbitrage possibility introduced when a new type of ship components was made available in the game), i eventually left when i came to the conclusion that after all the time i had invested in it, most of the time playing EVE was composed of boring tasks, NOT fun.
    • We've (wife & I) just started playing EVE (been about a month or so).

      The time-between-doing-things-requiring-immediate-acti on is one of the features we actually like.

      While she mines in her huge, freakin' mining ship (lotsa shields, not much in offense) I guard with my cruiser/frigate/destroyer and whack the NPC pirates and ensure the real-life pilots mind their manners (we stay in 0.5 systems still, but that will change when I get everything to tech level 2).

      In a couple hours, we pull in 1-3M ISKs betw
      • While she mines in her huge, freakin' mining ship (lotsa shields, not much in offense) I guard with my cruiser/frigate/destroyer and whack the NPC pirates and ensure the real-life pilots mind their manners (we stay in 0.5 systems still, but that will change when I get everything to tech level 2).

        You've got the right idea here, but some friendly advice: Don't think that some shiny Tech II gear will save your butt in a fight. Yes, tech II is better, but proper fitting and tactics are what will make or b

        • Cool, an fellow EVE-universe resident I can pester with relentless questions!

          OK, how 'bout just a few:

          1. I *really* like the Kestrel (Caldari, as you know doubt know). Great missile ship, but no capacitance and pathetic power/cpu. It's great for NPC pirates, but that is not good for those fights you're talking about, right? (or, would better skills/implants make it more useful by upping the values a bit)

          2. My current ship - a Caracal (sp?) seems to have enough highslots and power/cpu/capacitance, but one of
          • As for 1 and 2, I'm really not too sure what to tell you. I primarily fly Amarr ships, so I'm not the best person to ask about Caldari tech. Some things that will help with any ship you fly are the basic skills. By basic, I mean the Engineering, Electronics, and Mechanic skills that give you more grid, cpu, shield armor, cap, and cap recharge. You will never be able to fit everything you want on a ship, and there are many directions you can take your fitting successfully. This is what makes working out
    • I started playing EVE again (on a new account) about a week ago, I played it before back in 2003 and now it seems like a totally different game to me.

      Back in '03 I did the mining thing for my money, which wasn't all that fun in the end, I did like the PVP though. So when I started this time around I had one goal: no mining whatsoever, and outside of the tutorial where you get taught different aspects of the game I have met that goal.

      So right now I have around 20 million isk, which I figure isn't that bad fo
    • I'd like to partially correct some misperceptions possible from your post, as well as mention what perceptions are true.

      You do NOT have to mine to get started. I didn't make my initial stake mining, and whenever I train folks in my corp I encourage them to avoid it and teach them how (people are welcome to Evemail me ingame for help there, same moniker as here). Making a living by Trading, which is one of the options, does indeed lead to long travel times- you tend to fly slow ships over long distances. Tha
    • Like forums are the best place to find information about a game. They're typically the domain of the vocal bitchy minority.
      • You're pretty active on those forums, last time I checked. ;)

        Love your comic BTW.
        • Thanks. :)

          And actually you might have noticed I've not been frequenting them as much as I used to, and when I'm there I'm trying to be constructive.
          • I'll admit, I'm not on nearly as much as I used to be, so my assessment of forum activity is not as thorough as it used to be.

            Thats actually one of the high points of Eve. The forums are much more interesting to read than other MMO's. Still a fair share of flaming and such, but even that is more intelligent than you'd expect. (Corporations and Alliances anyone?)

            (FYI me = Aitrus, retired pilot and forum whore)
            • As EVE has become more and more popular, I've found the forums have started to become filled with, shall we say, undesirables? Moreso than say a year ago. It's an unfortunate side effect, but I'm noticing more and more "vets" staying away from the forums in general, or staying in the Corp and Alliances forum.

              That being said, you're right in that it still has the best community of any MMO around.
    • If you like to play a single-player MMO with other people who coincidentally happen to go by you once in a while, this game is not for you. However, if you are looking for a VERY complex and engaging game which nearly requires a multiplayer mentality, this game is more for you. Of course it's not impossible to go solo, but it will be a lot harder to accomplish anything, and it will be boring without people to help you out and whom with you can do cool things. On the other side, multiplayer end-game conte
      • "There is a fairly sharp learning curve, but if you want something besides a boring grind, rewards come to those who like challenges. "

        That's funny...because mining has to be the worst grind of any MMORPG i've ever played, and in order to get anywhere in EVE, mining is kind of a necessity.

  • 100,001 (Score:3, Funny)

    by eyeball ( 17206 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @10:43AM (#14669691) Journal
    They would have 100,001 players if they had a Mac OSX client :(

  • I played the trial, and loved it and the concept at first. I've read the stories posted here and elsewhere about the billion isk scandals, awesome I thought.

    My problem with the game was that my accomplishments did not translate into a stronger character, only more resources. Even were I to do something really savvy and make a billion isk during the 14 day trial, I realised there was no way I could possibly reach a high enough skill level to fly something cool, because of the way skills are acquired in the
    • Uhm,

      lots of people try buying expensive ships or even whole month-old characters which is frowned-upon for some reason:

      Without the knowledge on how to use them, that doesn't work too well. Spend those months honing your skills in smaller ships and figuring even more workable fittings. Try taking out an NPC cruiser with a frig.

      If you can't after 14 days of skilling combat, you may want to work on your tactics instead.

      Of course, if all you want is quick hour of fun after work I'd say you don't need a MMORPG.
    • Just my personal opinion, but I never had as much fun in that game as I did flying my Crusader interceptor. (interceptors are not a significant time investment compared to some ships in the game) Yes, if you want to be the guy piloting a Titan, you've got your work cut out for you. But frankly, I think those ships are high on logistics and low on fun.

      Also in Eve, Resources and playerskill are far more important than character skillpoints.

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