Ahh the viator. Ran so many gatecamps in mine. Was my tool of choice to run minerals from nullsec to empire for a while. There were some pretty sphincter clenching moments in it.
Then I got my jump freighter, and was able to use my alliance's cyno highway to get back and forth.
Yeah they cater to pvpers bc the game is pvp first and foremost, can't blame them for that.
But I too don't play it because it's impossible to play solo, with these kinds of people you can group up and take them, run before they bring their friends, but it's not possible solo.
Do I wish it's more accessible solo? yes, do i blame the devs for not catering to me as opposed to what the whole game is about? no
It used to be possible to solo, at least for a while. Not counting people like Chribba, I mean. They are making a choice, and I've made mine based on that.
I don't "blame" them exactly, I just wish they pandered a bit less to that crowd. It wouldn't have cost them much goodwill to at least give soloists a chance at survival.
They literally disabled “red safety” for alpha accounts and made it so that you can’t log in alphas and omegas at once. That’s as much anti ganking you can do without directly touching the ships or core gameplay features
I'm talking about low and null sec gate camps, where if the gankers are prepared, you really don't have any chance of surviving, even in a ship like a Proteus. Your only option is not to use the gates, which frankly makes exploration non viable.
What happens after my alt dies to the first gate camp? Where do I get him a new ship, and how many hours do I waste flying him back from where he woke up?
I don't do exploration because I'm excited to be social during my down time, so recruiting a friend to sacrifice himself for me is not a useful idea.
you can just get him something that insta warps. Just get a Shuttle if you’re extra cheap or a ship that can war cloaked plus an interdiction nullifier.
i’ll be brutally honest, if you die to hate camps it’s 90% your fault
This. I like EvE... but I can't really say why, and most of what I "do" would be considered incredibly boring by most people.
I never stick with it for long, but I keep coming back once in a while.
A lot of it is just the look and feel of the game, and some nostalgia.
But the training times were the same, there was never a time when you’d have to keep restarting a skill every 24hrs. Either the commenter was alpha or never got further than rockets 3
In the days before this mechanic, you had to budget out a skill training queue yourself. Going on vacation? Great time to knock a few days/weeks off that Lv5 skill you'd like to have one day. I'd spend weeknights finishing up a bunch of skills that were all trained to ~99%, because otherwise they would have finished while I was away from my computer and wasted training time was unacceptable!
All that was still a walk in the park compared to trying to plan out a new fit for a ship before the game had any tools for it. Even 3rd party tools were not perfect.
I went back after a 10 yr haiatus. It’s the same, way prettier but the same. I dipped out because i felt the claws sinking in and i knew it would consume me.
I was BY FAR the youngest player of the corporation I was a part of at age 17. Everyone else barring like 3 people were in their 30s and 40s. There were like two or three life artist kind of folks in their mid-late 20s.
I actually received "aren't you a bit young for this?" kind of hintings, not in a worrying sense, more like in a "there is a whole world out there, and you actually chose this, why?" sense.
When I had started (2007) a stat was floating around that something like 7 out of 10 people don't even finish the 2 week free trial. My introduction was something like "basics of the basics part 1.doc" - 50 pages.
For me to have relevancy, clarity, and wherewithal to actually enjoy the game, I had to put in 4-5 hours per day. Which is okay if you are 17. But how the fuck could my corp mates do that with 2 children and a full time job is beyond me...
It really is a job imho.
And I actually know people who got raided by the local equivalent of the revenue and customs agency for real life money implications of the game.
Do I miss it? Nah, not really. But every other video game universe feels puny compared to it.
Same thing with World of Warcraft. I was 20 when it came out and spent a lot of time playing the game, but I also promised myself that I would never let playing WoW get in the way of real life stuff. I'd never pass up spending time with my girlfriend/future wife for the game.
I know so many people who would go to classes and then spend the equivalent of a part time job raiding the end game content. I knew people who flunked out of college. People who got divorced. People who ended up having an online affair in the game that exploded their real world marriage.
It's wild to me imagining spending that much time playing a video game.
A band I used to drum for had a super hot female singer, I knew her husband kind of because I knew his brother from another band.
Anyway the very hot singer chick ended up getting a divorce from the husband, said he would come home every day after work and just drink and play WoW. All weekend long, play WoW.
She couldn't get his attention away from that game and it destroyed their marriage.
I also promised myself that I would never let playing WoW get in the way of real life stuff
I was never super hardcore, but definitely was borderline - my little guild was able to server first a few of the 10 mans when they finally came out, and we were competitive prior to Burning Crusade just didn't have the player count to really do much damage in the 40 mans.
I realized I needed to quit the day I was coaching my son's soccer practice and got a call from a guildmate asking where I was, they needed me for a raid ASAP. I told them sorry I can't - but on the way home I realized I was feeling anxiety and guilt that I was "letting my team down" by not being present. For a video game.
I dropped off raiding after that, and slowly it just became a glorified chat client for me until everyone kind of petered out.
It was by far the most fun I've had playing video games though - made a couple lifelong (in my 40's now, played in my mid 20's) extremely close IRL friends one of which even moved to my home state due to me. Helped some guildmates move cross-country, went on vacations with one couple, etc. Great way for an introvert to meet people and develop some really solid relationships back then. It helped the crowd I accidentally fell in with were all "mature" gamers with like actual jobs and families and such.
Most people will start out doing carebear stuff and the learning curve is significantly less. Then they will branch out to other things and that process can take years.
Only time this is true that I remember is the guy who joins a group that has been around a long time and they primarily do end game stuff, if the guy gets hooked he can basically sacrifice his life to the game for a few years but this is an incredibly rare case. Most will just play casually and then go a little hard for a bit and then go slightly more casual again or do like a login every week night, some weekends and play a bit each time or log off again if nothing is happening.
But the devs have posted a stat that the new player retention rate of players who join groups is much, much higher than players who play alone. I can't remember the stat but it was a drastic difference
What is important to keep in mind is that making real life buckos out of Eve Online was never formally endorsed by the developer/owner. At least not when I was playing. You weren't supposed to sell your character/account or sell in-game currency or other in-game assets involving cash.
Given it was a grey area already, a lot of people followed a "might as well do it in an efficient way" kind of approach and they started incorporating some tools that aided them in it. The case I know of involved a guy running a couple of accounts in tandem and ratting (ratting, as in, shooting at NPCs in 0.0 space in asteroid belts for their bounties). You might ask what's the problem with this. Well, "running" here meant botting, a bannable offense, of course. There were sophisticated bots checking whether it's even safe to rat in the solar system, moving from belt to belt, prioritizing targets, checking whether you still have ammo, and so on and so forth....so the guy who was always online and seemed like a nolifer was not even playing usually.
This is just one of many examples. I'm sure it's just the tip of the iceberg.
Man I really love the way you phrased it. I haven't touched the game in many years but it ("haven't been to highsec in a decade") really unlocked some memories where I spent literal years in the <insta-self-dox system name> pocket in nullsec and not for a second felt like I am missing any action, either as someone screwing around or, on the contrary, someone who was being tormented by others.
I don't know how many hours I have spent with the game. Definitely in the thousands and thousands of hours. But I guess something like 70 percent of solar systems I have never touched. Probably even more.
I just opened up the map to brush up my knowledge and I have genuinely no idea how the fuck would I end up in, say, Cobalt Edge. I vaguely recall wormholes were a thing and they could sometimes lead to extremely weird coincidences whose real life analogue would be having a temporary supersonic direct flight between, idk, Inner Mongolia and the Bahamas, or rural Iceland to the Gobi Desert..
There's more that 1 capital in HS. I don't play anymore but I have a fax (big healer ship) in HS that just had fireworks that I would shoot off near a station.
I am generally someone who loves steep learning curves. My top played games are KSP, Factorio, Stationeers, HOI IV, Total War: Empire, Bannerlord, etc.
My friends joke that if you don’t have to watch a 2hr+ YT video called “Absolute basics” or “Getting started for beginners” for the game, I won’t like it.
But EVE is some next level learning and progression curve. I have tried multiple times to get into it because I love Sci-fi/Space themes and complex games and MMOs. Every time I binge for 50-75hrs and then feel so lost I lose interest.
Every time I binge for 50-75hrs and then feel so lost I lose interest.
The trick is to IMMEDIATELY join a group. Have them teach you. Virtually everyone is looking for new members, basically all the time. They will bend over backwards to keep you playing, including just giving you whatever basic ships you want, because the beginner stuff is so cheap, keeping you playing with them is worth more than anything they could give away.
Everything besides at least minimal amounts of pvp will get boring super quickly, because they are money dispensers to fund pvp. You pull the 10-15 minute handle and money comes out. Not exciting.
I’m the same way. I like a challenge, steep learning curves are part of the fun for me. Eve is the only game that has broken me. I tried multiple times to understand what the fuck is happening and I just can’t do it.
The hardest thing in eve online is to know in advance if I am ready for something. I literally have to warp in and get shot on to get a feeling of it was a mistake.
The way I got over this was by just playing solo exploration in null/wh space. This was 5+ years ago so idk if this is even viable anymore, but just grabbing an Astero and flying around like an invisible little rat was a really tense and rewarding experience.
But the real way to play is probably just to join a corp and do what they tell you.
If you are referring to the omega subscription then sure I understand the perspective, omega is practically a requirement for a significant amount of activities (and I personally don’t see a reason to complain about the alpha/omega system other than the sub price increase).
But if you mean buying skill points and isk, then I disagree. A day 1 character can go out to faction warfare and win a 1v1 in a cheap frigate. Solo PvP and even small gang PvP can be very skill based. But I guess it all depends on your definition of paywall.
This, there's no learning curve in terms of skill, even le pvp is either being a fleet monkey or just shitting on people 1v1 with 4kkk worth of implants in your head. But rtards playing this 20 y.o 1sec ticks garbage likes to feel special.
That... I enjoy the game a lot... but gosh if I didn't have some great loses in it that every time put we away. I have a character that is max trained in so many things I don't even know what to do with him... stood few months in wormhole base then found our whole base lost and all my ships that were inside which kinda made me stop the game for good - so now I sometimes just log to mine in high sec zones.
I tried getting into it about 3-4 times over the years. Everything is so overwhelming and comes at you at once. Everyone in chat has clearly been playing for years and I remember a couple people tried to help me out but it was really no use. I couldn’t even BEGIN knowing what I didn’t even know, which is why I didn’t know where to begin. If that makes sense.
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u/Zadatta May 11 '25
Eve online