Space trading game is not dead. Go play EVE people

[Unkillable Cat]

Like has been said, there are several ways to play EvE.

You can go PvE...and get absolutely bored out of your skull after about 6 months, grinding the mother of all grinds, standings. It's a sure and reliable way to earn money though.

You can go PvP...and learn really quickly that this isn't Guild Wars. 1v1 battles are rarely fought, 'cause at least one side has 2 or 3 buddies lurking nearby to assist their friend/kill the other guy at the drop of a hat. That's Hi-Sec PvP, BTW. Low-Sec PvP is better known as "ganking", and Null-Sec PvP involves bringing as many people from your corp/alliance as humanly possible, not in order to kill the other fleet but to hopefully lag out the server node, incapacitate the other fleet and gank them while they're waiting for everything to load. Metagaming FTW. (There's also wormhole space which is basically uncharted territory. You can easily become rich in there, but you'll also need a healthy dose of paranoia, 'cause you can never really tell how many players are in the same system as you.)

You can go industrial...buy blueprints, research them, acquire the materials needed, and produce whatever it is you want to make. Just keep in mind that EVERYBODY is doing this either as a main occupation or a side occupation, and in order to make money out of this you'll need time, patience, and market savvy. Also, the latest expansion pretty much nerfed mining into oblivion as a profitable profession, but at least you can go FarmVille on planets now. Sorta.

Playing the market requires effort, but once you've figured out how it works you should have an easy time buying, selling, bidding, underbidding and cornering markets to make some obscene amounts of money. Failing that, you can try your luck and patience with the various forms of scamming that the game allows. A good example is trying to pass off a unit of Carbon (Cost: 300 ISK) as a Charon ship (Cost: 700 million ISK). Yes, people are that stupid.

But in general there are two ways to play EvE. Casual and hardcore. Casual involves you logging in now and again to keep your skills training or maybe do some PvE or PvP, checking on the forums now and again to see what's going on, the usual. Hardcore involves grinding/mining/marketing 23/7 (as the servers are offline 1 hour a day for maintenance), usually joining a big alliance out in 0.0 and becoming an indentured servant in return for some "privileges", and keeping the browser constantly open on the main forums + at least 2 EvE-related forums, pressing F5 regularly to try to catch the very latest news/exploits/gank targets/alliance activities, all with the impossible goal of getting to the top of the heap. If you have enough time in your life to check your shit for fiber amounts or parasites, you have enough time to play EvE in hardcore mode.

You have to play hardcore-wise for a few months to get into the position where you can play casually, but that's how it is with all MMO's.

 

[Lothers]

Maybe Black Prophecy will be nice? Check blackprophecy.com - it'll also be free to some degree.

 

[Truman]

I played for just over a year. Went from miner to merc to pirate. EVE is a fantastic experience with tremendous depth. I cannot imagine anything that I would have rather done with that year. The experience of living in that world at least once is a worthwhile trade for the real-life time.

 

[King Crispy]

Some stupid, basic questions:

- Is the combat tactical in nature at all? IOW are there formations, any options other than click?

- Are there things to see other than ships, planets, asteroids and stations? Something visually interesting?

- How much of a derp factor is there? I mean players named ".xXx.IK1LLuNI66eR.xXx." and stupid shit like that?

- What if any are the restrictions placed on the free 14-day trial?

 

[DefJam101]

Some stupid, basic questions:

- Is the combat tactical in nature at all? IOW are there formations, any options other than click?

Combat is more about preparation, information gathering and ship setup than tactics. That being said you do, depending on the class of your ship, need to:

- Manage your velocity relative to the target. Larger guns have difficulties tracking objects at higher speeds, so you need to maneuver yourself in such a way that your weapons can hit the target. Smaller targets are also more difficult to target with larger weapons.
- Prioritize targets. Generally this is a no-brainer since the fleet commander will be telling you who to shoot, but for support roles it's not always so clear. Sometimes you might need to eliminate smaller frigates or enemy drones, or use ECM to jam other ship's targeting systems.
- Manage your capacitor so you don't run out of power mid-fight and become useless.
- Sometimes you need to 'crash into' other ships to move them in a certain direction. Exploits the fact that the game has no real collision detection; you can 'bump' other ships but you cannot crash into them.
- Stay within, or out of, range of certain weapons so you don't get horribly raped.

Other than that combat is mostly about numbers, ship setup, overall strategy, and skillpoints.

For instance, I often fly solo frigates whose sole strategy is to float just out of range of enemy frigates and slowly snipe them to death. Actual in-battle tactics amount to making sure I stay within a certain distance threshold from the hostile ship and deciding early if I need to run away. Everything else is in the ship fittings.

- Are there things to see other than ships, planets, asteroids and stations? Something visually interesting?

There are stargates, which bring you from solar system to solar system, but that's about it. Missions (PVE) are occasionally cool looking but they are also boring as fuck. It's not a very visual game.

- How much of a derp factor is there? I mean players named ".xXx.IK1LLuNI66eR.xXx." and stupid shit like that?

Mild. There are no real limits as to what you can name yourself, but the majority of the "PvP" playerbase is 25-40 years old and generally okay.

- What if any are the restrictions placed on the free 14-day trial?

You are restricted from training certain skills that would break the industry side of the game. Usually these limitations are useless (you cannot train to use a freighter effectively within 14 days, for instance) but if they were not in place every industry giant would have 300 trial accounts running supply routes through empire space.

There may be a restriction on certain public chat channels as well, but I'm not sure. Most of them are filled with stupid shit anyway so it doesn't matter. Other than that you're free to do whatever you want, including kill people.

 

[King Crispy]

Hmm. It sounds mildly interesting and I've heard good things from other people, too. Kinda on the fence about trying it, though.

Was there ever any talk about being able to land on planets, set up your own bases and stuff like that?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Was there ever any talk about being able to land on planets, set up your own bases and stuff like that?

They're halfway there now. You can now get a planet overview where you can plonk down structures to extract resources, process them and have them shot into space for you to collect.

Future plans involve you being able to land on the planet and attack enemy structures to take them over, but all the plans for that are gathered into a sister game called DUST 514...which is scheduled for the consoles.

 

[.Sigurd]

Hmm. It sounds mildly interesting and I've heard good things from other people, too. Kinda on the fence about trying it, though.

Was there ever any talk about being able to land on planets, set up your own bases and stuff like that?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNWWxD-q-bg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbjjACFBE88

 

[Sergiu64]

They kinda ruined 0.0 experience with the ever more gigantic ships with mega weapons on them. It used to be about fleet combat with hundreds of Battleships sniping away at each other, that was fun. Then it became about having those as support for Dreadnaughts and possibly Carriers as those attack other player's Outposts. The outposts would take forever to die, and would require you to come back many hours later to finish it off. It was a goddamn job to put those down and defend them. Then they put in the goddamn Titans that would take a year of real time to build and required support from alliances of thousands of people. Since those Titans can clear the whole field of Battleships by activating its Doomsday weapon something that used to be fun (Battleship fleet combat) became a hide-and-go-seek game with enemy fleets/Titans. Meanwhile as an average Joe in one of those alliance you're sitting there and scratching your head: what exactly are you getting out of risking your expensive ships trying to defend bunch of infrastructure thats just generates money for others in your alliance, or spends months/years building some giant ship for someone in your alliance so that it can attack/defend more infrastructure.

It's massive, but it's just not all that fun for the common Joe.

Small scale engagements are more fun, but its not all that easy to get those to happen.

 

[DefJam101]

Low sec is where it's at. Shame there's really shit all in the way of resources there, and big megalolcorps like Eve University run 100+ man blobs through on occasion.

Level 5 missions are quick, easy money in 0.4-0.1 but you'll need a buddy, multiple accounts, or a carrier.

 

[Destroid]

Titans were worth ~$5000USD in converted currency last I checked. They have probably come down since then.

(you can turn USD into ISK but not the other way around)

 

[Hoaxmetal]

Allegedly there are at least 500 titans in-game so the epic factor of those ships is long gone.

Low sec is where it's at. Shame there's really shit all in the way of resources there, and big megalolcorps like Eve University run 100+ man blobs through on occasion.

Yep, it's really different game than high-sec, high risk and dependance on good stock of ships and modules. Haven't seen any huge blobs on Syndicate though.

Level 5 missions are quick,

Standing grind isn't.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Since those Titans can clear the whole field of Battleships by activating its Doomsday weapon something that used to be fun (Battleship fleet combat) became a hide-and-go-seek game with enemy fleets/Titans.

They actually changed that recently, now the Titan's Doomsday weapon only ever affects one ship, but you can kiss that one ship goodbye.

 

[Sergiu64]

That's a good change I guess.

 

[xrm1]

Yes sounds good but that was just one of many terrible design decisions they made that fucked up the game.

If only they started to scale the damn universe up with the number of players so that smaller engagements could actually happen again, EVE felt way bigger when there were 10-15k people online.
Now every shithole system has people in it, "solo" PVP means running at least 3 accounts at the same time and 50vs50 is small gang PVP.
Jump bridges, cynos, WTZ and freighters all made the universe even smaller leading to alliances forming even bigger blobs and small corps having to adopt cheesier tactics.

Back when you had to actually haul valuables back from 0.0 to empire and vice versa in a flimsy industrial ship piracy was fun. There were supply lines that had to be kept clean and people had to pass through lowsec, giving it a purpose. Lower player density and longer travel times meant smaller battles with bigger impact of the individual pilot, more people were roaming around solo or in small gangs.
The servers probably can easily handle lag free 150vs150 battles by now and its not like having 400 more people in the system makes it more fun.

 

[Tycn]

Reactivated my trial account a few days ago. Pretty boring right now but I hope it gets better after I find a PvP corp.

 

[Truman]

Been thinking of re-joining but not sure if I want to do Star Wars: The Old Republic instead. Or if I can handle the time commitment for that matter.

 

[.Sigurd]

Been thinking of re-joining but not sure if I want to do Star Wars: The Old Republic instead. Or if I can handle the time commitment for that matter.

Old Republic is only another "WoW-killer" made of a cake recipe.
Not worth the trouble.

 

[Ermm]

Space Rangers 2 mothafucka.