dj_ivocha on 20/3/2008 at 10:02

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This is also one of the selling points of the game, though. Unlike WOW and other similar games, losing your equipment actually matters, which makes it all the more exciting. And you can easily lose billions of ISK if you are not careful. But the deal goes the other way too - when you manage to kill your opponent without losing your ship you can really feel you accomplished something.

There are ways to minimize your losses though. For example, my corporation has a reimbursement program, that pays your insurance costs if you lose your ship in a fleet battle. With current module and mineral costs that basically means each Tech2-fitted battleship costs you at most 20 million ISK, and in most cases even less. Due to various other advantages we have, you can VERY easily make 10-20 million in less than an hour. And battleships, being quite big and sturdy, don't really die that easily (again, if you are careful), so you can go quite a few days with one without losing it.

Another way is to just use cheap throwaway ships and fittings. Not every alliance will like that but there are many who don't mind. For example there are two alliances, called Red. and Blue., who are in a perpetual war and are open to everyone interested. No requirements to enter, no strings attached. You can join one of them, buy a cheap frigate and fittings for 200k ISK and go fight. If you only run one level 3 or level 4 NPC mission, you will earn enough cash to buy 10-100 such frigates and then have days and even weeks of fun. And those two alliances stay in the secure empire space most of the time so you don't have to travel far and go through dangerous space to get there and get blown up by random pirates in the process.

While many people play it for the PVP, there are MANY other activities which won't require you to even train combat skills, much less actually equip weapons on any ship or shoot at anyone.

You can participate in the economic side of the game, trading and manipulating the (entirely player driven!) market, earning (and losing) billions in the process, without ever leaving your station. Many of the participants call this "market PVP" and it can be in fact even more cutthroat than real PVP, due to the fact that you can lose billions, even tens of billions of ISK with just one wrong decision.

You can be a big industrialist and build basically every item that's in the game, from simple cargo containers, through modules, ammunition and drones, to frigates, battleships and even carriers. If you are in a big alliance you can even build motherships and titans and build and deploy outposts - these are just normal stations, similar to the one in my screenshots above (the Gallente station with an Iteron ship next to it), except they can only be built in lawless space and be conquered (but not destroyed) by other alliances, if they are stronger and more determined than yours. For reference, a titan takes more than a month to build and costs more than 30-40 billion ISK in minerals and you need a lot more than one person to help build and defend the manufacturing arrays (those are in space and thus can be destroyed, unlike normal station production facilities).

You can be a scammer, thief or other similar lowlifes ;). While some people frown upon such actions, they are completely legal within the game world, just like ANYTHING, except cheating/hacking/macroing by using out of game means. You can make hundreds of millions, even billions, for example by taking a normal battleship blueprint with limited runs (worth 1-10 million) and sell it as an original blueprint (unlimited runs, worth 500-1500 million). You can gain a corporation's thrust, join them, rise in the ranks and thus get hangar and wallet access and then steal everything and run away.

There are a lot of other things you can do, some easier than others, some more dangerous than others. While this is also one of the major selling points of the game, it's also what puts some people off - basically it's a sandbox, with the entire content being player generated. There is no fixed storyline and endgame that guides you through the game. Like many people say, EVE is what you make of it - if "endgame" for you means controlling vast regions of space, you can try and do that. If it means being rich beyond measure and being able to hire entire mercenary alliances to do your bidding, you can do that too.


To give you an example of the deep intricacies of the game, I'll tell you about one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, wars in the game. How it really started and when is controversial - some people say one of the alliances (Band of Brothers), being entirely PVP oriented, wanted to get really epic fights, and set a goal of conquering the entire lawless space, which encompasses thousands of star systems and hundreds of stations. To this end, they launched massive offensives against several other alliances, conquered all their space and basically exterminated them. At the high point of their offensive they were in control of close to half of all the lawless space.

Others say it all started when a couple members of the GoonSwarm alliance (the ingame alliance of SomethingAwful and the biggest one ingame with over 5000 members) made fun of a deceased player of Band of Brothers. The latter then swore to destroy GoonSwarm.

Yet others (at one point the majority) say it's because of the (http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/08/172206) developer misconduct last year.

Whatever the reason, this war has been raging for a lot more than a YEAR, with at least half the entire EVE population involved in it in one way or another. Tens of thousands of ships have been destroyed, trillions of ISK worth of assets have been lost by most alliances. Battles are being fought daily by fleets of hundreds of players and the war is still going on, with the tides turning multiple times.

And all of this was done entirely by the players, without any developer intervention or developer-generated content.


Damn, I sound like an employee of CCP's marketing department, don't I :laff:? I just wrote the above WALL OF TEXT so you guys can decide whether the game is for you or not and not waste weeks or months expecting something else.



Oh and Ulu, I hate you! :mad:

I only have 25m skill points

catbarf on 21/3/2008 at 02:57

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Yeah, good luck with that. I have four, by the way, and none of them are 'catbarf'.

I earn roughly $200 per month. That's all it really is to me.

Spaztick on 22/3/2008 at 01:18

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You could feed a chinaman for a year with that money, you monster!

catbarf on 22/3/2008 at 04:51

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If you could hire NPCs to, say, take cargo back to base while you mine it, or have them mine, or act as wingmen, I'd probably stop macroing and play for real. That would be a fantastic idea.



I make money, people get 150mil ISK (that's somewhat high) per time card, and other people get timecards for 80% retail. Everyone wins.

Spaztick on 22/3/2008 at 15:57

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Autopilot.