I am someone who has played eve-online quite a bit for about one-two years. I'm currently not playing, but thinking of starting again after my exams are finished. I think I may be able to shed more light on some of the downsides of eve-online, as I have some more experience than 'tried the trial, didnt like it'.
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Originally posted by BurnedToast:
The skill system, for example, is very different. You train skills over time, based on your stats and so even when you are logged off you advance. Unfortunately, the downside is that there is nothing* you can do to to make them train faster, and so you quite literally can never catch up to the people who have been playing for years. That's right, they will always be better then you at everything and there is nothing you can do about it.
It's true that you will never gain more skill points than someone who has been playing for a longer time. It's not true that you will always be worse.
First point, skillpoints don't mean all that much. A well set-up ship will be able to kill a worse set-up ship. All ships are weak against other ships. I would even dare to say that in this game, new players are a lot stronger relatively than in other games. For example, I personally once killed a caldari navy raven (which was one of the most expensive ships back then, at about 1 000 000 000 isk) with 2 cruisers and an interceptor (approx. 10 000 000 each). Calculate modules (weapons, shield boosters etc.) and the difference is even greater.
The gain per skillpoint decreases exponentially. LVL 5 takes about 4 times as long as 1 to 4. You generally gain 20% bonus with lvl 4 and 25% with lvl 5. For the real specialization skills, this bonus often reduces to only 3% or 2% bonus per level.
Next point is that the amount of skillpoints you can use in one 'branch' of ships is limited. This means that a specialized newer player can be as good as a veteran player in a certain ship. A veteran player will have more different ships he can fly effectively. But this is not limited to them either, new players can get this diversity at the cost of not specializing as much.
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Or take the economy. Virtually everything is player made. This is great, and it actually works out decent enough... except combined with #1 there is little point in you, as a new player, making anything. The older players all have skills that make manufacturing more efficient so you are better of just selling the raw materials because you make more money.. except you don't even really get very much money from selling ore because older players have giant mining barges that can mine as much in 30 seconds as you can mine all day.
It's true that mining is pretty useless for new players. However, you can build effectively as a new player. I believe the only skill that really improves industry much is one that reduces the mineral cost by 4% per level. You can get this to lvl 4 in a few days. Sure, you miss out on the 4% extra that the veterans have, but it will still make a profit.
Even new players can get large profits by trading. It doesn't need a lot of time, just a good trading spirit.
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Then there is PvP. I'm not opposed to PvP, except in EVE PvP seems to equal assholes sitting at gates between systems ganking people before they even load, with no penalty. This is made twice as bad by the fact you lose your ship and money (from a clone to keep your skill points). There are also fleet battles and such I guess but good luck with that unless you join one of the uberguilds.
Here I am kind of divided. Let me start by saying you don't need to join an uber guild to get in fleet battles. However, when I last played really big fleet battles lagged pretty hard and weren't all that much fun (IMO!), as it is mainly fire primary, fire secondary, hope you don't get shot. The thing about this though is that you and your friends can really change the eve-universe by controlling large amounts of space and this is a great feeling.
I liked the small gang fights. Here, every ship fills a role and you can make a difference even in your little just-above-starter-ship. It is pretty fun, and the feeling you can really lose something makes it quite 'intense'.
Last pvp options as I see it is soloing, for this you don't nééd good skills (as in ingame skillpoints), but you need to be willing to try and get killed a few times before you get someone. The key here is target selection, and you need to know a bit about the game to know which targets you can kill.
To give some perspective, I killed my first other player ship (larger and more expensive than mine at the time) before my trial was over.
I agree that gate camping happens a lot. However with this, as long as you stick to low-security and empire, are in a reasonably fast ship and don't afk you will not be killed by gate-camps. There is a 30 second cloaking time after jump during which you are invulnerable and if you are in a fast enough ship you will have time to go away before the campers have time to lock you down.
The major problem I had with this game is that it is pretty time intensive. I found it hard to find many targets to shoot at, and if you are on an op with your corp (ingame guild) it can take a couple of hours before anything really happens.
In return for this you get moments of the most exciting pvp I ever had in any mmorpg.
[ June 12, 2008: Message edited by: Robke ]
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Topic: DF invading other games (Read 6679 times)