Eve

GeorgeK said:

It's an MMO where you are a spaceship captain. You train skills, get bigger ships, mine asteroids, form corporations or conduct wars or hunt pirates or be a pirate, whatever direction you want to go with it.

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Played it for a while. It is definitly different from Everquest, WoW and other MMOs like them.

It's nice and non twitchy for the most part, but I did encounter so far one player who is a player killer and preys on newbs. I'm not sure how common that is

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Extremely.

and of course the boards on the topic are dominated by the hard core players who insist that it is not a problem

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That depens on what you'd call a problem.

or simply a part of the game

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this.

and a way to keep out the non-serious players. Any experience?

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Well there's one useful bit of info you already got: it's a game for "serious" gamers. Now, there's no real point in talking about constant grinding and repetitive boring stuff, all MMOs include that, Eve is no exception.
A few noticable differences are: You "level" by waiting. Seriously. There is pretty much nothing you can do to make your character progress. You assign a skill to learn, and it will simply be learned, over time wether you're logged in or not. Your attributes make this go faster and you can buy attribute upgrade, but that's maxed out pretty quickly. So, after a few weeks of playing, your character progresses pretty much without you. Some players might like it, i think it takes much of the point out of a RPG.
Eve gets called "by griefers for griefers". Which is pretty accurate. Preying on newbs is allowed. Encouraged actually. Think of it as a constant, no-rules, free-for-all PvP game. The only people you can trust are the ones in your corporation (guild/clan) and even there it's been known to happen that people took months to infiltrate a corp and get access to accounts and steal everything and disappear.
The interesting part of the game is corp vs. corp fighting, which the game is pretty well suited for. Though you can expect the "serious players" in the serious corp to make serious demands of your time.
Since the game is free to DL though, and you can play the trial for a while (iirc two weeks) i recommend just trying it out.

I played the trial, loved the idea (I'm an Elite fan from way back) but it is a little inaccessible unless you can join an existing corporation. I've been keeping an eye out for a decent casual group but no dice so far.

Lhun and DoomBunny have the right of it. I played for about a month, joined a corp, and discovered that it was more work than I was willing to invest.

Even in Empire Space (which is high security) you're still not safe. If you're part of an alliance then any other alliance can (and will) declare war on you. This means that you can be attacked in Empire Space without reprisal.

My other big complaint had to do with the way you get your ships and equipment. If you get blown up (and you will) then you have to buy a new ship and all the equipment. You won't be able to get all of that in just one system. You'll have to travel a fair bit. The end result is that screwing up and dying means about three to six hours of work to get back to where you were before.

If you're willing to put in the time, find a solid group of hardcore players, and contribute heavily to their cause, then I could see this being a good time. For a casual player, I really wouldn't recommend it.

Bored me to tears.

GeorgeK said:

So if you never join a corporation, then are you more or less immune from wars?

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In high sec space, yes.

Obviously there will still be pirates and some players willing to lose their ship just to attack you.

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Not a lot of them. It's quite pointless.

However, ships get very expensive very quickly and the police will shoot out of the sky anyone fighting, so I'm wondering if player killers are active at anything beyond the smallest ships? I'm assuming that the newbies at some point, like I did, learn to alter the game's default settings so other players can't trick them into taking the first shot. I've also learned, when in doubt, warp away.

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In low sec space, anyone can shoot you out of the sky without consequences. And then shoot your capsule so you lose your implants and possibly some skills as well. In high sec space, you can only be attacked when in a corp and at war. But if you never leave high sec space, and never join a corp, NPC missions are pretty much the only thing you can do. If you've done a few of them so far, well, they don't get much more interesting. And since Eve has no real aggro system (at least, didn't have one when i stopped playing) doing missions in teams is also not very common. For fighting NPCs, pick either missiles or drones, those work best because you can easily pick the damage type the enemies are weak against.

I've heard that playing Eve is like holding a second job.

That says it all. ;-)

I did some of the exploration stuff when it came out. Alas, it wasn't as spiffy as I thought it would be. In a regular star system you can find a number of sites. Usually they're covered with bad guys of one stripe or another, and usually they're pretty easy to clean out. Unfortunately in EVE risk = reward, and anything in 0.5 or higher is going to be very low risk.

Then you can find wormholes. Sometimes these lead to other parts of the star cluster (known space), and sometimes they lead to W-Space. W-Space is always 0 security, and any sites you find in there are likely to be guarded by Sleepers.

Sleepers are leftover remnants of an ancient civilization. Effectively they're robots. They have some truly amazing loot available on them, but they're crazy hard to kill with anything less than a small battle group (sometimes a large battle group).

Also, there are skills to consider. It will be about three weeks before you have all the necessary skills to begin exploring, which is unfortunate.

Sorry to hear about the PC trouble. I have no idea why the game doesn't run from your hard disk. I can't think of anything that might cause that, short of a failing disk. You might try running the error-checker. If you're not sure where that is, post here and we can point you in the right direction.

I knew some guys at university who basically spent all their free time attacking and betraying everyone they possibly could. That's all I have to say about Eve, and that's all there is to say.

I hate playing EVE.

But I fucking LOVE the politics and economics of it.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/new...-Shenanigans-GoonSwarm-Ganks-Band-Of-Brothers

LOL at the graph.

Zoombie said:

I hate playing EVE.

But I fucking LOVE the politics and economics of it.

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EVE scams are the stuff of legends. This is the kind of crazy crap I want to see in more games. Real piracy FTW!

Way back in the day I was beta-testing the original Jumpgate (sequel in development apparently). We had an odd method of piracy, involving flying freighters as fast as possible into enemy stations and buying everything - thereby shorting out their production and killing their economy. Of course large numbers of escorts were involved, thus massive battles and fun for all the family. Emergent gameplay is my god.

That sort of emergent gameplay is good.

The kind of "emergent gameplay" that involves abuse of bugged gameplay mechanics or flaws in level design to acquire unintended advantages is not.

Watching the politics in EVE goes well with a nice slice of Schadenfreude Pie.

Mmmmm that's good suffering!

Zoombie said:

I hate playing EVE.

But I fucking LOVE the politics and economics of it.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/new...-Shenanigans-GoonSwarm-Ganks-Band-Of-Brothers

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Heh, ditto.

I love the politics/scams etc, but the game itself really wasn't my bag.

Yeah, there are something like 40 total missions, of which each agent type can select from twelve or fifteen.

I'd suggest giving Star Trek Online a whirl once they have trial subscriptions available. However, knowing Cryptic, that will be at least six months from now. Most big/shiny new MMOs prefer to grab as much cash from box sales as possible before allowing people to demo the game. Bright side: by then most of the irritating bugs will be squashed.

I've been playing Eve for three years now, and it's the only MMO that can retain my interest, because the game is run by the players. It's a social game, a sandbox as opposed to the "theme park" of other mmo:s.

I wouldn't say that it's not for the casual gamer. It depends on what you want to do.

What I like about it is this: it is emphatically not linear. The developers do not lead you by the hand to different kind of rewards. And, there is a "death penalty". If you lose in Eve, you feel it. But, on the other hand, if you win in Eve you really win.