March 9, 2007
EVE Online
So after hearing about it for a few years, I finally decided to try EVE Online. It's spring break, I figure now's as good a time as any. It's an MMORPG set in deep space, and the backstory, while interesting, is something you can look up for yourself. I think I may have finally found the online game that's right for me, as WoW couldn't keep my interest.
Fortunately, a lot of the things that bugged me about WoW are very different in EVE. For starters, there's actually an incentive to log off and go do something else, because you gain skill points at a fixed rate whether or not you're logged on. EVE uses a skill-based not a level-based system, but you improve your skills not by using them but by "training" them, i.e. select them for training and the skill points you gain are applied to that skill. You can train one skill at a time.
Perhaps the biggest difference is that it's all on a single realm. Every player plays in the same world. There are between 15,000 and 33,000 logged in at any given time, which suggests a player base of about 45,000-50,000, though I have no figures on that last one. But if you know someone who's playing EVE, there's a possibility of meeting them online, something which is quite often not the case with WoW. There are also no login queues. I don't know if EVE even has a screen for that. Logging in takes as little time as loading the program. In some sense it doesn't feel like I'm online at all.
Another thing: getting around in WoW is a huge pain in the ass. In EVE, you tell the computer where you want to go, and it'll take you there. Pretty quickly too. Which is good, because things are scaled properly, as in a system really will be a few dozen AU across. Which would take a long time in normal drive. A recognized survival technique is to set a waypoint in the middle of nowhere and just jump there if you get in trouble, because the odds of someone finding you is pretty much zilch. Getting around tactically can take a while, but if you're trying to get from location to location, it's really quick.
EVE doesn't use instances. It doesn't need to. They just chuck an encounter some random place in a nearby system and give you a waypoint for it. No one else will ever find it. Space is just that big.
EVE doesn't have grinding. Training a skill takes a fixed amount of time, and you don't have to make 3800 worthless items to level it up. Just leave it be. The downside of that is that there isn't much you can do to hurry things up, and some of the skills take quite a long time to level up that way. The "Learning" skill will reduce training times by 2% per rank, but that maxes out at rank 5. An advanced skill could take a week or more to train.
EVE doesn't have high-level gear that only drops randomly. Anything in the game that you want, you can build. It may take a few dozen people and billions of credits, but you can theoretically do it. This is not to say that there isn't end-game content. There are a few ships that have only been built once.
Basically, it's a game you can play for fifteen minutes or two hours, but you don't need to do either and there aren't real disadvantages either way. At the time this is posted, I'm training Learning, and I'll switch to Caldari Frigate III once that finishes, around 10:00 or so. Sounds fun.
