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dkirschner's EVE Online (PC)
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| [October 8, 2013 01:26:11 PM]
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Quitting EVE after toying with it a couple months. All my free time is up and they are asking me to pay. Actually I have another 60-day card, but I'm giving it to someone who will get more out of it. About once a week, I think to myself, "Aw crap, my skills probably finished training a couple days ago. When is the last time I logged on?!" And I realize it's usually been a week. I just can't be bothered to log on and play! I just don't find it exciting, I don't have anything I want to do enough to go do it, outfitting a ship and doing pretty much anything takes a while and involves navigating a lot of menus.
On top of all that, about 10 days ago I got my ship blown up. Or rather, P got both our ships blown up. He'd lost a lot of ships, but I had been playing conservatively because, well, I don't wanna die. We'd devised a fun plan to play together where I would fit my ship with guns and armor and he would scout out hidden places to explore. I'd kill things and he'd salvage the goods that were left floating in space. We decided to warp to an anomaly in 0.7 space (1.0 is perfectly safe [high security, or hi-sec] and 0 is terribly dangerous [null-sec]). I guess we shouldn't have been anywhere but 1.0 or maybe 0.9 because we got obliterated. I warped in first to take out any enemies. There were about 30 of them and they toasted me. In my frantic state, I couldn't remember how to warp away from danger and my ship exploded. I should have warned P, but I think a part of me, since he brought me (lured me?!) into 0.7 space and certain doom, didn't warn him and he warped in right as I blew up and got blown up himself. He laughed his ass off and I was demoralized because I'd just spent 1/3 of my money upgrading all my weaponry and things just to go on this mission. P has had a mining ship and has been making money that way so when he dies it's not a terrible setback.
That death sealed the deal really. My character is currently in a replacement ship I bought somewhere between where my old one blew up and where all my stuff is stashed. I never even bothered to log in and fly back home. It would feel like starting over. No motivation.
So it turns out that what everyone says about EVE is true. EVE is hard. If you are still playing after 6 months, you'll play a long time after. I made it two. P said that he will stick around and try to get into EVE University still so that "I didn't just spend two months mining to make money." I don't want to do EVE University because it just seems like more time and more commitment. So long, EVE! It's been an interesting ride!
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| [September 22, 2013 12:10:36 PM]
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Suppose it's high time to write something about EVE, which I've been dabbling in for a couple months. First observation: EVE is hard. The playerbase and advertisements don't lie. Second observation: EVE requires a large commitment. I say I've been "dabbling" for a couple months, and that totals upwards probably 30 hours in-game. I still have very little idea what I'm actually doing.
Here's what I have done so far: (1) all the tutorials except advanced military, and these took me on average probably 3 hours a piece; (2) learned my way around the UI for the most part, or at least I have the basics down; (3) learned how to form a fleet and have flown around with P, doing some missions and exploring; (4) joined a corporation and chatted with the leader and his friend for a while; (5) followed all the steps, short of the actual application, to joining EVE University, a corporation that exists solely to train new players; (6) and the biggest thing, which usually defines my play session, is that I have logged on and played with my skill queue and certificate planner.
Of these things, like I said, just planning skills seems to be about all I feel like doing whenever I log in. Log in, fix skill queue, check certificates, look up fitting build for my ship, realize I have no money and if I want money I should go mine, don't want to mine, log out. EVE University is daunting. There is a humongous checklist of things you have to do, configuring the UI a specific way, reading history and rules, pass an interview, do all tutorials, and on and on. Then once they accept you, you can participate in intra-corporation PvP, which sounds neat, but also sounds very time consuming.
That's back to Observation #2. EVE is time consuming. It takes a long time to do things. You have to fly everywhere and go through each warp gate on the way. You can put the ship on autopilot, but then it takes longer. Although the background of space is BEAUTIFUL, it's not EXCITING. Battles are not active. I've killed tons of AI ships. They show up as little red squares on the screen. You lock onto them, keep them at a range, and press fire. You fire. They fire. They die. Then click the next ship from your list and target and select fire. You just fire at little red squares. More often than not, you're zoomed so far out, because you need to see more things in space, that your own ship is a little spot on your screen. And it takes a while. There are often 10 or 20 ships, sometimes multiple waves. I'm sure it picks up, and I'm sure PvP battles are at least a little more intense, but I doubt I'll make it that far. One of my friends asked me if I was having fun playing Microsoft Excel Online, and after playing for a while, I understand.
The depth of this game is incredible. Another reason for the MS Excel Online joke is not only that enemies aren't (and don't need to be) visually represented on-screen besides a red square or whatever, but that because the visuals can be so stripped away, it's all about calculations. You try and calculate optimum this and optimum that and there are a zillion fittings for your ships (I have like 6 ships already -- that's a lot of fittings and numbers to think about) and you need to learn all these mining recipes and skill trees and on and on and on. It is the most massive game I've ever played hands down. It is awesome on the one hand, as I enjoy its complexity, but on the other, like I said, it requires so much commitment to play well. The challenge of learning isn't daunting, but the commitment is. It's easy to rationalize playing now because I've managed a couple free months.
I think I'll leave more for later. Still got a few weeks free and going to run some missions with P soon.
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dkirschner's EVE Online (PC)
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Current Status: Stopped playing - Got Bored
GameLog started on: Sunday 28 July, 2013
GameLog closed on: Tuesday 8 October, 2013 |
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