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EVE Online is virtually a religion to me. It is an aesthetic vision. It has periodically been driven off-rails by bean-counters, but EVE players care more about their game than other players of other games, and the backlash when this happens is something to behold. Mostly, the bean-counters now get shouted down by the devs.
The end result, though, is that EVE Online is one of the few games on the market that qualifies as an actual work of art.
There’s a lot of selling points for the game, but the biggest one is probably the wide variety of “end game” goals. They’re literally endless.
In a traditional MMO you generally have some variety of “healer, tank, dps, and maybe crowd control”
In EVE Online, your endgame might be as:
An Industrialist
A Spy
A Leader
A General
A Soldier
A Merchant
An Explorer
A Researcher
A Tactician for Hire
A Religious Icon or Priest
A Generally Trusted Individual (one of these is the richest and arguably most powerful man in the game - it turns out Trust is so valuable in EVE Online that it allowed someone to actually find the limit to the amount of money an EVE Online ISK wallet can hold)
EVE Online is a sandbox - there is virtually no meaningful content that is not the direct result of player interactions. All significant political factions are player-run, and we’re not talking the 30-hicks-makes-a-guild you get elsewhere. EVE Online Corporations can involve hundreds of players with well defined roles, and the corporations can in turn organize themselves into alliances led by an executor, capable of holding sovereign space. These alliances in turn create coalitions (no official game structure for this exists), which can involve tens of thousands of players, and which conduct wars that last for years.
The structure of these political blocs is largely not enforced by the game. The game supplies tools that these political entities can employ or not employ, as they choose. EVE Online sports alliances that are run as socialist states, as mercenary groups, as democracies, as dictatorships, even as religions. There’s ethnic enclaves, gung-ho opportunists and desperate alliances between worst enemies seeking to fight off an enemy slightly worse. Two of the oldest and most respected alliances are Role Playing alliances, even (and both were fairly strong at one time).
All of these entities have their own way of thinking, and they implement those thoughts in the game in meaningful ways, so to do anything of import in EVE Online means you need real diplomacy.
EVE Online is the only game where the diplomats representing a group are respected and feared and where the deals they strike become binding on thousands of players who, in general, will follow these rules. They write treaties, produce propaganda, and quietly interface with networks of espionage-oriented players that keep them informed. To insult a diplomat is, often, to incite a war, and sometimes these insults are fielded precisely to get an enemy to strike first out of wounded dignity.
EVE Online is the only game I can think of where “tradeskills” (Industry) are an essential, ongoing part of the game. Everything in the game is destructible (with the temporary exception of Stations) and, consequently, always in need of replacement. Industrialists are not something you hire periodically to build something for you. You build entire alliances around them. You sacrifice fleets to protect their projects and supply lines. You conquer entire regions of space to get them access to a resource they need. Industrialists are terrifying centers of power in EVE. They build stations, supply your fleets with replacement ships and ammo, keep your Control Towers online and make sure your capital fleet does not run dry of jump fuel. A powerful Industrialist in EVE Online can deploy an entire alliance across the entire universe without disrupting their operations, allowing them to land in a new theater of war fully equipped and ready to roll. Industrialists, consequently, are treated like the royal assets they are.
EVE Online is the only game I can think of where Espionage is an actual thing that matters. The game has, essentially, no “fair play” rules. At all. If you fall for a scam, you weren’t observant enough. If your entire alliance is, say, scuttled overnight when it turned out one of your recently promoted directors had, say, been infiltrating your alliance for your enemies for half a decade, well… too bad so sad. Yes, it’s very mean that they’re ransoming your own name back to you, and it really does suck that he emptied the alliance reserve wallet right before your sov bills came due, so you lost all your territory overnight. Next time you won’t put all your sovereignty under the holding corporation, eh? Lesson learned! Talented spies are, consequently, virtually revered in EVE, and their heists are made much of on the internet.
EVE Online is the only game I can think of where Generals (Fleet Commanders) are a respected, contended position held responsible for their actions. They have to stay one step ahead of your enemies at all times, both tactically and strategically. They deploy suicide fleets, distractions, bait, pincer maneuvers. They order fleets of hundreds of ships to lie in wait for days on end and the fleets actually do so.
I could go on, but it’s endless.
The truth, though, is that the game isn’t for everyone. It is not a casual game, and it is not forgiving. It feels great to accomplish anything in EVE precisely because accomplishing anything in EVE is hard. Other people are also trying to accomplish those things, and they’re generally willing to kill you to remove the competition. Death in EVE Online is stiff, and for many years, all those people will be better than you, all the time, and unless you take each successive defeat as a lesson and an adventure, you will never reach the point where you can turn the tables.
This point has nothing at all to do with character skill points. Throw me into EVE Online in a new character and I’ll be kicking your butt inside a month, even if you’re flying my current main. I’m more patient than you. I’m more diligent than you. I know how to network, how to build trust and how to use trust that I have gained. I know where things are, what things are worth, and a thousand little game mechanics that I’ve learned by dying, over and over again, to people better at the game than I am.
EVE PVP is the most skill-based combat I have ever encountered in a game, made more difficult by the fact that your heart is beating so fast you feel sick, your balls are trying to crawl back up inside you and your entire sovereign space is at stake if you fail to outplay your enemy.
Of course, EVE is also perfectly willing to let you play the game like a treadmill. They actually installed a few treadmills because a large amount of the player-base apparently wanted them. The game will not teach you how to play the game. It expects you to go out and do that yourself. The sole teaching tool that EVE has is that the game will simply destroy you, over and over again, until you learn. If you don’t learn, it will never. Ever. Stop.
And nowhere, even the places covered in rules and green dots and big assurances of safety, is safe. It’s perfectly acceptable for someone to kill you in high security space. They can do it by declaring war on your corporation (for a pittance) or by suicide-ganking you. Concord will eventually arrive and kill them, but the death of their 50 million isk of destroyers is small comfort compared to the loss of your 1.5 billion isk faction-fitted battleship. If you petition this, the GM will reply “welcome to EVE!”
But in the end, the friendships you make in EVE will be lifelong and meaningful. The quality of the people you meet in the game (once you get four jumps away from the alts spamming scams in Jita) is simply above and beyond what you’ll find anywhere else, in any game… and I’d know, I’ve played basically all of them.
There are long periods of boredom. Sometimes, the most effective thing you can do is wait for a situation to change. Things can get pretty bad in EVE, if you screw up badly enough or your intel is bad. You will, inevitably, end up leaving assets behind, sometimes expensive ones, in all kinds of corners of the EVE universe, simply because extracting those assets would be nearly if not actually impossible in the political/military climate you’re evacuating from.
I like to liken EVE to extreme downhill skiing: a week of boredom, waiting for the weather to be (theoretically) perfect, followed by an hour of heart-pumping adrenaline.
I guess the TL;DR of the thing is this:
I play EVE because EVE is not a waste of my time. The stories it generates are meaningful and unique - capable of raising the eyes of even non-gamers. The people you meet will sometimes be lifelong friends (or enemies), and you meet all kinds of interesting folk, because interesting folk play EVE.
EVE makes me laugh, makes me cry, makes me care in a way no other game ever has. Even when I don’t have time to play, I track the progress of the game’s politics with an eager eye, following the careers of my closest in-game friends and worst in-game enemies with all the attention I pay to the 2016 Presidential bid or North Korea’s latest shenanigan
The end result, though, is that EVE Online is one of the few games on the market that qualifies as an actual work of art.
There’s a lot of selling points for the game, but the biggest one is probably the wide variety of “end game” goals. They’re literally endless.
In a traditional MMO you generally have some variety of “healer, tank, dps, and maybe crowd control”
In EVE Online, your endgame might be as:
An Industrialist
A Spy
A Leader
A General
A Soldier
A Merchant
An Explorer
A Researcher
A Tactician for Hire
A Religious Icon or Priest
A Generally Trusted Individual (one of these is the richest and arguably most powerful man in the game - it turns out Trust is so valuable in EVE Online that it allowed someone to actually find the limit to the amount of money an EVE Online ISK wallet can hold)
EVE Online is a sandbox - there is virtually no meaningful content that is not the direct result of player interactions. All significant political factions are player-run, and we’re not talking the 30-hicks-makes-a-guild you get elsewhere. EVE Online Corporations can involve hundreds of players with well defined roles, and the corporations can in turn organize themselves into alliances led by an executor, capable of holding sovereign space. These alliances in turn create coalitions (no official game structure for this exists), which can involve tens of thousands of players, and which conduct wars that last for years.
The structure of these political blocs is largely not enforced by the game. The game supplies tools that these political entities can employ or not employ, as they choose. EVE Online sports alliances that are run as socialist states, as mercenary groups, as democracies, as dictatorships, even as religions. There’s ethnic enclaves, gung-ho opportunists and desperate alliances between worst enemies seeking to fight off an enemy slightly worse. Two of the oldest and most respected alliances are Role Playing alliances, even (and both were fairly strong at one time).
All of these entities have their own way of thinking, and they implement those thoughts in the game in meaningful ways, so to do anything of import in EVE Online means you need real diplomacy.
EVE Online is the only game where the diplomats representing a group are respected and feared and where the deals they strike become binding on thousands of players who, in general, will follow these rules. They write treaties, produce propaganda, and quietly interface with networks of espionage-oriented players that keep them informed. To insult a diplomat is, often, to incite a war, and sometimes these insults are fielded precisely to get an enemy to strike first out of wounded dignity.
EVE Online is the only game I can think of where “tradeskills” (Industry) are an essential, ongoing part of the game. Everything in the game is destructible (with the temporary exception of Stations) and, consequently, always in need of replacement. Industrialists are not something you hire periodically to build something for you. You build entire alliances around them. You sacrifice fleets to protect their projects and supply lines. You conquer entire regions of space to get them access to a resource they need. Industrialists are terrifying centers of power in EVE. They build stations, supply your fleets with replacement ships and ammo, keep your Control Towers online and make sure your capital fleet does not run dry of jump fuel. A powerful Industrialist in EVE Online can deploy an entire alliance across the entire universe without disrupting their operations, allowing them to land in a new theater of war fully equipped and ready to roll. Industrialists, consequently, are treated like the royal assets they are.
EVE Online is the only game I can think of where Espionage is an actual thing that matters. The game has, essentially, no “fair play” rules. At all. If you fall for a scam, you weren’t observant enough. If your entire alliance is, say, scuttled overnight when it turned out one of your recently promoted directors had, say, been infiltrating your alliance for your enemies for half a decade, well… too bad so sad. Yes, it’s very mean that they’re ransoming your own name back to you, and it really does suck that he emptied the alliance reserve wallet right before your sov bills came due, so you lost all your territory overnight. Next time you won’t put all your sovereignty under the holding corporation, eh? Lesson learned! Talented spies are, consequently, virtually revered in EVE, and their heists are made much of on the internet.
EVE Online is the only game I can think of where Generals (Fleet Commanders) are a respected, contended position held responsible for their actions. They have to stay one step ahead of your enemies at all times, both tactically and strategically. They deploy suicide fleets, distractions, bait, pincer maneuvers. They order fleets of hundreds of ships to lie in wait for days on end and the fleets actually do so.
I could go on, but it’s endless.
The truth, though, is that the game isn’t for everyone. It is not a casual game, and it is not forgiving. It feels great to accomplish anything in EVE precisely because accomplishing anything in EVE is hard. Other people are also trying to accomplish those things, and they’re generally willing to kill you to remove the competition. Death in EVE Online is stiff, and for many years, all those people will be better than you, all the time, and unless you take each successive defeat as a lesson and an adventure, you will never reach the point where you can turn the tables.
This point has nothing at all to do with character skill points. Throw me into EVE Online in a new character and I’ll be kicking your butt inside a month, even if you’re flying my current main. I’m more patient than you. I’m more diligent than you. I know how to network, how to build trust and how to use trust that I have gained. I know where things are, what things are worth, and a thousand little game mechanics that I’ve learned by dying, over and over again, to people better at the game than I am.
EVE PVP is the most skill-based combat I have ever encountered in a game, made more difficult by the fact that your heart is beating so fast you feel sick, your balls are trying to crawl back up inside you and your entire sovereign space is at stake if you fail to outplay your enemy.
Of course, EVE is also perfectly willing to let you play the game like a treadmill. They actually installed a few treadmills because a large amount of the player-base apparently wanted them. The game will not teach you how to play the game. It expects you to go out and do that yourself. The sole teaching tool that EVE has is that the game will simply destroy you, over and over again, until you learn. If you don’t learn, it will never. Ever. Stop.
And nowhere, even the places covered in rules and green dots and big assurances of safety, is safe. It’s perfectly acceptable for someone to kill you in high security space. They can do it by declaring war on your corporation (for a pittance) or by suicide-ganking you. Concord will eventually arrive and kill them, but the death of their 50 million isk of destroyers is small comfort compared to the loss of your 1.5 billion isk faction-fitted battleship. If you petition this, the GM will reply “welcome to EVE!”
But in the end, the friendships you make in EVE will be lifelong and meaningful. The quality of the people you meet in the game (once you get four jumps away from the alts spamming scams in Jita) is simply above and beyond what you’ll find anywhere else, in any game… and I’d know, I’ve played basically all of them.
There are long periods of boredom. Sometimes, the most effective thing you can do is wait for a situation to change. Things can get pretty bad in EVE, if you screw up badly enough or your intel is bad. You will, inevitably, end up leaving assets behind, sometimes expensive ones, in all kinds of corners of the EVE universe, simply because extracting those assets would be nearly if not actually impossible in the political/military climate you’re evacuating from.
I like to liken EVE to extreme downhill skiing: a week of boredom, waiting for the weather to be (theoretically) perfect, followed by an hour of heart-pumping adrenaline.
I guess the TL;DR of the thing is this:
I play EVE because EVE is not a waste of my time. The stories it generates are meaningful and unique - capable of raising the eyes of even non-gamers. The people you meet will sometimes be lifelong friends (or enemies), and you meet all kinds of interesting folk, because interesting folk play EVE.
EVE makes me laugh, makes me cry, makes me care in a way no other game ever has. Even when I don’t have time to play, I track the progress of the game’s politics with an eager eye, following the careers of my closest in-game friends and worst in-game enemies with all the attention I pay to the 2016 Presidential bid or North Korea’s latest shenanigan
