*shudders*
On the good side:
> There is no level treadmill. You do not have to kill 3827 mobs to increase your skills.
> The graphics are excellent and when I was on (almost 2.5 years ago when they were hoping to break the 10K people online at one time) there was no lag. (They now boast 30k people online at one time and have added a lot so I do not know the current lag situation).
On the bad side (for me):
> You learn skills by training. This takes REAL TIME. Learning the 1st level of a basic skill may take 1 hour. learning the 5th level of that skill (skills are grouped in 5 levels, then groups are chained) may take a couple of weeks. This means that anyone that started EVE before you will ALWAYS have a training advantage over you.
> You can only learn 1 skill at a time, PER ACCOUNT. That's right, even though you may have 3 very different characters on your account, only 1 of them at a time can learn anything. This very much forces you to focus on 1 character.
> The Devs Love PvP. They do their absolute best to force you to PvP. Then they totally bork any RP related to PvP and allow obvious exploits (at least I think they are exploits).
Code: Select all
Example:
If you initiate attacks on law abiding citizens or government facilities your reputation becomes negative, you are flagged as a pirate and rewards will be offered for your death. BUT if you want to collect a reward in anyone who's rating is between 0 and -5 DO NOT do it in a system patrolled by the police. The Police will arrive guns blazing, shot you to pieces, then the "Pirate" will gladly come loot your remains.
Note: from -5 to -10 the pirates are fair game anywhere. But for 0 to -5 you have to leave all civilised space (effectively going to a place of 0% gas) if you want to initiate the fight.
> You will NEVER see another player. You will spend a lot of time making a face for yourself and you are the only person to really see it. Others will only see a SMALL icon sized version of it in their chat (if they turn that option on). There is no direct character to character interaction. All you actually see are ships in space and chat channels. It is very much IRC with graphics.
> The whole game is BORING! You CANNOT train anything unless you buy the skill. To buy the skill you need credits. To earn the credits you have to go out and mine asteroids for minerals, haul them back to a base to process and sell them. Provided there is someone there that actaully wants to buy the stuff you just mined! That is right, 90% of all market activity (100% of everything above the most basic minerals) is Player based. If noone is buying, tough.
So how do you mine? You approach a rock, stop and start firing mining lasers at it till you hold fills up with rubble. Real Exciting Stuff!!! Oh! Did I mention that while you are doing this in ANY sector but the highest fortified noobie sectors there is a very good chance that someone that wants to play pirate will warp up to you and blow you out of the sky with their 2 years of training and no thought for your 1 day in game. Don't bother to petition, our ARK system here is Light Millenia ahead of anything they have thought of in EVE. Provided noone abused you in chat, there is no griefing, it was just the normal action of a priate, get used to it and get better training.
Hmmm. Does it look like I HATE the game? It does? GOOD!
Erm ... did I say I
HATE the game?