Eve Online occupied my time for a solid three months. And I definitely didn’t quit out of boredom. Eve Online is a space MMO, and character customization is minimal at best,visually that is. Right from the start, you have a few very important decisions to make, and if you choose wrong, it could take days or even weeks to fix your mistake. Eve Online, which I’ll be calling Eve from now on, doesn’t have levels. It has skills. You always are learning these skills, even when you aren’t in the game. This is good and bad. It means that the casual player can progress at about the same speed as a hardcore player, at least skill-wise. However, you can’t queue your skills, so if you are at work, and you finish learning Electronics 2 around 11:30, you will be wasting at least 4 or 5 hours, depending when you get home. There is a lot more to skills, but I could write for a long time about that mess. So you start out in a junky tier 1 frigate, which can’t really do much for you. You have a variety of paths to pursue from the start, many of which I tried. With one account, you can have up to 3 characters, but only one of the those three can be training a skill at a time. I had two accounts and it worked out well for me. One was a dedicated miner/crafter. There are asteroid belts which are mineable, and you can easily spend your entire career mining. The crafting profession I have some experience with, and it wasn’t very profitable, at least early on. If I took it to the end I’m sure I could’ve made nice money. Then there is the fighter route, which most people take. What’s the point of having a spaceship if you can’t fight? Even within the fighter route, you can try to pilot a capital ship, which needs a whole armada of support but can take down bases. You can go for a large solo fighter, like a battleship or battlecruiser. You could go for a stealth ship, or a support ship. You can even just specialize in a small, and incredibly fast interceptor. They all have pros and cons, and I changed my mind a lot, but ended up in a battleship. It was so much fun, but I became obsessed with it, to the point where I had my skills laid out a week ahead of time. The problem is, that you are fighting a losing race against the old-timers. If you started playing today, and focused on the fighting path, you could never surpass someone who had taken the same path as you before you, unless they stop training it, or they quit. So people who have been playing for years have a huge advantage on all the new players. With time, the differences become less, but they are still there. The fighting isn’t too complicated, you press a button, and the weapon is auto fired whenever possible. There are a few tactics which take sometime, but for the most part, it’s who has the tougher/faster ship and who was luckiest. There is one more role, and that is going down the path of a CEO. Basically, the guild leaders of Eve. Their skills improve corporation size, what races can join the corp, etc. It’s a great MMO if you are looking for something less fantasy and more scifi.

Also, I’m working on a post about multiboxing, and whether or not I will do it, should be up later today.

Have any of you played Eve before?

-Bremere