As someone who played Eve Online quite a bit how does playing Eve differ than an outsider's perception?
I haven't played Eve in a good few years, so everything I say here comes with that qualification. In particular I've no idea how the last few years' activation of a lot of toxicity which was apparently previously latent in gaming might have affected Eve.
The big one that I always say is: the game isn't just the betrayals, espionage & ruthless warfare which make the non-Eve news. Those aspects turn up in the headlines, understandably, but I don't think the game entirely deserves its reputation for unfettered libertarian wars of all against all. I was never betrayed or scammed during the years I played, & I don't think my experience was that uncommon. And the flipside of the game's permissiveness is that loyalty & friendship in Eve can be more tangible & meaningful. I was in a tight-knit, small corp with stringent entry requirements & a fairly strict, enforced code of honour, & it was a really good group. I met a lot of my corpmates repeatedly outside the game & eventually went on holiday with some of them. It's true that when I played there was at least one corp with an explicit Objectivist ethos, but it wasn't a powerful corp. In fact some of the most powerful groups had partial or total systems of common property & operated /internally/ along quasi-socialist lines, not for ideological reasons but cos that was quite effective. It's also worth noting that player-controlled space can be considerably calmer and more orderly than the theoretically neutral 'high security' starting areas—if, that is, you're onside with the players who control the space in question.
Another thing it took me a while to grasp—I dunno why they don't make more of this, because it could be a selling point—is just how shallow (in a positive way) but broad the character skill system is. There are certain specialised functions which have to be unlocked by training for months, but a lot of what I regard as the meat of the game is accessible with a few days' skill points. In a number of interesting fields (trading, certain kinds of PvP, command and strategy…) it really is the knowledge, experience & human skill of the player that matters, not the equipment & in-game skills of the character. I spent a lot of time hunting in low security in cheap ships, and if you understood the situations you needed to create in order to have max advantage, you really didn't need many in-game resources to knock out bigger ships & older characters.
None of this is to say that it's a game for everyone. It's a game for a particular bunch of people. But it's tremendously interesting—far more interesting to me than any other MMO game I've ever played.
The big one that I always say is: the game isn't just the betrayals, espionage & ruthless warfare which make the non-Eve news. Those aspects turn up in the headlines, understandably, but I don't think the game entirely deserves its reputation for unfettered libertarian wars of all against all. I was never betrayed or scammed during the years I played, & I don't think my experience was that uncommon. And the flipside of the game's permissiveness is that loyalty & friendship in Eve can be more tangible & meaningful. I was in a tight-knit, small corp with stringent entry requirements & a fairly strict, enforced code of honour, & it was a really good group. I met a lot of my corpmates repeatedly outside the game & eventually went on holiday with some of them. It's true that when I played there was at least one corp with an explicit Objectivist ethos, but it wasn't a powerful corp. In fact some of the most powerful groups had partial or total systems of common property & operated /internally/ along quasi-socialist lines, not for ideological reasons but cos that was quite effective. It's also worth noting that player-controlled space can be considerably calmer and more orderly than the theoretically neutral 'high security' starting areas—if, that is, you're onside with the players who control the space in question.
Another thing it took me a while to grasp—I dunno why they don't make more of this, because it could be a selling point—is just how shallow (in a positive way) but broad the character skill system is. There are certain specialised functions which have to be unlocked by training for months, but a lot of what I regard as the meat of the game is accessible with a few days' skill points. In a number of interesting fields (trading, certain kinds of PvP, command and strategy…) it really is the knowledge, experience & human skill of the player that matters, not the equipment & in-game skills of the character. I spent a lot of time hunting in low security in cheap ships, and if you understood the situations you needed to create in order to have max advantage, you really didn't need many in-game resources to knock out bigger ships & older characters.
None of this is to say that it's a game for everyone. It's a game for a particular bunch of people. But it's tremendously interesting—far more interesting to me than any other MMO game I've ever played.
