Brother has joined my former MMO: Eve Online - what's new?

[Vexr]

I've found out my brother has just started playing Eve Online with an IRL friend who's the CEO of a small corp.

Got me to thinking what's up in EVE these days. My characters probably total 200 mil+ SP (a 90 mil main) across 2 accounts before I effectively went bankrupt/lost the will to keep up with the ever-increasing price of PLEX using ISK.

That, and my speciality was WH PVP, which took several serious hits to the fun factor, not to mention the once immutable ships and modules were being overhauled by CCP, which started to break the very delicate/finalised ship fittings and implants I'd settled on. Of course my old corp mates/connections who I'd come to know also left the game, and I too decided to call it a day around 2013/2014.

I've logged on recently using the new free alpha thing, whatever they call it, to shift some assets+ISK I had lying around to my brother, which was a fortune to him just starting out.

Just wondering what the verdict is of any EVE players on here? Is this game dead, or coming back better than ever?

 

[Rroff]

If you don't mind chasing flavour of the month and doing short term stuff still a lot going for it. If you want to make longer term plans likely to be disappointed despite that being an advertised feature of the game.

 

[Vexr]

That I do mind. My willingness to explore the sandbox of Eve was entirely based on a static toolset (ships and fittings + SP and implants + tactics). It was the first game I played to show ingenuity could be very profitable. I'd go so far as to say it affected me IRL, discovering a winning formula that I'd never seen done by anyone else. That was just the solo part. In PVP and corped up small gang-wise, the scope was even wider.

What was odder is sharing an innovative winning formula and finding the uptake is non-existent Learnt a bit about human psychology that way too.

 

[Rroff]

What was odder is sharing an innovative winning formula and finding the uptake is non-existent

Lot of people in the game who lacked imagination and/or unable to think outside the box and stuck to cookie cutter setups, etc. but that isn't really surprising when you look at the 2-3 collectives that a big number of the player base originate from.

Which is why the likes of Rooks and Kings were relatively successful.

I really miss the peak of wormhole days when they finally polished it up to something close to the original vision before they started messing with it - its a pale imitation of what it used to be today with too many silly mechanics, etc. interestingly no one ever seemed to crack the secrets of wormhole space (though after the lead designer left I'm not sure it was ever fully functional in the game) - the sites, etc. in wormhole space weren't just there at random and had a sequence leading upto The Mirror that did something.

 

[Vexr]

News to me I heard they grouped WH space in to regions that sites respawn into, but they never quite proved it (nor was it realistically possible for anyone to keep a foothold region wide in WH space). The tricks I learned were soloing C5 magnetar sites in a battleship, or NS/LS plexes up to 8/10 in a battlecruiser. The doctrine for the 99% was to 'blob' everything, PVE or PVP, with some T3s capable of soloing, especially the Tengu. but they were juicy targets.

I'm pretty sure if I'd posted the solo fits capable of the above, they'd have been labelled 'fail fits' by the community. They do break a few common sense rules, yet only those fits were capable of doing the job. Their loss in the end.

 

[Rroff]

With the changes lately a good chance even a few months old fit isn't possible any more.

It is funny logging in as alpha as even if I was paid up 90% of my ships have wrong slot layout and invalid modules, etc. which stops dead any sneaking thought of subscribing again. For a game like Eve developers need to remember to touch established mechanics with as light a hand as possible unless something it utterly game breaking and can't be sorted any other way.