Thu Apr 28, 2011 8:43 am by ATTSS2
Since in Eve you can train all skills and are able to explore all professions of the game with a single character, multiboxing is a matter of convenience (able to do more things at once and a faster way to aquire the necessary skills). It is very common to multibox together with other players and player interaction offers a great deal of options such as setting personal standings with any player, corporation or alliance in the game (so you remember who is your friend and who is your enemy), contracts of various types (e.g. courier or auction), grouping in fleets, corporations or alliances and many more. Bottom line is playing solo is possible but hard to acomplish solely because interacting with other players is hard to avoid.
Other things that might interest you:
- The monthly fee can be avoided by use of PLEX (in game item buyable with ISK that extends your subscription with 30 days). At the moment any character by making use of the new Planetary Interaction alone and a FAIR AMOUNT of math homework can raise the 370 mil ISK to buy a PLEX each month. Note that PI is an almost entirely passive income system that requires you to mess around with it at most once per day.
- The entire market minus the skill books is player driven, everything you buy somebody else built, stole or looted. Eve has such a complicated economy that CCP has hired an economist to analize the ingame market traffic.
- Alot of players tend to believe Eve is a game all about ship combat. This is only partially true as the PvP aspect in Eve does not involve solely blowing somebody else up. It includes competition for mineral aquisition a.k.a mining, sell or buy order prices, teritorial or otherwise resource oriented wargames, espionage, treason, theft (e.g. can flipping), scamming, resource hoarding, griefing, smack talk, timezone exploits (e.g. pos bashing). What most if not all forms of PvP have in common in Eve is that the planning stage carries more importance than the actual "combat" allthough both of these allow lower skilled players (in terms of ingame skill levels not personal skill) to gain the upper hand over the veterans (that is if they dont die painfully allong the steep learning curve).
- The most important trait of the PvP aspect is that loosing means loss. Unlike some of the other mmo's, in Eve each time you are attacked and loose you will loose ISK in form of goods, ships, implants, player owned structures or market income. This is why, for the most part, attacking other players is usually never just for fun or random but entails a potential gain from their loss.
- Eve is split into 3 types of security zones. From 1.0 to 0.5 (a.k.a. hisec) players are protected from an NPC Faction called Concord. The attackers will be destroyed relatively fast by Concord (this is refered to as Concordokken by players), however more of them in a group are able most of the times to take out even bigger ships such as freighters before being destroyed. This is called suicide ganking and the aim is to target ships with content more valuable than the ships lost to Concord. Aside from this one can get killed in high security under special circumstances (e.g. player is mining in a Hulk during the Hulkageddon player organised event) or during a corporation war where members from both parties can freely shoot each other (corp wars are expensive so they dont take much time). In any case if the player does not make himself a worthy target he will be most of the times left alone in hisec. From 0.5 to 0.1 (a.k.a. lowsec) players are only protected by attackers at stations or at gates by the available NPC turrets (lower security status means fewer turrets). These turrets can be tanked by the attackers so this makes lowsec very dangerous. Moreover it is usually the home of solo or small pirate groups that hunt all passerbys and ransom their ship and/or pod or just blow them up to loot their wreck. The last security zone, 0.0 (a.k.a. nullsec) is populated by corporations of players usually belonging to alliances. All rules of lowsec apply, there is no NPC protection and gatecamping can make sure only the luckyest of pilots make it through the camped system. 0.0 space is mostly unclaimed and player alliances can claim sovereignity and build stations. Needless to say a solo player, even one that multiboxes will never have enough numbers or combat ability to survive in nullsec.
- PvE elements in Eve have been improved over the years with epic arc and cosmos missions or exploration but it still represents an income source more than anything else and, for the most part, it is not really fun unless done in a group. For bigger groups oriented towards PvE Eve offers wormhole space (a.k.a. w-space) where systems are connected by wormholes rather than gates. Wormholes are not permanent so the links between w-space systems or from w-space to normal space change as wormholes dissapear and reapear. This random aspect makes exploration very important to surviving in a w-space solar system. However, the NPC's in these systems (called Sleepers) use an advanced AI and offer very hard and very challenging combat for a group of players (though some of the low class w-space systems can be soloed). The rewards are good to excelent depending on how organised the group is.
EDIT:
- If you are looking to start then keep in mind that while on trial in Eve you cannot run more than one client. The best way to start more than one character is the following: Get an Eve trial possibly from steam to get 21 days instead of 14 or from another player (I am willing to send invites to a 21 day trial if you give me your email). Once played through the trial and armed with 21 days worth of skill training upgrade your account with money or buy a plex if u managed to raise the money (hard to do but possible). After you got the upgraded acount go to Eve account management website and send a trial invite from your now full acount to your email (can be the same one). The new trial account will train for 21 days while you play on the main (you cant have both open on the same computer coz one is trial). After the trial account is finished when you use a plex or buy a month you get another 30 days on the main aswell. Basically you use 2 plex or buy 2 months and get 3 months so far. From these 2 accounts you can go to 3 or 4 in the same way, just remember you cant multibox the new trial accounts their first 21 days. Using this method you spend 3 plex or pay for 3 months over 4 months and you get 4 subscription accounts one 4 months old one 3 months and 2 x 2 month.
ATributeToSystemShock2
