EVE… Again
I’m not sure what makes me keep coming back to games that I have played and rejected before. I gave EQ2 three tries. I hated Vanguard during beta, yet I gave it another try at release. Back when I played DAoC, I quit the game only to return a few months later. Now it’s EVE Online. I played the free trial and didn’t like it. I gave it another try a few weeks ago. Oddly enough, this time it stuck. Two weeks ago I upgraded my trial account to a full subscription.
EVE Online is still the same game that I didn’t like 15 months ago. It’s still the same unimmersive spreadsheet game that is just one spaceship model away from being a text MUD. It’s a game that’s not about space combat but about activating icons to shoot at little red crosses. It’s not a game about spaceflight or genuine exploration, it’s about selecting items from a list and clicking icons. The game is missing an element of interactivitiy that is present by default in games in which one has to actually navigate his avatar through a synthetic world. In EVE, it’s all about bookmarks and items on a list. The graphical representation of the universe is mere window dressing. It is utterly irrelevant. The UI is the game, which makes it even more infuriating that the UI is so horrible.
The UI is a clunky bastard that has been amended and expanded to the the point of being almost comically bad. The amount of information you regularly want to be displayed does barely fit on a 1280×1024 screen. Commands to drones have to be issued through right-click context menus. The map interface is horrible and bloated. The interface of the recently added Loyality Point store is almost unusable. If you want detail information on equipment in the Market or the Fitting menu, you have to open an additional multi-tab info window that is filled with often irrelevant stats. The general problem is that too much information is burried too deeply within EVE’s complex UI structure.
For example, let’s say we want to find a higher quality mission agent who hands out missions of a certain level and is located in high sec space. In order to do this, you have to open the info screen of the NPC corporation (right click, pick “show info”). There you have to switch to the agents tab. In the agents tab, you are presented with an expanding list menu for the various corporation divisions. Expanding a division list menu entry produces a list of agents.
Now, let’s say there is an agent of the desired mission and quality level (if not, you have to collapse the division menu and check a different division) and you want to find out if the agent is located in high-sec space. So you right-click on the agent name and pick ”show info” from the context menu. In the agent’s info screen, you change to the “Agent Info” tab. There you open the info window for the “Location” entry by clicking on the small “i” symbol (right-click doesn’t work here). This opens the Station Information window. Change to the Location tab and click the “i” icon next to the solar system entry. That takes you to the solar system info window, which finally display the security level of the system the agent is located in.
Alternatively, you could open the “People and Places” window, change the search type to Solar System and type in name of the solar system the agent is located in. This opens search result window, where you right-click on the solar system’s name to open the info window. That saves of few clicks but is every bit as annoying.
Now, if you want to make sure that the agent is located at least two jumps away from the nearest low-sec system (since some missions send you to systems two jumps away), you click the “Show on Map” button in the solar system’s info window, which takes you to the horrible ingame map. There you have to change the options so that the solar systems are coloured according to their security level. Then you have to hover the mouse over the solar system and figure out if the system is connected to any low-sec security solar systems.
A task that should be trivially easy - finding the best mission agent in high-sec space for your standing level - becomes retardedly complicated. In terms of usability, EVE’s UI is an unmitigated mess. The same applies to general readability and the presentation of important stats and information.
The newbie experience is still pretty damn horrible. There is that boring, long-winded tutorial that leaves the newbie with more questions than it answers. There are hilariously idiotic things, like the tutorial instructing newbies to activate the option to avoid systems with recent pod killings in the autopilot setting, which leaves newbies wondering why they can’t warp anywhere once the tutorial has ended. There is no proper explanation of deadspace acceleratoion gates, which confuses newbies to no end. Star Gates don’t appear in the overview list’s default filter setting, which is plain stupid. The map interface is utterly incomprehensible to new players, and needlessly so.
Tutorial woes aside, the newbie experience would also be much less retarded if CCP did away with the concept of “Learning” skills. Learning skills are skills that lower the time it takes to train skills that actually do something. Instead of giving new players a strong sense of immediate progression (something which EVE’s skills system would be quite capable of doing), EVE essentially tells new players to train skills for a week or two that do absolutely nothing to enhance their gaming experience.
Much of the learning curve’s initial steepness doesn’t result from the game’s complexity but from CCP’s bungling incompetence at designing a newbie experience that turns free trial accounts into paid subscriptions. Once newbies have braved the initial irritations, they are confronted with a game of immense complexity that completely leaves them out in the cold. There are bits and pieces of information available, there is a New Player Guide on the EVE Online website, there are a number of short, optional tutorials but all that these things do is provide tidbits of information that still leave the newbie without a sense of the bigger picture.
If the newbie turns to the web, he is immediately swamped with information, often riddled with utterly cryptic acronyms. It’s overkill. There are plenty of tutorials and articles that tell you what to do and how to do it, but what often seems to be missing is an answer to the question of why you are supposed to do it. Again, the bigger picture. By now, I have figured out most of the basics of fitting a ship but, for example, the inner workings of the player-driven market and things like research, production, probing and exploration are still little more than obscure concepts to me.
Uniqueness is what is keeping this game alive. There is no other MMO like it. The terrible UI, the lag, the general clunkiness, the bugs, the lack of immersion, the paucity and repetitiveness of EVE’s PvE gameplay… all these things are bearable only because EVE provides something no other game can: a sense of almost total freedom. It’s the ultimate sandbox. EVE also does an exceptionally good job at giving players things to look forward to, like bigger ships, being able to fit better equipment and, ultimately, a chance to become part of an epic struggle between warring player empires. Somehow EVE sucessfully subdues this creeping “why bother?” feeling that I usually get when confronted with sandbox MMOs.
On the surface, EVE looks like a success story. A game that started out with a tiny subscriber base and grew to more than 150k subscribers, still growing even years after its launch. I believe, though, that EVE as a business is much more fragile than it looks. The game very much encourages multiple accounts. There is so much stuff to be done. Multiboxing is the way to go and it seems that all but the most casual players run two accounts at the very least. Three accounts is extremely common and there are people running up to 6 accounts, with 4 or 5 not being uncommon at all. I’d be surprised if EVE has more than 50k individual players, which means the game does a horrible job at attracting new players. Should the game ever fall into disfavour with a large chunk of its player base, it will suffer proportionally worse than other MMOs would.
7-13-2007 @ 00:14
Does this mean you are finished with vanguard? If so do you think you will end up going back to it like you did the other games?
8-2-2007 @ 13:22
Yes, I cancelled my Vanguard subscription a few days ago… there just isn’t anything to do and most people I used to play with are gone.
I don’t think I’ll end up going back. Vanguard has some problems that are probably unfixable. The combat system is deeply borked, the item system sucks and, most importantly, the game is and will always remain terribly unimmersive.
8-14-2007 @ 20:34
As cliche as it sounds… The EVE experience does not come alive until you join a professional and active corporation. I originally felt the same you did about EVE. I was very disappointed at the lack of spaceship control, the lack of guided content for newbies, and the uncustomizable UI. I promptly quit the game.
After growing weary of other MMOs and in part to the dedicated (and admittedly more mature) fanbase, I decided to give EVE another chance. While trying my hand at trading, I stumbled upon an advert for a well-known (and feared) pirate corporation. I decided to try for position.
The process of joining was very sophisticated. They were very wary of spies and saboteurs. Once I past several security checks and interviews, they let me join their newbie corporation. If I could earn my keep and prove my maturity, I would be allowed into the real corporation with access to their warehouses and knowledge of their 0.0 base of operations.
The vetting process was the most fun in EVE I had ever had. I love MMO PvP and yet I have never felt the thrill of combat like this until I ran ‘ops’ with these guys. All of the ops were tightly organized and highly professional. Voice communication, using teamspeak, was 100% required. The ops were fast-paced, precise, and brutally efficient. At times, my hands would shake, my heart would pound, and my brow would sweat at the anticipation of closing a trap, or breaking a 0.0 blockade. I thought, this must be the intensity and fun that everyone refers to regarding EVE.
I highly suggest that if you have not done so, do not ‘write-off’ EVE until you have joined an organized and professional corporation that shares your goals. It is impossible to realize the potential of EVE as a loner.
8-17-2007 @ 00:40
I’m not ready to give up on EVE yet, in fact, I’m running two accounts now. I’ll move to 0.0 with my Gallente guy in the forseeable future and I figured that having a Caldari char parked in Empire for mission whoring might come in handy as a source of reliable carebear income.
8-23-2007 @ 20:38
Eve has a very stable economy compared to many games, and because it is very oriented towards casual/almost non gamers I think it will stick around a long time. Plus people can’t reach their goals too fast because learning takes time for everyone, no matter how “good” you are.
And just to add to your statistics, I run 11 accounts, 7 of which pay for all of them plus a little extra for the work ;)
8-24-2007 @ 02:52
I’ve met people with 7 and 8 accounts since I’ve written this entry but 11 certainly takes the cake. What would one do with 11 accounts?