Friday, January 29, 2010

Why I love Eve

Crazy Kinux on his blog wrote:

Eve Blog Banter Special Edition: Why I love Eve

Welcome to this special installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to me. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

When you’ve been roaming New Eden as long as I have, it almost feels like home. That’s how familiar it has become over the last 5 years. Not that I have done everything or touched every aspect of this most amazing of virtual world, far from it, but it just feels as though it’s always been there. And always will be.

Whether you’ve logged into the game every day since its launch in 2003, or you’ve taken one or several sabbaticals from your capsuleer career, you’ve always come back to New Eden don’t you. Why is that?

We know the EVE Online Community is unique in so many ways, and that EVE Online is like no other MMORPG out there. But what makes the game special for you?

What is it that makes this particular virtual world so enticing, so mysterious and so alluring that we keep coming back for more. Why is EVE one of the very few MMOs to see a continuous growth in its subscriber.

To put it simply: Why do you love EVE Online so much?

Eve is an MMORPG, based in space, a universe of thousands of different systems, inhabited, shaped, changed, managed, exploited and loved by people like me. Here's why it rocks...

1. It's hard, when you start playing it's not a learning curve; it's a learning cliff (as one of the developers of the game called it). It's challenging to get familiar with, the brain works out a lot while you play Eve. It keeps growing and becoming more complex, learning is endless; I like that. I don't want to pay £50 for a game I can blitz in a few days of intense play.

2. Someone worked out it would take 13 or more 'real time' yrs of play to train all the skills the game has to offer, and more keep getting added. This means that everyone who plays has different skill sets, they choose different paths, all players are unique in what they can and can't do; that's amazing when you consider there are in excess of 30,000 players online most days.

3. I've been playing for 10 months , I'm still a noob in so many ways, I like having something to aspire to ( I'm a member of Aspire Corp for that reason). When you meet players who been playing for 6 yrs or more, they are like gods; but even they are afraid sometimes, there's always someone out there who will eat you for dinner.

4. The first time I went into a PvP fight with my corp, after weeks of abuse and intimidation we had decided to fight back, I got into my best ship ( a caldari drake battlecruiser) that had taken me weeks to train and save for. Excited and nervous 12 of us went hunting, hours passed while we tracked down and chased three of the Corp members who'd war decked us. We eventually found one sat at a gate, alone, and we engaged. My heart thumping, sweating and truly terrified of what was about to happen. He had a tank of the gods, his two mates in battleships warped in within seconds. About one minute later we'd lost five ships, mine included, and were running for our lives to gates and stations. Yes we lost, yes I personally lost my ship in about 15 seconds ( it felt like hours), yes we ran scared, but it was amazing, breathtaking...wow, I was hooked. At the time I knew nothing, I had no comprehension of how they'd even done it to us, so easily too, but I knew that I wanted to learn. They tracked us all down later while we sat in a station licking our wounds and counting our losses, AND THANKED US for a good fight! And they were serious! One of them gave me a skill book he 'tongue in cheek' said I'd need; he was right.

5. The people, the community, my Corp mates. People come and go, leave the game, move corps or just go off solo exploring the Eve universe, those that stay are like old friends, I'll probably never meet them, or know what they look like, but friends they are. And what a diverse bunch, scattered across the globe, different cultures and languages all coming together to share something wonderful.

6. The graphics are lush, the screenshot is a real in-game pic, this is what I dreamed of 26 yrs ago sat in front of my Commodore 64 playing Elite.

7. I can do what I want, go where I want, be what I want. I can mine, manufacture, trade, explore, build corporations, run missions, act as a courier, act as security and most importantly... Blow stuff up, in a spectacularly blinding fashion, that is very satisfying indeed.

Get online, come join us, you'd be mad not too :-)
Religiosa ( in game character name)