I’m just going to run down a list rather than do a fancy preface paragraph.
1. No PvE. None. Virtually every mission in EvE is kill braindead ships or mine or move stuff. It’s sole point is to give you ISK to PvP. This is how bad it is: missions are duplicated exactly across all 4 EvE nations. You can be Amarr, change races to Gallente, and get the exact same mission with the exact same text, exact same reward, and same NPCs. It’s not even challenging, people boast about running PvE content afk, or macroing it.
Harvesting is the same. Mining involves clicking on an asteroid, activating lasers, and moving ore to a can every minute or so. There is little to no activities otherwise, and it’s all braindead. There is no PvE aspect to really play.
2. No lore. There’s nothing really in game to tell you about the nation you are fighting for, except bare minimums. I’ve seen more roleplaying in Champions online, a linear themepark, than in EvE. Even FFXI had more RP and more of a coherent storyline.
3. It’s not a sandbox. There is only one type of real gameplay with any results in it-PvP. Marketing , harvesting, and crafting are pointless in themselves as all they do is give ISK, and fund PvP actions. It’s impossible to play the game except in PvP mode, because even if you don’t others can and will PvP you unless you cripple your experience by staying out of player corps. There isn’t enough meat besided the openworld PvP experience. This would be ok except for…
4. The PvP sucks. There is no balancing mechanism at all. You can get ganked by as many and as powerful ships as anyone wants to. In my time playing:
-One destroyer, a ship barely above frigate class, got ganked by three battleship-using pirates.
-One frigate, in RvB, got killed by a Tech 3 cruiser from a hundred + KM away, to the point where it would be impossible to respond.
That’s just a couple. The PvP simply isn’t fun. It’s too reliant on player stats (and dont let people lie to you, having all level 5 skills and being able to equip tech 2 stuff is a huge difference, as well as shipping up to higher ship classes) too reliant on large fleets all coordinating fire on single targets, and has no point.
5. PvP has no real point. Even the big alliances, what are they doing? Just PvPing for the sake of PvPing. There’s no meta-purpose to the PvP itself except collecting stats and killmails. The big allaince versus alliance crap is just a game of halo versus clans-driving people in or out of space does nothing but remove targets.
6. Community sucks. They want to play the game one way, and call anyone who doesn’t a carebear. Then they wonder why lowsec is empty and people don’t want to PvP. They don’t make room for anyone who doesn’t agree with what they say or play the way they want, and they love to gank on the helpless-the lates “player-driven” event was ganking unarmed mining barges.
I started playing to give the game a chance. Playing it only reinforced my belief that it is one of the most overhyped, underwhelming, content-free experiences in the MMO sphere. CCP cannot design an actual compelling game, so what they do is put a half-empty shell, encourage players to go blow each other up in it, and call it content. If this is sandbox, I’m glad Ultima Online died and hope it stays long dead.
Edit: You want to know what I did half of the time playing EvE? Using the ingame browser to surf the web while my FC took an hour to get a fleet up, or I half-afk’d a mission or salvaging. EvE is the only game where I felt so unengaged that I did that. That’s how boring it got, that I wound up surfing the web most of the time, and the “Action” took minutes.
MMO misanthrope 
[…] link: EVE online-why I quit. « MMO misanthrope Read […]
carebear! 😛
Easily the most honest account of EVE I’ve ever read. I don’t think I could possibly have said it better. Sooner or later some game studio is going to realize nobody wants Battlestar Galactica Online, but rather an original, deep, tactical space MMO experience..like CCP has pretended to deliver for six+ years. Maybe then we’ll get what we’ve all been dreaming of – a game like EVE that doesn’t suck galactically.
While yes I will agree that as a new guy, the learning curve is steep. . . and Mining SUCKS. I have to disagree on the other points.
Marketing is very life like, and is like a stock market. You can corner markets in regions, exploit regions, make couriers do your dirty work to make your isk, etc. It takes time and research though. don’t play the market if you can’t do math, and don’t have a pad and paper handy. If you don’t find math fun, don’t do trades. . . it’s kind of like real life.
I HAVE killed a battleship in a frigate… SOLO. I HAVE killed a cruiser in a frigate SOLO. While YES, you won’t be able to PvP until you have about 2 months worth of time consuming skills… after that it is player skill. I have killed players who have 3 years on me. Players who are much younger than I have killed me (to my own humility). Know your target. Plan the attack. Gather intelligence. Make tactical warp points. Change your ammo, adjust your distance, analyze your current angular velocity. IT ALL MAKES A DIFFERENCE!
Here again, if you don’t like math this game will not be fun.
IF YOU ARE SUCCESSFUL IN EVE YOU PAY NO REAL CASH
SO
Successful PvP corps can play the game for free. Successful marketeers or entrepeneuers play for free. Some even MAKE REAL LIFE CASH! It is the only game that encourages this. And because of this, game items have real life cash value, so when you lose a ship it hurts. You lose a battleship its like “Shit, that’s twenty bucks!” or if it’s faction fitted “Thats 80 bucks! DAMNIT!” Same goes when you kill a faction fitted ship and pick up the scraps… you feel like you are on top of the world. No Risk, No Reward.
I am thinking of quitting, but not because this game is shallow…. because it is too deep. If you cannot devote the time to become an alter ego, you will not get the most out of this game. The difference with this game is that 95% of the game is dealing with, and talking to IN VOICE other players. You make money by doing jobs for other players, you pay other players to do jobs for you. You fight other players, you work with other players. If you want a PvE game, steer clear. This is total interaction.
If you like to deal with people. Make people mad. Get pissed, Plot Revenge, Make people happy etc. This is your game. If you like to plot schemes to become rich in real life, this game can help. If you want to find out how the stocks work, try this game for a bit.
If you want a casual game to just unwind at the end of the day, this is not your game. If you don’t want to work with other players, don’t play eve. If you hate math… Nope… don’t do it.
Basically, I am quitting because I am spending too much time and paper creating spreadsheets and analyzing my combat statistics of using a J5 Prototype Warp Scrambler Vs A Warp Scrambler I and the effects it will have in conjunction with the rest of my layout, powergrid, cpu, speed, maneuverability etc. If you like DEPTH, go EVE, if you want casual stay away.
PS
I can see why you feel the way you do about most of your post. The last two paragraphs are an unfair assessment since you were obviously in a crappy situation. You need to find a corp that suits your play style. Check most characters that have been around for more than 2 years. They have been in 6 corps until they stay in one for the long term. This is a PvP game, and if you can’t find good players to play with it will suck. If you find fun players it beats everything else out. . . The fact your FC took 30 minutes to get a roam going tells me a lot. If a roam leaves at 16:00 I will wait 10 minutes after that for you, if your not there… catch up on your own precaution.
I am sorry your experience was not as rewarding as it could have been.
The no real cash thing to me doesn’t matter. It’s fifteen bucks a month, and I easily get more than that out of the game. I don’t understand myself why people think that’s so important to play for free on it. As for thinking of losing ships as losing money, well I can not lose any money at all by not playing. That’s too much like a gambling mindset to me.
I think you miss what I was in. I was in RvB when I listed those examples, and RvB honestly is one of the better corps out there that any newbie can join. Same with FW, but even worse: half the time they don’t bother opening the fleet and just make it a corp one. There is a tremendous amount of wasted time in the game.
As for deep, eh. Some aspects are, some are just complex, some aren’t. You can crunch those numbers with your warp scrambler, but in a battle chances are you are just pointing someone and praying to god you don’t get the warrior IIs sent on you.
Agreed… There’s no reason to hang around in high sec unless you want to mine. If you want to do anything in low-sec, you have to join a corp and be involved in ridiculous wars and pvp, or you get pirated by the zillions of gate-campers. Not my idea of fun. So… I’m signing off… for good. Until they can come up with a way to not get ganked every other day.
EVE promises a lot and fails to deliver, I have been a hardcore gamer most of my life, 40+ years old. I have thousands of flight hours in military grade sims. Falcon4, SF2, WOV etc. There is no skill involved in EVE “PVP” it is stats and mechanics. Pop a MIG-17 over Hanoi in a F-8H with guns, now that is a PVP kill. I have deleted the client and my 24MSP toon will run out the clock in darkness, Done.
well eve is a waste sure the ships the missions but until you can use the good ships a year pass by there are better mmo around especially in scifi aside the support is horrible
I just quit eve after almost 2 years in the game.
I gave away my tengu to some lucky n00b who was only 3 months old.
Why I quit eve.
1. PVE is boring and you only do it to get money for plex and pvp. I’d treat pve as a job and procasinate and play other games. I could even run sanctums while surfing websites.
2. PVP is a bore. Almost all pvp is ran at the commander level. FC tells everyone to kill 1 ship and every does that. And on and on and on. No delegating tasks to LTs or Captains and no platoons like a real navy or army would do.
3. The only real fun aspect is the griefing aspect and even that gets boring.
4. Almost everything in eve is a timesink. I don’t know of a single activity that doesn’t require at least 2 hours of play.
Overall eve is great game for the 1st year but then you realize something is missing.
Good summary, but I can be even more concise: EVE caters to immature sociopaths.
I’d rather spend a Saturday afternoon trapped in a Chuck E Cheese with 200 kids than spend one hour in EVE low-sec. It’s full of people who get their jollies by inconveniencing and harassing other players. No thanks.
and UI sucks.
hauling, trading, manufacturing would be fun, but market and asset forms make my eyes bleeeeed.
pvp is boring –
* in 1v1 – you spend hours to prepare, then you fight, i mean press your 3 buttonsand hope other guy will die first.
* in fleet battle, – hours of waiting, then press button when told and hope other swarm of dots is not shooting at you.
pve is retarded –
~20 quests in seven years? camon ccp?! 😀
eve is probably fun for those 100 top guys who lead alliances, and control jita market, but not for those who still want to do something ir real life.
You sound rather carebearish, the pvp mechanics in eve are not that bad, in fact their quite good, you just have to understand how A and B interact, which obviously you don’t. Lets assume that t3 was a tengu with heavy missiles, lets assume that he had a standard set up and was putting out around 250 dps @ 100km +… lets go over again how to warp out? lets talk about minor dps killing you @ what range prior to NO warp out caused 99% of the time by user error considering a 100K+ missile tengu certainly isnt going to have a disruptor on you.
Now lets talk about those battleships dropping your inty… Have you seen the scan res on most battleships? are you aware of how long your nubblet carebear self had to be sitting there to get targeted? AND why are you talking about pvp when the major complaint I have heard is that Eve doesnt PvE to your satisfaction? Fine but don’t go talking about pvp, you obviously dont understand how it works.
It was a munnin, not a tengu. Missiles will not kill a frig at that range instantly, but arty will. You don’t think I could have evaded the damage just by speed tanking in a frig if they were using heavy missiles? Arty on a set-up cruiser can nail frigs easy, t3 or not. I was targeted, nailed from the maximum distance you can warp in from, and killed in theoretically one of the smallest sig radius ships in the game.
You also seem to forget sensor boosting. It was a dessie, not an inty, and you don’t have the near-insta align times on one of those. The only way to escape a station camp is by having an insta-undock or playing docking games if you have the tank. Most new players don’t understand those, and traveling to a new system makes it impossible to do so. These days in EVE even a fast frig is no guarantee, the latest trend is using an off-grid T3 to boost scan res and enable sebo’d heavy ships to get respectable lock times even on frigs.
The PvP mechanics in EVE are horrid. It’s for the most part just massing DPS on anyone unlucky enough to engage in the fight, and playing one unbalanced type over another. The whole problem of the game is convincing people to fight: this is why we have Hulkageddon and gate camps in the first place.
Nice ownage! Never let the liars win 🙂
“The PvP mechanics in EVE are horrid. It’s for the most part just massing DPS on anyone unlucky enough to engage in the fight, and playing one unbalanced type over another. The whole problem of the game is convincing people to fight: this is why we have Hulkageddon and gate camps in the first place.”
-Probably the best description of Eve PVP I’ve ever read.
I used to describe PVP in Eve as “just like sleeping on a railroad track” because nothing is going on at all until suddenly something big comes out of nowhere and kills you instantly.
[…] your statistics, but the core game is the same. I still stand by the things I said when I wrote this. It’s gotten worse, […]
I quit after 3 years +, nothing new in the game and a patch every time I logged on. I just got boring. Feels more like a second job than a game.
After 3 years we move away too.
My buddies and I (11 ppl)
Because we didn’t care about PvP.
Our Corps are Comercial/Industrial/Mining/Missionaires
So we ganked every 1-2 weeks in every activity we had!!!
For what reason? Just for fun!!! But there isn’t so much fun when you pay for this game and be ganked all the time.
As far I’m concern? I’m sick about those crappie rolepleying in EVE. There isn’t justify existing for RP in this game, just crap!!!
Second, all big alliances are connected with one or another way directly with CCP. So from my point of view, miners are ganked by CCP!!!
So buh-bye dudes and keep your Corps and put ’em there you know…:)
What the hell? HAve you seen a lot to become rich after playing Eve? Lmao..
If you want to achieve a level up , from your economic class to a higher one then dont play Eve but instead find a job your interested in. If you cant try to open something of your own..
Search for opportunities everywhere, take classes about the stock market , try to find uncovered needs of your city..
Eve wont help you get rich.. It will force you into a chair thinking about the game while your job (if you have one) will become static if not bad for you also.. You wont evolve and the top goal you might achieve is getting 5000$ after some 10 years of playing which in terms of probability is just like becoming Rich in real life..
Hard? Of course ..
Impossible? Maybe..
Possible : Sure..
Actually this game got me interested in FOREX, and I am doing quite well for myself. Won’t say EvE ‘did it’ I’m just saying, the connections are there. To play the markets you need analysis. Yes, Fibonacci numbers work to your advantage in EvE believe it or not. So I guess the answer to your question, Mike, is yes. But flame all you want I don’t really give a shit.
I’m still playing Eve after about a year and 8 months. I’ve gone through the things you’ve gone through and got bored and almost quit several times, but haven’t been able to bring myself to do it.
But now I have found my own little niche in the universe and I disagree with the guy who said you can’t accomplish anything in the game in less than 2 hours. I log in every day, most times only for 10-15 minutes at a time. I tend to my planets, keep buy/sell station trading market orders current, and keep my blueprint inventions running.
Once a week, I make the 17-jump trek to Jita to sell my T2 blueprints and my PI creations, and buy more T1 blueprints for invention. I’ve created a business for myself and while it certainly doesn’t make me rich, it makes me enough two pay for both my accounts every month (currently about 860 million for 2 PLEXs). I do all of this as a currently solo player not in a player-run corp. I don’t have the time to devote to being in a corp at the moment.
I also have a mission-runner that can solo level 4 missions in a Dominix. I haven’t explored all his potential yet though, as I mostly just do PVE things these days.
As for the PVP between alliances being pointless, I disagree there too. I’m not currently living in nullsec but I have in the past and it’s about claiming territory and holding it. Territory means resources. Resources which keep your corp supplied with replacement ships, ammo, fuel for your player-owned stations. Nullsec is truly wide-open and whatever the players make it. I might eventually go back to null but for now I’m staying in highsec because in the past when I moved to null I had trouble making enough money to support myself, but part of that could have been the fault of the corps I was in.
I will freely admit that Eve is not for everyone. The UI is unimpressive and not visually stimulating. And at times the gameplay can be monotonous. But it’s a unique experience from other MMOs and as long as I can keep making enough money to pay for my accounts with a little time here and there, I don’t foresee closing my accounts anytime soon. And I am proof that you don’t have to PVP and lose ships every other day to play Eve and enjoy yourself, though not everyone has the same tastes as me so others may not enjoy the way I play.
You’re a market and science guy though. I tried that, but there was too many dues you had to pay for invention in order to finally become profitable. Selling stuff is pretty much just price arbitrage when I played-there was little need to establish markets even in places like militia hubs because everyone had an alt in jeuno and a blockade runner. I originally planned to join EVE as a space trucker-eschewing combat in exchange for being a free hauler, but that’s where the alts torpedoed my ideas. It was just too easy due to PLEX to buy and train a transport alt. Trade really wasn’t my thing in it. Most people are saying the 2 hours are for pve and pvp.
The thing about PVP with alliances is the actual resources you need are secondary to being there. They are not fighting over resources, they are fighting each other for lulz and the resources keep them supplied. If anything it’s inertia keeping many corps there. They have a POS in nullsec, so they need resources to maintain the POS in nullsec, and they have to defend it because some alliance gets bored and roams in their space and they don’t want to let their buddies in the alliance down. because it’s near impossible to inflict permanent, lasting damage on an alliance’s pvpers, there’s no real end goal to the nullsec wars. something like Aion had the same problems, but the PvP was better because it centered around palpable goals-you could take this fortress, and this one, and have a goal to work towards.
Market stuff though is one of the few strengths EVE has, but it’s not as great of an economy as people think it is.
Quitting after 1.5 year (7 years counting from when I started playing eve) It does feel more like Microsoft Excel after a while. PvE gets extremely boring with the few missions they have. PvP is even more boring and time consuming – especially fleet fights. There is nothing epic in fleet fights. You wait for hours to hunt down some targets and then they run away…even if they fight, all you could see is little boxes shooting at little crosses. And all you could do is swarming at some guy…there is little maneuvering that makes any difference. The only tactic is making the decision of hit or run.
For PvE It might be fun if there are more tiers of missions with larger ships to play with…(and don’t even mention the 5 drone limit for ships less than a carrier…that is just so disappointing). Also, having those missions in high sec could allow some PvE oriented players to stay more.
For PvP, there should be more rewards in that than the mere feeling that you made someone else to feel bad and grind for days to get back in shape. Also there should be intermediate rewards – you can get some rewards without killing someone. A battle ground for simulated battle is also good.
Allowing controlling multiple ships is going to fix PvP a little too. Otherwise there is still not much to do during PvP. You click a few buttons…and wait. You can try maneuvering…but it usually doesn’t help that much.
Yes one can argue it is a social game. In the end…all of EVE’s gameplay can be simulated using a text game. But that is why it is so boring after a while…especially when the social aspect is not very good either. The characters are ugly and you cannot directly interact with them besides killing them…the eve loyalists are mostly bullies as you can see from some posts all over the internet.
The fact that they are mostly bullies is understandable…the only thing “fun” in eve is bullying the helpless – because it does hurt in eve…it takes days or even weeks for new players to grind back their ship…
The consequence of losing your new shining ship is too great and the reward too little. And you wonder why people don’t like PvP? No most of us do like PvP, just not EVE’s PvP. Because in EVE, there is no real PvP, there is only bullying. You run/hide/play docking game when you can’t bully the other person/team. When you can…well you scramble them, push a few buttons, and then send a message invite for some isk…