MMO BinA Geek's Look at Massively Multiplayer Online Games

One of my favourite games, and the game that has been keeping me away from this site is Eve Online. Recently, Goonswarm,, KIA and the corporation I am in, have taken over Delve, Period Basis and Querious, and Kenny (the re-formed Band of Brothers) has finally given up its last bastion of space.

As a show of force near the end, the alliance fielded 27 Titans, the most expensive ship in the game, usually seen in groups no larger than three or four, around a single station.

This means that we win Eve, since it was originally assumed that BoB was the penultimate alliance, in one of the richest of pieces of space. Space now controlled by the Alliance I am in.

What will that mean for Eve Online in the future? Who knows. The biggest thing we are trying to do as an alliance is to not get too cocky, as we feel that was the reason BoB died off.

If you play Eve, and are a friend of mine, contact me, as we are looking for more fighting characters in our alliance.

One way of making money for combat focused players in Eve Online is to grind through missions. I hate grinding through missions in any game, but Eve can be especially boring. Running through level four combat oriented missions with my cousin, me in a Caldari Navy Raven, and him in a passively shielded Drake, we rip through the missions at a fairly quick rate. We just wait to collect our bounties, loot and rewards, and move on to the next one.

The only reason I am doing this is to gain some in game currency, as I’ve become rather poor recently. One thing that I’ve noticed though is that there are very few people that enjoy grinding through missions. Even with a goal, it is tedious. They’ve tried to fix this by making more multi-mission quests, but I don’t care about stories, or epic arcs. I just want my money.

I haven’t been able to really get into the role-playing aspect or metagaming aspect of Eve Online. Has this ever happened to you? How did you find enjoyment in the game? Or did you just eventually quit?

One of the reasons I started this blog was to talk about my experiences in Eve Online, a game that I have come back to at least half a dozen times for different reasons. The last week or so, I haven’t been playing much. The corporation I am in has been shooting at towers (which for the most part are either defenseless, or are being attacked by so many ships that the odds of being shot at are one in two hundred) and pulling out of previously occupied space (which I am opposed to).

Add to this the fact that building a Jump Freighter has emptied out all the in game currency I have, and you create a situation where I just don’t feel like playing.

Don’t get me wrong. There is so many things happening in the game, and they are interesting, but they don’t interest me. One of the only reasons I even got back into Eve was that my cousin was playing, and I really needed the distraction from work sometimes, but the only things that excite me in Eve anymore are player to player combat, and making lots of ingame money quickly. I don’t want to grind through missions. I don’t want to mine ore for hours on end. I just want to fight in battles with under one hundred combatants and find easy ways to make ISK, the in game currency.

It is a real shame that the goals of my game play don’t match up with the corporation I am in currently. Too many friends in the corporation to start over somewhere else. It might be time for me to put the game down for a while, and come back to it again later, once PvP and making ISK are the main goals of the corporation again.

The other day in EVE Online, I went with a fleet to help shoot some player owned stations, and I fell behind by about a minute and a half. In doing so, I was caught unaware that there was a gate camp. I was subsequently destroyed in about fifteen seconds, and had my pod destroyed as well.

I did have my ship insured, but that doesn’t cover the cost of the modules, ammo, or even the implants that I had during that fight. It was a frustrating waste, and makes me want to play some more of the game that isn’t so confrontational, though most of my enjoyment in the game has come from PvP lately.

If you are ever in EVE and you loose an expensive ship, does that make you redouble your effort, or does that make you want to take a break from the game?

EVE Online has been working hard at making the new player experience as easy to slip into as possible as their learning curve has always been insanely high, but I think that they don’t realize how overwhelmed older players can be in their game.

There are simply too many choices, too many paths. I want to do too many things, and the more things I want to do, the less competitive I become for my age in the game. There are combat focused characters that have only played half as long as me, and they can destroy me with little effort. There are industrial characters that have the same advantage, and this is all because I am overwhelmed by the possibilities.

Currently, I am training leadership skills, so that I can take on squads and give effective bonuses to my fleet, while queuing up skills to make my future Jump Freighter run more effectively, and thinking about how I can fit a ship for the maximum damage output possible, so that my cousin and I can pair up on some smaller PvP runs.

He has been able to consistently stick to combat skills, while I continue to go off task. Seems to me like EVE Online needs to work a bit more on its “old player experience” as well.

If you are already a fan of EVE Online, then you know that the Fanfest is coming up in Reykjavik, Iceland on October 1-3. This is a month earlier than previous years, and so could be a bit confusing for people.

As a fan of the game, I find it a tempting event, but due to cost, distance, and the type of people it attracts, I doubt I’ll be heading there. I will be looking for someone to report on the event when it gets closer, as I know some people that are attending.

Usually, at Fanfest they have some interesting events, including information on upcoming releases, tournaments, and lots of drinking and partying. Most of the people I’ve talked to skip out on many of the sessions, for an opportunity to hang out with people from their corporation that live all over the world.

If you need any more information on the event, please watch the EVE Online site, as their blogs will be covering it more and more as it draws nearer.

One of the most feared weapons in EvE Online, the Doomsday can wipe full fleets from the map, and this recently happened to my allies in the game as a Titan destroyed around fifty battleships in a single attack.

Here is a video of my “enemies” getting attacked in the same system that we are now defending.

I didn’t really play EvE Online today. I was really excited about an operation that the alliance I am in was going to be involved in, but my excitement was short-lived as I was told, in not so many words, not to come. See, they have a very specific fitting that they like to use for fleets performing certain actions, and I don’t currently have the skills to run that set-up.

It is really frustrating to me to have these limitations put on me as I try to play a game. Having other users set rules on how I can interact with a game that has nearly no rules is frustrating, but as part of a corporation, that is part of an alliance, I have to make certain sacrifices in order to have access to amazing events, technology, and parts of the EvE Online universe.

One of the biggest things that people have to adjust to in EvE is the breadth of skills available in the game. It isn’t like most games where you choose a class, and then you are stuck being that class for your entire existence. Things in EvE aren’t so set in stone. My character used to be an industrialist. I used to mine, haul ore, refine ore, and other such tasks. Now, I have spent months learning how to effectively use my character for combat, and while it is not yet near the upper echelons, it is quickly becoming more and more effective at this task.

Had you asked me when I first started playing, if I’d ever be interested in PvE or PvP, I probably would have laughed at you, as I had more interest in mining, inventing, and manufacturing at that point in my online gaming experience. Choose your skills wisely though, as a focused player, has better opportunities within the right corporation or alliance.

One of the most common ships I use currently is my Cerberus, a small heavy assault cruiser that is good at spitting out damage, but not so great at staying alive in extended engagements. This ship isn’t a perfect fitting, but one that has been working rather well for me. I am sure EvE PvP experts will have something to say, especially when it comes to the few technology level one modules I have on board.

Gang Cerberus

High Slots:
5x Heavy Missile Launcher II

Mid Slots:
1x Cap Recharger II
1x Sensor Booster II with a Scan Resolution Script
1x 10MN MicroWarpdrive I
2x Invulnerability Field II

Low Slots:
1x Ballistic Control System II
1x Power Diagnostic System II
2x Capacitor Power Relay II

Rigs
1x Low Friction Nozzle Joints I
1x Capacitor Control Circuit I

According to the Eve Fitting Tool this gives my main character a ship with the following characteristics:

• 15,037 Effective HP
• Cap Stable at 55%
• 1596 dmg per volley
• Targeting range of 96km which allows me to lock a Battleship in 1.7 seconds
• 1376m/s maximum speed

Of course, without my MicroWarpdrive being enabled, my capacitor does much better than being stable at 55%, and if someone attacks me purely with EM damage, I won’t hold up very well, as my resistance is only 48%, but I have done fairly well with this set-up on a number of engagements. It could use some fine tuning, but I am open for that, so if you have any suggestions on what I can do to make this ship better, please feel free to let me know in the comments below.

One thing that CCP hasn’t gotten enough thanks for is the implementation of a skill queue in the EvE Online Apocrypha expansion. The skill queue, while it had a few glitches when it first came out, has been one of the most beneficial additions to the game for me since it came out.

While my main character, Daray II, has over forty-two million skill points, there were still a number of partially trained skills I wanted to train up, and I was able to complete many lower level skills, and partially trained skills in a way that I otherwise would not have been able to, due to being away from the computer and whatnot.

I don’t think enough people have thanked CCP for releasing this long requested feature, and so I wanted to take a second to do so, as I think it will revolutionize the way I train my skills. I already seem to be giving preferential treatment to those that can fit within the twenty-four hour queue, despite needing to train some longer skills to bump myself up to the next class of ships.

Has the skill queue changed the way you play EvE Online?