Mariko Ishii
Brotherhood Without Banners
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Posted - 2013.03.06 05:54:00 -
[1] - Quote
In some ways I agree with the OP, as the boredom of level one mission running caused me to throw in the towel a little over a year ago, after only about a month of gameplay and training. But I picked the game up again about two months ago and just threw myself into it in any way I could. And now I'm having an absolute blast with my 4.5 mil SP player.
In fact, I clearly remember the day I quit playing a year ago. I spent most of my hard-earned ISK on a Celestis, fit it for exploration, and proceeded to take it out to low sec sans any sort of cloaking device. No need to explain what happened - you can easily figure it out. But what I've realized now that I'm back in the game is that my SP had nothing to do with that or any other debacle. I lost that ship and quit because I didn't understand a damned thing about fitting, the right ship for the right job, life in low sec, and of course EVE Rule Number One.
Yes, Eve has a treacherous learning curve. It's hard. If that's not for you, there are plenty of games that will hold your hand and let you use end-game equipment in a few hours. Personally I love games that challenge me and don't try to hold my hand until I'm a capped level god with uber equipment fighting a bunch of equally-fit 13 year olds who obtained their god-characters after a week of playing.
I'm now a full-time explorer living in low sec space, and I'm there about 90% of the time, other than the occasional trading run to sell my loot. I can't fly any T2 ship. I can't use T2 guns. In fact, only about 50% of my modules at best are T2, and that includes drones. In the past month alone I've pulled down in excess of 1 billion ISK without losing a single ship to pvp. In fact, the only ship I've lost was a LOLfit exploration Thorax, which is nearly as funny an image as the exploration Celestsis (Note to budding explorers: Don't try to solo a low sec 4/10 with a gimped Thorax wielding t1 guns and a cloak/salvager/probelauncher/codebreaker/analyzer. it is spectacularly bad).
Anyway, I've learned that surviving and thriving in EVE is far more about understanding the environment than it is about having the best equipment. I've learned about creating safe spots, and the cloak/MWD method of giving the finger to gate camps, and (thank the good lord) the d-scan button. I've made friends with some locals, and we exchange intelligence about our low sec patch. I'm at the point now where I laugh at some of the idiot "pirates" trying to scan me down, and have almost as much fun taunting them into a game of cat-and-mouse than I do actually making ISK. And if it backfires and one of these jokers pops me? Oh well. next time I won't make that mistake.
And finally, one point that that I don't think I've seen anyone make in this thread yet - if you gimp down the SP requirements for new players to get into more ships and professions, you might make it more noob-friendly and gain subscriptions on the front end, but how many veteran players will you lose? "From Noob to Titan in 66 days!!!" Great. What do I do on day 67 when I'm already tired of battles between fleets of titans (and only titans) in every freaking system, all piloted by 13 year olds? oh yeah, I quit and find something else to do with my time. You have to bring in new players, sure, but you also have to keep the vets engaged and interested. These are the things that make this game great.
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