Taran Blake
ANZAC ALLIANCE
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Posted - 2006.08.08 11:15:00 -
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 Originally by: Maximillian Pele
Eve - interestingly enough - has two distinctive types of grind.
The first is early grind. As a noob player you are forced to grind for ISK (unless given it or you obtain it via OOG methods), faction standing and, if your bad, security standing.
Skills cost ISK. Ships cost ISK. Insurance costs ISK.
Then, depending on how long and hard you grind as a noob, you one day reach a post-noob-grind state. Skills now take days and weeks to train, more than off-setting the higher skill costs. You can do lucrative Lvl 3 & 4 missions. You may have jump clones and therefore can protect your precious implants.
Suddenly you have enough ISK that you can take risks that you'd previously avoid. Now its not grind ISK/faction standing that is holding you back, it's skill training time.
This is a liberating stage of EvE - you are free from grinding unless you choose to do it. The majority of EvE's content is available to you, and you have near total freedom.
This happy state exists until you finally decide to enter the final stage - the big end of town: Big corporations and Alliances (although many players in EvE will prefer to stay in the previous stages).
Here you encounter a new form of grind - organisational grind. There are POSes to fuel, goods to haul to and from empire, gates to camp, space to control. PvP is suddenly no longer just "lets go hunting"; its a matter of logistics, blobs, and POS lag fests.
EvE has now become work again.
And if you choose to be a leader, then EvE really does become a job. And CCP has not provided the tools to make managing a corp/alliance any easier.
Hence it doesn't surprise me that the old average character age (has anyone seen new figures) was around seven months: people moving to last stage suddenly found EvE to be work again.
So if by "Grind" people mean repetative tasks that are necessary rather than voluntary, then EvE has grind.
Quoted for the Truth indeed.
The weekly Corp/Alliance Mining op to fuel the POSes and provide minerals for the Munitions and the like can be a grind, and if you have any sort of leadership role, you know how necessary these jobs are. If you don't turn up for them, how is your membership going to react?
Ratting becomes just as much about laying up warstocks of low end named mods to fit out expendable ships or Vanilla items that you can reprocess for their mineral content as it does about providing ISK.
After a while you have enough ISK that you start buying items not because you will ever fly them in harms way, but for something to do with the cash generated by the ratting. I have a Machariel sitting in a station. I doubt I will ever my money's worth out of it, but it looks really cool and I had the cash on hand at the time...
A high end Hauler spawn is welcome, not so much for the amount of ISK it gives, so much as it produces a boatload of pre-refined minerals that you wont have to sit in a belt tanking some Rat spawn for hours on end while your miners hoover up another defenceless belt while your scouts sit out watching the approaches in other systems providing warning of the inevitable hostile incursions.
It may be a grind, but it is a necessary one.
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