Rockpapershotgun guy (he's in their corp, but posts at gamingdaily.co.uk) is writing about his time in eve. Good reads for those interested in giving EVE a chuck and good reads for bittervets like me!
His first article - brilliant read (sure I posted it here, but may be confused):
Eve is big and scary. At least that’s what I thought before I began my 14 day trial. I started playing a week ago for reasons of ‘journalistic enquiry’, now I’m worried that it’s become something more. I swore I wouldn’t fall for it, I’m almost certain I haven’t, but Eve and I have already developed something of a close bond. I’m not an MMO fan, you see. I’ve played them in the past; there’s the honeymoon period: all is glorious novelty, exciting adventure and rewarding progress; then the hollowness sets in, next thing you know you’re making up excuses to your guildmates before you finally disappear forever and spend the next few weeks trying to stop your brain from adding up all the hours (and currency) you spent on that other life. I would almost certainly be fluent in French by now, just saying. So it’s more than simply not wanting to play Eve – I don’t want to start enjoying it; I don’t want to start thinking €14.99 a month is acceptable. I’ll admit: I’m a little bit scared. Suck it up, Millen. Let’s see how we get on.
Eve Online - ME
Me! Pupil direction options rolled back into head – will certainly scare away all potential threats
Eve is not big and scary. At least, it isn’t at the start (I guess if you’re the head of a massive corporation, after years of effort accumulating vast wealth and influence; balancing a complex structure of alliances, treaties and economic policies; with tens, if not hundreds, of potential back-stabbers and usurpers under your command, and solar systems full of enemies baying for your blood – then – then I can see it being big and scary. Lock-the-door-cover-yourself-in-tinfoil-and-start-weeping kind of scary). I logged in and created my character. I was borne into the universe and deposited at a random world in my chosen race’s empire; that being Gallente, a race who possess strong senses of liberty, democracy and tolerance. It was an easy choice; I’m totally all about the tolerance and stuff. I read the Guardian.
Eve Online - shiplanet
Failing to take a ‘non press-shot’ screen capture
Before I could begin wondering what to do, an email blipped into my in-game inbox. It invited me to attend the University of Caille ‘tutorial agent program’. Good call. A series of tutorial pop-ups and menu ‘welcome overlays’ helped me launch my little ship and begin the short journey to my, soon to be, alma mater. Getting by in Eve is really pretty easy; most things revolve around right-clicking and selecting context sensitive options, or they simply have their own icons. All very un-scary. I clicked to undock.
Uh oh. Falling into space for the first time in Eve Online is one of those gaming moments. You know – the marines shooting the air vents in Half-Life, or the first time you step out of the Vault in Fallout 3; the moments that take your breath. Against black space and thousands of stars, a station and its many tiny lights sit dwarfed in the shadow of an enormous planet; the glinting hulls of space craft drift around, all lit by the expansive, red rays of the system’s sun. Zoom out and I’m a tiny little blue thruster flame to all this celestial magnificence; delicate ambient music finishes the scene. As far as trying not to love the game goes, this may be a fairly big problem. All my childhood Elite fantasies come flooding back.
To the University of Caille.
Agents are Eve’s quest spitting NPCs; they’re in stations all over secure space, it seems, providing players with missions and rewards of varying difficulty and value. My career agents at Caille take me through all the basics, from military to business, in painlessly simple steps. They provide me with equipment, ISK (the game’s currency) and, to my immense glee, new ships. I get one that looks like a B-wing; this makes me happier than I thought I could ever be. Perhaps most importantly, within a couple of days I’d picked up all the game’s fundamental principles and I could go off and forge my own path be it mining, exploring or continuing NPC combat with agent missions. I feel a spot of exploring is in order.
Eve Online - station
Space stations – home to agents, commerce and industry
Fitting my ship with a ‘core probe launcher’ allowed me to fire probes out into space. These are teeny scanners that can detect any cosmic signatures within a solar system; signatures which, when pinpointed, reveal the locations of rare mining sites, salvageable archaeological ruins, radar stations to hack and other curious anomalies that can be exploited. It’s a neat mini-game: on your space map, you have to overlap the spherical radii of the probes around a faint cosmic signature, slowly increasing the probes’ scan strengths and rearranging their positions as the signal gets stronger and its location more accurate. When you hit 100% signal strength you can tell your ship to warp there. I indulged in this activity for a while, enjoying the sense of doing something advanced so early on in the game. Within a couple of hours I’d uncovered several wormholes, pirate hideouts and something called a ‘Haunted Yard’. A little research revealed that visiting any of these locations would offer only swift and certain death. I made a noise that sounded like ‘hrrmph’ and decided it was time I found some friends.
The Spectre Assault Fleet.
So far, I’d not interacted with any humans, other than through the ‘Rookie Help’ chat window, where my many naive questions were answered quickly and with patience. Eve’s not a game where you can sidle up to a ship and start chatting as you would if you were all humanoid avatars, standing next to a bank in a town, or something; it’s a bit more abstract. You have chat windows which you open to communicate with players who are often many millions of light-years away. I found the ‘recruitment’ chat with the aim of joining a Corporation, Eve Online’s player run space guilds. “Rookie, new but fast learner. Interested in exploration. Looking to learn the game with friendly Corp” I typed, feeling a little like someone submitting an ad to the personals. A guy called Kinovic messaged me, he seemed amiable and after a brief chat I’d joined his Corp, the Spectre Assault Fleet.
Eve Online - Bwing
My B-Wing. I love her dearly.
He was very helpful, of course, but with the advice of more experienced players comes ‘the right way of doing things’. ‘The right way of doing things’ is another of my MMO turn-offs. It spoils the adventure. When you know there’s already an ultra-efficient path, deep trodden by hundreds of others, to whatever objectives you’re looking to achieve, some of the magic evaporates. I was immediately told I was training the wrong skills, instructed to buy and learn the right ones (you have to buy skills in Eve, then dump them in a training queue as if your character’s revising them; this ticks away whether you’re logged in or not). Kinovic casually tossed me more ISK than I’d managed to accumulate in a week: “This’ll cover them”, he understated.
Eve Online - scanning
Scanning for cosmic signatures
The exciting Eve stuff I’ve read about; the PvP ship battles, all the inter-corp intrigue – that’s not for rookies, it seems. I imagined I’d be doing something crafty as an Eve noobie; accompanying fleets on enigmatic missions at the beck of an unseen and shady superior, a disposable employee waiting for an opportunity to prove myself. Quizzing my corp mates about this lead to cheerful rebukes and instructions to continue doing the NPC missions for a while. That’s the thing with Eve, ya see. It really isn’t all that different from other MMOs. There’s the gold grinding which takes the form of mining, a lucrative but dull activity, and there’s the NPC missions, which are RPG staples but in spaceships. Although it’s certainly a little more sophisticated than your average sword wielding MMORPG, it’s not hard, but the really interesting stuff is just a faint glimmer on the distant horizon for a rook like me.
Eve Online - targets
The number of times I’ve said ‘target locked’ out loud would horrify and depress you
So. I spent about half an hour before I knuckled down and wrote this looking up ship load-outs for my Gallente Catalyst. And I’ve been searching Ebay for cheaper alternatives to a monthly sub directly from CCP (this is above board – it’s just the odd person selling off unwanted game time top-up cards). I’m about 70/30 pro continuing Eve after my trial runs out; is this just the expected MMO addictiveness taking hold? I am keen to explore the Corp structure further – all those amazing stories I’ve read still entice.
I’ve been MMO free for about seven years now, dear Gaming Daily reader; my soul hangs in the balance. After a few months in Eve Online, will I find unparalleled gaming adventure, or that sickening MMO hollow feeling? Unnervingly, there appears to be only one way to find out.
Trying to start a fight with another corp:
‘Broadsword out’. The comms had been quiet for a while but this statement hinted the operation was about to commence. A rival Corp had been making a nuisance of itself in a nearby system and tonight’s plan was to, in EVE parlance, ‘push their shit in’; we were going to flex our muscles, destroy their shiny, expensive ships and hopefully encourage them to move away for good. This Broadsword undocking from the station, leaving the safety of its hanger, was a sign our trap may be about to spring – if it attacked the bait ships, our larger force hiding in the next system could jump in and escalate the fight, drawing out their valuable battleships. If we could blow up a few of them it would soon be clear that living next to us just wasn’t profitable.
It’s been nearly two months since I took a deep breath and began a 14-day EVE Online trial, breaking a seven year no MMO streak in the process. I was curious to see if an MMO-phobe like me could actually enjoy what is supposedly the most challenging and unforgiving online game around. The sharper tacks among you have probably already noticed that I have, in fact, continued playing.
In my previous article I described the (very useful) career agents, NPCs that disseminate missions, teaching the basic skills and providing an early leg up in the form of a few ships and a few thousand ISK. I wrote that I was enjoying the experience but the dramatic Corp on Corp battles which characterise EVE seemed a distant objective for low-level pilots like me. This wasn’t the case. If you find the right Corp, you can do pretty much anything you want; it’s ‘the key’ to EVE Online, as one CCP staffer recently told me. I wanted the PvP drama and so I found a Corp that specialised in recruiting fresh-faced pilots and introducing them to the maelstrom of unsecured 0.0 space as quickly as possible. The Corp is called RPS Holdings.
I’ve made liberal use of the words ‘our’ and ‘we’ in my first paragraph but in truth I was unlikely to be pushing anyone’s shit in personally. It takes a few months to begin piloting the scary ships, the kind of ships I was orbiting in my tiny frigate as they waited, their ECM systems clouding the nearby space in which we sat. A call came over the comms: ‘I’m just coming into Reb, I’ll need a scout in’. A few reinforcements were inbound from another system to join the bulk of the fleet; these approaching pilots needed a fast scout to check their route for threats – a role I could perform. ’Urm, OK – be there in a sec’ I volunteered, conscious that I’d be responsible for alerting a several hundred million ISK ship to any immediate danger. I warped off to meet them at their entrance gate.
A note on gates: EVE Online’s universe comprises thousands of solar systems. Each system has one or more jump gates which allow the players’ ships to travel or ‘jump’ between them; essentially a point at which the next system loads, to put it unromantically. It can be dangerous travelling between these gates as there’s no way to see what lies ahead. In ‘high sec’, 0.5 – 1.0 space, there are the CONCORD, AI ships of immense strength to ensure order and safe travel. In 0.4 space and below there could be anything out there.
This is why it’s important to use scouts when travelling about, fast disposable ships that can warn fleetmates of danger or potential targets. It’s this job that newbie pilots can perform adequately when it comes to PvP and RPSH kitted me out accordingly. The veteran players in the Corp soon taught me the basics of PvP fleet operations, provided me with ships to use, a sensible skill training regime and instruction on how to ‘tackle’, the principle combat role for light, fast space craft.
The job of the tackler is to charge up to a target ship and hit it with a warp scrambler, a beam that jams the enemy ship and prevents it from escaping into warp, pinning it in place for the larger ships to take down. As you’re a considerable threat but a soft target often ahead of the main fleet, tacklers tend to get blown up a lot. Well, I get blown up a lot, but I remain philosophical; it’s important to learn to lose your ship in EVE. My first few outings with RPSH, roaming (searching a few systems for enemies to shoot) in null sec, were unlike any other gaming experiences I have had. Veterans will undoubtedly laugh, but I can only think it’s as close to a military exercise as I’m ever likely to get; commands are issued over comms by the fleet commander, info is relayed by the scout – when threats are close things get a little tense. I messed up a lot at first but it doesn’t take long to get used to the various commands and what to do if things get sticky. I’m considerably more practised now after only about ten major roams, I like to think anyway – I hope.
‘Right, give them a tickle. See if they’ll bite’ says Eben, the fleet commander and RPSH’s glorious leader, instructing the bait ships to try and provoke the enemy Corp’s Broadsword into a fight. The comms go quiet again. I continue to orbit the behemoths that sit at the gate, awaiting the order to jump in and help out the baiters. ‘They’ll be organising themselves’ someone says, optimistically. More silence. ‘Nope, nothing – he’s docked up’. Then ‘OK, alright. Fuck it, another time’ says Eben. Not tonight; the ops off. In this particular case, I wasn’t really in a position to do anything in my little ship but I was hoping for a dramatic story for this article at least. That’s EVE though. That’s why I like it. You’re fighting real, crafty people who’ll do their damnedest to ram your shit in if they can possibly get away with it and avoid it happening to them at all costs. The drama’s there but it’s unpredictable; there’s nothing instanced about it.
Soon I’ll be flying larger ships, I have my eye on a fearsome Brutix battlecruiser when I get a few more million in the bank. I’m excited. It’ll alter my role in the fleets and diversify the ways I can play the game. I’ll probably write about it here if you’d care to pop back.
First time he saw carriers and black ops used in combat:
“And that’s how you make a proper ham sandwich”, concluded someone over comms. Something like this anyway. The conversation had meandered considerably since we began camping the stargate in our home solar system; there was little traffic coming through and nothing much to shoot at, we were getting bored. Boooooored.
With only about five of us knocking about this evening in small ships we didn’t fancy prowling into deeper space at the risk of being battered by a much larger fleet, so we occupied ourselves with this sedate activity. I’d just learned all the skills to fly interceptors and piloted a shiny new Ares on which I’d lavished about half my savings, buying rig upgrades and pricey tech II modules. Interceptors look like the game’s smallest frigates but with a much greater capacity for speed and firepower and I was enjoying simply orbiting the gate in mine, making ‘neeeowm’ noises as I buzzed about, five times faster than I’d ever been able to travel before. I didn’t want to see it pop just yet so was content enough to hang around on a nice, safe gate camp.
“Scorpion coming in”, our scout reported from the other side of the gate. A lone covert-ops battleship, packed to the gills with electronic countermeasures. Nothing we shouldn’t be able to take before anything nasty happens, we thought. There was nothing untoward on scan anyway – and we were booooored, remember?
When ships warp through a gate they remain stationary and in cloak until they decide to move or after 30 seconds elapses. Unless a ship is equipped with a cloaking device, that is, in which case it can remain cloaked indefinitely or until another ship flies within two kilometres, disrupting and disabling its cloak. But this is fairly unlikely.
In an attempt to get a decent range on the likely position of the incoming Scorpion, Lucious Desire, RPSH vet, flew straight into it, de-cloaking the thing and suffering the full power-zapping wrath of its defences in return, draining his ship’s capacitors and rendering it pretty much helpless. The rest of us barrelled in and were doing a decent enough job of hacking through its shields and armour when:
“Cyno dropped”
I’ve heard of cynos or cynosural fields before. People ask for them at stations, they are used as beacons for big ships to jump to, ships that are too big to use stargates. This was the first time I’d seen one in a fight.
Almost immediately the number of pilots in our local system rose dramatically. Thankfully, I’m not a writer to blanch at hideous cliche, cus: IT’S A TRAP!
Members of my fleet started reeling off enemy ship types over the comms channel, of which many I’d never heard: “Widow, Panther, Scorp, Rapier, Azaru, Pilgrim”. Lucious blew up. There was little I could actually do to help so decided on the gentlemanly thing and ran the hell away back to our home station. Neeeowm.
The remainder of the fleet had the same thought but jumped into their meatier ships when docked and flung themselves back into the fight, determined to bring down that initial sneaky Scorpion. Which they did, hurrah. Just before the cyno jumped in two Thanatos. Erk.
Thantos are fighter carrier types. Carriers are like angry, moon-sized beehives containing squadrons of fighters – which are like angry, cruiser-sized robot space bees. A tactical retreat was the only sensible option.
It was crazy that our tiny gate gang had instigated such a massive show of force, and the conflict was escalating still further. One of our guys was busy contacting local allies and our comms channel was steadily filling with more and more pilots as a rapid counter attack using our own carriers began to assemble. With more people arriving, I chanced leaving my hanger and pootled my Ares to the point in space where the enemy fleet was only now disengaging and warping away. I just caught sight of a massive, hulking carrier crawling itself into warp.
We regrouped, a much larger fleet now, and waited for a cov-ops ship to probe out the enemy fleet who were hidden somewhere in the system. We’d turn the tables, re-engage then drop our own cyno to summon in our allies’ carriers, hopefully taking down one of theirs – a loss to the tune of over one billion ISK.
But we were too late. The enemy fleet escaped, using another cyno in their home system to jump out. An interesting 10 minutes, nonetheless where one of the slowest evenings had suddenly turned into the biggest operation I’d ever been part of. And, after months piloting ships that seemed to get destroyed by the slightest enemy interest, I was flying something that was fast enough to dodge hostile fire and beat extremely hasty retreats, as I did tonight.
And it was really something to see so many players from several different corps dropping everything and banding together as allies of RPSH to respond to a hostile incursion. Dramatic stuff. I hope it happens again soon.
