EVE

So I’ve not logged into my EVE online account in, probably some 3-4 months at this point. All that wasted time that could have been spent leveling up a new skill . ..

Except that the game itself has failed to pull me in, not even enough to pop in every 2 or 3 days and update skills. There are a combination of factors that I think have contributed to this:

1) Wars. I’m not a PVP guy, really. Particularly in a game where PVP skills equate to getting to your ideal radius before the other guy does - there’s very little twitch in EVE, by and large the result of the combat is already known ahead of time - not necessarily to the combatants, but logic and probability govern the fighting more than skill - at least in a one on one situation. I was not able to experience fleet combat - but I’d expect that to require a great deal of coordination and team play, and that is a big bucket of skill right there.

However - as I said I’m not a PVP guy. It’s fun to dabble in, but when I’m a lowbee broke ass puttering around in a poorly equipped cruiser, I don’t really look forward to leaving the station when the corporation I am in is likely in one war or another somewhere else - thus making me a sitting duck. In Warcraft, at least, you had a choice. In EVE, you do not. While this does create a bit more tense and interesting game play - somedays, I’m just not in the mood.

2) Environment. There are perhaps as many as a couple dozen “backdrops”. These are the images you see in any given solar system as you fly about outside of hyperspace. Different races have differently shaped space stations and jump gates.

That’s it. That’s all there is to look at. Asteroids all look alike, planets are great amorphous green/gray spheres that you can’t land on. You can’t get out of your ship to wander around the space station. You are in your tin can 100% of the time, except when you get blown up by somebody. To sum up: the game is visually monotonous (sexy missile and rocket explosions are a notable exception). While this is, of course, SPACE, the fact that you are limited to just viewing space, and never physically exploring planets, or looking at the chain of idiots dancing around in the space station, and so forth, coupled with the fact that all of your personal contacts, quest givers, etc, end up being little 1“ square static pictures, and the sense of immersion, at least for me, was highly lacking.

3) Crafting. There are blueprints out there for all sorts of things, from missile ammo to high end top of the line massive battleships. However - if it’s a high end item, you can only make it once. The blueprint is consumed/destroyed/exceeds its copyright limit, whatever you want to abstract it as, in the process. There are a few exceptions - but these special blue prints were apparently handed out in some sort of lottery to the big corporations at the time, and no one else will get one, ever. So that’s a bit of a bummer, as someone who likes crafting is basically relegated to the same boring shit as everyone else no matter how much time they spend on finding things.

4) Exploring. I had hoped I might find a Star Trek like niche in running some big ship out to all sorts of places. Well, the exploring ”mini game“ as it were is very realistic, and thus, very, very boring. Launch probes in a system. Fly to the probe that finds something. Launch more probes around that one. Fly to the probe that finds something. Continue in this way until you are using your shortest range probe, and if it finds something you can actually fly there.

Whereupon you will immediately be set upon by powerful NPC pirates who will kill you.

Thus, to explore, you need at least one buddy to come help you beat shit up so you can find this amazing artifact they were guarding . . . that will likely contain some research to allow you to (eventually) create one of those shiny blueprints.

That you can use only once.