When I was younger and would just hang out in teamspeak with the crew it was a lot of fun and a lot of just sitting around or jumping for hours trying to catch a fight only to die in an instant or kill them in an instant.
This round of playing I really got into wormholes and exploration and I'm having a blast with that. I only play maybe 7 or 8 hours a week and I find the probe scanning and data/relic site hacking minigames both a lot of fun.
I've also started using mapping tools for wormholes which is something else that's oddly fun. There's just something about sitting in space scanning for wormholes and people could warp on you while you're taking the 2 seconds updating your mapping tool that gives me a thrill. It's also mostly work I throw away when the wormholes close because I live in a high sec area too lol but I still find it fun. Sometimes I'll play two days in a row and visit wormholes I mapped earlier to scan new sites in them.
Just remembering the good times make me want to jump back in! I’ve been the same as yourself. Probably tried a dozen times over the years. From mining to pvp, red v blue, tried it all but it always started to feel like work in the end. Exploring and Signal Cartel made me stick around the longest. Eventually got a bit bored with it.
The most EVE entertaining i’ve had recently is Andrew Groen book series Empires of Eve [2]. Basically all the great big war stories bundled into a very engaging 2 series book. It is a lovely read!
this is almost always true, so i argue that it is not a good measure of anything.
(note: eve online is probably not fun for most people, lol)
i also try not to spend money on games unless i am sure it's going to be good, or the amount is small enough to avoid the sunk cost fallacy. i'd want to get my money's worth.
whenever i get the feeling that i should be doing something more productive then that means that the game is not enjoyable enough any more and it's time to stop.
Too true. And sometimes you stumble upon the fun. For instance, a long, long time ago (circa 2008 or 9...) I thought Stealth Bombers sounded cool so I started to learn the skills, not realizing they were essentially useless.
Except that they could be used somewhat productively to fuck around deep in enemy territory and be a nuisance to their mining and logistics efforts. Was a I troll? Basically. Did I have any real impact on the war effort? I doubt it. But hey, I did blow up a few mining barges and annoy people.
At some point I made a bunch of outrageously blingy ships and when they ran out I sold the accounts on eBay.
I had a great time while it lasted and hope something like Star Citizen can bring back some of that fun with more immersive gameplay…eventually.
Some of the game mechanics, like scanning with probes, are interesting, but once you figure them out it's all tedium. If you want to PvE in a nice ship, you need to be wary every time you undock. If you want to PvP, you need a source of isk to replace your ship and implants, since every time you go there's a significant chance that clone isn't coming back alive. There's so much effort involved in everything, and very little payoff other than the occasional shot of adrenaline or lootbox find. Which is exactly what they count on. Variable reinforcement, rather than consistent reinforcement.
I got a carrier, started thinking about supercaps, and gradually lost interest in the whole progression due to the logistical effort keeping such things. I suppose I could have tried getting involved in corporate or alliance politics, or I could have switched to trading. However, like the lootboxes, those human elements too are constrained by game dynamics to be predictably unpredictable, and not in very interesting ways. Few long-term real-life friendships come about due to in-game friendships, since almost everyone quits games within a few years. So, due to all of the above, I left.
The best part of the game was hanging out in occasionally good, fun voice chats, but you have to be in a well-organized corp or alliance that runs good ops. Unlike real military-style organizations, though, scheduling makes good ops very difficult. People's ships are in the wrong systems, most of the op is just getting organized, and then, as GP said, you might get ganked at the first nullsec gate you jump through. Oh well, time to rat or mine or trade more to finance another ship and clone, so you can organize another op, which will probably also not be that great other than some fun voice chat moments.
At the end of it all, the other people you're hanging out with in corporations and alliances are there either because they've gotten hooked on the game's adrenaline or lootbox reinforcement mechanisms, or because they have a Machiavellian desire to pull the strings of a corp or alliance, and you're cannon fodder or logistical support, there to be kept happy. Or they're there to figure out an angle to scam or gank you.
EvE is more fun to read about, or think about doing things in, than it is to play.
Non-persistent games, like any good RTS, are more fun because they're lower-stress, and because you can see that you're making progress solely because your skill is improving. In a MMORPG, you're progressing only partly because you're developing more skill at playing, and more because the game company rewards you, in skill or lootbox upgrades, for spending more time in game (or spending money buying isk which lets you buy pre-skilled characters and in-game stuff).
Back when skills couldn't be queued, the devs at CCP knew exactly what they were doing. Force people to be logged in when their last skill had been trained, or they'd lose precious minutes, hours, days of training time. Once players are logged in, they might as well engage with other aspects of the game, getting more addicted to grinding.
The implants mechanic is terrible as well. For long-term use, maxing out learning implants is valuable, but that conflicts with playing the game where you want combat-related bonuses, so you have to jump around, which adds logistical difficulties. You have to be able to jump back to your learning clone before logging out for a while. And if you're not looking for an edge with a combat-focused clone, and you fly around with maxed learning implants, you lose billions, in addition to your ship and its modules, if you get podded.
The stakes for having to log out on short notice when you're PvPing in 0.0 or even lowsec can be losing your ship or worse, since you will at a minimum be separated from your gang/fleet, and might even be probed in the minutes before your ship disappears (unless they've changed that mechanic), or trapped if you log back in and warp back to a (same or different) gate camp. Having game mechanics that put a lot of pressure on players to prioritize game time over real life, is not good.
There was a period I did what's called incursions, high-level PvE content that has been min/maxed to optimize how fast you can make money. Other times I did exploration, especially after they rehashed it and added hacking minigames and the like, but the competition there was quite firm.
Last times I played it I was careless; I lost a Loki (a half a billion advanced ship) from going into low-sec to kill things, running out of ammo, going out, and making the mistake of coming back. And I lost a Stratios (another half a billion ship with equipment) by going into new content where you need to clear it before the time expires, but I couldn't because I was harassed by tiny enemies that my ship couldn't hit.
Maybe one day I'll come back to it, but I just don't have the spare time for it anymore.
Got to do something while autopilot is running... how about conspire a heist?
(Seriously through, I almost never used autopilot even when in highsec systems. There are some mad people out there and you don't want to know them)
At some point I realized that this is an financial game with a space setting, not a space game with a rich economy, and I never played again.