EVE is attractive, but has too little reward-cycle for me
As of March 2009, EVE Online is undeniably the most successul space-mmo. Their attractive spaceship designs, lighting, and lens-flare grace the advertizing on many game-related websites. The game has been dubbed 'space opera' by many, possibly because of the opera-like cadence of missles and lasers firing from ship-to-ship during battle. It offers some unique gameplay unlike any other game, however, for this author and fan of MMO, RPG, and RTS games it falls short for one glaring reason, the game offers very little reward cycle for playing. I'll explain that more in a moment, but first let me provide my opinion of the primary game elements.
When you initially enter the game, you have many options about how to spend your time in the game. The Apocrypha release made available on March 10th 2009 provided a much-needed simplification of the new player experience. After some simple questions about player race and family-line which are not very well explained, you will be thrust into the world to do what you will. The most important part of that decision is race, as it will dictate which part of space you will start in, and as a result what ship and weapon equipment will be most readily be available to you. The next part of the new player experience will lead you through some basic elements of the game, including mining and combat. I learned the game before Apocrypha, and even just a few minutes with it showed me the improvements are significant. Most notable is that the tutorial keeps you on track and following along instead of confused and stuck in the wrong part of space such as would often happen pre-Apocrypha.
As one of the first parts of the tutorial, you will be acquainted with the skills training system. EVE prides itself on the flexibility that characters can ultimately learn anything, so regardless of which race you select, you can cross-train into equipment from other races if you like. However, that open-ended nature comes with the confusion of more choice than most beginning players are ready for in the game. As with all things in EVE, some online studying will be appropriate before you get too far into your talent training.
After learning the basics of the game, most players begin with some combination of mining, combat missions, manufacturing, or joining corporations (i.e. guilds). It takes a while to be ready for PvP combat, serious manufacturing, courier, market trading, or some of the other more complex roles the game has to offer. It's here that the game shows both how dramatically open-ended it is, and as a result, how limited the rewards system is. I will breakdown the rewards and development into five categories: Skill Training, wealth accumulation (ISK), NPC faction standing, social standing with your real-player corporation, and personal satisfaction from doing whatever you prefer to do.
Skills Training does not require playing
Many of the roles you will take part in are limited by the skills you have trained. EVE is unique in that those skills train in real-world calendar time regardless of what actions you take in the game. This choice, like many design choices in EVE, is a double-edged sword. It brings the benefit that a player can learn skillpoints in EVE at the same rate whether their weekly schedule allows for one-hour of play or eighty-hours. However, this also means skillpoints are not a reward for playing the game, as your skillpoints train at the same rate whether you play or not. (Knowledgable EVE players will know that there are items you can purchase for your character which very slightly increase learning rate, however, that doesn't negate my point, learning is not accelerated by playing.) Another drawback, is that EVE is designed with a skill-tree so large you can't train it all, making the game an unfair time-grab of who got their first. The players who started the game five years ago are literally five-years ahead of you in training skills. You will never catch them. In one year, they will still be five-years ahead of you. For those of us who want to rise to the top and be the best, the only solution is to head to ebay to purchase a character started back in the early days of EVE, of which there is a healthy trade.
Wealth is easier bought than earned
Once you have enough skills to pilot more than a trivial ship, you will be confronted with the cost of purchasing it. In EVE, when you lose a fight, you really lose your ship and you have to buy another one. Early players typically turn to mining asteroids for cash, which ranges from mind-numbingly boring to serenly relaxing depending on your temperment. Alternatively, players may run combat missions for NPC agents for a cash bounty. A corporation can greatly help with you increasing your cash yield early on through safe access to better minerals, overly generous splits of corp-mining operation spoils, allowing tag-alongs on high-end mission running, outright donations, and a variety of other ways. Sadly, CCP has decided to allow you to purchase in-game wealth with real-world dollars. Instead of spending hundreds or thousands of hours accumulating wealth, you can outlay $30-$70 of real world currency to buy a timecode and use CCP's secure timecode transfer to sell it to a player for in-game ISK. Even the most rudimentary minimum-wage real-world job will produce more ISK per hour than playing the game. This removes most of the early motivation to play the game to earn wealth through game mechanisms, as it's condoned and so much more efficient to simply buy it.
NPC Faction Standing accumulates slowly
Since neither skills nor wealth accumulation require playing the game, this game element is a major improvement. NPC Agents provide you missions in the game (i.e. quests). These can be military, courier, manufacturing, and possibly other types. In the beginning you can only receive missions from the most basic of low-level agents. As you complete these missions, you can talk to better and better agents. However, these missions are not very exciting, and the rate at which you earn this standing is so glacial that it's nearly imperceptable. If you run combat missions, for example, you may find early missions exciting. However, your ship capabilities will improve faster than the mission difficulty. This will reduce the mission itself to a chore of targetting and destroying underpowered ships, nestled in between the extremely boring travel to and from. Lather rinse repeat and one day the mission difficulty will catch back up and provide you a challenge, but that day will not be soon.
World's largest role playing game
EVE is the single largest single persistant world in an MMO. Much of the action is player created wars between player created corporations. Therefore, much of the game revolves around social interaction between corp members. For those who loved playing real-life role playing games such as WhiteWolf's Vampire, with little focus on stats and achievements and more focus on social interactions, EVE is an excellent playground. When you beat the enemy corp, aside from a weapon or booster you grab from the wreckage or control over a resource or system, your satisfaction is largly in knowing they died and you lived. I was more of a D&D fan myself, focusing on items, levels, stats, and achievements, and this incredibly open-ended social game interaction leaves me wanting.
Personal Satisfaction from Playing
With the limited amount of reward directly provided by the game in the scenerios I've described above, this leaves the obvious, pure satisfaction from players. I've met players who love the fact that after years of skill trainining, they can park their impressive mining hauler up next to an asteroid and turn on the ISK. Nevermind that they could buy ISK from CCP with a much better hour/ISK efficiency, they simply like the satisfaction of hitting the asteroid themselves. Likewise for PvPers, especially griefers. If you have a deep seated enjoyment in destroying weak outgunned enemys and causing them pain, then you can eventually find something to enjoy in EVE. You'll need to buy a character on ebay or train skills for a year or so, but eventually, you too can roam the cosmos to destroy a ship so the player has to buy more ISK from EVE, or kill the character pod that ejects, possibly costing the player months of real world skill training time. I'm not a griefer, so I'll never understand this. I don't want to be on either side of a very unfair fight, it holds no interest for me. I like remotely fair tests of skill, so I gravitate to near evenly matched battlegrounds or arenas.
Conclusion, Reward systems Left me Wanting
In the end, I find the most efficient way to play EVE is not to play. I might Login for a moment every couple days to switch around skill training. If I feel the urge to fly a ship, I purchase a wealthy fortune from CCP for just a couple real-world dollars and go fly that ship of my dreams. When I find the experience unfulfilling, because it hardly increases an agent standing, I fly into lowsec. This quickly reminds me that I'll never have as many skillpoints as as the early players, and combined with the lack of structured pvp challenges, the idea of a remotely fair pvp matchup is impossible. With all the possible reward systems having disappointed me, I log back out and let those skills train more, with the hope that one day this game will turn out to be totally different. I'm not hopeful.
