The Beginning

I have been playing many MMORPGs in the past, taking a quick glimpse at Ultima Online, starting with Dark Age of Camelot during its beta and staying for six years, moving on to Everquest II, World of Warcraft, Rift and many others.

What makes EVE Online my game of choice is its incredible harshness and the causality of your actions. You don't play EVE on different shards - everything that is happening in EVE is happening in YOUR universe (not taking into account the Chinese server and the test server). You have a variety of possibilities in your choice of profession. You can either make a living of shooting NPC ships or killing other players for bounty. You can produce stuff or you can transport it. You can become a salesman playing the market or a banker living of the interest rate of the credits you grant. You can earn your bucks by pirating and ransoming wealthy pilots or by simple fraud, scamming the unalert player.

That said, EVE has lots of flaws, too. Having all the player base squeezed into a single environment has its disadvantages. Lag and time zone differences come to mind. The aforementioned bounty system needs to be revised, urgently. Bot users cause all sorts of problems, especially economical ones. Huge power blocs sucking up all the space and overpowered end-game space ships leave little room for smaller entities. But CCP, the developers, seem to be taking action to cope with some, some more, even more and yet some more of these issues.

More to come...