In praise of EVE

I'm very pleased with EVE. Coming from WoW, it's a breath of fresh air in so many ways.

There's no entitlement to success. The choices one has to make have consequences. A player needs patience to wait for his skills, money and standings to build up. Sometimes you fail, and have to learn from it.

In particular, what prompted me to make this post was having to drop the "Dead Drift" level 2 mission (which caused a loss of standing with the agent who provided it) because of something that could be interpreted as either bad design, or lack of foreknowledge on my part. I prefer to think of it as the latter. It's doable, and if I had researched it first, it wouldn't have come to telling my agent to stick it where the sun don't shine. Even without any googling, escaping with your ship barely intact is a learning experience.

In the game which must not be named, such a mission wouldn't survive in its original form after the first hour of forum whining, if by some miracle it made it into the game in the first place. After years of expecting success from pretty much everything, failing can be a pretty enlightening experience.

I've been running missions while learning the ropes and building enough oomph to do something more exciting, hopefully COSMOS missions or wormhole space; the story aspect of the game is, from my wiki- and forum-reading perspective, commendable. It certainly kicks the bejesus out of anything that air-headed buffoon Metzen could even dream of coming up with.

Overall, CCP doesn't seem desperate to spew out half-assed content at a pace fast enough to please your average overgrown teenager, and that's no small feat in today's "I can't be bothered to pay attention to something for longer than ten seconds" world. Hope the game stays that way. In any case, I thank the developers for a great experience so far.



P.S.: in case another hapless noob happens to stumble onto this, here's the thing: you have to close in on the battleship that's adrift near the wormhole, and when it explodes, loot the passengers from the cargo container it leaves behind. What you have to do with the passengers afterwards, I couldn't really figure from my research, but I wouldn't advise even trying to fight (bunch of frigates, webber drone, cruisers, BATTLESHIPS). Luckily I was trying out a Rupture with a large extender, and so had a beefy shield buffer; if I'd been there with my trusty sniping Thrasher it likely would have been popped before I could run for the hills.