I came across an old post today on Terra Nova. Part of it hit the nail on the head as to why I prefer EVE over WoW. Let me share that part with you.
WoW (and too it symbolizes so much in the genre) is a place that reeks of fun and playfulness on the surface, but once ensnared, players are led into a deception that spells W*O*R*K. Eve-Online on the other hand is Icelandic with Calvinist overtones - yet in this confining straightjacket there is opportunity to find one’s own way towards a demeanor of play. One represents a fall into an abyss, the other, a rise from one to redemption…
Most all MMOs out there that I have played go for the fun and easy right off the bat. Levels ding several times a night. New skills and new armor in a flurry of action. Fast forward a few months and it’s days to get a level and you are still wearing that same ugly cloak you found 2 weeks ago. EVE on the other hand starts out kind of rough and ugly. Confusing at times and seeming as if there is nothing to do. Fast forward a few months and you can go from a hardcore ice miner to a covert-ops pilot sneaking behind the enemy forces in the time it takes to dock and switch ships.
Yes, I am an EVE fanboy and I hope more MMORPGs can find a way to make a game keep getting more fun as you play it, like EVE does.
- Ethic
I have to say after going to Eve from EQ2 I wouldnt go back. At first I thought Eve wasnt that good with its confusing interface and after the tutorial was done found myself thinking “Now what?”. However I found a good corp (Eves version of a guild for those who dont know) and that made my playing experience so much better. CCP could probably give a bit more guidance about things to do to the new starting player, but a good corp helps immensley.
“in the time it takes to dock and switch ships” … get the money for the expensive skills, get the money to buy the expensive ships and modules, and spend the months of real time training the skills.
Other than that, I do agree with you. I do like EVE, but it isn’t quite as simple to switch between ice mining and covert ops as you say unless they drastically increased learning rates since I’ve been gone.
No, but if already have the skills…
Wait, that’s like saying you can just log on your level 60 Priest alt when you are tired of your level 60 Warrior main. They’re just all wrapped into one character on EVE. I could presumably be in a mining barge in a month, but then I could have a level 60 in a month, too, I suspect. You are still going a month or three to get that good functionality, compared to a character who has never tried it; that seems comparable to starting a new character in Yet Another Fantasy MMORPG. Given offline training time: advantage EVE, I think.
- Yet another Zubon post that goes in no particular direction.
I think EVE Online is inferior to World of Warcraft in most regards because you cannot advance solo and PvP is non-consensual. The majority of players wish to be able to decide these two issues themselves and not have the game make the choice for them. Your talk of too much freedom and choice in the game makes sense only on a small scale. On the large scale EVE is much more controlling of gameplay then WoW.
However, the uniqueness and cutthroat nature of EVE Online has attracted a lot of gamers who are burnt out on the fantasy MMORPG. These gamers willing to accept EVE’s very rough rules in exchange for its uniqueness.
You have to realize though that most people are not burned out on fantasy and that many of the WoW subscribers are brand new to the genre.
It’s not burning out on fantasy so much as burning out on poor game mechanics. WoW is broken in very big ways. The solo game you mentioned is generally limited to grinding either one monster type, for quest completion, or one monster class, for faction; that’s not effectively much better than EVE’s solo mining, courier missions, and deadspace encounters. There are great disparities between classes’ comparative abilities and handfuls of bug exploits that have just about become features (DS/MD pet rez, anyone?). Blizzard took good IP and marketed well, and raise the population of the MMO market by an order of magnitude or two.
CCP took no IP and made a space MMO with a very slow starting game and, granted, that’s given it a much smaller population. My argument is in favour of game stability and design. I have tried every way I could think of to take advantage of some of the options available, and they just don’t work. I acknowledge that there are far few variables to consider in meticulously balancing a ship’s design, rather than a class template, but I’d rather always play a simple game with few glaring errors than what has become an ongoing subscription beta.
I find that most bugs except terrain exploits have been cleared up in WoW pretty quickly. As for the general rancor towards questing I admit that the easy to find quests are the standard “Kill Ten Rats” but WoW has a ton of unique and interesting quests which just seem to beat the “Mine Ore for your Corp” gameplay of EvE Online.
The Pirate Chain quest in Arathi Highlands where you have to activate canons to blow up attacking Naga.
The Ecto-plasm quest where you have to blast ghosts in Live Stratholm with a ghostbusters looking gun.
It seems as if the most interesting feature in EVE Online is that raiding doesn’t control guild/corporation size and politically powerful entities can actually be created. Of course these huge corps can then take over huge parts of the galaxy and prevent exploration and gameplay. But then again most people like forced pvp, right?
Not counting WoW’s battlegrounds, I’m far more partial to the “forced” PvP in EVE (no one’s forcing you into non-secure space) than to the occasional unexpected gank that passes as WoW’s excuse for a consensual PvP server.
PvP in EVE is so easy to avoid. I’ve played over a year without encountering it when I didn’t want to. Most of the space is safe from PvP in general. I hate and avoid PvP in every MMO I’ve played, yet I still play EVE. It must not be too bad. There are players for every game in general, no reason to claim one is better than the other. It’s all up to personal preferences.
I enjoyed the first 30 levels or so of WoW and then I got burned out of the grind I was going through. Just can’t get excited about it. EVE, for me, is filled with lots of “you never know what is going to happen next” moments which keeps it exciting. For example, the war that was just declared against us. I’m excited to go fight to defend our home space and stations. Stations we built. However, if one didn’t want to fight - there are plenty of other things to be done if you chose to do so.
Really EVE and WoW are so different - I wouldn’t expect there to be very many people that like both of them. One or the other.
Zubon, I totally agree with you. The EVE model where you have one guy/gal that can eventually get good at everything and just needs to switch ships to take on a different role is superior to the WoW model.
All I was pointing out is that it isn’t quite so simple to get to that point. I played EVE for maybe 6 months or so, got into Assault Ships, was working on Interceptors and was close to HACs. Now I was pretty damned far away from being able to mine in a barge let alone mine ice and I could afford to buy and fit maybe 3 or 4 Assault Ships before I woulda been broke ;)
When I first got EvE, I just sat in the statio for the first 30-45 min, trying to figure out how to get out of the station. As a game, it is a bit daunting (the newer tutorials help alot in that regard, but those were not in place when I started) with a learning curve that is pretty steep. That said, once I began to learn the ropes a bit, the game seemed…. meh.
That was then. Now, the game holds an odd draw for me. And I think I have my finger on why; It’s the ability to be anything, and everything. Every MMO I have ever played, I always tried to avoid specialization. This comes from a desire to solo 90% of the time. In EvE, you can do just that. You can train in any direction, and eventually arrive at a point where you can handle the ntire process from A to Z.
A perfect example was I had joined (on my return to EvE after a rest) a fairly young corp. I had trained pretty much everything I could to a mid level. When the ceo would say “Gee, we need a miner…” I would link my mining barge, and say I’m your guy. And with little more training, I was sudenly well advanced as a miner. Ceo would say “Gee, we need a builder/researcher on these BPs”.. I would quote my skills, and with a slight amount of training I was top science guy. Same for hauling, trading, and even fighting. (Swear I’m not trying to brag)
EvE’s form of cooperative play always felt more natural than it did in other games, as like I said I prefer to solo. And, I guess that’s the final statement on why I like the game. I can do both just as easily.
The two games are very different in several different ways:
1) Sci-Fi vs Fantasy
2) Skill based System vs Class based System
3) Ship based combat vs Character based Combat
The guess if there was more character to character interaction I could like EVE a bit more. Also skill based systems do give a lot of freedom but it seems as if its easier to gimp your first character by training in the wrong skills. I like Scifi and Fantasy equally but EVE is a little too diferent for me to appreciate. I do hope it continues to do well though cause I would love to see more Scifi based MMORPGs.
Gimping your first character as a result of training the wrong skills doesn’t happen, thankfully. Getting the wrong attributes (piles of charisma) isn’t the best, but characters start with so few skills that if you suddenly find there’s something you need it’s quicker to just train it and keep the extras you picked up than to start over. It’s not like Asheron’s Call. There’s no cap or degredation in the speed of learning.
Ok guys to be honest I have played several online games an most of them have been the ones were you have to sit all day in front of your computer an kill npc to level up. But once you reach that level what is it that you do ? The answer to that is kill more npc to lv up and i think thats boring. And if all you do is lv up that doesnt leave much time to pvp or to do nything else but lvl up.Also in most games were all you do is kill monster after monster to gain experiance an to get to a lv is pretty bad an to make things worst you have to choose form a knight or elf maybe a mage or somthing an the thing is each one has a ability an advantage over a nother one an i think thats bad. But like in EVE I have been playing it for over 3 years and I have come to like the game lol its mroe like a life style lmao tell me how many times have you gone to sleep an rested while a skill trained an once that skill is done you can wake up the next day well rested an play the game with out having to stay all night an kill monster after monster. Also in EVE you dont have to worry about oh your next level an armor an crap like that in eve you can just do what ever it is that you do maybe kill npc for some small cash not for exp or go mine or go pvp in a cheap command ship lol even go teach new players how to make isk fast an get them to join your corperation, now thats is good gaming I think. But in eve it does have it ups an downs for example unlike other games lol eve can cause stress such as in your wallet or how rich you are lol or maybe like oh crap I died an lost a tech 2 battlecruiser an now im broke but in some other games you dont get the stress in stuff like that since you umm die ok respawn with your stuff some times or with out it but its no big deal cuz you can rebuy it easy. But tbh an so sry for the long discussion lol I think eve is better
In the end this comparison is a mute point;
Eve online is not a war faction game.
WOW is not an economy/political simulator.
I have played multiple accounts on both games. I’ve had 7 lvl 70’s and I have had 6 active eve accounts (Able to take out a rorqual, 4 hulks, and a defensive ship myself to do “mining ops”).
In the end, I believe world of warcraft is a better game for those who are interested in somewhat mindless fun. “kill ten rats”, collect resources for the war effort, raid and go kill throll.
However, I believe that eve online is a vastly superior game for those who are interested in playing a meta-game. Eve is not a space combat game, nor is it a flying simulator. Eve is a political simulator. Players can be members of corporations who can be members of alliances who can be “pets” of other alliances who can be members of coalitions.
Currently, 4 main coalitions control the insecure regions of eve. They fight with each other and form non-aggression pacts within there own members (alliances).
There are dictatorships, capital societies, secret societies, and capitalist sects. All of the war and mining and camping are simply tools in the political manipulation game. Players can find a role in any level of that structure, but in the end, if a player wants to leave the newbie training area (empire space) they will end up in the midst of a huge political, economic, and social landscape with the ability to start as a miner, and pvp drone, and work your way up to becoming a member of the war council controlling literally thousands of player’s direction against other similarly sized factions.
Its just more fun to send out multiple hundreds of billions if not trillions of assets to wreck havoc on the supply and moral of our enemies.
“On the large scale EVE is much more controlling of gameplay then WoW.”
Yet, you just mentioned that PvP is non-consensual in EVE. That means anyone can attack anyone, anytime, anywhere, without limitation. On top of that, the EVE economy is player-based. The players, not the game, decide how much items are worth. On top of THAT, anyone can fly any ship, fit any module, train any skill, and they aren’t limited by their race, unlike in WoW. Yeah, EVE gameplay is soooo much more controlled than WoW…
Well, I played both Eve online for about a year and Wow for about 9 months I’d say. Unlike Eve, in Wow if you want to be a human but like things that orcs or blood elfs use you can’t get them. But, in Eve if you are an Amarr and want to use Caldari wepons, you can train for them(they are mainly missles). What empire you choose in eve dosen’t affect much about who you can mission for or what wepons you train except the starting skills you get. Yes, Eve is much more economic and political based, but it has a large millitary asspect to it and wars can be started with other corps/alliances. In wow, you are just at war with horde or alliance and no one else. It gets very boaring just doing that. Eve is deffently much more complicated to learn for new MMO players, unlike wow which is much much more simple to play(click to auto-attack to activating moduals and wepons). Eve deffently also has much better graphics. Wow pvp is somewhat better because in eve you need to find a group usuaily to to some good pvp but wow you can just do a battleground and are automatily matched up. Wow also has an endgame(hitting lvl70), but eve really dosen’t.
In the end, It’s a tie for me. Wow is good for playing for a few minuets and than stoping but Eve you can play for hours and get a new ship or skill but gets repiditive eventuily.
basicly:
Eve=complex and huge but repeditive. good for group play. good for hardcore mmo gamers
Wow=simple and fun but gets boaring. good for new mmo players