The past few weeks I have gotten a great deal of positive feedback about my Eve adventures both here, via email and in-game.  We have seen a sizable number of new players subscribe to Eve, in part because of my promotion of the game and the enjoyment I am experiencing with it.
I need to manage expectations somewhat, because I am cognizant of the fact that I am misleading some people in terms of what they can reasonable expect as a new player starting out in Eve.  To understand my Eve attitude, you need to understand me.
I am the guy who loved the camaraderie of 8-hour scheduled spawn camps in EQ.  We set up out of game contact lists and schedules that every player had to spawn sit for 8 hour shifts 3 times per week.  This time you were permitted to do nothing else but sit in place and stare at an empty spawn site.  I am the guy who enjoyed wiping to Onyxia 50 times in a row.   We would grind gold relentlessly before the raids just to afford the repair bills and consumables.  4-5 hours a night for weeks… die, run back, die, run back.
Wormhole living for a new player is a bit like that.  When I entered this wormhole I had less than 1,000,000 skill points on my account.  This is a very frustrating way to learn the game.  I have never flown a Level 3 or above mission.  My first PvP experience was when I got blaped inside the W, setting PI Command Centers in a badger.  My first experience in Fleet combat was the night I got my Hurricane roasted by a Sleeper because I didn’t understand what ‘tank’ meant in Eve terms.
I enjoy it, and would not have it any other way, but many players with lower tolerance for pain, and without a taste for Fail Pie, might find this a poor way to learn a game mechanics and gain understanding of their role in the Eve universe.  Trust me, this isn’t because I am better, more skilled or more hardcore… in all reality it probably means I have less functioning brain cells than the next guy, and enjoy walking into the same brick wall over and over because, well… it red. I like red.
Please be excited about Eve, and keep following my adventures if they interest you, but be careful not to ruin your own experience by following in the footsteps of a jaded old MMO vet hell-bent on breaking every last ship that can be flown in New Eden.
~Cyndre
So can the game be played more casually? Could someone have an impact on anything or help a corp just playing a few hours a week?
Yes definatly. You could even do what I am doing. I just see a lot of new player enthusiam right now to sort of follow my trajectory, and it isn’t all rose-colored glasses that I write about.
I have gotten blown up a lot, podded twice, and spend a lot of time with nothing to do because my skills aren’t high enough to solo in the Hole.
It would be like a Level 50 player sitting inside the Upper Blackrock Spire zone entrance waiting for 14 level 60s to come along so they can run the zone, only to get aggrod 10 times during the run and have to corpse run over and over.
That might be fun for me, but it wouldn’t be fun for a lot of people…
A Corp witha High Security space presence would be more suitible for a brand new player to have a casual impact.
fwiw I play mad casually, just running missions and queuing skills and feeling good about the taxes I pay to my corp. I failed to get involved with wormhole activities because they didn’t schedule their activities there (and in a pvp environment there’s only so much one can schedule) and I wasn’t available to be just generally- well- available! But I look forward to doing some grunt work for the corp in terms of mining and trading down the line.
EVE’s more like a 24/7 (well 23.5/7) pen-and-paper RPG than a crpg you can hop in and out of like most theme-park mmos. So you can’t necessarily get your quick fix of a variety of gameplay elements, but there’s always something productive you can do- maintenence of your personal game, if you will- and that won’t appeal to many people, but it will appeal to many others!
When I said in the other thread how cool it was that Cyndre was having so much fun “not doing anything” that’s what I meant, rather than him literally not doing anything ;)
Similarly with my sprint through Guild Wars: I am logging more hours than one might expect. I am playing through normally, but I am playing a lot.