Money makes the universe go round and just about the only way to get it is to
mine minerals from asteroids. Mining is just about all that you will be doing
for quite some time, and you’ll have to dedicate time to it throughout your
character’s online lifetime. Mining involves flying out to a nearby asteroid
belt, targeting an asteroid, and then waiting as your mining laser slowly fills
your cargo hold. You don’t even have to worry about crashing into the rock as
the game does not have any collision detection (you can fly right through
spacestations if you’d like). Once you’re full you need to fly back to a
starbase, process the ore, and then sell the materials to the market. Then it’s
back to the asteroid belt to start the cycle anew. You can eventually afford
upgrades to your mining laser, ship, and cargo hold, but when you reach that
point the next tier of upgrades will be even more expensive so you’ll have to
collect more minerals. The net result is that you always seem to spend the same
amount of time mining no matter how much you upgrade.
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| Returning from another mining run. |
The mining cycle is one of diminishing returns, so you’ll always be driven to
system hop your way to rich mineral belts further and further out from the safer
inner systems. Soon you’ll encounter pirates, bandits, and other renegades
patrolling the asteroid belts while you’re just out trying to do a little
mining. The good news is that this breaks up the monotony of the mining and may
reward you with a little booty of your own from the remains of your attacker’s
ship. The bad new is that you’ll no longer be able to take a bathroom break and
grab a soda while your mining laser toils away because you could come back to
find your that your ship is now debris. The battles themselves are pretty much
automatic affairs in which the better equipped ship always wins. Lock onto your
target and your ship will automatically maneuver to stay within firing range as
your weapons automatically and methodically work their way through the enemy’s
shields. Should you lose because you brought the smaller stick, you’ll be taken
to the nearest starbase. If you remembered to buy ship insurance, you will have
the money to replace your loss. Otherwise it’s back to a bottom of the line
model and a lot of mining trips to work your way back out of the hole.
Unlike most MMOGs, your actions do not translate to experience or higher
skill levels. You can mine or fight all day and you’ll have the same skills as
when you started. Instead the game attempts to even the playing field between
casual gamers and those who really should get a life by tying skill advancement
to real-world time and not time spent playing. You can train one skill at a time
by simply selecting the skill you want to improve. A clock is started in
real-time and when time runs out you will gain a level in that skill. Lower
level skills require minutes and then hours to train, but before long it will
take days and even weeks to train up to the highest levels. The good thing is
that you can select a skill to train before going on vacation, and when you get
back and log in your skill will be improved. The bad thing is that this hurts
the average gamers the most by penalizing them for the habits of a game-obsessed
few for the sake of those who don’t play that much anyway. It also takes some of
the fun out of the game. In most MMOGs, destroying a tough foe has the immediate
and gratifying payback of a nice big experience payoff. In EVE, there’s just
some potential financial gain that really does not justify the time spent
seeking out and fighting your foe.
Mining and skill leveling; EVE is a game of waiting … and I haven’t even
mentioned the long travel times yet. EVE features a convenient auto-travel
system that allows you to select your destination and click go. The game will
automatically route you through the intervening systems, taking the shortest
path between each in-system warp gate. The problem is that even with the ships’
high speed warp engines it can take some time to cross a system from warp gate
to warp gate. If your journey has you passing through several systems along the
way your travel time can add up quickly. There’s not much you can do while in
transit other than watch the pretty graphics and chat with other players, so you
may as well enter your destination and then do a few chores while waiting for
your ship to finally get there.
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