In this series of articles, Mr. Nash discusses his continuing adventures in the Eve Online universe. Today, he talks about getting started, mining, and all the skills he's trying to learn.

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Eve Online: Apocrypha

A MMO for Busy People

One thing that keeps some people from diving into an MMO is the perceived time consumption associated with the sub-genre. Some MMOs have people running huge dungeons that take hours to complete, or grinding through countless levels just to top up their character, both of which require a considerable time commitment. What I’ve enjoyed about Eve Online: Apocrypha so far is that it goes out of its way to try and make this sort of stuff an option, but not a necessity. If you want to go on grandiose missions, or become some super powerful privateer, or business person, that’s fine, but you can also be some schlub helping a backwater corporation do their thing when you have a few minutes. It’s up to you.

I had actually played Eve Online for a little while after it launched, and quite enjoyed it then. Coming back to it with the Apocrypha update, I was starting from scratch, and had some catching up to do. As always, my first priority was to start acquiring isk, the currency of Eve Online. There are two main ways to get this done as a newbie: by mining, or doing missions for NPCs at the various space stations. While the missions are certainly fun, sending players into danger to blast up some bad guys, I’ve been favoring mining since I can just park my ship in highly secure newbie space, and have it blast up asteroids while I go do chores around the house, or whatever.

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One feature that I’ve really come to appreciate so far is how characters level up new skills. Unlike other RPGs where characters go from level one to two to three, and so forth, characters in Eve Online have their skills levelled individually. So, a player may decide that they want to level up their mining skill, or a particular aspect of operating a ship’s shields, or perhaps improve engine

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operations in some way. To start the levelling process, they selecting it from a list of known skills, and choose to take it to the next level. This sends that skill to a queue, and after a pre-determined amount of time that is set by how advanced the skill is, said skill goes up one level. If one doesn’t know a particular skill, they can also take a look and see if the manual is available for sale on the market so they can buy it and get started in that new skill. As the skill is levelling, it is slowly improving in the background, as players go about their business, with a small message popping up to notify when the levelling process is complete. The best part about all of this is that levelling continues even while a player is offline, so if someone has to take some time away from the game to study for an exam, take care of some stuff at work, or go on vacation, they can just set their character to learn a high-level skill (assuming they’re qualified to do so), and by the time they get back to Eve their character may very well have completed levelling up that skill to the next level.

I’ve been using this process a fair bit, and while my character is far from wealthy, he’s been turning into a big, throbbing brain from all of the skills that I’ve been trying to teach him. The challenge now is earning the isk to get better ships and properly equip them so that I can do more in the game, and hopefully contribute when I decide that it is time to join a corporation, Eve’s equivalent to a guild. This is largely a matter of time, as I just have to mine out the materials to sell, and slowly but surely get ready to plunk down the dough on a better ship.

At this time, I’m favoring a Badger to do this with. They may not have any mining advantages, and can only carry one laser, but their cargo holds are quite big, and as such can store quite a bit of ore in them. As such, I tend to park it somewhere in 1.0 space (the safest region of the known galaxy, and playground of the newbies) and have it mine to its heart’s content while I take care of other duties around the house. On extremely rare occasions I’ve come under attack by NPC pirates while doing this, but that was only when venturing into slightly less secure 0.8 regions of space. One day I hope to upgrade to an Osprey, and eventually a Hulk for so particularly gluttonous mining, but for now a Badger will have to do. I could see people getting a little frustrated with the game if all they did was sit at their computer, and wait for their mining to be finished, but if one takes the time to do other stuff as the process goes on (even if it’s just playing in windowed mode, and reading the news while mining), the time goes by much quicker. I just figure it’s better for one’s sanity to give one’s undivided attention to running missions or doing some PvP, rather than somewhat more mundane tasks like mining in highly secured regions of space. Granted if one wanders into unsecured space, everything changes, and one needs to watch out for all sorts of dangers, so it wouldn’t be a good idea to go do the laundry while mining there, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

I’ve been enjoying taking a slower, more relaxed approach to MMOs with Eve Online: Apocrypha. There is a lot to learn still in the game, like how all of the various skills interact, and deciding what one wants to specialize in for the game, as well as the in-game economy, not to mention all of the politics surrounding the exceptionally large player-run corporations in the game. Considering all that there is to learn, it makes a lot more sense to take one’s time to soak in all of the little details in the game. I’ll let y’all know how it’s going in the next update to this series of articles. Hopefully by then I’ll have that Osprey I’ve been eyeing.

Mr. Nash
July 19, 2009