Eve Online

[Squiggoth]

My other true love in the MMO Kingdom is EVE Online. For a quick reference, check out Skuggomann's avatar. That's an EVE-O avatar. It's a LOT of fun. I am imagining 10-boxing Thoraxes (a Gallente Cruiser, known for it's heavy dmg up close)...yumm.

Only problem is, as far as I know, no way to move the ship without doing a lot of mousework.

Anyone ever tried/contemplated/theorized multiboxing in EVE?

I mean, I do it all the time (1 cyno alt, 1 carrier alt, 1 scout), but never in a concerted effort to kill stuff (such as the 10-man Thorax squad I mentioned ;P).

[Squiggoth]

Well, any object on screen can be right clicked. It's all menu driven, rather than /slash commands in WoW.

To simply "drive off" in one direction you double click where you want to go.

I imagine if you could lock the camera somehow so it's always the same on all clients you could just broadcast the mouse, yeah...hmm...ideas...

[Ellay]

I tripled box Eve Online for about a month, but the clicking to every screen for many tasks was just too tedious for me.

[Ellay]

To be fair the game has a sort of /follow, you select your "main" and orbit it, and you can choose to orbit any distance you want. The difficult part is actually targeting, you can to click on the menu and lock down targets that way. Many NPC's also have the exact same name so it is hard to tell if your assisting the same target.

To be fair though the game is truly amazing though if you can get it to work

[thinus]

I almost checked it out myself... but after reading about developers being part of "corporations" (guilds) and cheating to boost them in game... I was completely turned off on the game. The mere thought of an employee cheating in game is horrible. Add in the fact that its a subscription based game and well.... yea. No thx!

I used to play EVE as well. The whole fiasco when an employee was caught spawning BPOs and giving it to his corporation really does leave a bad taste in the mouth.

Subsequent handling of the issue, lack of transparency, CCP employees still retaining high ranks in active corporations, node crashes during huge battles, exploiting by deliberately crashing nodes, etc was a big turn off. Also cheating, scamming, exploiting interface complexity and any manner of underhandedness is tolerated and even encouraged to preserve the "lawless space frontier" atmosphere.

There is also not much you can be effective at before about 6 months worth of skill training to pick up crucial base skills to make you somewhat effective.

As for multi-boxing it, I used to run 2 characters on 2 different comps but didn't link them up in any way. I mostly ran lvl 4 missions and my main cleaned out stages while the alt came in afterwards and looted and salvaged. The alt was mostly manufacturing skilled but I started training the alt to be a decent combat pilot to help finish the missions quicker and aimed at the new lvl 5 missions that were going to come out.

A friend suckered me back into WoW though.

[Squiggoth]

There is also not much you can be effective at before about 6 months worth of skill training to pick up crucial base skills to make you somewhat effective.

I could not disagree more. This is the fundamental reason why Goons are so powerful in the game. They take people who are interested in the game, train them in the basics, and let them loose. They took down the Titan, not anyone else. They, with their "ineffective" noobs.

They have a propaganda/recruitment poster that says (and I roughly paraphrase here):

We won, because their leader quit, because he was fed up with them being disorganized, because they kept asking where to go, because the next system over was mobbed by us, because their scout died, because you tackled him. Every person counts.

It's like that. As a BRAND NEW character you can at least do basic scouting and tackling and you can make the difference in something as major as a Titan kill.

So yeah, disagree on that. And the whole BPO thing...jeeze, it was a long time ago. The scandal bothered me too but it's a game. I still fight against BoB every day because it's fun. They had an advantage -- so what? I don't give up...psssh.. Anyway. =)

[Ughmahedhurtz]

I Played the trial for about 19 days. As space stuff goes, it's a beautiful engine. The first time I hit a skill that said "Time left to train: 23 days" pretty much killed it for me.

[Squiggoth]

That's a bit overkill. No skill you train at the start takes 23 days....at most you are talking like, maybe a rank 5 skill that will take 10-15 days, but if you pick up a new skill it'll take maybe an hour. And if you're smart about it you can really min/max your training time.

The greatest part about EVE for those who don't know is the training -- you train in "real time" whether you're logged in or not. So a 1 day training skill takes 1 day and you can just not log in if you feel like it.

Right now I am knee-deep in WoW raiding and multiboxing........but I also have 2 characters constantly training up. I only have to log in when I need to change the skill. I have a 60 million Skill point character and a 15 million Skill point character. There are programs to help you track your skills, plan for new skills, etc.

Anyway, not trying to sell the game to you (err, can't, it's free ;P ) just wondering in the back of my brain if it's possible to somehow synch clients...hmmm....

[sway]

I have also played EVE about 1 or 2 month in the beginning of 2007.
One account was the miner and with the second account i picked up the boxes and fly them to the station.

[thinus]

There is also not much you can be effective at before about 6 months worth of skill training to pick up crucial base skills to make you somewhat effective.

I could not disagree more. This is the fundamental reason why Goons are so powerful in the game. They take people who are interested in the game, train them in the basics, and let them loose. They took down the Titan, not anyone else. They, with their "ineffective" noobs.

They have a propaganda/recruitment poster that says (and I roughly paraphrase here):

We won, because their leader quit, because he was fed up with them being disorganized, because they kept asking where to go, because the next system over was mobbed by us, because their scout died, because you tackled him. Every person counts.

It's like that. As a BRAND NEW character you can at least do basic scouting and tackling and you can make the difference in something as major as a Titan kill.

So yeah, disagree on that. And the whole BPO thing...jeeze, it was a long time ago. The scandal bothered me too but it's a game. I still fight against BoB every day because it's fun. They had an advantage -- so what? I don't give up...psssh.. Anyway. =)

As a tackler you are useless without your gang/fleet backing you up. How long do you spend sitting at gates waiting for scouts? You probably don't even have guns fitted...?

If you are so effective why are you playing WoW while your characters are training?

Don't get me wrong, EVE is a good game. I am not disputing that. I just don't think it is the kind of game you can play unless you commit to it long term or if you have a problem dealing with the backstabbing underbelly encouraged in it. And be prepared to deal with attacks against your corporation forums if you ever go up against some of the other corporations.

And I personally have a problem with developers playing leading roles anonymously. I just don't think it is fair and I don't want to get involved in competition with someone else only to find out at some stage they got an unfair advantage. Especially when it takes you months to accumalate funds for a decent ship. But I suppose if you are flying a cheap T1 fitted frigate for tackling purposes you don't really care if you get blown up.

I enjoyed my time playing EVE but I never had the intention of becoming a cog in a big corporation. I never mined either. I mission ran mostly and now and then helped the corporation out on missions and hauling. My aim was to have a combat pilot and a manufacturer. To have an effective combat pilot or manufacturer takes a very long time.

My most enjoyable time playing was probably in my passive tanked Drake. That was one sweet setup. I got caught by pirates twice and managed to fight them off twice. They were unable to break my tank. I was in a Raven and saving up for a Navy Raven when I quit while my manufacturing alt was almost trained up to fly a freighter.