[colkassad]

I bought the game when it first came out (2003? Boxed, from Target) and played with an online friend for a while. We mostly mined and we didn't really have a corporation, it was just the two of us. There wasn't much else to do at the time. At one point I fell asleep at my keyboard during a mining op. Gave up soon after.

In 2015 a coworker talked me into trying it again. We joined a small corporation, swore fealty to a larger corp (Brave? Band of Brothers?) and moved to low-security space. We got involved in massive 3000+ ship battles, some of which made the news. These are not as fun as you would think.

However, the most fun I had was joining 100+ ship bomber fleets that would warp in on unsuspecting mining operations and destroying billions of ISK (in game currency) worth of ships. We'd use Mumble for voice chat, which allows for a hierarchy of chat rooms, so that we could hear the fleet commander giving orders but he couldn't hear us. It was super organized and our fleet commander was really skilled.

In the end I couldn't keep up with the time commitments. For the fun stuff, you had to be online at a certain time and there was a lot of prep involved (buying the proper ships which changed all the time, getting your ships to the right station, etc). I still consider it some of the best multiplayer experiences I've ever had though. Nothing beats warping in and seeing those huge mining ships and then hearing the fleet commander start issuing targeting orders. It would raise the hair on my arms.

[Twirrim]

> I still consider it some of the best multiplayer experiences I've ever had though.

I played Eve for a few years as part of a corporation in Xetic and then Ascendant Frontier.

So many painful large battles (time dilation got added after I stopped playing), and some wild solo fights. My favourite was the time I got caught solo in a T2 Interceptor, when out scouting. We knew an attack was coming but didn't know where.

I screwed up, and found myself surrounded by 5 enemy player ships, with no possibility of escaping. The only thing going for me was that I was in an inty, and they were in larger ships, so I could outmanouver them. I knew I was done for. If I flew away they'd be able to hit me as the only thing keeping me safe was my radial velocity (I was orbiting the ship faster than their weapons can rotate, but that only really works 1 on 1, to the other ships you're not moving quite as fast)

It was really just about how long I could hold out and making sure I was ready to warp the moment I got podded. I constantly switched orbit between ships, trying to keep them close together so I could maintain high radial velocity, while taking pot shots at them and starting to chip away at armour, and taking glancing shots from them myself. It felt like that fight went on for hours, but it was probably only 5 or so minutes before they finally managed to pod me, and I managed to warp away to freedom. That was probably nearly 20 years ago (I stopped playing maybe late 2007 / early 2008?) and I still remember it vividly. Once I'd got myself to safety I remember just sitting in my seat staring at the screen, as the adrenaline faded.

[colkassad]

I know exactly how you felt. I had many moments like that exploring, which was a mechanic they might have added after you left. Searching for loot in ancient artifacts (or whatever it was) and never knowing if you are being hunted until it's too late was so nerve racking.

[vsviridov]

My buddy and I were playing a bunch of years back, unaffiliated with a big corp, just doing our own thing in mid-sec systems. They added wormhole diving into w-space in one of the updates, and we decided to try it out, which was pretty fun. We both made enough resource to fly Drakes at the time.

In one of the wormhole there was an ambush, I got blown up but my buddy managed to lose them, but didn't leave the system. He started talking to them in local chat, and in the end we ended up joining them. We were playing together for a while after, but life ultimately took over for me. My buddy remained for a while. He was a long-haul trucker and would play in his downtime from various truck stops across US and Canada.

[colkassad]

My coworker ended up defecting to a corporation that lived in wormhole space! The wormholes add so much to the game. A lot of times we'd find the mining ops by people scouting through wormholes. Another activity I liked was hacking those resource thingies (I forget what they were called, or even what they were). Doing that in wormhole space was so scary but the payoffs could be huge.

[WorldMaker]

I watched a couple battles at the most time dilation over the shoulders of college friends. They would have entire days of needing having EVE open on their laptop through every class and that gave me enough of an understanding to realize I probably wouldn't enjoy that.

I got a lot out of Empires of Eve which tells a lot of the big stories of Eve in a very approachable multiple volumes of history books: https://www.empiresofeve.com/

The author put so much amazing work into those, including interviewing people that were there for many of those battles and compiling great visualizations to help make the battles easier to read.

[Pyrodogg]

NPSI romps were pretty fun. Been a few years since I've fired it up.

NPSI = Not Purple, Shoot It!

Squad up and then move to some objective location and raise hell shooting anything (w/ coordination from squad leader since the idea is to usually pool DPSl) not in the squad.

[cbm-vic-20]

For the non-EVE players, when you join a fleet in-game, the other members of the fleet have a purple icon next to their name. NPSI is a play-style where you join transient fleets with the express intention of getting into battles.

Players in your own corporation and alliance typically have blue icons, and those you're at war with have red icons- this is based on manually-set "standings". Alliance roams typically have a NBSI policy: Not Blue, Shoot It!, which means you'll be attacking enemies and neutrals.

[zer00eyz]

> However, the most fun I had was joining 100+ ship bomber fleets

Bombers Bar!

In a twist of fate, my corp found one of their fleets sitting in wh space waiting on their scouts...

We did the only appropriate thing and bombed them.

I think I giggled for about 3 hours after that, and recalling the story brought a smile to my face.

[colkassad]

Yes! Bombers Bar! That was it :) It was so much fun and quickly became the only thing I wanted to do.

[wavemode]

What is it about the giant battles that was not fun?

[cbm-vic-20]

To expand on "time dilation": an EVE Online star system is served by a single compute node in their server farm at a time. Most systems are empty most of the the time, but some locations in the universe have much more player activity. Eve can dynamically move systems between server nodes, depending on player activity. Once the number grows into the thousands in a single system, the server CPU resources can't keep up. In the past (prior to 2011), this would make the game randomly unresponsive, or cause dropped connections.

Time Dilation is the in-game solution for this: the simulation is throttled so the game runs slower for everybody, but doesn't kick people off. Last time I checked, time dilation could go as low as 10% normal time- meaning you can only fire at 10% normal rate, move 10% as fast, etc. It feels like your ship is flying through molasses- it's not fun, but is also more fair for all players.

Alliances that know there will be a big fight can fill out a form with Eve Online to "schedule" the fight so that star system can be migrated to a larger server before the fight.

[dxdm]

I was never part of one, but in case nobody with more experience chimes in: I'm assuming the large battles involve a lot of sitting around, pressing the occasional button to change to the next designated target, while stuck in massive game-time dilation:

https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Time_dilation

[colkassad]

Others have explained it pretty well in their replies. It's basically a slide-show. My big battle was the fight over the UALX-3 Keepstar that TEST was attempting to build as a FOB. My experience was sitting at my computer clicking my attack button when ordered and watching everything go by at a few frames per second. I had no idea if what I was doing was effective. The only fun part is knowing how momentous it was, with massive ramifications for each side depending on the outcome.

[singron]

The system the fight is in experiences time-dilation, where everything slows down to 10% speed or even less. However, a few effects create a positive feedback loop that makes the problem worse.

All the surrounding systems still run at full speed. You can travel large distances and still arrive soon enough to matter in the fight. You can also die, respawn in another system, rejoin the fight, and barely miss anything. The positions in the fight therefore move even slower than time-dilation since ships on both sides are replaced so quickly.

Large groups have a massive advantage over small groups, so alliances are very large and join various alliances-of-alliances. The playerbase is often organized into only 2-3 major coalitions. At some points in history, nearly all the alliances have joined the same coalition, which leads to a strange pax-Romana called the "blue donut" (referring to all the ownable outer-systems being "blue" or allied with each other).

Also, nearly every player in a large fight just follows simple orders. Orbit A and shoot B. There are just a few people calling the shots.

Fights sometimes end just because people are bored, need to sleep, or go to work.

[cellular]

It's almost like gravityof all the players' mass slows time! Ie general relativity

[syncsynchalt]

Games are not as fun at 1 fps, or with 10s input lag.

[jpfromlondon]

time dilation