Meet the Cheetah

[ubergeek2012]

In my second installment of EVE related posts I'd like to introduce the Swollen Eyeball, a Cheetah class covert operation frigate. This has become my favorite ship, and probably the one I spend the most time in. Fast, nimble, and stealthy, when piloting one of these I can slip unseen through hostile or pirate infested space with near impunity.

Comments

[ubergeek2012]

There is a lot of PVP combat, but the majority takes place in what's called lowsec or zero space. In high-sec empire space nobody can fire on you unless you do something to invite it, such as steal from their loot containers. This excludes situations where you are in a player run corporation or alliance that is in an officially declared war, but these are not surprise situations.

Questing doesn't work in the WoW style. There are mission agents in NPC corps that will give out missions of various difficulty levels. The missions are drawn from a pool so they can get repetitive, but they are spawned in random locations for you when you accept it.

A big difference in EVE though is that there's a lot more to do besides run missions for NPC agents. You can set yourself up as a trader, working the market to make a profit off of the player to player economy. You could even make your living just by picking up courier contracts created by other players that need goods transported between systems. You could be an industrialist, building ships and modules to sell to other players.

Lately I've been spending my time probing out randomly seeded and hidden sites full of NPC pirates or salvage and making a pretty hefty profit that way. I haven't started playing around in wormhole space, but I plan on doing so eventually. Collectively, this kind of activity is referred to as exploration.

I don't want to give a false impression though. Some of the PVE can get tiresome, and PVP activities can be stressful. Lowsec space tends to be a wretched hive of scum and villainy, and even high sec space holds a lot of scammers and troublemakers. The game's setup creates a pretty neat environment, but it's not for everyone.

Just like I told Kinnerc above, let me know if you decide to try it out and I can give you a hand starting out. In fact, I can give out free trial invites. They're a 21 day free trial, and the game effectively costs $5 in addition to the first month's subscription.

Oh, and another neat thing. It would be hard to do so starting out, but there's a way to buy game time with in-game money. This basically lets you play for free if can make enough to buy the time from other players that are usually funding their wars and PVP activities by buying the extra time with real life money.