It is anniversary post time as today marks the 19th anniversary of my start in EVE Online.

And, as always, I am looking for something to write about to mark my 19th year.

Funny thing: I already have the post for the 20th anniversary written and scheduled.  Inspiration hit, and I ran with it.  But it was a post too good for just year 19, so now I have to fill in the intervening year.

I mean, I suppose I could skip it.  There is no law that says I need to do these posts… or any posts for that matter.  But it has kind of become a thing and I do like these posts later on down the road.  There is a history of them here:

Anyway, each year I try to find something new to poke at… though I often start down a path for something and realize I have already done that post.  Not only have I done that post, but I have nothing new to add.  I don’t mind going at something again if I feel I have something new to add… you may have noted some posts where I just append something like “2025 Edition” to clarify that I might have additional or new thoughts on an otherwise well trod subject… but I often don’t have anything new.

So, in searching for a topic I thought I would tackle one that comes up fairly often in different forms on Reddit or other social medial; is EVE Online a good game?

People ask it in a myriad of different ways, but that is the underlying ask when you are wondering if you should play it or if it is worth getting into or whatever.  You want a good game.  That seems clear.

So is EVE Online a good game?

Oh man, it has so many strikes against it.

I mean, to start with the mechanics and core game play loop or difficult, unfriendly, opaque, and often awkward even when you know what is going on.  It can be impenetrable when you are just starting out.  We’ve been through a dozen or so iterations of a tutorial and new user experience trying to tell you the million things you need to know, most of which you will instantly forget and won’t be obvious later on.  They used to sell a shirt in the merch shop that said, “How do I warp to something?” because it was such a common question.

CCP literally has a policy of trying to have a GM show up and check in on new players after a certain time just because they know how bad it is trying to figure out what it going on.

And the UI is no damn help.

If there were any justice in the world… and 2025 seems set to prove that there is not… I would spend at least 10x as much time complaining about the user interface of EVE Online as I do about Lord of the Rings Online.

When I wrote about the Top Five Problems with EVE Online back in 2016… and I feel like that post is still mostly valid… a “2025 Edition” would likely be 90% overlap… I probably spent the most time harping on the UI.

Since then, CCP has 100% redone the game’s UI in their new Carbon framework… and it is still as impenetrable for the new user, still as frustrating for the seasoned vet, as it was in 2016 or 2011 or 2006.  Little things get better, but then they’ll redo a window so that it is only usable if you have a 4K monitor or they’ll put an annoying red dot everywhere that you can’t opt out of.  They often eventually fix these things… but then they go and do it again.

The mitigating factor here is that there is no other game like EVE Online, so you don’t have a lot of examples of how they should do things.  It is more often just “Oh my lord, not like that!”

Compare this to LOTRO, which came into the world a good three and a half years after WoW, so you know they had to have seen it, and which has carried on for all of this time in a world where WoW and dozens or even hundreds of like games exists, and yet still makes just obscenely bad UI decision despite copious examples out in the world as to how a specific problem might be tackled.

I don’t want to be mean, but the UI team LOTRO, if there even is one, is demonstrably bad at their job.  The User Interface division of the International Criminal Court must have a warrant out for their arrest.

So EVE Online may be as bad or worse when it comes to UI, but at least they have the excuse of there not being a dozen competing MMORPGs just like it that could be used to compare it again.  Even when they fall into their “okay, Excel is our model for everything, so let’s do this as yet another grid” they somehow manage to screw it up…  see the new compare tool… but still have the excuse of there being no other game trying to solve the complexity that they are trying to.

And the UI is just a symptom of another problem, which is that EVE Online is not, in fact, like a dozen or a couple of hundred other titles, where the UIs are the same because it is a first/third person avatar game with hot bars and a mini-map.  It takes place in space in spaceships, so is much more a vehicular oriented title.

But it isn’t World of Tanks or War Thunder adjacent because space is huge and the distances involved in much of what you do mean that other ships are often not visible on screen save for a bracket on screen and an entry on your overview that is listed as thousands of kilometers away.

Charles White of NASA once said he liked doing presentations for us because EVE players totally get astronomical units as a measurement because we deal with such distances all the time.  Engagement envelopes for fleet fights are often beyond the 100km range.  We have a Kestrel frigate doctrine that kits up that hull to launch light missiles out to 105km… a range generally the domain of battleships and battlecruisers.

EVE Online is absolutely a great game if you want to get into insane details of theory crafting I suppose.

But it also isn’t adjacent to other vehicular combat titles because it isn’t anything like a shooter where you need to aim or where you can shoot from cover…  or at least any cover besides being outside the range or weapons or by virtue of having high resistance to your foes chosen damage type or by moving fast and having a small signature radius or probably a few other things I am forgetting.  There are a lot going on in combat.  The problem is that most of it is determined by the fit you had when you undocked.  You cannot bunny hop or circle strafe your way out of a bad fit.  That pisses a surprising number of people off who inevitably demand that CCP remake the whole thing as a first person dogfight simulator so they can use their skillz to win rather than having to think about fits in advance.

Which kind of gets us into the biggest reason people think EVE Online is not a very good game, which is that it is a PvP game.  I don’t think I can exaggerate the amount that people hate PvP games.

Yes, the whole thing is not helped by the fact that PvP games attract people who are, to put it bluntly, assholes.  You know the type.  They aren’t out in the world doing anything that advances their character or profits them.  They’re in the lowest level contested zone they can find on a WoW PvP realm ganking players 20 levels below them and camping the graveyard to kill them again because their goal is not just to win but to make other players leave the game.

And you’ll find those people in New Eden, without a doubt.  You will find some who are up front about just liking to blow people up, some who hide behind role play saying things like “but I’m a pirate,” and some who just want to see their kill tally go up no matter who they shoot.

But you will also find people for whom things like suicide ganking is a serious business plan.

Few things enrage people as much as suicide ganking in EVE Online.  This is the act of tanking some small, cheap, barely fit ships and using them to blow up something big and expensive and ostentatiously fit, knowing that CONCORD, the high sec police force, will blow up the cheap ships, but having done the math and determined that their loss will be move than covered by having one of their team not engage and simply scoop the loot from the wreck.

I have to imagine this is high on the list of reasons for rage quitting.  You bling out your mission Raven, you have officer modules and the whole thing is worth a couple billion ISK… and then maybe 50 million ISK in Catalysts show up and explode you and take whatever drops.

That the game is designed to consider ships expendable… ISK solves your ship loss problems… doesn’t always help.  19 years in I accept that, and I am even good with it most of the time.  A ship lost during a battle is the price of being there some days.

It is when I get caught because I was impatient or otherwise ignored my internalized safety rules and get blown up, that is when I log off and get mad at myself and wonder why I play this stupid game.  That passes… I get over it, though it is possible I just haven’t lost anything expensive enough through my own blunders.  Losing an Ishtar or two… or four… I’ve lost four this month… I can get past that.  Not always easily.  Two in one day was a blow and I have to remind myself I made 4 billion ISK from those ships, worth a little over a billion combined, so I am ahead.  But the caprice of the game can get to you.  I can go for weeks with no losses then suddenly everything goes bad and it feels like every time I undock to do something I end up being blown up.

Destruction keeps the economy going.  I know that.  The very fabric of the game is woven with the wreckage of our ships… needs our destruction to maintain order.  That doesn’t mean I have to like it when it is my turn in the barrel.

Anyway, I have covered all of this and a lot more in past posts, some of which I linked above.

None of it argues in favor of EVE Online being a very good game.  I can see why it frustrates people, why they get mad after a streak of bad luck and just quit.  I am often exasperated or bemused by the game.  There are any number of things I’ve ended up saying, “Hell no, this is not worth the effort” about in the game.  A lot of the game is just travel or hauling things across space.  And the UI… well, I’ve been on about that already, but I just want to add in we’re 19 years in and they don’t have a useful in-game map, but I often spend as much time tabbed out of the game looking stuff up as I do in the game.

And yet… and yet… if you go back and look at my annual “what did I play?” posts for past years (the most recent one is here and it links back to older ones) you will find that EVE Online is in the top three titles every year when I measured time… even with me being tabbed out so much… and I’ve been active every month for more than a decade, with periods of running two or three accounts.  Even on a bad day, when I log off and hate the game… I still log back in a day or two later and carry on.

2021 in gaming for me

For all of its flaws, EVE Online is also arguably the most successful western PvP MMORPG in the genre, having lasted since 2003, during which a number of titles trying to go full PvP have come and gone… or have had to adapt and make a PvE version of their world.

That in itself argues that it must be a good game.  The market has decided.  Yes, it has never and will never put up WoW subscriber numbers.  But it put up and sustained peak EverQuest numbers during its run.

I think, in the end, if you can get past the bad parts… the UI, the relentless PvP, the pace of travel, and the game play that no other title trains you for… there is absolutely something there that you can invest yourself in.  There is a flipping point at which time the sandbox, which can drain you with its lack of direction, suddenly becomes the hook that keeps you playing.

There are just enough mechanics… just enough toys… in the sandbox for you to find something agreeable, something that keeps you going, if you dig around enough.  It likely won’t be something you initially sought… the game is great at promising things it doesn’t deliver on… but some variation thereof.

For me it is the drama of null sec… and it is often just drama, played out as much on the r/eve subreddit as in the game… where coalitions of thousands of players have engaged in what is now a two decades long struggle to maintain and expand their empires, a tale of hubris and betrayal and bad choices and empty boast and long memories and battles involving more players and having more consequence for the lot of us than any other MMORPG I have played.

I once, foolishly and incorrectly, back in the early days of the blog, said I was more likely to be in a world first raid victory in WoW than I was to be in any of the storied battles of null sec in EVE Online.

And then I managed to be around for:

Those were some of the most celebrated battles in the history of the game.  And there were more, like the ongoing battles at X47L-Q, a strategic system in Pure Blind, where we have epic Keepstar fights, including one that went through down time.

In a genre where every battleground is the same setup and arrives as regularly as a street car, where every mythic raid is a matter of learning, the repeating, the right dance steps, those battles, and the hundreds and thousands more that led up to them, were all a matter of player action or lack of action, where even seemingly small decisions have an impact.

There is a long used GSF propaganda poster about how every ship counts, which was revised once again after M2-XFE because those battles were set off after a new player shot the cyno jammer, setting a timer, and PAPI let it slide.

Every Ship Counts

I absolutely cannot claim to have had any but the most minor role in any of those fights.  I am the quintessential line member who answers the ping, gets in the right ship, and follows the FC’s instructions to the best of my meager abilities.

Books have been written about null sec, academic papers submitted, articles publish in general interest news outlets.  The introduction of PLEX helped, as it allowed players, the company, and the press to reverse the transaction flow to give battles a dollar value in losses.  A six figure amount makes for a splashy video game headline.

Largest battles in dollar values that are exciting but fairly meaningless

EVE Online has had an influence outsized relative to its actual player count due to things like that and the stories of around events… especially betrayal.

But is it a good game?

Clearly I started down this post with an idea in mind, a conclusion to land on once I made it this far down the page.  A lot more people have logged in and called it shit before getting much past the tutorial.  No matter what you know about it in advance, you’re still not prepared.  It is neither as bloodthirsty nor as savage as tales make it out to be.  It is often quiet, peaceful, and even dull… enough for you to let your guard down, to think that nobody is stalking you, waiting on the other side of the next gate with an insta-locker ready to tackle you.  You look out the window and see the stars and the planets and the nebulae… the sky boxes of New Eden are a study in themselves… and just feel the majesty of the universe.

In a relic site in Scalding Pass, a region with an orange nebula

And clearly I keep playing.  So maybe it is a good game, on a good day, when the fates align and something epic happens.  Those days… they don’t come often… happen just often enough to keep me lingering, waiting for the next one.

There are still nice days in between, days when you accomplish a task, even a simple one, and you don’t mess up and nobody shows up to ruin your fun and every gate is clear as you go about your business.  It makes you feel like you’re getting away with something, because you know trouble is never far away.