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EVE Online: Apocrypha

No Experience Bar...

Yes, EVE has no experience bar or character levels. You cannot powergame up in levels at a rapid rate until you have a maxed-out character and then go on doing "endgame" until the next expansion raises the level cap - that's "theme park ride" stuff". Instead, in EVE your character advances by accumulating skill points over time to a skill of your choice and in many ways the net worth of your character matters more than the skill point total.

You first learn the skill by consuming a skill book that, assuming you meet the prerequisite skills, adds the new skill to your character. You then set the skill to training and it starts to accumulate skill points at a rate determined by the stats of your character. It keeps doing that until the skill is trained - even if you are logged off from the game or if the servers are offline. You can also freely change the skill in training at any time without losing any SP accumulated in the incomplete skill. Easy skills can take just a few minutes to reach rank 1, with each subsequent rank requiring exponentially longer to train up to rank 5 which is the maximum for every skill. SP needed is multiplied by the difficulty level of each skill - from 1x for a Frigate skill to between 3-5x for many intermediate skills and up to 12x and more for skills related to capital ships.

There are only two ways to improve the rate of skill training - implants and learning skills. Implants improve your otherwise immutable stats - Willpower, Perception, Memory, Intelligence and Charisma - by up to 5 points. Unfortunately high level implants can cost a ton and they are permanently tied to the body of your character (which can get killed). Learning skills do the same, permanently increasing your stats but as you really can't lose skills and the benefits are substantial, they are pretty much a mandatory investment after the first day or two as they can greatly increase the skillpoint rate with no drawbacks beyond the time needed to learn them. In the end, the rate of character development is pretty much fixed - the only small difference comes from the amount of ISK (in-game currency of EVE) you are willing to invest in implants and in the long run it is not a material difference.

To speed up early character development and to balance the lower number of free starting skills, with Apocrypha new characters start out with a +100% bonus to the rate they accumulate skill points and they retain this bonus until the character reaches a total of 1.6 million skill points. This takes perhaps a bit over a month if you make sure the character is always training a skill - easy to do due to the new skill queue that allows you to set multiple skills into queue, as long as the last skill in the queue starts training within the next 24 hours.

...and No Levels

When considering the "level" of EVE character in the absence of levels, people look at two things - the date the character was created (readily visible to everyone) or, to asses the character abilities more accurately, how many skillpoints your character has (hidden, unless you choose to disclose it). One might then conclude that a new player can never catch up with the old players. This is both true and false. The skillpoint requirements to advance a skill raise exponentially. Rank 1 in a 1x skill multiplier skill takes 250 skill points (a few minutes) while training from rank 4 to rank 5 in the same skill takes over 200 000 additional SP on top of the approximately 45 000 you have at rank 4 - taking around four to six days, depending on stats. So, a veteran character that has 30 million skillpoints spread around 150 different skills may have spent over 25 million of those (over 500 days of training) on training the fifth rank of his key skills - gaining, at best, an extra 5-10% bonus to the effectiveness of the skills in question.

The number of skills to pilot and fight effectively in a single shiptype is actually very small. A character with 1 million SP - around three weeks of training - can be quite effective in any battle while performing a narrow role and while it is true that it takes a few months to learn the necessary skills to unlock more advanced ship types and weapons required to safely handle the hardest NPC enemies on your own, in player vs. player combat the benefits you gain from bigger ships or expensive "Tech 2" toys can be nullified with playskill and tactics and every combat ship type has a role in large battles.

Every hour of training and every SP added to the character does benefit the character, but most of time the benefit is extra flexibility - additional roles you can fulfill, additional ship types you can choose to fly and additional weapon types you can use. In a way, there are dozens of narrow "careers" you can reach in very short order and it doesn't matter if the other guy can choose from 30 different ships to fly - he can still fly only one of them at a time and he can't switch his choice without returning to a ship hangar.

Neither ISK nor skillpoints guarantee a win and in most cases sheer numbers, pure playskill, co-operation and competent leadership far outweighs other factors in combat - it's very common to see a lone veteran looking for "easy" 1vs1 kills go down losing a ship valued over ten times the combined value of the attacking ships - simply because he ended up outnumbered and outplayed. In such battles it doesn't matter if the attackers lose a frigate or two when a single gun in the other ship may cost more than the lost frigate - and the winner gets to pick the wreck clean of any surviving valuables - even PvP combat can be a way to make a living, as proven by many roaming low-sec pirate gangs.

Getting Blown Up

This brings us to the defining design choice of EVE - dying hurts your virtual wallet. A lot. While pod pilots are effectively immortal due to cloning technology, the ships and equipment are definitely not. So, your ship was shot to a million pieces and your escape pod got vaporized by a quick-locking interceptor before you managed to warp out? You'll wake up as your backup clone at a station - welcome to the afterlife. Remember to purchase a new clone (or risk losing skill points next time you die) and then board another ship to fly. Don't have one? You did insure your ship, right? Well, PEND Insurance has an infinite supply of "noobships" but in practice you get to buy and outfit a new vessel before picking another fight. At least you always receive a partial complimentary insurance payout based on the base price of your ship. Of course if you didn't get away in your pod, all those expensive implants you may have had got vaporized with your previous body.

Remember when I said that EVE is mean? In other MMO games you have a pretty green health bar, and running out of pixels on the bar means nothing more than waiting face down for a few moments so your buddy can resurrect you or a short run back from the nearest resurrection point. In EVE, due to the costs of ship loss and potential implant loss, death stings. Death has meaning. Obviously you should avoid dying at all costs. Tangible losses also keep the massive market of EVE going as someone always has to manufacture ships and modules to replace ones lost in combat. Rule one of EVE: Never fly anything into harms way you can't afford to lose.

CONCORD and You

The known space is divided into three classes of systems. The empire-controlled areas are either high security space - security status between 0.5 and 1.0 or low security space - 0.1 to 0.4. Areas beyond the empire systems are security status 0.0 and just about every 0.0 system is claimed by some player alliance. While PvP is common in low security space and 0.0 space, fortunately things are not quite as bleak for those who stick to safe empire space. The local police, CONCORD, patrols all systems with security status of 0.5 or higher and they will be dispatched immediately to take out any aggressors. So, you can generally fly safe in empire systems without getting shot at, but like so many things in EVE, this is not an absolute rule. CONCORD does not provide protection, it provides consequences.

If the hostiles manage to kill you before CONCORD arrives and kills them, your ship will still be gone. In fact, the only question empire pirates ask is if your ship carries anything that is more valuable than the ship(s) they are guaranteed to lose to CONCORD by shooting you down. Small paper-thin hauler carrying a cargo worth 500M ISK is definitely worth pirating even in high security space, as you could easily destroy it with a ship costing perhaps 5M, with a friend waiting ready to pick the wreck clean after the carnage. You are likely to blend in with the traffic of busy empire systems, but the theoretical risk is always there. Once again, EVE is harsh and in reality there are no "safe zones" from PvP - only systems where unlawful acts carry a penalty.

CONCORD will also ignore any combat between corporation members and between corporations that are involved in a formally declared a war (the aggressor paying CONCORD a fee to make them look other way). It doesn't mean that everyone in the EVE universe is out to kill you, but since it's a dangerous universe, the best way to survive is to have some common sense and to find some friends you can trust. Looking up the security status of other players in their character information is a good first indicator - the only way it can go to negative is by killing players in empire space.

EVE can be commended for putting the "Massive" into MMO. It's not impossible to have a solo career in EVE, but personally I'd recommend against it. To get a good start I'd suggest finding a corporation (EVE's "guild"). One potential option is to apply to the player-run "EVE University" - a corporation with the goal of training up new players to the world of EVE. As numbers mean a lot more than skillpoints in EVE combat, there are always plenty of friendly corporations looking for fresh recruits.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: Gameplay, cont.Page 4: Gameplay, cont.Page 5: Apocrypha FeaturesPage 6: Visuals and PerformancePage 7: Summary, Scores

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