I started playing
EVE Online again, which for the two of you that don't know is very much like a Freelancer MMO (but without space-flight-sim controls), or as I prefer to think of it, like Cowboy Bebop - the game. For those that don't even get those references; it's a space game. You fly ships around, blow stuff up, trade, research, mine, build, upgrade, all that.
They've got a promotion I guess where they hand out 14-day free trials to friends; if you convert to a paying customer then I also get 14 free days. So let me know if you want to give it a shot.
It's cool because I can log in for just 30 minutes and get something done and get out without a lot of fuss. It's good to hang with people, but not people you don't know/trust, so the game is very lenient on 'solo' play...no wasting hours trying to find a 'party' just to get something done. Most missions really assume you're playing alone. There are, as with many games, some frustrating points, but nothing overly tiresome for me. The learning curve is rather steep, and there are a great deal of 'kids' hanging around to be ignored.
But for example one day I might be running missions, cleaning up the galaxy one bad guy at a time, and another day I might be psuedo-afk-mining an asteroid field while watching TV or whatnot. The other day, I was poking around the market, and found a guy buying some stuff called "Kernite" for 500 ISK (the game currency) per, and usually (these days) sells for more like 260-300 ISK...so I made the trip and cleaned up 4 mil. ISK...quite a good haul for just a few short jumps.
PVP is permissible in the entire game world, but you can avoid it effectively by just sticking to the "high security" solar systems.
The biggest advantage to the game, and the best design decision, is that there is no XP, and no classes. The analogue are skill points, which accrue even when you are not in the game towards some skill you've selected to improve (or train anew). You sort of make your own class by training the skills you want/use. The wonderful side effect of this is that "playing the game more" does not "speed up progression." So the usual disease I have with MMO's - where I find that I want to stay online for multiple hours to get "the next level" - is vapor. I can stay logged in, I can log out, and either way I get the next level on the same schedule. So I have less trouble logging out. Playing the game more does get you more
cash, but cash becomes markedly less useful without skills to use the stuff you might buy.
One more subtle design decision is that everything in the game is made out of some number of minerals. So unlike other MMO's where better stuff comes out in patches and drives prices of old gear down to nothing, you retain a lot of the value of your purchase (but there is still a supply/demand curve). You're always guaranteed that your equipment will be worth as much as you can
recycle it back into minerals, and as everything, even new gear in new patches, are made from these minerals, there's always a good demand for them (in fact, it's what makes mining profitable).
Anyway, I'm having a lot of fun with it.
