Welcome to this special installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to CrazyKinux. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!
When you've been roaming New Eden as long as I have, it almost feels like home. That's how familiar it has become over the last 5 years. Not that I have done everything or touched every aspect of this most amazing of virtual world, far from it, but it just feels as though it's always been there. And always will be.
Whether you've logged into the game every day since its launch in 2003, or you've taken one or several sabbaticals from your capsuleer career, you've always come back to New Eden don't you. Why is that?
We know the EVE Online Community is unique in so many ways, and that EVE Online is like no other MMORPG out there. But what makes the game special for you?
What is it that makes this particular virtual world so enticing, so mysterious and so alluring that we keep coming back for more. Why is EVE one of the very few MMOs to see a continuous growth in its subscriber.
To put it simply: Why do you love EVE Online so much?
Normally, in most of my MMOs, I'm attracted to the role-playing aspect of the game. For example, City of Heroes and Champions Online I find very attractive for that - possibly as a carryover from my tabletop RPG days.(I mean, what kid never had a moment where they wanted to grow up to be Superman, or Spider-Man, or an X-Man, or whatever hero or heroine tickled your fancy back then?)
EVE Online, though, is a different beast, and one that I enjoy on a lot of levels. Once I got out into null-sec space with the rest of my alliance... the game changed for me. Instead of running around and pew-ing at missions, trying desperately to find a series of agents that gave me lots of "kill" missions and also went up to Level 4, scrimping and saving so that when I lost my cruiser to some random gank I could buy a new one, now I'm out floating around in a battlecruiser, killing rats, making millions of ISK in hours, and getting in on some epic fleet battles, and the occasional twelve-billion ISK Drake kill.
But more than that, EVE is the only game where I really feel like I'm making a difference. Besides the abomination that is Second Life, EVE is the only MMO I know of that is entirely player-driven. Between the economy, Faction Warfare (broke as it is), and the happenings of null-sec alliance combat, one player can have a fantastic influence on the landscape of this game. For example, look at the Goons' abandoning of Delve and Querious after their sovereignty payments bounced. If either of the guys that normally handled those payments had been around (reportedly both were on vacation), the Goons probably would still hold Querious and Delve. This is a prime example of CCP's much-vaunted (yet rarely-occurring) butterfly effect.
And, as I tell anyone who asks me what's so cool about EVE... you can do any gorram thing you want. Piracy, manufacturing, mission-running, null-sec... there are so many niches in this game it'd be impossible to list them all, but as long as you accept that there are definitely landmines in this sandbox (cough Hulkageddon cough), the sheer amount of freedom you're granted when compared to something like World of Warcraft or Champions Online is staggering.
This game isn't for the faint of heart, and it's damn hard to learn, but once you do learn, this very dynamic and interactive universe that CCP built for us to play in is one of the most fun that I've encountered through my travails in the Internet, and I love it that way.
