[Village Idiot]

Its the best MMORPG on the market. Hands down. No contest.

Just what is EVE about? Well, its a space setting (like Firefly/Serenity) where your only avatar is your starship. You can go anywhere you want in the 5,000+ star systems in the game, which makes up an entire galaxy.

Unlike most MMORPGs, EVE doesn't have levels, or experience. Rather, it have skills. Basically, there are catagories like "Engineering", "Gunnery", "Propulsion", etc, and within each are various skills like "Energy Operation", which gives -5% Capacitor Recharge Time per level, to a maximum of 5 levels per skill. Now unlike most MMORPGs, in EVE, there is no active grind to skills. Rather, you just choose which skill to train, and the game will automatically start training the skill for you, along with telling you how long it will take for the skill to finish. The skill will also train while you're offline, so unless you don't have a skill going, you will always be making progress.

The length of time for a skill completion depends on two things:

1) Your attributes (which you can raise a maximum of +10 each via Learning skills)
2) the Skill Rank (ie, a Rank 3 skill will take exactly 3x the time to finish compared to a Rank 1 skill)

Lower ranking skills can be finished in mere minutes to days for a lv5 skill, while a high ranking skill can take weeks/months to complete.

Note that there are hundreds of skills for you to learn, and its been calculated that it will take over 20+ years to max out each and every one.

Unlike almost all MMORPGs, the beauty of EVE is that skills/levels doesn't matter when it comes to PvP. A person with 40 million SP can still be killed by someone with 5 million SP. For example, if the 40m SP player had maxed out skills for flying Cruisers, Battleships, and Recon Ships, whereas the 5m SP player maxed out skills for flying Cruisers only, then both players are actually even when it comes to flying Cruisers. So just because someone have higher SP doesn't necessarily mean that they'll win every time against a low SP player, just that they will have more options to choose from.

You can be whatever you want to be in EVE. There are no set classes to choose from. Miner, Missioner, Manufacturer, Pirate, Anti-Pirate, Trader, Transporter, etc. You want to be a Miner? Then skill up some Mining/Industry skills, put a few Mining Lasers onto your ship, and hop to an asteroid belt and start mining away. Getting bored and want to shoot something? Skill up some Gunnery and put on some guns, and go hunting. Want to do a bit of everything? Then go ahead, the option is yours.

The economy and manufacturing of EVE is entirely player based, and player created. Almost every item in EVE is made by some other player, with the cost of goods and were goods are sold depends on where the manufacturers decide to sell them on the market. The game controls inflation via the PvP system, where a ship destroyed is gone forever, with the modules equipped on it having a 50/50 chance of being destroyed as well. This keeps the market from crashing, as people continually lose ships/modules.

As for ships, they are what represents your avatar in the game. There are numerous ship types: Frigate, Destroyer, Intercepter, Cruiser, Battlecruiser, Battleship, Recon Ship, Interdictor, etc, all the way up to mammoth capital ships such as Dreadnaughts and Carriers.

Each ship type/class have there own strengths and weaknesses, and have various module slots which is divided up into three different catagories: High/Med/Low, with a possible 8/8/8 slot allocation. Every equipment is either High/Med/Low, with fitting requirements called Power Grid/CPU, which every ship have a set amount of. You can fit whatever you want onto your ship, as long as it meets the slots/fitting requirements.

EVE is completely based on PvP. Simply put, you can be attacked anywhere and everywhere by another player. Though there are systems known as "High Sec/Empire", (0.5-1.0 sec) where an NPC police force known as CONCORD will automatically kill any player that attacks another player, though that doesn't make you immune to being PKed in Empire, you can still die before CONCORD kills them.

As you venture out more and more to the fringe of space, you'll start entering Low Sec systems, which not policed by CONCORD and where you can be attacked by another player at anytime without CONCORD assistence, though if you're attacked at a stargate/station, the sentry guns there will help you provided that you didn't fire the first shot. Player pirates often go to these sec systems, to hunt for other players.

If you venture even further, you'll eventually reach the 0.0 regions, which is completely lawless, or rather, the laws depend on whatever player alliance controls that region of space.

PvP is quick and brutal, yet complicated. Battles are dependant various factors, like ship size, signature radius, speed, gun tracking, shield/armor/hull resistences, ECM, etc. Its really far, far too complicated to really explain unless you try it out for yourself. Destroying a ship will leave a wreck, which contains whatever modules that managed to survive the explosion. Thus there are people whom actually pirate for a living, hunting on fellow players as a source of income.

Also like the skill system, just because someone have a bigger ship doesn't mean that they will always win against a smaller one. For example, if a player in a Frigate (small ship) goes up against someone in a Battleship (largest non-capital ship), the Battleship pilot with Large Guns can kill the Frigate in as little as 1-2 volleys. However, the weakness of Large Guns is that they have bad tracking (basically slow turning rate) if the Frigate orbits around the ship extremely quickly, then the Battleship guns won't be able to track the Frigate, and thus cannot hit the Frigate. During this time, the Frigate can hit the Battleship with its smaller, faster tracking guns, however, its highly unlikely that it will have the fire power to break the Battleship's tank. Is the situation hopeless? No. Why bring in one small Frigate, when you can bring many? If you have friends with Frigates, they can just swarm the Battleship and wear down its tank, and destroy the ship. Now does that mean Battleships are useless against Frigates? No. If the Battleship pilot fits smaller Frigate-sized guns (or various other options), it can then easily hit the Frigates, and destroy them. Though in this case, the Battleship won't have the firepower to go up against another Battleship.

Next we come to the Corporations/Guilds.

A corporation is basically a guild in other MMORPGs. The Corp's goals is whatever the corp decides it to be. Unlike most MMORPGs, where a guild is just really a list of players on a friend's list, a Corp in EVE can control actual territory. In High Sec, the regions are controlled by the four Empires. In low sec/0.0, territory can be claimed by other corporations.

Corporations can also declare war on one another, which allows them to fight openly in low/high sec without CONCORD intervention. This means that if you really don't like another corp, or want their territory, fight/kill/kick them out by force. Or settle it diplomatically, its entirely up to you.

Multiple corporations can also band together, to form an Alliance. An alliance is basically multiple corporations uniting under the same banner. Many alliances claim 0.0/lawless territory as their own, implementing/enforcing their own laws. With possible massive resources, industrial and military powers, they essentially become a player created, player governed empire. Just like with corporations, alliances often declare war on one another for various things, and often leads to entire alliances either kicked back to Empire or disbanding entirely.

Corporations/Alliances can put up Player Owned Stations (POS) to massive Starbases (the same as NPC ones). This is a huge investment because POS/Stations actually appear on the map, and can thus be destroyed/taken over by another entity.

With all this real politics involved, the story of EVE is actually moved and controlled by the actual players. Betrayal, propaganda, and politics all exist and controlled by the players.

Last of all, unlike every other MMORPG out there, everyone on EVE plays on the same Shard. Thats right, some 150,000 players all play in the same universe. Thats right, the same server. Thus there's no jumpping to another server to start over when the going gets hot. Your reputation matters, and everything you do can have consequences. Publically insult another player? Unlike other MMORPGs where they just put you on their ignore list and thats the end of that, no they can war declare your corp and either repeatedly kill you and your corpmates until you leave your corp/corp kicks you out/corp desolves. Or you have someone joining your corp, then the next day realise that he had stolen everything your corp owns and left. Is this griefing? No. Its exactly what the game is about. Real politics. Real reputation. Real consequences. All controlled and dealt with by the players.

Thats EVE for you.