Quick disclaimer here, I’ve been playing EVE Online on again, off again for almost 20 years and I tried to recruit so many people over the years with little success, so this post was born out of frustration especially considering the recent craze in extraction shooter and persistent world type video games.
Here’s the thing: why are people who enjoy the risk and reward mechanics in games like Escape from Tarkov and the likes of them not willing to try EVE Online? Or even Albion online? Sure EVE has a notoriety of being hard to get into - although this is no longer true, at least it got significantly better than it was even 3 years ago - but the adrenaline rush, the content and the variety is just so much more rewarding than EFT and to be perfectly honest I’d take EVE Online’s ship fitting system to the constant inventory tetris in EFT any day.
While I get that a lot of people don’t like the genre itself and that’s a hard stop for many but the variety is what really sells EVE to me. I could spend (and I have spent…) days in EVE without getting bored for a minute, there’s a lot of different things to do on different scales and at the end of the day it’s the same mechanics as EFT: you make a fit (loadout), you fly the fit, you find content (mining, pvp, exploration, hell, you can even go and get lost in an endless system of wormholes!) and try to make it to somewhere you can sell the loot. If you can’t it’s lost and you start again, you have the ability to quickly refit ships, some corps even give out free stuff so it only takes minutes to have a go at it again!
One other great thing about EVE is the skill system. There are more than 400 skills in EVE with 5 tiers each and you can train them while you’re offline. Not being able to play the game for a few days or even weeks doesn’t cause you to fall off because you’ll be training whatever is queued up. It’s not like active skill development in games where you don’t gain skills unless you play.
I personally just got back to EVE again recently and it’s been great. I don’t have as much time to play as I used to with the child but whenever I have the chance I jump on for some quick rounds of doing missions or running some exploration. I made a new account to try Alpha to Omega, kinda like the hardcore challenge in EFT, and I’m having a blast.
EVE Online has two account types, alpha accounts, which is the free tier, have access to less skills and less ship types, train skills half the speed as omega accounts but it’s a good way to try your hand at the game and there aren’t many activities alpha players can’t (or shouldn’t) partake in. The community is pretty good although corps tend to be suspicious about new recruits as spying and stealing money has become quite common, if you find a good corp it will make the game even more enjoyable.
All I’m saying is, if you enjoy Tarkov, Marauders, The Cycle or whatever extraction shooter you play, try EVE Online. Spend some time with the tutorial, join a corp, try different activities (small gang PVP, fleet mining - provided you found a corp - and Faction Warfare are pretty easy to get into and they’re tons of fun). Try not to think about min-maxing or making tons of ISK because it’s the quickest way to burn out, just go and try to enjoy it and see how it goes!
Also, I would be silly not to include this but if you haven’t done already, please sign up using this link or if you have, you can still use it, just log in instead of signing up. You’ll get 1 million Skill Points which is quite a lot in the beginning, enough to train a lot of skills. Having said that, here’s the link: https://www.eveonline.com/signup?invc=51cacdb4-d3b2-4592-977a-42f2ae7d12e9