Eve Online: Commisioned Officer Edition Review

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(More customer reviews)Warning: long and detailed =>
While I have not purchased this particular version of the product, I had played Eve nearly continuously from Open Beta until about a year and half or so ago (when I stopped due to a lack of time), however when time permits I have activated my account for a month here and there a couple of times since then. To be honest it has an extremely steep learning curve as it is unlike any other game out there, however they have done amazing things with making it easier to learn and once you catch on to the basics it is pretty intuitive as to the user interface. Unlike other MMO's they also offer their regular expansions (typically about two per year) free to their player base (thus you don't have to spend an extra $50 to buy the new shiny bits every so often in addtion to your monthly subscription).
However this game is not for everyone. If you want to play a brain-dead game that takes very little thought you are better off with something like WoW (which in my opinion is about as challenging and engaging as opening a box of cereal). Having played more than 20 different MMORPG's over the last 10+ years, Eve Online is by far the most flexible and engaging that there is. Characters are not cookie cutter as they are in games such as WoW, in fact you are unlikely to find any two characters that are exactly the same in Eve, even with the hundreds of thousands of active accounts that exist within the single game universe (yes, everyone in the world plays together, as they don't have hundreds of different servers, but one single server farm that handles the single game universe). There are no "classes" or "professions" that limit what you can do or what you can be good at or what you can learn. In Eve Online you can train and do just about anything you set your mind to, and training is handled off-line such that you don't have to play 20+ hours a day to become powerful.
It allows for both hard-core gamers as well as casual gamers (and both can be very successful), there are no experience points and no levels. Likewise you need to be cautious as if you come across another character you have no idea if they are simply a newbie or are a skilled and dangerous player. It is also possible for a character that has been around for years to be "taken out" by a new player or character, as no one way of doing things always conquers. There are things that only small ships are capable of doing and accomplishing, likewise there are things that can only be accomplished if flying a capital ship that takes a year to work up to being able to fly and build. Likewise there are things for combat twitch gamers to do and keep their adrenaline going, while there are plenty of things for casual "care-bear" gamers to do as well (and can make damned good game money doing so with such things as mining, industrial manufacturing, hauling and transporting, or even simply buying low and selling high a wide variety of equipment and commodities in the game). There are also thousands of NPC "missions" that can be run with a variety of themes (combat, trade, hauling, mining, manufacturing, as well as combinations of these) and difficulties (can be done with a light frigate to those where you need to have an organized group of skilled pilots flying high-end battleships).
Then there are player operated and run "alliances" (essentially groups of "corporations or player run governments) that claim and rule over their own sections of space (in some cases very large sections of space). However even with more than 5,000 solar systems (all with numerous planets and resources) prime real estate is still a very hot commodity, so these alliances are constantly battling between one another (sometimes involving huge battles with hundreds of players involved on each side, and with make WoW and other similar games "arena" type battles look like a friendly game of tic-tac-toe by comparison). Not to mention that there is probably no other game or virtual world where political, military, economic, and industrial espionage all occur and one needs to be on their guard if you participate in any of these aspects of the game on a large scale. And from an economic standpoint, this game environment is a prime example of what a truly capitalistic economy is capable of being. The business end of things can be very cut-throat in some areas and commodities, but can be very rewarding and profitable if one knows what they are doing. As an example, one of my characters in the early days of the game manufactured and sold nearly 1-billion isk ("Inter-Stellar Kredits" I think is the intent of their in-game monetary system) in ammo before selling my entire collection of ammo blueprints (for every type of ammo that was available in the game at that time, all of which were heavily researched to maximize efficiency) for a sizeable amount to an organization that was one of the early fore-runners of the alliance system (before the mechanism for creating alliances even existed).
And unlike other games were resource recovery was added in as an afterthought, in Eve Online, it plays a major role in everything (if you control access to valuable resources, you control those resources, thus a major portion of the reason for claiming various solar systems or regions of space). As most items you purchase is made by a player and requires appropriately large quantities of resources to manufacture. Although even the rarest of resources are still available in many different locations, so it is probably next to impossible to truly control the economy. Although I have seen it done with an item for which there were only two blueprints available early on in the game and the owner, who purchased both of these BP's from the people who "found" them) thus became the sole supplier of them and was able to effectively set up their own monopoly and made billions of isk from the venture (at least until more BP's eventually became available).
Or if you have a darker side, there is always piracy (and if not, you will want to learn quickly what areas of the game to avoid to keep from being jumped by player pirates, as there are a fair number of them) along the fringes of the "safe" zones (security ratings 1.0 to 0.5) and the lawless zones (where the alliances tend to control large tracts of space, security ratings of 0.4 to 0.0), as the pirates tend to sit and wait along the borders of these areas and often work in small but organized groups. But beware of doing this as there are definitely repercussions, as by being a pirate you usually end up becoming "wanted" with a "bounty" being placed on your head (yes this is an active mechanism in the game), where other players will try to hunt you down for the reward and you may not be able to even enter "civilized" space without even the NPC "cops" ("CONCORD" as well as NPC law enforcement ships) attacking you.
Thus if you are interested in a game that is truly engaging and where you don't have to sit at the computer for hours on end and let it take over your life to be successful (as there are hundreds of ways to be successful, with each person being free to pursue any aspects of the game that they enjoy), then this game is well worth considering. As far as the other persons comments about not being able to transfer your free 14 day trial over to this version where you can train your character more quickly, trust me, you will make lots of mistakes and I highly recommend that you use the free trial first and then go ahead and create a new character if you purchase this product, as you will not be out that much time anyways (as the first couple of months you will still be learning what you can and want to do to enjoy it anyways and will likely change the direction of your training plans more than once). I also strongly recommend that you either find someone you know who plays to help guide and/or tutor you or that once you are in the game that you try to find someone there who is willing to help by giving advice and answering questions for new players as it does have a steep learning curve and there are so many different options and things you can do that it will likely blow your mind and you may feel overwhelmed initially.


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