The Daily Grind: Which MMO has the hardest learning curve?

@SiML

That image came to mind the second I read the title.

@SiML Eve doesn't have a learning curve, it has an obfuscation curve.

nothing in Eve is particularly difficult, or require any serious amounts of player skill (least nothing I've found)... what it does require is knowing how translate "Eve-speak" into "making sense".

EG: "You are not required to destroy all targets" does NOT mean "you can kill everything if you want, but you don't have to", what it does mean is "you can not possibly hope to overcome these odds, so bring a shuttle so you can do it faster than they can spawn". Obfuscation for obfuscation sake, it's not hard, it doesn't have a "curve", you either know what it is saying or you don't.

Combat is depressingly dull. Target ship, orbit at distance or align as needed, press F1, F2, F3... and either you kick their hull in first or they kick in yours. Hell WoW has more complex combat (and watch the downmods FLOW!)

I played Eve expecting this engaging universe that would give an actual challenge, what I got was slow combat, slower travel, gank-squad pvp, and mission text that never meant what it actually said.

@fallwind
Finally someone echoes exactly how I felt/feel about Eve. While I loved the setting and lore behind the game...it left me going...what's the big deal? And why is this overly complicated and yet completely unfun?

Hoping Dust 514 is fun and does away with the obfuscation.

@fallwind

I would tend to agree that EvE has the hardest luring curve and I will also agree that a lot of that learning curve is needless. Not that I would really consider any MMO learning curve to be difficult, hell Eve took at max 40min to get a decent grasp on the general operations of the game.

Hell if you consider Minecraft an MMO I would say just the redstone in minecraft has a higher learning curve than all of EvE. Assuming of course you are working on some decently complex circuits/devices. (double doors need not apply)

@fallwind What you seem to be describing with regards to PvP is the 0.0 slug fest that has been created with the Dominion expansion and the Sov changes.

There is a whole other realm of PvP that actually requires a lot of skill, planning, cunning, and split second decision making that you can find within EvE. If you have ever been in an Interceptor duel you'll know exactly what I mean. Also if you find that kind of warfare boring I highly recommend turning to a life of Piracy (look up a corp called Sinners. They are a good bunch to fly with) for a wide range of antics ranging from suicide ganking hulks in destroyers to baiting anti-pirate corps into fights and dropping a (single) carrier on top of them at the very last second...

(If you're the guy with the Cyno DO NOT WAIT TO LIGHT IT... I almost lost my carrier because the guy hesitated, talk about a heart attack...)

Anyways, basically what i'm saying is tat at it's surface you can get away with doing that but if all you do is orbit and toggle your guns then someone who's spent any amount of time in lowsec could easily take down your fancy expensive faction ship with a cheap-as-hell tech 1 fitted cruiser.

Also the EvE learning curve never ends... It just shifts and with every patch some parts of it get thrown up into the air again...

@fallwind

I'm a new subscriber to EVE (about a month or so) and it is quite complex but complex for the breadth of things you need to know rather than the inherent difficulty of any one thing.

As for combat, you're assuming the strategy lies with the combat mechanics. I don't have much experience at all yet but it seems to me that you've already won or lost the match before you ever target the other ship. It's your experience, skill training and ship load out that will largely determine who will win and therein lies the strategy.

Also, in the case of a fleet battle who you target first, then next will greatly dictate the outcome - targeting the capital prior to taking out the electronic warfare frigates will hurt you. Did you have a cloaked scout survey the system and the enemy fleet before warping into battle? Have you sent interceptors to take out snipers on the periphery of the battlefield? Is your weapons load out targeted for the enemy fleet type? What does your fleet composition look like? Do you listen to the fleet commander? Is your fleet commander even any good?

There is a ton of strategy and complexity in EVE combat but as in real life, it is mostly won or lost in the planning phases rather than how you control your ship's pew pew.

@Christopher Boerger but the question is... is any of that hard? Knowing rock beats scissors and needs to run from paper may be complex to some, but not to me. Having combat decided before you even fire a shot still falls into the obfuscation for obfuscation sake "curve". Either you know you will win and you shoot, or you don't know you will win and risk getting your butt handed to you.

That's not complexity, it is glorified rock/paper/scissors.

Eve is NOT hard, its "complexity" comes from withholding information. Don't tell the player what they will face in this mission, don't tell the player what their opponents can do, don't tell players how to easily counter it with the press of a single button. A game with actually hard content can tell you every detail you can imagine and you still have a hard time beating it.

@fallwind

It's rock/paper/scissors/log/leaf/bumblebee/scorpion/snowball/whatever with a ridiculous number of possibilities, and you're never certain when your enemy might drop a surprise in on top of you. I think you missed a lot of complexity in the game.

Either that, or you didn't experience much of the game outside of mission running for NPCs.

@OmegaTwig

There are couple of things I really really enjoyed in EVE:

1) Fleet Command: Commanding a fleet (no matter size) is extremely challenging and a lot of things rely on your skill and ability to direct a bunch of other players against a group of enemies. Very much like strategic military simulator. This bit that actually has a "high" learning curve.

2) Alliance leadership. Keeping your space, planning for objectives, your defence etc., Keeping thousands of people together and happy and working together towards same objectives. Planning your deployment to enemy space. Also, high learning curve.

3) Small roaming gang warfare. Interceptor duels or just a small wolfpack zipping around in enemy space, nipping off kills. Takes a lot of control and has high learning curve.

Getting to that part of the game takes years (perhaps excluding the last one) of work - there are no "tutorials", you need to learn by doing, watching how other great FCs and leaders do stuff and adapting like crazy. *THAT* EVE is the one that has murderous learning curve. But also, very few people commenting here actually have any idea of that side of EVE - they're talking about finding your way in the UI and killing the first couple of rats in the tutorial - the boring and tedious part of EVE - that's not actually at all what EVE at its core is about.

...phew, rant over :-)

@(Unverified) If you have X and I have Y, I win... if you have X and I don't have Y, you win.

Not that complex, and again, relies totally on obfuscation not actual difficulty.

Let me put it this way: WoW, the crowned god of casual play, has just put in a feature that tells you exactly what that raid boss will do, how often, and how it will affect you. And even knowing all this, what, 1% of the players finish heroic raids while they are still current? What would happen to your challenge in Eve if you were given that kind of information about your opponent (be they pc or npc)? You would tear them apart wouldn't you? Of course you would, because the only "hard" part about the game is knowing which X beats what Y and only attacking when you have the upper hand.

A game isn't hard because it keeps secrets from you, a game is hard when it can tell you every little detail and you still have to work at winning.

@SgtBaker1234556

I would submit that the first two aren't part of the "game" so much as the "metagame". There's what's coded, what's in the UI, what goes bang when you press a button, etc, and then there's everything else around/above that... what another game of mine likes to call "the social puzzle". That's politics and management and subterfuge, and has little (directly) to do with moving little spaceships around virtual space. (It's also, for many people, much much harder.)

@fallwind

Honestly Fallwind, sounds like you are more of a FPS player.(which is fine) I don't see obfuscation, I see the game is more like chess. There is a ton of info for you to read, if you like to read about almost every aspect of the game.

The only reason I don't play is text font size, it is an eye strain killer that causes me bad headaches and neck strain due to leaning into my screen trying to read the 13 font (at max) size on my monitor/resolution. Amusing my son's 17 monitor it isn't so bad and you can read it, that said I refuse to go down to a smaller monitor or lower resolution setting for one game.

@Eamil

Same for me. Haha.

@(Unverified)

this!

@SgtBaker1234556 I, too, have played EvE for many years (I believe it will be 4 come December) and I did love FCing and I loved running an Alliance/Corp but unfortunately RL caught up to me and i turned into a *Bitter Vet* so I had to leave the 0.0 slug fest for low-sec pirating (More flexible hours, better pay, etc...) where I discovered and absolutely fell in love with small roaming interceptor gangs...

Anyways basically what I was trying to get at is that even though I have spent (almost) 4 years playing EvE literally every time I logged in for more than 30 minutes I've learned something new about the game, and not something new as in this was changed in a patch new but fundamentally new...

It took me 2 and a half years to learn that you could double click in space and move whatever direction your screen was looking...

And now that I've recently moved to WH space I've learned the importance of fundamentally good intel without relying on local to tell you when 10 guys have jumped into the system, the nuances of probing, and (many might argue) the most "pure" form of EvE PvP.

Also the POS Sov Warfare was actually my favorite part of the game because I was usually the guy who would ninja into a system and drop 10 towers at a really awkward time... The LOL's you get from that are PRICELESS

@fallwind

I think you're confusing learning curve with required skill.

@OmegaTwig

Well, I've been a bitter vet ever since Dominion and the following slugfest between -A- and CVA in Provi. Stopped playing around the summer after that.

But darn, you're making things sound temping :-P

@fallwind

common, admit it...you tried pvp twice, got blown up and went crying back to high sec to farm missions like a drone all day.

nothing wrong with that (well, a bit, but w/e), you're far from the first or last one to do that. but if you wanna express an opinion, at least stick to something you know. just sayin ;)