Eve Online spaceship viewer uses WebGL

The only aspect of Eve I really enjoyed was the economy. It's actually pretty fun to find niches and verticals then exploit the hell out of them.

I played the margins on nullsec loot (often melted and sold for pennies), shipping it off to Jita (using outsourced freighters) and selling for significantly more. Made twenty or thirty billion simply playing the margins between nullsec and highsec.

Another few billion were made by importing "compressed" minerals for all the capital ship producers.

Moonmining was a lot of fun because of the logistics involved. Ditto for the wormhole exploration.

At one point I wrote a bot that sat in Jita and basically daytraded, playing the spread between bid and ask. I lost interest in Eve around that time because of work and a social life, but it was a fun project to work on (lots of OCR involved).

All that said, I was small fish compared to others in my corp. One guy took an investment of 100bn from our corp and used that capital to finance an "Officer Loot Buyback" program. Basically, ratters were bringing in a lot of officer loot, but that stuff is really only worthwhile in Jita, and you had to babysit contract. Most players can't be bothered to sell it themselves...but they know it is worth good money.

This guy purchased the loot at a 10-60% discount simply because of convenience. Ratters were happy with getting some money, he shipped it off to the markets and made the difference.

He quit eventually, having repaid the entire 100bn investment and making several times that in profit. Pretty crazy (for an internet spaceship game)

I've been playing it on and off since 2003. It's the best online game I have ever played, bar none. It fills a niche in the world of games that nobody else does, and for that alone, is worth playing to see what it's like.

The real problem with EVE is the "learning cliff" and how easy it is to get your ass handed to you. Even after you learn everything -- you don't know anything and you will die repeatedly and with no mercy. That's the name of the game, though, and it's a hard lesson for some people.

EVE is the closest parallel to real life I've ever seen in a game. It truly is a sandbox world. There aren't arbitrary protections like in other MMOs. You can be killed anywhere; you're never safe. There are people who exhibit every facet of human behavior -- and games within games within games. It's a player driven economy, the sociopolitical landscape is all created by the people who play it, and truly a lifestyle if you let it be.

A real 24/7/365 game. It doesn't stop. I've set alarm clocks to get up at 4AM and help my corporation or alliance out when needed. I've taken days off from work to make sure I could be available for crucial moments. It's a video game -- yes, it is -- but it can be so much more than that. For many people this is an alternate reality.

At any rate, I highly recommend it. It's not for everybody, most people quit before giving it a real chance, but it's something worth experiencing. If it is the kind of thing that catches you, though, it will grab you and shake your very worldview on what "online gaming" can be.

It's beautiful, it's cruel, it's terrifying and wonderful.

Doing what, trading? Even if you sit in jita 4-4 all day trading, even if you have market analysis fully automated, it still requires tedious updating of market orders. Nevermind what a pure trader would do with the isk made in playing the market.

If you fly ships, you can't do something out of game at a moment's notice without losing ships or getting stranded if you're in a group that moves on in lowsec/null by the time you're back, or pissing people off if you're in a group in highsec doing PVE.

A lot of time in EVE is spent moving around. It's approximately one minute per system jump, and that's in highsec (with no scouting). Like so much else in EVE, it's purposely designed to keep people active by requiring tedious participation, rather than allowing things to be automated so that time spent in-game is not tedious.

The only thing I know of in EVE that requires no tedious commitment and allows task switching to/from EVE near instantaneously is in-game chat.

Have been playing for five years.

The game itself revolved around PvP. Combat drives the market, which drives production, which creates ships, which get destroyed and so on and so forth. Because of this, EVE has the best economy I've ever seen in an MMO.

Solo and small gang PvP is quite fun and what I spent most of my time doing, but some other people enjoy being a small cog in the big machine and flying as part of the large alliances.

The two things I find frustrating about EVE are:

1) The players. As you lose your ship and anything it had when it gets destroyed people are motivated to win. This results in a large proportion of PvP involving you and your ten friends against one poorly fitted player. For the past few years this has been what the majority of combat has been like. It's certainly possible to win when outnumbered (my corporation Genos Occidere is known for it) but at the end of the day most people like to win and will do whatever they want to - even if that makes the game less fun than it could be.

2) CCP are horrible at communicating.

CCP, the company which develops the game tend to be very bad at communicating with the player base about issues, or approach things very heavy handedly. Last year there was a large scandal involving micro transactions where the majority of EVE players felt like people were going to be able to pay for an advantage in game. Instead of addressing the concerns, CCP went silent until an email from the CEO was leaked which showed his disconnect with the fan base.

Eventually an apology was issued, but many people felt insulted and treated like sheep. Proper communication about what was really happening (small cosmetic transactions) would have made people a lot happier.

Similarly, my alliance has been banned from competing in this years "Alliance Tournament" despite being last years winners due to poor communication from CCP.

At the end of the day EVE is a great game, and there is a lot of depth to it but it is not for everyone. My advice is to get some friends and take a look at the trial, it's enjoyed best when you have people there to help you through the hardships of space.