I like a lot Eve-Online. At the same time there are parts of it that are really completely retarded. Bt really, retarded beyond ANY standard.

I still have the purpose to write down a complete review so I started to test how the “police” system works. Basically the universe of this game can be imagined like concentric circles (or like an onion). The more you move out from the center the more the world becomes risky and the probability of getting involved in PvP goes up. In the center (maximum security) the order is kept by an automated system. If you do something illegal, the police is supposed to show up and stop you. In a similar way to what the guards did in the old UO.

So I went out near a jumpgate with a shitty, expendable ship and I decided to shot at one of the “flying monitors” that are supposed to diffuse news and whatnot. A pop up window shows up asking me if I really want to shoot it and I press “yes”.

The first shot lands, doing zero damage. Then everything stops. I wonder why. After a few seconds I see my energy blink to zero. A second later my ship explodes and I get two error messages (and these are the routine in Eve). Well, I figured out it’s lame. I was expecting to actually see the police ships warp in and start to shoot. Instead it’s just an instant blow-up two second later you do something “bad” (like delivering 0.000001 damage to a flying monitor).

After having verified how lame it is I decided to continue with my normal playsession. So I took a mission and left with another ship… As I’m out of the station I get anoter instant explosion. My ship (the one that wasn’t expendable and that required me many days to buy and upgrade) gone. Forever. I tried again. Another explosion. I digged around my character statistics to understand if I flagged myself in some way but nothing. Basically I cannot do anything because as I step out of the station my ship autodestructs. No matter what.

The last resort, since nothing in the UI could give me an idea of what was happening, was to ask help in the chat. Well, this is how the system works. Basically you are locked in the station for 15 minutes. If you go out, you explode. Nowhere in the UI there’s sign of this timer, or a warning or whatever. Nothing like that exists. They also told me (in the chat) that the timer often gets bugged and it can randomly last up to an hour.

Good. Not only we have a really retarded police system that simply autodestructs your ship as you commit a crime (again a crime like shooting once, and only once, doing basically zero damage to a structure that would need me 10 minutes repeatedly shooting just to scratch its dye). But it also locks you out of the game for an arbitrary, unknown time.

Who designed all this is a genius. It’s the perfect demonstration of how niche games are often interesting but totally retarded on too many basic elements. In a game you should always expect (and encourage) the players to experiment. Not only this system is annoying (try to shoot by mistake something, just like a slip of finger and you can blow in milliseconds the ship on which you worked for many days), not only it’s completely unrealistic (at least send me indestructible police ships to shoot me, not just a sudden auto-destruction that isn’t even registered in the logs), not only it is not intuitive (because you keep autodestructing as you attempt to leave a station with zero feedback about the reason) but it also kicked me out of the game for the last hour I had available to play and made me write all this.

How to ruin a brilliant game at the basic, elementary levels (because this is one example in very long list).

These are (also) the wonders of the independent market.