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EVE Online is a space-based Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, created by the Icelandic company CCP Games. Players take the role of a new breed of elite spaceship pilots branded "capsuleers", named for the mechanism they use to control their ships, in a far distant future where four galactic empires, numerous player corporations/alliances and a number of NPC factions vie for control and influence.
Unlike most MMOs the playerbase is generally not divided into different unique servers, but coexist in a single universe. EVE Online contains almost 8,000 solar systems, each with their own planetary system and asteroid belts. EVE's record for logged-in accounts currently stands at over 64,000 simultaneous connections.
Perhaps partially inspired by Origin's Wing Commander: Privateer and the old 8-bit classic Elite - as well as, flavorfully, a slightly grittier Star Trek - EVE gives new players a ship, a handful of credits (Inter Stellar Kredits or "ISK"note ), and a very large sandbox to play around in. It's possible to be a pirate, a stock market mogul, a mercenary, a trader, an explorer, a miner, a manufacturer, or any other profession that you can justify within the game mechanics.
EVE occasionally pops up in the gaming press
(and sometimes the mainstream press
) for extraordinary feats of sabotage, theft and other devious exploits carried out by a player or group. Feats like this that may get them banned in other multiplayer titles are regular in EVE. EVE was created by former players of Ultima Online in response to its restrictions.
As a result, EVE is primarily known for it's learning cliff◊, though later updates have considerably smoothed things out for new players. One EVE blogger/podcaster calls the game "a sandbox with landmines" due to the often brutal Player Versus Player focus of the game.
The ongoing Backstory of EVE is written in regular in-character news articles as well as semi-regular Chronicles, a few short stories, two novellas and three novels (two of which are linked to the novellas.) A number of tropes that reference Non Player Characters come from these sources.
EVE is the first online game to have its own democratically elected player oversight committee, known as the Council of Stellar Management, the members of which serve one-year terms as of the fifth CSM. The CSM is flown to CCP's Iceland headquarters, where they meet with CCP engineers, present players' concerns, and discuss future features and expansions. They also help mediate between CCP and the community in case of scandals. As with other parts of any massive community, the CSM has moments of intergroup and community-wide drama.
There was previously a PS3-exclusive FPS tie-in known as DUST 514 (link) which allowed players to play as mercenaries engaging in faction warfare on a planet surface, with the option to call for orbital bombardments courtesy of EVE players.
In 2013 a second spin off game, an Oculus Rift-exclusive multiplayer dogfighting shooter with integration into the main game similar to Dust 514 named EVE Valkyrie, was announced for a 2014 release. It was set to ship with the Oculus Rift Founders Pack. In 2017, a "Warzone" expansion update for Valkyrie allowed non-VR gameplay on PS4 and PC. The game was delisted on July 1, 2022, and the servers shut down on August 5th that same year.
A series of tie-in novels have been released. The first, called The Empyrean Age, is a sci-fi political intrigue action novel that jumps perspective frequently and showcases the beginning of the galaxy-wide war in the original game. It has a sequel named Templar One, which follows some characters from the first book and is much more action-focused, dropping a lot of the cast and becoming a lot darker as it explores the idea that War Is Hell.
In 2013, Dark Horse Comics announced that It would begin work on a series of comic books detailing the real life exploits of players from the perspective of their characters inside the game, based upon the "True Stories In EVE Online" forum set up by CCP during the 10th year anniversary celebration of EVE Online. On February 19th 2014 they released the first comic, "EVE Online: True Stories #1", which is the story of the highly publicized destruction of the Band of Brothers alliance at the hands of Goonswarm and the Mittani.
As propaganda by player entities about player entities is a major part of EVE Online's ever-evolving metagame (and even its history as remembered by most players) is in part Written by the Winners, all trope descriptions concerning players, corporations, alliances and coalitions should be taken with a grain of salt.
This game provides examples of:
- 2-D Space: Ships can move in any direction, but there seems to be a universal "up." Stations and deployable objects are all oriented the same way, and unmoving ships automatically level themselves to this same orientation after a time.
- This makes a certain amount of sense, however; almost all bodies in solar systems are aligned on the same plane due to conservation of angular momentum.
- After-Action Report: There is no single hub for them, but they make popular reading topics on EVE forums and are usually written for battles in corporation/alliance wars. Killmail also counts.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Rogue Drones. The Gallenteans have historically been innovators in artificial intelligence, with their society relying heavily on automation and ubiquitous computing. As such, the trend towards increasing autonomy and plurifunctionality of space-based remote drone technology seemed a given. When a few prototype drones escaped their research environments, hitched a ride in passing starships, reprogrammed those ships' own drone compliments with their new software, took the ships over completely and used them to mass-produce advanced copies of themselves, a galaxy-wide pest problem resulted. CONCORD treaties currently ban research on advanced AI and the trend in research has moved towards interfacing artificial intelligence with human intelligence, an example of which is Capsuleers.
- Allegedly Free Game: While Alpha accounts can travel anywhere in the galaxy, there are fairly harsh limits on what skills can be trained and what ships and equipment can be used. This can make the game look like a freemium title.
- Alternative Calendar: The game uses a modified Gregorian calendar called YC (Yulai Conference) with the start being nearly 100 years in the game's past as it is the year in which the empires formed CONCORD and the calendar became standardized. As such, 2012 corresponds to Year 114 in-game.
- Anchored Teleportation: Ships equipped with Jump Drives need a friendly vessel to create a Cynosural Field at the target location before they can jump there. Since an active cyno is very visible, this alerts anyone within the target system that something big is inbound.
- An Entrepreneur Is You: The economy of EVE is almost entirely player-run. Players can make money from various activities such as trade, manufacturing, mercenary work and even banking.
- And I Must Scream: What happens, according to
Word of God, when a Capsuleer is disconnected from their pod incorrectly. Called Jovian Wetgrave Syndrome, you retain your senses but lose the ability to move or speak. Capsuleers in this state are labeled brain dead and slated for incineration.
- Another Dimension: Some of the Wild Mass Guessing around the nature of wormhole space and the Abyss involve this as a theory.
- Anti Poop-Socking: Skills are trained in real time, at a speed based on the Capsuleer's attributes.
- Arbitrary Weapon Range: Turret weapons have an optimal range and a falloff range, but hitting a target outside of both is possible. Missiles are limited by their speed and flight time, and drones can only be controlled within a certain range. Smartbombs, on the other hand, have a fixed effective range.
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: From the Customs Office description:The following items may only be imported or exported with the express prior approval of the Imperial Underscrivener for Commercial Affairs:Narcotic substances; handheld firearms; slaver hounds (except as personal property); Mindflood; live insects; ungulates; Class 1 refrigerants and aerosols; forced laborers/personal slaves (or other sapient livestock); animal germ-plasm; biomass of human origin; xenobiotics; walnuts.
- Truth in Television. Tree nuts are restricted cargo on ships due to their propensity for spontaneous combustion in large quantities.
- Art Evolution: This is particularly notable with Caldari ships, more than half of which were remodeled from random assemblages of grey bricks, engines and struts into something resembling actual spaceships.
- Artistic License – Engineering: A number of ships are asymmetrical. While balanced symmetry isn't needed in space for aerodynamic reasons, it's still important for balance and stability even in a vacuumnote . Fortunately, many recent redesigns have brought a lot of ships into more symmetrical shapes.
- Artistic License – Physics: Ships have arbitrarily low top speeds and turret-based weapons have arbitrarily limited ranges, both of which are eclipsed by modern technology. Cruise missiles are even described as "lifting wing" designs. When ships collide, they rebound off of one-another.
- The main accepted theory is that warp drives, which must be kept perpetually powered or they spontaneously detonate, change how the ships interact with space up to and including drag, rebound, acceleration and deceleration.
- Asteroid Miners: The economy is fueled by the players mining a variety of asteroid types. The ore is then refined and used in the construction of a vast number of ships, modules, consumables and more. It's one of the main forces driving the economy.
- Attack Drone: Favoured weapons of the Gallente and Amarr. Other races use them mainly as secondary weapons, typically but not exclusively for dealing with frigates and smaller craft.
- Ascended Meme: Caldari ECM ship the Falcon was long viewed as overpowered and "Because of Falcon" became a stock phrase explaining why things went wrong among the EVE Community. CCP recognised this in two sets of patch notes:"A phantom Tempest silhouette will no longer appear when piloting a Legion and activating any of the modules. Minmatar scientists are convinced this was happening BECAUSE OF FALCON."— CCP, Patchnotes for Apocrypha 1.1"Additionally, CONCORD has declared all “BECAUSE OF FALCON” jokes passé."— CCP, Patchnotes for Apocrypha 1.2
- Awesome, but Impractical:
- Black Ops ships are supposed to kick ass and chew bubblegum by virtue of the fact that they're the only ships able to see and jump to Covert Cynosural Fields. They can also use cloaks and don't have to worry about not being able to target anything as the cloak is turned off. As useful as it is to be able to launch a fleet of invisible battleships behind enemy lines, they're crippled by being exceedingly expensive and only slightly more offensively and defensively able than the ship they're based off of.
- Any limited ship like Alliance Tournament ships, or any ship otherwise very difficult to obtain. Generally good models and bonuses, but because of their limited nature they're extremely valuable as trophies and losing one is a serious blow to your wallet. In some cases, Alliance Tournament ships have gone for sums that could be used to pay for a titan.
- To an extent, all bigger ships. They are usually armed with weapons only effective against similar-sized spacecraft, making them borderline useless against smaller ships.
- EDENCOM ships; their AoE damage is weak against single targets or small numbers of ships, but can quickly overwhelm fleets. They're also very expensive to build and require unique, specialized skill training. The result is a suite of ships that can't be built or used in the numbers necessary to make them worthwhile.
- Back from the Dead: Anyone with a clone.
- The Battlestar: The Guardian-Vexor, a Gallente special edition cruiser that can field up to 10 drones.
- Guristas ships have immense bonuses to fighters/drones and missiles.
- Beam Spam: The Amarr specialize in beam weaponry.
- Bio-Augmentation: The Jove are masters of this; they've made themselves superhuman and engineered away their emotions. They also gave the Caldari cloning technology for reasons known only to them.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: Because they treat bodies as little more than shells and wield spaceships capable of killing tens of thousands in minutes, any Capsuleer who claims to have morals will usually end up like this even if they don't realize it.
- Nuclear ammunition for projectile and missile weapons exist, and Capsuleers in the same corporation will sometimes fire on or destroy one-another "for the lulz" or as training. Capsuleers will use nuclear weapons for entertainment.
- Goonfleet rules are something like this. Do whatever you want to the "pubbies" and enemies, but God help you if you fuck with another Goon.
- The Jove qualify. Isolated, equipped with technology far beyond anything possessed by the empires, and they have altered themselves so thoroughly that they are no longer naturally aggressive.
- the Drifters, on the other hand, are apparently Jove or Jove-descended and have gone the opposite direction; The only thing keeping them from being Omnicidal Maniacs is that nobody knows what they're trying to accomplish or why, resulting in a certain amount of this.
- Triglavians, due to being a Proud Warrior Race, invite capsuleers to invade their space and steal their stuff as a way to examine their fighting style and culture. They openly admit that they will be merciless in their "provings."
- Body Backup Drive: Dead players automatically download into cloned bodies.
- Body-Count Competition: The purpose of killboards
.
- Boring, but Practical:
- Mining is a reasonably reliable, safe means to earn ISK open to you from the very first ship you get.
- The "Damage Control II" module. A cheap and easy to produce passive module consuming one low slot with modest fitting costs, granting moderate resistances to all incoming damage. Uniformly one of the most efficient modules to have.
- The cruiser class of ship as a whole. Able to do much of what a battleship can at a fraction of the price, they're the go-to for many forms of PvE and even some PvP.
- Bottomless Magazines: Drones do not need any sort of ammo, civilian weapons synthesize their own, and basic types of frequency crystals (used as "ammo" for lasers) never break or need replacement.
- Breathable Liquid: Capsules are filled with a glucose-based hyper-oxygenated liquid.
- Bribing Your Way to Victory:
- PLEXnote can be bought for real money and sold on the in-game market for ISK. As the in-game market allows you to purchase nearly any item for ISK, this allows you to indirectly purchase nearly anything for real life money. There are accounts, corporations, alliances and even wars funded with PLEX alone.
- Skills that let you use ships and equipment effectively can be quickly obtained through the in-game purchase of skill injectors for ISK, which add skill points to your character. There are also "packages" available for real money that directly include skill points. A character with maxed-out skillsnote is far more effective note than an untrained or moderately-trained character. A Master of All would take years of subscription (or billions of ISK, or hundreds of dollars) to create, but training can still be significantly advanced through real money purchases.
- Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": CONCORD and a majority of other Non Player Characters also have another name for you: "egger." A Capsuleer is mentally capable of not just piloting a ship, but replaces many of the on-board computers and staff. How this alters their morality is a major narrative theme.
- Can Only Move the Eyes: How Sansha's nation abducts planetary population. Nanites attack the motor nerves in the neck, causing the victim to walk out into the open where they are scooped up by tractor beams. Victims can scream all the while this is happening.
- Cap: There is no theoretical limit on the number of players that can be present in any given system, but mechanically this isn't the case: overcrowded systems will enable time dilation, which makes entering the dilated system extremely difficult because of how jump gates work.
- The battle of Caldari Prime during Retribution was a great example of time dilation in action: traffic leading into the system was heavily restricted to avoid server overload, leaving the gates at surrounding systems clogged with ships.
- Another example of time dilation in action was the Battle of HED-GP
. When time slowed down, there were hundreds of players left defenseless, waiting for hours to jump into or out of the system.
- Achieved once again with the Battle of B-R5RB
which was run with a time dilation factor of 0.1 - it took 21 hours in real time to finish, which was only 2 hours in-universe due to the time dilation.
- Again achieved in the Siege of 9-4RP2, and the Fury at F-WST8. Both of these fights were 12-18 hours long as a result of the 0.1 time dilation.
- Chronic Backstabbing Disorder:
- The Ammatar suffer from this. Their collusion with the Amarrian subjugation of the other tribes earned them the contempt and enmity of their former brethren. Then, a large number of them stabbed the Amarr in the back to save the remnants of another tribe. Then, some of the turncoats switch sides again and rejoined the Ammatar.
- City Guards: CONCORD, who will warp in and destroy any player that breaks their laws in high-security space. There's even a name for this: a "CONCORDDOKEN", delivered by "PWNCORD." CCP considers evading CONCORD's retribution to be an exploit due to their extreme power.
- Cloning Gambit: Capsuleers. After getting podded, a Capsuleer's consciousness is transferred to a new clone.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Each faction has a general color scheme. The thumbnails for each ship even use a nebula background of the faction color.
- For icons and nebulae: Gallente are green, Caldari are blue, Minmatar are maroon, and Amarr are gold.
- For ships: Gallente are light greenish grey with dark tinted detailing, Caldari ships are bluish grey, Minmatar are dirty brown, Amarr shiny gold/tan, and Jovians are green.
- For Missiles and Bombs: Light blue is EMP, red is thermal, green/dark green is kinetic and yellow/beige is explosive.
- Continuing is Painful: You lose the ship and most of what it's carrying when it explodes, and you lose what implants your clone had when your clone dies.
- Cool Starship: Naturally, given the premise. New Eden has any and every sort of funky spacecraft you might hope for.
- The Con: Because of the hands-off approach of CCP regarding player interactions, many stories of legendary cons, scams, and other debauchery abound in EVE.
- Copy-and-Paste Environments: The station environments are suspiciously similar within empires and even pirate factions.
- Space is also like this. The nebulae and starfields seen in the background of each system don't change much.
- Used to good effect in the Crucible expansion. Each empire region has it's own nebula, and a pilot familiar with them can navigate almost solely based on how far away each is.
- Corporate Warfare: There's a mechanic for it.
- Corralled Cosmos: The limitations inherent in star gate technology keep the factions neatly herded and at each other's throat.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: In many ways, EVE is essentially Corrupt Corporate Executive: The Video Game. NPC examples aside, the player-run corporations are generally filled to the brim with politics.
- Corrupt Quartermaster: Player corporations (read: guilds) need players with hauling skills to move supplies where they're needed most. This is vital but very boring work that not many players will want to do when they could be blowing up other players or NPCs instead. As a result, those that volunteer are often not given a proper background check before they're put into a position to siphon off massive amounts of goods headed for a war effort.
- Crapsack World: In New Eden, billions are enslaved by the Amarr Empire under less than humane conditions and there is nothing anyone can do about it. In the Caldari State you are born into a megacorporation, and if you get fired or quit you will starve to death because no way are you getting another job and they're not keen on the idea of welfare. The Caldari Provist and Loyalist movements constantly threatening a civil war hasn't helped. The Minmatar Republic has a standard of living barely better than when they were enslaved by the Amarr, and a government rife with corruption. Things ain't looking too peachy in the Gallente Federation anymore either since the start of the Empyrian War, between enemy titans threatening their home system, the rise of a Secret Police to guard loyalty, a brief threat of civil war and dictatorship on the horizon of possibilities and the in-universe effect of the Caldari occupying many of their low security systems. Oh, and God help you if you live on a ship or in Capsuleer-controlled space, because you now have a life expectancy of about five minutes.
- Crippling Overspecialization: ships tend to have trouble hitting other ships that are smaller than them, and so the worst are the largest. The fix is to use drones or other players in smaller ships. However Death of a Thousand Cuts isn't likely unless they're the kind with no defenses.
- The stated design philosophy behind most tier 2 ships. The intent is for them to perform one task very well and fail hard if they're shoehorned into a role outside their specialty.
- Critical Existence Failure: Ships can and have survived direct hits from a doomsday device only to eat a bullet from a civilian gun and spontaneously explode.
- Cult: Quite a few actually, Sansha's Nation and the Equilibrium of Mankind being the most obviously immoral ones.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: There have been many, both in the backstory and in the player-run metagame. Some stand out, such as when the Amarr tried to take on the Jovian fleet.
- Around mid July of 2011, The LEETPVP coalition decided to invade Goonswarm's home sector
with a large fleet of supercapital ships, thinking that they could set up camp and cut Goonswarm off. Goonswarm responded with over 2000
subcapital ships, calling in every ally they have to that sector, swarming the [player stations=] the supercapitals were last seen hiding in and preventing them from leaving. Less than 48 hours later
, all the LEETPVP player stations were destroyed and LEETPVP were spending billions in subcapital ships to buy time for their supercapitals to flee.
- History repeated itself in December 2011 when the White Noise alliance and friends declared they were invading Goonswarm space, the speech declaring this making the statement "Deklein by February." Goon spies got wind of this and counter-invaded the region of Branch over Christmas. White Noise were caught by surprise and failed to mount any successful defence of their region and were relieved
of their territory two weeks later.
- The Battle of B-R5RB
, in which 75 titans were destroyed. 16 of those belonged to the Goonswarm-led CFC, while the other 59 belonged to the losing side.
- As of February-May 2016, the rest of Eve Online banded together at the behest and payment of upset bankers and routed the Goonswarm-led Imperium (they rebranded from CFC). The Imperium lost numerous battles, all of their systems, and were camped into their evacuation point station for weeks on end. The Northern side of the map, the old Imperium ancestral homeland, is now inhabited by over 20 smaller alliances that participated in the defeat of Goonswarm.
- However, losing North was not the end of Goonswarm and Imperium (Except CO2 and FCON, who broke off and eventually ceased to exist), as they reformed themselves in Delve, a relatively inferior region, which however has a lot of sentimental value, as they once destroyed their original mortal enemy, Band of Brothers, here. After the I-Want-Isk casino, which financed the Moneybadger campaign, was banned by CCP, Moneybadgers fell apart (until reforming as PAPI in 2020 to destroy the Imperium). Later, they went on a trail of vengeance, promising to glass the north and punish everyone who dared to settle in their former home. And succeeded in doing so.
- In 2020, after 4 years of relative peace and goodwill between Imperium and Legacy coalition (led by TEST), TEST decided to break the NIP agreement and formed PAPI coalition with great number of alliances, including Northern Coalition, Pandemic Horde, Brave Collective, Fraternity and others) with the intention to not just defeat the Imperium again, but to totally annihilate them and erase them from the game, starting World War Bee 2. Having around 3 to 1 player advantage, PAPI expected to destroy Imperium quickly.
- However, Imperium has once again proven to be an extremely tenacious opponent, and did not break despite losing nearly all of its sovereignty during nearly one year long war, except for a single constellation in Delve region, including the capital system of 1DQ1-A. With PAPI unable to break this last bastion of their nemesis for several months and facing internal discord, the coalilion enventually fell appart and sounded a withdrawal. And thus, Delve became a site of another victory of CFC coalition (Now known as Imperium) against their mortal enemy. The Mittani, leader of the Imperium, vowed to exact vengeance on PAPI and especially TEST, for their failed genocide attempt.
- Most fights the elite PvP alliance Rooks and Kings get into end up this way, almost always in their favor, despite usually being outnumbered at least two-to-one.
- Trope literally enforced when applied to any interventions/retaliations by CONCORD against capsuleers in high-sec space since any CONCORD interventions in high-sec that failed to destroy the aggressor are considered to be an exploit on the part of said aggressor who in turn are liable to be banned for violation of Terms of Service.
- The Massacre of M2-. A massive, record setting battle on 12/30/20 saw over 250 titans destroyed between the Imperium and PAPI, roughly equal losses on both sides — easily the largest number of lost titans in any one battle. Three days later, when the space station became vulnerable again, The Imperium had formed up over 4500 people in the system to defend it, and PAPI had organized over 6000 to attack it. Details are still up in the air as to what exactly happened on 1/2/21, but either a massive overestimation of server capabilities or a massive tactical error resulted in PAPI attempting to jump thousands of players directly on top of Goonswarm's defenses — and right into the waiting arms of the "woodchipper," a massive swarm of thousands if not tens of thousands of heavy anti-capital fighter drones. The resulting battle saw upwards of 166 PAPI titans destroyed and ZERO Goonswarm titan losses. It was such a lopsided massacre that Goonswarm stood down because they ran out of things to kill, with many players upset things were dying so fast they couldn't shoot them and get in on the killmails.
- Around mid July of 2011, The LEETPVP coalition decided to invade Goonswarm's home sector
- Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Capsuleers all suffer from this to some degree. The numerous cybernetic augmentations, spending time in isolation in their pods, and ill conceived notions of immortality can leave capsuleers emotionally stunted and awkward at best or completely callous/psychotic at worst.
- Damage-Sponge Boss: Drifter Response Battleships, Optional Bosses that can be summoned at the end of high-level Wormhole combat sites. They have very respectable damage, and a couple of other nasty tricks that generally require foreknowledge and planning for a successful kill, but their most obviously noticeable trait is having enough HP to take even small gangs of battleships up to 10-20 minutes to kill them — a very rare feat among NPC ships, which can usually be blown away by the dozen. They are designed to offer a challenge, or at least resistance, to both capital and subcapital ships.
- Damn You, Muscle Memory!: The point-and-click movement leaves many new players from other space games with direct controls confused. CCP noted this behavior and tried to avoid it in the Rhea update, which includes traditional arrowkey based movement as an option.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: If you keep your clone and insurance policies up to date. It still hurts more than other games, mind you; if you get a billion ISK (say about $15) worth of strategic cruiser shot out from under you, it's gone (and its wreck probably looted by the people who blew it up), and there's no insurance for the implants (potentially another billion ISK's worth) that got blasted out of your skull when they destroyed your escape pod.
- Deliberately exploited with "Dreadbombs": hit squads of dreadnoughts fitted with the cheapest heavy armor and the cheapest huge guns they can find, catapulted into battle next to hostile capital ships, fully expected to die in a blaze of glory but destroy more value in hostile supercarriers than is lost in the destroyed dreadnoughts. The "slap on the wrist" aspect is taken to its extreme by dreadbomb pilots commonly being fully expected to launch their dreadnoughts, jump into battle, die, respawn back at a friendly station, and then launch another dreadnought and do it again.
- Lampshaded in the forums in response to someone
going Leeroy Jenkins against a hostile capital fleet with a single poorly-fitted dreadnought and no backup:
Stupidity is not a survival trait.Oh.Dammit.We're immortal.
- Defenseless Transports: Haulers are designed to transport large amounts of material and are virtually defenseless, having paper-thin armor and poor, if any, weapons. Taken to the extreme with freighters, the capital-class Haulers. While the regular haulers can at least fit some defense modules or weapons, freighters have no high or mid slots whatsoever! (Although in practice freighters are actually much harder to destroy than regular haulers, as their much greater size gives them many more effective hit points than even a heavily tanked hauler).
- "Deep Space Transport" Tech-II transport ships boast an inherent warp core strength modifier (making them harder to tackle) and a hit point potential rivalling a battlecruiser. They're designed to be able to survive long enough to escape a gate camp.
- On the other hand, "Blockade Runner" Tech-II transport ships have a bonus to warp speed and can use the Covert Ops Cloaking Device, allowing it to warp while cloaked. While only having as much tank as a T1 Hauler and far less hauling capacity, they are designed to bypass gate camps entirely, cloaking up immediately to avoid being locked onto and having fast enough align times and warp speeds to be able to bounce between celestial objects quickly enough to outrun or mislead anyone who gives chase.
- Can be averted with certain mining ships, and may be deliberately averted with "Battle Venture" fleets (mining frigates, fitted with weapons) or the normally irrational "Battle Rorq" (a Rorqual capital industrial ship, normally a 2km long mining ship and mobile refinery, refitted with nigh-impenetrable shields and hundreds of combat drones).
- Deflector Shields: Equipped on all ships, the primary means of defense for Caldari and Minmatar ships.
- Department of Redundancy DepartmentAutomatic override. Manual control overridden by autopilot. Please wait for operation to complete. You can override the automatic autopilot override in 10 seconds. Then you can make it wait.
- Diminishing Returns for Balance: Multiple damage or defense upgrades receive "stacking penalties". The first such module has full effect, the second approximately 80%, and after the third a fourth becomes near-pointless.
- Dramatic Space Drifting: A major fleet fight could leave hundreds of wrecks in a space, ranging from the metal jumble of support ships to the drifting husks of capital ships, right down to the corpses of pilots who got podded. Of course these fields are often salvaged for loot and the corpses scooped as trophies.
- also seen at the start of the Dominion trailer
.
- also seen at the start of the Dominion trailer
- Dropped a Bridge on Him: Otro Gariushi, NPC leader of Ishukone corporation, pretty much the only reasonable person in the whole of Caldari space during the rise of Tibus Heth- except that they dropped a mothership on him
.
- Eagle Land: The Gallente — everyone watches their TV, listens to their pop music and drinks their soft drinks. They like to bang on about freedom at every possible opportunity. And their government consists of a President, a Senate, and a Supreme Court. Sounds rather like America, except they're French.
- Earth-Shattering Kaboom: The Lost Technology device that opened wormholes in Apocrypha destroyed Seyllin I (and eight other planets in entirely different parts of the galaxy), along with Seyllin I's 2 billion inhabitants, as a side effect.
- Eldritch Starship: Invoked with the starship designs of Sansha's Nation, which were built to look as weird and alien as possible as an intimidation tactic... and also because Sansha Kuvakei is both very smart and utterly bugnuts insane. The Transhuman Aliens of the Jove Empire play it straighter with their enigmatic, quasi-organic, and astonishingly powerful craft, but probably the purest examples are the Sleeper Drones, the mysterious and horrifyingly potent mechanical guardians of a long-dead civilisation in the farthest, darkest reaches of wormhole space, which basically crawled out of the pages of a H. P. Lovecraft story. The Ambiguously Human Triglavian Collective ships are a bit less eldritch-looking than the Jove, however most of them have what look like teeth on their front arms (giving the impression that their ships want to eat you), and all are built around a small black hole which they use as a power source.
- The Empire: The Amarr Empire — aforementioned Catholic megalomaniacs with a serious hard-on for colonialism. Emperor Heiderran tried to tone it down (writing the Pax Amaria celebrating the Empire's opportunities to affect peace) and was awarded a prestigious Gallentean peace prize for it, but after his death from old age he's been replaced by a series of expansionists.
- The End of the World as We Know It: Some players and groups attempt to bring about the an end to the game via killing every other player, destroying every other ship and generally acting like an Omnicidal Maniac. In theory they can actually succeed in this, but the game designers aren't worried as most people who try this get distracted by the game itself or get bored with it once the massive amount of time and effort required starts to sinks in.
- Militas have declared temporary truces and even 0.0 alliances have participated... though in their case typically for the lulz.
- Escape Pod: A player's capsule is ejected from their burning ship wreckage to give them a chance to escape. The capsules are fast, tiny, unarmed and effectively unarmored. The unseen crew on capsuleer and NPC ships are stated to have escape pods, though they are not seen in-game.
- It's implied now that Capsuleers do not actually have crew, their cybernetic augments allow them to interface with the ship and expand their minds enough to run the whole thing directly. Presumably their ships still contain the living quarters non-capsuleers would need, however.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Normally, scamming, grieving and general malice are positively encouraged, but it's completely forbidden to scam or grief CCP's charity fundraiser events.
- In-game "legal" scamming, scheming and plotting are all done within the boundaries of the EULA and in-game rules. Sometimes, the in-game rules may be used or turned against the unfortunate victim, but hey, it's still legal according to the EULA!.
- Griefing is technically illegal in the game, and more players than you think have been banned for it. Its just the CCP doesn't usually consider it griefing as long as you make a profit.
- Event-Driven Clock: It has a term alarm clock op. Since everything in EVE is real-time, sometimes that tower comes out of reinforced at 3 am local time, Tuesday. Also, Eve time is GMT. So Daylight saving time changes can really screw things up.
- Evil vs. Evil: Most the Nullsec Alliance wars, if not most wars in game period, could be viewed as this. The war of BoB vs Goonswarm stands out especially though. Goonswarm is famous for griefing as many people as they can and once the Band of Brothers collapsed it was very clear they had been given significant aid from people inside CCP.
- Excessive Steam Syndrome: The mining barges discharge smoke and flames from ports on their flanks. These exhaust pipes are always venting, even when docked in a station.
- Explosions in Space: While the explosion particle effects actually look like the zero-G description the trope's page provides, many explosions also include a Planar Shockwave.
- Explosive Overclocking: Pilots with the "Thermodynamics" skill are able to overheat active ship equipment, gaining percentage boosts to functionality at the expense of the modules taking heat damage over time, eventually rendering them inoperable.
- Expy: The Tristan frigate looks very similar to Prince Xizor's personal fighter, the Virago.
- Fantasy: In spite of being a Sci-Fi game, most of the game's factions name their ships and Non Player Characters with some kind of mythical or fantasy-themed naming scheme. Part of this is due to Translation Convention: the Caldari don't know what a Raven is, for example, but they name that battleship after the bird with traits that the 21st century players would associate with ravens.
- The Gallente Federation names all their ships after Greek and Mesopotamian deities or descriptive latin words.
- The Amarr Emprire names all their ships after terms with Christian connotations
- The Minmatar Republic names all their ships after either forces of nature, violent acts, weapons, or Norse Mythology, plus a few Earth animals (One ship, called the Wolf, is described as "Named after a mythical beast renowned for its voraciousness")
- The Caldari State gives most of its ships bird names, with a few mythical creatures scattered around. All of its NPCs have Japanese and Finnish themed names.
- Sansha's Nation and the Equilibrium of Mankind name all their NPCs after demons, monsters, and cultists.
- The Blood Raiders name all their NPCs after religious titles and ghosts.
- The Angel Cartel names all its ships after...Angels of course.
- Fashionable Asymmetry: Almost all ships are asymmetric to varying degrees — some
◊ wildly
◊ so
◊. Each faction has its own flavor of asymmetry — Caldari ships usually have symmetrical fuselages (the Moa and Blackbird were notable exceptions until their redesigns), with various doodads and wings stuck on haphazardly. Minmatar ships typically have an overall symmetric body, with spars and solar panels on some of their larger ships being mounted off-center. Amarr ships are generally very symmetric, but when they do have asymmetry, one side of the ship ends up looking completely different from the other
◊. Gallente ships are almost always hilariously lopsided, with engines nacelles protruding from weird positions and cockpits mounted on the sides of frigates.
- Faster-Than-Light Travel: Both through intersystem Jump Gates and intrasystem Warp Drive.
- The Federation: The Gallente Federation, who are all about freedom, spiced wine, tasty pastries, and exotic dancers. Except when they're all about "democracy by any means necessary".
- Fetch Quest: A fair percentage of NPC missions depending on the type of agent you use
. Courier contracts from players behave similarly, moving cargo from one station to another.
- For Want Of A Nail:
- The Battle Of Asakai, a giant war involving some 700 corporations and 3,000 ships, began with a simple misclick. An alliance was attacking an orbital tower in the Asakai system, in low-security space, expecting to be ambushed, and had reached out to the Goonswarm Federation for backup to ambush the ambush. The Goons had a strike force assembled in a nearby system, with a Titan standing by to open a jump bridge to the battle zone. The initial ambush was sprung, the Goons' allies deployed a cynosural field to give the counter-ambush a target, and the Titan pilot got ready to open the bridge ... but mis-clicked and triggered the Titan's jump drive instead, stranding the strike force at the assembly point, and dropping the Titan into a battle zone two jumps out of high-security space, with no escorts and a doomsday weapon that doesn't work outside of null-sec. The Titan got tackled, anti-Goon forces mobilized to get in on the kill, Goonswarm forces and allies deployed multiple Titans and other supercaps and support forces to protect their wayward pilot, people flooded into the Asakai system from all corners of the galaxy, and one of the largest battles in multiplayer gaming history was on.
- The Battle of B-R5RB
, taking place literally one year to the day after the The Battle of Asakai, was started because an alliance in the N3 Coalition missed a bill payment for the system where the Pandemic Legion was staging and storing their fleets. When sovereignty dropped across the system, the Clusterfuck Coalition (which includes the Goonswarm) and Russian Coalition jumped at the opportunity to destroy the station and capture the system.
- The battle, the largest battle to take place in the game's history (for now) and was the largest PVP battle in gaming history. 7,548 players participated in the battle, and SEVENTY-FIVE TITANS WERE DESTROYED (smashing the previous record of titans destroyed in a single battle at 12) among the 4,286 exploded ships counted, estimated at approximately 11 TRILLION ISK ($300,000) in materials. The Doomsday lasers were fired 775 times, accounting for 24% of all Doomsdays fired in the game's history. The battle lasted 21 hours, and only ended due to daily server maintenance.
- The Massacre of M2- was started off when a new player on the Imperium's side took a potshot at a Cyno Jammer in an interceptor, putting it into repair status and thus preventing PAPI from activating it for 15 minutes, causing PAPI to lose the ability to prevent Imperium capital ships from entering the system, completely ruining the longstanding tactical plans of PAPI. Over 400 titans have died because of that one single shot from a 6 month old "newbee."
- Fun with Acronyms: Exotic variants of the Target Painter used to have acronyms beginning with "pwn". Meta 1-4 respectively being: pwn, pwnd, pwnt, and pwnage before they were renamed during a major overhaul.
- The in-game currency unit is the InterStellar Kredit. which happens to share an acronym with the Icelandic Króna (ISK).
- PIRATE, as suggested in the Help channel once, is an acronym for Protector of Interstellar asteRoids And Their Environment. Their actions are, however, still not forgiven.
- Outer Ring Excavations designed most of the ships in the dedicated mining classes.
- Yulai Archives & Record Repository, the guys in charge of maintaining and improving the official EVE wiki
.
- CONsolidated COoperation and Relations CommanD is a, well, concord of individuals from all four empires dedicated to keeping the peace.
- Several Titan weapons get in on the fun. The Gravitational Transportation Field Oscillator is an AOE device that teleports away all subcapitals in its area of effect. The Bosonic Field Generator unleashes a very powerful AOE blast.
- A Rorqual pilot can protect their mining fleet with the Pulse Activated Nexus Invulnerability Core.
- Perform enough missions for Distribution agents and you might find yourself hauling OrganoPhosphate insecticide.
- Future Imperfect: The premise of Eve's backstory is that humans emigrated from their crowded, overpopulated systems to the New Eden star cluster through a wormhole. The wormhole disastrously collapsed, cutting the colonists off from Earth and leading to a die-back of civilization due to the worlds of New Eden (with a few small exceptions) relying entirely on Earth for imported food. Fast forward almost 20,000 years: Earth is all but a myth and some strange artifacts and the humans of New Eden have had to rediscover most advanced technology including spaceflight FTL travel.
- Game-Breaking Bug: An exploit with starbase reactors completely warped the Tech-II market when it was discovered that the majority of an important compound was being produced via an exploit. After CCP fixed it, T2 prices shot up for a while.
- The Trinity expansion installer included an OS-breaking bug
in its first release. It's been taken care of.
- From Apocrypha till Tyrannis 1.1 there was a bug that could give guns infinite range and accuracy in certain wormhole systems.
- The Trinity expansion installer included an OS-breaking bug
- Gameplay and Story Integration: Things such as PC immortality, speed differences between gameplay and background story, etc. are described as publicly available technologies with the consequences being explored in depth.
- A CCP-published short story even explains the player character's ability to customize their own avatar — as the new face being surgically removed from one of a group of slaves, numerous enough to give capsuleers an ample selection, who are then forced to wear a porcelain mask for the rest of their lives.
- That said, CCP is not always speedy on the uptake. It took them nearly a week to notice that the Caldari had captured nearly all of the Gallente faction warfare systems (including a planet important to the storyline) and way longer for them to do anything about it.
- Before incursions started, it was stated that all Sansha pirate ships were only the remains of a fleet over 100 years old. When incursions started and waves of Sansha's nation ships would invade a system, Sansha ships will still show up in incursion afflicted systems months after the incursion has passed.
- Gatling Good: Several guns in the game are gatling guns. The largest of which shoots 220mm shells at rapid fire rates. There are also Gatling Pulse Lasers and 75mm Gatling Railguns.
- Amusingly, with the updated turret graphics from Inferno, the models for the aforementioned Railguns and Pulse Lasers are clearly NOT of a Gatling design, having only a single "barrel", for lack of a better term, and no rotary parts whatsoever.
- Genetic Memory: The Intaki supposedly have this, although it's not well fleshed out in the story — a religious practice called Rebirth transfers the personality of a dying person to a newborn. Nowadays it's done with technology, those who apparently do it without tech are called Idama; they train to recall past memories and are spiritual leaders.
- Gimmick Level: Some Wormhole Systems apply bonuses to some ship stats, and penalties to others. Forcing some players to change up their usual fits for that particular system. It has lead to some absolutely hilarious fleets, including destroyers fighting Non Player Characters that are normally fought by capital ships.
- All pockets of Abyssal Deadspace also have both environmental bonuses and penalties, and small environmental clouds in them. These Abyssal environments both allow for, and enforce, fitting choices and flight strategies which would otherwise be considered very strange.
- Metaliminal Storms apply bonuses and penalties similar to Abyssal Deadspace effects, but in nullsec in the form of multi-system-wide storms that move every 1-2 days. These also increase certain types of site spawns tied to the bonuses, such as an Exotic storm that boosts mining speed also spawning more ore anomalies, or an Electric storm that boosted exploration ship scanning while disabling cloaking also increasing Relic site spawns.
- Glass Cannon: Destroyers are intended to be this against small ships; with a cruiser-sized hull and sensor signature, but only frigate-level defense slots, their effectiveness is... a bit situational. Blackbirds and Falcons are shield tanked ECM boats, which means they have to sacrifice most of their defensive shielding to maximize their electronic warfare capabilities. The Gallente Heavy Assault Ship Deimos is usually called "Diemost" because its impressive firepower, combined with average-at-best hit points, draws the attention of the entire enemy fleet. The ultimate example is the Stealth Bomber, a specialized frigate that fires anti-battleship torpedoes and area of effect bombs while having less resilience than a regular frigate.
- Pre-Dominion(~2009) Titans are considered this, as they used to have less than 3 times the hit point buffer of a dreadnought, while costing up to 50 times more. In fact, most Titan pilots were mandated to plug in implants that drastically improves agility, turning Titans into FragileSpeedsters. Enter the battlefield, Deploy Doomsday, get out in 25 seconds. Rinse and repeat.
- The Attack Battlecruisers introduced in the Crucible (2011) expansion have bonuses to allow mounting of battleship-class guns on ships with cruiser-level shielding and armor. The defenses are basically tinfoil, but an Attack Battlecruiser can approach the firepower of the heaviest-gunned battleship of the same race (and in practice, will often exceed it, because a Tier 3 pilot will likely have fitted his ship to maximize firepower instead of worrying about shoring up his defenses).
- The "Insta-Cane": a Hurricane-class battlecruiser fitted out with artillery cannons and as many Sensor Boosters, Damage mods and tracking enhancers as it can hold. The result is a ship that can achieve a lock in under a second, at the cost of having no tank what so ever. Very useful to pick off tacklers and Stealth Bombers as it can destroy most frigates in a single volley, but it will get torn apart if it tries to lock horns with anything that can survive a few hits.
- Global Currency: ISK, amusingly its also the acronym for the currency of Iceland, where CCP is headquartered. Justified thusly: ISK is the currency of space, as agreed upon by the empires through CONCORD. Planets, and indeed countries on said planets, are all implied to have currency of their own; ISK was just created for space because the awesome amounts of normal currency that would be required otherwise. Anyone planetside can retire and live comfortably for the rest of their lives on a few ISKnote .
- One mission involves getting a bunch of cash to a certain group to ransom some prisoners. "Luckily they just want planetary currency, so the real ISK value is minimal." You're given an item to transfer to them; "A lot of money". It has no use except in the mission and is totally worthless.
- Averted by Loyalty Points, a set of currencies gained from running missions. Loyalty Points are specific to the corporation they were earned with, and can only be spent to buy things from that one corporation. However, CONCORD LP can be converted into LP for other (law-abiding) corporations.
- Gondor Calls for Aid: After seeing war declared on them by the entirety of Nullsec (~150,000 players) in late 2020, with the explicit stated goal of removing Goonswarm from the game, Goonswarm activated "The Horn of Goondor", a long standing emergency plan. What is the Horn of Goondor? The Mittani emailed every single user who had ever been a Goon, no matter how long ago they played or how skilled they were — all hundred thousand plus of them — and asked them to return to the game."You knew this day would come; you knew that you would be called. Only as a last resort; only when it matters most, when the fate of our tribe and the galaxy itself hangs in the balance. The Horn of Goondor, only to be sounded in our darkest hour, when the enemy is at the gates of Fortress Delve and it is time to win or die."
- On a more common note, Cynosural Fields are basically "the beacons are lit" in ship module form. A Cyno beacon is so bright that not only is it visible to everyone in the star system, it's visible on the galactic map, and is used as a destination point for capital ship jump drives. The result of this is that a ship which is in serious trouble, but has a Cyno module and friends within jump drive range range, can light a Cyno, and in seconds have anywhere from a dozen to a hundred friendly subcapital, capital, and supercapital ships there to save it.
- Grey-and-Gray Morality:
- The Gallente are a liberal society that will preserve their democracy at all costs. Even if it involves the occasional lynch mob or campaign of ethnic repression.
- The Caldari state fought a war of independence to protect their patriotic and meritocratic ideals from Gallente imperialism. And for the right to order their society into a collection of brutal corporate fiefdoms.
- The Minmatar are a proud tribal civilization who broke free from Amarr slavery to found their own republic. A republic rife with corruption and a standard of living that only occasionally dips below the slavery they escaped.
- The Amarr are the largest and most stable of all the empires, dedicated to justice and morality. Unfortunately (probably for you) their conception of justice and morality involves unabashed imperialism and a slave trade that is not only allowed by the government but blessed by the church, there being very little distinction between the two in Amarr.
- Griefer: As you may have gathered from the rest of the article, this game is a griefer's paradise, and most of the player base loves it that way. As long as you don't use a hacked client or a known and classified exploit, any method you can find to kill players or steal their hard earned goods is allowed, with very few and specific exceptions.
- Guide Dang It!: The learning curve creates a lot of this. It isn't that you have to learn a lot fast but simply going into PvP against players with far better skills and ships outfitted with better stuff or even anything at all is going to get you killed. Mining for example is fairly easy and safe (at first) and is a good starting point. The in-game tutorials are bare bones. Most players realize that specialization is key to get decent at something fastish even if because of your lack of money and skills you won't experience much of the sandbox for months. Information on everything must be dug out of wikis or using the ingame market to find a ship, piece of ship equipment, implant or something else because of the lack of an ingame database. Luckily the market gives all the details on anything you can find on it (which is nearly everything important because of the player driven economy) but well see further for why this isn't the end of your learning. The game is kind enough to tell you the bare minimum skills you need to use something but not always the prerequisites for those skills or if there are any additional skills that would make you better at using the item. The skills themselves are this because there are a LOT of them and you won't realize they even exist until you first go on the market and sort through the dozens of skills. Also many skills descriptions are misleading or don't tell you everything the skill does. Many of the ingame terms such as CPU, powergrid, capacitor, hardpoints, turret hardpoints and high, medium and low slots on ships also require research to understand. There's more but well look at this section already.
- Hard-Coded Hostility: You can work for the human pirate faction if you're willing to brave the lawless space they make their bases in. Good luck trying to negotiate with the Rogue Drones or Sleepers, however.
- Hated by All: Goonswarm Federation, to pretty much everyone in EVE but themselves. They literally brought down the rest of EVE on themselves (Twice, actually, during two World War Bees). In WWB 1, the Imperium (led by Goonswarm) was defeated and driven off from their home regions in the North, forcing them to move back south to Delve, with some alliances (FCON and CO2) leaving and eventually dying alone. The Moneybadger coalition did not pursue the Imperium, as they lost their funding from ISK casino I Want Isk, which was banned by CCP. The WWB 2, declared by Legacy Coalition (Led by TEST) as war of extermination, saw the Imerium fight for survival. And against all odds, despite losing vast majority of their space and after over a year of fighting, the Imperium emerged victorious, angrier and more vengeful than ever. Legacy coalition fell apart and many smaller PAPI coalitions ceased to exist.
- Hell Is War: Civilians captured by Sansha's nation during first incursions were used to crew the prototype vessels used in current incursions and given cloning access. That means they are dying to ISK and LP hungry capsuleers over and over again in combat, with no hope of truly dying. Also applies on many other NPC's who use cloning, even on capsuleers themselves, but they seem to be rather content with their situation.
- High-Class Glass: Enforced Trope with the Royal Exchange monocle which costs $70 in real-life money. Player reaction has been overwhelmingly negative.
- Hired Guns: DUST 514 allows players to interact with EVE players as this. In other words, Sociopathic Heroes hire Mooks!
- Hoist by His Own Petard: BoB when its overly serious attitude causes the alliance being disbanded by a disillusioned director and then Goonswarm itself when they forgot to pay their bills.
- Holy Ground: The New Eden system, which is where the EVE Gate is located. Considered holy not merely within the NPC religion of the Amarrians, but actually by the players themselves to a small extent. It is quite common for players to make pilgrimages to the system, because of the mysticism surrounding the lore of the Gate. You can't actually reach the Gate in game, but it is common for players to place markers showing how far they traveled towards it.
- Horde of Alien Locusts: Drones (little robot ships that assist capsuleers) fill this niche. They have a tendency to become fully sentient and escape to form hives that attempt to expand and assimilate any planets or stations they encounter. Even the player-controlled ones can have this effect; they are small and difficult to target, and a full flight can tear apart a large battleship while the owner stays safely out of range.
- Hub Level: Jita, high-sec trading center in Caldari space. The other three empires have their own hubs but Jita trumps them by far. Unlike trading hubs in most games which feature a cluster of NPC shops, there's nothing special about Jita except its location (location location). It became a trading hub through players following economic pressure. Hell, Jita is even run on a separate server, to keep the universe from crashing completely if too many players enter Jita.
- Perimeter, one of the systems adjacent to Jita, on the route that (used to) connect Jita to Amarr. Player-owned starbases and structures cannot be constructed in Jita (once again to protect the server), and as a result, Perimeter has hundreds of player-owned structures, including the infamous Tranquility Trading Tower, the only Keepstar-class XL Citadel in high-sec.
- Thera, the only named wormhole system. It has a constantly shifting series of wormhole connections all over space, usually around 12-15 of them. Several groups live out of the stations there, and take full advantage of its nature.
- Each of the five Drifter Wormhole systems have between 60 and 70 outgoing wormhole connections to different places in the galaxy at all times.
- Human Resources:
- Played just straight in an old world event involving a scandal over the trade item and tasty treat "Protein Delicacies".
- Deleted characters are killed and converted into biomass, according to flavor text in the character select menu.
- The key ingredient in making Quafe+
, possibly normal Quafe and all.
- Humans Are Bastards: Repeated in a lot of the fiction and in promotional videos.
- Humans Are Cthulhu: The Revelations II
trailer ends with the line "We are the enemies of the gods." Capsuleers are seen as inscrutable deity-like beings with unknown motives and moralities by planetside populations.
- Hyperspeed Escape: Know in game as "Warping Off". A significant portion of PvP is preventing it by scrambling the warp drive or deploying a bubble.
- Hyperspace Lanes: Jump gates are used to travel between systems. In addition, Titans (large, capital-level ships) can create their own jump gates.
- Inevitable Tournament: Twice a year CCP holds the Alliance Tournament
. A series of matches pitting small teams from various player Alliances against each other, for cash prizes and unique ships. True to the spirit of EVE, it is plagued with player corruption. There are recorded incidents of ransoms being offered. A number of fights blatantly thrown, with one side activating their ship's self-destruct mechanisms or violating the rules. In the 8th Alliance Tournament, Hydra Reloaded negotiated said match throw while the match was still being fought(albeit victory for Hydra was all but academic at that point).
- Note that Hydra Reloaded are well-known trolls, and their opponents claim that the deal never went through.
- Hydra Reloaded did it again in the 9th tournament; in the finals, their opponents, Outbreak, had all but won, then threw the match. The fact that Outbreak and Hydra are essentially the same people may have something to do with it.
- The Alliance Tournament was cancelled in 2019, however it was reborn in 2020 as the player-run EVE_NT Alliance Open, featuring all of the spirit and drama of the original Alliance Tournaments.
- Inferred Holocaust: Once again, the single largest and bloodiest battle to date, the Battle of B-R5RB
. Among countless smaller ships, 75 Titans, 13 supercarriers and 370 dreadnoughts were lost. Now, if one considers the fact that in-universe, even capsuleer-piloted ships do have crews (which was stated explicitly several times by CCP), it starts to get chilling. While no hard figures have ever been released, it is relatively common to assume in the EVE community that battleships have a crew of about 1000, dreadnoughts something about 5000, while supercarriers and titans might have a crew of about 10000 (which seems plausible if one considers the size of Titans, which is mostly over 10 kilometers). Multiply that with the amount of ships lost. That's right, in-universe, about three million people died in one single battle of a few hours.
- Although the crew have life pods of their own to escape to, which may soften the blow, if one considers up to 60% of all the destroyed ships crew safely evacuated before the ships were destroyed it still adds up to over 1 million people lost. And that is only the best case scenario.
- Although never given exact figures, there are said to be thousands to potentially hundreds of thousands of people on the Citadels that Capsuleers blast into space dust. Despite the heavy death toll associated with them colonists continue to flock to them. Now not even the largest and most powerful of the Citadels, the Keepstar Fortresses, are safe. The first Keepstar has been destroyed possibly ending millions of lives in an instant (although, again, it is said in official reports evacuations proceeded through the siege which may soften this blow).
- In-Game Banking Services: players proposed banking services though, as befits the universe, all of them were frauds, whether by conception or by execution
: since players had no way to ensure the bankers would actually pay up capital and interest and the bankers themselves had no way to force debtors to pay up their loans, along with the fact the game had plenty of liquidities circulating, banking was simply unpractical for the time being.
- In-System FTL: Warp drive can get you anywhere within a star system in minutes, but to reach another system you need to warp over to the jump gate.
- Ironic Echo: "There are no Goons." "There is no bob.
"
- Ironic Nursery Rhyme: Description of the Delve region, referring to the leader of the NPC Blood Raiders.Bloody Omir ran awayHiding from the light of dayMade a base out in the nightFar far from the Empire's mightHolders think they all are safeProtected by the Emp'ror's graceSilly people, they should knowYou shall reap just what you sowBloody Omir's coming backMonsters from the endless blackWading through a crimson floodOmir's come to drink your blood
- ISO Standard Human Spaceship: The Caldari approach to starship design. Knowing the Caldari it would be unsurprising if their ships really were ISO standardized designs.
- Mordu's Legion and Outer Ring Excavation (ORE) ships also exemplify this trope. Legion ships are all flat, angular designs, with dark blue-gray coloring and plenty of antennas. ORE-designed ships, being oriented toward mining and industry, resemble spaceborne factories more than anything else.
- Item Crafting: The entire basis of the game economy. Except for the part that is driven mainly by stuff blowing up.
- A stated goal, one which they are well on the way to achieving, is to make everything in the game player created. With the exception of skill books, every ship, weapon, and item in game was created by someone.
- It's All About Me: Quite common among capsuleers — but curiously, it's usually only those among the most successful and the least successful that tend to be this way.
- Jolly Roger:
- The flag of Guristas pirates omits crossed bones or swords but adds rabbit ears to the skull. Presumably in honor of their founder and current leader, Korako "The Rabbit" Kosakami.
- The banner of the Blood Raiders cult depicts a fanged, horned skull on a mottled red and black background, again omitting crossed swords or bones.
- Karma Houdini: Many players. Most MMOs will let you kill other player characters with no legal recompense, but how many explicitly say it's completely legal to scam other players, so long as you don't break their game rules in the process?
- Karma Meter: Sec status theoretically gives a rough indication of how a character approaches the game, with a 5.0 character being a shining paragon of CONCORD's virtues and a -10 character being the bottom of the pirate scum barrel. It really tells you nothing about how a given player will act. A 5.0 character might suddenly turn on a juicy target of opportunity on a whim while an inveterate -10 might ignore a helpless hauler and find something bigger and better to blow up.
- Most 0.0-based players have a flat 5.0 due to ratting there for cash or merely something to do. Most 0.0 players are also the ones who have extensive experience with blowing your stuff up.
- Kill Enemies to Open: Justified, as enemy ships carry jammers for the acceleration gates which separate mission pockets. Kill the enemy ships and the jamming stops so you can proceed.
- Killer Rabbit: The Rorqual, the capital sized mining support ship for out of high sec, is seen by most players as just a indy ship. The Rorq is actually quite beefy and hits like a carrier when it does fight however, so anyone trying to kill a properly fitted rorqual better bring a good sized fleet and/or a capital if they hope for any success. ESPECIALLY if said Rorqual has back up, which it can use it's insane bonuses to capital sheild repairs to make sure you can't kill its friends.
- TEST loves useing Rorquals to fight for the sheer lulz potential of killing hordes of people with one, doing things like hot dropping them into fleet battles, makeing everyone do a double take as a mining ship tears through their fleet.
- Got a massive buff in the Ascension expansion, vastly increasing its mining potential and giving it a weapon that can make it invulnerable for 7 minutes. Naturally, it gets used as a long range super tackler because of its ability to fit so many scrams.
- Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: The Caldari and Minmatar certainly seem to think so, with their racial weapons being railguns and missiles for the former, autocannons and gatling guns for the latter.
- The Caldari take it literally, with many of their ships providing bonuses to Kinetic damage.
- Law Enforcement, Inc.: Each Caldari megacorp operates its own private police force or paramilitary, while the Federation has hired Roden Shipyards' extensive fleet to assist in border patrols. ("Coincidentally", the current President is Jacus Roden, founder of Roden Shipyards.)
- Leave No Survivors: Most NPC pirates will show mercy (or more probably apathy) towards your escape pod, but standard protocol for capsuleers who will even go as far as scrubbing their own team's wrecks and pods to keep them away from the enemy. sociopathic heroes indeed.
- In Empire Space, pods slip into warp almost instantly. Getting a lock on a pod before it warps is extremely difficult (unless the pilot is AFK), so pod kills are fairly rare in space that doesn't allow bubbles.
- In Abyssal Deadspace, and during the months of the Triglavian Invasion, NPCs will not show mercy to escape pods. And if a ship is destroyed in the Abyss, there is no way to recover any of it equipment once that abyssal pocket collapses.
- Level Grinding: Skills level via real time, and it does not give a damn what you're doing during that time. They'll even level while you're offline. However, getting the money to pay for your ships, upgrades, and whatnot all require some manner of grinding.
- There is status grinding. In order to be allowed to run higher level missions for an NPC corp, they have to like you enough. In order to do that, you usually have to run many low paying missions first. Several perks, such as being able to create jump clones at certain stations, also depend on high status, so players often will have to go through this many times.
- Long Runner: One of the absolute arabian long-distance stallions of the MMO world, EVE has had a nearly 20-year run with plenty of indications that it's good for at least another ten. It infamously outlasted its original main competitors,Earth & Beyond and Jumpgate: The Reconstruction Initiative, by decades, and is one of the remaining, still-running MMOs from the pre-Warcraft era, albeit from the tail end of that era.
- Lost Technology: The story of scientific progress in New Eden is dominated by discovering and relearning Lost Technology, from jump gates to Tech 2 and Tech 3 gear to Jamyl's mystery superweapon. Players with the Archeology skill and tools can recover artifacts and databanks which can be used in building T2 and T3 stuff.
- Not to mention the one and only superbly kickass Federate Issue Megathron. What Entity gets, Entity keeps.
- Love Ruins the Realm: In the Metagame, no less. The Tribute War and the collapse of the NCDot alliance partly happened because of an internet romance between one of the NCDot CEOs and the CEO of the pirate corporation Black Legion; this dragged NCDot into a war that only half of their members wanted, and NCDot broke apart due to a friendly-fire incident between a Black Legion vessel and a vessel that was owned by the industrialist wing of NCDot.
- Luck-Based Mission: Invention.
- Apocrypha introduced Reverse Engineering, which is doubly luck based. You have a 30% chance of a successful job, then a 25% chance of that job producing the desired result.
- MacGuffin: A mission item: "Device" This is a thing. It does stuffnote .
- Macross Missile Massacre: The only adequate description for the new Caldari and Minmatar Doomsday Weapons.
- The old Minmatar doomsday
probably counts too.
- All races can use missiles but the Caldari especially like them and have dedicated missile boats. This becomes most obvious when up against a squad of Caldari NPCs.
- Several player-controlled Caldari ships stand out in this regard; the Caracal-class cruiser and its variants, the Navy Issue Caracal and the Cerberus, fitted with rapid light missile launchers (anti-frigate weapons) will shoot in a near-continuous stream; the Navy variants of the Drake battlecruiser and Raven battleship mount eight launchers each for full effect; Tech 3 destroyers and cruisers fitted with missiles; other battlecruisers with bonuses to missile launcher rate-of-fire, fitted with Heavy Assault Missiles; Battleships like the Raven fitted with Rapid Heavy Missile Launchers (similar to Rapid Light Missiles, but anti-cruiser); capital ships fitted with Rapid Torpedo Launchers (as anti-battleship weapons). Taken to its maximum point by the Caldari Nighthawk and Minmatar Loki, both of which are optimized to use Heavy Assault Missiles, and which despite only sporting five launchers each have ludicrously large fire-rate bonuses.
- The old Minmatar doomsday
- Magnetic Weapons: Long-range hybrid guns are explicitly railguns.
- Mana Burn: Capacitor Warfare weapons — respectively, Energy Neutralizers (or "Neuts," which remove a significant amount of energy from both the victim's and the user's capacitors) and Energy Nosferatus ("Nos" modules, which remove a much smaller amount from the victim but also restore it to the user). Most ships rely on their capacitor to use some of their modules and sometimes guns.
- Master of All: It's technically possible for a character to train to maximum level in every skill, and be able to pilot every ship at maximum efficiency, but those skills would take years of real-world time to complete training and wouldn't necessarily translate into player ability.
- Master of None:
- In some player's opinion, Gallente. Specifically, their fighting style requires lots of power intensive equipment that their ships just don't have power for.
- A few of their ships are the most favored out of their respective classes, like Thantos, Moros, and Nyx. special mention however goes to the Catalyst, whose dirt cheap price tag and ability to deal massive amounts of damage quickly make it ideal for "suicide ganking" ships in high and low sec. Because of this and its surprising effectiveness in PvP (where destroyers normally don't well)make it one of the most feared ships in the game.
- Also an opinion of tech 1 Minmatar ships. The Minmatar have some of the only ships that can be legitimately fit for either armor or shields (but therefore don't excel at using either), and Minmatar weaponry in particular has extremely long Falloff ranges, but relatively short Optimal ranges (making it functional at almost any range, but almost never able to live up to its full potential).
- MegaCorp: All the space-dwelling NPC corporations in the game are megacorps, occupying varying levels on the scale of "shady" and "not shady" and wielding significant influence. The Caldari megacorps are the state.
- Metagame: EVE Online's metagame is a vast and terrifying entity, with entire pieces of software written to allow simple tasks to be accomplished properly. Quite a few players, particularly those in 0.0 space, state that they hate the actual game, but the Metagame is fantastic.
- Metal Slime: The aforementioned Drifter Response Battleship, found listed under Damage-Sponge Boss, also fits here. Though having a 100% spawn rate under the right conditions, they are still hard to find, as they appear only through a special trigger at the end of the hardest sites in the hardest wormholes, and unusually for NPCs, will attempt to warp off when sufficiently damaged and threatened, as well as their massive piles of HP. In return for this, they drop a guaranteed 300 million ISK (!) worth of "Blue Loot" per kill.
- Mighty Glacier: The Amarr — They'd melt you out of the skies... if you couldn't run from them.
- Mile-Long Ship: Titans can be up to 18 kilometers.
- Mind Screw: The whole of the Black Mountain storyline.
- Alts. You could in theory be chatting to three or four separate people at one time, only they're all the same person and you have no way of knowing it! This is also sometimes used in scams — posting with alts to make it look like there's far more support for your "investment opportunity" than there really is.
- Money Spider: Killing pirate NPCs will net you the bounties placed on them.
- More Dakka: Specialty of the Minmatar race.
- The Rifter, a frigate around the size of a medium/large aircraft, normally fits 3 pairs of 200mm autocannons.note
- The Vagabond class Heavy Assault Cruiser is typically fitted with 5 pairs of Gatling Guns that shoot 220mm Shells.
- A lesser example would be Gallente ships configured for blasters; short range, high damage guns. A Thorax cruiser can peak around 700 damage per second, a pack of them flown by the Star Fraction alliance is famous for taking out a Band of Brothers tournament fleet setup they boasted was unbeatable. And God help you if you land in blaster range of a Megathron battleship.
- And then, the mere existence of a 6-barreled, 2500mm autocannon kind of proves this point.note Finalized by by the Ragnarok titan, which fits six of these "Hexa-25s", and thus carries enough gun to output roughly 7000 megatons of kinetic and explosive energy per second.
- And then for dreadnoughts, High-Angle Weapons. Battleship-sized weapons, multi-mounted on capital hardpoints. For the Naglfar, this takes the form of three pairs of turret hardpoints, each carrying three quad-barrel turrets. Someone order 72 800mm autocannons?
- Mundane Utility: In Eve, the God-Emperor of this trope is Chribba
and his fleet of mining-fit supercapitals, including four Titans. This would normally invite mockery and mass-ganking from the entire player-base, if not for Chribba being so universally beloved.
- Carriers and super carriers get used for this quite a lot, to the point they are often called the Swiss army knives of eve. When not in combat they are often used for hauling (especially assembled ships and drones) and can even be seen helping out with mining ops.
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The Thukker Tribe. Thukker Tribe. Also an example of a Punny Name.
- Some player pun names adopted from technical glitches; (Node Crash), which was inspired by yet another character named Server Lag, and is first cousin to the character Jump Queue... all things EVE's players fear. Node Crash's player has noted that they inevitably die first in combat against other players, perhaps because of fear she'll invoke her name.
- Most capital ships in general have names like this, but the Hel-class Supercarrier gets a special callout for its desciption, which ends with the line: "Imagine a swarm of deadly hornets pouring from the devil's mouth. Now imagine they have autocannons."
- A lot of player-run corporations get this reputation at some point, in particular CODE., any Low-sec pirate group, and most high-class Wormhole corporations.
- Special shoutout goes to Republic University School. Their level of sanity is below standard, to the point where a guy has, on a couple of occasions started a campaign against CONCORD... And even recruited newbies for support.
- "There was this explosion, and I'm in a small, egg-shaped ship now. Did I level up?"
- Appropriately enough for this trope, Republic University's corp ticker is RUN.
- Hilariously averted by Signal Cartel: despite sounding like a criminal organization, they're pacifist explorers who host a public map of wormholes to and from Thera.
- Negative Space Wedgie: The EVE Gate, for starters. Then there was whatever bit of ancient technology triggered the Seyllin Incident, which also lead to the formation of hundreds of unstable wormholes to uncharted space that. The systems that said wormholes lead to tend to have various physics-altering anomalies as well.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The Minmatar's "Elder Fleet" attack on the Amarr Empire wound up doing this. They arguably lost more in personnel than they freed in slaves, they gave Jamyl Sarum the perfect moment to make her "miraculous" entrance and become Empress of the leaderless-for-years Amarr Empire, and the Defiants, a band of well-led and well-armed Minmatar pirates who were long a thorn in the Amarr's side, were destroyed to a man holding off the Imperial Navy long enough for the Elder Fleet to escape. Ultimately, the attack wound up helping the Amarr a lot more than it hurt them.
- From Bad to Worse after Jamyl Sarum uses her nice new super weapon it gets blown up
. Which directly causes the destruction of Seyllin I and the creation of unstable wormholes
.
- From Bad to Worse after Jamyl Sarum uses her nice new super weapon it gets blown up
-
Nintendo Hard: Here is the learning curve
◊.
- No One Could Survive That!: CONCORD Police ships are so powerful that CCP has specifically stated that they consider surviving an attack from them to be an unacceptable violation of the game's mechanics.
- While it's actually possible to evade Concord somewhat reliably if you know what you're doing, it requires an extremely specific setup that is useless for doing anything you would get Concordokkened for in the first place, meaning it's largely done on the test server for bragging rights.
- Novelization: EVE: The Empyrian Age and Templar One by Tony Gonzalas.
- Numbered Homeworld: All planets and moons are numbered after their star, except for planets in capital systems. Stars outside empire control have alphanumeric names like B-VIP9 or IZ-AOB, with a few exceptions, mostly in NPC controlled nullsec. The most famous of these is Poitot note .
- Systems in wormhole space are denoted JXXXXXX (with one exception), where the X's are numbers (for example: J123456), leading wormhole space to be also known as J-Space. A few of them have dashes in their name, as well. Players will informally call their home holes a name though, such as Nova or Rage. Only one wormhole system has an official in game name, Thera, and there is a random lava planet in class-6 wormhole space named Eyjafjallajokull
.
- Systems in wormhole space are denoted JXXXXXX (with one exception), where the X's are numbers (for example: J123456), leading wormhole space to be also known as J-Space. A few of them have dashes in their name, as well. Players will informally call their home holes a name though, such as Nova or Rage. Only one wormhole system has an official in game name, Thera, and there is a random lava planet in class-6 wormhole space named Eyjafjallajokull
- Omnicidal Maniac: The Equilibrium of Mankind, and most players.
- One-Man Army: The players, but only against NPCs. Even in the fiction pod controlled ships can take down dozens of non-pod controlled ships with ease.
- One ship is usually enough to take a Level 4 Blockade. It's just faster with 3 Battleships with very powerful drones and guns and a Stealth Bomber rather than 1 Battleship.
- One Nation Under Copyright: Caldari State.
- Only Mostly Dead: Players who die have their consciousness instantly transferred into a clone body. Technically, the person doesn't even die. When the capsule detects a hull breach in the pod, a probe injects itself into the capsuleer, scans the capsuleer's brain, and transmits the information almost instantly. All they've done, really, is swap bodies before the body in the capsule dies.
- Our Elves Are Different: Jovians are a secluded human-esque race who have such an amazing understanding of technology that they have found a way to live forever (without cloning!) but have one weakness: depression... sound like Tolkien Elves to anyone else? Just rewrite it a bit to be magic and forests rather than space ships and sectors of... space.
- Outside-Context Problem: The Drifters are shaping up to be this, given that every single Drifter Battleship has a Doomsday Device and one of their first major actions was to kill Jamyl Sarum
.
- The Triglavian Invasion became an Outside-Context Problem when hundreds of Capsuleers sided with the invading Triglavians, and started tearing apart empire space. While most of the empires faired decently, the Caldari State were decimated. The aftermath of the invasion has subsequently become an Outside-Context Problem for traders and industrialists, as there are now suddenly several large holes in the stargate map (because whatever the invaders were doing to the stars in the invaded systems blew up the stargates), including the most important trade route in high-sec being completely cut off.
- Palette Swap: The pirate ships, with the notable exception of the Angels and the Sansha, are just the bog standard ships that players fly with different colour schemes. Tech 2 and faction variants are similar, although this is a bit more justified.
- Most T2 ships usually have bits added on somewhere to varying degrees.
- Perpetual Motion Machine: The Industrial Career tutorial has you build one. And mocked in the flavour text for the Skill Thermodynamics:"Also gives you the ability to frown in annoyance whenever you hear someone mention a perpetual motion unit."
- Perpetually Static: Nothing changes in High-sec space. In 0.0, player run empires can rise, deploy stations and collapse through player activity.
- Jarringly averted by the Triglavian Invasion, which saw NPCs roaming through invaded systems attacking anyone in their path, and culminating in 27 star systems being effectively removed from the galactic map.
- Plasma Cannon: The short-range Blaster weapons favoured by the Gallente and to a lesser extent the Caldarinote .
- Player Versus Player: ALL of the game — EVE arguably stands for Everyone Vs Everyone.
- Considering market manipulation is a very real possibility in EVE and has been used as a weapon, arguably you don't even have to leave the station to be engaging in PVP.
- Proof of the market manipulation part.
- Referred to as "PVP Economics" or "Market PVP".
- Proof of the market manipulation part.
- As the game has continued, the dev's inclination to emphasize ship combat to the exclusion of all else has also become obvious to the extent that some have nicknamed the game "Counter-Strike In Space". Never mind that Eve is not a twitch shooter...
- Considering market manipulation is a very real possibility in EVE and has been used as a weapon, arguably you don't even have to leave the station to be engaging in PVP.
- Point Defenseless: Ship weapons are generally poor at hitting targets faster or smaller than the ship they're mounted on. Cruisers and battleships have difficulty dealing with frigates, and should best leave them to allied frigates and destroyers or drones.
- There are two notable exceptions to this — larger missile-using ships can sometimes mount rapid launchers which fire missiles one size category smaller (but require considerable reload time), and capital ships eventually received the ability to mount entire clusters of "lighter", anti-battleship weaponry. Capital ship High-Angle Weapons were designed to solve this in the dreadnought-vs-battleship scale, however their accuracy against cruisers and below is still questionable.
- Enemy missiles generally cannot be shot down. Defender missiles exist, but can only be used against Bombs.
- The solution: Smartbombs, which aren't very smart as they hit everything within a certain radius with damage. Including incoming missiles, though, so fleet combat often involves "firewalls" of interlocking smartbombing ships, being repaired by logistics ships to keep the firewall going despite the fact they're hitting their neighbors.
- Police Are Useless: CONCORD's protection is very... idiosyncratic by real-world standards. They will not intervene for theft, but will warp in and vaporize you for even a single accidental shot at another ship. It is possible for a thief to trick you into being blown up and make off with your stuff right in front of the police ships. Justified in-universe as CONCORD has given up on trying to parse the morality of capsuleers, and basically considers incidents between them to be Evil Versus Evil. They settle for a strict letter-of-the-law approach to maintain some approximation of order. The Odyssey expansion made it somewhat more realistic by flagging thieves as legally killable by anyone with no repercussions.
- Portal Network: Solar systems are connected with stargates, while sufficiently advanced groups of players may wield the portable version, jump portal generators.
- Alliances can also build their own full-fledged networks in space they control, using Jump Bridge Arrays.
- The expansion Apocrypha added unstable wormholes that allow players to travel to unexplored solar systems.
- Power Crystal: Laser turret crystals. And Mining Crystals.
- Powered by a Forsaken Child: It is quite possible that clones of capsuleers might not contain their original consciousness, but it's implied that most people who use cloning don't care anyway. In-Universe beliefs about this vary. The Amarr believe that the soul does not make the transfer and that clones are an abomination, if a necessary one — families of the nobility are forbidden from cloning (Jamyl Sarum's "miraculous return" to save Amarr after her ritual suicide in the Succession Trials has to be danced around very carefully). The Intaki (a sub-culture of the Gallente) dabbled in consciousness transfer for centuries as part of their religious beliefs (think Reincarnation of a sort); their scientists made many of the advances in cloning tech, including Jump Clones. And so on.
- The Power of Trust: In a game where any member of your corporation can kill and/or rob you without police intervention, trust ends up being one of the most important assets a corporation can possess. EVE Online is rather famous for cases of said trust being magnificently broken.
- Chribba. A man who somehow managed to be trusted by the majority of EVE — trusted enough, in fact, to handle multi-hundred-billion ISK transfers and ship trades. His third-party transfer service is well-known and loved throughout all corners of EVE and has built him a reputation as "The Only Honest Man in EVE". At one point, grateful members of an alliance gave him a star system. And to top it off, he mines veldspar in a dreadnought. In hi-sec.
- Red Frog Freight. In a game where letting anyone else touch your stuff in any way whatsoever is normally considered the height of stupidity, Red Frog is trusted to ship player goods all over the game. The very few times they have been robbed or double-crossed they have received almost universal sympathy rather than the usual pointing and laughing.
- Powered by a Black Hole: Triglavian ships utilize naked singularities contained on the external hull as their vessel's primary power source.
- Precursors: The humans that settled New Eden via the Eve gate before it collapsed. These may or may not have included (sources are hazy) the four lost civilizations whose artifacts are spread around space: the Yang Jung, the Takmahl, the Talocan and the Sleepers. We don't know what happened to the first two, but the Sleepers and the Talocan somehow got to wormhole space, populated it, and whatever remains puts a hurting on explorers who venture near (see
Demonic Spiders). This hints around the cataclysm that heralded the (re)discovery of wormholes makes you wonder if they planned it.
- The Jove survived the destruction of the Eve Gate best, and though they still exist, little has been heard from them in a long time. As a species they're threatened by a genetic disease that could wipe them out and last known, they were on the decline.
- Prestigious Player Title: "Capsuleers" or "Empyreans".
- Privately Owned Society: In a way, since literally every single organization of any kind is a corporation, from player guilds, to branches of governments, to charities, to universities, to pirate bands, to terrorists, to zombie cults... everything is a corp. No exceptions.
- Private Military Contractors: Many player corps and some entire alliances advertise themselves as mercs for hire. Often it boils down to slightly more targeted piracy with cash paid up front, but the better mercs get it done professionally.
- Promotional Powerless Piece of Garbage: The Interbus Shuttle. It came with the boxed set of Eve and a new account must be created in order to get it. It is a Gallente Shuttle with a Palette Swap and double the cargo capacity. Meaning it has zero offensive ability, extremely limited defensive abilities and 1/10 of the cargo capacity of a frigate.
- Most anniversary and christmas gifts fall under this catagory as well. The Apotheosis is a shuttle with a cool new model, and the Zephyr will not be targeted by Sleeper drones, but is poor in every other respect and can only fit what amounts to be a core probe launcher.
- Past Christmas gifts included Snowball Launchers as a fun but useless-for-killing weapon, and the snowballs all melted shortly anyway. Nigh useless now, they and the melted snowballs sell for millions on contracts. Snowballs have since become a regular winter affair, and Fireworks (which work the same as snowballs) have become common giveaways for other events.
- Averted by the three SoCT ships. While freely distributed as part of anniversary events, the ships are Jack of All Stats and extremely cheap for their sizes.
- Proud Warrior Race Guy: The Minmatar Clans, particularly the Brutor tribe.
- Psycho for Hire: The majority of "mercenary" corps fall under this heading. Many of them are thinly disguised pirates who use the unprovable excuse of being paid to wardec your corp, and most of the rest are thinly disguised pirates who actually are being paid to wardec your corp.
- Punch-Clock Villain: The empires' attitude towards low and null security space vacillates between military oppression and withering apathy, and unsurprisingly many citizens in these areas decide to join pirate corporations to escape their worlds half empty. It can get so bad that in one instance citizens literally signed over their solar system
to the local pirates. This raises some troubling implications about the actions of capsuleers, with only a few beleaguered voices such as the Servant Sisters of Eve calling them out on their sociopathic "heroics".
- This is largely limited to the Angel Cartel (referenced above) and the Guristas Pirates. The other major pirate factions are portrayed in a much more consistently negative light.
- Purely Aesthetic Gender: The ability to pilot your ship is determined exclusively by your mental capacity. Even the Race and Faction you choose during character creation only determines where you start. Anyone can use any item or ship in the game, or fight for any side, once they get the right skills.
- Ragnarök Proofing: The backstory states that the pre-Amarr invasion Minmatar Empire used still-functioning stargates they found to move around a few star systems. At this point, these stargates were somewhere around 15,000 years old.
- Ramming Always Works: Collision damage does not exist, however you can change the direction and velocity of an opponent's ship by applying sufficient ramming force. This enables the use of "bumping" as a combat tactic, where you ram your target in order to keep them out of range of the stargate or station docking ring (and thus prevent escape).
- Bumping is also used to prevent enemies from being able to align to warp. Combined with heavy energy neutralization, bumping was the only effective way to kill capital ships in low-security space before the introduction of heavy interdictors. However, this can also be a detriment to your allies (preventing them from being able to warp), leading to the rise of fleet commanders yelling "Don't Bump the ***ing Titan".
- God help you if your station's shields have been sabotaged though (a fact only alluded to in The Novel). See Dropped a
BridgeMothership On Him, above. Does not apply on a ship whose shields have been depleted however.
- Randomly Drops: Faction and officer gear. The Salvaged Material is also determined the moment the wreck appears. And it's random (though certain enemies have higher chances of dropping certain types of salvage loot (Angels, EOM, Amarr, Blood Raiders all have high chances of giving Armor Plates, Serpentis and Gallente both have a decent chance of giving interfaces)
- Rat Stomp: IN SPACE!!!!111!!1 In Eve lingo, NPC piRATes are "rats" and the act of hunting them in asteroid belts "ratting". While technicaly optional, it is part of the tutorials, and most PVE combat missions have some variation on it.
- Reading The Enemy's Mail: There are several instances of real-world hacking on player alliance forums. Spies are also assumed to be nearly universal, to the point where many major alliance leaders freely admit to lying flagrantly and constantly to their own membership to stymie spying efforts.
- Reality-Breaking Paradox: You can't do it, but there is apparently a method involving the local Bags of Holding. "You cannot place a Planck generator container within another Planck generator, as it will cause a graviton harmonics chain reaction whose end cannot be determined."
- Rebellious Spirit: The Minmatar Republic.
- Refining Resources: Let's say that Planetary Interaction, a lone facet of the whole process, has around 120 resources spread across five tiers, each with it's own multiple-resource inputs and uses. And Planetar Interaction is considered simple.
- Reformed, but Not Tamed: Aritcio Kor-Azor. Maybe.
- Religion of Evil:
- The Sani Sabik, an heretical, blood-obsessed splinter group of the Amarr faith. While some sects are fairly innocuousnote , the Blood Raiders are... rather unpleasant.
- The Amarr religion itself a more debatable example. On the one hand, it does have a basic system of morality common to most religions. On the other hand, it condones slavery and forced conversions.
- Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: Amarr ships named after various religious/mythological concepts, some Caldari ships named after mythological creatures (e.g. Tengu, Kitsune, Phoenix, Chimera), plus a few Minmatar ships named after parts of Norse mythology (Ragnarok, Loki, Sleipnir, Hel, Valkyrie), Gallente tend toward Greek and deities with a sprinkling of Sumerian (Ares, Ishkur, Nyx...). Minmatar also have the Wolf assault ship, said in the description to be named after "a mythical beast renowned for its voraciousness".
- Rule of Symbolism: The shape of the capsule just so happens to be similar to a design that, in Amarr religious symbology, means "man become god."
- Sandbox: If you want to, do it.
- Scandalgate: LarkonisGate
- The T20 scandal, when a CCP dev was caught giving rare T2 Blueprints to his alliance, Band of Brothers. This fueled a lot of the hate that they would get later on. Also resulted in the creation of the Council Of Stellar Management, a player-elected oversight council.
- Brisc Gate: The 2019 banning, and subsequent un-banning, of CSM member (and real-life politician) Brisc Rubal, over allegations of breaching the CSM's NDA. The allegations were eventually declared false, resulting in Brisc's un-banning.
- Scenery Porn: The Dominion expansion brought a revamp to the planet models that lands them firmly in this category, in combination with other graphics updates over the last couple years.
- Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale:
- The University of Caille — the largest university in the cluster — has a grand total of less than half a million students. That puts it on par with City University of New York.
- Of course one has to wonder where all the mass for the stargates are coming from since each gate weighs 5 orders of magnitude more than the Sunnote .
- Combined with the fact each gate (volume of 10,000 km3) has a volume 1.4 trillion times smaller than the Sun (volume of 1,400,000,000,000,000,000 km3) and you wonder how they don't collapse into a black holenote .
- The reason for this is that mass is a key determining factor in lots of thing, most notably how things interact when they bump into each other, even things that are held still like stations the things that bounce of them are (or were) effected by mass. While almost everything in space can be bumped/rammed, planetary bodies, stars etc cannot be. Soooo they gave all of the big things in space that they didn't want anyone to ever be able to move and gave them impossibly vast mass values, while planets and stars have realistic(ish) values. Chances are the guys putting in mass values for different things never spoke to each other.
- It is even more egregious with ship dimensions and cargo capacity. An example: A deep space cargo vessel, explicitly designed and built for shipping, might be about 700 meters long — 715 m in the case of a particular tech II Caldari transport, to be precise, and, judging by the scale, somewhere between 80 and 130 meters high and wide, respectively. That same Caldari vessel has a cargo capacity of 5500 m3. This is explicitly given in the ship info. Now, the cubic root of 5500 is...slightly over 17.5. That's right, the cargo hold of a ship which is over 700 meters long apparently is, if a cubic shape of said hold is assumed, about 17.5 meters long, high and wide...on a ship specifically designed for transport of goods across interstellar distances, with all the energy needs that implies, which thus should require an extremely high ratio of mass transported versus energy expended in order to be profitable. That's not a slip-up anymore, it's mind-bogglingly inane.
- You can eject cargo into a "jet can," a small barrel like structure that can hold a staggering 27,000 m3 by default. Any ship has an infinite number of these things on boardnote , but for some reason most hauling ships can't even reach a fifth of that capacity in their cargo holds. Even if every ship assembles the jet can before loading it and jettisoning it into space, that still means ships have 27,000 m3 of space it could be using as storage but instead spent on shooting comparatively small amounts of cargo into space.
- Second Place Is for Winners: Invoked like crazy in the game's politics. If a corp or alliance's membership perceives they are losing a war, the largest portion will flee in droves, and often try to join the enemy. So it is standard practice for leadership to construe what objectively appears to be a loss as having achieved some secret agenda. In a handful of cases, this has turned out to actually be truth.
- Secret Police: When the Empyrian War started, the Gallente got their version of this called "The Black Eagles", because the Caldari invasion was partly enabled by an admiral who sold them information. Later, they tried to enforce an attempted nationalization of several Gallente megacorps...and Jacus Roden, founder of Roden Shipyards, backed by the other corps, successfully faced them down. He became the new President soon after.
- Also applies to the Providence Directorate, or Provists (essentially Tibus Heth's gang of enforcers) until they were deposed by the megacorps in the aftermath of the Battle of Caldari Prime.
- Self-Deprecation: Eve Infomercial Spoof
from Fanfest 2011.
- Serious Business: On rare occasions, players have spent more on this game than they would on Ferraris. People try to win battles by getting the power cut to their enemies' alliances' computers... in real life.
- Corp/Alliance forums and TS/vent servers are attacked or compromised to prevent their use or to gain information.
- Some players have 6 or 7 accounts... or more...
- Spending large amounts of money on ingame money or items is rare though, since CCP bans anyone caught doing it, with the exception of selling game time codes, which works out as EXTREMELY expensive.... Buying enough codes for a titan or mothership plus fitting would cost thousands of dollars. People have done it though. Large purchases of ISK, particularly when combined with buying a character, are often followed by losing an extremely badly fit capital ship or other expensive ship due to having no idea how to fly it, followed by being laughed at on the forums.
- Plus, if you haven't noticed from the intro text, the game has its own goddamned governmental body to provide real-world democratic oversight. Have you ever seen this in any other game!?
- Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundssonnote , CCP's in-house economist, publishes Quarterly Economic Newsletters.
Yes.
- Shout-Out: "Frak" is the Unusual Euphemism of choice among Eve players, and has even been spotted in Eve Voice ads and mission descriptions.
- The tagline for the planet mining update? ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS.
- In the system of Dead End (two jumps away from the EVE Gate), orbiting the fifth moon of the fifth planet, is a massive black monolith. The description reads "It's full of stars."
- The description of the Caldari Naga mentions that, before it entered production, the ship appeared in the popular Police Procedural CPF Blue.
- Shoot the Medic First: Logistics ships and their Tech 2 variants are the medics of space ships. They can repair armor and boost the shield of other ships. Of course, they're always the ones who get popped first by an enemy fleet; however to try to avert this, they are also very small and hard-to-hit targets, and have extremely high damage resistances.
- Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: On the cynical side.
- Sociopathic Hero: Most of the players are, indeed, sociopathic heroes. Yes, the players, not the player characters. If you aren't prepared to deal with someone who you grew to know as a close friend over months or even years turning out to have been lying the whole time in an effort to get in position to rob you of every last isk you accumulated in the game, you shouldn't play EVE. If you are that someone, congratulations: you're playing as intended. Behavior is encouraged by the developers that could get you jail time in any other context.
- Sons of Slaves: The Minmatar were invaded end enslaved by the zealot Ammar Empire several centuries ago in New Eden's timeline, and successfully rebelled against their masters a bit over a century ago. Though the Amarr (begrudgingly) recognize the young Minmatar Republic, many Minmatar are still slaves in the Empire, and their options for being freed are generally either by assimilating into the Amarr culture (where they will be second class citizens at best) or by force. Since, up until the Empyrean War, the two were officially at peace, this remains a hot political issue. Many freed slaves are fairly assimilated, but much of the Matari culture involves efforts to revive their tribal culture, and the Brutor especially tends to carry the Proud Warrior Race flag.
- Sorting Algorithm of Evil: More dangerous enemies will only usually appear in lower-security space, but it's possible to get at them right from the start of the game if you so desire. The reason for this is that it becomes impossible for more notorious criminals (and that includes players) to enter high-security space
- Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: Depending on the way the market is set out, it is usually possible to buy some of the best weaponry in the game from the station you start in — but it is highly unlikely you'll be able to use/afford it immediately.
- Space Fighter: Fighters can be launched by Carriers and Motherships. Unlike other ships, they're too small to fit the capsule system and thus cannot be controlled by players. Instead they are controlled by AI, much like drones.
- Controlled by AI only as far as game mechanics go, anyway. If you zoom in on an individual fighter, you can clearly see a cockpit with a humanoid figure inside
◊. Carrier-based fighters are the only "manned" drones in the game.
- Controlled by AI only as far as game mechanics go, anyway. If you zoom in on an individual fighter, you can clearly see a cockpit with a humanoid figure inside
- Space Friction: Some message boards have speculated that EVE space has the viscosity of WD-40. Word of God says the in-game physics engine is actually based more on fluid dynamics than real zero-g physics.
- The in-universe explanation is that warp drives cause an effect similar to friction. A ship without one could reach any sublight speed with enough acceleration. Oh, and you can't turn them off once they've been turned on, because they explode. This in turn is the Hand Wave for ships suffering Critical Existence Failure in combat.
- Space Is an Ocean: All of the race navies use nautical rank names, space has plenty of friction, copious amounts of nebula in deadspace complexes, and many ships have visible bridges, decks, et cetera. The Caldari Corax
◊ takes the ocean theme to the next level, as it's pretty much a Space U-Boat
◊ injected with the typical Caldari design choices.
- Space Is Cold: Destroying a player's capsule yields the player's Frozen Corpse. Some people collect corpses as trophies. Partially justified in most cases, as most activity takes place many astronomical units from the system's star, where corpses really would freeze if given time. However, being blown up tends to cause instant flash-freezing rather than the hours of cooling suggested by thermodynamics.
- And, of course, some people even sell corpses to the highest bidder, should the corpse be of a very notorious person such as a major Alliance CEO.
- Space Is Noisy: Because the sound is actually just the ship simulating the noises that events might make if they were audible. This is supposedly done to prevent a capsuleer from going insane. Since every capsuleer is a mass murderer, well...
- To quote the
old meme: "EVE has sound?". (Meaning, many players play with the sound off either to save computer cycles or to not interfere with voice coms.)
- Players sometimes comment on why the pod would simulate the sound of wind. The pod is of Jovian design, but the first ones given to mainstream humans were built with the Caldari, whose ancestors worshipped the winds.
- Also of note, the "wind" is actually the most real of the sounds to be heard in EVE, bar UI clicks and beeps. It's been described, in a few places, as the solar wind; could even be the pod's converting it to audio and streaming it from external sensors.
- Wormholes. Select to look at them and not only do all of them hum constantly, but some of them even transmit the (simulated) radio chatter from the systems they connect to, creating a constant unrecognizeable babbling of several different voices and sounds. There are stories of people who're convinced of being able to understand fragments, thinking those holes talk to them if their wormhole observation shift was just slightly too long. Something that is easily to dismiss and laugh at, until you realize on one of your own shifts, that other wormholes create a sound that is disturbingly similar to a slightly agitated, deep breathing.
- To quote the
- Space Pirates: Every. Single. Character. Even CONCORD counts, since they hire criminals—i.e., the PCs—to do their dirty work.
- Space Police: CONCORD, the galaxy wide apolitical police force with a ten second response time. LAPD eat your heart out.
- Spaceship Girl: Aura, the main computer AI which is, apparently, shared by every capsuleer ever, who provides tutorials and help options, as well as vocally informs the pilot of just about everything. A Chronicle tells the story of her history
.
- Space Trucker: You can become one, hauling other players' goods around can be very lucrative. Red Frog Freight is particularly well-known.
- Special Effect Branding: The Amarr have sleek, symmetrical, shiny golden ships with beam weapons. The Gallente have smooth-shaped, almost organic-looking green ships with Attack Drones and blasters. The Caldari have utilitarian, gunmetal grey/blue, angular ships with railguns and missiles. The Minmatar have rust-brown/red heaps'o'junk which fly at unsafe speeds and the larger ships fire car-sized artillery shells. Some of the minor factions also have their own designs. Angel Cartel fly ships that resemble the Shivans mentioned above, the Sansha ships look like they have been designed by a sadomasochist, the rogue drones are basically mechanical insects and the Jove fly Gigeresque biomechanical ships.
- Spectacular Spinning: Projectile turrets, with the newly animated turret models, typically feature some variety of multiple spinning barrels. A few of them, however, have only a single barrel, which doesn't stop them from having seemingly pointless spinny bits.
- Status Quo Is God: No matter how many times you run a mission or kill NPCs, the enemy never seems to run out of ships, men or equipment. In four years, despite constantly being stated to be on the brink of war, almost nothing of note has happened to the four Empires.
- On the other hand, 0.0 space is outside of the four Empires' control and left entirely for the players to shape. Changes in Alliance's member corporations, Coalitions between different alliances, and the regions controlled by different alliances occur constantly; some alliances might be completely destroyed and replaced by others. See the collapse of the Triumvirate, the disbanding of Band of Brothers, and Goonswarm moving in its entirety to the BoB's former space for the more prominent examples.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: Yes, the enemies you fight in the Gallente mission "Exploited Sensitivities" are unidentified mercenaries who are in no way affiliated with the Caldari Navy. The fact that they fly Caldari Navy ships in Caldari Navy colours that drop Caldari Navy loot is totally coincidental. Move along, citizen.
- Tenuously Connected Flavor Text: Most ships' flavor text is a short in-universe history of the ship in question. But for most Strategic Cruiser and Titan class ships, the flavor text is tangentially-connected quotes from in-universe literature or interviews:
- Strategic Cruiser:
- Legion: Only clear at the end:Revelation burrows through the material world, devours creation's soil, digests the thoughtless void, and produces significance with God's grace. From emptiness comes meaning, essence from existence, soul from matter.Is God through the wormhole? Did God grant us this boon, this new technology, a revelation from on high? These weapons are God's new prophecy, domain, and blessing. Let us use God's grace and prepare New Eden. We are God's soldiers, weapons, glory. Our people are God's army. Together, we are the legion.-The Heresies of Hinketsu
- Legion: Only clear at the end:
- Titans:
- Avatar: Referencing the name's original meaning as a god's manifestation on the mortal realm, this only makes sense if you know that old meaning. This from the Amarr Scriptures
:
Casting his sight on his realm, the Lord witnessedThe cascade of evil, the torrents of war.Burning with wrath, He steppeddown from the HeavensTo judge the unworthy,To redeem the pure.-The Scriptures, Revelation Verses 2:12 - Komodo: From an interview of one the founders of its creating organization, Guristas:"We're the Ninth Mega now, have been for a long time and we're necessary to the entire setup. The Caldari State was getting stale, hidebound, all that "Heiian" bullshit. Think the Big Eight give a fedo's fart for that? That's holoprop mindflood. Strictly for the dopes. The proles looking for an excuse not to stick it to Big Daddy Mega. And the eggers who spout "Glory to the State". They're the worst. All that power and they bow down before Mother State and Daddy Mega. Sickening.""What? Ah yeah, Ninth Mega. What do I mean? Look, the Big Eight, right? They carve up the State between them. They get together, decide what each Mega will run, make it look good for the masses, bit of competition here, a bit of warfare there. That's all show. They're vertically integrated megacorps that run entire sectors of the economy because they've all signed up to a plan. Well, we're the anti-plan. We're the Ninth Mega because someone's got to take care of crime, right? That's us, the Mega of Crime!"— Korako "the Rabbit" Kosakami, interview with Ret Gloriaxx of the Scope's Galactic Hour with Ret Gloriaxx
- Avatar: Referencing the name's original meaning as a god's manifestation on the mortal realm, this only makes sense if you know that old meaning. This from the Amarr Scriptures
- Strategic Cruiser:
- Theme Naming:
- Animal Theme Naming: Caldari ships are typically named after animals. Usually birds (Cormorant, Raven, Ibis, etc.) but occasionally non-avian creatures as well (Scorpion, Caracal, etc.)
- Arms and Armor Theme Naming: Minmatar ships are usually named after things that invoke images of destruction and violence, such as weapons (Scythe, Broadsword), fierce weather (Typhoon, Hurricane), or physical attacks (Rupture, Stabber).
- Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: Amarr ships are named after religions ceremonies, punishments, and events (i.e. Armageddon, Heretic). Gallente ships often have classic Greek mythological names, (i.e. Phobos, Hyperion). Some Minmatar ships are named after Norse mythology (i.e. Loki, Nidhoggur)
- There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The usual result when a day old n00b blunders into a 50+ man 0.0 gate camp. Also seen in roaming gangs, where one man tackles a defenseless mining ship, and waits patiently so the entire gang can get in on the kill.
- Not to mention any time someone pisses off CONCORD (the NPC police force in high-security space). They have a response time measuring in seconds, and weapons far more powerful than anything available to players — so powerful, in fact, that actually managing to escape CONCORD's wrath after invoking it is considered by CCP to be an exploit and can get your account banned.
- Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: The Jovians were a spacefaring nation when the eve gate collapsed, and were far enough away that none of their technology was destroyed by the ensuing shockwave, which makes them far more developed than any of the other races. They've spent most of that time perfecting their cloning and evilutionary biology in order to drive out their base instincts and other undesirable traits. They even have an "Academy of Aggressive Behavior" which teaches people how to act aggressively in spite of their genetic conditioning so that they can preserve that option just in case it's ever needed. However, somewhere something went wrong and they ended up introducing the "Jovian Disease" into the gene pool. The Jovian disease causes its victim to fall into an incurable depression which invariably leads to suicide.
- Those Two Guys: Kruul and Zor.
- On the game's dev team, CCP Torfi Frans and CCP Soundwave, and CCP Guard and GM Hinrik H.
- Too Awesome to Use: Every so often, CCP hosts contests with unique ships as prizes. While these are usually either just palette swaps of normal ships or have minor improvements at best, if you win one, you do not ever, ever attempt to fly it until you are ready to lose it. The second you undock with one, every single player in the game will attempt to murder you simply so that they can brag that they blew up an irreplaceable ship.
- To the Pain: The Amarr
and Gallente
Methods of Torture chronicles make use of the second and first variant, respectively.
- Torture Technician: The main character of Methods of Torture — The Minmatar is one.
- Tragic Villain: In the fiction, Idonis Ardishapur. Rare among Amarr of his era, he saw great things for the Minmatar people, generally treated them better than everyone else, and was even involved in a secret romantic relationship with one whom he truly loved. Then they killed his father, the Royal Heir, putting him into that position with all the demands and responsibilities thereof - including the responsibility to punish this murder and act of rebellion. Severely. With great reluctance, he ordered his House's fleet to evacuate all Amarrians from the planet and then glass it, nearly committing genocide of the Starkmanir in the process. What's left of the planet has since become a haven for Minmatar exiled from their own society, and a law Idonis secretly enacted keeps the Amarr from interfering with them.
- Training from Hell: The failure rate for Capsuleer applicants is a staggering 99.993%, and with very good reason. The whole training program lasts five years, and that's assuming you're not part of the 86% of applicants that fail outright due to not meeting the prerequisites to even begin. The first year is academic, capped off with a six-hour-long oral exam, with anyone who fails to be perfect getting sent home. This is followed by two grueling years of constant physical and mental conditioning, during which around a tenth of aspirants will outright die due to being unable to handle it. Only then can aspirants actually get practical experience piloting. Even then, many who actually make it through the third phase will end up washing out due to the fact that the final test is voluntary euthanasia to get the aspirant used to transferring into clone bodies.
- The Turret Master: Sentry drones can turn drone carriers into these.
- United Nations: The CONCORD Assembly.
- Universal Ammunition: Ammunition exists in four sizes, and each turret group has it's own types, but within each type and size, ammo is universal.
- Unobtanium: Asteroid-mined ore refines into exotic-sounding materials such as Zydrine, Tritanium and many others that make the advanced technology of EVE possible. The clearest example of unobtainium is the main ingredient of tier 3 ships: nanofullerenes and fullerites, found only in wormhole space and mostly salvaged from the wrecks of Sleeper drones.
- Used Future: The Minmatar were once very technologically savvy, but the enslavement by the Amarr hindered their advancement considerably. When the Minmatar rebellion came around they had to use what they had. Early Minmatar ships are not suited for prolonged warfare, relying on hit and run tactics and overwhelming numbers. Their earlier ships reflect this. In the current time, the Sebiestor and Thukker tribes foster some of the best engineers in the cluster, with the development of the jump freighters credited to the Thukker specifically.
- Victory Is Boring: Periodically, nullsec will stabilize with one of the major power blocs winning a war and controlling the largest portion of it. Unfortunately, most null security pilots are there for shooting things in the first place. Stagnation inevitably sets in, and boredom becomes a major problem for most of their soldiers. Keeping them from leaving or picking fights with each other can become a major headache.
- War Memorial: Several times over the game's history, the developers have created permanent memorial sites in places where significant battles took place. Among the monuments:
- "Titanomachy," for the 75 Titans and 4,200+ other ships destroyed at the Battle of B-R 5 RB;
- "Wreck of Steve," the wreckage of the first ever Avatar-class titan to be destroyed;
- The wreckage of Fort Knocks, the first Keepstar-class citadel to ever be built.
- Warp Whistle: Null security alliances can deploy Jump Bridges, which allow for instant travel (for a small fee) between systems that would otherwise take several jumps.
- We ARE Struggling Together: Usually, war in this game ends when an alliance melts down from a combination of external and internal pressure. Even one of the strongest alliances in the game, Goonswarm, has fallen victim to internal politics, going through at least one cycle of disbanding and reforming.
- We Buy Anything: You can find players willing to buy almost anything. Low-end modules are bought for mineral value when reprocessed. The reprocessing plant itself will reprocess just about any ship/module and give you the minerals in return for taking a percentage unless you have good enough standing with the station owners.
- We Will Spend Credits in the Future: The currency, known as ISK (Inter-Stellar Kreditsnote ), is not so much a global currency as it is a global exchange currency. Planetary economies and sometimes individual planetary nations have their own currencies, and ISK is set up as an exchange medium to manage the obscene amounts of money being used at the inter-stellar level. You can retire comfortably planet-side almost anywhere in the cluster on single digits of ISK Despite that, the economy is such that the de-facto unit of currency is in millions of ISK. Ask someone for a price, and they say '50', they mean 50 MILLION ISK.
- Weapon of Mass Destruction: Titan-class ships can fit a Doomsday Device; each of the four major races in the game have their own version which inflicts their faction-specific damage type, and forks to multiple targets in the vicinity of the first. Only ships of similar size can survive their damage.
- The mysterious superweapon Jamyl Sarum deployed on the Minmatar fleet over Mekhios from her battleship, wiping it out completely and forcing the other two fleets to retreat. The nature of the weapon is top secret: it is a reverse-engineered Terran device.
- Another mysterious superweapon causing a star in Turnur to go supernova and destroy most structures found within the system, and otherwise heavily damaging anyone within the blast radius.
- What Measure Is a Non-Super?: In space, if you're not a Capsuleer, you life is worth nothing. Your family won't even be notified of your death.
- Wide-Open Sandbox: A defining trait of the game, as established above.
- Wretched Hive: A large chunk of the game, as mentioned above.
- Jita (the premier trade hub, overflowing with scammers and pirates), Rancer (a choke point in a pipeline from Jita to Rens - the Minmatar trade hub - which is stiff with more ruthless pirates), Aunenen (a choke point like Rancer leading to a resource-rich "island" in Caldari territory, also heavily camped by pirates), and HED-GP (the primary entry to southern null security systems from Amarr territory, whose entry stargate is usually a camped, warp disruptor bubble-filled kill zone.)
- Thera, by design. A system in wormhole space with a lot of connections to other systems that're always shifting due to the nature of wormholes. It's also the only wormhole system with NPC stations, leading to lots of camping.
- You Have Researched Breathing: There are a number of skills that make no sense as something you'd need to learn. For example, you can buy stuff from distant stations from the beginning, but you need a skill to sell things remotely. And up until December 2010's patch, it was imperative that you learned to learn. There were eleven skills in the game that raised corresponding attribute points, and those attributes were and still are used to calculate the speed at which you learn other skills.
- Zerg Rush: The tactic that really gave Goonswarm its name. Instead of trying to win wars with capital ships, the early Goons fought by flying massive numbers of frigates and destroyers against enemy fleets, and while they died in droves, they still destroyed several important enemy ships. As an added bonus, the ammunition used against each frigate cost more than the frigate itself.