EVE Online

When you go to Orgrimmar, the Zeppelin overhead is coded in. The shop keepers are scripts, and not even smart ones.
 When you go to Jita, you sell to humans, you buy from humans, you are scammed by humans. There's a player flying that mile-long cargoship currently eclipsing the sun, and for that matter the other 17 giant f*cking scifi transports dotted around your screen.

It looks like something out of Babylon 5 or a Star Wars "crowd shot", but none of it is staged. Everyone is there for their own reasons, and you might never know what it is.
—Forum post, on the subject of Eve's appeal.

EVE Online is a space-based Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, created by CCP Games. Players take the role of a new breed of elite spaceship pilots -- "capsuleers", named for the mechanism they use to control their ships, in a far distant future setting where four galactic empires, numerous player corporations/alliances and a number of NPC factions vie for control and influence.

Unlike most MMOs, the player base is not divided into different stand-alone servers, but coexists 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[when?] 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, flavorfully, a slightly grittier Star Trek - EVE gives new players a ship, a handful of credits ("ISK"[1] ), and a very large sandbox to play 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. Not to mention what you can do for fun in your free time.

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 of players. Feats like this, that might get the responsible group banned in about any other MMO, are legal gameplay in EVE and these events become player-generated Crowning Moments of Awesome. On the other hand, EVE is known for having not so much a learning curve as a learning cliff - though recent[when?] updates have smoothed things out for new players considerably. One EVE blogger/podcaster calls the game "a sandbox with landmines" due to the often brutal Player Versus Player focus of the game. It keeps some potential players away, but many players see it as a good thing, on the assumption that you have to be at least halfway competent to survive in 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, and three novels. Many of the tropes that reference NPC characters come from these sources.

EVE is the first online game to have its own democratically elected (real world) 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 of the game. They also help mediate between CCP and the player community in case of scandals. As with other parts of any massive community the CSM has moments of drama between themselves and with the larger playerbase (also often seen as a good thing).

There is an FPS tie-in known as DUST 514 set to be released summer 2012 as a Play Station 3 exclusive.

Tropes used in EVE Online include:
  • 0% Approval Rating: Tibus Heth, Caldari CEO and now effective leader of the state.
  • Aborted Arc: Only the Amarr and Caldari COSMOS missions are in a state remotely resembling completion, and only then because they were the first to be released. Gallente and Minmatar COSMOS suffer from bugged missions in the middle of lengthy chains, and some of the nullsec COSMOS missions don't even have descriptions.[2]
  • Absent Aliens: There's plenty of flora and fauna, but nothing sapient. Borderline cases include:
    • The Jove, who were certainly human once but bio-engineering has changed them dramatically.
    • The Sleepers; far as can be told, they're descended from an ancient human civilization that predate the current ones and whose artifacts can be found in New Eden (Minmatar space particularly), but no one really knows for sure what they are now.
    • Rogue Drones, Gallentean creations that evolved their own form of semi-intelligence and live in hives. See below.
  • After Action Report: No single hub for them but popular reading topics on Eve forums, written for PVP battles, usually in the context of corp/alliance wars.
    • Killmails are used as exactly this, but very bare-bones by the standards of an AAR.
  • 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; however, when a few prototype drones escaped their research environments and managed to hitch a ride in passing starships, reprogramming the ships' own drone compliments with their new software before taking them over and reproducing advanced copies of themselves, a galaxy-wide pest problem was result. CONCORD treaties now ban research on superintelligent autonomous AI, and the trend in research has moved towards interfacing artificial intelligence with human intelligence, such as Capsuleers.
  • Allegedly Free Game: DUST 514 will be a free-to-play game.[3] It was initially considered to be as a regular CD (think Electronic Arts' latest games having an "Online Pass"), but was scrapped along development. Instead, this will have microtransactions, like some new maps.
  • Alternative Calendar: Played with: the game uses a modified Gregorian calendar called YC (Yulai Conference), with a zero point slightly over 100 years in the game's past, the year in which the empires formed CONCORD and the calendar standardized. 2011 corresponds to the in-game year 113.
  • An Entrepreneur Is You: The economy of Eve is entirely player run. Players can form corporations which make money from activities as varied as trade (both selling long and hauling), manufacturing, mercenary work and even banking.
  • Another Dimension: Some of the Wild Mass Guessing around the nature of wormhole space involves this as a theory.
  • Anti-Poopsocking: Skills are trained in real-time, at a speed based on the player's attributes. This understandably leads many to assume that older players have an unbeatable lead over new ones, but in truth the number of skills for any given task is very much finite; particularly since all skills cap at level five. Focusing on a specific skillset, such as maxing out one's abilities in a particular ship class, can easily result in six-month-old characters who utterly destroy four-year veterans in single combat.
  • Attack Drone: Favoured weapons of the Gallente. Other races mostly use them as secondary weapons, typically but not exclusively for dealing with frigate-sized ships.
  • 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.

  • Ascended Glitch: Individualized videos in captain's quarters.
  • 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:
    • The various Titan Doomsday Devices, which have a face melting base attack power of two million damage. The flip side is that it immobilizes your ship for half a minute and offlines cloaking, jump drives, and the doomsday device itself for ten, making the Titan pilot all but a sitting duck.
    • The Doomsday Weapon used to be broken in that it was basically a giant stupidly overpowered Smart Bomb, able to literally vaporize hundreds of enemy ships in one stroke that weren't extremely well-tanked Supercarriers or enemy Titans (and crash the server sometimes because of the lag). Dominion nerfed the weapon to be single-target only but upped the damage. The Crucible expansion has nerfed it even further by not allowing it to be fired on ships that aren't Capital Ships.
    • 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 in other systems. They can also use cloaks and don't have to worry about not being able to target anything right as the cloak is turned off. As useful as it is to be able to launch a fleet of invisible battleships with no targeting delay behind enemy lines, they're all crippled by being very expensive compared to other invisible ships (stealth bombers), their very short jump range and when fitted for DPS they are very squishy.
    • The Talos, the Gallente Tier-3 battlecruiser. Designed to mount a full rack of eight battleship-grade hybrid weapons, with its bonuses optimized for large particle blasters, it is the ultimate sub-capital sustained damage-dealer ... in theory. The problem is that in order to throw the insane damage it's designed for, it has get to point-blank range, and without the defenses you'd find on a battleship or capital ship, it's likely to get melted by defensive fire before it gets close enough for those blasters to do more than scorch the enemy's paint job.
  • Badass Normal: Nedar. Works for an insanely cutthroat drug-dealing corpoartion, successfully engages in suicide missions on a regular basis, maintains a relationship with two women at once, manages to outwit a treacherous member of his fleet and defeats a capsuleer.
  • Back from the Dead: Jamyl Sarum and Sansha Kuvakei, as well as anyone else with a clone.
    • Cloning tech is usually described as not something you can just wear as a backpack, but breaks from this exist; it also makes killing off background characters difficult.
  • The Battlestar: The few ships capable of carrying manned[4] fighters really don't qualify.[5] A number of subcapitals are borderline cases; a fair number of ships are specifically designed to use both drones and turrets, but they're borderline cases at best- only five drones can be deployed and active at any time.
    • Pretty much played straight in the case of the Guardian-Vexor, a Gallente cruiser special edition ship that can field up to 10 drones at once. Also, a certain skill used to allow control of extra drones up to 10 total drones at once, though this has since been changed to a 20% per level damage bonus.
  • Beam Spam: Specialty of the Amarr.
  • Bio Augmentation: The Jove are masters of this, to the point it's debatable if they're human any longer; they've made themselves superhuman and engineered away their emotions. They also gave the Caldari clone tech for reasons known only to them.
    • The Chronicle A Beautiful Face deals with a company who has developed the technology to swap faces into anything a person wants. When Walking In Stations (now officially "Incarna") is released this tech will probably be available to the player characters to justify character customization.
  • Black Market: The "Unholy Rage" banning of over 6000 macro accounts in June 22, 2009. Led to a timer being placed on the forums as the macro miners sought revenge. Extensively examined by the lead economist at fanfest
    • In-Universe, the manufacture of drugs, including combat boosters, is a trade that a few players have taken up. CONCORD is allowed to shoot you for carrying contraband (but actually detecting them is chancy). Most pirate factions have fingers in the black market and Intaki Syndicate, though not pirates, depend on the black market for their livelihood since when they were kicked out of the Federation, they were forbidden to settle planets.
  • Blue and Orange Morality: Because they treat bodies as little more than shells and wield spaceships capable of killing tens of thousands of people in a few minutes, any capsuleer who claims to have moral standards will almost inevitably end up like this, even if they don't realize it. A lot of capsuleers avoid this problem by simply not even trying.
    • Nuclear ammunition for projectile and missile weapons exists in the game, and capsuleers of the same corporation will occasionally fire on or destroy each other "for the lulz" or as training. Consider what this means in terms you may be more familiar with: capsuleers will use nuclear weapons for entertainment.
    • Goonfleet's rules seem to be something like this. Do whatever you want to the "pubbies" and the enemies, but God help you if you fuck with another goon.
    • The Jove also qualify. Completely 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.
  • Body Backup Drive: Dead players automatically download into cloned bodies.
  • Body Count Competition: The purpose of every killboard ever. E-peen waving has never come with so many numbers.
  • Boring but Practical: Frustrated by the lackluster performance of their missile defense batteries, many high security Caldari station managers turned to their other racial weapon, the ECM battery. The result was the dickstar, a defense designed to literally bore attackers off the battlefield by ensuring they wouldn't achieve target lock for more than five to ten seconds at a time. Since ships with ECM immunity aren't allowed in high security space, only the most persistent pirates continued to attack them.
    • Also, mining tends to be the most reliable way to make money (to build replacements for all those ships that keep getting blown up), but it can be mind-numbingly tedious. Fortunately, the game has an in-client web browser...
    • Alternately, you can haul things from one planet to another, play the market, refine and sell ore and metals, or any number of other things that are, potentially, just as boring as mining to someone who doesn't care for such details. Mining actually isn't all that efficient of a revenue gathering method; it is, however, a reasonably reliable one (barring griefers or pirates) and one that you can potentially do even if you have somehow literally lost everything you own, since the free ship you get as a mercy if you have nothing else comes fitted to mine.
    • ECM ships in general are this. Logistics pilots also don't have the most exciting jobs (for some) but they're critical to fleet success.
  • But for Me It Was Tuesday: A capsuleer can come along, blow up your colony, destroy every ship in the fleet defending it, kill everyone you ever loved and leave you dying in the ruined shell of a space habitat. If you survive and by some miracle manage to get face time with them to talk about it, they probably won't even remember that it was Tuesday. In fact, they probably left about ten thousand people like you in precisely the same situation on that same Tuesday.
  • Call A Player A "Capsuleer"
  • Can Only Move the Eyes How Sansha's nation abducts planetary population. Nanites attack the motor neurons in the neck, causing the victim to walk out into the open where they are scooped up by tractor beams. Victims can, and probably do, scream all the while this is happening.
  • Cap: Averted on the area of player population by CCP's design, having no (theoretical) limit on the number of players that can be connected to the single server, and allowing an arbitrary number of players to be present in any given system. They did make a single exception for the Jita system, a very popular trade hub in CONCORD-protected space due to its popularity occasionally overloading the server, but the cap is so high and the server has been better optimized since the cap was placed that it is rarely a consideration.
  • Capsuleers Are Cthulhu: Capsuleers are primarily considered inscrutable, godlike beings with completely incomprehensible motives by planetside populations.
  • Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: The Ammatar seem to suffer from this. They were originally the seventh tribe of the Minmatar, the Nefantar. Historically, their collusion with the Amarrian subjugation of the other tribes earned them the contempt and enmity of their former brethren - then, recently[when?], 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 who had remained loyal.
    • In the game, habitual corp thieves quite obviously suffer from this - and most people who've betrayed just one corporation will automatically be assumed to, whether or not they actually do.
  • City Guards: The Concord Fleet, who will warp in and destroy any player that breaks their laws in high-security space (aka a "Concorddoken", delivered by "Pwncord"). CCP considers evading CONCORD's retribution to be an exploit due to their extreme power, and the overall fact that they'd be horribly ineffective City Guards if a player could avoid the repercussions of doing stupid crap in CONCORD space.
    • Concord is so strict. Pirates have convinced orca pilots to rep them, then fired on someone (sometimes the orca) and gotten both concorded. Pirate for the obvious reason. Orca for assisting the pirate, even if the orca was fired on. This has been patched as of the Crucible expansion. Any repper you have running will automatically turn off, and you'll be warned if you turn it back on.
  • Cloning Gambit: The players. After getting podded a player's consciousness (or at least some of the memories) is transferred to a new clone body.
  • The Coconut Effect: See Space Is Noisy below.
  • Color Coded for Your Convenience: Each faction has a color scheme for all their ships. The thumbnails for each ship even use a nebula background of the ship's faction's color.
    • For icons and nebulae: Gallente are green, Caldari are blue, Minmatar are maroon, and Amarr are gold.
    • For ships: Caldari ships are grey, Minmatar a dirty brown, Amarr shiny gold/tan, and Gallente light grey with dark tinted detailing, Jovians are green (but rarely seen and not accessible to players). Tech 2 variants are typically color-coded based on the NPC manufacturer, while faction ships are usually in some form of camo pattern.
    • Ammunition also uses this rule.
      • For Missiles and Bombs: Green/Dark Green is Kinetic, Red is Thermal, Yellow/Beige is Explosive and Light Blue is EM.
  • Comedic Sociopathy: Goonswarm Federation
  • Continuing Is Painful: Forgot to keep your clone and insurance up-to-date? You can lose weeks of training and billions of ISK with some ships. Particularly a capital ship or T2/T3. Or if you have faction/officer fittings. Or if you have a set of pirate implants in your pod.
    • New "Tech 3" ships in the game's March 2009 expansion, Apocrypha, cost players skill points in the skills required for the subsystems of those ships if they get blown up with the player inside. At worst, it takes about 5 days to train back up. How much this hurts you depends on your understanding of opportunity cost (time lost training subsystem skills you could be training something else).
  • Cool Ship: Depending on your perspective, any or every ship in the game. Even the shuttles or the free ships given to new players are significantly better than any current human technology.
  • The Con: A capsuleer named Cally set up the EVE Investment Bank, complete with capsuleer employees, and took deposits from other players. The Bank eventually had liquid assets of over 700 billion ISK... which Cally proceeded to steal. He bought himself a fully-upgraded war ship, placed a bounty on his own head, and retreated into deep space.
  • Copy and Paste Environments: The station environments are precisely the same for every station belonging to a particular race - even to that race's assigned pirate faction.
    • Space is also like this. The nebulae and starfields seen in the background of each system don't change much. Which makes sense, they're probably the same ones.
      • Notably 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.
  • Corralled Cosmos: The limitations inherent in star gate technology keep the faction neatly herded in and at each other's throats.
  • Corrupt Corporate Executive: In many ways, EVE is essentially Corrupt Corporate Executive: The Video Game. Not just the (numerous) NPC examples, the player-run corporations are generally filled to the brim with internal politics.
  • Crapsack World: Although not nearly as bad as some, billions are enslaved by the Amarr Empire 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 too keen on the idea of welfare. The Minmatar Republic has a standard of living comparable to Mexico. 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-story effect of the Caldari occupying much of their low security systems currently. 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.
    • "[N]ot nearly as bad as some"? Virtually every bit of lore that isn't purely informational is there to show just how terrible life in New Eden is. Whether you're the voice of the tutorial or a clown entertaining children, you still can't escape the tragic past. (Or, perhaps, a tragic death.) Special mention for having a series of short stories just on how each empire likes to torture people... and an entire book to really show off this trope.
  • Critical Existence Failure (Ships can and have survived a direct hit from a Doomsday Device only to get spanked with a couple of light missiles and die)
    • Very slightly averted, in that once you're low on structure HP, some damage will leak through to you components. They still work fine until destroyed, though, and chances are that your structure will be gone long before your modules burn out.
      • Still a most extreme example of the trope: A ship can have 0 shield hit points, 0 armor hit points and 0.1 hull hit points out of several million - and be on fire - and still function perfectly, until that last fraction of a hit point goes.
  • Cult: Quite a few actually, Sansha's Nation and the Equilibrium of Mankind merely being the most obviously immoral ones.
    • The Blood Raiders.
  • Curb Stomp Battle: There have been many, both in the backstory and in the player ran meta-game. Some stand out, such as when the Amarr tried to take on the Jovian fleet. (Key word: Tried)
    • In mid July 2011, The LEETPVP coalition decided to invade Goonswarm's home sector of VFK with a large fleet of super-capital ships (Supercarriers and Titans, with logistic support—the biggest ships in the game), thinking that they could set up camp and cut Goonswarm's head off. Goonswarm responded with over 2000 sub-capital ships, calling in every ally they have in the game, all to that single sector, swarming over the new POSes the supercapitals were last seen hiding in, preventing them from running away. Less than 48 hours later, all the LEETPVP POSes were destroyed and LEETPVP are spending billions in sub-capital ships just to try and buy time for their supercapitals to flee.
      • How bad did the above get? 72 hours later, not only did they give up invading Goonspace, they are actively running across the universe to escape the wrath of the Goons.
    • History repeated itself in December 2011 when White Noise. (extraneous period intentional) alliance and friends declared they were (again) 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 teritory approximately two weeks later. words
  • Death Is a Slap on The Wrist: If you keep your clone and insurance policies up to date. It still hurts more then other games, mind you; if you get a billion ISK (say about $40) 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.
    • Lampshaded in the forums in response to someone going Leeroy Jenkins against a hostile capital fleet with a single poorly-fitted dreadnaught and no backup:

Stupidity is not a survival trait.
Oh.
Dammit.
We're immortal.

  • Deflector Shields: equipped on all ships, the primary means of defense for Caldari and some Minmatar ships.
  • Did Not Do the Research: One corp lost their shot at killing a Titan because not one of their two-thousand player alliance checked the rules on sovereignty.
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Any baseliner that ever manages to seriously inconvenience a capsuleer. The Burning Life provides a particularly impressive example.
  • 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.
  • Divide by Zero: 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."
  • Doomsday Device: See Weapon of Mass Destruction below for details.
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • And interestingly, they by turns invoke both sides of the trope—the stereotypical Gallente is a full-bore Flavor 2 hedonist (with hints that it gets far crazier than real America ever goes, especially with things like weird plastic surgery being readily available) but until recently[when?] the leaders often invoked, and tried to live up to, the Flavor 1 ideal.
  • Earthshattering Kaboom: The Lost Technology device that opened wormholes in Apocrypha destroyed Seyllin I along with 2 billion inhabitants as a side effect.
  • 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 partcipated...though in their case typically for the lulz.
  • Even Evil Has Standards: Normally, scamming, griefing 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!.
  • Everything would be better without BoB.
    • And so it was.
  • Evilutionary Biologist: The researcher in Extinction Burst.
  • 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.
    • As of this update (June 2009), any individual modules, or an entire "rack", can be overloaded. In addition to increasing heat to dangerous levels, it also drains the capacitor faster, and incrementally damages the module affected.
  • 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 NPCs 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.
  • Fan Nickname: Numerous contractions or respellings of ship names and classes, alliances, and other things. An example can be seen in the entry for City Guards above in relation to being attacked by CONCORD; another version is "Concordoken" based on Memetic Mutation from Eight Bit Theater.
  • 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".
    • Well aside from the Tribal rule of Minmatar, They are also another aspect of The Federation. Except they are about freedom, a single way of life and serving your tribe in junk heaps)
  • Fetch Quest: A fair percentage of NPC missions depending on the type of agent you use.
  • Feudal Future: Amarr Empire
  • Five-Man Band: The five Amarrian Royal Heirs.
    • The Hero: Jamyl Sarum, newly-crowned Empress of the Amarr Empire.
    • The Lancer: Aritcio Kor-Azor, the new Imperial Chancellor.
    • The Big Guy: Yonis Ardishapur, appointed leader of the Ammatar Mandate.
    • The Smart Guy: Uriam Kador, a noted and respected philosopher.
    • The Chick: Catiz Tash-Murkon, the merchant princess.
    • The Sixth Ranger: King Khanid II, leader of the Khanid Kingdom, recently[when?] re-allied with the Amarr Empire.
  • Flame War: On the official forums, the Intergalactic Summit (IGS) forum is entirely in-character. This frequently results in roleplayed flame wars between the Amarr and Minmatar players. Or the Gallente and the Caldari players. Or the pirates vs the non pirates or the transhumanist anarchists vs. any of the empire supporters, or...
    • On the same, venture into "Corporation, Alliance, and Organization Discussion" (CAOD) at your own risk. It's player politics (particularly those of the space-holding alliances) with large doses of trolling and Serious Business.
    • While CAOD and IGS posters usually do not get along very well, there are certain individuals that both groups will actively troll for the exact same reasons.
  • Fragile Speedster: The Hat worn by any Interceptor pilot, but pushed quite close to eleven with the Crusader and the Claw. Meanwhile, the Dramiel, the fastest ship in the game, is often considered a Lightning Bruiser for a frigate, as it combines the mobility of an Interceptor and resilience/firepower of an Assault Ship in a single package, counterbalanced only by cost.
  • Fun with Acronyms: Exotic variants of the Target Painter have acronyms beginning with 'pwn'. Meta 1-4 respectively being: pwn, pwnd, pwnt, and pwnage
    • 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 wikipedia.
  • 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 the majority of an important compound was being produced via an exploit. After they fixed it, T2 prices shot up for a while.
    • The Trinity expansion installer included an OS breaking bug in it's 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.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation (Frequently averted. 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.
    • The company involved claims that the face-givers are horrible criminals, it should be mentioned.
    • 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. Additionally, FW captures currently[when?] have no gameplay effect except the system name changing.
  • 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.
  • Genetic Memory: The Intaki supposedly have this though 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.
  • 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 Tier 3 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 a Tier 3 battlecruiser can match 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).
  • 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 ISK.[6]
    • One mission involves getting a bunch of cash to a certain group to ransom some prisoners. "Fortunately, they asked for planetary currency which is nearly worthless in ISK." You're given an item to transfer to them; "A lot of money".
  • A God Am I: The players.
  • 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 unfairly kill players or steal their hard earned goods is allowed, including finding ways to subvert the anti-pvp measures in the beginning, "safe" areas.
  • Heroic Sociopath: EVERYONE. You think I'm joking, don't you?
    • Sociopath? Yes, definitely everyone. Heroic? There's maybe a few people who'll stab mostly bad guys in the back from time to time.
      • Most of the players are, indeed, heroic sociopaths.
  • High-Class Glass: Enforced Trope with the new 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, Heroic Sociopaths hire Mooks!
  • Hoist by His Own Petard: Bo B 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Humans Are the Real Monsters: Repeated in a lot of the fiction and in promotional videos.
  • 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.
  • I Fought the Law and the Law Won: CONCORDDOKEN!
  • 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 quite recently[when?]; 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.
  • Inferred Holocaust: It is written in the storyline that NPC ships have a crew as many as ten times the size of that of a player ship, meaning that every NPC battleship one kills is as a many as ten thousand people dead. And it is not uncommon to kill dozens if not hundreds of these ships a night! Hence the above Heroic Sociopath entry counts even for those players who never fire at another Player Character.
    • Every player ship (except small frigates and shuttles) has a crew. If your ship blows up but you survive in your pod? Well, that crew is gone. Although the crew is said to be significantly less than non-capsuleer ships by an order of magnitude, you're still killing hundreds or thousands of people when you lose, say, that carrier ship you just stupidly flew into low-security space.
    • A couple of recent[when?] Chronicle stories better establish that the non-capsuleer crew do have and use escape pods, which may soften this blow.
    • Worse, some people make a practice of self-destructing ships to collect the insurance money. You can imagine some of the crueler capsuleers not waiting for the crew to get to lifeboats. If you get stuck in wormhole space without scan probes, this may be the only way out.
  • 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 away
Hiding from the light of day
Made a base out in the night
Far far from the Empire's might
Holders think they all are safe
Protected by the Emp'ror's grace
Silly people, they should know
You shall reap just what you sow
Bloody Omir's coming back
Monsters from the endless black
Wading through a crimson flood
Omir'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.
  • Item Crafting: The entire basis of the game economy. Except for the part that is driven mainly by stuff blowing up.
    • Where do you think the replacement stuff to get blown up comes from?
    • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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[when?] President is Jacus Roden, founder of Roden Shipyards.)
  • Leave No Survivors: Averted with most NPC pirates who 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. Heroic sociopaths indeed.
  • Level Grinding: Averted with a bite back; 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.
  • Lost Forever: The Gold Magnate frigate. 5 out of 6 Imperial Issue Apocalypse battleships.
  • 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.
  • 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 stuff.
  • 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.
  • Massive Multiplayer Scam: One of the few examples in a Massive Multiplayer Online Game. The player group called Guiding Hand Social Club infiltrated a corporation, worked their way up the ranks before emptying the corp's wallet, stealing their assets and killing it's leader once.
  • Mega Corp: 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.
  • Mind Screw: The whole of the Black Mountain storyline.
    • Alts. Just 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: Justified. Killing pirate NPCs will net you money, but it's justified by the fact that you are collecting bounties placed on them.
  • More Dakka: Specialty of the Minmatar race.
    • The Nagalfar class Dreadnought has guns that fire shells the size of semi trucks FOUR at a time.
    • The Vagabond class Heavy Assault Cruiser is typically fitted with 5 pairs of Gatling Guns that shoot 220mm Shells.
    • The Rifter, a frigate around the size of a medium/large aircraft, normally fits 3 pairs of 200mm autocannons.
    • A lesser example would be Gallente ships configured for blasters; short range, high dammage guns. A Thorax cruiser can peak around 700 damage per second, a pack of them flown by the Star Fraction alliance is fameous 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.
      • The Moros, the Gallente Dreadnought, takes this to it's logical conclusion: with 3 "XL" Blasters, Tech 2 Sentry Drones (effectively portable turrets), and maxed out skills, they can do over 7000 DPS, which is more damage than anything else in the game by a very, very long shot. The downside? They're so unwieldy and turn so slowly that it has a hard time hitting anything smaller and faster than itself.
    • Of course, the mere existence of a 6-barreled, 2500mm autocannon kind of proves this point.[7]
  • Named After Their Planet: Inverted by the Amarr. Amarr Prime was originally called Athra, but was renamed after the Amarr nation conquered the Khanids and Udorians.
  • 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.
    • One of the Supercarriers (formerly Motherships) had this in its description: "Imagine thousands of Hornets pouring out of the Devil's mouth. Now imagine they have Autocannons." This may also just be a reference to the Hornet Light Drones.
    • 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?"
  • Negative Space Wedgie: The EVE Gate, for starters. Not to mention the newest addition—hundreds of unstable wormholes to uncharted space that appeared following a galaxy-wide Earth Shattering Kaboom. 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.
  • No Endor Holocaust: Averted - the planet Mekhios was devastated after a major battle was fought in orbit, according to official news reports.
  • 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.
  • Nothing Left to Do But Die: Remarkably common, even "in-character"
  • Novelization: EVE: The Empyrian Age 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.
    • Justified for reasons of practicality, given the number of systems, which can each contain up to 10 planets.
    • Exception: Major planets of the empire home systems will sometimes have their given name written next to their official numbered designation.
  • Oh Crap: Standart reaction from any player being ambushed by pirates players for the first time. Unexpected gate camp can trigger this quite often too.
  • 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.
  • Only Sane Man: It's hard not to think that CONCORD is composed entirely of the Only Sane Men in EVE.
    • Not that hard, actually. Just don't seek out sane people in RUN.
  • Our Elves Are Better: 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.
    • Somewhat subverted when you realize they gave themselves this disease through excessive genetic tinkering, and it hurt them so badly that they had to abandon most of their space. That space has since been taken over by the Angel Cartel.
  • 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.
    • Justified when you read the ships' descriptions, which tend to say they're heavily-modified, upgraded versions of the base hull.
    • Most T2 ships usually have bits added on somewhere to varying degrees.
  • Perpetual Motion Machine: Played straight in the Industrial Career tutorial, which has you build one. And averted 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: Played straight in High-sec space. Brutally subverted in 0.0, where player run empires can rise, deploy stations and collapse through player activity.
  • 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.
    • As the game has continued, the dev's inclination to emphasise 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...
  • Point Defenseless: Defender missiles need multiple hits to kill torpedoes, must be manually fired, cannot intercept missiles fired at friendly ships, and can easily be overwhelmed by multiple missile-spamming opponents.
  • 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.
    • In the expansion Apocrypha, unstable wormholes will allow players to travel to unexplored solar systems.
      • Or to other systems in known space, be they in (relatively) safe Empire space, or out in the middle of nowhere in Outlaw space.
  • 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.
    • Possible, right. CCP apparently haven't read The Origin of Consciousness. . .
    • 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.
  • 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 cayaclysm that heralded the (re)discovery of wormholes makes you wonder if they planned it.
    • The Jove technically count; they 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.
  • 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 Pieces 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 anniversery and christmas gifts fall under this catagory as well. The Apothesis 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.
  • 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.
  • Quicksand Box : The sheer number of options, career paths and play styles can be overwhelming. There is no limit and hence no guidance to what a player should do next.
    • Some learn this the hardway, if they let themselves get tricked into attacking CONCORD along with a certain non-CONCORD-friendly guy.
  • Ramming Always Works: Mostly averted. You can bump your ship into things and neither object will be scratched, attributed to shields actually working as advertised. 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 (especially motherships, which could not be warp-scrambled) in low-security space before the introduction of heavy interdictors.
    • God help you if your station's shields have been sabotaged though (a fact only alluded to in The Novel). See Dropped a Bridge Mothership 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)
  • Rape, Pillage and Burn: scorched earth attacks were once viable but now largely averted by sov mechanics. Arguably, roaming gangs targetting ratters has an element of this.
  • 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: the Metagame is better.
  • Rebellious Spirit: The Minmatar Republic.
  • Recycled in Space: Sansha's Nation are Zombies in Space. The Amarr are Space Catholics. The Gallente are the only democracy out of the four empires (although the Jovian government isn't known). The Caldari are Space Megacorps. The Minmatar, between the immigration they're sending to the Gallente and their battles with drug cartels, are Space Mexicans.
    • The Gallente race are originally French, but the Federation contains multiple races, including some Minmatar immigrants in the fluff, although you can't create a Gallente character from one of the Minmatar races. The Gallente Federation is very similar to America in many ways (see the Eagle Land entry)
    • The original settlers of Gallente Prime were at least a degree or two removed from France itself, having lived in Tau Ceti before migrating to New Eden. As well, the sect that the Amarr descend from are heavily implied to have been excommunicated by that era's "Unified Catholic Church."
  • Refining Resources : Let's say that Planetary Interaction, a bare facet of the whole process, got five tiers of resources, about 120 total, each with it's multiple-resource schematic. and it's considered simple.
  • Religion of Evil:
    • The Sani Sabik, an heretical, blood-obsessed splinter group of the Amarr faith. While some sects are fairly innocuous,[8] 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'
  • Ruined FOREVER: Some players were upset when CCP unveiled their new MT features. More so because they were added to support a mandatory change to the station environments... a change which was made to allow for the MT features. (As a side benefit, the new station features allow for public beta testing of the World of Darkness MMORPG.) It is currently[when?] possible to disable the new station environment.
  • 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 Mode: If you want to, do it.
  • Scandalgate: LarkonisGate
  • 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 coupple years.
  • Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: The Gallente Federation is listed as having trillions of citizens, and they're only the second largest empire in the cluster.
    • At the same time, the University of Caille—the largest university in the cluster—has a grand total of less than half a million students.
    • 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 Sun.
      • To clarify: the sun's mass is about 2*1030 kg while a stargate's mass is 1035 kg.
      • Combined with the fact each 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 hole. Note: when calculated out stargates are denser than black holes.
      • 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.
  • Screw The Rules We Have Connections: Band of Brothers in the lead-up to the T20 scandal.
    • Or so other alliances say...
  • 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. Recently[when?], 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.
  • Self-Deprecation: Eve Infomercial Spoof from Fanfest 2011.
  • Serious Business: Several 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 Guðmundsson,[9] 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 upcoming 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."
  • 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.
  • Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: On the cynical side.
  • 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: Averted. 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 - although it is highly unlikely you'll be able to use/afford it immediately.
  • Soylent Green: Pretty much just declared the key ingredient in making Quafe+, possibly normal Quafe and all.
  • 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.
  • Space Flecks
  • 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.
    • All There in the Manual 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 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: Justified in that 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.)
    • Fridge Brilliance: 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.
  • 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.
    • Response time varies widely depending on system security status, including large areas of empire controlled space with no coverage at all.
      • Don't let the above think you can get away with anything: official response time for CONCORD ships is between 2 and 20 seconds. If you get CONCORDed, you're screwed, make no mistake about it.
  • 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 from August 2013 tells the story of her history.
  • 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 Bo B's former space for the more prominent examples.
  • Stealth in Space: (via cloaking)
  • 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
  • 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. So with great reluctance, he ordered his House's fleet to evacuate all Amarrians from the planet, then glass the entire planet and kill everything on it, nearly completing genocide against the Starkmanir Tribe in the process. What's left of the planet has since become a safe-haven for Minmatar exiled from their own society, and a law Idonis secretly enacted keeps the Amarr from screwing with them.
  • 2-D Space: Ships can move in any direction, but bizarrely, there seems to be a universal "up"—stations are all oriented the same way, for instance
    • And most players pretty much ignore up and down, to the point where high or low areas are commonly used to hide ships that are too big to dock.
    • To be fair, all systems generally have planets orbiting on roughly the same plane, just as they do in our solar system, and because stations must be anchored to a moon or a planet, it's only reasonable to rotate them in such a way that is parallel to that plane.
      • And ships that aren't moving automatically level themselves at a right angle to "galactic north". Turns out the game made it to beta testing without any of these conveniences, but it was discovered the lack of direction made players feel lost and insecure and the developers became concerned that the game was too hard core. Conf. What Could Have Been
  • United Nations: The CONCORD Assembly
  • Used Future: The Minmatar, massively Many of their ship designs look so haphazard that they are often joked as being held together by duct tape, or called "flying junk-heaps" by those who mock them (One notable EVE machinima once referred to the titular Minmatar ship as "an explosion in a girder factory"). Those who like them declare "In Rust We Trust" and "never underestimate the power of Tech 2 duct tape". Some of the newer Minmatar ships have moved away from the more haphazard 'held together with duct tape' style of other ones (such as the Hurricane battlecruiser, the Maelstrom battleship, the Loki strategic cruiser and all the capital ships, which have a very definite style).
    • In the backstory, the Minmatar were once very technologically savvy (but didn't develop interstellar drives) and the enslavement by the Amarr hindered their advancement considerably. When the Minmatar rebellion came around, they had to use what they had, so early Minmatar ships are not suited for prolonged warfare and battles of the line, relying on hit and run tactics and overwhelming numbers. In the current[when?] time, the Sebiestor and Thukker tribes foster some of the best engineers in the cluster; Development of the Jump Freighters are credited to the Thukker, for example.
  • Unwinnable Training Simulation: Describes many core philosophies of Eve.
    • One of the most common types of PvP engagement involves the target, bait, and overwhelming force. Bait the target with something juicy, let it choose whether to engage or not, and if the target engages, crush the target with inescapable force. Often the target can perceive the trap and choose to disengage(or not to respond, if the target is in high security space), just as Sulu did.
      • Of course, the target that takes the bait can also be a bait that pretends to take the bait, summons an overwhelming force(often a super carrier nowadays) with a cyno to turn that opposing force into a target. That target-turned-force can also turn out to be a bait... with less than a couple more iterations a baiting attempt can escalate into a full blown fleet battle sporting several capital/super capital ships.
    • Every player has to eventually face the situation of losing one's prized property(be it isk, a ship, a cargo full of an industrial, a well constructed POS full of valuables, or a capital/super capital ship, etc) and come to terms, by either leaving the game altogether or accepting the loss and moving on. It is almost as close as one can get to facing death in an MMORPG, and it is part of a capsuleer's cycle of life. This kind of loss effectively fuels Eve's thriving market economy, as everyone is busy replacing the spontaneous loss of ships and modules during Pv E situations, and stockpiling to prepare for future losses.
      • To facilitate players to cope with the eventual losses, the advanced combat tutorial has incorporated a literal Kobayashi Maru test in one part. It orders the player to blow up a pirate frigate, and suddenly summons dozens of cruisers fitted with sensor dampeners/webs that will obliterate all but the most agile and reflexive pilots. A similar type of test exist in the level 1 epic mission arc, which is usually the first time a new player faces real warp jamming and the panic of their trusty warp drive not responding. No wonder beginner systems and Arnon (the hub system for the newbie epic arc) are always lit up like Christmas trees at the star map when showing "ships destroyed" statistics.
  • Vendor Trash: Prior to changes introduced in Tyrannis, the Trade Goods category was only useful to players as mission objectives, POS fuel, and outpost construction components.
    • Rogue Drone alloys are Reprocessing Plant Trash. Dropped low-grade ship modules are also frequently shunted to the reprocessing plant. However reprocessing yields minerals which are the backbone of manufacturing, so minerals always sell well.
  • Video Game Characters:
    • Mighty Glacier: The Amarr—They'd melt you out of the skies... if you couldn't run from them.
    • Fragile Speedster: The Minmatar—Dance circles around everyone.
    • Lightning Bruiser: The Gallente—Fast and Tough, but only effective at close ranges.
  • Warp Whistle: 0.0 alliances can deploy Jump Bridges. which allow for instant travel between systems that would other wise take several jumps to reach.
  • We Buy Anything: Averted—the market is almost exclusively player-driven.
    • Although you can find players willing to buy almost anything. Many low end modules are bought solely for mineral value when reprocessed.
    • The reprocessing plant itself could be a considered a We Buy Everything, they 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. they will reprocess anything except non-metallic items really.
  • We Will Spend Credits in the Future - The currency is known as ISK, but it stands for Inter Stellar Kredit.
    • Although 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 motherships can fit a Doomsday Device; each of the four major races in the game have slightly different ones but they all operate on the principle of the Earthshattering Kaboom (or nearly so). Most commonly deployed against large fleets, especially in PvP alliance warfare, but the effects when used against a planet are not pretty).
    • The mysterious superweapon Jamyl Sarum deployed on the Minmatar fleet over Mekhios from her battleship, wiping it out completely and forcing the other two Minmatar fleets to retreat. The nature of the weapon is top secret: it is a reverse-engineered Terran device.
    • As of Dominion 1.1, Titans have been converted from mobile nukes into single-target Wave Motion Guns.
  • What Measure Is a Non Super: If you're not a Capsuleer, you life is worth nothing. Your family will not be notified of your death.
  • Wide Open Sandbox: To the point where participation in any of the NPC actions of the game is considered by a large group of players to have negative implications.
  • Wild Mass Guessing: Word of God is deliberately vague on whether the unknown space opened up in Apocrypha is the Milky Way, some other galaxy, or even Another Dimension. Were the sleepers human? alien? sentient machines? Are they truly extinct?
    • The Enheduanni. Introduced in one official short story as a secret adversary to the Jove embroiled in vast conspiracies, get credit by the Wild Mass Guessers for nearly every major world event, even those with other established story reasons. It's the Eve version of this wiki's Everyone's a secret Time Lord theories.
  • Worthy Opponent: The Amarr and Minmatar roleplayers to each other, especially out of character. See this video.
    • They also have a blanket ban on certain tactics, such as alt spies. Anyone caught using them is essentially barred from the Amarr/Minmatar RP community.
  • Wretched Hive: Definately Low Sec space and most of 0.0 space. Most of EVE in general, possibly, depending on your opinions of scamming and market manipulation.
  • Writers Cannot Do Math: Some of the age, density, mass and volume figures listed on stars, planets, and moons are utterly impossible. This is more Writers Not Trying To Do Math: they were created by a random generator program. People complain sometimes but no one has attempted fixing it yet. (It's been mentioned that it's a misplaced decimal point. Nothing to see here.)
    • A slow movement is beginning to show for this sort of thing, however. Beginning with canonically important worlds being locked out of the planetary interaction system, and in a recent[when?] update, many of the planets mentioned in the various stories around EVE have had their statistics corrected to within habitable ranges.
    • The recent[when?] Sansha attacks offer further illustrations of the trope. They involve Sansha battleships in the hundreds being lost to abduct tens of thousands. It sounds okay, until your remember that each NPC battleship has a crew of ten thousand. They're losing millions of crew to abduct tens of thousands of people, never mind material losses.
      • This could be hand waved in that Sansha is very far on the "mad" side of Mad Scientist and his followers are either brainwashed cultists or zombies. Neither are likely to question the management's orders. Not to mention the main point of the invasion was to get "genetic stock" for cloning.
  • You Fail Economics Forever: The friendly Pend insurance company will compensate the loss of a ship whether you destroyed it in an accident, were killed by law enforcement perpetrating a terrorist attack, or even if you didn't buy a policy. How they stay in business is one of the mysteries of the Eve universe.
      • The insurance is only partly failing economics, since the payout you get from an uninsured ship is very small, and is mentioned as being the basic insurance payout (presumably you get basic insurance, while buying the better ones are just upgrades)
    • Not to mention CCP themselves, who on more than one occasion failed to notice that huge portions of the game economy were based on exploits. (See Game Breaking Bug)
    • Many people who buy items in contracts often forget to double-check the price. There's a very big difference between 300 million ISK and 300 billion ISK. The difference is the extra zeroes.
  • You Have Researched Breathing: Some of the skills have no logical justification except gameplay. Why do you need a skill to invite members of other races into your corp? Or to place standing buy orders on other stations even though you can remotely buy items already up for sale from the beginning?
  1. ↑ which just happens to be the currency code for the Icelandic króna
  2. ↑ For the time being, it appears that COSMOS has been utterly abandoned in favor of the better-received Epic Arcs. A recent[when?] devblog has stated that they have a team working on this.
  3. ↑ read this as "a lot of money from EVE"
  4. ↑ ...well, manned in the fluff, anyway.
  5. ↑ Carriers and Supercarriers don't have any turret or missile hardpoints. Most fits make heavy use of defensive, logistics, and EWAR modules, with direct offensive weaponry being limited to one or two smartbombs.
  6. ↑ Don't try this with the real ISK, which is worth around half a U.S. cent
  7. ↑ 2500mm is over eight feet. The tallest players in basketball could stand upright inside ONE of those barrels.
  8. ↑ as far as cults go, anyway
  9. ↑ Mercifully abbreviated to Dr. Eyjo G in most contexts.
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