YMMV / EVE Online

• Audience-Alienating Era: For many people, Crucible marks the end of EVE's Dork Age as CCP refocuses on Internet Spaceships while simultaneously removing many players from their rusted claustrophobic Minmatar quarters. Depending on who you ask, it began as far back as Apocrypha. Other popular answers are that the Audience-Alienating Era began with Tyrannis or that Incarna was not a climax but the entirety of the Audience-Alienating Era.
  • The 2019-2021 Scarcity Era and the preceeding Blackout event reduced the income of a large portion of the playerbase and saw a marked drop in subscriptions. Simultaneous changes to industry that made capital ships more expensive and difficult to produce weren't too popular either.
• Awesome Music: Eve has an impressive soundtrack to help along jumping, 'rat killing, ship management, and etc and has tracks added to it fairly regularly. A few standout examples are below.
  • This track and the other four uploaded by the user.
  • I Saw Your Ship Slow start, but then it turns into a great skirmish track 50 seconds in.
  • Below the Asteroids has been a player favorite since before the game even launched, and is the closest thing the game has to an overarching theme song at this point.
  • Nouvelle Rouvenor Hero is another favorite.
  • And a few more awesome songs.
  • Little Bees, the Goonswarm Newbee Ballad. Now with live version, to boot.
  • We Fight Proud For The Holder
  • HARDEN! THE! FUCK! UP!
  • Come Fly With Us is an amazing song, and beautifully shows how EVE touches lives, and also has the inherent humor of stuff, mainly you, blowing up.
• Demonic Spiders: The Sleepers. They automatically switch targets to any ship emitting assistance beams for armor/shield/energy/hull, their frigates will switch targets to attack any drones launched. They even metagame, staging the NPC equivalent of a logon trap for capital ships.
  • In the Hacking Minigame, we have Restoration Nodes and the Virus Suppressors. The former has a lot of health and low attack power but adds 20 extra defence to a random node each turn, while the latter reduces your virus' attack power by a great amount as long as it's uncovered and alive. If either of these pop up, you basically can't win unless you can deal with them promptly.
  • On a more meta level — other players. Just ask anyone who has ever been surprised by Suddenly, Ninjas or a surprise gate camp. Arguably the worst of these are the Wormhole players. Gangs from wormholes can come out anywhere (depending on which wormhole links them to normal Null-Sec or Low-Sec), and they rampage around the region of space they invade until they get bored and go back into the Hellhole they popped out of multiple times per day.
• Even Better Sequel: When it comes to the novels. Theodicy was fairly dumb and treated the Jove like they'd never seen slavery before; Ruthless was okay but didn't seem that important at the time (though became far moreso later). Empyrean Age was big and full of spectacle but felt disjointed, jumped all over the place, felt like nothing happened at the end and the "Retford" plot in particular felt like it didn't go anywhere at all. Templar One, meanwhile, still did the perspective-jumping thing, but with much tighter plotting and much more sensible jumps, and it finally brought all the dangling plot threads from the past three works together into one whole and brought a satisfying conclusion to all of them (while still leaving a few Sequel Hooks), has a lot of events of consequence occur in its pages (specifically, it justifies the existence of a whole damn game) and it's a fun read by itself (including staging the EVE equivalent of the Battle of Five Armies), and it introduced the world to the awesomeness that is Muriya Mordu.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The game as a whole is sometimes lovingly referred to as "Spreadsheets in Space", due to the massive amounts of information that are presented to the player.
  • 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 8-Bit Theater.
• Fridge Brilliance: The Sansha's Nation Incursions. Many players wonder why Sansha and the True Sansha are able (or willing) to keep launching them even when they receive devastating losses and are utterly crushed each time (since the Highsec incursions tend to be outright farmed and even deliberately extended for money, being long since solved content), but... those are the Highsec ones. The most daring raids into the hearts of the Empires' territories. Sansha would surely be expecting and planning for losses on such maneuvers, and willing to receive them in order to damage and/or terrify the Empires and their citizens. Moreover, Incursions in Low and Null Security systems receive... much more varied responses from players, often going outright ignored^note Full graphs mean players winning heavily and farming the incursion, empty graphs mean Sansha winning unopposed as players are unwilling to face the risk of PvP attacks, considering the added rewards definitely not worth the added risk. This means, in-universe, Sansha is able to replenish his forces with these far more successful raids, as he uses cybernetics to take control of the kidnapped victims of successful raids and rebuilds his fleets with resources from uninterrupted mining operations ^note All those Nation Mining Colony sites in Vanguard systems seem to be humming along nicely without players inserting explosive Lyavite ore in them, as do the Nation Industrial Proxy sites in Staging systems that go untouched even in highsec).
• Goddamned Bats: NPCs have the Spider Drone. Players have the infinitely more frustrating ECM drones.
  • The player ones are flimsy. The Spider Drone is Made of Iron.
• 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!
  • 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 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.
• Internet Jerk: Let's say this...if there is one thing that'll bug you about EVE, it's the sickening amount of dickery that happens in this game... unless it's what you signed on for in the first place.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • That's a Templar!
  • Because of FALCON!
  • Concordokken!
  • Honour-tank.
  • Real men Hull Tank.
  • Poitot! It's the only named system in syndicate!
    • Hero Tank!
  • MY RAVEN WAS EQUIPPED WITH THE FOLLOWING:
    • A really bad fitting ^{(technical explanation)} Among other things, excessive stacking of modules that shouldn't be stacked, use of noncombat modules on slots typically reserved for weaponry on PvE ships, a module only useful in PvP, defensive modules equipped on both mid and low slots (redundant, typically even dedicated "tanking" ships are either shield or armor tanked and fit the other set of slots with more useful modules) made his ship rather inefficient. At least he didn't try hull tanking... on a ship not particularly suited for the mission, then he kept repeating that post over and over again (the latter not actually being his fault — he got up from the computer and came back to find his son banging on the keyboard).
  • SOON? (When referring to if promised content will ever be released/bugs fixed).
  • HAVE A BIG GLASS OF PEPSI
  • Harden. The. Fuck. Up.
  • Military experts are calling this a Memetic Mutation example
    • It Makes Sense in Context (the Scope is a civilian news channel in-universe after all), but since the players are familiar with it, well...
    • The meme has now Ascended with a login ad about soaring PLEX prices saying "Market experts are calling this an opportunity."
  • eBay. Mentioned anytime a player obviously has more ISK than brains. (Even though he likely funded it with the legal GTC market.)
  • We didn't want that starbase/system/titan/alliance anyway.
  • I TOO FEEL COMPELLED TO TROLL THE FORUMS
    • I TOO ROLEPLAY THAT I SUCK DICK
  • Failguns and Roflockets.
    • Recent changes to mechanics, proposed or implemented, by force this meme to change.
  • The $70 monocle in Eve's cash shop, which has been adopted by many as the symbol of the Noble Exchange controversy, to the point of the issue being termed the "Monoclepocalypse" by the playerbase. Expect to see it shopped into a lot of image macros in any Eve forum, blog, or news article until (and possibly long after) the madness dies down a bit.
  • The Dr. Evil picture, used whenever someone is accusing The Mittani of a conspiracy to RUIN THE GAME.
  • "Kurator is primary", referring to a rather infamous incident where Pandemic Legion FC Shadoo quite loudly berated a junior FC for poorly calling targets. The same incident also inspired "ARMOR HACS! ARMOR HACS ARRRRMOR HAAACS!"
  • Praise Bob! ^note This is not the Band of Brothers alliance, but instead a god that wormhole space residents claim they believe in.
  • Demanding cybernetic cat ears as a cosmetic item (promised by CCP in an April Fools post).
• Memetic Psychopath: The players. Yes, all of them.
• Moral Event Horizon: A major spaceholding alliance will always be on the far side of the Moral Event Horizon by capsuleer standards, or about to die to someone who is. Individual capsuleers make it to the far side by normal standards just by completing the tutorial.
• Most Wonderful Sound: "Skill training completed." This is the closest equivalent to the "ding!" of level-based MMORPGs, thanks to Eve's time-based skill-leveling system.
• 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 hard way, if they let themselves get tricked into attacking CONCORD along with a certain non-CONCORD-friendly guy.
• The Scrappy: Goonswarm, largely because they've developed a reputation for ruining the game for everyone else. Not to mention their rules basically let their members do whatever they want and get away with it as long as it's not being done to another Goonswarm member.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The Apocrypha probing system has drawn criticism both for "scrubbing down" probing and for adding Fake Difficulty in sorting through scan results. Some of these concerns, especially about Fake Difficulty, have been addressed in patches since then, however.
  • Prior to Apocrypha, the challenge wasn't in button-pressing. It was in creating an efficient set of bookmarks that properly covered every planet in every system that you wanted to scan... without the ability to place one probe inside of another's scan radius. Depending on skills, you also had a long and boring wait for results. And the incarnation of scanning before that was also Scrappy.
  • Faction Warfare has been getting a lot of Scrappy hate lately. It started out promising, but after two years of almost no mechanics changes, some half-broken fixes, a rather boring capture mechanic and a few Game-Breaker issues, the players who want to like it are getting fed up and the players who don't snipe at others to go play the real game in 0.0.
  • Generally, almost every major update, one or more new Scrappy Mechanics will emerge as old ones get fixed or nerfed and new things are introduced. Nano Tanking, Black Ops, Blasters, Warp Stabilizers...
  • The Unified Inventory change in 2012, which forcefully merged all inventory management into one window, drew universal hatred from the player base, with 100+ page topics on the forums about how it seriously crippled logistics.
• Scrub: Some alliances think that spying on their enemies is a cheap move; they don't do it, and they complain when they get beaten by alliances that do use spies.
• Squick: Perime Veaulore. He's not healthy, you know.
• "Stop Having Fun" Guys: Alliance warfare is Serious Business. This led to Band of Brothers's undoing. A senior BoB member grew so tired of its overly serious mentality he betrayed them to a rival group, Goonswarm, stealing over 20 billion isk in assets and dissolving the BoB alliance.
  • Similarly the World War Bee against Goonswarm (then led by a player named The Mittani) that happened long after that could be said to have stemmed from this trope as well.
• That One Level: Jita, the largest trade hub which is often so overcrowded that death by lag is commonplace there.
  • Jita has the dubious honour of being the only high-security system marked in the player-made sovereignty maps displaying who owns territory - with a gigantic, ominous black cloud.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: In 2012, the last round of a major art upgrade was applied to Minmatar ships; reaction was ... mixed. There was general agreement that a lot of ships had been improved, but much to the dismay of some pilots, the upgrade removed the Vagabond heavy assault cruiser's distinctive "frill" (a set of wingy bits bracketing the cockpit). This prompted a fleet of upset Vagabond pilots to shoot up the Jita monument and then cruise deep into null-security space to "deliver a sternly-worded letter of complaint" to the headquarters of the Thukker Mix, canonical designers of the Vagabond. (Remember, we're talking about guys who throw around live thermonuclear weapons as entertainment, here.) To everyone's surprise, later that summer, EVE developers announced that the Stabber cruiser (basis for the Vagabond) would be updated further ... and the Vagabond variant would sport a new, more elaborate "frill".
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: A big reason most players ignore all of the backstory and fluff is because of how ridiculously bleak and miserable the setting is. Your player character crosses the Moral Event Horizon by simply completing the tutorial. Players of Echoes actually noted that the tutorial there notably dials this back a fair bit, and you can only really start crossing the line after you're truly out on your own.

---