Eve Online

Eve online offers a free 14 day trial.

EVE is based on four races:
Amarr
Caldari
Gallente
Minmatar

Once you downloaded the trial and setup your account, run through the tutorial. This tutorial is very complex and will show you everything in the Eve universe ie mining, courier runs, and earning ISK (Eve money)

Eve is massive and there are things I still haven't done or seen.

With everything in Eve it is skill based and even though it may seem boring, you must complete the Learning skills first. This will speed up your learning later.

I currently run two accounts, with both characters being Caldari based. Why Caldari? I liked their ships.

A state built on corporate capitalism, the Caldari State is run by a few mega-corporations which divide the state between them, controlling and ruling every aspect of society. Each corporation is made up of thousands of smaller companies, ranging from industrial companies to law firms. All land and real estate is owned by a company which leases it to the citizens, and government and policing are also handled by independent companies.

Although this gives the corporations dictatorial powers, they are just as bound by Caldari customs and laws as the individual, and the fierce, continual competition between the corporations ensures a healthy, consumer-based social environment, which benefits everyone.

While the Caldari State may not be nearly as big as that of the Gallenteans, let alone the Amarrians, they are still universally feared and admired. Their economy is strong, and their military might parallel to that of the larger empires. Coupled to the fact that they are more unscrupulous than the Gallenteans and more combative than the Amarrians, this makes them in many ways the most meddlesome of all the empires. As most Caldari trade is conducted by individual companies rather than the State itself, this makes it difficult for the other empires to deal with them at a political level. If a company is found guilty of unethical business dealings, it simply disappears into its parent corporation, and before long another one appears to take its place. But if a Caldari company is threatened, the whole corporation and often the whole State backs it up with full force.

Caldari society is steeped in military tradition. As a people, its members had to fight a long and bloody war to gain their independence, and even had to surrender their home planet to their hated enemies, the Gallenteans. It was at this time that the corporations established themselves as the driving force behind creating and maintaining the new Caldari State. Even if the Caldari have not engaged in war for many decades, they still strive to be at the cutting edge of military technology and their vessels, weapons and fighting methods are inferior to none but the enigmatic Jovians.

To curb their aggressive tendencies, the Caldari actively pursue and sponsor a range of sporting activities. Many of these are bloody, gladiatorial-like competitions, while others are more like races. But whatever the sport, the Caldari love betting on the outcome, making gambling a massive industry in the State.

The Caldari State offers its citizens the best and the worst in living conditions. As long as you keep in line, do your job, uphold the laws and so forth, life can be fairly pleasant and productive. But for those who are not cut out for this strict, disciplined regime life quickly becomes intolerable. They lose their respect, family, status, everything, and the only options left to them are suicide or exile. Although not xenophobic as such, the Caldari are very protective of their way of life and tolerate only those foreigners that stick to the rules.

People who are very interested in training the various learning skills often ask what order it would be best to train the skills. The following list shows the most effective order to train the skills. When you finish this list, you'll have all 11 learning skills at level 4. If you do not want (or cannot afford) to train the advanced learning skills, simply omit them from the list.

- Instant Recall 1
- Analytical Mind 1
- Learning 1
- Instant Recall 2
- Analytical Mind 2
- Learning 2
- Instant Recall 3
- Analytical Mind 3
- Learning 3
- Instant Recall 4
- Eidetic Memory 1
- Eidetic Memory 2
- Eidetic Memory 3
- Analytical Mind 4
- Logic 1
- Logic 2
- Logic 3
- Learning 4
- Eidetic Memory 4
- Logic 4
- Spatial Awareness, Iron Will, and Empathy 1-4 (Order does not matter. Train level 5 of these before training their advanced counterparts if you want to stick to the optimal order.)
- Determining the best order in which to train Clarity, Focus, and Presence is a little tricky. For each skill, take your current attributes and plug them into this simple formula: Primary + ( Secondary / 2 ) Whichever skill gives the highest result, train it to level 1 first. Repeat this until all three skills are at level 1, then repeat this same process for levels 2-4.

For the average player without implants, this process would take about a month and you'd be training 2.19 times as fast as you were to begin with. Though it would eventually be worthwhile to train the learning skills to level 5, it can literally take years to make up the time spent training them. That said, many people do actually max them all out, myself included.

By Flora Graham
BBC News

It's a credit crunch nightmare.

The chief executive of the world's biggest corporation gets a phone call in the middle of the night. Thanks to industrial espionage, the company has been bankrupted, assets stripped, bank accounts emptied. When trading starts the next day, even the company name will be gone.

If this were real life, the executive might consider jumping out the window. But in the online game of EVE Online, it's all part of the fun.

"It is another challenge," said Par Molen, the leader of the "corporation" Band of Brothers (BoB), who got the late-night call.

"That's what we live for."

Mr Molen and his online colleagues had spent four years building BoB into the dominant force in a game where 200,000 players battle it out in an online galaxy of spaceships and planets.

Unlike other multiplayer online games like the hugely popular World of Warcraft, which is split into smaller groups, the thousands of EVE players are in it together.

In one virtual galaxy, players build, fight, and trade, joining together to form "corporations" to gain control over sections of the huge starscape.

This creates a complex society where anything can happen, and often does. Rules are few, and all of the lying, cheating and stealing that occurs in real life can also happen in the game.

A player called "The Mittani" is the shadowy spymaster who runs dozens of agents for his corporation - GoonSwarm. He got the call of his career when a disgruntled BoB director contacted him to say that he was thinking of switching sides.

With the director's access to BoB's internal workings, the pair were able to disband the corporation and steal all the assets they could lay their hands on.

To add insult to injury, GoonSwarm then re-registered the Band of Brothers name for itself, leaving the former alliance nameless and broken.

It's a finale that has been compared to "Apple dissolving Microsoft", and led to some players calling for the game's developer, CCP, to "roll-back" the game to the previous day and cancel the change.
Eve Online is about the struggle between giant corporations

"Any one director should not have the power to destroy the work of so many people for so many months and years with two mouse clicks," wrote a player called David on an EVE-related blog.

But CCP is well-known for keeping its hands off action within the game. Since no rules were broken, the changes stood, and thousands of BoB members woke up to a very different world.

Scams in space

This is not the first time that rogue bankers and credit fraud have made EVE Online seem more like the financial pages than a space cowboy video game.

In January, a player absconded with over 80bn ISK, the game's virtual currency, from an in-game bank. Although the 80bn is only worth a few thousand pounds if exchanged for real money, it represents hours of in-game toil.

In an online echo of the real-world banking crisis, the bank's chairman issued a statement to calm a run on deposits, writing: "Dynasty Banking will get over these times and we will continue to strive to earn the public's faith as one of the leading banks of Eve Online".

Another scam on an epic scale beyond the fantasies of real conmen was perpetrated in 2006, when a player ran off with 700bn ISK from another EVE bank.

"Think of me as a space Robin Hood-steals from the rich and gives to himself," wrote the perpetrator in an EVE-related internet forum.

Such swindles left some players in awe of EVE's potential for realism, whilst others called for a stronger code of ethics in the game.

But spymaster Mittani scoffed at calls for in-game morals, noting that without dirty tricks, GoonSwarm would have had no chance of toppling a more established corporation like BoB.

He wrote: "We don't have any advantages, so we can't obey your stupid 'space bushido'. We're going to spy, we're going to use defectors, we're going to lie, cheat, steal and be bastards."