Well it has trading and combat, as does Elite. The engines are vastly different but I don't think the concept is radically different to Elite.
Elite is all about you vs the world. Eve is completely based on team play, and the bigger the team the better.
Apart from trading/manufacturing T1 items and lower classes of player vs computer missions, solo play in Eve is close to impossible.
Some of the bigger classes of ship (ie, dreadnoughts and carriers) can't even move to another solar system without help for another player.
Can you be more specific? I have been playing EON for several months and haven't noticed any "flaws". It can be a bit frustrating to start with when you don't have enough skill points or credits to join a corporation of other players, but this is an incentive to complete the single player missions to improve your character to a level where you can join a corp.
Like I said, the flaws don't become obvious until you've been playing for a while. It's at corp and alliance level that things are really borked, but some of the more obvious stuff:
- Lag. This is when the server can't cope and the game client stops responding. It's no fun at all when you are warping into combat in a ship you might have saved for months to buy, only for the game to lock up for 30 seconds when you get to the fight. When the game unlocks your ship is dead and you've no idea what happened.
Lag gets worse the more stuff is happening in the one place. In big fights its not unknown for lag to be so bad it takes 5 minutes to even activate a module on your ship. In
really big fights (many hundreds of ships) the server node will often just give up and crash - this once happened to me 4 times during a large battle.
- Lack of documentation. CCP often provides little or no information on how things in Eve work. That can lead to a lot of expensive mistakes.
- Corruption. Employees of CCP, Eve's developer, have been found to be giving secret assistance to favoured groups of players.
This message is way too long already, but I'll go into more detail if you want. I've been playing Eve for 4 years now and I'm pretty much convinced the higher levels of the game are so broken that it is dying. The number of people playing supports that view. Until the end of 2006 that number kept rising, now it is slowly going down.
