My primary activity in EVE was PVP/Piracy. I actually tried to pirate even though it was probably one of the most unrewarding activities in EVE in terms of money generation. I would often make more money just blowing up the target and looting his wreck.
My comparison of the 'grind' mainly focused on my experience with the PVE side of EVE.
There were something like only 20 mission in the game and once you know the trigger all you did was blitz and grind your way through them.
Exploration? Ha! There is no such thing as actual exploration in EVE. Scan the system find your installation or whatever hack it and grab your loot.
I point blank refused to mine in EVE.
I played EVE for 13 years since the day it was originally released. I know very intimately the grind that EVE can be.
Elite was the game that drew me away from EVE and in all honesty I can say that apart from a couple of days running Fed missions to finally get my Dropship I haven't felt any grind in ED at all. I've logged too many hours I'd care to admit to in ED and still I can't say I feel any grind and I try many different activities, heck I even mined to unlock Selene and actually enjoyed it.
IMO the only people who experience the grind in ED are one's who set themselves a big goal (anaconda, triple elite type of thing) the one who just experience being part of a huge galaxy just don't experience any grind.
I cant comment on the missions because I didnt do missions...thats what carebears did and we hunted carebears, and podded them without mercy even if they offered to pay. We saw begging fer ones life as a weakness and gave no quarter to those who lowered themselves in such ways.
Sounds like your experience was vastly different to mine...we were paid to grief other players by the same alliances their corps were aligned to. At times that meant creating false accounts or just buying them from various out of game sources, and infiltrating corps with a view to cleaning them out...destroying them from the inside. The ultimate in salt excavation where some take their grievances out of game in the aftermath as they tried desperately to find out our real ingame identity.
Very much the pvp aspect as ye can see. Enough that I changed my name when I stopped playing...because
Regardless...I really didnt grind that much there and had no issues with playing that game which is why I commented on it. Certainly if ye were a miner and were involved in production, then it was the ultimate grind when mining veldspar fer 6 hours straight with nothing but protection drones fer company. By god we killed so many of those which used to cause all sorts of problems on the forums...so funny at the time.
Exploration in eve had better mechanics than here...one doesnt even hesitate in that answer and Im an explorer here, so I speak from experience. The stellar forge didnt exist in eve though so elite wins on that point alone...shame we cant have those mechanics of dropping multiple probes into a system to find anomolies and jump holes, then sell the bookmarks or share them with others who could explore them. That was what exploration here could have been as opposed to pointing the ship at a planet and flying to it to scan it...and thats about as good as it gets really.
Such a waste of potential.
I dont grind in Ed simply because Im lazy and cant be bothered...the rng grind doesnt interest me because its rng based and after a year Im still in an asp explorer with very little in the bank as it were so I dont grind credits either. If the grind in eve was so much worse then why did I enjoy it so and ignore it entirely here?
The answer is simple...we both play in very different ways and we both made very different choices in whatever game we played. To me, eve was pure pvp while pve players were a free lunch and a healthy source of salt on the forums afterwards. Here, the pve is boring, the pvp pointless but the stellar forge is brilliant ^
