Combat

Combat is the most rewarding aspect of E&B in terms of experience gain. But it is another slightly lacking aspect. To E&B's defense, there are not many successful and entertaining combat engines in any MMORPG out there. E&B tries to take DAoC's approach in forcing you to press a button to fire your weapons, but it quickly becomes tedious. Combat is simply a button-pounding fest that last for around 30 seconds.
There are also some issues with targeting. When faced with multiple opponents, you might be fired upon by many foes but have no real way of knowing which ones until you actually see them firing at you. This tends to be confusing, and sometimes lends itself to frantic targeting and firing when you get nervous. Of course in those times you might end up targeting the wrong enemy, and you suddenly find yourself being fired upon by two opponents at once instead of just one. An auto-targeting system when you are being fired upon would have been nice.
There is no PvP (Player vs. Player) combat in E&B. At least not so far. There are discussions about a PvP server in the community, but it's unclear whether it will ever be made available. Actually, I don't think E&B would do well in a PvP environment. All classes complete each other quite nicely when grouped together, but stacked up against one another in combat there would be an all out champion in the Warrior class. Groups of players attacking each other would only succeed depending on how well balanced they are, and how many warriors are in their group. Those players looking for a challenge in PvP combat should avoid this title as there is nothing here for them.

Character Advancement

This is actually a very complex part of E&B. Every character, every class as well, has 3 different types of experience points they may gain. Certain actions give out Combat experience, others give Trade experience, and some give Exploration experience. Whenever you buy/sell tings at stores, or even trade with other players, you will earn Trade experience. Whenever you first go somewhere you never visited before, or mine ore from asteroids and gas clouds, you earn Exploration experience. Of course, it will come as no surprise when I say that to gain combat experience you will need to kill things. The sum of your individual Combat/Explore/Trade levels make your character level. This system makes for a very rapid growth in character levels. Sometimes on a quick trade run you might advance three character levels at once. It is very easy to attain level 20 (out of 150 total levels) within about ten to fifteen hours of play, which is very interesting and keeps things moving at a nice pace.
Once you gain a level in any of your three classes, you get a skill point to spend on your varying skills, which differ depending on which class/race you have chosen. These skills are specifically tailored to be useful to you, and some of them are actually well thought out. Up until the later levels though, you will quickly find that you are able to maximize most of your skills, which means that everyone in your race/class combination probably have the same specs as you do. After level 20, you can start seeking out missions to open up new skills for your class, and by then you will start seeing a little more customization and you'll have to do a little more thinking before spending your skill points.
The problem with this whole system is that combat is, again, more rewarding than anything else. It is much easier for a warrior to advance in combat levels than it will be for an explorer because he can get bigger (and more) guns than anyone else. Of course, that's normal, and there cannot be any dispute to it. But what's frustrating is that the warrior will gain his combat experience much faster than an explorer will gain his exploration experience. 30 minutes of Combat will also give out some loot which will sell for more credits than what you will gain by mining ore for the same amount of time as an explorer. And that's not mentioning that the experience gains will be far better for the warrior than the explorer as mining ore only gives out a handful of experience points at a time. This might all become very frustrating as you quickly get to feel you are never rightly rewarded for doing what it is in your profession's nature to do.

Death

The death system in E&B is quite forgiving, maybe even a little too much, which further distinguishes the game for being an entry-level MMORPG. When a player dies, he will be asked whether he wants to wait there until a player with Jumpstart (resurrecting) capabilities pass by so he can go on his way, or be towed back to the last station he registered (saved) at. In any case, your death incurs a certain experience points penalty which you will need to pay off. Every time you get experience after that, a certain percentage of it will go towards paying that debt. The good thing about this system is that you never feel as if you're taking backward steps. You don't lose anything for dying. You do get a penalty, but it's rather mild.
For frustrated players, the game offers you the opportunity to leave and cool off after dying. If you quit, your XP debt will still continue to be paid off even though you're logged out. You can wait a few hours, go watch a movie, do the groceries, or whatever's your fancy, and when you come back there's a good chance most of your debt, if not all of it, will be cleared. Again, while this makes for a very forgiving system, it also creates a lack of sense of danger. As an explorer, I almost never feared going to uncharted systems that I knew were much higher level than I was. I usually waited to go there at the end of the day when I knew I would log off for the night after I was done. I would get killed, get towed back to the station and safely log off there. The next morning when I logged back on I had no more experience debt left to pay off.

Community (Grouping & Guilds)

E&B's developers had some good intentions with grouping, and on paper it does work magnificently. Unfortunately it does work so much that it creates a problem, especially at lower levels. When grouping with fellow captains, bonuses (or buffs) are gained. Grouping with an explorer will give you reactor bonuses, while grouping with a warrior might give you Hull bonuses for less damage, and so on. You also receive experience bonuses when grouped with others, which can make it very appealing to players in search of gaining fast levels.
Since everyone agrees that grouping together is a nice solution to getting experience bonuses along with other nifty bonuses, people tend to send you a grouping request, and you tend to accept it even though no one asked you, or even talked to you at all. Once in the group, no one utters a word. You don't even know where the other members are, and they don't care. As long as you are all in the same vicinity, you will each get experience for whatever actions your fellow group members do. For instance, you could suddenly get a nice bundle of combat experience while mining ore because someone in your group defeated a mob a few kilometers away. Everyone is content as long as they get experience, and no one needs to talk.
Needless to say this creates a very silent community. There is not much chatter going on, and although that can sometimes be a good thing, it's pushed to an extreme that doesn't make the world very 'alive'. Grouping is simply a means to an end, and regardless of your abilities you will still bring in some bonuses.
At higher levels this changes somewhat as the higher level monsters require group efforts. But it still doesn't require a lot of tactics. You get into formation, which the group leader will have chosen among a few available ones, and then you lean back and wait for the group leader to target a monster as he flies the whole group around. Once he engages combat, you simply follow suit, pushing on your buttons for a few seconds. No one really needs to say anything, it's all very straightforward.
Guilds give you a nice pool or resources and possible group mates once you reach higher levels and find out that you need to group to advance further. In return, Guilds receive experience along with its members, enabling them to receive bonuses and notoriety among other things. It's a mutual benefit that encourages individuals to seek out guilds, and also guilds to seek out new recruits. The guild system is one of the best I've seen so far, and gives a true sense of purpose. Instead of being a simple chat group for players to join in, it becomes meaningful and rewarding, up to a certain degree.

Game World

In short, E&B's game world is huge. This is both a good and a bad thing. It's always good to have a huge world to explore, as long as you have ways of traveling fast enough as to not make it too boring to go from one end of the map to the other. In my opinion Asheron's Call has always had the best solution: portals that can take you from one place to the next in a minimal amount of time. The challenge was that these portals were fixed and you had to figure out which portals to take to go where you needed to.
E&B uses a system similar to AC's to travel from one system to the next, but once in that system you'll need to rely on your warp engines to go from one end of the sector to the other. And that gets tedious very fast. Traveling is perhaps E&B's weakest point. It can easily take you 5 to 10 minutes to get from one portal gate to the next in the biggest sectors. When you reach the gate, you'll jump in to change systems, and find yourself in a new sector where you'll need another 5-10 minutes of traveling to get where you need to go. It is not uncommon to be on a mission or quest that will take you to many places and end up having to spend about a half hour of raw time in warp!
Warp is boring. You just wait there until you come out of it. Think of Star Wars. Remember what everyone did during the trip from Tatooine to Alderaan? They played around, some with a board game, others with a shiny light sword and a floating ball shooting lasers. You can't even have as much fun in E&B during your travels, and you will spend most of your time in warp...bring a book. This has to be the most frustrating part of the game. They should make the warp speed at least twice as fast as it is now.
Once in a while something exciting will happen, though. Like a fleet of pirate ships flying by who activate a gravitational pull device which effectively pulls you out of warp. Of course by then you'll be so entranced in your reading that you might be completely taken off guard and die as 5 pirate ships that are 10 levels above yours all attack at once...If no one else is around, then you'll have to call a tow ship which will bring you back to the last station you visited, from which point you'll have to start all over again...fun!

Conclusion

As was mentioned before, E&B is not all that bad. In fact I'm sure most of the issues I have with the game might be solved within a few months with strategic patches. But some of these things are design decisions that don't make sense to me, a veteran MMORPG player, and that doesn't help keep me interested in this world. In short, the older titles I am still playing right now offer me as much or even more than E&B offers. The time spent in warp alone is enough to bore me into quitting the game.
But, in all honesty, E&B has a true appeal to those new to the genre. The simple level and skill systems make for a nice entry-level game. The community is safe enough that you do not need to fear grief players too much, and there is enough variety to help those new players ease in to the community and find people that like the same things as they do. E&B certainly has its moments. The story integrated in the game is quite interesting to follow, and the quests tied to gaining new skills make more than good sense. Only for me these few moments didn't manage to keep my interest for long.
If you are a novice to the world of MMORPGs, take a look at E&B as it will ease you in to the genre very nicely. If you're a veteran MMORPG player, you might want to pass this tile up and wait for Star Wars: Galaxies.

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