What you see is not what you get

I setup my new 21-day trial account, created a new character and entered the game. I immediately noticed that my character’s eyes were pointing in a way which made him look weird. It didn’t look that way during the creation process…

I guessed there wouldn’t be, but went searching for a way to alter the character portrait nevertheless. I was correct, there was no way to change the character portrait once created, but discovered that the developers would allow you to portrait swap if you pay (real-life money) for the privilege. Charging for changing character names is common in MMOGs, but charging 10 Euros to allow you to change a 200x190 pixel image seems a bit excessive.

One good thing came from my search as I discovered a nice internet guide for creating your EVE character’s avatar picture. The guide mentions how this is the only picture other players are going to see of you in the game, so you should try to get it right. It would have been nice if a similar warning was given in the game when I was crating my character.

Anyway, since I hadn’t really done anything with my first character I thought I would just delete it and start again. Ten hour wait for deletion? Well, I couldn’t put up with the picture, so I had to live with the ten hour wait.

I messed around on my 14-day trial for a bit and practiced creating my avatar picture so it would be perfect once I could finally get to delete and recreate it again. When the time came, I must have spent an hour on that portrait tweaking it so it was just right. Satisfied with how my character looked, I entered the game only to find a strange pixel mark on his mouth….

Again this was not visible in the portrait creation process and I realised that what you see is not what you get in this game. I decided to just put up with the imperfection rather than wait another ten hours to change it again.

I let my 21-day trial buddy know my character name and promptly received my pile of cash (ISK). I was now ready for EVE, or that is what I thought...