EVE General Discussion

Indeed. It also goes a long way to prove my theory that if a person has no real major problems in their life, they turn minor problems into major ones to compensate.

10% of the players... yet what percentage of developer time & effort?

I think I see the real problem here.

"Bet everything on Red!"

Any valid links we can look at to view these mysterious contracts?

I'm going to assume you were not around for the first few years of EVE with that attitude.

Whilst i generally agree with you there are exceptions out there like World of Tanks. That game started horrible and complaining all around when it was still in beta. It took a lot of time and even more patches till the game became playable like it is now.

I hope for CCP that they are in it for the long haul and expand their platforms to PS4 and PC so the time they invested wont go to waste, because i believe in the vision CCP has in a big universe.

Speaking as a non-FPS person here (my encounters in the FPS area was some minor Blood and Quake3 Arena 10 years ago). Since then I've not played any FPS, never tried CS, CoD, MW, BF or similar.

Due to the love of EVE (also the only game I played for the past 10 years except some hours of Final Fantasy on PS) I tried DUST. And my impression is that just as EVE, DUST isn't the normal FPS where you just go right into it and shoot like crazy.

It takes a similar level of training and thinking like EVE in terms of choosing what to train for and similar. So I think maybe the focus group of DUST isn't the normal FPS player that will try the new game that comes out until the next one arrives. DUST looks more aimed at the long term player - like myself.

Of course we go screaming DUST is dying, CCP is doing it all wrong... wait wrong? Yeah they might be doing things that are wrong from various perspectives, sure I'd like to have it on PC as well so I don't have to move between the computer and PS3. Question is, do we really know exactly what their intentions are? Is their intentions to completely run over CoD, BF, CS and you name it? Could their goal be like EVE to build over time, a long term relationship with its players and not just until the next game comes out?

I'm not claiming to know the right path, I don't even claim I have any idea if CCP knows what they are doing - for all I know this could be a huge screw up. What I do know though is that it's most likely too soon for anyone to make a proper judgement if this is going to work or not.

They do listen to the players, just as they do and did in EVE, I've seen many times in EVE were it feels like they don't listen and other times when they are sitting in your lap listening. Plus the fact that we've only been in beta until today makes the call of death even harder.

I personally find DUST very enjoyable, but then that doesn't say much due to my limited experience with FPS games, but I for one am very interested to see how it turns out even if we won't know more within the next year (probably), and hopefully by then we will also see what CCP's intentions are and what their strategy is, and for whom.

Finally, do the numbers look good? Well it's going down like one would expect from the hype calming down (and it has for a while now) but still having 3000-4000 players on, that's quite good, EVE peaked at 5000 back in the days too, so what are we expecting here? 25,000 online on average after 2 months? I seriously doubt that, I'd be surprised if we kept and average of over 10,000 in the first year - but I find it all very interesting to be a part of.

/c

CCP's financials and Sony's financials give a tiny bit of insight into both companies' doings, but let's face it, we as consumers aren't exactly privy to everything that happens in the boardrooms. Developer intent and game features also give a tiny bit of insight. I obviously follow CCP and I'm like BR90 in PS2 with a vet tag so it's relatively easy for me to see those similarities. Gee guys, we have a PC FPS IP with a decade-old history and a brand new FPS IP with none essentially owned by the same company, what's gonna happen?

Spring 2004. I guess that makes me somewhat of an EVE pubbie but there ain't a whole lot of people left who can call me that anymore...


I don't know man, Planetside's pretty old. And like I said, we don't know what goes on behind closed scenes in the corporate world, but one of the things that stuck in business school was how everyone generally agreed that the moves happen before the public knows about them. It happens in-game too. Bought any ice within the past few years?

The point is that CCP are also structuring Dust rather differently to other FPSMMOs.

1) It's free
2) So are the expansions
3) They've committed to long term support

These are all "long term growth" enablers. I'm not saying that it's a lock, I'm just saying that the traditional barriers to long term growth are not present. If the market is ready for a long term accretive growth model FPSMMO, DUST is in place to to reap the rewards. If not, then it won't. But right know we just don't know, because it's never been seriously tried before.

I definitely don't believe CCP "can do no wrong" - in fact the DUST team are rediscovering quite a few learnings that the EVE team have slowly and painfully acquired over the last 5 years - but I do give them full marks for actually trying to do something new and different in their game model, and giving Joe Console credit for not just wanting to dowload Call Of Duty: Black Ops: Space Marines vs Toy Story: Wallet **** Edition

If you don't know, look it up.

Dust was teased in 2009; demoed on a xbox devkit in early 2011 and revealed as console-only at the same time; declined by Microsoft later in the year and turned PS3-only (which is not the asme as PS3-exclusive). Claiming that Sony somehow made it console exclusive before it even became PS3-only is rather silly.

About the same, just like in EVE (and PS/PS2).

My point was an FPS is different than EVE, also PS1's cert system isn't really comparable.

As in, you can't apply a long-term growth model to an FPS, PS2 doesn't have a long term growth model (especially not compared to DUST's start with 2000 work your way up).