EVE General Discussion

I don't know where you got this weird idea, but CCP always fixed and polished things, in any expansions, in the past even more than now. The difference is:

Before: they polish and fix gameplay AND extended it (and this produced growth) according to a strategic vision

Now: they only polish and fix exsiting stuff (and this is good) and... and not much more; the few change on design level are genrally nerf and trivializations with no strategic idea.

The reason of the change is simply they focusing their devlopments resources on something else, not on EVE.

I don't know who told you that before Crucible there was no feature polishing and bug fixing. But - since you're only here from 2011, so cannot have a direct knowledge of this - you may want to study and check the past espansions patch notes instead of relying of other people chitchatting.

Problem is CCP successfully pushed EVE into P2W F2P mode: instead of developing subscription-worthy sci-fi game with rich "themepark-y" content they are developing worthless "player interactions" (World of Tanks / Star Conflict / War Thunder / LoL / etc. = F2P games) - to sell more GTC* to players who want to compensate their losses from "player interactions" (yesterday I've seen a person purchased deadspace-equipped NM for GTCs after he was scammed). So content which does not promote PvP and GTC sales directly - it has zero chance to appear in EVE (WiS, hi-sec PvE).

* that's why CCP praised SOMER - because losses in casinos are forcing players to buy more GTC

Actually, yes. And this is my fear, since I loved UO and i wouldn't see this happening again.

When EQ was launched, witht heir 2-300.000 players crushed UO. At the time the common opinion was that 2-300k players was the max possible for this new MMORPG ****.

Even UO guys thought that the market was saturated, there was no margin left for them so basically gave up, halted any project to extend UO as well as to release an UO2, switched UO to a mantainence status/life support (small updates, bug fixing, tweaks, rebalancing, but no relevant gameplay improvement) and this basically signed the death of UO and the raise of the themepark model over the sandbox model; that we still suffer. But could have been differently if UO was able to kee

After some time Blizzard recycled some EQ concept and proved that the market was ready for milions of subscribers. But this is another story.

Discount GTCs sold through resellers such as SOMER, for example.

And I am aware of what Roberts did in the past, but past is past. I don't doubt he can make a good game. I've mentioned Freelancer earlier - it was a good game, I enjoyed it greatly.

But it wasn't what he promised before it released, was it. Roberts promised a "simulated, living scifi universe". In reality, outside of missions Freelancer was rather boring and repetitive.

I'm positive that Star Citizen is fully capable of being a competent game when released. I'm nearly certain though that it won't meet the overhyped expectations of a crowd treating it as a messiah among game.

Sooo SC is a cold, harsh sandbox game with single-shard universe? It's... actually not, it's got a lot of instancing going on. Can you drop a hundred capitals on someone's frig fight in SC? Can you play it unfair and get away with it, even be hailed the king of kings for doing so?

Publishers, for all the evil they tend to be (your release date is cut! ship it before christmas! no more money! make a bad ending!) also have one good thing to say: "Enough of your feature creep and promises, bucko - now start deliverin'". Roberts only has fans breathing down his neck it seems, and that's hardly as motivating to get things done right as a bunch of suits with their vast army of soulless lawyers.

SOV is indeed broken. So are POSes. And have been ever since before Incarna, you are right. Those issues, and CCP stubbornly chasing a vision instead of tending to glaring issues in the state of today contributed a lot to the summer of rage.

Riots erupted not from people's unwillingness to see WiS. Anti-WiS movement and mocking cries "Space barbie" didn't come from the fact people didn't want to walk around their holdings looking cool.

It came from CCP not addressing existing, massive issues in the state of the game today and instead promising to sort it out with another jesus feature that gloriously took flight the same way a rock doesn't. A lot of people got burned on this, and given CCP is still sorting out the pre-incarna mess it will take a few good deeds (like tiericide, medium rail rebalance etc.) to make people trust the company again.

Why bother doing the same as EVE does? The chances are that if you started playing EVE because you liked the genre, you played games that were a lot more like SC than as EVE.

This gets to the heart of the problem CCP faces, though. It's far, far easier to design a theme park, because you can put everyone on rails. You can make a lot of safe assumptions about what people will do when, and how. Designing a multi-player sandbox is considerably more difficult (even acknowledging the "sandbox" design style that has so many rails going in so many directions that the players never realize that they're on a train), and CCP have accomplished it mostly by reducing the number of fundamental variables in play as much as possible (shoot, heal, run), essentially eliminating terrain, pushing all the complex interaction out to comms and chat, and pushing all the lore out to prose, then handling edge cases as they come up.

It works, but it's pretty empty. One of the main reasons I want avatar gameplay is that--if they do it right--it brings complex interaction out of the little gated communities created by third-party comms software and into the game proper.

The "ammount of PLEX" available in the ingame market and its isk price inflation from 300million to 650 million reflects more than a double in its demand over its supply since Incarna. Regardless of who is buying it off the market or how they are wasting it, it means it is being used more often. You don't need to pay a sub when your account has PLEX time on it, so yes, it does reflect how your subs numbers are going down. "Active accounts" does not equal "Subbed accounts" or "Logged in accounts". If you claim your sub numbers are high and growing, why hide the official numbers from yearly reports? Show them to me.



Roberts, as much as it may cost you to admit, programs more by himself than a whole team of CCP programmers. He's got more expertise, more experience, vision and motivation (which goes a long way). But he is also a smart man with enough sensibility to grasp that he and his team mates alone will not be able to all the work by themselves, so they are not beating on the chest yelling "We are the best and can do everything alone", coming up with Reinvented Wheels™ and moving around the world to work on spawned side projects. Instead, they outsourced a big portion of the work to other studios (CIG, Behaviour Interactive,Turbulent, CGBot, Incan Monkey God Studios,Massive Black, Conley Swofford Media, Crytek (please consult this link to check out the full list of SC developer teams and their assignments and this video to watch their interviews and work presentations).



CCP's stakeholders took the decision by themselves to neglect EVE and develop side games with EVE players' money, only to sell them to Sony and ask for pittance exclusivity money. It was their own decision. No one forced them to.
Don't come cry crocodile tears now like "Bohoo but the bad publishers and their lawyers forced us to do it". No they didn't, you did it because you are looking to profit by scamming the players, treating them like fools, instead of creating empathy with them and using the money they pay you to develop the quality game that they wanna play.
And don't come with these "PC is dead because of piracy, consoles are the future of gaming" rants. Anybody whos not a completely brainwashed fanboy can see this ain't nothin but a console/exclusive game marketing campaign. Online games all require a valid costumer key to access them, be it on PC or console. Keeping offline games in consoles is not "the future of gaming", it's the future of trying to make the most buck out of them.
CCP's lack of motivation to continue the develoment of EVE doesn't come from Sony suits forcing them to develop other games. It comes from a basic profit oriented mindset, which ultimately and ironically is cutting the company's revenue. They are so concentrated in trying to obtain a fast buck that they forgot to deliver a quality game and are even trashing it with favoritism/RMT scandals.

You say can say that and it is true. However new space mmorpg competiton is coming and EVE's monopoly on that market is over.