Out of Pod Experience

CCP's bigotry against religion. I'm an atheist, but a society as advanced technologically as Amarr would recognize that humans are an incredibly inefficient energy investment to perform work when technology and energy sources far beyond the first world are available.

No matter what I do, my character will always be 10 years behind every other character. This is an absolute fail in game design.

Attraction to the thing you hate most? Like this little gem from today on the BBC.

Hence, goodbye.

I find it ironic that a trol.. I mean player who claims to be athiest and anti-slavery would chose the Religious Slaving zealot class to play

1. CCP's bigotry against religion. I'm an atheist, but a society as advanced technologically as Amarr would recognize that humans are an incredibly inefficient energy investment to perform work when technology and energy sources far beyond the first world are available. A human being puts out about 80 watts sustained power for external at the investment of about 1200 Watts for the sustaining of life. That's an efficiency of less than 10%. Because there's no reasonable reason to believe advanced technological societies would ever consider slavery, there's no reason to believe that the attribution of slavery to the one theocracy in the game is anything other than a childish atheist's CCCP straw man.

CCP's response: "Yes, the Amarr were capable of harnessing energy to bend space-time for faster than light travel, but they really needed Minmatar slaves to thresh wheat by hand because religion, obviously."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level

Saying a futuristic society with the alleged technological capabilities of the societies in game would engage in human slavery is as stupid as saying the Caldari plow their fields with oxen. Obviously, this wouldn't happen because, well, obviously, oxen are inefficient, slow, and expensive compared to the technological capacity of the society.

2. No matter what I do, my character will always be 10 years behind every other character. This is an absolute fail in game design. What CCP should have done is get some differential equations together and come up with a training speed multiplier that is applied to later started characters allowing them to catch up to older characters while still lagging behind somewhat, but not as much as they always will. This way, players who join the game late can actually have some legitimate hope of being able to contend with ten year old characters at some point in the future. Most older players would dislike that, I'm sure, but it would be far more reasonable then the current system which doesn't allow for simultaneous avatar customization and player advancement. Sure, you can work your way up to the cashflow to buy a new character, but that's a somewhat insane endeavor. The game, as it is, has nearly nothing to do with skill or experience, and comes down to the fact that someone else just has an older character than you and you have to wait another 2 years to maybe be able to reasonably contend with them.

3. Unfriendly players. CCP called it the "Eve Gate" (Eve, through whom all evil, mythologically, entered the world) because I'm sure they anticipated the kind of douchey people that would take over the game. It'd be fun if some of the major alliances were interested in negotiation or developing rules for interaction in territory they control or something. For example, in any realistic political entity, nearly no government is going to just shoot people on site for no reason whatsoever - that, of course, is not Eve. There's no contacting the pilot to arrange terms for safe passage or enforcement of rules by major null and low-sec alliances - it's just shoot whatever is neutral because you can. It's lame and takes out the factor of politics/economics/security enforcement etc. that is supposed to be present in space trading games. I've met about three-five people in five months of playing who were actually friendly and one of them I gave my billions of space stuff to.

4. This game isn't fun for new players - every major alliance knows that new characters aren't particularly useful to them and there's no reason to really go out of their way to protect them from pirate types. There doesn't seem to be any major alliances with a kind of ethos that wants to play the game in some "honorable" fashion. Instead, it feels like a bunch of street gangs going at one another rather than empires who behave with decorum, ideology, and philosophy.

5. Seriously, CCP, apply a differential modifier to the training time of later toons - you're creating a caste system for your player base - if there's no hope of ever being as good at the guy who's been playing for the last five or ten years - there's really no sense in playing because you're not going to be able to get back at him later no matter what because you'll always be five or ten years behind him.

I draw the line when the developers of a game imply that Catholics are cannibals because of the Eucharist like that one mission where a blood raider tells you "We don't actually eat people, we eat a wafer symbolic of people" or something along those lines. It's too bad CCP won't go after Islam with such vitriol because they know what would happen.