EVE General Discussion

Yes. Seriously. Absolutely 100% dead serious. Time for a side rant.

I've been following the MMO industry for the last ten years or so. UO was before my time, and I never played SWG. I grew up on Ragnarok Online, a Korean grinder of moderate reputation. I discovered Eve around seven years ago. I've been playing it on and off ever since. I can never play it for more than a month or two at a time because the actual gameplay bores me to tears more often than not, but it absolutely fascinates me in the way that it attempts something different.

The sandbox is a great thing, and it agonizes me that we don't have more of them. Before WoW hit, clones of EQ was the basic trend. UO was, despite popular myth, actually extremely successful. In fact, it was the most successful MMO ever created at the time. It was the first online game to prove that you could actually have a subscription model and still be profitable. It broke 100,000 subscribers back when that was considered an insanely big deal rather than a horrendous failure.

When WoW came out, it basically butchered everything. It became the gold standard. But unlike EQ which was actually surpassed without that much trouble, WoW has reached numbers that nobody else has even come close to. So we get people chasing that goal, and the way they figure to do it is to copy WoW in its every element. And that leads to stagnation. And I thank every single Eve developer for holding up a shining light of originality in an otherwise dead and depressing swamp of minimaps in the top right and hotkeys in the bottom left.

But.

The problem with the current state of the industry is not that WoW is bad. WoW is not actually that bad. It's enjoyable, it's refined, there's an enormous amount of content and an appealing art style. It has 11 million subscribers, and that's no accident. It genuinely is a good game. It's not my cup of tea, but it is a good game. The problem is not even that everybody is copying WoW. WoW did a lot of things right! The problem is that people copy WoW without actually understanding what it is that made WoW good.

What made WoW good was a hell of a lot of polish. That's what Blizzard did. That's what Blizzard have always done! They had a really polished game with fairly modest system requirements. It was easy to get into. It wasn't even necessarily shallow; Not as deep as Eve, certainly, but it was no browser game. This is what people should look to when they want to understand what made WoW great.

But people don't see that. They just see the hacky slashy kill ten rats deal. And they think that's what makes WoW the killer that it is. But they're wrong.

So we get a ton of people copying the gameplay. And the gameplay isn't actually that bad per se; I've played it. It's tolerable to an extent. The key phrase there, however, is to an extent. When everything you eat is ice cream, even if ice cream is pretty damned tasty, sooner or later you get pretty sick of ice cream. And when every MMO out there involves verb number noun quests, you start to get a little ******* sick of verb number noun quests.

But the key thing to realize here is that this does not mean you should avoid doing anything as WoW did. We should take WoW as an example of how to do things right. Eve should do the things that WoW did right, because if it did, it would still be Eve, it would just be a really refined and polished Eve. Because that's the example we should take from WoW. Take your core concept, and polish it until you can see your face it in.

And now we're back to your comment, about Eve being hard.

Eve's core is not about difficulty. It was never about difficulty. It is a difficult game, but that's not what makes Eve what it is. Eve is about depth, complexity, and variety. It's about freedom of choice. It's about having a giant world which just functions, and the idea that if you give players the power to interact with and exert influence over each other, they'll go on to do some incredible things with that. This is the essence of Eve. This is what the hacky slashy dikumud paradigm can never have, and it's that which we should seek to preserve, not simply difficulty.

Eve is a very rough game, and it is a very interesting game. Sometimes we mistake the roughness for that which makes it interesting. That leads us to bad places.

Let's not do that.

Yes. Seriously. Absolutely 100% dead serious. Time for a side rant.

I've been following the MMO industry for the last ten years or so. UO was before my time, and I never played SWG. I grew up on Ragnarok Online, a Korean grinder of moderate reputation. I discovered Eve around seven years ago. I've been playing it on and off ever since. I can never play it for more than a month or two at a time because the actual gameplay bores me to tears more often than not, but it absolutely fascinates me in the way that it attempts something different.

The sandbox is a great thing, and it agonizes me that we don't have more of them. Before WoW hit, clones of EQ was the basic trend. UO was, despite popular myth, actually extremely successful. In fact, it was the most successful MMO ever created at the time. It was the first online game to prove that you could actually have a subscription model and still be profitable. It broke 100,000 subscribers back when that was considered an insanely big deal rather than a horrendous failure.

When WoW came out, it basically butchered everything. It became the gold standard. But unlike EQ which was actually surpassed without that much trouble, WoW has reached numbers that nobody else has even come close to. So we get people chasing that goal, and the way they figure to do it is to copy WoW in its every element. And that leads to stagnation. And I thank every single Eve developer for holding up a shining light of originality in an otherwise dead and depressing swamp of minimaps in the top right and hotkeys in the bottom left.

But.

The problem with the current state of the industry is not that WoW is bad. WoW is not actually that bad. It's enjoyable, it's refined, there's an enormous amount of content and an appealing art style. It has 11 million subscribers, and that's no accident. It genuinely is a good game. It's not my cup of tea, but it is a good game. The problem is not even that everybody is copying WoW. WoW did a lot of things right! The problem is that people copy WoW without actually understanding what it is that made WoW good.

What made WoW good was a hell of a lot of polish. That's what Blizzard did. That's what Blizzard have always done! They had a really polished game with fairly modest system requirements. It was easy to get into. It wasn't even necessarily shallow; Not as deep as Eve, certainly, but it was no browser game. This is what people should look to when they want to understand what made WoW great.

But people don't see that. They just see the hacky slashy kill ten rats deal. And they think that's what makes WoW the killer that it is. But they're wrong.

So we get a ton of people copying the gameplay. And the gameplay isn't actually that bad per se; I've played it. It's tolerable to an extent. The key phrase there, however, is to an extent. When everything you eat is ice cream, even if ice cream is pretty damned tasty, sooner or later you get pretty sick of ice cream. And when every MMO out there involves verb number noun quests, you start to get a little ******* sick of verb number noun quests.

But the key thing to realize here is that this does not mean you should avoid doing anything as WoW did. We should take WoW as an example of how to do things right. Eve should do the things that WoW did right, because if it did, it would still be Eve, it would just be a really refined and polished Eve. Because that's the example we should take from WoW. Take your core concept, and polish it until you can see your face it in.

And now we're back to your comment, about Eve being hard.

Eve's core is not about difficulty. It was never about difficulty. It is a difficult game, but that's not what makes Eve what it is. Eve is about depth, complexity, and variety. It's about freedom of choice. It's about having a giant world which just functions, and the idea that if you give players the power to interact with and exert influence over each other, they'll go on to do some incredible things with that. This is the essence of Eve. This is what the hacky slashy dikumud paradigm can never have, and it's that which we should seek to preserve, not simply difficulty.

Eve is a very rough game, and it is a very interesting game. Sometimes we mistake the roughness for that which makes it interesting. That leads us to bad places.

Let's not do that.

Basically you say:

- you dont play EVE that much
- EVE is boring for you
- you say WoW is a good example, and we should copy that
- you say EVE needs to be easier

==> gb2WoW, or, preferably, kill yourself, thanks!

EVE is the 12th MMO that I play, therefore I, unlike you, see where these kind of changes are leading us, and it is NOT for the good of EVE!

Now, where exactly is this name change a "UI polish" as you state?! o.O

You sir, are a troll!

Obvious devalt is obvious

Naa... I understand that banana looks different than tomato. You will too when you grow up.