EVE General Discussion

Deopheel Dalonne, ok here it goes....



I gather now that you are not a typical forum troll, and thus deserve a better reply. I am not going to go into the whole real world aspect of your post because it would turn into a multi-page debate (and prob get locked). Suffices to say that you comparing that to the current state of eve is extremely inaccurate.


Here Is Why

EVE has been around for a long time and we are playing the same game (for better or for worse) as we were in beta. The people are the same and the content is more or less the same, with any number of buffs, nerfs and content added into the mix. Yet, this is the first time in the history of EVE that subscriptions have taken such a nose dive.


The players have not changed
The old content has not changed.
So what is the unexpected variable that has caused this?


It Started With Dominion

Game breaking lag really pissed people off, especially since CCP was marketing the huge fleet battles at that time. On top of that CCP accidentally killed "all of the great stories of EVE" (this part is important) by creating game mechanics that allows alliance to be destroyed with a press of a button (no stasis) and Sov mechanics that ultimately annihilated all of the old alliances.

Atlas
BOB
Goonswarm
The "unbreakable" Norther Coalition
CVA
And others....

All fell to CCP's short sighted "buffing"


It Culminated With Incarna

Allot of people were waiting for the "single most anticipated expansion in the history of EVE". No one could have imagined the outcome of this expansion. Content that drove people away from other MMO's began to work it's way in as our video cards died do to an underwhelming room they called "incarna"


What REALLY DId EVE In

I truly believe that getting rid of the station environment (aka station spinning) really had a number of unexpected effects. This act alone forced people to confront "The Door" every time they logged in. That is damn frustrating... 1/2 to 3/4's of EVE collectively turned off walking in stations and the game just got uglier. With only a door to look at our eyes are drawn to that awful Nex store, and it is an ever present reminder of one thing...


"This is as good as EVE will ever be" it tells us.
Eve's ultimate expansion is here, everything else that follows will be nothing of consequence OR it will be content that will slowly turn EVE into "just another MMO" like WOW in terms of it's gameplay. Most of the people here play eve because it is the exception to the norm, if it becomes the norm they will try something else (and may be trying perpetuum)





The player base did not change.
Something else did.
Thus your assertions here are wrong.

Eternum I think the player base has changed, a lot. However, it may be due to at least some if not all of the reasons you listed.

I quit for eight months, in part, over the lag as well, after patiently waiting six months into Dominion for CCP to fetter out the solution and seeing no end in sight, when coupled with the shortsightedness of the new sovereignty mechanic that Dominion introduced, I had just had enough.

However, after my first real break from the game, I resolved myself to the fact that it was not solely any one thing that resulted in the game we play now, but everything.

☼ The subscriber churning leading to more and more instant gratification junkies.
☼ The veterans, like myself, who hung it up for a time, did not mostly all come back like they had in the past.
☼ The developer(s) continued separation from the trenches of the game at the ground level.
☼ Major coalitions being unable or unwilling to police themselves, leading to continued and near universal exploitation of a flawed system (read: Renters/Botters Online)
☼ CCP changing its base policy from a fledgling project that survives on quality to a product that survives on quantity (read: the shiny new content versus supporting existing content debacle)
☼ Etc.

The main problem I see now is, EVE is irrevocably altered at a fundamental level, as a game based on pure unadulterated competition, and subsequently the null mechanic, being based solely on that mentality in its entirety, is hemorrhaging on principle, which has a domino effect on the player driven economy (see ship losses percentages for various sectors of the game, and take note of losses that null sec accounts for).

When no one can set foot in an entire expanse of the game without aligning themselves with one side or the other and theoretically having to meet any and all demands made of them no matter how egregious, what is the point anymore?

It is not a sandbox anymore, more like a voluntary gulag.

Lately a number of my friends have been asking themselves, what is the point anymore? What are we fighting for as a smaller group of players in null?

Well, other than ourselves, we are not fighting for anything at all, because none of it matters anymore in relation to the broken mechanic and coalition dominance in the game at this time. Player sovereign systems are no longer consequential and have no legitimate and tangible benefits for smaller groups of players who have not curried themselves to one or the other coalition. On principle alone, none of it matters anymore.

Do the players suck?

Not necessarily, but there is a difference between being a poor competitor or adversary, and simply banding together in such numbers that whether you are good or not no longer matters.

The players are their own worst enemy in this game just as much as CCP is their own worst enemy for thinking they can just release new shiny things every six months for another five to ten years and keep people entertained. If this were Blizzard and they had relatively unlimited resources with which to ensure a high level of quality and satisfactorily bug free implementation, sure. But it is not. Players will not be satisfied for long with quantity over quality if the quality dips so low as to devalue the entire system in the first place.

I for one, am cautiously optimistic that CCP has no choice but to face this stark reality with the winter expansion, as much as I prefer not to make grand predictions without adequate research or data, I believe for a lot of us, if the winter expansion does not broaden the game a bit in null security and knock everyone down a notch equally so the little guy has at least some fleeting hope of being able to participate in a meaningful way again, that quite a number of us will be leaving null, never to return.

TLDR
The players do not suck but that does not mean they are innocent bystanders in all of this either.

Preaching to the choir for sure, I miss the old EVE forums the way they were just a few short years ago, and you and I are not the only ones.

The scary part? Even the trolls seem to be running out of steam.

Normally this would encourage me, but given that nothing much has changed in the past few months since the uproar began, I'm not so sure.

Sort of like being pinned down after a building collapses, the trolls at the very least keep these forums bustling, or give the appearance of a community that cares enough to throw eggs at one another (or to search through the rubble to find survivors)...but now, it is more quiet after each passing day.

If I thought this would leave us with mostly fun folks to chat it up with, regardless of our different opinions or ideas, I would be glad, but like you said, a lot of those people seem to have been turned off from these forums for good, and are not likely to return.

For instance, I was a huge optimist about Warhammer Online, the Open Beta before launch was magnificent, the game client ran like a charm, everything was new and dark and sinister just the way I wished Warcraft had been from the start, and then the live client was launched and well... needless to say I unsubscribed within a few weeks. But beyond that, I watched one of the more popular forums go from thousands and thousands of users daily to single digits, with posting sections that go weeks without updates, hardcore trolls both for and against the game having given up since there is no one to troll anyways.

The EVE forums, have that feel to them at the moment, that feel of people clearing out and/or lacking the care to even bother, and that is relatively alarming to me.

A few of the posters here like to give me titles like, CCP Apologist, and etc. but to be honest, I already unsubscribed from this game once (only in part, had RL things going on as well) because I took fault with CCP over Dominion. And while Incarna in and of itself does not really bother me (in its present form, NEX included) like it seems to for so many others, the problem with Dominion itself, and the game mechanics it introduced, is the same if not far worse than ever before.

So the jury is still out on whether CCP can finally and wholly address the situation, as they have noted recently, admitting at long last, that they may have messed up with the changes they made concerning sovereignty and super capitals.

It is a good start at least, one that I am hopeful leads to a better place for all of us.

This is the heart of the problem.

CCP is a company. In order to survive, they need to make money. And in order to make money, they need to satisfy the greatest possible number of players. This means that the highsec carebear silent majority is the group they need to cater to as a priority. Indeed, this group is ALSO the one experienced nullsec PvPers should worry about because it is them who, in effect, subzidize their use of Eve. All players pay the same amount regardless of how much they play. If Eve was billed on an "per use" basis, nullsec fanatics who put in several hours a day would have to pay much more than the casual carebear who checks in twice a week to update his skill queue and then mines for 2 hours on saturday night. Yet, these casual carebears each pay the same amount as the high-usage players and they are far more numerous while consuming a relatively insignificant amount of CCP resources per head. In other words, this large group of casual players is the single biggest reason which makes CCP economic model viable.

Faced with this quite obvious challenge (all MMOs are in the same situation), CCP opted for an unconventional strategy that appeared brilliant at the beginning but has badly backfired. They decided that they were initially going to cater in priority to the needs of the high-usage PvPers and not, as would have been more conservative, to those of the silent majority. That is why PvP is so much at the heart of every aspect of EvE, why nullsec exists at all, etc. All the basic initial design choices of the EvE universe are the direct consequence of this strategy to favor the high-end PvPers over the silent carebear majority. However, CCP management is not crazy. They knew from the start that they would need a large mass of casual users in order to generate enough revenue to stay afloat. What they assumed, and that assumption is the key to all this debate, is that the High-end PvPers would take care of the casual users; that they would protect them, lead them and inspire them. In other words, they hoped that they could create a caste of aristocratic leaders and that the bulk of the people would follow them. In particular, it was assumed that they would follow them TO NULL SEC.

The problem is that this assumption proved false. The high-intensity PvPers have proved unequal, in their large majority, to the task that CCP had hoped they could accomplish. They proved unable to lead the casual carebears in the conquest of Nullsec. Small cliques of high-intensity PvPers were formed quite rapidly in nullsec and they focused so exclusively on their own rivalries that they completely ignored the carebears who therefore remain together in highsec.

Faced with this situation, which was already quite obvious a few years after the start of EvE, CCP had to undertake the increasingly difficult task of keeping the carebears happy without the help of the high-end players while at the same time keeping open the possibility of high-intensity PvP, the prestige of which was deemed essential to maitain the allure of EvE online. This means CCP had to pursue two diffierent goals at the same time, one of which (catering to carebears) was not at all envisioned in the original design of the game. Predictably, pursuing these two mutually incompatible objectives has proved increasingly intractable. The disappointment that has been Incarna is not the decisive event that so many make it out to be. It is just another symptom of the difficulties CCP has had for many years to provide entertainment to the mass of casual players without at the same time disappointing the high-end PvP specialists.

It is in that context that we may say that "players suck". CCP had assumed that there would be enough advanced players endowed with enough leadership qualities to take care of the other, less advanced, players. In this vision, CCP would have fed the leaders with whatever they needed and the leaders would have then passed it on to the less advanced players and everyone would have been happy. One alliance exemplified what CCP probably had in mind, the Interstellar Starbase Syndicate. We know what happened to them.

The reason for this failure is what I have been trying to say all along. CCP had hoped that advanced players would be gentlemanly and inspiring leaders. They turned out to be in their majority a bunch of lawless egomaniac thugs. As a result, instead of getting a process of expansion involving the casual players, what we end up with is an endless tribal war from which they are excluded.

We may blame CCP for being too optimistic about human nature. Or we may blame them for coping inadequately with a situation that is completely at odds with what they had hoped for at first. It remains that if the advanced players of Eve had proved less disappointing, things would have turned out differently.

Wow, from the title I thought this thread was about something TOTALLY DIFFERENT.

Confirming I suck.

No, that is Mexico.

It would be if not for the suicide bombing part---not even mi vida loca is that loca it seems.

I like to suck !

Yeah!, some players suck. They are called suckers. What kind of egghead whining is this ? Grow some balls Deopheel ...

Maybe, but then again EVE was designed for anything and everything.
And in a gaming market that is primarily designed for rules and fair play.
Well where did you think all those people were going to go.

EVE is a free for all so you get all kinds.
And everyone is playing there own version of EVE.
You can't please everyone.

Not really an answer , but you can't really answer it without judging people.
And that is not what EVE is about.