Jita Park Speakers Corner

CCP's marketing department is sending you mails discussing their 'increasing unease' to your mail inbox?

If you deliberately chose to avoid 75% of end-game content and stay in the starter area for the rest of your character life, CCP won't go out of their way to change the game to push the end-game onto you. In fact you should be happy that EVE allows you to stay in one small area doing your little favorite thing over and over and still gives you some sense of progression. As far as I know no other MMO does that.

As I stated a few times, customers buy what they want to buy, not what you want to sell.

Let's say that you manufacture Hardcore Cola, a soft drink so sour that drinking it is an acquired taste. You suggest your customers to water it until they get used to its taste. Then, some sunny day, you learn that 75% of your customers keep watering it forever. What are your options?

A, water out the formula of Hardcore Cola
B, make Hardcore Cola even more bitter so no amount of water can make it palatable to the Flanders
C, launch Hardcore Cola Smooth and onslaught the ordinary cola market with it

Option A will mostly please most of your customers, but will **** off the 25% who actually dink it the way it is meant
Option B certainly will teach your customers that Hardcore Cola is not for lilies, but you will lose 75% of your revenue in the process
Option C is a win-win solution, your loyal customers can get all the sourness they like, and you may begin getting customers who never thought that Hardcore Cola was for them

CCP is actively doing B, misguided by the few who "drink like real men"

And I mostly think that C is the only way out.

Everyone has characters in hisec. Nullsec, lowsec and even wormhole players have characters that never leave hisec or atleast spend the majority of their time there. Market, hauler, missioning/incursioning, locator and industry alts for example. Or even characters that have originally been created only to reserve a name. ALTS.

This means that even though my interest in the game is nullsec, some of my characters (who have very low skill points compared to my "main" characters, who are in nullsec) sit in hisec 24/7.

Please stop saying 75% of players are hisec players.

Well let me show you my stats: - I have been living in WH for last year (I think even more)

Characters that I have and log in in WH - 2

Characters that I have and log in in Hi-sec - 7

Reason? Market information, Logistics (as in freight movement), and other similar intel (spais)



I would also like to notion, that Eve is a business that works best when it is growing, In fact I would say that CCP main production is not what eve is now but more how it is changing over time.

Since I don't think we would have as big subscription as it is now if Eve remained same from 2002

As such if we view the models you proposed based on iteration and innovation the CCP stance is actually closer to the C version: they work on hardcore stuff, they also work on general stuff for everyone, and they currently in research phase for WiS too.


While your proposition looks like it is C based on current content, but if we look at it as outlined above it is actually closer to the A - Since you are interested in CCP moving its focus from "hardcore" to "WiS" or as you have described it - "watering down the formula"

So you start up 9 clients and log in all your 9 characters at once? Houm, that may be worth considering as it could sort of skew the statistics...

Anyway, by admiting that you log in 7 characters at once just because they do something useful in hisec, means that hisec is key for your gameplay style... else wo you wouldn't bother to pay 7 accounts just for taking advantage of it.

As for "C", I seriously disagree with you. It is not about removing hardcore, instead it is about adding casual friendly content that can be enjoyed in small incremental steps and can be left alone without fear of losing it if you can't log in for a few days.

Stuff that allowed to enjoy the game even if you can't put more than an hour a day on it. Stuff that makes sense and is rewarding even if you do it on your own, without a need to wait for somebody else while your precious ltitle hour ticks away. Stuff that is safe from losing the fruit of tens and hundreds of gaming hours in a minute, to the hands of someone who could recoup his loses in ten minutes if he as much as lost. Stuff that rewards careful, patient building up instead of whimsical destruction.

"C" is about MORE ways to play EVE, and not just the same second job psycho mobster endgame being iterated forever. WiS is perfect for that purpose as it's both new and disregarded by "elite" players.

Sorry but i don't get what "trammel" is supposed to mean.

As for what i want, it is to be able to enjoy the game within my real life constraints. I can't use Teamspeak and can't spend a lot of time in New Eden. That means that I play solo and in a casual way. And EVE essentially punishes that for no good reason. I can come up with many things that could be done about it, but won't go into details now.

There's many people who can't play EVE the way it is intended now, more like a second job than as a pastime. But alas, EVE is the only game in its genre. So either we stop playing the genre (bad), adapt to EVE (until burning out, can be depsised so amny) or strive to expand EVE in a direction suit to our needs w/o prejudice of the "cult".

This, or either someone comes out with a EVE killer, which is the unlikeliest of all in the current state of the industry...

Back when MMO's just appeared there was a game called Ultima Online - it was very interesting game and quite similar to the current Eve in it's hardcore approach, but eventually the subscriptions started to die out - Developers linked it to the "too much pvp" and introduced an expansion called Trammel that introduced areas grief protected without non-consensual pvp.

Problem is, that subscription dwindling was not associated with it. and with addition of Trammel UO stopped being UO as many people knew it - specialized niche game. And as such players who were forced to band together against common enemies (griefers pvpiers) no longer needed that. Strong communities shattered, most faithful players left and UO disappeared to be consumed but other safer MMO's.


As such many old eve players actually remember that and they fear not the incarna, or WiS (I would definitively say that many pvpiers and greifers would enjoy WiS done RIGHT) - they fear the introduction of "safe" zones in eve. Something that will render Eve no longer Eve.

Something that will break the steady growth of subscription we have now and turn it into something like SWTOR - huge peak in the beginning and 30% development cut within a year.


I dont know if you are trolling or not - but please do not think of introducing the grief-free environment into Eve - Dont break one of the last remnants of hardcore past. That is the reason many of us came into eve, that is the reason many of us remained here...

Oh, the old UO stories. I also have a story about how PvP killed the first MMO I played, Pirates of the Burning Sea. Already told it a couple times IIRC so will not repeat it.

The important thing to take from the UO story isn't what your opinion on unrestricted PvP is, it's what happens when you create a separation - a PVP game, and a PVE game that don't mesh anymore. The answer is quite simple: most everyone flocks to the PVE game, and the PVP game stands deserted. If that's the case, you'd better hope to hell that people find the base game fun enough to keep subscribing, otherwise your game is dead and you don't even know it yet. It's actually even worse in Eve's case, given the symbiosis between PVP losing ships and PVE selling them new ships and modules. Take one away and the whole thing is likely going to collapse.