EVE General Discussion

Someone was kind enough to post the prototype footage (here) and I have to say, looking beyond the unpolished state, that is genius!

Can you imagine it with dark atomospheric lighting, sparks and smoke making every innocent shadow appear to be a murderous rival player, all the while in fear of what will happen to your unguarded ship tethered outside and if you'll even find that big score?

How anyone would rather sit for hours gate camping or belt mining and demand CCP focus more on those features over something like this I'll never know.

(A thousand) +1 for anything that increases immersion, and a thousand more for something that does it so well, good show Team Avatar, I tip my hat to you.

See. that's an excellent point. But this stagnation leads to problems of its own.

Incarna launch was a mess. True. Not because of WiS itself, but because it was a perfect storm from three fronts - Incarna failing to deliver content, NEX store, and the infamous letter. This resulted in the "atomic bomb hit" effect you mentioned.

However, since then CCP stayed away from anything WiS. The last two years have been virtually 100% FiS. And what happened? Did the game grow? Well, yes and no. Total number of subs climbed past 500k, which is good. The bad part is, the PCU record hasn't been broken in over two years. This, to me, suggests that the new accounts are alts, and the actual number of actual people out there in the game hasn't grown. Arguably, it shrunk. Or at the very least, as PCU records show, the game never recovered to pre-Incarna Incursion expansion levels.

My point is, CCP can continue to do what they've been doing for the past 2 years. And they continue to do what they've been doing for 8 years before that. And the end result will be the same - the game will continue to stagnate. All the FiS development they did, all the improvements to the new player experience, all that still failed to bring in more people. Or if it did bring some, the amount is fairly negligible.

They NEED to push past "spaceships and spreadsheets" image that has been attached to EVE like a fig leaf for a decade now. No amount of new spaceships or space mechanics will bring new people in, or make those who tried EVE and quit come back. Anyone who wanted to play internet spaceships is already playing internet spaceships. Adding more internet spaceships won't add more people. But adding a whole new dimension to the game by way of meaningful avatar gameplay will turn this game into a full-fledges sci-fi sim, and population is very likely to jump.

Now, a lot of people are REALLY against "barbies in space". And I totally get that. But how can it be a bad thing if the game suddenly attracted hundreds of thousands of new people with this "barbies in space" content? No matter who these new people are, would adding a few hundred thousand new people to the game possibly be a bad thing?

Now, you could argue that "barbies in space" may not attract anyone at all. To that I say, extremely unlikely. Why? Simple. What is the best-selling PC game of all time? WoW? Call of Duty? Nope, it's The Sims series! Between the three games, the series sold around 50 million copies. Sims 2 alone sold over 20 million copies. There IS a market for this kind of stuff.

Bottom line, I feel the last two years PROVED, beyond any reasonable doubt, that as far as "internet spaceships" go, EVE has peaked. No amount of additional internet spaceship content will make this game move forward. It will either continue to stagnate, or it'll crash and burn if sufficiently strong competition appears. Those are the only two possible outcomes if they stick to the current internet-spaceships-only development plan. They need to diversify.

Now, I'm going to just say some more totally-off-the-wall stuff, so just ignore that if this kind of thing bothers you. But consider this - what if Star Citizen, for example, is a hit and delivers just enough MMO-like stuff (persistent world and character), and has vastly superior physics and combat mechanics? Can you look me square in the monocle and say this will not affect EVE's population one iota? What if Elite is a similar hit? What if Blizzard's next MMO is set in a sci-fi universe (e.g. Starcraft)? What if it is a sandbox, not a themepark? I can't speak for anyone else, but I personally plan to try out both Star Citizen and Elite when they come out. And while I'm doing that, I won't be playing EVE.

See where I'm heading with this? It's good to stay in the bomb shelter and play it safe. Until the food runs out. And then you starve to death.

Personally I am of the opinion that they need to figure out what they want to do with the NeX store, before adding new items to it. Pricing issues aside, as in-game micro transactions stores go its pretty badly done.

The three things they would need to fix
- Be able to purchase Aurum ingame.
- Add something other than clothes, like ship skins or upgrades to CQ.
- Redo the store front, add filters (sex, price range), packs of clothing.

Or get rid of it entirely and allow us to produce these things ingame.

CCP karkur is apparently picking up the pieces of Incarna that were left on the cutting room floor. So at least we know that the remaining clothing for the NeX and perhaps the sleeve tattoos are on someone's "to do" list. I'll just wait for news of progress from CCP karkur & friends.

CCP karkur is apparently picking up the pieces of Incarna that were left on the cutting room floor. So at least we know that the remaining clothing for the NeX and perhaps the sleeve tattoos are on someone's "to do" list. I'll just wait for news of progress from CCP karkur & friends.

Kind of like how I could care less about a POS revamp because I don't own a POS nor care to either. It's content that I am not against having resources dedicated to, and I recognize that it needs to be done, even though I will not benefit from the work done on them.