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New Perspective

Author
Dominae Verites
Royal Amarr Institute
Amarr Empire
#1 - 2011-09-08 16:36:51 UTC
For some time I have been following the Incarna drama and generally speaking I have been sympathetic to the arguments of the pro-FIS crowd. I still am.

However, yesterday I went into a major electronics outlet to purchase a copy of Space Marine and I got to talking to the clerk and Eve came up. The clerk was less than enthusiastic in his appraisal of our beloved game. "I tried it but it was too much like work" was his quote. It seems that I hear that particular quote more and more often.

My first thought was: "well we don't need you any way!" Upon further reflection have changed my mind. We need as many players as possible and here was a guy who was in a position to recommend games to the massive amount of customers he comes in contact with. His opinion carried weight in the sense that he could steer more players our way.

So, while I am all in favor of keeping Eve "Hard core" , it seems to me that we may have to be more patient with CCP in their attempts to make Eve more palatable to the space barbie crowd. Of course, the roll out with Incarna was terrible and hurt CCP in my opinion, but going forward I hope that they come up with a solution that caters to the casual player.

It is my further hope that if they do grow the player base again that they give us more hard core FIS content. It has been a while...

Denidil
Cascades Mountain Operatives
#2 - 2011-09-08 16:41:25 UTC  |  Edited by: Denidil
good post, i do take exception to your describing the whiners as "pro-FiS". they're not pro anything, they're anti-change and butthurt and stomping their feet. Look at my sig - i'm pro-FiS, i'm also pro-WiS. they're not mutually exclusive.

and we do need a "shallow end" for the people with less time.

i enjoy eve, and even i often describe it as "9 hours of boredom, 1 hour of pew pew". i think one big mistake that CCP made was nerfing the insurance payouts so hard.


i think eve needs some environment where you can easily get small ship fights, without the ability to blob. i have no idea how to implement this, but i think it is something we need.


[edit]
i also think the a revamp of bounting hunting, and merc contracts - as suggested on the old forums - would help.


wait.. i just had an idea. going to post it over in the the CSM forums.

Tedium and difficulty are not the same thing, if you don't realize this then STFU about game design.

Krixtal Icefluxor
INLAND EMPIRE Galactic
#3 - 2011-09-08 16:42:28 UTC
Dominae Verites wrote:
For some time I have been following the Incarna drama and generally speaking I have been sympathetic to the arguments of the pro-FIS crowd. I still am. .........................



see my thread about what the endgame of all this is: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=32831#post32831

"He has mounted his hind-legs, and blown crass vapidities through the bowel of his neck."  - Ambrose Bierce on Oscar Wilde's Lecture in San Francisco 1882

baltec1
Bat Country
The Initiative.
#4 - 2011-09-08 16:45:49 UTC
No. Dumbing down eve so the lazy can play is never the answer.
Jade Constantine
Jericho Fraction
The Star Fraction
#5 - 2011-09-08 16:46:02 UTC
Dominae Verites wrote:
For some time I have been following the Incarna drama and generally speaking I have been sympathetic to the arguments of the pro-FIS crowd. I still am.

However, yesterday I went into a major electronics outlet to purchase a copy of Space Marine and I got to talking to the clerk and Eve came up. The clerk was less than enthusiastic in his appraisal of our beloved game. "I tried it but it was too much like work" was his quote. It seems that I hear that particular quote more and more often.

My first thought was: "well we don't need you any way!" Upon further reflection have changed my mind. We need as many players as possible and here was a guy who was in a position to recommend games to the massive amount of customers he comes in contact with. His opinion carried weight in the sense that he could steer more players our way.

So, while I am all in favor of keeping Eve "Hard core" , it seems to me that we may have to be more patient with CCP in their attempts to make Eve more palatable to the space barbie crowd. Of course, the roll out with Incarna was terrible and hurt CCP in my opinion, but going forward I hope that they come up with a solution that caters to the casual player.

It is my further hope that if they do grow the player base again that they give us more hard core FIS content. It has been a while...



Question to ask the guy is probably:

"Would it help you to like Eve and pay a subscription if they gave you a single room to walk around in while picking up tutorial missions?"

If the answer is "ummmm, not really"

Then the solution to selling more subscriptions is probably not based around space station avatars and might have more to do with accepting that you are appealing to a particular user base of potential players.

My story here is slightly different. I know a group of mmo fanatics from university that play as a guild across a variety of games, they tried Eve a couple of years ago and keep debating on trying it again but every time the question they ask me is :

"Has the corporate management screen got any easier to use? Because last time it really was like poorly-optimized spreadsheets online."

And again a few weeks ago I showed a non-eve playing friend the game trying to get them interested and was setting up a ship on a trial account and questions were;

1. Why can't I just use corp overview?
2. Why aren't there corp bookmarks to use?
3. Why aren't there custom window layouts and settings?
4. Why do have to turn off the CQ to run on this computer?

(and looking at my screen)

5. What the hell are you doing thats so complicated just to give me access to a common hanger?

Basically, there are 101 things that CCP can do to make this game more user/novice friendly and to help corps to recruit non eve players and get them quickly involved in the game that have nothing whatsoever to do with CQ/Incarna.

Simply improving the antiquated corp/alliance tools will help a hellova lot.

The True Knowledge is that nothing matters that does not matter to you, might does make right and power makes freedom

Barakkus
#6 - 2011-09-08 16:47:39 UTC
Denidil wrote:
i think one big mistake that CCP made was nerfing the insurance payouts so hard.


Definitely this, they should have made it so concord intervention and self destructing don't pay insurance and changed the rate to be more reflective of the market for the ship, or a percentage based on what you're willing to spend to insure. Would probably encourage more pew-pew in the end.

http://youtu.be/yytbDZrw1jc

Smoking Blunts
ZC Omega
#7 - 2011-09-08 16:56:52 UTC
Dominae Verites wrote:


So, while I am all in favor of keeping Eve "Hard core" , it seems to me that we may have to be more patient with CCP in their attempts to make Eve more palatable to the space barbie crowd. Of course, the roll out with Incarna was terrible and hurt CCP in my opinion, but going forward I hope that they come up with a solution that caters to the casual player.

It is my further hope that if they do grow the player base again that they give us more hard core FIS content. It has been a while...




we have been waiting for a decent expansion for 2 years, how long do we have to be patient for? i know trinity raised teh bar high and is tough to follow, but ccp havnt even tried to come close to that benchmark

dominion was poorly planned badly put out and has made 0.0 only about how many scaps you can field(i know small battles happen, but look at the map and how quickly 1 army is running over it). tech, they were told, they didnt listern and now they notice they were wrong.

tyranis and pi, was and is ******* bad, not just semi bad or a bit bad, ******* bad. i understand soem poeple like pi, but that is not a view i and most of the people i know share.

incursions is the only one that had any actual FIS stuff in it and its ok, but not something that can bring in many subs(everyone has seen the 2 year graph)

i love eve, ok some times you wouldnt know it, but i hate what ccp have done to it in the last few years, i used to tell people about it, send out buddy invites really promote it. now i dont even mention it, to me its like a smack habbit i need to get rid off but cant let go of. will be down from 8 accounts to 4 soon, so im half way there. and unless something dramatic changes in eve and with ccp, i might and probibly will pack away my needles

OMG when can i get a pic here

Denidil
Cascades Mountain Operatives
#8 - 2011-09-08 17:04:52 UTC
here is the idea i had

Tedium and difficulty are not the same thing, if you don't realize this then STFU about game design.

Reeno Coleman
#9 - 2011-09-08 17:07:33 UTC
You do not have to re-invent Eve as a game to appease to newer players. Seriously. Giving some thought to the content newer players see first would be far more effective.

As players keep saying for years now, polish up the stuff that new players and solo players tend to see in the beginning of their career. That mainly includes missions and mining.

  • Design missions in a way they guide you more and prepare you for pvp.
  • Design mining and task around it so it slowly introduces a player into manufacturing and trading.
.

Thats all that is needed, not some fancy looking useless prison cell. If your establishments or whatever you wanna do with incarna have anywhere near the quality asurence that you current content has, it won't bring the desired effect anyway.


Yeah, but I am talking against a wall here. Sad truth.
Skex Relbore
Center for Advanced Studies
Gallente Federation
#10 - 2011-09-08 17:42:01 UTC
I think the anti-incarna aspect of the recent drama is overblown. While there are indeed a substantial number of people who would just as soon walking in stations never take place there is also a substantial portion of the critics who have no problem with or in fact are strongly supportive of Incarna itself.

The issue is primarily over the NEX store and concerns about where CCP is going to go with it. The natural skepticism of the EVE player base combined with CCP's reversal over their stance regarding a cash store in less than a year has made us less than willing to simply take them at their word when they say "no gold ammo" particularly when taken in the context of the rather blatant suggestions of pay for advantage in the leaked fearless document.

Personally I actually support Incarna I think that having an avatar will broaden the appeal of the game and bring in all those players who would otherwise enjoy EVE but simply can't wrap their heads around playing an egg. I also think it will reinforce the cultural aspect of the game and make it feel both larger in scale and less isolating.

The thing is that what they rolled out as Incarna really isn't, It's so limited in scope and buggy in design that it's painfully obvious that it was rushed out the door in order to function primarily as a show room for the NEX. Now instead of being locked in our pod we're allowed to walk around a cell, there is still no interaction between avatars and no additional station environment is accessible. For this we end up having to suffer through much higher resource requirements resulting in poor performance on any but the highest end machines and even they struggle with multiple clients which are relatively common in this game.

Then we get to the NEX store itself, to start no additional art assets are added to the standard set, the stuff that is added through the NEX for aurum are for the most part stuff that is so underwhelming that it should have been freely available anyway.

Next despite claims to want to support this aurum/plex/isk cycle the items in the NEX itself are so pricey that there really is no reason to buy them off the market when you could just exchange a plex for aurum and end up saving isk.

We also get this silly song and dance with the attempt to roll the Ishukone scorp that the store isn't able to accept items in exchange to keep it from magicking things into existence, As if it would be any more difficult to have it drop a BPC that required a standard scorpion to create than to simply drop the completed ship into inventory.

What they should have done was release the CQ as an optional part of a different expansion, should have called it something else because a single CQ does not Incarna make. That expansion should have included some long sought after bug fixes even if it didn't include any new content people would have been happy enough. Most of the current items on the NEX should have been made available via BP's to the manufacturing market, A small number of particularly interesting different items should have been made available via the NEX store via multi-run BPC's that would have required existing PI resources to create, The Ishukone Scorp should have been made available via the NEX as a BPC that required a normal scorpion to manufacture.

Now back to the idea of bringing in more players the first thing to understand is that this game is never going to get WOW like sub numbers. The things that make EVE successful are also things that prevent such mass market appeal. It's a niche game that appeals to a particular niche market who want something more from their game than an instant satisfaction WOW clone.

There are of course some definite advantages to this market compared to the WOWies primarily being that we tend to be more reliable over the long term. Since the game rewards patience and long term planning it attracts players who have patience and are willing/able to plan for the long term.

An important thing to understand is that in order to attract the ADHD WoW kiddies EVE would pretty much have to be rewritten from the ground up you'd have to change the entire nature of how the economy works, put something more than the half-arsed excuse of a UI that we currently put up with, the consequences of PVP would have to be trivialized and well they'd basically have to create a new game.

All these changes would be things that would devalue the efforts of their existing players they'd have to make it easier/quicker to train skills they'd have to simplify combat, hell imagine the amount of support personnel that would be required just to process all the petitions from these new players when they get suicide ganked or have their missions invaded and are Concorded for shooting a Salvager. How long under such circumstances would it be until such activities are coded to be impossible?

Basically in order to attract a new demographic the game would have to change to the point that the likely hood of running off the existing demographic would be high, and trading a small but reliable demographic for an imaginary one that may not actually materialize once the old one goes away just doesn't seem like good business sense.

Another thing to consider when talking about Incarna bringing in new players is that you're talking about people who are experienced with MMO's where they control a humanoid avatar and quite frankly are going to be appalled when they use the clunky poorly implemented controls and camera that CCP put in Incarna.

So to summerize

Incarna would be great if it were done right,
The NEX store was a disaster
It's generally not a good idea to run off existing paying customers to get an imaginary player-base that probably doesn't exist because they're playing STO or WOW already anyway.
What was released as Incarna was nothing more than a poorly implemented and optimized showroom for the crappy NEX store.

Rodj Blake
PIE Inc.
Khimi Harar
#11 - 2011-09-08 17:49:07 UTC  |  Edited by: Rodj Blake
A lot of people don't like the novels of Tolstoy or Joyce because they're difficult to read.

And so a lot of books are easy to read. The literary stylings of Jeffrey Archer or Dan Brown for example.

But is that an argument for only publishing books that will appeal to the masses?

Of course not.

And so it is with computer games. WoW is "First Among Equals" by Jeffrey Archer. Eve is James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake"

Dolce et decorum est pro Imperium mori

RUSROG
Avalanche.
#12 - 2011-09-08 17:53:06 UTC
LOUD NOISES.

SOME SHOUTING.


Don't get your knickers in a knot - what's wrong this time?

tl;dr
Sovennek
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#13 - 2011-09-08 18:05:05 UTC
Dominae Verites wrote:
The clerk was less than enthusiastic in his appraisal of our beloved game. "I tried it but it was too much like work" was his quote. It seems that I hear that particular quote more and more often.

These were the same words that came out of my mouth, when first I tried the the 14-day free trial a couple of years ago. P I opted to play another multi-player console game, but I never lost my interest in the beauty of the game or the idea of blowing up spaceships.

I continued to watch the occasional YouTube video and enjoyed watching others "work" at EVE. Then, a guy, with the character name of DrOgres, started a series of videos called Let's Play EVE Online. I fell in love with game!

I needed to see that there were so many things to do and endless paths to take. I needed to see the vibrant community of players. I needed to see that EVE was, indeed, "real." Real people; real opportunities; real consequences. Just as in the real world we need to work to accomplish our dreams, so too in EVE. It is work. Except you get to fly spaceships and blow them up! Big smile

Remember: They're only pixels; it's not real money; it's supposed to be fun!

Maxpie
MUSE LLP
#14 - 2011-09-08 19:17:39 UTC
There are plenty of 'easy' games out there. Why can't there be one...just one...that's a bit more hardcore. It's not like Eve is exactly insanely difficult.

No good deed goes unpunished

Zensige
B00sh Industries
#15 - 2011-09-08 19:23:54 UTC
Lots of good stuff in there, this deserves one of my IN TRES DIOS bumps!