EVE General Discussion

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.

No. Dumbing down eve so the lazy can play is never the answer.

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.

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.

LOUD NOISES.

SOME SHOUTING.


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

tl;dr

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.