EVE General Discussion

I'm curious, and this question is mostly aimed at those of us from 2005 and earlier.

In having expanded the game so much over time, do you feel that the impact of expansions are slowly shrinking with each one released? If so, do you think there's an entropy point where they either should stop expanding the game, or focus purely on reinventing what's already in the game, in order to get the most value for the effort?

For example, Exodus added POS towers, Moon probes, destroyers, battlecruisers...and a lot of other major features and content that is today a major part of EVE Online. When we logged in that day, and over the week afterwards, EVE seemed almost like a new game. Today, expansions tend to be reworkings of existing features, ship rebalances, system (as in game systems) overhauls, 1-2 new minor features, and a swath of bug fixes.

Having started out playing with the boxed set of Exodus, I believe that the expansions generally have had less and less actual content each expansion.

A few reasons are:
1. Content used to be thrown out much more broken and untested than nowadays
2. Content developers arguably had more working knowledge of their code, rather than trying to learn someone elses code before being able to change it
3. They needed big marketing catches a lot more to advertise and grab more players attention whereas Eve is now widely known

I hate to sound pessimistic, but I only see development slowing on Eve while CCP look around for their next big thing (see Dust and now Valkyrie) and product to take their company to the next level.
While Eve will plod on and probably still be developed and rehashed (rather than have new content dropped in), it is much more important that the developments adopt a 'right first time' attitude so any new content doesn't need revisiting 1 or 2 years down the line.

I inevitably will get lots of flames for my opinion, but since a lot of people here would rather believe 'their Eve' will last forever and that CCP are not a business that make decisions based on profit like any other business, then I welcome the flames to toast my proverbial marshmellows to chew on later.

Cheers.

I think they are small now simply because of how bad the Incarna expansion was. While I think Incarna was a good idea and still has considerable potential, CCP got burned really bad by that release. It was huge, it was massive, yet it was of almost no use to the players while it ignored gigantic problems with the game. After facing the resulting player revolt, CCP wisely went back and began fixing the major issues as well as introducing new iterations and technical advancements to bring the main game up to speed again.

Do I think there will be big expansions again? Yes, there will be. Walking in Stations still has tremendous potential for the Eve universe and I don't think there will be an expansion that could match what Incarna had the potential to bring. But I would say we are at least a year or so out.. probably delayed a little bit longer due to the preliminary success of Eve Valkyre.

I dont recall CCP doing Call of Dust: Future Warfare in past. Then suddenly CCP doing this game and that game and third is on menu. Perhaps that is the reason of EVE getting less "major" updates, but that is just speculation.