EVE General Discussion

Not to derail the thread, but I'd beg to differ on this point. MMO companies have to have great Forum mods and PR in general - one "bad" release (in the eyes of the customers/players) can alienate substantial members of your community. You have to walk a line of always innovating but also always satisfying the customer. That's vastly different than say, creating special bolts to be used on airplane wings.

Anyway, I'm not doomsaying CCP they've proven themselves to be a resilient company over the years but I agree that greater transparency would be beneficial.

the sky is falling

I don't think the OP ever demanded an explanation for why the Devs left. He clearly states above he wants transparency with where the game is going, which is a concerned raised from old well-known Devs leaving and new ones coming in (EA guy and DICE guy - though the DICE guy is 'only' working on Valkyrie).

So in other words, you do not want to know if the game you play is heading down the pay to win line? You are not concerned with the game being dumbed down every expansion? You are not concerned when the meta specifically is attacked, in addition to the aforementioned "dumbing down" of the so called learning cliff?

This is not just about Soundwave and Zulu. This is about answering questions that more than just myself have expressed concerns with.

Did Decker work on any pay2win game or was it all micro transaction that does not give in game advantage?

The "dumbing down" you mention also happen to make most of the content they change become relevant in the game insetad of being useless database entry no-one ever use.

The meta stayed the same unless someone can prove that CCP is lying about some case being ahnded the way they say it was. For all we know, people got banned for it and just STFU after it instead of crying everywhere.

The learning cliff is the reason why it took over 9 years to even break 500k subscribers. From a corporate point of view, it's ridiculous to lose so much revenue just because too many people didn't even find thier way out of the beginner system or got blapped without ever understanding what was happeneing to them.

You're ignoring key parts of this discussion - namely that internal business affairs haven't been asked for. We don't want to know their internal benchmarks or what their revenue goal is, when their sprints end, etc.

What is being requested is an overarching roadmap of where they plan on taking EVE in the coming months and years, especially given the amount of change recently. That is all.

In your Microsoft example above do they not tell you, the lowly customer, when Windows 8 is coming out? When it is entering beta? Don't they tell you about the timeline for the Xbox One? The answer is, of course, yes.

That is the request here - what's next? Where are we going? What exactly are your plans given the recent changes? The answer could simply be "we're staying the course." However from the outside, especially with their new SVP Decker, it seems like they are dramatically trying to change the course. That is the concern.

9 Years... 9 Years of standing by in faith of the Blade-Runner-inspired juggernaut of dark space that I could just imagine going places. It killed off the WoW junkies in teaching people valuable traits essential to life and had a learning curve that made you feel incredibly proud for surviving through it. The universe opened up, ship hulls could be configured for anything (*remembers Moas with projectile turrets*), and life paid off because you were intelligent over experienced.

Space is cold.

Please don't change that.

Please don't change what I've given my heart to for 9 years running.


Where are you guys petitioning? Ingame? Under which section so I know where to put mine.

Riot have been pulling in senior MMO devs for years now, even numerous ex-CCPers.

Check the dev blogs and what was presented to fanfest. It's the equivalent to press conference from MS announcing stuff. All MMO makers by know know to never put a date on anything unless it's already raedy to be put in the game. So many ahve been burned by playing the date games it's pretty much a given by now.

When will X be implemented? Next X-pac.

When the next X-pac will be released? When it's done.

Those answer are not fun for us but at the end of the day, I understand why they give us that instead of Sept 10, then Sept 17, then Oct 1, then november 15th, then "before x-mas",...

At this point I think I'd prefer they attempt to go "mainstream" with this game just so we can say we told them so after it dies. I am extremely ambivalent with respect to the future of Eve after so many years of trying to explain that this game is fundamentally terrible in terms of raw mechanical gameplay, and the only thing that keeps it going is the individual and group narratives that are solely the product of this game's unique freedom of action and, especially, interaction.

Ten years ago a few nerds in Iceland hit on a niche in the gaming market, emergent gameplay, and despite their continuous best efforts to otherwise sabotage this game, that fundamental gameplay has kept them afloat. Until they step up again with expansions that capture the same innovative and risk-taking spirit that both maintains and expands the core emergent gameplay that defines this game, this game will continue to muddle around in limbo...or until people just get bored of expansions that are ultimately only dressed-up patches.

Personally, it has been my growing impression over the last two years or so that Eve has been written off, and all they are attempting to do is maintain it as long as possible with the least effort possible. This outlook does not encourage me to play at all, and especially discourages me from having the long term plans and goals that create a personal narrative, and then interact with the similar aims of others to create the collective narratives that drive this game.

Eve may not be dying, but my concern for and attachment to its future prospects certainly are.