EVE General Discussion

did I miss it

My personal belief comes down to three things:

1) First, yes, they have to whip the game they are actually shipping into shape. That doesn't just mean fixing the broken stuff, it means getting people excited again. Odyssey was a meh attempt at that. I hope subsequent releases are more successful.

2) CCP has active, and highly sophisticated, avatar gameplay development going on. My hunch is that EVE will see WiS once WoD is released and has been out long enough to shake the worst bugs out. Say, in three years or so.

3) Avatars are really, really hard. The trolls who go on about emoting and /dancing are irritating, but there is a real point there, which is that most games squander all the potential expressiveness of their players' avatars in a few dozen lazy, silly, exaggerated animations. That's because making a human act human is incredibly difficult. The facial expressions are individual and subtle. Everything from posture to gait to how dilated the pupils are communicates something. The most powerful reactions are the immediate, involuntary ones that /emotes, as relatively slow reactions, can't possibly mimic. Then there's the problem of voices, and realistic voice communication. How far does your voice carry? How well do you control that? You can go deep into the weeds if you want to. If CCP learned anything from Incarna, it was that avatars aren't a feature like wormholes or POSes. They're absolutely huge if you want to do them right--and all evidence points to the conclusion that CCP wants to do them right. I note that Sony has a facial expression translator for EQNext, which is very cool, but of course the facial expressions are caricatured and then rendered onto cartoons. CCP will not be satisfied with that.

Meanwhile, they're just now beginning to experiment with "expressions" on ships, via the Marauders (yes, Rorqual--but they showed a Crucifier model at Fanfest that did something similar, so this isn't just about siege or bastion modes). I think it would interesting to make them more expressive--to have them, for instance, reveal (or retract) their guns, power their shields, have the lights flash and turn red when the ship enters hull, and otherwise have some form of visual communication. It wouldn't be a huge, banner feature, because many people play EVE as a 3D-projected 2D tile game with an ancillary spreadsheet, but for the people who don't it would be a nice extra touch.

- Spaceship gameplay is fine on a baseline combat content level. They've done a good job rebalancing T1, they've still got T2s and pirate ships to deal with.

- Metagame is not fine. Nullsec is becoming rapidly stagnant and it is not, as much as a lot of people would love to believe, "lol goons killing 0.0". It is a result of flawed game mechanics (SOV) and repeated nerfs to 0.0 income that caused sov-space to be nearly worthless.

I don't think games like SC would compete. I can see myself playing a game like Star Citizen, the same way i played Freelancer or Freespace and Freespace 2 (check out the Freespace SCP thingie by the way people, it's downright amazing what they've done to that old game) - spaceships pew pew, you do it for a while, get bored, come back to EVE.

Because in the end, out there, is always EVE. It ticks in the background, a game where a kill can be more than a worthless number on your killcount. Where loss is meaningful in many ways, and where hopes and dreams can fall to the relentless march of a thousand pilots. It falls quiet until a ping pops up, your coalition marches to a new war. You're needed - your tackling Slasher, your black ops, your battleship, logi or carrier.

What New Eden is now was created by hundreds of players that flew through those systems in the past. The likes of Vile Rat, whose actions shaped the political landscape that exists today or The Mittani who to some is the worst being to ever visit the cluster and to others a leader that sets a new course and select a new enemy to be crushed by the Coalition. It's a game that has a lore aside from its own lore - violent history of wars, riots and great heists.

StarCitizen promises... vague "revolution", promises to be the next BIG THING. I don't tihnk we'll see it in its full potential until goons descend upon it and break it to pieces to make their mark. Until someone tries to fight them, sparking a year-long holy war that would culiminate in a collapse that is still remembered after many years.

I think, to be honest, in a game where chat channels and external voice comms are as far as interaction goes (good, it's efficient) what we need now is more triggers to drive conflict not "shiney shiney WiS". Nobody ever started a war over how ugly was the mug of the other side.

Unlike CCP, Chris Roberts would not let anyone try to destroy his masterpiece.

We can't forget what is EVE in its core - ruthless, cold sandbox universe that will take your cookie and run away laughing as you cry.

To get a cookie, you'll have to endure a road that will turn your innocent, newbie soul into that of a grizzled veteran. You will endure months of training, losses, being beaten by those who outmatch you by years of experience. You will not be rewarded by just logging in or paying - you will log in for your daily dose of a punch to the face.

But when you finally find the guy that stole your cookie and claim it through cunning or sheer superiority of force, it will taste delicious.

So delicious you will want more and set yourself a new goal. We all have our cookie we work towards to achieve.

From the responses to SC it seems like people want EVE just without murderers, theives, scammers and ruthless warlords that burn regions without care for the tears of the owner. Which means - without what drives EVE's content. Without it, this game would become a soulless tactical space game.

As for the crowd WiS would bring... I doubt it'd last long. Many would join the forum whining and quit.

I'm guessing about the same, if they can afford a shiney ship they can afford mercs and a machinegun.

I'm curious, is CCP even monitoring those threads? They seem awfully enigmatic as of late... I mean, you know, actually reading through all this crap inside.

If you check polls in SC - most (2/3) players want exploration, not PvP. Casuals provide most money for games and they don't care if game is for hardcore PvPers or not - they'll go to the game where they'll feel more comfortable. There are 5 sandbox games in development, with its "no content for you, go PvP" development doctrine EVE will lose subscribers - the only questions are how many and how to minimize losses? Obvious answer - better WiS functionality surely won't hurt because besides gameplay it will provide much more socialization opportunities than local chat from 90s.

Well, CCP tries to turn exploration into something big, adding NewSpace (TM), but obviously they don't get that the need to succeed in PvP before you as much as have a chance to earn any profit from EVE is plain driving players away BEFORE they get a taste of the rewards.

It's like:

Hisec content: go there, get stupid cookie.
All other content: go there, learn to defeat bears barehanded, get slightly nicer cookie.

The barrier of learning to PvP makes most of EVE space useless. Some players will not PvP, others will just fail at PvP, others will join the wrong corporation (like, anyoen who fought CFC the last two years), and many just didn't signed in because of PvP (a mere 74% last time CCP released data).

So, what's left? Stuff that doesn't requires PvP (industry, trading), and the blank sheet of WiS content, whcih can be written and drawn in any way.

EVE's success has been to find a niche within a niche of people who like EVE's PvP. but those guys don't pay the bills to 550 guys in Iceland, the USA and China. In order to just stay, not grow, just stay, CCP needs to draw in people from larger niches, and do it before someone else grabs those niches.

And that can't be done with more of the same. Something new is needed.

You're right. The rest is likely busy looking into POSes and Sovereignity, things that are among the foundation of conflict in this game.

Here's the thing: games condition you to fight the bear. In a sandbox, you don't need to fight the bear.

Outsmart the bear. Run from the bear. Hide from the bear. If you don't feel stupid, reckless or just plain lack the testicular fortitude along with a shotgun - don't fight the bear.

Hell, talk to the bear. It turns out the bear is not a dumb bear - it's a member of Bears United, a corporation of unionized exploring bears that wish and have the power to contain local resources to themselves. Befriend the bear, join him and his friends and use the newfound alliance to build up your own fortune.

What would come next? Would you betray the bears, steal their riches and run? Would you eventually, through resourcefulness and discovered talent for leadership become the Chief Bear, leading the Bears to join a massive alliance and march to war, carving a constellation of 0.0 space for themselves?

Of course, this would require you to get out of a restraining mindset. Because anyone who does PvP is clearly a hardcore no-lifey ganking bastard that has all skills to 5 and billions of ISK to boot. Because it's bad to be bad. Because good and evil exist, or matter. It would require interacting with others.

Or, maybe you go a different way. You die. You wake up and swear to get revenge on the damned Bear. You get your skills to 5. You scam people out of money to get the billions. You learn to pvp alone, against the numbers and when the time comes you return and smack him down barehanded. By that time you're probably someone whom people recognize and dock when he enters local.

Either way, you just went through a story arc of your own, designed by events that happened to you and driven by a goal you found as your own. And it won't just end here.

If that "2/3 Casuals that want exploration" and "74% that didn't sign on due to PvP" had their say, we'd probably never hear many of the stories that made EVE itself. Everyone who ever lived outside of hisec has a story to tell, even more than one. You can have one too - just dare to be bold, as one trailer said.

Sorry, I can't help but think having to leave your ship, risk Death by other capsuleers inside or someone stealing your ship whilst your inside or people waiting for you when you come out... etc... is infinitely more hardcore than sov grind or structure bashing.

Imagine, you go in to look for things and when you get back you find that your ship has been stolen or destroyed and the only way to leave this place is to put a bullet in the back of your skull and clone jump back to station. Sorry, but shooting POSes with your friends and your ship reimbursement scheme seems a lot more jovial or carebear if you ask me.

You seem to imply with ever post that WiS can't be hardcore when the existence of this very thread is evidence to the contrary.