EVE General Discussion

A recent Jester's Trek article on EN24 http://evenews24.com/2014/05/10/jesters-trek-the-seven-percent-solution/ discusses CCP's concerns with the New Player Experience and suggests that some of the guys at CCP have been struggling to understand why Eve isn't more popular. Among all the reader comments on that article one jumped out at me immediately. PvE in Eve is shite.

It's completely true, there's no denying it.

You warp into a level 4 mission and there are rows of red x's all arranged in neat little blobs. They sit there dumbly as you start picking off the ones at the end and only actually shoot you back when you start attacking the ones in their own little blob. They don't remote rep at all, and apart from a couple of bosses their local rep is pathetic, they almost never web or scram you, and they don't try to escape before they are killed. Ewar between NPC's and players either doesn't work at all, or is mostly a chance based mockery of real player ewar that makes using it in PvE almost completely pointless.

What's more. Despite all the changes to the game over the years basic NPC combat of the kind you find in missions and belts hasn't improved one little bit in 10 years.

'Epic arcs' were added back in Dominion (2009) and touted as a framework that would permit the constant creation of new and exciting PvE with "immersive story, with dramatic arcs, unique characters, and an ebb and flow of dramatic events" in which the choices the player made would impact on how the story developed. Well what a crock of **** that turned out to be. To date there are I think 7 arcs making this a classic example of a good idea that once implemented has been pretty much left to rot on the vine.

What you have to keep in mind is that anyone coming into Eve is likely to have had experience of other (often free to play MMOs), and naturally they will have certain expectations. Equally, as developers of an MMO CCP should know this and be perfectly well aware of what those expectations are.

Many new Eve players will expect to be able to log in and chill out while leveling up their Raven/(faction pirate mission machine). In order to do that Eve has to provide an entry level NPC combat system that is engaging. NPCs should be hard enough to be challenging and have some basic combat intelligence. For better realism, missions should consist of fewer, harder NPCs. They should have decent tanks, remote rep in harder missions, attack in a coordinated fashion, attempt to retreat before they are destroyed, and EWAR should work the same on NPCs as it does on players.

I seem to recall that when Sleeper AI was introduced there was talk of that eventually finding its way into mission and belt/exploration rats, and again with the introduction of Incursions. Needless to say, nothing came from that.

Another thing that was mentioned in the article was that most players who play Eve leave almost immediately, of those that don't most play entirely solo for a while and then leave later, and that very few engage with other players at all, but the one that do engage with other players tend to be the ones that stay. Well if that's the case and you want to do something to encourage new players to engage with other players, then instead of having the new player experience being nothing more than an introduction on how to run missions by yourself, why not instead have a new player experience that focuses instead on player interaction?

Here's a random thought. Instead of having new players start off in an NPC corp, why not have them start off in a Faction Warfare militia instead, and have a few extra simple missions just for brand new characters to ease them into it. They can always leave of course and revert to an NPC corp once they've completed the tutorial.

I stopped reading at pitchfork wielding Looney.
We forget, eve is hard, realy hard.

Dear Op, don't like pve, don't do it.

EVE requires a certain amount of effort and applied thinking, and the game rewards such players for said effort and thought.

Most other MMO's and console games... not so much, in either respect.

Just saying... because, now and then, just to rage at the idiots and crush them like lemmings, I like a mindless "hack and slash" as much as the next guy.

Screw their expectations.

And what is is with people wanting this game to be "more popular"? More people equals more crap, that's why for example IRL exclusive night clubs are exclusive and night clubs open to anyone are just ghetto-trashy places that experience a lot of police calls lol.

It's mainly because PvE is a fairly secondary part of the game, its main purpose being to provide an influx of ISK into the economy.

Not really. They framework did allow for all of that, and the arcs work that way. They just haven't revisited it to create much more of the same.

So as always, the problem isn't really the game but the deeply flawed expectations that people bring to it?

…well, aside from Sleeper AI now being used by mission and belt/exploration rats (not just in incursions).

That seems odd since the research done shows rather the opposite: those who don't engage with others are the ones to leave, and while many people spend time flying on their own, not many are playing entirely solo. Moreover, all the most popular activities in the game are intrinsically group oriented.

A good deal new players leave because they are used to hand holding and theme park MMOs. Without something telling them how to proceed or a YouTube video telling them the mechanics of a static fight, they vapor lock.

These are the ones you see on the forums that want a pvp toggle, whine about never being able to compete with a 100m sp person, or super-concord in every system(to name a few). Eve is better off without them.

And we have identified yet another one of Jester's butt puppets.

I motion that we make linking his blog grounds for locking a thread.

Inertia.

Just think about how much work it would be to change every mission in the game to be a proper PvP-like experience and how many tops would be blown by people who'd no longer be able to just warp in with their battleship, F1 everything in sight, and casually collect cash…

Im only playing devil's advocate here...

But in Soviet Minecraft, the PvE ganks YOU!