EVE General Discussion

I dislike lights flashing out of my butt, but EVE's combat GUI is pretty sad too, imo.

EVE PVP has incredible depth, but those red squares and alphanumerical data don't exactly do a spectacular job in conveying that depth

because when nobody's holding your hand, people tend to get lost.

In the wrong part of town, where you get scammed, trolled, mugged, griefed, and awoxed.

Fun isn't it?

Is it any wonder people do not choose to pay for that, apart from maybe the bottom 1% or less of the barrel.

You know most people, Even long term players *shock* do not want to play in a game version mix of downtown Detroit and a Crack house.

In the wrong part of town, where you get scammed, trolled, mugged, griefed, and awoxed.

Fun isn't it?

Is it any wonder people do not choose to pay for that, apart from maybe the bottom 1% or less of the barrel.

You know most people, Even long term players *shock* do not want to play in a game version mix of downtown Detroit and a Crack house.

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.

Why do PvP and PvE have to be different things? I don't drive to work in the morning and say oh I'd better not get into a crash because this isn't my PvP car. It's stupid.

Welp, that's stroke #4 I've had caused by clicking the like button, check your EVEmail tomorrow for the bill to my obamacare premiums that are now sky high.

I know a lot of people who have tried Eve and there biggest complaint was that trying to find a decent corp to play the game with people was next to impossible.