EVE General Discussion

Oh, gosh, I guess the fact that CCP tried to develop another game magically means it doesn't matter what they do today, so they may as well go ahead and sink a lot of time and effort into developing new PvE content that will be nothing more than a rote isk generator 90 days after release, right?

So its ok to waste years of development on a game you don't release but not create new content for your main product Eve, and its only a waste on your say so, for others it isn't.

We will have to agree to disagree this argument/discussion will go around in circles.

Lets see what the future brings.

Tal

I'm following it fine. This is just aimed at the common complaint that the sandbox is purely based upon player content creation rather than developer created content.

Of course it's okay. It's their money. If they want to spend it on hookers and blow, that's perfectly fine. It doesn't magically make your ideas a "smart" use of whatever dev resources they do dedicated to Eve.

Quoted for truth.

My youngest brother recently became an avid reader of minerbumping, and while he doesn't play the game at all right now, I am pretty sure once he's no longer unemployed I can get him to sub.

That's content. That's how you hook new players.

Not shooting red crosses, no matter how much you try to give it a facelift and some mascara.

You make a reasonable point here, I can see where you're coming from, but in response to this I'd say two things.

1. If the gameplay value of PvE does indeed decline over time then I'd say that's at least partly (if not largely) because CCP puts little effort into enrichening it.

2. While the gameplay value of PvE might reasonably be perceived as less than the gameplay value of PvE, the actual isk/resource value of it most certainly isn't. There's a fairly strong current of opinion here slagging off PvE as something worthless that Eve would be better off without, but without it where are all our ships and equipment for PvP going to come from? Missions, anomalies, exploration, wspace, incursions, mining etc. It's all PvE and it's the source of pretty much all resources in Eve. So it seems pretty daft for people to suggest that it should be left to rot, never improved and for its role to be marginalized, when fundamentally there's no escaping the fact that it's how the majority of people are obliged to acquire resources.

Pirating and market trading are PvP, but they are a zero sum game and I'd don't think there are that many players who bought their capitals and funded their space empires through ransoming enemies and looting their wrecks. If everyone pirated and market traded and no one PvE'ed then the resources available in Eve would diminish until we were all left fighting in free spawned rookie ships.

You could make the point that if all NPC based PvE were removed and all that was left was asteroid and moon mining then the fight to control those resources would be a form of PvP. However, that's not the way Eve is, and even if it were that way it would only serve to reinforce the already overwhelming incentive to blob up the largest coalition you can muster, and although that might promote more PvP my personal view is that the drive to form the largest coalition is one of the suckier aspects of Eve already and that to reinforce that would be a mistake.

This is EXACTLY what WoW did, and now every other MMO out there. I'm not even a fan of PVP and even I don't want this.

You can immediately improve missions by adding mechanics that let other players control some of the mission ships. Yep I know pvp but unfortunately until AI is invented every pve encounter will be predictable and boring.

Uh... it's not a "PvE in EvE" issue. It's a wholesale PvE issue. It has nothing to do with Eve or CCP - it's the nature of PvE. If the declining time-value of PvE is a problem that could be solved by just "putting in some effort", as you seem to believe, then be a doll and explain for the class: Why do games whose expansions primarily revolve around new PvE content suffer from the exact same issue?

You can't really say Blizzard hasn't poured enough effort into (ahem) "enrichening" their PvE, can you? That's damn near the whole game. Their entire dev cycle revolves around it!

PvE - all PvE, not Eve's PvE - is inherently repetitive, and repetition ultimately yields boredom. The notion that if they just put a little effort toward enriching the PvE experience, they could solve the problem of repetition = boring is a fantasy. You may as well put a little effort toward solving cold fusion or overcoming the speed of light.




No there isn't. That's your own, rather biased interpretation of what we've been saying. There IS a fairly strong current of opinion here that the PvE we already have is largely sufficient in providing what the game needs PvE wise, and that the quality of the PvE is not a major issue with respect to player retention, as the OP claims.

Space-chores as a resource generating mechanism are basically okay. It's actually not important that they be super-fun and engaging to fulfill that role, and the fact that they aren't is actually an aspect of what gives the generated resources (and everything derived from them) their value: Loss matters because replacing things represents a real cost. The player has to do work to replace that loss. There's really nothing wrong with that, and it has value in its own right, even if that value isn't really appreciated by the type of player incapable of appreciating loss as a vital gameplay element.



I honestly cannot think of a single instance of "good" PvE (by which I mean, "I would consume this PvE content purely for the sake of the PvE content itself, and not just for the sake of the cookie it promises.") I would not say some do it better than others. At base, it's always a repetitive task that can be completed by an essentially static methodology.

Some do it with more pretty particle effects.

This is a neat idea. Or missions with bosses that are run by ISD, or some other 'Other' with free time. :D