Player Features and Ideas Discussion

EVE was always a niche game. And as ive linked, its not just about the subscription numbers. Go play the game that has the most subscribers ever if thats what you think makes a game.

Hi-sec is the easiest for most players to exploit isk out of which is why many people have their isk makers in there. Your PvE themepark land will be just as easy to exploit. All PvE ever, has been made farmable from every MMO that has ever been made. It doesnt matter if it pays less or you cant use cap ships. The mere fact that it relies on pre-determined written code means it will become a riskless tedious bore once you've 'beaten the game'. To prevent that you'd have to add unlimited content at impossibly frequent intervals with infinite power creep to keep players interested and entertained (see blizzard). Or you can have players make the content, which is more interesting, more immersive and cheaper to boot.

And yes you are taking things away from me. The ability to hunt any player for any reason i want and inflict space ship destroying love upon their unsuspecting lives. The risk of having my beloved home attacked at any moment by someone i slighted three months back. Thats why i play. Thats why many of us play.

And the link to zkillboard has player deaths and kills on it you realise? its does not include NPC deaths. And asakai was 4000 actual players.

Candy floss indeed

Yet no one calls that game brutal. It might be because each one isn't individually reported that you don't realize the scale, but yeah, EVE's killboards even at the highest they ever go probably doesn't come close. The largest fight in EVE's PVP history gets likely eclipsed by nothing more than their arenas. on a nightly basis.

I'm not saying that to denigrate you, I'm saying that to put everything in perspective. EVE doesn't get to live along in a vacuum, all those games you like to sneer at, it's not just numbers games. Plenty are far more dangerous, even through normal PVE activity, because the client is doing something a player doesn't always do.

A client tries to kill you. Period.

It doesn't matter if it can't or if it has no hope. It gets lucky, but it doesn't care about ship losses or money/hour. It doesn't care about having to go back to the beginning and fly back out. It doesn't get frustrated, it doesn't quit playing, and it doesn't look for easier targets. Computers do as they're told, and if they're told to kill you, they do their best regardless of the consequences.

The reason you have a low opinion of PVE is because CCP has been very kind to you and not really tried to kill you very hard. Do you think it's really beyond CCP to program in complex instructions like tackle-and-kill-support-ships or frigates-kill-frigates-first-staying-in-orbit? Do you think that the NPCs are underpowered because that's how PVE has to be? CCP has, very intentionally, tried not to kill you. It does not have to be that way. I certainly wouldn't have made it that way. I'd have set the computer in nullsec to hunt even large alliance fleets with superior force just to see if they could survive a pummeling and hope their neighbors didn't notice.

But it's not CCPs fault. I mean, you guys are already avoiding hard targets and looking for soft targets as it is. You're saying here that a core part of the game will be gone if you can't kill people who aren't even interested in playing with you, much less fighting you or even possibly killing you. Imagine the outcry if this game actually did start wiping out whole corporations with roaming PVE fleets and spawned events.

I'd love it, but I'd imagine that wouldn't be popular with the current crowd. That's why I set up the proposal as I did. Leave the PVE hammering for the PVEers who are interested in it. If you can't conceive of the computer throwing more at you than you can handle, you haven't played some of the games I've played. It's only a riskless, tedious bore, even WITH capital ships, because CCP made it that way. And they made it that way intentionally, because they could have very easily made it worse.

But, like CCP said, they think their game is unique because it's a PVP sandbox at its core, not because it's actively trying to hunt down and kill you. They figure that if a player gets that role, at least he wins or loses, but someone can't complain. If you're bulldozed by hardmode PVE because you're in a cheap ship, the computer doesn't get onto the forums and tell you to leave because it's having fun. You just turn up to complain.

I want that. I want a game, finally, to try to kill me, and EVE is a game that could do that. But look at that killboard for today. Look at the guides for how to survive in nullsec currently so you can farm rats. Does that actually sound dangerous to you? There's dangerous out there, games that will kill you dozens of times before you make any progress. They're rarer than PVP sandboxes these days. Even if all the players were half as good, the World Cup would still be the same. But if all the climbers are only half as good, nobody climbs Mt Everest.

Again, though, CCP has avoided that.

In any case, as stated, many people play for the vendettas and the "thrill" of PVP. I certainly didn't take that away from them. If anything, I expanded it. I made damn sure that Free Space wasn't going to be sharks-and-minnows, I encouraged full on corporate cannibalism. I designed it that way specifically, knowing that there was no way any pure PVE player was going to get involved. I figured, they'd have their space. You'd have space more dangerous than anything EVE has ever seen. The fluctuating resources can't happen in PVE space (it'd cause inflation by the truckload), but it's a ripe way to make corps fight each other constantly.

The proposal removes all CCP's kid gloves. For everyone.

How did it end? Elite dangerous did not have the strongest release. I really into nostalgia gaming did not take it up as what I heard was jsut lacking in some some ways. Odd turn of development here...I played elite when it was fresh and new...on my amiga 500 long ago. Fresh from factory amiga, no less. Hell one time when my little brother broke it at the time we dropped it off the actual commodore factory...it was like an hour drive away.

yes I am dating myself here, no one else will these days (or so says my wife lol). I should have been all over this really. Hell I got the new bards tale a few years back which wasn't all that good only because it piggy backed the old style bards tales in it. that was my youth in those old bards tales. Hated the new bards tales....the retro bard tales...brought back memories. Went full bore even, pen and paper as I whipped out a graph paper pad and wrote the maps down jsut like the old days (yes I know the maps online these days....I wanted the full retro experience, why half ass it I say).


then there is SC which to its credit seems to making some progress beyond adding aquariums to the "captians quarters" of late. It has not hit full release yet though. Where I have some outstanding questions that won't be answered till then. High among them is how will the overt p2w play out. Over various pledge drives they have offered some kick ass ship/deals. One time only for some of them. So that even in alpha/beta they have tiered benefits new players will not have. I am leery of this tbh.

Eve I never saw this issue. The special ships are extremely rare. If old boy wants to gank me in a freki....depending on location I know I will get backup from complete random strangers who want to kill the 20 bil frigate as much as I do for the lolz. that and even if no help and I died...its not every day you can post a lm saying you died to an AT prize ship in common every day eve.


This also based on the fact I have done the backing in the past for a few games and all I got was cosmetic stuff. Even Wots present to early backers/testers was not really special. Lets jsut say you didn't see them roll out in force to roll stomp the field when it went production status. Hell we can argue compared to the common to all tanks they were just plain meh....

This isnt about PvE being formidable. You can have that a long side the PvP sandbox. Your proposal does not take gloves Off. It builds walls between players.

You keep saying no one wants to be part of the PvP sandbox, and hardly anyone PvP's anymore. But clearly thats not the case.

Oh, don't worry about dating yourself. I've made the comparison before that one of EVE's strengths is that it's pretty much a MUD RPG. I mean, it has a very pretty GUI, but once you strip everything down, that's the one HUGE thing that sets EVE apart from its counterparts. Despite all the claims about how complex it is, it really is a bunch of line items relative in space which you have a bunch of code commands for. Sometimes, all I'm missing is the whole:

"You see a cannister (25m North)"
"/approach cannister"
"You approach the cannister."

I know that probably dates me quite a way back, but I suppose that's why I have a far less dependent view on the game and on the MMORPG field in general.

I actually dropped out of EVE to play Wildstar when it came out because I was looking for some kind of challenge. The idea that PVE is easy has nothing on Wildstar, five man dungeons were outright flattening people. I was in one group with a bunch of new players trying to do a dungeon called Skullcano on veteran mode (basically a heroic dungeon for anyone who's played WoW lately), that wiped our five man team constantly for three hours. Look up that Mordechai Redmoon fight; it's harder than it looks and it looks crazy.

I mean, honestly, I like EVE's play better, but EVE, as I said, wasn't trying THAT hard to kill me. Or anyone. And my God was it glorious to have someone build a game to try to kill you. F2P came to that game, though, and I know where F2P with NCSoft leads these days.

So I came back, and the game's in even worse shape. The PVP warfare has stagnated and most people seem to be saying that Fozzie's SOV changes are a joke. The Drifter stuff seems to be building up, but it doesn't look like it's going to be that blistering attack I was looking for. Even more people are crowded into hisec because the PVPers are looking for soft targets instead of hard ones. And that's not even stuff I had to see (though I took the tour and confirmed it). That's just how the game is.

And all of this really combines into why I made the proposal in the first place. The problem with everyone telling people to play other games is that, well, they are. And nowadays, it's getting harder and harder to tell people they ought to pay a subscription when F2P developers aren't doing less than subscription developers. EVE is having an even worse time. I don't think any one game will kill it, but back in 2003 and 2004, it was in a pretty isolated pool. Nowadays, the entire idea of a space-faring open PVP world or a FFA sandbox aren't unique, and a lot of them are cheaper. Worse, a lot are getting more for their money.

I know a lot of people are ready to let EVE wither, but it seems like such a shame. For all the talk that the PVP sandbox defines this game, it leaves so much that it can do undone beyond that. And it can't be said that players aren't at least LOOKING for a game like that. SC and ED might, you'd think, not be the answers, but ED has a few thousand people in a group dedicated for PVE and SC is coming with a PVE slider.

Please see the above post and please read the proposal. While the community has latched pretty firmly onto this, I've very much answered all of this in the proposal and explained my rationale.

Right now, there aren't enough people playing the game for the reason you described as being why people play EVE. Period. Many people right now are not playing EVE that way, and most people aren't playing EVE at all.

I'm not being insulting here, I'm just saying that your take on the game may not be objective or accurate, especially given the game's current situation.

Again, there is NO SEPARATE PVE SERVER IN THE PROPOSAL.

It is very important, when speaking on a subject, to have read the source material. Yes, it is dense. There is a lot there. It is complex even though I've tried for brevity. But to have a conversation about the proposal, you need to read it. Especially before you say that you don't like any of the changes, considering the space redistribution is not even the majority of the proposal.

I know a LOT of people ask for PVE to be here that you would be tempted to not read it. The commonality of that request because I made the proposal to address player complaints and there is no single complaint more cited across EVE. So much so that you all have stock answers to those that don't in any way address the work.

However, if everyone is asking for it, and the population is low, that's a not very subtle hint that, in fact, there is more to EVE (otherwise those people wouldn't want to even request change). That's a large market of people who may not actually have another game at their disposal.

It's also very telling that you figure EVE's PVP would die if there was a separated alternative. I tend to agree, which is why I didn't go that route.

Except when you ask for a themepark PvE server? Cool.

I took the time to read your proposal, while I'm impressed with the amount of work you have put into it I must be honest with you. It is a version of EvE that I can honestly say neither I nor I am sure the majority of people I have flown with in the last six years would care to to be a part of.

Not supported.

-1 On top of all the other reasons given any idea that is so wordy that it cannot be posted here gets a -1 because I am not going to your linked web site to read it.