EVE General Discussion

EVE Online first bright star is the fact the every player (I think only China still have its own server) plays in the same shard. It was the flagship thing to turn EVE so unique. It was in fact copied then by some mmos.

EVE Online second bright star is the fact that it is a sandbox where players drive the fiction and the outcomes. Players make content. Every player is subject to the acts of every player else. It is in fact the only constraint that holds the need of cooperation in New Eden.

EVE Online third bright star is the fact that players make, trade and destroy itens, driving all market except for plex because understandably plex is the universal currency in New Eden direct related to RL currency and the ability to play the game.

Then every so often people start to demanding that the game changes all its long standing successful principles to accomodate solo or small gang play ?

There are other solo or team vs team combat that you can play if you want small combat.

It is sad that the mechanics already restrict universal play so people can have fun alone. We dont need more.

I think what he means is, elite is still new, it has not even been out for a year. You paying your lifetime membership for all that free stuff may not be what that winds up being in the future.

As elite is not even a yera yet (will be in dec iirc) you really don;t fully know what bennifit you gained. As a game company money has to come from somewhere, if the expantions or whatever they sell to make money, don;t make enough, they will look at the people witht he lifetime pass and go 'hmm lets see if we cna get money from them.'

People whine about the subscription model, becuase everyone now a days is used to FTP bull crap. But nothing is ever free.

FTP works becuase companies know they cna grab a whale who will send there paycheck every month to the company. Hell look at SC for example, where someone spent like 45k on it. and thats just 1 person.

Anyway the point is, the value of your 'lifetime pass' may noit be much depending on what happens with elite. In the case of eve, i cna always cancle my subs and move on if i dislike what ccp is doing.

Any hoot i rambled

... I fail to grasp this. Whenever I am online at least 20,000 people are online. If I have the chance to get online just before and after DT there are between 10 and 15,000 people online ... what on earth do you mean?

That would be a little odd since geeks typically have social skills
To steal away the hoards of nerd players from LoL?

but... EVE is real!
Somewhere in some New Eden pleasure hub, they are running our world in a simulator

Ironically, WiS would have achieved that perfectly

Hipsters engaged in furious fashion PvP at space station coffeeshops, sipping Quafe, while skilling up "social", browsing tumblr, and occassionally streaming some LoL/Minecraft for gamer legitimacy.

New "Selfie" skill tree adds Duckface, "V"-fingers and station toilet background to character generator!

Id agree, if not for the fact Ive seen in far too many games, and far too frequently in those, how reading and including forum feedback in decisions would have saved games from imminent demise.

More often than not, it seems Devs, in their work environment, become very disconnected from what player concerns are. A sort of "Ivory Tower" syndrome.

I think CCP has been better in this regard than most, and it is large part thanks to that this game is still around and doing this well all these years down the line. (With particular mention of ISD/CSM/volunteer programs, huge and encouraged Dev involvement with game and its community, very liberal forum policies, ranging all the way to EVEfest).

I sometimes wonder if perhaps CCPs native Icelandic culture has contributed to this approach, in ways that are fundamentally different from other gaming houses elsewhere in the world, and particularly in IT hubs.

Customer feedback is key and crucial, always, and central to design decisions. Its the customers playing and paying for the game, not the Devs, and its their needs/concerns that need to be met inorder to retain and grow the customer base.

I have issues with the kind of attitude your two points above demonstrate. Its a top down system, which runs contrary to basic principles of customer service and ensuring your product remains competetive from a customer perspective. Frequently there are players who do infact know the game, or atleast parts of it, better than a Dev. As to a silent majority, well, its silent, and the only reference point aside from vocal feedback from "minorities", is stat analysis, which can lead to the wrong conclusions.

Rather than ignoring forums and operating from the arrogant position that "Devs know better", Id encourage more critical reading and analysis of forum feedback by trained employees who can screen the real issues from hyperbole, who can intelligently sort the constructive and poignant, from the ranting, and then report those to staff so as to better inform their decision-making process.

Back in late 90s/2000, the enormous rise of forum interaction was considered a huge boon to sourcing FREE feedback, rather than resorting to focus group studies, which was until then the only avenue to discern a public opinion. The whole point was to build interactive player communities which can work alongside the company, to ensure the quality of the product, and also to take some of the weight off customer support, as players would answer each others problems without staff having to do it.

A symbiosis, with benefits to both company and customer. Im concerned with the attitude in your two points, which instead of viewing increasing levels of feedback as a wealth, instead view it as annoying, uninformed and useless.

The persons speaking in this way at expos have themselves the vested interest in arguing down the value of free public feedback, in favor of their own services. Ie: "Hire me to come speak to your staff and at expos, cos I know better whats good for your game, (though Ive never played it), than the thousands of players giving free feedback."

As is the case overall in an ever increasingly interconnected and vocal internet, critical reading and comprehension skills are movingto the forefront as necessary means to sort through the rough for the gems. It can, and should be, approached as scientifically and objectively as possible. Inline with that, having unstructured and open feedback data (intelligently analysed and sorted) is invaluable when applied to the raw statistical data of player behavior, towards understanding and deducing why those raw stat figures are as they are.

That, to my mind, is constructive and conducive adaptation, and hopefully a science that will be developed and improve.
A company already has its Devs, and access to their opinions. That is granted and inherent. The cutting and progressive edge, is properly utilizing customer/community feedback inorder to inform and support those self-same Devs with data for their decision-making. See what I mean?

hey well when it's in the game when I buy it, fine, or when it launches, sounds good. But when you buy a game and they get some idiotic bright idea to change that game into another game that everyone is already playing elsewhere, well that's when I uninstall.

And this has been the case for some mmo's, they did a total revamp of the game, turning it into a different game foundationally, and those people maybe wouldn't have bought in the first place if it were like that, game choked, died and shut down after they all left in droves. There are others that still just hang on by a thread with a skeleton crew dev team after doing such things, not because the game is old, but because at some point along the way they screwed up.

People say "oh don't listen to players in the forums", because they want dev attention on them and take their game changing ideas seriously while ignoring others. Luckily, CCP seems to know better. The stupid forum posters, well many of them here actually, have had generally the same vision of the game since launch as CCP did/does. Just because some random buffoon at a conference says blah blah, don't take it seriously, and likely they work on a fail game where they just care about hooking the big whales for their money.

Many came here and stuck around as they grasped the game for what it is. hah yet some people keep insisting this isn't a pvp game for example, even though that is exactly what CCP says it is. Then those players whine up and down for it to be less pvp, to make mining safer, or hauling safer (such as the OP) which the only way that could happen is to just cut big chunks of the game out to drop to the floor and stitch some other game into this one like Frankenstein's monster.

That should rationally have led to a decrease in PLEX price, as a factor of reduced demand for alts (which are far more numerous than primary accounts).

That hasn't happened.