Player Features and Ideas Discussion

What EVE has to offer:
At the outset it offers a change of pace and a change of environment, attracting players by the idea of doing something that no other MMO is doing - space, trading in space, space combat and space exploration. It offers advanced content like sector control, industrial empires, an intricate game economy and even piracy. However, once you start playing (second stage) the game scares people off by being overwhelmingly complex and later fails to grip a majority of casual players all together.

- World: While space is great for background, and nebulas are visually stunning, it in my opinion creates an empty, dead feeling environment. While this is what space is, it limits the initial accessibility to the world.
- Story: What story? The Epic arc is not that exciting and pretty much just an excuse to run you across the universe. There is in depth history available (Like the Gallente-Caldari conflict) yet again for casual or new players this fact is anything but obvious.
- Quest: EVE makes little or no attempt to make quest anything other than “Go Fetch” or “Go Kill”. On top of that quests are mind numbingly repetitive. No gripping/ overarching story is connected to most quests and thus there is no sense of any kind of quest progression.
- Combat: 90% of combat is decided during fitting of a ship in dry dock. Actual combat is then merely a function of pressing 4 buttons and knowing (PVE)/ hoping (PVP) for the appropriate fit.
- Solo content: Mind numbing repetitive quests, Industry or courier/ transport missions. Much of the game is not soloable as PVP is always present and usually not one on one. Thus even a solo mission runner has to constantly fear to be “ganked” by a group of PVP pirates.
- Group content: More challenging mind numbing quests, wormhole exploration. Or PVP battles. Much of the content is only available to player groups or corps of sufficient size, virtual financial means and experience.
- PVE/ PVP: PVP is an integral part and everyone is forced to experience it. Many otherwise interesting features are thus often inaccessible. For example: Some casual player likes to build an industry empire but is not in a Corp and does not have PVP savvy friends and thus low security regions are inaccessible to him. Also if a player likes to run PVE in low sec, this is virtually impossible since his PVE fitted ship will be easily overcome by PVP fitted pirates. This problem is especially confounding for new and casual players who do not have the resources or time to build PVP able ships.
- Challenge: Here Eve has a special problem. As it tries to be “realistic”, ships get destroyed. Now for hardcore players that is both exhilarating and affordable. However the casual player who only just could afford his cruiser is not happy or willing to lose it in a PVE or PVP encounter. Thus challenging missions that may entail ship loss are avoided by casuals making missions even more boring and low/ null sec exploration prohibitive. It can generally be assumed that a casual, new player is no match for an expertly fitted and experienced PVP player. As any combat loss automatically means ship loss which then in turn limits your further game experience this pretty much makes it impossible to provide challenging and exciting gameplay for casual gamers.

In summary: EVE Online is geared and successfully attracts hardcore PVP players but fails to entice hardcore PVEers and casual players all together. Also gameplay is geared towards group content and thus again completely fails to capture solo oriented players. Thus its player base is not likely to significantly increase unless significant changes are made.

While I like where this is going (atracting more players to the game), you must understand that some core elements just can't be removed from the game. Namely :

1) Ship loss. The entire economy rests on people needing new stuff all the time. And it's not like there are no warnings about this part of the game. Don't fly what you can't afford to loose, and always expect to wake up in a clone bay when you undock.

2) Crime. EvE allows piracy. This is much more a blessing than a curse. In most games, you can't do much against a griefer in your faction/guild/corp/whatever you don't like. In EvE, if someone pisses you off, you blow him up!

3) Technical limitations. Having a single shard universe already is a huge achievement, and you can't overload it with too much of fancy stuff.

4) The target audience being hardcore players. EvE is big and complex. This is why we like it more than other games. If you make it more simple, you open up to competition for games like Battlestar Galactica Online. EvE lives because it's unique. The worst thing CCP could do is to try to make the game mainstream. The mainstream game is WoW, and all games developers who tried to rival WoW on mainstream gaming failed miserably. So would EvE online. CCP is not Blizzard and vice versa. Both have their merits, but don't mix them up.

5) EvE is an MMO. While solo content is desired to some extent, it should not be a major part of the game. There are excellent solo games out there for that.

6) There will never ever be an EvE Online 2. This game is meant to grow and improve indefinately.

However :

1) The insurance mechanic could be improved for casual gamer friendlyness. Payout could be increased in high security systems for instance (and be void for ships destroyed by CONCORD).

2) Canflipping also needs a fix, since there is absolutely nothing a solo player (assuming single account) can do against it. If he tries to fight for what is rightfully his, he dies.
Suicide ganking isn't that much of a threat for new players, since they don't have anything valuable enough to justify ship loss to CONCORD. It's that simple. By the time they get valuable stuff, they should have learned to avoid suspect ships.

3) Fortunatly the optimization of ressources has been making huge progress over the years (see Crysis vs Skyrim), and CCP has worldclass staff in that department (see world of darkness and dust previews, and EvE of course). It's always a balance act between beauty and system requirements, but as you can see, most recently with crucible, CCP is quite good at this. Don't expect giant leaps though. CGI in movies or cinematic trailers is precalculated, and a few seconds of video often take days to process to that level of detail. In a game like EvE, everything need to be calculated in real time. This is to be considered.

4) Of course, a few things can be rationalized to be more practical (see most recent UI improvements and dev blogs about what is to come). But don't expect too much simplification, because this would doom the game.

5) This is where is agree with you the most. Repetitive missions without a real storyline are dull. Improving from the epic arc model is a good idea indeed. There also are interesting suggestions in this forum about ratting/missioning causing faction sov and power to rise and fall. Make players actions, even PvE, impact the sandbox's NPC content, just like the PvP actions impact the alliance warfare. The faction warfare could be the bound that ties both aspects of such a shifting EvE Universe.

6) And this where you fail the most. EvE is meant to grow and to pioneer the world of gaming (see a future vision trailer, WiS and dust). Over the years, we will more or less smoothly transition from a spaceship game to a comprehensive sci-fi universe. And that's a good thing.

They do need to work on their EVE Universe concept. This is the integration of other games into one, cohesive universe. For example, Dust 514. This is a step in the right direction because while it adds to the EVE FiS game; it does not overwhelm it or change the direction for it. It integrates. They should apply the same concept and add a RTS; a station / sim based game for the Space Barbies and so forth, but they should leave the core of EVE the way it is.

At the same time, remember that there is a certain mood in the MMO market at the moment. Games like S:ToR, WoW and RIFT are all clones of a very boring model. (Boring for some players, not all) If you read the average forum or gaming website you will see the last few years have had a growing dissatisfaction with those simplistic, theme park games. There are glimmers, such as with Project Titan and Guild Wars II that this might change and the anticipation in the industry is good.

This, to me, signals that a game like EVE that is very different to the bread and butter MMOs will always have an opportunity and a place in the market. It is not as stagnant or declining as your idea makes it seem.

In fact, it was the shift away from the core EVE FiS game that has seen the largest drop in subscribers.

Having large-scale structures to explore in space (Kuiper belt, oort cloud, etc.) might be an interesting addition to the game I feel, as well as more things that'd be local to each star system. These would freshen up things visually quite a bit, and I think that the little effects you sometimes see on gates (rubble, dust clouds, etc.) are a great touch and hardly present enough. You could have small LCO 'customs starbases' positioned about highsec gates and such, or something. I dunno.

I don't have the faintest idea how any of these other ideas could be integrated into EVE without causing it to be a fundamentally different game, though.