EVE General Discussion

Giving things unified descriptive names is better than giving them arbitrary nonsensical names.


Give me the names of the meta 3 power diagnostic system, the meta 2 CPU expansion, and the meta 1 damage control. Right now. Without looking them up.

(I'm sure some smartass will come along and name those 3 particular items perfectly, missing the point entirely)


Since when was Eve meant to be hard? This is a logical fallacy based on the idea that, if x is better than y, and x is different from y, that means that every way in which x is different from y is an improvement, which isn't true. If Eve periodically kicked you in the balls, would you defend it on the grounds that Eve is a hardcore manly game for people with sturdy gonads and that if you don't like being kicked in the nuts that you should go back to WoW where you can enjoy your unbooted genitalia?

I'm a vicious critic of CCP's more stupid blunders. I'm not defending this move because CCP made it, I'm defending this move because it was a really good idea.

Support good moves, called a fanboy. Criticize bad moves, called a troll.

The internet, ladies and gentlemen!


Four new prefixes. One for each meta level.

Four words.

Four.

You are telling me, with a straight face, that every single newbie, every player who hasn't cared to memorize the hundreds of arbitrarily named modules in the game, every single person who has ever had to right click to get the meta level or search the market for an item name, all of these people should just go screw themselves because the Eve playerbase should not be obliged to learn four god damned words.

No no and no. It seems the game has been dumbed down a little more. I'm disappointed.

But you seem to be pretty alone here.

Eve shall not be "easy mode", therefore you should re-think this issue.

Did the names change the stats or usefulness of the mods or ammo? No.

Did it change their function in any meaningful way? No.

Did it allow me to search for all of the same damage type of missile for several missile types with a single word? Yes.

Did it allow me to pull all the prop mods of a type/size in a single search? Yes.

I fail to see what the game gains functionally from arbitrary and meaningless complexity. I'm not to keen on the names themselves, but the fact that is was done IMHO was a + for usability. I prefer the "difficulty" (which really doesn't exist, this game is VERY strait forward from a mechanics standpoint for the most part) of the game come from the variety of choices rather than their obfuscation behind meaningless other words. If you couldn't figure our when/how/which mod to use before, you probably still can't.

Yes. Seriously. Absolutely 100% dead serious. Time for a side rant.

I've been following the MMO industry for the last ten years or so. UO was before my time, and I never played SWG. I grew up on Ragnarok Online, a Korean grinder of moderate reputation. I discovered Eve around seven years ago. I've been playing it on and off ever since. I can never play it for more than a month or two at a time because the actual gameplay bores me to tears more often than not, but it absolutely fascinates me in the way that it attempts something different.

The sandbox is a great thing, and it agonizes me that we don't have more of them. Before WoW hit, clones of EQ was the basic trend. UO was, despite popular myth, actually extremely successful. In fact, it was the most successful MMO ever created at the time. It was the first online game to prove that you could actually have a subscription model and still be profitable. It broke 100,000 subscribers back when that was considered an insanely big deal rather than a horrendous failure.

When WoW came out, it basically butchered everything. It became the gold standard. But unlike EQ which was actually surpassed without that much trouble, WoW has reached numbers that nobody else has even come close to. So we get people chasing that goal, and the way they figure to do it is to copy WoW in its every element. And that leads to stagnation. And I thank every single Eve developer for holding up a shining light of originality in an otherwise dead and depressing swamp of minimaps in the top right and hotkeys in the bottom left.

But.

The problem with the current state of the industry is not that WoW is bad. WoW is not actually that bad. It's enjoyable, it's refined, there's an enormous amount of content and an appealing art style. It has 11 million subscribers, and that's no accident. It genuinely is a good game. It's not my cup of tea, but it is a good game. The problem is not even that everybody is copying WoW. WoW did a lot of things right! The problem is that people copy WoW without actually understanding what it is that made WoW good.

What made WoW good was a hell of a lot of polish. That's what Blizzard did. That's what Blizzard have always done! They had a really polished game with fairly modest system requirements. It was easy to get into. It wasn't even necessarily shallow; Not as deep as Eve, certainly, but it was no browser game. This is what people should look to when they want to understand what made WoW great.

But people don't see that. They just see the hacky slashy kill ten rats deal. And they think that's what makes WoW the killer that it is. But they're wrong.

So we get a ton of people copying the gameplay. And the gameplay isn't actually that bad per se; I've played it. It's tolerable to an extent. The key phrase there, however, is to an extent. When everything you eat is ice cream, even if ice cream is pretty damned tasty, sooner or later you get pretty sick of ice cream. And when every MMO out there involves verb number noun quests, you start to get a little ******* sick of verb number noun quests.

But the key thing to realize here is that this does not mean you should avoid doing anything as WoW did. We should take WoW as an example of how to do things right. Eve should do the things that WoW did right, because if it did, it would still be Eve, it would just be a really refined and polished Eve. Because that's the example we should take from WoW. Take your core concept, and polish it until you can see your face it in.

And now we're back to your comment, about Eve being hard.

Eve's core is not about difficulty. It was never about difficulty. It is a difficult game, but that's not what makes Eve what it is. Eve is about depth, complexity, and variety. It's about freedom of choice. It's about having a giant world which just functions, and the idea that if you give players the power to interact with and exert influence over each other, they'll go on to do some incredible things with that. This is the essence of Eve. This is what the hacky slashy dikumud paradigm can never have, and it's that which we should seek to preserve, not simply difficulty.

Eve is a very rough game, and it is a very interesting game. Sometimes we mistake the roughness for that which makes it interesting. That leads us to bad places.

Let's not do that.

I don't mind you criticizing my post, but you could at least read it first.

All my speed mods and missiles work the same. Your failure to adapt to such a small change speaks more of your failings than CCP's.

I prefer the current results of search functionality. Pulling up entire groups via search is easier. The range of relevant searches which will return complete results for a group was increased.

Needless complexity is not a feature, it's bad design.

There is no point to this besides a failure to see the good in the change due to an overblown sense of elitism around a game.

It seems to be fashionable these days to rename a item with a name that has absolutely nothing to do with the item itself. I guess it is to make the item sound new and a lot more complicated than what it actually is.