EVE General Discussion

http://www.evenews24.com/2012/01/30/freebooted-power-gamers-vs-content-seekers/

I read through it, and it struck me as a reasonable concern.

CCP, IMHO, you have done a fantastic job at listening to our requests. You've fixed bugs, corrected issues that were neglected for quite a while, and the game is significantly... stabilized. I truly like and love your product, and the changes you've made have improved the gaming experience. At some point in the near future over the course of months, you will have reached a critical moment where all the remaining little fixes that could use some working can be put on the back burner. That is a good sign your product is not broken. At that point, the Power Gamers can take care of themselves.

This is where the content comes out. With Incarna, walking in stations didn't exactly pan out as we expected. I would still like to see the results of what you were working so hard for. There couldn't be much risk in taking action in generating new content at that point. I'd like my stake in a corner of that massive jita IV moon 4 assembly plant with some chess and backgammon tables. By then, we'll need content that doesn't absolutely require some unknown person in the game to sweep me off my feet and show me how far down the rabbit hole goes.THAT is why I am still here playing this game, and why I chose to pay for those extra 2 months of subscription, and after that a full year subscription, 6 plex, a second full year subscription, and this alt account paid with a full year subscription (about $460). But, I got burned out, I'm taking a sabattical from eve for a few months. Your game is outstanding and the people in it make it that way. Board games don't get my heart pounding and welling with anxiety like a fleet fight does. But meta gaming and changes in direction within a group can wear a person out.

I will pursue both content and power gaming. It takes a very long time to get a fleet up sometimes, I'd like to spend that time in a station where I can fart around and have fun. I'll most likely be playing Dust 514 when that shows up, it promises more immediate action than what eve normally gives. When I'm not power gaming, I'd really like to participate in a diversity of games themselves within eve. I'm sure you have employees that know a great deal about what makes a certain game fun. Come up with a few board games, try them in eve, sell them at retail. Do something.

Many null sec alliances don't even want to see you in a fleet unless you have tech II everything, certain faction fittings, or expensive meta 4 modules. Many months are the price of entry, and sometimes that costs CCP Eve Online players (AKA money, employees, etc). Provide content where EVE says yes and my peers cannot say NO. Aren't there a few things you'd like to do in game that aren't dependent on a skill book? Who would want to play a game of chess where your game pieces are determined by a skillbook training level?

Please, once your product is sufficiently fixed, take those risks again that were the start of a fantastic game.

And to eve players: what are you interested in seeing in eve? There's got to be more than just internet spaceships.

lost it at "evenews24 inspired thoughts"

Goonswarm? Proper Gender?
Goonswarm? EN24?

None of which is true.

Well said Tikhon and thank you for linking the article on the EVE-O forums. It wasn't actually one of EVE News 24's articles originally, I wrote and published it on my Freebooted blog.

So that removes all reason for any EN24 or Goonswarm prejudices and gives the trolls a chance to foster whole new ones. ;)

IIRC a TESTie owns the servers, but Riverini is very much not a CFC propaganda machine. He certainly has taken his time to report overwhelming losses in Delve to the CFC back when we came knocking.

man, a tier 3 battleship fleet
truly goons live like kings
i mean i lead an elite lifestyle flying the flagship of the Cascade Money Fleet (i trimark rigged my scorch geddon)
but sometimes i wonder what it'd be like to make the move to... tier 3

Riverini is hilarious, back in Majesta, he trolled the Alliance forums, then cried and complained about everything because he wasn't the Glorious Leader.

Also too many smilies

Confirming Riverini is GSFs best friend and they are not literally rushing to every opportunity to kill him.

Confirming noone bid a few hundred mil just to get his corpse ;) Confirming all the CFC loves him and donates half their Tech Income to him for being the most trustworthy and reliable newsprovider for evenews24

right...Ill just go back to my cave

Some of us *like* our nice clean socks... if it hadn't sucked by being a pointless waste of cpu/gpu cycles, there very well may have been reasons for the "powergamers" to enjoy incarna. Sadly, we'll never know because it was handled so badly, but to suggest content is somehow inherently subordinate to mechanics strikes me as rather short-sighted: without "content", the mechanics, as you have pointed out, can quickly become the sole focus of the vocal core and thus the developers. This is generally a "bad thing" as it moves a huge amount of the interest and experience out of the game and into the meta-game, and makes it harder to gain and retain players who aren't looking for just a maths experiment. It is also a problem to which EvE is particularly succeptable, as it is (suppsedly) very reliant upon the players to create content, rather than the more traditional approach of having a fair bit of content provided and the players work through it. Yes, improvements and additions to the core FiS mechanics are important, but just as important are improvements and additions to the tools available to the players for creating "content" of all types, from economic activity (keeping the industrialists and traders happy, the miners busy if not exactly happy, and ensuring a steady supply of tea---- targets to keep the pirates happy) to diplomatic activity (not just "massive bloc to massive bloc," but also smaller-scale exchanges such as a couple small groups working out how to share a system so both can better take advantage of the resources it contains) to outright conflict (keeping everyone happy as long as they're not whoever just got crushed). Simply changing the way a few things are balanced doesn't make large percentages of the population suddenly decide to start a war, it just makes them enjoy it more because they can fly the ships they want to fly when they go out to bring death to their foes. The mechanics should support the content- people have goals to work towards; the mechanics need to enable and encourage them to work towards those goals. When the players are sitting around looking for excuses to participate in a game mechanic, it's time to stop concentrating on the mechanic and improve the motivation for whatever activity that mechanic supports.

WiS has HUGE amounts of potential for providing players ways to create motives, sadly it currently has nothing to offer in practice. Many other changes also have great potential for getting more players doing more things (Incursions, for example, could be hugely entertaining for many many players, rather than something simply hugely profitiable for some and fun to whine about for others).

I think in general I agree with you ("powergamers" and "content seekers" are basically similar, the two groups just happen to pick different aspects of the game to dissect, and things interesting to each are both important); it just seems to me that a lot of people are quick to dismiss anything that isn't a direct change to ships/modules as irrelevant, without considering that perhaps what is most needed to get people doing things that it's often considered not enough people are doing is simply a better way to give people a reason to *want* to do them.