EVE General Discussion

There aren't any elves or lightsabers here. Or, in other words, people seem to be used to following something that already has a previous background and/or something that copies that other something that had/has said background/catalogue.

What do I mean?

Take World of Warcraft. It had a massive fanbase beforehand, with 3 different games and addons. It grew to a stupid amount of players and now, even years and years later, every other game developer studio is copying them.

With EVE, what do you have? A really awesome science fiction MMO with absolute freedom. Lots of room for imagination, creativity, whatever. Your average player just isn't into that, yet.

But, I was also under the assumption that we've been growing, very slowly.

Bad graph. STO never even had 1 subscriber.

Good job not grasping the very easy point: the relative popularity of missions is not an indicator of tons of people being “PvE:ers” since it's “PvP:ers” (and bots) doing a lot of them. The statistic simply further belies the uninformed notion that highsec PvE is in any way a large part of the game that occupies a vast majority of the players. This pretty much gutshots any argument that says focusing on PvP development somehow harms or disregards some imagined PvE majority.

Simple: because highsec is far too easy and profitable to stay out of. This is not a good thing, by the way. Quite the opposite: it means the balance between sec levels is out of whack. Highsec is not important — very little of any actual value goes on there that couldn't happen anywhere else — what it is is convenient. Functionally, it could be removed with no ill effects.

No, it does not beg the question — it just raises it. The reason PvP combat can't sustain itself is because it's not supposed to. Combat is supposed to destroy things to generate demand and thus act as the driving force of the economy. The actual money is supposed to come from the things it currently comes from, but they have zero connection to highsec.

This might come as a shock to you but not everyone running a mission every now and then is a highsec carebear. Some are highsec alts to low/nul/wh dwellers and there are others that actually do run missions in null/lowsec (for fun, convenience and profit). In fact, I have found it to be an important chain in the logistics for surviving in NPC nullsec to run a few missions (mainly for faction ammo implants). Also, quite a few are running FW missions in lowsec in between fights.

Unlike others, I exclude the current world economics is the cause of a sensible subs drop. Actually some players indeed left but many others just decided to work hard and pay with PLEX (one of the reasons of PLEX demand increasing and thus prices rising - along with Incursions and Fanfest tickets).


A more a apt explanation on the long term of EvE:


Blizzard perfectly understood the change of MMO player mindset in the beginning of the 2000s: from few geek addicts who loved rich experiences of the unknown (remember the MUDs giving more experience by exploring than killing stuff?), who loved to self build their own castles (MUDs again), roleplay, *be emergent*, deal with risk vs gain.

to

millions of apathetic, TV grown, demand instant gratification, no imagination nor creativity, sons of the "flashy and empty graphics age". They can't think, can't invent, can't imagine. They are holes to be filled by a canned storyline, canned campaign, canned and colorful characters, canned sensible rewards even for the stupidest tasks, "welfare epics", impossible to lose anything even when playing like an idiot. They are the sons of the most modern, weakened brain manipulation "culture".

Thus WoW was born.



EvE is for the "pre" WoW era mindset, a mindset that is slowly fading and being replaced by the "modern" one.
The "pre" mindset was of people ready to invest effort to achieve their own thought targets. Sandbox capable people. People who are intelligent enough to foresee the dramatic crash in EvE quality. People who would not be easily fooled by shiny Barbies in Space and would have pointed at the increasing flaws and bad work done.

In a prophetic thread created in April 2011, famous poster Akita T called CCP on their worrysome trend at dropping quality: Alter bad new company direction, STOP rushing stuff out.

In the same thread, for the first time ever a player (me) forecast the future harsh drop in playerbase, even posting a graph about it.

The graph was made on the premise that the EvE as a product (its subscriptions) is subject to the market mechanics of demand and offer.

From that post:




The last sentence, made 1 year ago, anticipated Crucible.


Compounding the above, EvE not only lost revenue and players.
After too long mismanagement, bad quality and trying at pushing "modern MMO crap" (including attempts at pay2win etc), it lost something worse because irreplaceable.
EvE lost the core of ancient, "old times mindset" alpha achievement players, those of the perceived "golden age".

Due to aggressive advertisment campaigns and initiatives EvE got a slew of newer players but they are of the newer mentality, they are not as strongly bound to the title and jump to another MMO because EvE is "just another MMO, gonna try new XYZ tomorrow".

I have witnessed multiple MMOs lose their original community (for many reasons) and they never fully recovered from that.

EvE won't return the game it has been in the past, all we can do is to hold it tight to our heart till possible.

This is very simple. EvE is a game that does not cater to your average gamer. Most gamers today are parents, husbands, wives and have jobs they have to go to every day. These people cannot log in every single day...when they can they can only log in for a few hours at most. EvE caters to players that have unending time on their hands and can play for several hours a day every day without fail. CCP want's to keep the game dark and difficult but at the same time wants to grow more players. Well...they can do that...but it will be very slow going. I am lucky to have a wife who is a gamer so making time for EvE is relatively easy for me. Most of my other friends that are married don't have that luxury.

Any major change to the game to make it easier for the average gamer is received with hate and riots from the current player base.

That's certainly part of it, Eve is one of the old character building (empire building) style games which generally requires a lot of time to do well in. If you have money and can by PLEX then it can be seen as being a bit more casual. Of course you can play casually in this game but generally you will not do as well as someone that has a lot of time on their hands, but that can be said of even casual style MMOs. Training offline has helped Eve a lot in this respect.

WoW style games generally suit a casual player better (except for some of the long instances), plus they tend to be more family orientated.

Eve is a niche game and if you try to force it to become inline with other MMOs (WoW style) then you will get rage from the player base because most that play it don't want to play WoW style games. Or if they do they would prefer to have both style games available.

People also like new games because they can be amoung the first to be in it's virtual world, even in WoW some people were always on the lookout for new servers. This game is old now some people will not play it just because it is old and they don't want to start 8+ years behind some other people.

Because of the age of this game it's better to keep it a niche game imo. But that does not stop the game developing and maybe attracting more people as long as it does not become too WoWish.

The part of eve that people seem to skip is it's potential.

Make high sec true safe space for the carebears and new players. Completely safe with no chance of pvp. This would satisfy all of the new players as well as the players who are true carebears. Because believe it or not.. there are people who want to just mine or just do missions. Make the rewards really low so people are directed towards lower sec areas.

Make low sec like current high sec and include low sec in this area. it's that simple, or maybe you split high sec so it has true safe and current high sec then leave low sec alone.

Change 0.0 so more people have the opportunity to enjoy it. Make sov so alliances can hold space based on their size of active members limited to a maximum of constellations connected to a "HQ" constellation. They must be connected via jump gates. Eliminate moon goo or make every constellation have at least 1 type of each moon min. Make all 0.0 belts have at least 1 ABC ore. Obviously quantities would have to be adjusted so not to screw the market.


This would make eve what it needs to be. Everyone wants to give eve a chance but some people want carebear and some people want chaos. so make part of it completely safe and make the rest where everyone has a chance not just huge alliances.

I'm going to go with a steaming pile of dog poo.

It's fairly obvious that High Sec is the place to be if you want to make ISK without getting killed. That's why it is so populated. I'm not sure what the problem is, exactly.

Why make it any safer than it already is? If it was really dangerous and the piracy was out of control, why is it chock ******* full of people?