EVE General Discussion

I agree with Ishtanchuk. Tweaking and rebalancing are great and should be an ongoing priority but, where is the fresh content? What new and exciting feature(s) have CCP rolled out lately that would encourage someone who's never played to want to subscribe? We really haven't gotten any major additions of fresh content or game play since wormholes were introduced.

It's time for CCP to come out of "Post-Incarna Traumatic Syndrome" and give us something bold and fresh along with iteration. Having the industry's coolest forum portrait generator and re-hashing of old content just aren't very compelling reasons to shell out $15 a month.

I was referring to last part of the post:

"nor I see an old player coming back because "wow, they nerfing T3, I've to come back to EVE"".

I am this old player Sura Sadiva wrote about, I re-subbed because "oh wow, now they changing the warp speed, I've to come back to EVE" (and CCP's event) literally.


Are you sure that this player you are talking about is "EVE material" so to say. Player that you are talking about never searched for EVE game experience in the first place.

So maybe I should look at Rubicon with the eyes of a non-eve player and a person who is searching for the sandbox experience.

Let's start:

Mobile structures:
Sounds cool, I will go and read about it on the main page:
"fitting facilities and storage space"; "last for weeks"; "ideal for personal ops";
Are you telling me I will have my own portable little station/base? This is awesome!

Ghost Sites:
Oh, nice and sounds cool! Something about hacking, exploring and pirates. Interesting, I would definitely want to try it when I'll subscribe.

Sisters of EVE faction ships:
More ships? Didn't that game have like, hundreds of ships? So wait, wait a minute ... now I will have even more options to choose from. Awesome, I will certainly find something I would love to fly.

Guerrilla style warfare:
Need to check expansion page again:
"disrupt production and steal materials from Player-owned Structures"
Ok ... can steal from old and wealthy players now, right? hehe up yours vets!

Hi-Sec Customs Offices:
Whaaat? What is this Customs Offices they are talking about? I better check main page, 'cause I want to learn what I can do in this game.
"ship goods down to the planet surface"; "blow up the InterBus office and build your own in its place"; "to keep collecting taxes "
I can build my own stuff and connect it to a planet to have space/planet economy of some sort and then tax it? That sounds complex and interesting unlike any other game I have ever played.

Warp changes:
So, ships are faster or what?
"Small ships will now reach speed and decelerate faster, with the opposite holding true for the lumbering beasts at the other end of the spectrum."
So, what is small - will be faster and what is huge - will be slower, just like in rl. cool!

ISIS your personal guide to ships of EVE:
wow, that's cool! Apparently EVE is not so hard!

Certificate overhaul:
Certificates? Going to check what those are on Rubicon's expansion page.
"to aid in planning out what skills you need to achieve your goals"
lol, I heard people say that EVE is hard to learn, but how can it be when you have certificates.
(certs are still useless =/ imho)
(btw. game achievements are horrible!)

Rebalancing and roles:
"Marauders"; "Interceptors"; "Electronic Attack Ships"; "Electronic Attack Ships"
I have no idea what they're talking about, but "improved and role expanded" sounds good.

Character screen update:
Oh ... ooook. Facelift for an old system I guess.

Additional features:
"Graphics and Sound"
for a 10 year old game it looks fantastic.

So, after Rubicon you should try EVE if you...

- are looking for a sandbox mmo.
- want to have your little portable base
- want to explore new dangerous and challenging sites
- like space ships and think that more options is better than less
- want to be a space thief/robinhood
- want your own space/planet economy thingy
- think that bigger = slower and smaller = faster actually makes sense
- thought you would be lost without a sensible guide in all those ship choices before


Not with comments like "definition of "meaningful" should be left to the players willing to pay for WiS." it isn't.


Luxury the game can't afford is implementing more unfinished and poorly thought out features.

You don't build a second floor of your house when foundation are crumbling, windows seems crooked and walls are about to fall down.

And we're all glad of this.

However here we were trying to make some point about the game development and future more than about someone personal experience. Anyway thank you for sharing.

Now if we check the "All Time (weekly average)" stats we notice this:

EVE has a steady growth from the beginning till about 2007.
Then we have a stronger growth roughly coincident with the Trinity - Apocrypha (2009) expansions (some of the best expansions ever).

After this the players stabilize with peaks and fall but always around 30-35k average. There's no more growth, what changed? CCP started to reroute resources from EVE and focused on something else (Dust was officially announced in 2009); CCP is not SOny, or Blizzard, so to focus on all these new projects: Dust, WoD, a brand new avatar engine, recently Valkyrie, they had to progressively reduce the effort on EVE till a life-support (only tweaks, minor changes, needed fixes).

As the gameplay stopped to expand so did the playerbase, the up and down we see in the stats are mostly the same pool of players, with the ususal increase on activity after an expansion release, the down again and so on.

The point is not if tweaks, fixes, micro-balanced are good, of course they are, and we should stop stating the obvious; the point is if they're alone enough to push a growth. The stats show the countrary. Despite any personal case.

This is slightly biased m8. I've shown the specs for Rubicon to some of the possible new pilots that I try to recruit, and none of them seem to really grasp what the changes are. Maybe that makes them unsuitable to even start playing EVE...but it also raises the question if EVE needs something more then just spaceships and spreadsheets.

For instance the customs office overhaul is a total mystery to them. ISIS was simply recieved as another extra spreadsheet (while we know better of course :-) ). The warp changes didn't do much since those people didn't have anything to compare it with, and if you start fresh now...you wouldn't know the difference anyway. That goes for most of the new features. If you haven't played EVE before, you wouldn't know the difference.

Don't get me wrong, I love Rubicon. It's just not an expansion that can get those new players playing EVE. It just services the current and established pilots that already know how the game works.

The avatar creation system is one of the best ones out there, if not...THE best. But at it's current state it could easy just be replaced with a picture select system. It has no other function then the picture you see above my name on the boards atm, and to me...that is a waste. Why even tempt the players with a captain quarters if that door is going to be closed untill EVE II arrives.

People that play MMO's love making their avatars. But new players of EVE feel a bit cheated after they spend 30 minutes creating it. From a programmer's viewpoint I can see problems regarding netcode and what will happen if say you have too many of these Hres characters running around in a station, but it's far from impossible to pull off. If I had a say I would start with making a boardroom were CEO's and their flock can arrange meetings etc, with a cap limit of say 16 players. Start off small and slowly build towards gambeling / trade / leisure spots and other lore expanding traits.

Nobody said it should be done "shoddy"

All the things you pointed out is not enough to pickup new players, and the number of players today kinda reflect this. A possible new pilot needs to be persuaded before it even knows what a Rifter is. Yes there has been allot of new features that support the role of the newbie, but does this reflect in an increase in players over the last few months?

WiS has little effect on FiS if implemented in a delicate and propper way. Expanding on it should not be rushed and possibly spread out over several expansions, like the changes to FiS imo.

Oh and let me add about this:



Here I agree with you, but we're talking about finish some unfinished and poorly implemented feature. WiS IS part of EVE fundation design, since the very beginning of this game.

There're 3 major fail expansions: Dominion, Incursions, Incarna. All these expansions tried to adress a specific core weakness in EVE gameplay: territorial warefare and gameplay (Dominion), lack of a decent PVE (Incursions), Player "housing" and avatar gameplay (Incarna).

These 3 expansion faild - for different reasons - to deliver what strongly asked by the players and needed for the gameplay. If CCP did it wrong and faild to deliver doesn't means that those needs are satisfated or vanished; still today all the major weaknes actually in EVE gameplay are directly or indirectly related to this areas.

CCP should go back to work just on the critical areas where they faild and fix/iterate/rewrite; is fundation, is stragegic/long term stuff. And who love should try to consider not only what is good for our personal idea of gameplay becuase such approach is not going to work.

Everyone understand as working on these 3 areas of the game is "hard". But is hard only cause CCP is focused on something else, move allt he resources from Dust, Valkirye and WoD back to EVE and you'd be surprise to discover what CCP can do in a 6 months cycle.

On the contrary, because Eve has a long complicated legacy back end, new content is easier to develop. As we see with the release of the new deployables that will (or so we are told) replace the old POS system. Avatar content is a blank state. When dealing with lots of old legacy code, starting from fresh is easier.

As for having to pull devs away from Eve things. This has already happened in favor of things no one in Eve will benefit from. You would still complain if devs came back from those projects to work on avatar content, and you would probably also fail to see the hypocrisy of your whining.


Everyone has made it clear that they don't want this. Why do you even bring it up? This thread itself is literally testament to people not wanting that. It is the entire purpose of this thread for that not to happen. If your not going to follow the arguments and logic in this thread, why even respond? You might as well just be talking to a wall.

Well, there was a interesting litle patch note with Odyssey 1.1., here it is:

http://community.eveonline.com/news/patch-notes/patch-notes-for-odyssey-1.1



We are left to wonder whether they mean it as "looking for a reason to expand the CQ" or "looking for a reason to get rid of the CQ", though.

Daydreaming, we can think of what could be the NPE if the new player spawned at the CQ, and Aura told him to walk to the balcony and said: "this is your first ship, it is called a (insert name). Opening this tab (points it), you can check its contents; you will see, it is already armed with a civilian weapon. Civilian weapons do not require a specific skill to use them, whereas more powerful weapons need them. To check your skills..."

And all the while the noob is looking at his avatar, understanding how this is a game about human who fly ships... and more things to come if CCP gets their sh*t right.

Malcanis, rather bluntly, yes it was. I watched major alliances in a foot race to try and sew up Plasma worlds in PI, Of the things released this expansion, the only one that did not benefit Alliances, particularly low and null sec ones, more than anyone else, was the tractor beam deployable.

Ghost site spawns seem to be overwhelmingly nullsec (latest estimates I've seen were 4-5 sites across the entirety of Empire at any one time, vs 6 or more per nullsec region).

The new ship is available more cheaply in null sec (meaning 'to goonswarm' in this case) .

The new depot deployable heavily nerfs solo pvp in low and null sec in favor of large gangs. The other one penalizes unwatched POS moon sites. Now these do have uses for players other than Alliances, don't get me wrong, but the biggest benefit is theirs.

And this has been going on for years.

If you stop and look at the numbers, something like 1/5th of EvE players are in a nullsec alliance. 4/5ths live in empire. If you look at expansions overall since launch, 20% of players have gotten 60% of content. Now, I understand that eve is all about Risk v Reward, but the way it's handled tends to alienate new players after a few months. Because those nullsec alliances don't want noobs, typically, they want seasoned players, this has led to the current plateau in server population.

We need more accessible content in empire. Not necessarily better paying content, but enough content to actually keep players hooked until they can go on to do alliances. Or whatever.

Pray tell how do you progress throught the game, when this game has no set goals, aside from those you set for yourself? Also now more or less actively playing for a bit over seven years, in my experience, this game literally has no content unless you are willing to join alliances - or very very large corporations, or small corporations with really really big balls. Not necessarily even nullsec ones, I also mean FW alliances, highsec alliances. To be a solo player (and truly solo - no alts) is just to be bullied around by everyone and everything. "Oh, but it's an MMMO! You're supposed to play with others!" True enough, but what about the sandbox? Cant I socialize on my own terms?

Now, this is, like, a crazy idea, but maybe, just maybe EVE could do with content that doesn't revolve around extremely large groups of players and that has PVP - at least in the form of beating the snot out of fellow plyer avatars - forbidden. Could have more immersive PvE - just like outlined in the first post in this thread. I'm more convinced than ever that EVE needs WiS - properly implemented, with something to do, but no absolute requirement to do it.