EVE General Discussion

Size of the community basis.

Why?

If there is a big community basis (aka amount of players * accounts, bouncers excluded) there is a good chance that this game

• is on a good basis (it has players who like it, long-term aspect etc.)
• will continue (numbers of players won't drop under critical mass, development will go on due to profit and profit maximization).

I hope I understood your question correctly

For me, feeling like I am part of something bigger, that what I do matters in some small sense... Honour and social interaction is what makes EvE a game I will keep playing for years like I already have

I spend most of my days checking the alliance forums, EvE forums, (even en24 and tm*.com) looking for eve related news and updates, I am in essence playing eve even when I am not online

One of the reasons I am so commited to eve is because of the community I am part of, this is a game where killing someone in PvP matters, your are essentially destroying something permanently when you blow up someones ship (when not considering that the person is likely to replace his ship with the isk he/she has)

It's the risk of eve, where blowing up an expensive ship can be painful... and bring joy even if it's your own.

PS. I don't need the 100mil isk :D just thought I would help out with whatever your doing

That's easy to answer:

1: How big I can make the boobies of the female characters.
2: A really good physics engine, possibly even exaggerated.
3: A machinima tool built-in, with slo-mo boobcam functionality.

Any game that is committed to the above gets my money, and sexual favours.

AK

I am a casual player. Maybe a rare sight in online games, or maybe not.
The most important factor for me is: fun.

Sounds cliche, but it's actually the truth.
Why on earth would I commit to a game that I don't find fun?

You see, I only play games to have fun. Whether I have fun alone (ie: i had this long period of being a miner+manufacturer, which is a pretty lonely living), or together (faction warfare, nullsec warfare), doesn't really matter. If I don't have fun doing it, I won't do it. It's that simple.
And it's not just online games. I have this same trait with single-player games.

And of course, a secondary important factor is content. Content is a very important issue for me, as I am a player who does not play the game in one single way.
No, I want to try every single career, every single game mechanic MUST be used by me once. The more game mechanics and the more content, the happier I am. So obviously, I like EVE's sandbox, as it allows me to do exactly that.
But if I don't like the game in the first place, you can add all the content you want, I'm already out of there.

Luckily, EVE is pretty awesome in that regard, as I think it has the most extensive content in game history.
Just some stuff I have done (and still do) in my 4 year time I play EVE:

- missions. (the first time running a level 4 solo mission was the greatest feeling, seeing as I used to run these in 4-5 man fleets with lesser ships.)
- plexing. (high, low, and null.)
- faction warfare. (currently trying that out.)
- mining. (high, low, and null.)
- manufacturing (high, low, and null.)... helping build capitals and titans being the highlight here.
- Wormhole exploration.
- Planetary Interaction.
- Ganking.
- RvB PvP.
- Nullsec sovereignty warfare.
- Leading a fleet (first op failed miserably.)
- Highsec warfare.
- Piracy in null/low.
- Mercenarism/Bounty Hunting. (not really a huge success here, but maybe Retribution will spark this career up for me again.)
- Spying (using an alt, obviously.)
- Corporation theft (250 mil in 2 days time. Ka-ching.)

Is there more to do? Surely there is. Currently I'm into faction warfare, digging deep into that. And then again, I switched back to some careers over time, like mining and manufacturing. Building my own destroyers and stuff for lowsec Faction Warfare.
I hope to go back to null one day, and fly a Titan. That would be one of the greatest achievements I have.
I also hope to get back into wormholes one day, try out courier contracts, scam people off their money, and overthrow a full alliance from nullsec. (requires a load of work.)

Honest, all trolls aside it's character Affinity.
I need to feel an obligation to my character and to do that I need to be able to impact how that character survives.

In relation to EVE the first few years I had little awareness of what others had available to them. I didn't look at my wallet and determine it to be less than others. I didn't look at my fits and think they weren't as good as the other guys. I didn't min/ max EVE and as a result I only really saw EVE as survivalist game play.

As time went on I found out how far behind the curve I was and lost that sense of accomplishment. While I still have a level of affinity for my EVE chars, far more than I do for any other MMO char, it's diminished. It is still what draws me to another game and in the end why I end up back here.

For me there are two main reasons I commit to any game, Depth and Community. For an online espcially I need to have a large number of things I can do to keep me interested. Single player games these days simply don’t have any depth, they don’t provide enough content or make the content interesting enough to keep me hooked, one of the things eve does so well is providing a whole bunch of different activitys to try out and considering your are pretty much stuck in a space ship its an incredibly achievement. Whether its exploration, industry, playing the market, diplomacy, null sec politics, war, piracys or the many other activites EVE allows you to do you are never short on activites if you are willing. I cant think of many other games that can offer that variety in an adult multiplayer enviroment.

Secondly it has to have the potential to create a community because I think it’s the community that really keeps people playing over the long term, it’s the friends you make and the storys that the game allows people to create such as the banking scams, the corp thefts and the battles fought. It’s the podcasts and blogs and meetups that encourage people to become involved in the meta game. With these storys comes a history and its one we can all share and relate to, this transforms the game into something resembling a real world, it’s a place we inhabit and one we want to come back to again and again to make new storys and new friends. I played MMO`s for a reasonably large amount of time solo and enjoyed them to a point but it wasn’t until I established my first corp and started to learn the game with people that I became commited.

I value content and immersion above all else in an MMO.

Often MMO developers will try the "create your content" trick. Sandbox MMO developers are especially guilty of this. Which I always see as a bit of a cop-out. It's like going to a pizza joint and having them wrangle you into "make your own pizza" thing, where you still pay the full price but do the work yourself. EVE is not the only game guilty of this, other examples include Darkfall, Mortal, etc. I don't mind the sandbox, but sandbox has to have sand in it. Lots and lots of sand. Good example is Elder Scrolls series - the game is a sandbox, but it is also chock-full of content.

This, at least in part, why I feel WoW was so successful - it had content! At launch, the game had a huge world full of content. Some quest chains were fantastic, with strong plots to them. Some quests took hours and hours and hours to complete (druid aquatic form), especially if you didn't cheat by googling the quest item locations and found them the way they were meant to be found - exploration. The quest took you to two continents, half a dozen zones, and on a PvP server you were a valid target in at least two of those zones, which made it an adventure. I still remember doing it, and it's been almost 9 years since I've done it.

By comparison, many MMOs are very light on content. For example, Aion, as nice as it was, basically was a grind game. It had a handful of quests, but the bulk of your time was spent grinding. Same goes for Age of Conan - the first 20 levels were fantastic, the next 20-30 levels were good, but the final 30 levels were an absolute pain. Why? Devs ran out of time and didn't finish it. No content - no fun. And some seemingly good games, like Guild Wars 2, still come up short when it comes to content. Dynamic events and all that are great and all, but they really lack in storytelling.

Storytelling as part of content, and quality of it, is very important. Consider SWTOR, for example. You'd think with all that time, money and excellent lore to work with, the quests would be interesting and cinematic. But for the most part, 80% of the quests in game boil down to "go there and kill that, because I can't/won't do it myself", with no real reason given besides "they're bad" or "I don't like them". By comparison, many quests in other MMOs were works of literary art. This is not to say SWTOR was a complete failure, far from it, some personal storyline missions were rather good. It's just the remainder of the game that was weak.

And finally, immersion is a big factor. It may not be immediately felt, but it's there. Consider a simple mechanic like day and night cycle. WoW had a real time cycle. That is, if you chose the server in your timezone, you'd see sunrise in game and sunrise outside more or less synchronized. You could tell how late it was just by glancing at the moon, in-game. I cannot overstate how important this small tiny feature was. Now compare that to Guild Wars 2, where the day/'night cycle is quick, nights are considerably shorter than days, and nights are very bright, so you often don't even feel it is night, but rather just cloudy. And probably the worst execution of this was in Darkfall, where day and night changed so quickly, and nights were so dark, that it was just a major annoyance. Sometimes it felt like the game was "flickering" rather than cyclic. Music is an important aspect of immersion as well. Changing the soundtrack from day to night, a minor as it is, helps a lot.

Other immersion features are important as well. For example small things, like fishing. Being able to sit on benches. Being able to interact with some objects. The world just feels like a static, artificial backdrop if you don't do it. Good example is SWTOR once again - can't interact with the game world, except for a few places. Can't sit anywhere except your ship's command chair. Can't fish in the water, or swim for that matter. The world felt...fake.

How does it all fit together?

Well, I still remember coming back from work back in 2004 and going fishing in the evening in Durotar. Real time day-night cycle meant I got to watch a moonrise in game. Music changed from daytime to serene nighttime tracks. The sound of waves lapping against the shore. Watching that fishing bobber on the waves. It was relaxing. I would see other players going around their business - hunting, fishing, gathering, doing their stuff. If I got bored I could swim to the Echo Isles and do some quests there - quests with a lot of stories behind them. For such a tiny little chunk of the game world, that place had loads of content. And the same paradigm continued throughout the game. And the sad part is, I've played dozens of MMOs since then, and haven't been able to recapture anything even close to that feeling even once in any of them.

Also, many developers seem unaware of major "immersion breakers". For example, consider fast travel. WoW had that in a form of a hearthstone, an item you activated that teleported you home. The animation for it, and cast time, made it very obvious when the player was using a hearthstone. So, you see a player in a distance. You see him cast hearthstone, you see his cast finish 10 seconds later and he disappears in a flash of light. You know what he did, where he went. It feels like a real part of the world, there's continuity to it. Now take Guild Wars 2, where you can instantly move between points of interest on the map. How is this done? You open the map, you click where you need to go, and pop you're there. BUT, to another player watching you, you just vanish without warning. One second you're there, a second later you're not. Totally wrecks the immersion.

Same goes for simple mechanic of logging off. In one game, your character would sit down, sit there for 15 seconds, and disappear. You can tell he's logging. In another game, they just go blap and vanish without warning or trace. Jarring to the immersion.

For me to commit to a game it needs to have meaningful things that I can accomplish each day. Currently I make the bulk of my isk by importing things to 0.0 and selling my goods on the market there. I use the isk to support my pvp habits. I am in a large 0.0 alliance and sometimes I lose a lot of ships and sometimes I don't.

The alliance has an excellent ship replacement program but I need isk for modules and implants and ammo. The skill training system is good because there are always things that I can work towards, goals to accomplish like getting into a new ship class, skilling another type of ship better, etc.

I do not like or play games that can be "beaten" or "won." I don't like ~endgame~ games. Once a person reaches the endgame then that game loses almost all of it's value to me. I played Everquest for 12 years before moving to EVE Online and the Alternate Advancement system in EQ kept me playing for many years because there was meaningful things you could accomplish to improve your character each day. The same with EVE. hth

For me the most important factor has allways been the people i play with, if I find a core group of people and i get to know them, that usually keeps me in the game almost by itself.

Take WoW for example, i HATED that game for 1½ expansion but i kept playing because i met some awesome friends in game. And even though it was 2 years since i played with them we still talk and have some fun a few times every month.

Second to that is the theorycrafting, I'm usually better at theorizing around games than actually playing them (Dota, Starcraft and eve) the sheer posibilities for strategies and builds is intreaguing for me. So to summarize: My "circle of friends" and the depth of the game is what keeps me in the game.

Over and out!
//Fnejki Adoudel

Consistency without stagnation -or- invalidation...