EVE General Discussion

Yet "new gameplay" is mostly what I listed. Such as bombing the snot out of dust bunnies is new game play. How many progression themepark mmo games sell expansions which do not really add new game play but just reiterate old systems (raising level caps) and drop in new zones (new content, not new "game play" by your definition). A "content expansion" or expansion doesn't necessarily result in new game play, yet it's still an expansion.

Wat?

So the only thing that qualifies as new game play in EVE, a real expansion, would need to be something that does not use a skill of any sort? Am I getting that right? Certainly orbital bombardment is not just a new skill... far more complex than that.

Is that your idea of what WiS should have been too, or should be? Completely void of skill for it to count as new game play? You do understand that this is a skill based sandbox, EVE is, right? It's how "game play" functions here. So the only way new game play for EVE could be considered new "game play" is to be based on something other than how EVE functions -or even on nothing at all?

You are not talking about new game play, but completely different game play. New does not necessarily mean different. And even in that, orbital bombardment is technically more different and original than anyone else has done thus far in the industry. Two different games, two different platforms, interacting. That is somehow marginalized as just a skill and rather bourgeois? eh-eh..
It was part of an expansion to EVE.

The stuff demo-reeled in 2007/2008 was done in the Unreal engine, and was admittedly pre-rendered. I even linked the video in this thread to make the point of how much work CCP had thrown away to chase the CARBON goose.
Nothing suggested any work had been done using their own engine.

I don't want to play made-up-stats ping-pong, but there will be a non-trivial percentage of players who are under 18, lets call it x%

For WiS to take the game R-18, it will need to, minimum, attract x% of new subscribers just to bring us to where we are. Which, for an expansion which would have left most of the core game broken, is hilariously unlikely. Going R-18 is a guaranteed loss of income, with nothing to suggest they will make that back up, let alone expand on it and make the development break-even.

But that's all beside the point, even CCP didn't think WiS was going to increase subscriptions, they were looking for the micro-transaction market. They saw companies like Riot raking in Billions per year from a free game selling vanity items. They saw silly little iPhone games making more profit in a day than CCP take in a year. That's what they were looking to get in on. The concept was a multi-avatar experience where you could pay silly amounts of money to show off what you'd bought. Any actual 'gameplay' (i.e. new things to actually do) were a long way off and in a conceptual stage.

The tragedy for CCP, is that if they had handled the idea correctly, it would have actually worked. A huge amount of the LoL playerbase will spend ~$20 a month on pure vanity items. A small percentage will spend $100s (the industry calls these people 'whales'). There was easily a future where CCP would have gotten a decent percentage of their userbase spending enough on AURUM each month to make 2-3 more effective subscriptions, and adding vanity content is quite easy.
Eve online is a hyper-niche game, so the logical thing to do is to try to increase your revenue from your existing userbase as much, if not more so, than trying to capture new players*, you just have to do this without throwing your existing players under a bus, whilst announcing you are going to fleece them for money.

*(this in part happens by itself, the largest drivers of new accounts are always news-worth ingame events, not a features list for an expansion. The sub-spikes around expansions are old players trying it out again).

e: as for the notion "kids get R-18 games anyway!" yes, in your example, but it's far, far less likely that mom/granny is going to sign up for a recurring subscription to an online R-18 anything than take note of the rating on a videogame box.

I disagree. As a company selling a product you want to sell the product to the highest number of costumers possible. I'm not saying you should ignore the current clients and stop maintenance on the product, what I mean is that the product, aside from maintenance and face-lifts, needs new features that will improve it's quality and attract new costumers who would otherwise not buy it.


Another reason to change the game's business model from monthly subscription based to one time pay-to-play with redundant micro-transactions.

They might make for a big percentage of videogame customers, but they aren't the mainstray of EVE Online customers like you claim.

First of all, I'm not fond of the idea of having "shareholders" fund your game company and tell you what you should or not do. Second, regarding kids playing M or 18+ rated games, welcome to life, we live on Earth.



I'm sorry, you lost me here, I have no idea what you're ranting about.

Thread closed.