EVE General Discussion

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A lot of fun is interaction between player characters, their personalities, social aspects of the game. For example in Warhammer 40K people personalize their figures to give them some character, and even they give them names, and those figures that survived many battles or have achieved something heroic have many personalizations.

Have you played Neverwinter Nights, the first, original? It had nice creator/editor called Aurora toolset and DM client in which you could build a lot of stuff and completely use it for multiplayer quest experience for creating your own adventures. If you can, look it up. It can be made for sure in EVE, but there would be a cost involved, mainly what I posted earlier. Still the amount of created assets and modules would need to be very high, and I dont know if amount of roleplayers in EVE would justify creation of such a tool for WIS, but maybe it would bring new ones to it. For sure it would be sandbox environment. REAL sandbox, where people are creating a content for others in the world of EVE.

I remember. Don't think this would be cost effective with the current WiS engine, but that situation would be preferable to other knavery we'd get.

Wouldn't really be necessary to do that and could be counterproductive. The profitability of avatar based social games far outstrips any free for all PvP game. WIS doesn't hurt anyone who likes PvP rather on the contrary if the popularity of WIS matched traditional ratios you'd likely see the WIS income supplementing development of PvP.

Recalling nearly every online game I've ever played you'd have around 100 to 200 on PvP server and 800 to 1000 on non-PvP, or a similar ratio.

That's the thing that doesn't make a lot of sense when PvPrs are getting on here saying the majority don't want it. The ones who would benefit the most.

The idea of giving the human toon itself a personality and identity could turn into something huge. As Eve is now, the character at the moment is really the ship you're flying. If you invite someone who might like the game to join, what do they usually say?
-"Why can't I ever see my character?"
-"What, I can't fly my ship around in space [like a flight sim/arcardey shooter]?"
-"Why can't I land on the planets?"

Those questions might seem absurd to us as EVE players, but they don't seem silly to people coming from other good MMOs. I think the biggest one is, "Why can't I get out of my ship and see my character?" Not being able to be a controllable human in the game sometimes makes it too abstract for many people to get into. (Examples: Wives and girlfriends of friends of hardcore male EVE players. Many of whom were brilliant and very intense players of other MMOs. But in the end, EVE didn't appeal to them for whatever reason. I suspect it was because of the idea of building a social identity around.... what? Your Thrasher flying from here to there? Your jockstrap KB, that only you really ever look at?)

Anyway, Eve has the char animations already built for WIS. And DUST already has on-planet environments built. A lot of the New Eden world is already built and ready for players to go into. The EVE Online systems and spaceships world is already extremely developed and constantly tuned, of course. If with a few game design decisions, CCP could create real incentives to go between EVE ships and WIS characters-- (and also DUST planetside guys)-- how addictive could that be?

TL;DR version: CCP has already done the hard tech development part. After that, it's just some game design things to put in. ("Mysterious Stranger in the corner of the bar"). ("Take the space elevator to the planet surface"). Could add dimensions to the game, and make it more than just a very clever shooter/ISK-gathering/higher-level shooting thing. With only a few design ideas needed.

The above post is almost everything I dislike about the WiS crowd rolled into one thing. The main theme is "CCP is against people who don't exclusivly pvp". Every time i read something like that I am almost always in game, shooting NPCs and wonder "WTF is this person going on about??". Somehow, you will never see much of this same poster in any of the actual PVE Sections.

It's not pve vs pvp.I'm PVE focused myself and have no feeling that CCP is somehow victimizing me. IMO CCP has spent too much time on PVE, and this can be seen by the fact that most of us who do PVE are doign the same PVE we had in the past, where as relatively few are using these newer PVE venues. ie despite people begging for 'co-op pve', people are still running pre-2006 missions, anomalies and explorations content more than incursions or ghost sites or burners or whatever else.

I find it ironic that the people who say "I want more new stuff" eventually end up just playing the same old stuff, it reminds me of how people rage quitted saying they were going to play SWG then Black prophecy, then SWTOR, then Star Trek Online then Elite Dangerous then (perhap soon) SC or No man's sky ....but end up right back in EVE because their preferences don't match their rhetoric...

I like the old stuff, which is why I'm not complaining about the fact that the 2 DED 10/10s I did last night were created before either of my grandchildren were born.



What actually happened in the past is that CCP learned the lesson that these other game makers and developers are learning (especially SC and Elite): You can't give everyone everything they want and still have a thing worth calling a game. You have to make choices. And any choice you make is going to turn off someone. EVE is a turn off to some people not because it's a bad game, but because it's a game that caters to certain mindsets. Not just pvp mindsets either, as the above poster is fond of saying, more EVE players don't even actively seek pvp.

That suggests to me that there are at least a few folks like me in EVE: people who don't care about avatars, who don't love pvp but don't hate it either, that love the thrill of "contested PVE" and who enjoy the minimalist nature of EVE Online. My opposition to Incarna like stuff has nothing do with not wating others to enjoy something, it has everything to do with not wanting the company that makes my favorite game fall into the trap of over-extending itself for the sake of people who claim to want WiS but (like the "Playstation Home" people) probably won't use it much even if it existed.

I think CCP learned that their original vision (of some kind of all encompassing, all immersing sci-fi universe) was competently unrealistic. Incarna taught CCP that the game's current more 'minimalist' approach was better. It's that approach that many of us like, as opposed to the "Star Citizen" vision of some complete space world that you can totally lose yourself in.

Some of us just want a good, engaging but not overbearing game (which is what EVE is), we don't necessarily need to find ourselves 'lost' in the experience, as we'd have to be while wearing some VR helmet while drinking imaginary booze in a fictional Jita bar. This is why I hope and pray Star Citizen is a smashing success (and/or Elite gets it's act together), so that the "I need more immersion" people will have something they like finally without needing to think CCP needs to devote resources to flipping EVE on it's ear to get it..

What you say is correct: you can't have a cake and eat it ! But you're trying to apply this case to a scenario where you can bake multiple cakes. When Indah says "Let's have different flavoured cakes.", you say "we can't mix flavours, that would taste horrible" barring the possibility that each cake can have one flavour different from the other cakes.

I never played SWG (Star Wars Galaxies), but what I read about it says that the pre-NGE version allowed players to freely choose professions ranging from musicians / performers to combat specialists. Now I'm not going to compare apples and oranges, I'm just saying that on principle it is possible to have variety in a game (aka catering to different tastes) as long as the different components don't step on each others feet. Because if they do, it hurts. Your argument is basically saying that different components will necessarily step on each others feet.

In 2006 I held similar opinions as you Jenn, but mainly because the arguments in favour of ambulation were ridiculous imo. The proponents (both players and some CCP staff) argued and I shall paraphrase here with a slight comedic undertone:

- We have 95% male subscribers and only 5% female, yet the MMO market has on average a 50% female to male ratio. How do we tap into that market to increase overall subscriptions ? Well of course, women don't like to identify themselves with things such as starships. Ergo, we need to create avatars so that women can identify with a human character. This way more women will start playing EvE ... it will be awesome and soon we will have as many subscriptions as WoW !!!11!!1

I had to facepalm really hard at this logic.
1) This arguments totally failed to include that SciFi is generally a niche genre that also happens to be more popular with men than with women.
2) In 2006 EvE had active role-players that had no problem whatsoever with EvE for the 2.5 years of its existence. Neither of them even tried to identify themselves with their ship as their avatar. I think that they all identified with the character they had named, whose picture was forever looking the same way as it did when they first created him/her, and for whom some even created elaborate background stories. None of those role-players failed to understand that their avatar was sitting in a goo filled pod, which in turn was contained inside the spaceship they were currently looking at.
3) When was the last time anybody would not play a racing game because they couldn't identify with "the car being their avatar" ... seriously: facepalm, facepalm, facepalm.

-> so in essence: adding avatar gameplay to EvE would not magically attract players that are not interested in the space setting or who are to dumb to imagine their character sitting inside a pod inside a spaceship.

I was against ambulation because the arguments brought forward were simply stupid.

But then came the prototypes shown at Fanfest and the footage made by nVidia in cooperation with CCP demonstrating cloth and hair movement which was truely stunning at the time.
- We saw footage of a pod pilot being decanted from his pod in a separate room much like Neo in The Matrix after taking the red pill. Oh yes, the rage is still strong in me over CCP putting the pod straight into the ship hangar ... it's so wrong and not gritty and dark at all. Definately not what was shown at Fanfest.
- We saw footage of empty sockets in stations where players would be able to set up a shop after renting the socket. (rage)
- We saw exotic dancers moving around strip poles. Didn't happen ... (rage)
- We saw a game supposedly playable at the bar. It looked so cool, but never happened ... (rage, rage, rage)
- We were told that we'd get NPCs for hire, like bartenders for example which could be possibly set up to deliver specific dialog.
- We were told of meeting rooms for corporations / alliances. (ok, didn't care so much about that)

I bought into that vision for EvE. CCP made me change my opinion from contra ambulation to pro ambulation. Ambulation was renamed WiS and the specific expansion Incarna.

... and all we ******* got was
- 1 (one !) Captains Quarter that doesn't have a door between the place I'm supposed to feel at home and the ******* ship hangar, seriously ?
- The pod from which I'm supposed to emerge from all wet and scantily clothed in the middle of the ship hangar, wtf happened to decantation room ?
- a micro-transaction store that nobody asked for instead of player built items (ok, we can live with that). Except that the prices were all macro-transaction like. That the initial free AUR was just enough to buy one single item out of all available items ... and that item are boots which I can't see on the character portrait and are not available to male avatars and I can't pool or trade my AUR to maybe get something else instead ??? WTF ?
- Oh yeah the "greed is good" and "people would buy $1000 Jeans in RL" leaks

... and all of this happened at a time when other MMOs turned from subscription based to F2P microtransaction blood-letting devices. But EvE players didn't worry about a cash-shop in EvE because "EvE will stay subscription based. There are no plans for micro-transactions".

(oopsie, ran out of characters)

CCP baked different cakes. There were called Incarna, WoD and DUST (and they thought up other cakes, like atmospheric flight, EVA exploration and Legion). Those cakes fell a bit flat lol. one had it's ingredients sold before it ever got into an oven, one got half baked (It's a "one room" cake lol) and the last one is literally about to bite the DUST.

The one cake that didn't fall flat is called EVE. I don't think it's terribly outlandish to say to the Baker that you should keep doing the thing that works and leave the rest alone.

That feature is dead.



That's the thing that isn't dead.



The WiS that exist is a relic of a broken way of thinking. Not much different from COSMOS (or any other abandoned feature) when you get right down to it. I'd rather they not revisit it, not because the feature itself is a terrible idea (it is, it stands to detract from the main aspect of the game, which is putting spacecraft in space), but also because it feeds the unrealistic hopes of the dreamer types that CCP will (or even can) deliver the kind of all encompassing "Immersive Space Universe" that is at the heart of the whole thing.

They can't. They tried, they failed.I love CCP, but they've done one thing right and that's EVE (the flying in space part). Everything else they've tried failed. Like I said earlier, it's not a pvp vs pve thing, it's more a "I like EVE pretty much how it's built now" side vs a "EVE would be so wonderful if it were a more immersive experience" side. I think CCPs history has shown that they can deliver a good niche game, but not a good 'super immersive' experience.



Gonna attempt another food anaology here lol . CCP is like a person who can make one hell-fire lovely Hamburger but screws up every other dish. The WiS crowd is composed of people who don't much like hamburger (or like hamburger some but think it could be better) and keeps asking CCP to fry up some chicken....while ignoring the charred carcases of 12 years worth of burned to a crisp chicken parts lol.

Good thing is, that a new KFC (Star Citizen) is opening up down the street in about 5 more years (lol) so you'll get your yard-bird fix then.... Maybe



Pretending? Who exactly is pretending? All is well for me and I'd hazard to say people like me. We have this niche game where the developers are focusing on that which we think is important (space ships and flying in space) while ingoring the fantasy stuff the WiS people want.

They may even be making a 'leg based' stand alone PC shooter game , which ideally would satisfy the desire of some to walk around New Eden a bit. And as long as they keep that sort of thing where it belongs outside of EVE Online, I'll keep being happy about it.