Player Features and Ideas Discussion

eve does promote solo play, more so when you use your wallet to run multiple accounts. we have people playing with over 60 accounts because they wanted to solo incursions.

Playing solo in a MMO is perfectly legit.
Instead of facing dumb AI with predictive results, you face real opponents, sometime dumber than AI sometime not, and is more rewarding because of various players interactions in a sandbox, even if they each play solo.

Absolutely agree, and MMO games should give new players hope that they can achieve something on their own, for those so inclined, regardless of when they join the game.

From the more poetic vision of letting people swim, or fish, or picnic, or waterski as they wish in our cyberstream; some game companies want everyone to waterski in groups of five.

Forcing multiplayer, usually along the lines of groups of five people running through dungeons, forces people to group up with pre-existing players or bring in their own group. So to do well in EVE you should bring your own large group to play. I'm guessing this is what the marketers are crossing their fingers for.

And back in the day WoW could force people to run in mobs of 40 to do raids and so forth, much more so than now. Not because players wanted to, but because players were entranced by the imaginary world they were in. They endured the imposition of forced group play, in order to be part of the world.

This forcing of groups limits growth of the game, or network. We see that with Blizzard shrinking the sizes of groups required.

Let's look at another network that grew quite well without forcing people to do things together.

Facebook.

Facebook tied in with Zynga games at that time, such as Farmville, to achieve fantastic growth. Without forcing anyone to do anything as a group. Sure you could recruit friends to Farmville and run around helping each other, but the emphasis was on solo play. I'd hate to guess how many Facebook accounts are "fakes", alts made to play games and so on, Facebook says 80 million or so, about 9%. So we could probably double that.

EVE has quite a history of alt making too, because people prefer to solo.

So we have two models; forced groups playing a certain way, or letting anyone link anyone into a game.

I'd rather we let every individual come and play with some variation in style and be rewarded with some fun.

The more styles that people can play, the better it is for everyone.

Sometimes I think that trying to explain the complexities makes it more incomprehensible, perhaps that's my style of talking. :)

I see these conversations quite a bit on the net, usually they polarize into name-calling; special snowflake, entitled, care-bears, griefers, gankers, scammers, casuals, blobs, and all the usual rest.

Here's how I see it.

People are generally nice and like doing things together. We saw that with Pokemon Go last year. But they don't like being forced, the game becomes like work then.

Everyone should be able to try running their own corporation. It lets them understand the mechanics, and the work involved. And would make them work better as part of another corp; as an ally or as a member.

Having two different styles of corporations, one for solo players and one for group players, isn't really necessary though.
But everyone should be able to play solo and achieve their goals.

If nothing else it enables every person to be a CEO, at least once in their life.

And that's fun. :)