EVE General Discussion

Holy ****.

People still here?

Except it can also be:

More players => more cash => more developers => develop a new game

which is exactly what CCP has done.

Not enough to keep their good employees from being stolen by other game companies.

Mr Epeen

Are you implying they've done nothing for this game as well?

Mr Epeen

Just remember the point of the venture was to chill out with Eve and have fun and gain a different perspective. Failure doesnt come into what were about to do.

The venture wont be measured by success or failure, win or lose it is just an experience we will learn from.

This is not a corp or alliance so there will be no head FC, I happy for dudes to try their hand at FC'ing no one will be left out and no one will be stopped from pursuing their reasonable goals. I for one am not going to be annoyed if an FC makes an error, together we will work through what ever the problem is in a positive and constructive manner.

It's time to take it easy with Eve and forget about this Elitist bullshit.

The bottom line for CCP does interest me. CCP have bills to pay such as, Electric, Taxes, Salaries, Services, Travel...what ever their business function there simply has to be enough money coming in to pay these bills and make profit.

So yes 10k more active players could make a difference to their bottom line, If they are the right kind of player then even better.

When I ask the question about more players, I am halfway hoping that someone will come up with a different answer. An answer that doesn't revolve around the central and self centered point of "I don't want my video game to die from lack of players".

But it never happens, the answer is always the same (and it's always delivered in find crying/defensive fashion, Look at Epeen's reply, a grown man 10 years my senior wrote that mess. lol. ).

I want EVE to survive. I want CCP to make money, hell get rich even. I hope this game is around when I retire and can devote REAL time to it between my retirement "jobs" aka fishing alone and prowling casinos with my wife on our old-folks-mobiles. But that desire doesn't blind me to the very simple fact that believing that more players means a better product for us is stupid as hell.

And what has been even dumber is thinking that you can turn a hard core niche game into some kind of mainstream thing that can't make World of Warcraft style money. Dumbing down and safe-ing up this game has been a disaster, in fact it's been the REAL threat to EVE Online. While rolling the game back pre-retribution is not the answer, the real answer can be found from that starting point.

Where it can NOT be found is even more safety and coddling or hand holding (which doesn't deter gankers while killing content for folks who don't NEED help).

It's been tried, it don't work and if want EVE to continue, then we better hope that CCP demonstrates that they realize this. No one is saying throw new players at the Wolves (I am against any idea to start new players in null, I believe in throwing people in the deep end of the pool to learn, yes, not the middle of the damn Atlantic )... but its also stupid to chase off the Wolves too.

And I'm cool with all that. What perplexes me is that these people yelling "moar players" have BEEN here to see attempt after attempt by CCP to "broaden the appeal" of the game fail. Yet it never penetrates, and the cling to the same idea even in the face of it's repeated failure.




I visit an MMO site called "Massively OP". A few months ago that had an article on there about a Themepark MMO player being given the chance to try some Sandbox MMO experiences and then tell about them from his perspective. The result was predictable, the thempark guy noted many good things but he looked at it like a themepark guy and decried the "lack of direction", the "lack of good story telling" and other such things.

I mention this because a guy in the comments for that article hit the nail on the head about sandbox games (not talking about EVE specifically but it rings very true for EVE".

He said (paraphrasing), "a sandbox game is "like writing a book, or a play, or a cool song. Most people will NEVER do those things for themselves, most people are content to enjoy other people's works. And so it is in MMOs. Themepark players enjoy an intensely interactive and immersive story told to them by someone else, sandbox players more or less want to make their own story. Themepark players will ALWAYS out number sandbox players by a whole lot thus the game world will be mostly themepark, but that doesn't mean stop making sandboxes)."

I think the commenter is spot on, and I think it shows in CCPs lack of success with efforts to broaden the game. The new NPE doesn't work because IT ENDS, and most people need some kind of direction and set goal. Regular MMOs have levels to grind for this reason. After the NPE ends, so does the EVE journey for most , and there is nothing to be done about it because no amount of hand holding can make a person want to write a novel or screen play if that's not a natural inclination they already have.



Which brings me finally back to the point. More players is fine, but the pool of humans who would like EVE is always going to be small, and trying to change EVE into something the "feed me content and show me how to get there" bulk of the gaming community might like is also doomed to fail.

CCP should stop advertising to MMO players and start advertising to creative people wherever they can find them. Well, them and people studying to be accountants, tell them EVE has free spreadsheets.

I still have the feeling that EvE's sandbox nature, permanent losses, brief NPE, complexity and all that jazz that people around here mention when it comes to discussing low player retention is dwarfed by the effect of the silly, confusing and unintuitive UI.

I'm not the kind of guy who draws conclusions from a very small sample... so I'm not gonna mention that 5 out of 5 buddies who I tried to draw in pointed at the interface as the main deterrant factor.

So I just mention my example - I spent the first few weeks just trying to figure out -how- to do very basic things here. I knew what I'm getting into, so I went through that process gladly. But I doubt many players these days have such dedication to dig trough it before they see the unique awesomeness that keeps people here.



Not that I think it's something CCP could 'fix' by a reasonable amount of effort - I heard horror stories working with decade old code of much simpler software than this one. Also the current players would probably stoned them if they tried.

I just feel that EvE's harsh sandbox nature is largely overrepresented in player retention discussions.

Or in parlance of Frank H. Knight, there is risk and then there is uncertainty.