EVE General Discussion

A fair point. However, "General Discussion" just has certain official connotations to it that makes you think it would be a heavily moderated forum for deep discussion about fundamental gameplay. It is not.

Furthermore, there is no shortage of venues for Eve players to be awful to one another in written form, so it's not like players won't find the ugly underbelly of the playerbase eventually, just not in what sounds like it should be an official and heavily-moderated venue.

Very much so.

What's contained in GD is has a lot to do with why so many people never venture out into null sec and rarely get brave enough to cross into low sec.

Rule 1) Don't fly what you can't afford to replace

Rule 2) Join a Corp

Rule 3) Trust no one.

Rule 4) HTFU

We know what that all means, but to a relatively new player reading the banter about null sec, Goons, carebears, Hulkageddon, Tengugeddon, etc etc how are they supposed to know what's forum drama and what is not?

Most "true" gamers, at least the ones you want for eve anyway, already know about it or have even tried it. Eve an old game, and it's well known regardless. It might have some bad stigma for some who tried it years ago but haven't followed the changes, but anyway, there isn't much you can do anymore.

Also, as far as MMO's goes, I'd say huge portion know about eve, and the rest aren't interested in pay to play.

TLDR?

it's a very old game, it does surprisingly well for its age, I can only think of WoW being the only other well known LONG term MMO.

Sadly EvE is really not for everyone. The very fact they told you "what good is playing a game where one corp seems to make the rules for the game instead of the developers" means they are hamstrung in the theme park "developers prepare a canned path and balance" mentality.

I will reveal a notion that probably got lost in the years: EvE is from an era when players were few and dedicated, the "pre WoW" generation. Many 1998-2003 MMOs took froom text MUDs, some of which make EvE look like an easy mode, shallow Hello Kitty Online. I am not joking. Permanent death / XP loss + force reincarnation, permanent stat losses, self crumbling structures, ugly diseases were a given any player could have to endure.

EvE and other MMOs are sons of those archetypes, and these archetypes don't attract the masses.
I distinctly recall when a great MMO launch meant 35k subs!

Then Blizzard invented easy to install, reliable, polished, low computer requirements games that catered to the millions and they made bank.

I still recall the two big schools of thought: Total Annihilation vs Starcraft, pure Chris Taylor technological genius vs the game that invaded unthinkable places (i.e. Korean cafes) with an unprecedented sales success.

Then WoW came, it took all the "sell millions of copies" concepts from their other games and it launched with about 500k subs. Now we know how it went.

But the dicothomy, it did not go. The EvE and "archaic kind" of MMO players are still the same early 2000 niche. The millions of WoW players are just another generation, another mindset, another and separated customer base grown from outside of the old type MMOs one. Bar few players who could adapt to both, there's no sharing.

Basically you don't "grow" EvE players off the others, EvE cannot steal players that come from another branch with a different foundation mindset.

Your friends are of the "other kind", they just won't fit in the EvE mindset.

This is also why old players retention is so important for EvE. The likeminded players pool is small and shrinking.


Barring some new and moronic CCP action (they are always trying, just look at this StupidUI), EvE will not die by itself. Its playerbase turnover might just leave it emptier and emptier till it's a desert.

I dunno, I'm an intermittent subscriber since 2007 (I actually remember when Liang Nuren was a noob ), and even at that time the game was quite a bit different in the complexion of its playerbase.

I think the problem is that CCP has created a monster. I mean, originally, the game was multiplayer Elite, the people who joined it were into science fiction, and the FFA aspect of it was just to give it hyper-realism.

In terms of rules, the game originally was "colder" and "harsher" than it is now, and yet people generally were more ... I dunno, more immersed in the virtual world somehow, more roleplay-lite. Whereas nowadays, everyone seems to be just themselves, playing a game and metagame, and mostly getting their kicks out of ruining someone else's day.

The idea in the early days wasn't that the gameplay should consist solely of ganking, griefing and scamming - it's just that those were allowed by the game rules, because the devs wanted the game to be as "realistic" as possible.

In those days, the game itself was, "here's this fantastic imaginary s-f universe, now go make your way in it."

But nobody cares about that stuff anymore. It seems that many players nowadays just want a quick pew-pew game where they can be assholes with impunity.

I think it's the type of player who's been attracted to EVE by the hullaballo generated by the media in terms of "you can be an ******* in this game" that's become the dominant voice - those are the people who have lowered the tone of the neighbourhood. Plus now it's virtually a P2W game anyway - which attracts more assholes. Yet CCP is now stuck with them.

The sad thing is, I don't know how CCP could have done anything different really. Unfortunately, if you have "realistic" rules in a game environment where identity isn't trackable, everyone eventually becomes and *******, and the very idea of a "virtual world" goes down the plughole.

(I should note that above I'm drawing the most pessimistic picture I can - in some ways it's not so bad, and I don't think EVE is going anywhere anytime soon. It's just sad to think what EVE was like in its early days, and how it's changed to become "you can be an asshat here"-land.)

Eve would be a fantastic game if everybody involved had honor. Unfortunately, they do not. The post earlier in this thread from the veteran who talked about how the playerbase worked for the betterment of the game is sad, only because of how far from that the community is today. You have people like Mittani and his cadre of boot-licking goonies who not-so-secretly hope they can spur some poor sap into killing himself in distress. These people are not good people. Yet they dominate the Eve landscape. And CCP allows this, which isn't a bad thing because we all want Eve to be a scary and dangerous place and if CCP put measures in to prevent the activities of these lost souls, it would detract from what the rest of us want in Eve. So, in effect, the bad guys would win by making the game less fun for all. It's just too bad that MMO gamers aren't what they used to be, both in the instant-gratification sense and the desire to grief rather than enjoy a game with many other like-minded people.

People coming to this game expecting Halo or WoW or Hello Kitty Online need to learn quickly the difference between a kid's tricycle and an SUV. Unable or unwilling to think? See ya.

God I really wish it were possible to downvote posts into the gutter.

No, no. You misunderstood.

When he said "like-minded" he meant, only people who like what I like.


And obviously he's not a hypocrit.

Most new players not interesting in FW, nullsec, PvP - they want sci-fi hi-sec carebear gameplay which is limited (for new players without deep knowledge) to hulkageddoned mining, repetitive missions, various noob-targeted scams-griefers-pirates, sitting in captain jail cell. I wouldn't expect player hemorrhaging will stop during next couple of years because CCP definitely doesn't have any plans to expand hi-sec / carebear gameplay after monoclegeddon.