That’s simply ■■■■■■■■. And I don’t have to read it from some article, I was there.
It was just like EVE, player A sees player B and kills player B. The fact that player B was unprepared doesn’t mean player A was “preying on him” or “preying on weaker players” is just meant Player A won and player B lost in a RANDOM encounter.
When hunting players it was better to hunt the more experienced ones because they dropped better loot.
All the rest was tears that were heaped on by people who didn’t even at that time believe that PvP should be allowed in any game.
They took the RP context or “Murderer” and projected that to real life, considering all PvPers to be bad people.
The devs were jealous of EQs numbers and tried to change a sandbox into a Merry Go Round, and failed.
An abject lesson if there ever was one to developers of niche games.
Well I read your post and then went looking for another one I’d seen earlier that told the opposite story, but I couldn’t find it, and at this point I can’t tell who’s right or wrong, who’s lying or telling the truth, who’s got a clear view of what went wrong or seeing the past through rose-colored lenses, especially since I wasn’t actually there to see it all for myself.
The only thing I have left to add is this:
Which is a lesson that I Jim Sterling (Thank God For Him) gets into here; if there’s a way, without compromising the game, to make a game appeal to more people then that’s probably a good thing. You just can’t forget the part about “not compromising the game” if you want that to work out, and I can’t for the life of me figure out if there’s any way for EvE to broaden its appeal without compromising what makes it unique.
With that said, I’m just going to bow out of this argument, and wish you all the best. No hard feelings?
He talks about a single player game not a multiplayer sandbox. Obviously it is good to increase accessibility, but changing the core of the game isn’t that.
Yeah, the video itself is about a single-player game and what it would mean to add an easy mode, but I think the idea that broadening appeal without compromising the game is a good thing can be applicable to all games, not just single-player games.
Of course, it’s much harder to do that in EvE since one of the game’s core concepts is being a single-shard universe where all player actions have an effect, however small it may be. I really don’t know how CCP could make EvE appeal to more people than it does now without ruining what makes the game great.
I mean what are we even talking about here? I think everyone is onboard if the thing is making the tutorial or user interface more intuitive so it is easier for new players to learn and understand the game. There are a lot of games out there today and I can see how you would ditch EVE for some more intuitive game if you encounter the interface for the first time.
Game play wise, I don’t see anything that sticks out as “hard”. I don’t want to build a straw-man here and attack it, so please share with us what you think could be made easier game play wise?
I was talking about how even if the entire video isn’t applicable to EvE, the specific part I linked to where Jim says that it’s generally good to broaden a game’s appeal without compromising what makes it good, appealing, and unique is something that I agree with, and it appears many developers who want to broaden the appeal of their game(s) forget the italicized part.
That’s basically all I’m saying, and I’m sorry for being confusing.
Aside from a general feeling that the game could use a better NPE and UI/UX? I have no idea, particularly because the nature of EvE makes it much much more difficult to make the game easier for people without compromising the qualities which make it unique.
I also appreciate you “not wanting to build a straw-man”, as you put it. It’s hard enough finding people willing to engage in honest dialogue on the internet, and I think you and I might be able to do that, provided I can work through my recurring issues with communicating clearly.
There is certainly a huge complexity to this game. There are lots of completely different things to do, different ships to fly. The tutorials should at least give the new player some basics. The problem I feel EVE has is that most of the basic PvE game play that you encounter when you start isn’t really all that interesting and that is where I think most of the people quit before even getting a concept of the real sandbox that lurks behind all this.
The problem is that the interesting parts of the game are dependent on other players. It isn’t obvious how you could guide a new player into such a highly dynamic thing. It is easy to suggest “go join faction warfare” or “go join a nullsec alliance”, the outcome of that is always different and may not always end in the same experience the person suggesting it had.
I think in the end all we can do is not “misguide” people and send them into the boring PvE grind like it seems to be the case today. But I also don’t feel like sending them into PvP will work. When I started there where a few missions at the start that got you some basics and then you where off on your own after like an hour or so. In my opinion that isn’t necessarily the worst thing, I could be wrong though.
What I feel could help though is an actual ingame documentation/help browser. It’s just really beyond my understanding why there isn’t a way to find out how certain things work withing the game without going out of the game to some third party wiki. If I open the fitting window I should be able to click on the tracking stats of a gun and get navigated to a documentation that tells me what that is, as a basic summary and also in detail if I really want to understand it. How is that not a thing?
That is really just an excuse bad programmers give. I have absolutely no idea why they never attempted that. There was an official out of game wiki at some point but it was horrible and just an attempt to outsource it to the community who had already other wikis anyway.
I have to option on what to believe at this point: either CCP is dealing with a coding snarl to rival the Gordian Knot, or they’re incompetent. Since I have no way to know one way or the other, the thought makes me makes me anxious as hell.
I’d guess that this holds especially true when the MMO is really, really big. Much as I love Elite: Dangerous, I think the developers kinda shot themselves in the foot when they made such a colossal universe for us to play in.
Are we still talking about a in-game help system or documentation? Because I don’t think this has anything to do with legacy code. They just recently added the agency, so I don’t see why something similar would suddenly be out of reach.
Oh common, that was just one example and maybe that would need no explanation for you, but certainly for new players. And there are so many other things that aren’t obvious, an in game help/documentation would be really helpful in my opinion.
They could even put the basic content on github or something and let the community help with contributions to the whole thing in a sane way. Then simply display it in an integrated reader in the game.
It depends on definition/context of ‘hard’. Recall that back in the day, it was fairly well accepted that over 50% of VCR owners never learned to program their VCR.
I wouldn’t call most of EVE ‘hard’ but many parts require much more digging, googling, and fiddling around than other games:
Overview setup
Ship fitting
Choosing the right ship for the task, fitting it appropriately
Checking mission intel in advance so you don’t get blindsided by ECM, scramming etc.
Weapon application mechanics
Manufacturing, PI, similar systems
Agreed, although 50% of signups quit by their first login. 3/4 of the remaining 50% quit on their first day. It isn’t just the ‘boring repetitive PvE’ getting to them - we lose them before that.
This is tricky. Themepark games pass you from quest giver to quest giver, story line to story line. You are moving alongside other people at roughly your level of capability, doing similar things to what they are doing. It is much easier to just ‘naturally’ make social encounters in those environments and even they struggle with getting people to socialize.
EVE can’t duplicate that process, but they could at least separate new players into streams - Industry, Exploration, and Mercenary for example - and customize an NPE for each of those game styles.
It would be best to send them into a group of other players that are interested in doing similar things, and then incentivizing group interaction. One of the most common questions I see in help channels is “I finished the tutorial/career agents, what do I do next?”.
Picture an NPE where you get a download manager that has some links and videos you can click on and “Getting started in EVE” resources while it is downloading. Then your character creation, instead of focusing on factions and bloodlines that are relatively meaningless, has more videos and info links on “Pilot Career Options - Industrialist, Explorer, Mercenary”. Then you head into a more interactive NPE with cutscenes and voice acting that gets you a little further along your chosen career.
When you are done that, the game puts you into the New Industry, New Explorer, or New Mercenary help channels. Further, it has a section of mini Resource Wars (for industry), mini Exploration encounters (modified Abyssal or whatever), and mini Red vs. Blue or FW type ‘events’ for you to form up a group/fleet with (or solo if need be) and try out with minimal risk of expensive loss (new ships granted upon loss or whatever). Hang out in that starter region until you get the swing of things, then when you leave that’s it you’re out in the regular game.
It’s not theme park and it’s not handholding, it’s grouping players of similar disposition into what I think of as ‘activity funnels’ so they are more likely to encounter other people interested in similar things and make some contacts that can move them on to the next step.
Certainly EVE could do a much better job of presenting some sorts of information. Real life experience however tells me that “RTFM” is rarely a good ‘solution’ to problems of overwhelming complexity for the average user (no matter how good the manual is). If players run into a game issue that needs to be resolved by spending 30 minutes reading the help manuals… chances are you just lost them.
There is literally an overview column for angular velocity. You made number in column lower than number on guns. Now you have to maths the tracking stat.
I’m not disagreeing over documentation helping but making the numbers in game intuitive is also a huge aspect of it. If number a matches number b, you can just make one bigger or smaller than the other without needing to understand what they actually mean.
See, I think this is where you’re tripping up because I think that the ‘pretend-PvPers’ only make up a very small portion of the ‘whole’ PvP player base.
The part I found most interesting from the article, which you quoted in an earlier post, was this:
“We were not successful in bringing back the (literally) hundreds of thousands of players who had quit due to the unbridled PvP in the world (~5% of former customers came back to try the new UO , but very few of them stayed)”
Emphasis on the bit I think is important, of the hundreds of thousands of players who had quit because “non-consensual PvP”, only ~5% came back to try the revamped “no non-consensual PvP” game, and of those ~5%, very few of them stayed.
Which tells me that even if Eve were to be re-engineered/designed for “real PvP” (whatever you think that is), it wouldn’t help but the constant calls for “stop the PvP” will lead to the games demise. The direction away from small/medium gangs being effective vs the blob is what, imho, has lead to the current state of things.
On this, we agree. I’ve not been around since 2008 but have seen evidence of the same behaviour my entire stay in the Eve Universe, and just like IRL it would appear we are in a race to the bottom, until it is no longer fun for anyone involved. Unfortunately I have zero solutions for any of this, just a (slightly tainted) view of things from back when Battle Cruisers were great.
Fake Edit: Have just realised I’m responding to posts that are a little aged, apologies for that, but posted anyway
I suggest having a look at what Arrendis proposes for Supers and Titans.
Those ships are a large part of the stagnation issue as they create a cold war stockpiling situation.
