If the game was getting to a point that it looked like it was going to fold, then it would be doubtful there would be any last storyline. Why invest in something that’s not going to be around.
It’s not so much a dying story line as it is a neglected one.
Hard to remember how there were actually Eve novels at one time! Oh such good times! I still have them on my shelf. Templar One. Empyrean Age. Burning Life. The Eve Chronicles.
People actually cared enough to write novels, and others to read them, at one time. Let that sink in.
Now nobody cares. About anything really. “muh stats” or “muh ISK” but these are not game features. These are people features. Perhaps it’s not the lost glory of Eve that I miss, it’s the human race.
I’ll finish this post before I break into song…
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I’d say that all MMO games go through this cycle. Back then, we were still discovering how the game worked, and all of the player interaction was also very novel.
The only way to recapture that feeling is to implement drastic changes, but the drawback to that is that a lot of players will quit because they’re only here to grind.
Imagine that the Triglavian invasion, instead of snatching away a couple of backwoods empire systems, played out like the Yuuzhan Vong invasion in old-school Star Wars, and started sweeping through null-sec areas with an almost unstoppable force, and the only way to push them back from destroying everything (including, ultimately, empire infrastructure) would be for everyone to join forces to try to push them back. Also imagine that in this situation, the prisoner’s dilemma is very strong, and groups that break ranks to operate in their own best interests can make untold riches. Imagine the player politics stemming from that, as the dedicated resistance has to fight off this existential threat, while also seeking revenge on those who sold them out for profit.
Would be a fun game, right? Except it would also result in many livid krabs and bot farm operators. So the game continues to be the same tired old cycle of grind → roam → repeat, because the fear is that if things change too much, everyone will leave to get their fill of routines somewhere else. But players never get that old feeling of discovery without drastic changes, so they get burned out and quit anyway. A genuine catch-22 right there.
Talking about drastic changes. 6-7 years ago, when the frustration about the blue donut was reaching peaks, I thought about a possible storyline for a game reset (naively of course, it would not have changed underlying social behavior…), It was about a catastrophic event the size of a black hole, indeed gobbling up all solar systems of k-space and literally promising to obliterate everything in it. The discovery of a massive wormhole system (larger than the current Thera) with several ‘regional’ exits to uncharted new k-space, gave the only possibility to migrate away from the impending destruction.
The basic idea was to have different groups, by their choice of wh exits, serve as new nuclei for human settlement, isolated from each other, with a whole new galaxy to explore and map, jump gates to build (yes, they finally got the technology from the Jovians), new npc’s etc. This temporary isolation and the fact that former enemies could turn out to be new neighbours would have forced resets of standings because of new interests, shared challenges, uncharted regions, unknown resource nodes etc.
All quite dramatic of course, and very inconsiderate of inactive players who, obviously, would have lost all assets and maybe be kept in stasis in the wormhole in a medclone carrying ship or w/e. But it was a way to drastically change Eve, up to the point of fresh hardware and fresh code if the devs so wished, in fact migrating from one shard to another and leaving all spaghetti code behind.
I never pitched the idea to anyone, but still think it would be good entertainment. I don’t think the original reason was the right one, there is, in fact, no persistent blue donut. But that aside, don’t ask me to come with a scenario for the end of Eve…
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Well if you won’t do it, then I will:
Hilmar, who’s been consuming copious amounts of hákarl throughout the day, thought that a police helicopter was following him. Maybe it was or maybe it wasn’t, but he did coincidentally get pulled over by the cops. In a panic, he phoned the CCP IT guy, who promptly started to flush their illegal supply of bootleg Brennivín down the toilet. Well, it turned out to be a simple traffic violation ticket, but the Brennivín was gone, and that meant that the hamsters powering the EVE cluster didn’t get their much-needed sustenance. The servers were shut down, and Hilmar went into hiding after selling out the entire roster of CODE. members to US and European authorities as persons of interest in investigations of potential ISIL recruits.
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Massive supernova and boom.
Only survivals are Rorquals in panic mode.
You make some good points.
One point I have made over the years, and whether it would work or not, is that Eve missed a boat for being an all-around genre on the level of a Sci-fi series, but not something that fans simply watch on a screen passively, but more like being in the storyline. I refer, once more to nausea, the Sansha live events. Those who know me would say at this point “there he goes again”.
At one time we had novels, chronicles that people greatly anticipated, and were very hardcore too, along with movies or shows like Clear Skies that were widely anticipated. Eve Radio was actually pretty damned good in it’s day.
Let’s take the Star Trek genre for example. Imagine if it were more than just a TV show. The technology during TNG was not readily available at the time, but imagine if there was a space MMO based on the series with real players commanding ships, flying fighters (light attack ships like Maquis Raiders for example), and all that, in the Battle of Wolf 359. We would, to this day, still be meeting people who were there. Even those who never played the game but watched the show might find that interesting.
And that’s just one idea.
It does work. Look at the Halo genre/series. The storyline is way advanced, has a remarkable following, tons of novels, movies, and related copyright. And it’s an FPS! If you can do that with an FPS, they could have done that with an MMO. And up to around 2011 it looks like they were going to.
Then the 1000 dollar pants…
That it all fell to Krabism and non-playing motivations like spergy min/maxing and botting is for the most part going in the opposite direction. It sucks the soul out of everything and drives out functional people. They could have even tried solving the grind problem without instituting RLM transfer by another name. They didn’t. Greed was good, and it bit them in the ass. Now things happen in Eve that, if it happened say in 2010-2011, players would have been dropping dead on the floor in complete awe. Now? “Meh. Is this going to bring my ISK/hour down another .0001? HUrr durr ragequit!”. Who wants to be around that?
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And this is why CCP is probably terrified to implement any significant, meaningful changes. They know that they’ll probably lose half of the players overnight. I’d be willing to pay twice as much to do my part in making up for that, but I’m just one person.
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