Game suggestions, mission system overhaul, newbro retention

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
142

It’s not arrogant - it’s a definition. For this discussion, and that famous study, “new player” is just that - someone who has just installed the game client and trying to figure out what this game is about. The vast majority of players are lost during this early phase and it isn’t to ‘griefers’. The study CCP did concluded what is obvious to anyone who thinks about the situation unbiasedly for a minutes - this game is confusing, different than most others, and boring if the players end up mining or missioning by themselves in some quiet highsec system. Perhaps a tiny number of people will connect with the missioning system, at least for a while, but most just go play something else.

That “new player” is the majority and where most subscriber losses happen. Yes, there are “newer players” who run into other issues and stumbling blocks a few months into their Eve career, and some of those may be a direct result of how other players are playing the game, but the hope is by then they have figured out what Eve is all about. Regardless, that isn’t the cohort CCP Rise and friends looked at. We don’t really know what makes them quit or stay. But I wouldn’t be surprised if non-consensual loss was more significant there.

But at that point we have a philosophical issue. If Eve is suppose to be dangerous and about non-consensual loss, can we really do anything when those things find a newer player and they decide they don’t like it and quit? I am not sure we really can. We should do our best to set expectations and prepare them for it so it isn’t a shock or surprise, but ultimately that is the game and if someone doesn’t want to play and take their ball home, then they can.

CCP has gone pretty much as far as it can giving safe space in this game. Highsec is already essentially completely safe for almost all behaviour if you have some basic level of assets, SP and game knowledge. We all know as veterans the tricks that keep us almost perfectly safe, and even if we get complacent, losses for a veteran are general in terms of a fraction of a percent of wealth. I get that this isn’t necessarily true for a newer player, especially one who hasn’t internalized the “don’t fly what you can’t afford to lose” Golden Rule, but again newer players are always going to be at a disadvantage as this is a competitive game so I am not sure there is much more CCP can do and still leave a functioning game for the rest of us.

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143

This is not true at all. Ccp is responsible for many lies, and alterations of factual industry standards. They take the industry standards, and claim they are lies.

Honestly, people being grieved out of eve (ie by things like the abusive war dec system) is a thing of the past due to changes to (war dec) mechanics, but that is not to say it does not happen, it probably and likely does, just not to the scale it use to.

The point I was trying to make is that ccp does intentionally alter their statistical data by leaving out the truth about it (or example by claiming that being scammed keeps them playing , but leaving out that after the second or third time causes them to quit and never come back). these sorts of actions show they cannot be trusted.

Ama yesterday was another great example. basically two hours of nonsense, no real substance after many people asked for actual discussion on how they will improve the game. The truth is they wont talk about it, because if they do they are likely to get backlash, all of which happens because ccp does not know how to properly engage players with their positions (again bad leadership).

Still, after all of this, the truth is that the biggest problem in eve, is the lack of corporate purpose. Social aspects are whats cause people to play a game like eve, and they have long faded out due to inaction corps (the major reason) abusive systems, or the monopolies in eve.

i grow tired of eve’s population claiming that health criticism is being toxic, or that constant ramble of dev alts claiming " ccp is perfect"

144

Nonsense. Anyone who can afford the cost of sufficient “shinies” for their mission ship that it becomes a viable suicide gank target can afford to lose that same ship fitted with T2 instead. And unless the player is PLEXing their wealth having that level of ISK accumulated takes you well outside “newbie” territory.

145

Exactly. At the end of the day EVE is not a game for everyone. And trying to pander to as many people as possible at the expense of having a coherent design goal (the PvP sandbox) is a great way to throw away the things that make EVE unique and kill the game. Long term success requires accepting that a lot of people are going to get started in EVE, find that it isn’t the game for them, and leave.

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146

this mentality is shared by ccp, presumably, and its insanity and the reason why eve has no playerbase. Positions like this are absolutely the wrong positions for eve to have (much less any other game). the truth is, the egotistical “i should have a highly complex game where i can one shot people” is an old way of thinking, and wont exist in 5 years.

if that is not clear, people who think like you do are a dying breed, which is why us “real” developers do not build games like eve, or star citizen, because building a game for a small playerbase is by itself, insanity.

the only reason why it has worked for eve, is because it has no competition.

147

CCP is far from perfect and has made so many mistakes and compromises over the years, many of which are coming home to roost in the low player activity metrics we see today. But that study is not one of them.

They set out with the goal to see what were the pain points for real new players - like ones doing the old trial - and they found that the intrinsic harshness of Eve wasn’t an issue, at least not one at the top of the list. Instead it is the confusing and atypical gameplay, boring PvE and grinding, and inability to connect with the greater universe, not “griefers” as so many were telling them. Yes, the harshness of New Eden is no doubt a factor later on, but the vast, vast majority of players never get that far so CCP has spent their efforts on other things than worrying about the scammers and gankers, and rightly so.

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148

Counter-argument:

EVE still exists as a PvP sandbox, while the list of PvE-focused WoW clones that have been created and died is immense. A PvP sandbox game may have a smaller player base than a PvE farming game, but it also has a unique market niche that is not threatened by all of the other PvE farming games and better long-term prospects.

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149

Your not being serious are you?
what about the eve clones that died, they are immense as well.

Those games did not die because they cater to casual / softcore players. This is a false-herring arguement.

Eve is not a perfect game, its no where near it, and the sooner we get voices that advocate clearly this point, the sooner we start making changes to this game that actually heal it.

Lets take the war dec changes for example. For many years people outcried “this is abusive, im camped in a station all day!” all the while people like you are claiming “this is eve! get use to it or leave!”.

where has that left us?

Now that the changes came (finally after years and massive population loss) we get the change, tell me, was it all that bad? Most would say no, only with the few who abused the players left claiming it was a “bad change” (and to be honest i have not seen much of that)

These are great examples of why ccp’s leadership should be replaced. I only mention they should be replaced because I believe they simply wont negate themselves from positions like yours, or are to slow at doing so.

150

I’d like official statements on what a “sandbox” is, because what you players here on eve forums it is, seems to be different then the rest of us working in the industry and how we define it, and more importantly, how we define it should work.

151

Wrong, WOW out does EVE easily. WOW didn’t just make one system and copy and paste it 2000 times and call them different, it made each area, each blade of grass, each tree unique a monumental task of time and money that frankly, EVE will never have the finances to do. EVE beats WOW in complexity of player interaction but the base game loses to WOW also. World of Warcraft is a HUGE game, while EVE pretends to be a huge game but really isnt.

WOW is far better designed, far better balanced in its game development, has a much more intuitive design fundamentally and the WOWs UI is near infinitely better than the piece of garbage UI we must ‘contend’ with in EVE.

152

Ok…so why are you here?

It has always seemed strange to me that people who strongly dislike a game will bother with it’s forums at all…

153

you can criticize something without “strongly dislike” that thing. It’s actually the opposite, when you don’t like something you do something else and don’t bother criticizing it - unless you are a butt hurt.

154

I loved WOW and played it for 8 years but the game basically changed so much that it wasn’t the WOW i wanted to play.

Day one of playing EVE more than 5 years ago, i told myself what is still true today, EVE isnt that great a game.

The clunky UI was the tip-off that EVE was mediocrity incarnate and my experiences playing EVE the last 5 years has only worsened my opinion of EVE as i discovered that EVE developers only truly care about dullsec and only hold onto other areas of the game to make enough money to keep EVE’s cash flow from completely drying up.

I play EVE as a default, ‘placeholder’ until a better game comes out. Most new games are of the ‘Sweet’ Crush variety and not worth my time.

I am watching Star Citizen’s development and believe it will be a game i truly like, not just a game I play by default because every other game available is junk.

(Any poster so inclined can get their dead-horse ‘vaporware’ commentary off their chest, go for it, if it makes them feel better about playing a mediocre game and fearing a much better game is going to kill off EVE, which it probably will do so, upon Star Citizen’s game launch).

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Fortunately I will have died of old age by then, so that will be a future generation’s problem.

As for WoW, I don’t know why you’re even attempting to make the comparison. WoW is a PvE-focused theme park game where the gameplay is all about following the standard procedures for winning the PvE encounter until you’ve farmed it enough to level up your gear and move on to farming the next thing. Maybe there’s some enjoyment to be found in perfecting your execution of a strategy, but that’s not at all like the player-driven conflicts of EVE’s PvP sandbox.

156

  1. Vaporware comment (no matter how you word it your comment was still the same old vaporware comment based on the ‘hope’ that SC wont gut EVEs pve playerbase and gut CCPs income stream both of which will happen no matter how many times bittervets post ‘vaporware’ comments).

  2. While many accept your definition of what a sandbox is, a true sandbox game does not have progression: like skill points, a storyline (all kinds of storylines in EVE), no hand-holding (EVE does this in all areas of game play: SOV mechanics come to mind) and a fourth tenant that I cannot remember at the moment. The term sandbox has become a buzzword and has also become seriously misapplied in the wake of it becoming a buzzword. True sandbox games have almost zero guidance or assistance by the game maker, this is far from all the intrusion that CCP has put into EVE.

In short, EVE is not, never was and never will be a sandbox game.

  1. The type of game is irrelevant to comparing them as to quality of game. The ‘Sweet’ Crush games are trash compared to both EVE and WOW but play nothing like either EVE or WOW. Just as i can make that comparison, i can also qualitatively compare EVE and WOW. EVE wins in intricacy of player to player interaction but loses in almost every other way, even though both games are roughly the same age, Blizzard did it right because they had the finances and CCP produced mediocre because their budget was (and continues to be) seriously constrained.

  2. I will also mention this sad truth about WOW vs EVE. World of Warcraft pvp is FAR, FAR, FAR better than EVEs. I pvp’d a lot playing WOW and was above average but not pro in quality. When i came to EVE, ‘the pvp game’, I was stunned to find that the pvp feels like your are neck deep in mud trying to kill each other.

World of Warcraft pvp is fast and furious, you need like 5 complete keyboard sets and mil-sec reaction speeds to compete at the professional level. I was not good at keyboard shuffling so pro-grade pvp in WOW was out of the question for me. I had to play WOW pvp with the crippling disadvantage of ONLY USING 14 HOTKEYS!!!

EVE pvp on the other hand is: (so i set orbit on that guy and press F1 repeatedly and one other question, did i die 30 mins ago because with all this TiDi im not sure I’m even still alive?).

Another comparison of WOW vs EVE pvp is just how interesting is it GENERALLY speaking?
WOW takes steps to try and match groups by both skill and gear, while EVE tends to play out as 120 guys gank some miner that was afk and just got back in time to see his retriever go, ‘boom’ and he is left to wonder why 120 guys thought that was even fun?

In the end I guess you are right I should not compare WOW to EVE, because even with regards to pvp (which is the core of EVE and the periphery of WOW), WOW is still vastly superior.

157

Shrug. Whatever. It’s very easy to make grand promises about your “EVE killer” when you haven’t released an actual product. We’ll see how things go if/when SC is ever released.

And by your absurdly narrow definition neither is any other (major) game ever published. You can define it that way, but you’re alone in that definition and it isn’t adding anything useful to the conversation. Meanwhile, by more conventional definitions, there is a huge difference between WoW’s theme park style gameplay where linear story arcs are handed to the player and you progress through the experience and EVE’s PvP sandbox where the major gameplay is player-driven content.

Nonsense. The type of game absolutely is relevant because it decides how much weight you give to various factors. If you want a PvE farming game then WoW is great and EVE is terrible. If you want a PvP-focused game with player-driven content then WoW is terrible and EVE is great.

Lolwut? Maybe if you like PvP arenas with no stakes WoW has some PvP. It’s a dismal failure by the standards that EVE is aiming for.

World of Warcraft pvp is fast and furious, you need like 5 complete keyboard sets and mil-sec reaction speeds to compete at the professional level.

Lolwut? Requiring a ton of clicks per second is an exercise in interface management and reaction time, not interesting PvP. EVE’s PvP is slow and that’s good, because EVE’s PvP is about the mental game of trying to out-guess the other side and catch them in a mistake. And much of EVE’s PvP happens before you even arrive on grid with the enemy. Last I checked WoW has nothing like that.

WOW takes steps to try and match groups by both skill and gear

And that’s a negative for WoW. WoW removes player choices to give you an illusion of fairness and success, ensuring that even low-skill players still win ~50% of the time. EVE removes all of that, you live and die by your skills and choices. The fact that failure is always an option is what makes success mean something. If you win it’s because you beat your opponent on a level playing field, not because the game accounted for your low skill level and matched you against someone you could beat.

158

TL;DR: you clearly want a game like WoW and dislike all of the ideas at the core of EVE’s identity. Just go back to WoW and stop bothering the rest of us.

159

As much as I usually dislike this guy’s intervention, I find your even worse than his.
This amount of dishonesty is usually only found in goon/CODE.

160

another vaporware comment…shrug

At least we can agree that WOW and EVE are different fundamentally but EVE is not a sandbox game. The original application of the term sandbox to a video game was because those video games where mostly of the builder type. You build something, nobody tells you what to build, where to build it, there is no progression, there isnt ‘game balancing’ because there is nothing to balance. The distortion of that definition due to it being a buzzword doesn’t change it actual meaning.

Do you find the definition of the word elephant ‘absurdly narrow’ as well, because that term is even more, ‘narrowly defined’ then the true definition of a sandbox game.

The Yugo was qualitatively one of the worst cars ever built, neither WOW nor EVE are anywhere near the worse video games ever made and i just compared them on quality.

It isnt that completely different things cannot be compared qualitatively, i just did it and it was easy. What you should state is that YOU cannot compare dissimilar things because of some sort of mental ineptitude on your part.

So the ‘standards that EVE was aiming for’ was Tidi nightmares, orbiting F1 monkeys by the thousands (since this is what most players in EVE pvp will be doing). That not even needing to hotkey anything and still being able to pvp in EVE doesn’t show a serious lack of interesting pvp. Ive seen plenty of videos of people pvping in EVE, solo, small gang and of course large scale and you know what i see time and time again, they mouse over buttons and push them, EVE pvp is so slow and boring that this is actually how many top end pvp’rs play the game.

It is obvious you have never played high-end pvp in WOW it has a ton of strategy involved, you need to determine your team makeup in high-end WOW pvp and plan and practice moves and counter moves and yes this is all done before you go to fight, you might practice for months or longer before you can break into the next bracket and again the actual pvp has to be done in mil-sec time frames with as i mentioned up to 5 keyboard sets, that is complex pvp, EVE has much more strategy in its pvp, it is just that the actual pvp is boring.

Wow places players into a game such that both sides are at the same level, it means that at all times you are struggling to beat your opponent and your opponent is struggling to defeat you, this is interesting pvp, since both sides are roughly balanced what remains are the two things you keep claiming EVE pvp is all about, ACTUAL SKILL and ACTUAL STRATEGY. EVE pvp usually comes down to simply (and boring and sad) n+1 victory outcomes, while this isnt always true it is true in the vast majority of EVE pvp (I can hardly wait for you to refute that this is the basis of most EVE pvp, that will be hilarious).

EVE pvp is played on an, ‘EVEN PLAYING FIELD’, did you really just make that statement ???

Ive been on roams of 120+ players and we spent all our time ganking solo guys mining or ratting. Exactly how is this an even playing field.

‘Failure is an option’, in both WOW and EVE, so i have no idea what that piece of commentary is even supposed to mean.

163

Thank you. This is 100% my point. People are BORED. The coveted PVP in this game is total ■■■■. Yeah you can get blown up at any time. But I mean really, I’ve engaged just about every form of PVP there is and it SUCKS.

The PVE experience on the other hand, this is what actually DRAWS people to this game. Then they realize it’s non-existant. But the PVP, oh the PVP and the scamming. So non-existant PVE and over the top PVP fanatics is what people leave EVE for. Because PVP is BORING. and the PVE right now is BORING. There’s nothing that connects people, or make people in corps want to run the content together. Everything about this game makes players split off and do their own thing, by themselves, until something happens that makes them go to WH or Null, then it’s just more of the scattered, divided, samey crap.