Good video about why EVE is falling apart instead of thriving

Communications Center General Discussion
21

The video in the OP sounds smart and eloquent, but I think it is more wrong than right.

Not even a mention of hard fights against NPC bosses or players in this piece. Most of it is just common practices that reduce mindless busywork.

I doubt anyone’s going to feel accomplishment for doing inventory tetris and I know I wouldn’t want an EVE without functional markets.

The only thing that stands out positively, is quest solutions you had to figure out yourself, but there’s obvious reasons why this thing couldn’t survive for long in MMOs on the internet.

For what it means for us, I think EVE cannot be compared so easily to other MMOs. EVE has her own unique problems since day 1.
The competition has the luxury of funneling every new player through the same pipelines and just adding more expansions every once in a while. This has worked well for many of them. For EVE development it has always been a far greater challenge to pad gameplay time in an entertaining way and the wrong choices were made.

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22

The mere fact that you guys use the word “accomplishment” for a game says everything about you.

23

Ha! The mere fact that we play games, already says it all.

We enjoy wasting our time solving fake problems.

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24

But when I do, unlike you, I don’t break out the marching band, make a speeech and call it an accomplishment.

25

Nah. At this point you’re just reading way too much into a single word.

The dividing line is playing games. You’re no better.

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26

I think you’re reading way too much in your pixelated
accomplishments.

27

The video mentions all the things that made EVE a worse experience and CCP has not skipped a single thing to make EVE “better” while making it much worse at the same time.

Instant travel? Filaments. They have reduced the need to roam, rely on corp mates to find good wormholes (you could argue that they also already provided instant travel, but at the very least it was a social activity to use it) and scouting.
Instant content overview and delivery? Agency. You don’t need to look for systems with lots of signatures anymore. You just open the Agency, go to Cosmic Signatures and filter for systems with lots of sigs. No exploration needed.
Instant high level, safe gratification? Instanced Abyssal PVE and PVP.

Just to name a few things that this video mentioned and that EVE has to offer for the sake “of making things better and easier”. It’s funny how you can say that EVE can’t be compared to other MMO when it does everything just like any other MMO.

A functional market has nothing to do with good and long lasting gameplay experiences. In fact, a well functioning market for the game economy helps to create better gameplay and experiences. But CCP has been trying to ruin this and destroy this aspect with the introduction of structure markets.

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28

You think, but you’d be wrong. I’m usually the first guy on the forums to say what we’re doing is silly and not to take the game so seriously.

Doesn’t mean I can’t have a discussion on what makes for better gameplay though.

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29

You’re right about that. What we’re doing is silly and getting bent out of shape over a game is worse: childish.

I enjoyed your post. I just had a knee-jerk reaction on your use of the word “accomplishment” which makes it sound like you take the game more seriously than you let on.
But I’m wrong and I accept it.

30

I never saw the appeal of roaming for hours looking for a decent fight or sitting for ages on a gatecamp hoping for something lucrative to pass by.
I doubt filaments are the problem. Anything that can get players to a fight more quickly is appealing to me.

The instanced, private Abyssal-problem I can see, except where the video mentioned them. Maybe delete T5 and T6? So it becomes little more than a small diversion for some players, for a limited time.

The biggest problem this game has, is an over-reliance on highly repetitive tasks like mining and PI. That’s a huge difference IMO.
Rocking that miner boat shouldn’t have had that big effect in the past years, because it’s super boring anyway, but yet it did, because the game is built on it.

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31

That’s okay then.

32

I’ve never understood why any one classes an activity where you have a roughly 50% (or higher in FFAs) chance of loosing your ship as safe. Safe is the one thing it isn’t.

33

Nice video, and an accurate one too.

(Warning: long text about WoW incoming)

One of the things I loved about World of Warcraft back when I started end of vanilla was the huge world with other players.

The things I find fun haven’t changed much: where these days I like flying cloaky ships and killing unsuspecting players, or flying in groups providing remote repairs to my team, those days I was a Druid sneaking around stealthed and ambushing horde in that wonderful world that I got to know during some of my first computer games of warcraft 1 and 3. And I liked healing (and tanking) back then too, which was why I played a Druid, not a Rogue.

Details of WoW aside, one of the things I fondly remember of those early days was the adversity of doing dungeons. I loved dungeons, grouping up with other players, filling any role I could (Druids were good at that) but that meant our group had to travel to the physical location of those dungeons on the huge map. Also we’d need a group.

Finding a group could be hard, especially if you needed a tank or healer. Since I loved doing those dungeons I made sure I could do either of those roles, so I usually just messaged a group that was looking for either of them and we could be on our way.

In the earliest days summoning stones didn’t exist: 5 people had to travel all the way over to the other side of the game world, especially for some of the more remote dungeons. And if that dungeon was in the middle of horde territory (we were alliance) it often resulted in the same thing that would happen in EVE if your ‘dungeon’ was in 1DQ in Delve and you were not imperium-allied. PvP, fights and lots of it.

But we did it anyway.

You got to learn the layout of the land, the tricks to avoid enemies, you got to know other players who went with you. And the next time they’d ask you again, and you them.

Then came the convenience of summoning stones at all dungeons. Only 2 people had to move instead of the full group. It was a nice change.

Few years alter came the convenience of auto-grouping. You pressed a button and you’d be matched with a few random other players. And you were conveniently automatically teleported to the dungeon as well! I never got that many dungeons with random players that easily before, it was awesome!

… yet I also completely forgot who I was playing with, and didn’t really care either as they’d be replaced the next dungeon. You’d suddenly see the worst players, both in mechanics and in attitude, because there was no penalty to being a dick. Worst case, you got kicked, pressed a button for a new group and continued.

In the end, I completely didn’t care who I was playing with and didn’t know what the game world looked like, because team members and world were both made irrelevant by the game for the sake of convenience.

Apathetic convenience.

WoW as a game had some really nice elements, but the convenience they kept adding over the years really took out the soul of the game and I stopped playing. (I and many other players loved playing Classic again for that reason – it really had the right amount of adversity and none of the soul-killing convenience yet.)

Back to EVE

I’m glad EVE isn’t far on this path yet to convenience. Location in the universe (mostly) still matters, your name and reputation still matters.

Or is it?

EVE is already on the path to this apathetic convenience: instant travel to PvP fights with random enemies has already been added to the game! As well as PvE fights in the form of abyssal filaments that take people out of the universe. Because of those things, location and players stop mattering.

Why would you roam the universe to find out where other players live, group up with other players and befriend other players to play with, if you can get random easily replacable ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’ at the press of a button?

Please CCP, when you add more convenience, keep in mind the heavy drawbacks that more convenience can and will bring.

9 Likes
34

While I’m not saying that you are wrong. I would like to state that since I started doing the Abyssal PvP I know more players than I did before. Both the enemies who I face over and over and friends who I have to team up with.

I totally understand that it does take some players out of the sandbox while the fight goes on, but as the equipment used and lost comes from the sandbox and the team events require you to use comms to be effective, I’m not sure it has the same effect as your example.

35

They are a massive problem.
First off: They remove the need to roam around which puts your roaming fleet at risk for encountering other roaming fleets or defense fleets from locals.
Secondly: They are a cheap and risk-free Get-Out-Of-Jail card from unpleasant situations. Just warp around until your combat timer is gone, gather in one place, light the filament and out you are from a defense fleet that you don’t want to play with.
Thirdly: They even made it unnecessary to use cynos or dangerous routes for logistics. Just light a filament to Poochven, wait 15 minutes and light another extraction filament to a system near Jita and off you go, avoiding several cyno mid points or wormholes or gates to get your goodies to where you want them to be.

And which MMO has no incredibly repetitive tasks? Any and all MMO have them. They are games. Unless people start developing new content every day, ALL of them have TONS of repetition. EVE is by no means an exception or has at all more repetitiveness than any other MMO. I played Albion for a while where I spent hours every day going into the same areas to farm Cotton just so that I could improve my cloth cap crafting ranks. That was more repetitive than anything I have done in EVE. All the while I had to be glued to the screen because the repetitiveness didn’t work on its own, I had to do it all the time for hours. In EVE, I can at least do something else in the meantime.

Then you don’t get it and that’s why we have Arenas in the first place. You are safe from outside interference, from unforeseen situations, from unpredictable events. Nothing like that can happen in an Arena and that is why you are safe in them.

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36

Okay, that’s a fair point.

Since the pool of players for abyssal PvP isn’t big, there is a good chance you’ll get to learn new frequent faces because of that.

Just like in WoW the convenience has upsides too. I’ve never seen as many dungeons from the inside as I had after the convenience was added that teleported you and a random group to them. I got to learn all those dungeons completely from inside-out, which was great!

Yet it had a cost. The outside world, the game universe that used to be magical to explore, alive with players, was much less alive as most players weren’t there. They were teleported to wherever they needed to be.

Likewise, abyssal PvP may have the positive effect that it conveniently gives you much more PvP and lets you get to know other abyssal PvP players much more easily.

But it goes at the cost of the living universe, that now is missing all those players that don’t need to be there anymore. That don’t need to roam around anymore.

All that extra convenience is just slowly killing the soul of the game.

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37

You have a point. I guess the devs could prohibit the use of filaments in null and w-space, so players could still get quickly TO the action, but not out so easily. I reckon that should solve it.

The thing is, for most MMOs, the repetitive part that you end up doing the most, is also the most developed and varied part of the game: fighting. It’s also the thing they usually advertise.

Compare mining is: select rock and press F1.

I reckon EVE would’ve been in a far better state if did more involved stuff instead, like defending passive mines from other players, or even just do gun-mining.

38

I take exception to your knee jerk reaction.
Organising people is difficult in any circumstance, doing so successfully worldwide to attain a goal is an accomplishment.
Any other game I would agree with you so long as we swapped the word accomplishment with the word achievement. Yet EVE is not any other game, it is the sum (and quality) of its players.
When the foundations fail, so does the construct.

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39

Much easier to just find organised people to play with, I would be frustrated as hell playing with some people.

To put this into perspective, I once found a huge mining fleet (30 people) pinged my corp mates who where ready to go in about 4 minutes (5 friends) and the allied alliance took 45 minutes (15 people) to get ready, that is the moment I knew alliances where not a thing I wanted anymore the amount of time wasted in them is rediculas.

40

So this is essentially the counterpoint to Josh’s other often-linked vid when Eve people talk about him: the “quit moment” one, where he goes through all the minor inconveniences that make players quit, arguing for the easiest possible experience ever.

Hayes falls into the trap that many similar content creators do - their quest for engaging arguments leads them into a circle of doom, rotating arguments around each other without any thought to overall consistency or having any core points beyond “people will click on this video”.

In the process, they whip their audiences into frenzies of negativity, endless criticism and general dis-satisfaction. It’s the same with INN and the ilk in the Eve metaverse; constant ragging on the bad things in the game causes dis-satisfaction and reduced players. Constant RP slagging off of enemies causes the more suggestible of their audience to take this message to heart in wider engagement with these same “enemies”.

It’s also the same play that “news” networks have been making to drive audience share and advertising revenue - increase polarisation of content, get more views and damn the consequences.

Sorry Mr Strife Hayes, but if your arguments are without consistency, or totally ignore your previous output, then you are just a clickbait factory and not really a commentator of the genre worth paying attention to.

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