Difference is Firefall never really left development phase and was like a neverending open beta.
Kind of like Eve is for testing new technology for other games. Remember character physics and World of Darkness?
With out a doubt eve will be perfectly fine. If correct measures are taken.
Huge stock piles of ships by big bloc groups is not good.
Because when a titan is built its not dying its sitting in a hanger.
It needs to die or be replaced with a new better titan at some point to create demand in the market and keep miners mining and ratters ratting to get the new improved ship.
Bit like navys in real life constant upgrades to ships.
Creates constant never ending demands to be one better than your enemey.
If in rl you bought a car 20yrs ago, its now an old obsolete car… a titan on the other hand is still just as powerfull 20 yr ago (save for game adjustments)
As it is today. No evolution at all.
Evolution of ships certainly capital ships is necessary to keep older players interested in the game and the neccesary demand in the markets
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While I think the introduction of CSM was a good step forward, it is now time to do the next step with regards to modern and community inclusive product management for EVE. What I am talking about is that CCP should introduce a clear idea input funnel for the community where ideas can be read up, commented and voted for. However, the vote of a player should have various weighting depending on where he has lived over the last 100 days. E.g. if I lived 80 days in Wormholes and 20 days in high sec my vote counts for wormhole topics 80% while for high sec topics 20% only.
Finally, as a special goody voting should be only available for Omega players.
It’s had a ton of new pve content.
Abyssals, pirate fobs, drifters, resource wars, trigs, krabs and dozens of events.
Trust me, no amount of pve content is going to save eve.
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Im up for that. Give players some say in the content they want
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You also have to factor in market changes and future customers so appeasing the current player base only is not enough.
I don’t think this entierly captures the possibilities a company has with an MMO.
An MMO is not just a product, it’s also a platform to launch products on, called expansions.
The biggest MMOs we see today, are still the ones that emerged when the technology got to a point that enabled them to not make compromises with graphics etc. A lot of them successfuly managed to continuously recandle the interest of their player base by launching new expansions.
There is no saying how long this can continue. I don’t think a regular product lifecycle applies in this context.
Obviously EVE doesn’t have expansions anymore. It was put into maintenance mode. It honestly seems like CCP is no longer interested in continuing expanding EVE, but just squeezes it for money to finance other projects, which if past performance is an indicator, will probably end them.
The chart shows reality. Possibilities are future promises and fiction.
CCP has clearly went down the route of Eve branding as a franchise of products. Spin offs and tie ins. They even have a comic, for stories, wasn’t there something about an animated story or movie?
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You have a point that MMOs are more unique than say dish soap and thus have more unique characteristics to their lifecycle…but, I think you would be hard pressed to make the claim that Eve is an outlier and will not follow the normal (like Coke Cola for example). We’re in the Decline phase as you noted and that could easily last a few more years.
You’re one of the smart ones here so I have this question for you: What do you think is the minimum average player count needed to actually make playing Eve “fun”? 10K? 5K? 15K?
Knowing this answer and making projections could give accurate best before date…
Oh yes, no one can deny that. Obviously we have seen a lot of MMO fail and decline over the years. But I would make the argument that it was almost always the fault of the corporation mismanaging the game.
What I’m saying is, that there are example of other MMO’s that manage to renew their product by launching new expansions. The expansion itself will obviously have a lifecycle, but it builds on the platform. Maybe an MMO doesn’t live forever and has an overarching lifecycle, but it’s hard to say, since we still have really old ones that still go very strong.
Thanks for the flowers, but I have honestly no idea.
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Expansion after expansion, extends interest, sure, but eventually they release a new numbered version and overhaul.
Guild Wars does this. They’re also ripping out DX9 for DX12 and tooling up for GW3 even though GW2 is still being expanded and updated.
Differences is how other companies capitalise on their expansions. They also have a larger, wider customer/player base.
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A counter example to that would be Runescape, where the original is still bigger than the “new numbered versions” and IMHO is still receiving new expansions.
EVEs smaller player base isn’t a negative because it’s operating on a niche market (PVP sandbox MMO) inside a niche market (MMO). It doesn’t have the potential player base of a WOW or FFXIV which targets an entirely different audience. That doesn’t mean it should become more like those titles, being the #1 in a niche is far more lucrative than being #20 in the more mainstream segment.
I don’t argue that EVE is in decline, it clearly is. But in my opinion the source of this is the mismanagement of the game by CCP and not a inevitable consequence of it’s age because it has to follow some lifecycle graph of a regular product, when the whole construct of an MMO is far more complicated.
We have also seen like for example the company behind Path of Exile clearly communicating that their version 2 release will not be a new game but just like a big expansion. Because, otherwise it would split the player base and not really something you want. That’s why I say it has more the characteristics of a platform than an actual product, and the product are the expansions launched on it.
Now when was the last time EVE had an ACTUAL expansion that felt like they add new exiting stuff and that caused people who used to play it to come back and give it another go?
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I don’t think they ever stopped
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It is if it relies heavily on multi-accounting.
Eve is not a soloable (easily) game by design, so they sell you TWO+ accounts as a business operation and promotions. That’s ludicrious.
I have not seen that on other MMO’s. Eve needs more feature itemisation billing. Not just binary Omega and Alpha.
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A lot of what I saw did impress me. The new UI, evolving NPE, the in-game tracking of activities to offer missions based on prograssion, new docking animation, decals for ships and stations, new ship attachments, balancing the game …
All that rather gives me hope that the devs are working hard to project EVE into the future.
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They might be working hard but not on the right things. The game need a total rebalance of industry and mining. Yeah new animations are great but who cares if theres nobody left to look at them.
The game is declining but it is entirely CCP’s fault, theres plenty of similarly old games that still have a healthy playerbase, and those arent usualy as pretty as EVE, you know how they did it? Frequent expansions, frequent balancing, not turning the community against itself, all those ‘destroy their dream’ type promotion just hurts the non-hardcore-pvp playerbase a lot and those make up the majority of the playerbase.
Might be too late though, since my post will probably receive a lot of hate from said hardcore-pvp fans. So yeah maybe CCP itself realized and they know the game is doomed and this is why we arent receiving any good update anymore.
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Yea thats been known for a few years now.
Thats because its an actual MMO, the multiplayer part is pretty important, the game was never meant to be soloable, so you either need multiple accounts or friends to help you with tasks
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And they went with promoting and selling multi-accounting. A lot of players want solo, so they multi-account.
So that by itself is an admission that it’s lacking what customers want.
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Well they can’t exactly promote you finding friends, thats not something they have control over lol
Interesting mental gymnastics there, its a multiplayer game, the issue is customers want to play it like its a single player game, thats not a CCP issue thats a player expectation issue
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