Make Eve Great Again (MEGA)

Council Of Stellar Management Assembly Hall
1

Eve Online had was best around 2008 to 2013. I’m going to keep this simple.

Things that made Eve Online good:

  1. 100% player driven economy.
  2. Inaccessibility.
  3. Planning and effort.
  4. Listening to player feedback.
  5. Creating a game the developers wanted to make, not making a game to please shareholders.

The economy is currently diluted by free items. When something is injected into an economy such as a large amount of assets of capital it devalues the currency. Take a simplified hypothetical economy where we have 10 Rifter’s and 10 ISK, each Rifter is worth 1 ISK. If you then inject another 10 ISK, we now have an economy with 10 Rifter’s and 20 ISK, this artificially raises the cost of the Rifter by 100% to 2 ISK. Not a lot of people get how economics or specifically inflation works, but this has been artificially induced in the Eve Online economy by scripting the new player experience. Eve Online now gives new players free things, which pollute the economy. This scripting also makes redundant the line from the Butterfly Effect trailer which they specifically say “the experience is unscripted”, referring to a new player, “a lone wolf”.

You tried to fix one of Eve Online’s core mechanics, inaccessibility. Eve Online worked because those who wanted to be here, were here. People stuck with Eve Online for many many reasons but ultimately it was their first experience and it was their own and unique to them. Eve Online doesn’t work by being accessible it works because it’s only accessible to those who understand it.

People who play Eve Online are intelligent, creative and imaginative people, who often work in similar jobs and end up providing unique roles in Eve Online. Roles that may take place in the meta game such as web development for example. Now players can use the in game interface to achieve a lot of things that would of taken planning and effort to achieve, most notably the ship-fitting, that can all be simulated in game. It’s little things like this that made Eve Online.

The reason I’m being so honest about all of this is simple, you as the developer, the producer and shareholder need to hear this. The Eve Online developers used to make a game they wanted to play, they had a white paper which helped them work with members of the player base who were democratically voted on to help them develop the game. The producer’s and the shareholder’s were the afterthought. Now it feels like this has been reversed and the players are the afterthought and the shareholders are the primary reason for editing the game. This is evident in the fact you devalued the currency by injecting and polluting the economy with free items and skill injectors, they drove down the value of ISK and put the cost of plex outside of the reach of more of the player base. This is directly been done to generate more income by forcing people to pay with their card, rather than ISK. I don’t care about the shareholders, i care about my Eve Online experience that i pay your shareholders for the experience of.

Eve Online was unique to every player in New Eden because we all had the same unscripted experience, we were dropped into a universe with no tutorial, no free stuff, no way to cheat using skill injectors and we had to earn out place in New Eden. This experience was different for everyone who played it and it’s why we kept playing, it was our experience.

Stop riding the coat tails of the previous developers success to make yourselves rich and I say again… “MAKE EVE GREAT AGAIN!!”.

3 Likes
2

I’m really disappointed in you for going with “MEOGA” instead of “MEGA”.

Second worst acronym ever.

image
image760×652 46.7 KB

This post has been brought to you by MY ASS (Making Your Acronyms Significantly Superior).

3

I hope my edits have satisfied you

1 Like
4

Well in EVE they expect you to destroy half of those Rifters so your back to adjust for inflation. But yes if you take your Supply line and Intersect it with your you Demand line you get the Price (yes I too took many an economics class) but its not what drive CCP. They want you to make microtransactions like PLEX since you already own either a Subscription (ideally) or you playing the game and all that stuff on the EVE store is cosmetic or something that helps your Alpha but would still be better as an Omega. They know you will want to fly some ship or use some module that requires Omega so they don’t mind PLEX since it’s gravy to the sauce for them.

To make the game great again would require them to understand why folks are willing to sit at a keyboard for hours at a time interacting with the game. But a company’s goal is how much money do they reap per hour you sit there. So they want you to pay for either multi-boxing (same person paying for the same time on the game) or cosmetic upgrades exist in several MMOs (Sims, WoW -pets, etc.) and PLEX is the CCP money grab if you are unwilling to multi-box your account. You’d like it to be your experience and related to that, but the company needs to make money per minute you play. So either you get more folks playing or PLEX, which they incentivize all the time by telling you to convert it to ISK to buy in game stuff.

So they want your credit card it’s how they make their ISK per hour :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

5

So, how much do you want to license my acronym for?

See linked prior art.

6

You can’t turn back time. If they had stopped iterating on the game in 2013, the game would have died. A lot changed since then outside of the game.

7

Im surprised brisc you did not say it as it was at fan fest.
Fair we got our skins etc but thats it, nothing else.
I thought u were going to say come on ccp is this it?..where is the spaceships in the spaceship game.
That was equally as dispointing as the lack of content released.
But on a whole pre-fan fest i think you do a great job, so thanks for that.

Mon Brisic give ccp some real ■■■■. Because they have been ■■■■…

8

I’ll talk about it more on the Meta Show this weekend. While I’m unhappy that there was nothing that is immediately deliverable, there was a lot of stuff presented, including a lot of stuff we asked for.

9

Na i know you do a lot of good for that game so i was very reluctant to give you a right hard time.
Cant wait for the show tho,
Thanks for the reply o7

10

Well I can’t no I can’t turn back time, but the developers can roll the game code back. Blizzard managed with WOW Classic. I don’t see why CCP’s developer would lack the skills.

I’ll explain it simply; peak player count prior to 2013 was 27% higher and PLEX was about 650 million. Now PLEX is 3.2 billion (over 20% higher) and the player count 27% lower.

If you look at CCP’s market summary around 2012, it just crashes. This is a direct result of the leadership changing, and the new CEO introducing microtransactions. Other problems include; making the game more easily accessible, granting free in-game items to new players and the introduction of skill injectors making it “pay to fly with the big boys”.

Many players left the game because of these changes which is not only from my own experience but it’s also mentioned in this Wikipedia article: CCP Games - Wikipedia

So your statement “If they had stopped iterating on the game in 2013, the game would have died.” is not correct, it is dying because of the changes made in 2011 which took major effect around 2013. Had it remained unchanged it would of retained its player base and not be in this state.

These changes remain unremedied and the player base and profits continue to deteriorate. So let’s look at is this way; I want my game back, Pearl Abyss want’s their shareholders to be happy and the shareholders want more money.

What is the alternative here, continue down this path or negative changes till Eve Online dies…

I’m not just saying this to have ago at random people online, I truly care about this game and I love it. I want to see it returned to its former glory. Your on the CSM show this to the other CSM’s, the shareholders and show Pearl Abyss.

If you think I’m wrong that’s fine by me, but whatever they do MEGA!!

11

The reason the game was better back then wasn’t the mechanics. It was who was playing and what they were doing. You can’t roll that back, like a WoW classic server. You are assuming that micro transactions killed the game, and it’s the opposite - they are what kept it going and made the company more profitable. Even if you could roll the game back to 2011 mechanics, it would start with a 2003 player base and it would take a decade to get back to where it was in 2011. It’s not like WoW, where you just grind out your character again and you’re ready for endgame.

People wanted WoW classic because they wanted to remember the game as it was at launch and how that felt. EVE would not hold up to scrutiny if we did that.

1 Like
12

The dev’s can make any change they want, if they couldn’t make changes then the game couldn’t be changed at all.

Maybe “roll back” was the wrong phrasing but the dev’s can make small incremental changes to bring it back inline with the product it once was. Or they could keep this server the way it is, and start a new server with the older style mechanics.

I presented you with a series of evidence highlighting what I was saying and the reality of what happened. To which you refuted with no substance at all. I hope you can appreciate that it’s difficult to accept that when independent evidence states otherwise.

I’m going to leave this now, I feel I’ve said all I needed to. I just hope I’m heard and someone MEGA!!

Goodnight!!

1 Like
13

You didn’t provide any evidence. You showed what the numbers were in 2013. You argued that if they could roll the game back to 2013, we’d get those numbers back.

That is simply not true. There is no way to roll the game back to 2013, because what made the game good in 2013 was not just the game mechanics. It was the people playing it, what they were doing at the time, the state of alliances across space, the interactions between people, what else was on the market, the state of the world economy, etc. EVE in 2013 was good because of a lot of things, not just game mechanics. And to get an EVE server with all of those things at 2013 levels will take 10 years to get there because you want a server that’s brand new, with no characters, no skill injectors, etc.

It would flop miserably.

2 Likes
14

Its like folks dont understand that

1 Like
15

I completely disagree. Here is some more supporting evidence.

How greedy microtransactions sparked EVE Online’s disastrous Summer of Rage, 28 May 2021:

“In this exclusive transcript taken from the middle of Volume 2, Groen recounts the giant missteps by CCP Games that led to widespread in-game protests in the summer of 2011, the ripples of which are still felt in EVE to this day.”

Eve CSM chair Mittani breaks the peace, 5 Sepember 2011:

“The outspoken chairman of Eve Online’s player-elected Council of Stellar Management, Alexander Gianturco - aka ‘The Mittani’ - has broken the temporary peace established at June’s emergency Summit meeting, in order to address what he views as the abandonment of the core gameplay of Eve Online.”

You must understand the history of the game and what made it enjoyable. You are failing to understand that people played because they enjoyed the core game mechanics, which were changed in 2011. If they restore the game and specifically remove monetisation, older player’s and new will enjoy the game more, the player base will grow and have a greater retention. All this will lead to a more positive and emergent player experience, this is what they understood pre 2011 and why Eve Online was so successful.

Removing microtransactions something they have ignored doing for 10+ years now, would be a good start, I mean it’s just tacky, cheap and ignorant to the player base. And they are only doing it because profit means more to them now than developing a cool game and that’s what changed.

I really love this game, i want the best for it. Even the players back then were calling for what I am now, that is to MEGA!!

PS had 4 links originally but as a new user i can only link 2.

1 Like
16

You say this like I wasn’t there.

I played the game back then. Or, rather, I logged in every couple months to run a mission or check my skills. The game didn’t keep my attention then, because I wasn’t in nullsec.

Which core mechanics were changed in 2011 that you think caused the downfall of the game?

You do realize that removing microtransactions would put CCP out of business right? And that monetization did not change any actual gameplay - at worst it let people create more alts more quickly. The rest was all cosmetics. So what’s the issue with cosmetics?

You are looking through rose colored glasses, assuming that it’s possible to turn the game back to 2011 or 2013. It’s not. This game is more than just a game, and you can’t turn back time.

17

I find it a bit strange you are trying to tell me what I mean.

You also don’t understand what I mean, so you are literally just arguing for no reason.

I detailed previously; the mechanics and philosophy that made eve great, and what I would like to see back. It would appear that sentiment was echoed in history by a large portion of the player base. It is shown in the records and data, evidentially.

You not understanding is a you problem, not a me problem. I don’t know what else to say.

18

I’m not. I’m telling you that literally everything you’ve said in this thread has been wrong. You’ve linked things that are largely non sequiturs, and you don’t seem capable of understanding that things like “inaccessibility” that you think were bonuses were actually harming the game and keeping it from being more widely exposed to the gaming community - people literally turned away from the game because they could never catch up with the folks who started years before unless they wanted to spend hundreds of dollars on a pre-made account, for instance.

The things you listed as mechanics aren’t mechanics. “Planning and effort”? You are literally arguing that making the game better so you don’t have to use a dozen out-of-game tools made the game worse. That’s absurd.

I am so tired of arguing with IT people today. You are living in a dream world that does not actually exist.

19

Well that’s all your bothered about, isn’t it. That you are right and I am wrong. The problem is your telling my subjective experience with the game didn’t happen, along with 10s of thousands of other people who shared my experience. Which is documented in media around the web, articles which are still produced about this debacle to this very day.

Whoever runs Eve Online would rather spend time working out how to monetise the platform, than actually make a fun game that people want to play. That’s not my problem, i can take my money and give it to someone who produces better content.

I’ll put it to you like this; I was thinking of subscribing with 12 new accounts just to get started off again, as I have lost my original account’s details. With the price increases that’s $239.88 a month, that a large amount of money to be parting with to play a game. An amount I’d happily pay for given I knew the game was going to return to normal and it’s future was secure.

Given the price of membership is rising, which is not the sign of a healthy game. I fear it will not see the end of 2023, therefore I can’t invest in it.

I’m genuinely sad to see this, I want to believe in MEGA!! <3

20

You don’t even play the game?

…

2 Likes