I am happy with that as a result. It was fought over hard by both sides, the NPC’s were balanced as it was Amarr. I was amused to see gankers fighting on both sides. All in all I think the Trig invasion content was great apart from that Caldari NPC imbalance.
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It was the only good thing about the whole debacle.
What I was referring to was many people weren’t. And many people were happy about caldari space getting stomped, as unintentional as it was. People will always call the outcome they are unhappy with ‘broken’ and the outcomes they are happy with ‘emergent’.
The trig invasions were an example of the storyline driving the games content, just as the OP seeks. And it made many people happy and many people upset. It’s just what happens when you’ve got a thousand opinions and thousand ideas of what’s a good storyline but only one shard to share.
Drifters was another attempt by CCP to let the pve drive the game. And it too caused ‘war-ending’ controversy.
To be honest, there is only one way to have players carve out their own little microcasm of narrative that allows them to impact the world around them and, coincidentally, it upscales perfectly with the ambition and group size as well as requires less dev time…
Can anyone guess?
Most of the unhappiness I have seen from this event was the Caldari NPC imbalance and its result, the Niarja loss was the Trig players winning that and justly so.
People do not like fighting poor mechanics and bad balance. Which is the Otela loss.
From my perspective anyone upset with it for this reason has a right to be unhappy whether you like it or not
CCP bottled out of the Drifters event because the nullsec players deemed that only PvP was allowed in their Eve and screamed real loud. And yet they are the same players who laugh at NPC miners and diamond rats in hisec. I never saw Drifters come back to every structure timer and the only structures to be destroyed were at the hull reinforcement stage. Again it was bad implementation because the range of the Drifters in terms of locking and weapons was silly, bad mechanics and bad imbalance again.
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As much as I’d love to tell politicians to stfu, or tell Woke Leftists and Hardcore Conservatives to jump off of a cliff, I simply have no control over that.
This…isn’t at all what I was referring to in the post, and I’m honestly not sure how you drew such a conclusion, when nobody else did.
Once again, I never suggested that everyone’s decision should affect everyone else’s gameplay, unless it’s something like the Trig invasion, or even Faction Warfare. Having a playable storyline, with multiple decisions that alter your course through it, and open up new and different chapters does not necessitate impacting everyone else’s game. All it changes is the storyline that you play, your experience with it, and the rewards you receive upon its completion.
And, as for replayability, another commenter had a nice idea. Start off with an SOE campaign (as is the current case with many new players), which opens up storylines to the different Empires, based on your decisions (the decisions you make in those storylines thus opening up potential storylines for the various sub-factions and pirate factions and so on). This epic arc can be replayed, every few months, in order to open up the other storylines to live a different experience and earn different rewards (much like how the current SOE epic arc can be replayed to boost your standing with a particular faction).
CCP did, indeed, give players the opportunity to alter the landscape and subsequently pissed off a good portion of the playerbase. Much of that stems from nobody really knowing what the end game would be for the Trig invasion, as well as the disruption of the main trade route, in the game. I don’t believe most people, who were not in the thick of the invasion, knew or thought that it would have such a massive and widespread impact on the game and virtually all of its players. The concept of the invasion was great, but the implementation and outcome seemed to miss the mark.
See what i mean.
Then i think I’ve misunderstood what you meant by pve driving the game. It now seems like you asking more for updated/new epic arcs.
I think of ‘driving the game’ as something else.
In a fairly reductionist way, I suppose you could say that.
Actually what you do need to do is play some singleplayer games.
Eve was never meant to tell you an immersive singleplayer storyline to play through cause eve´s story is made by players.
There are thousands fantastic story driven games out you just need to play them. Eve is a sandbox not a theme park. Perhaps try a themepark?
PVE is much more interesting then 5 or 10 years ago. You can do a lot of stuff but in the end you do pve to do interesting stuff with other players.
And sometimes its about you. Its not that eve is worse then 10 years ago but perhaps its no more the game you are looking for (doing pve for 1 hour after work to relax?).
But please dont make ccp responsible that you do want eve to be somehting its never been and never was intended to be.
PS: I can recommend to play Pathfinder: Kingmaker if you look for some cool sp experience and if you want to give some other games a chance i love to play rimworld, mount & blade and path of exile if i need some different style of game.
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And to add something relating to story telling:
EVE is based on one giant server for anyone. If CCP should decide to try building some more storyline they should rather hire some storywriters that do write a babylon 5 like story for the next 5 years and implement that into the game. Not in a way that you can play it when you login but more like a live story with big events (like those dreadfleets attacking in empire some time ago).
No other game could tell a story like this cause no other game has all players in one single server. That would be a kind of storytelling fitting to the game if we need more story.
Isn‘t this exactly what CCP did with the Triglevian Invasion. Okay not for 5 years but at least for 1 or 2… maybe more to come, who knows?
This is exactly what I have been doing since I stopped regularly playing Eve, several months ago. Mass Effect, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, even Minecraft and other MMOs.
The definition of a Sandbox MMO, per Technopedia: "Sandbox games can include structured elements – such as mini-games, tasks, submissions and storylines – that may be ignored by gamers…
…Sandbox game types vary. Massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) generally include a mixture of sandbox and progression gaming and heavily depend on emergent interactive user gameplay for retaining non-progression-focused gamers."
A sandbox is literally meant to be a game that has something for everyone, where “anyone can do anything,” so nobody feels shoe-horned into a particular playstyle (something the I see PvP-oriented players actively attempting to do - I say this as someone who actively enjoys PvP).
The whole thing comes down to “Progression-focused gamers” (PvE’rs) and “Non-Progression-Focused gamers” (PvP’ers). As Eve both has and encourages both, it’s far from out of place to point out the severe shortcomings of PvE from the perspective of those of us who are “Progression-focused.”
Were the over-arching storyline unfeasible, and were CCP to do this, instead, replacing the “wave spawn” mechanics of current missions in favor of aggressive and intelligent Burner-style missions (fighting an individual or small fleet of difficult and dangerous opponents), with meaningful rewads, I’d be more satisfied.
But isnt abyss such kind of content you are asking for?
The Abyss is a nice option, but it does nothing in the way of telling anything that can be considered a story. It’s basically Anoms with extra steps.
But to tell you new storys all the time all the content and devs would need to do just that stuff so you could have some new story from time to time.
Wow trys to tell a story and all they can do is timegate and timgate and hide it behind grind cause players are so fast consuming that kind of content. And blizzard probably has a lot more devs trying to satisfy those needs. I guess its nothing you can do in a mmo without people getting bored superfast.
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You’ll never be able to prevent certain players from blitzing through content. That is just the nature of the beast. And having a story worth telling would definitely require an investment of both time and money from CCP, but it’s something that would be worth the investment, from my perspective.
CCP is constantly rolling out new gimmicks to encourage PvP, particularly Large-scale PvP, because it’s what makes the headlines. But I know that I am not alone in the fact that large-scale PvP (or PvP in general) is secondary to my experience.
Ignoring individuals who prefer storyline-based PvE seems like a bad decision, for any game that calls itself a Sandbox MMO, as that is a large subset of gamers and can even lead to misconceptions about the game. Like I said. Eve has an incredibly rich lore behind it, and that gives the impression of an overall storyline that players can take part in. I know this, because that was my impression, when I first started playing. I remember being brutally disappointed with the missions, when I first started playing. If it weren’t for the great folks that I started playing with, and the fact that Eve is basically alone in its market, I probably wouldn’t have kept playing, all of these years.
https://www.techopedia.com/definition/3952/sandbox-gaming
A sandbox is a style of game in which minimal character limitations are placed on the gamer, allowing the gamer to roam and change a virtual world at will. In contrast to a progression-style game, a sandbox game emphasizes roaming and allows a gamer to select tasks.
In the definition you referenced, they state it right there that the sandbox emphasizes a contrasting playstyle compared to a progression-style game.
Maybe there is some misconception about what a progression-style MMO is, but EVE’s PvE is not progression-style nor would it fit with the overall game.
Your wish for more rewarding PvE doesn’t have anything to do with the game being sandbox vs. progression-style.
But yes, CCP really needs to revamp the whole mission system, cause it’s one of the first things newbies experience and it’s dull as ■■■■. The mission system is the real sinner when it comes to player retention.
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I see you expected EVE to be a story telling machine while EVE is a game where you are creating the story. You simply was expecting a different game than you got… get over it, such things simply happen.
From a resource perspective it is definitely a good choice of EVE investing into the PVP stuff as this is content created by players and this scales much better than a small team of developers.
Just to clarify, I don’t think a game can be fully only sandbox or progression, nor are these terms completely set in stone when it comes to the definition of the concepts.
One can argue, that the SoE arc is progression in itself, cause you progress through a story or getting more skills is progression. I think that is what they try to explain in the “Techopedia Explains Sandbox” part, that there are different ways of “progression”.
However, what people usually discuss when talking progression-style MMO (or themepark) is that there is a loot treadmill, where new, stronger items and content is introduced with new patches.
This is usually what people reference, when they talk progression-style vs. sandbox on these forums. This style of game development does not fit with the current state of EVE. If we would want that, then EVE will require a major revamp (might as well just make a new game), otherwise it will simply become one of the most boring themeparks out there and die even faster than it is now.
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