Sure, and we’ll just retrain concert pianists to be geologists.
Art and audio are specialists. That’s why you hire specialists for those jobs. If I have a problem with my car, I’m not going to tell the company that makes it ‘hey! retrain your marketing guys and have them repair my car’. I’d want the people who have a lot of experience and passion for working on cars to be the ones doing it, and the marketing guys to be doing marketing.
The Old Ishtar was overpowered. How often do you see one of those? Whenever I want to, they’re still in use, and they’re still tremendously powerful. The issue isn’t ‘OMG, they broke this ship by nerfing it’, it’s ‘the ships you see in use everywhere are broken, and need nerfing in a thoughtful, careful way that actually provides balance’.
Honestly, yes. They should be. The events of the empires should be more visible than it is now. One of the things that keeps people from getting hooked into the game is the lack of any coherent story when they start playing. There is one, mind you… in fact, there’s several… but new players never see it. New players never even get told the World News channel exists. It doesn’t even get onto the ‘articles’ page, despite all of the bullshittery going on about ‘retention’.
You want to retain players, give them something to be interested in. Give them news about what other players are doing, and what impact that’s having on the background story. Right now there’s a great example:
A bunch of FW players in the Amarr/Minmatar warzone got pissed about mission-botters and LP farmers who refused to fight[1]. So they cut a deal between some of the big FW groups to not contest one another’s ‘home’ systems, and to actively shut down missioning in their own ‘home’ systems. They even shot at members of their own militia who tried to contest the enemy base system. They even went so far as to codify it as an in-game treaty.
Other FW players—RPers, mostly—didn’t like the idea of an actual ‘treaty’ between ‘enemies’, and reacted. They didn’t try to be dicks about it, but they did complain about it in the IGS, the in-character RP forum. And that’s what they’re supposed to do. They’re RPers, they RP’d. Oh noez.
CCP Delegate Zero spotted it, and had the Amarr NPCs react in the way the Amarr Empire should react to its ‘loyalists’ making a treaty with the enemy to not attack them: they issued a public statement saying ‘anyone who does this is a traitor’ and announced there would be slave-raiding going on in captured systems.
And on and on, with players poking at CONCORD, and now a response from them about it. A whole bunch of ‘player actions may not be driving the story, but they’re definitely factoring into it’—which is something that can help get new players hooked in, and interacting with other players, and keep them in the game.
And that’s an entire avenue of gameplay that new players never hear about. The more the background story of EVE Online is presented, and made accessible—not prioritized, mind you, not forced on players in ways they can’t opt out of having to deal with—the more you get people stuck in, and staying around.
1 - That’s an important distinction, because the FW players getting pissed are massive LP farmers who do fight.
