Nah, that’s wrong.
Just because CCP added systems first, before adding ships, does not mean they designed the systems before the ships.
He’s conflating design and implementation.
CCP could have made a PVP game, eg with competitive areas, where your income is tied to your results in daily matches, and NPC build all the ships.
However the issue is that would require devs to handle frequent content addition to the game, therefore a lot of work.
So my interpretation is, the solution was to have players create the content.
Basically at the time there was … say, four main issues in MMOs :
- The need for content addition by dev, which means that the players are only interested as long as dev add content to the game. The money income is therefore tied to the work of the devs. The solution is to have conflicts in the game, so players create that content. Hence the notion of “emerging content”, that is content that was made available by devs but not designed by them. a synonym for that is abuse of course(and therefore unbalanced game), but that’s interesting nevertheless.
- Inflation is an issue in MMOs. Player who start acquiring wealth end up making the currency worthless. The solution was to make every action cost, by making PVP a negative sum game. Also the need for more content to be more valuable means in itself more money printing(like we noticed with pochven), so reducing the dev content also reduces inflation.
- I forgot this one while I was writing the others
- RMT . This was later addressed by PLEX : instead of paying RL money to the buyer, CCP gets its share. Not perfect, but very good idea.
Basically, IMO Eve was designed as a massive submarine simulation MMO with a few clever initial choices to make the game running in the long term.