This is what I’m driving at, yes. I miss the early pre-FW campaigns with lasting consequence.
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I’ve been playing EVE as a faction supporting loyalist since 2004, and involved in running one of EVEs oldest corporations since 2005, so maybe cut out “go back to WoW” nonsense.
Interactions between factions and players goes back to day one of EVE and are part of the sandbox.
Before FW there were very cool consequence filled campaigns. After, it was just the pendulum. I would like those campaigns back.
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I agree with this 100%. I had to re read it to understand it but no I agree because this is exactly what I’m doing currently.
- I created a narritive based on lore from CCP.
- I’m trying to get more pilots involved, and so far people are joining me.
- I’m running fleets, something I’ve been scared to do for a long time playing this game.
- I’m not good at PvP, but through this I’m learning how to become a better pilot.
- I’m gaining facition standing and LP, using that to further buy / make more ships / equipment for my fleets.
- I even got contracted out some ships from an industry corp wanting to help, and will keep getting ships from them.
CCP is not in that, they provided the narrative and now I’m getting things from going with it. The fights that I get, are with others like me though some have been with implanted Trig / pirate ships. But its a gameplay loop that so far they’ve seem to enjoyed and I actually enjoy an activity I didn’t used to do (though my fleets are small gang oriented)
WE create that story, not CCP. As far as rewards go, I’m making the isk my own way. I’m motivated to do these fleets to see what may or may not happen. Regardless, I’m getting rivalries and getting closer to the pilots that are flying with me.
The trade off people want, is a high that they chase that they will never recieve. No matter what you will not be satisfied with what CCP gives you as a reward for following the story but I digress.
I think, this is why they are changing the way the story is presented. Certain players that maybe haven’t had that payoff may not like it, but more like me will.
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I’m not best at explaining. Especially not in native language. Glad that someone at lest got a gist of the point I was trying to make.
That being said your “story” seams to be quite interesting. You don’t mind explaining more of what exactly you do in game? You can mail me in game if don’t to get stuff public.
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Any changes planned to ESI to support this?
For example:
- Amarr/Minmatar conflict: Amarr/Minmatar Faction Warfare - EVEMissioneer
- Caldari/Gallente conflict: Caldari/Gallente Faction Warfare - EVEMissioneer
- Will mercs appear in the same list as pilots? FW Pilots: Kills Yesterday - EVEMissioneer
- Will merc corps appear in the same list as FW corps? FW Corporations: Kills Yesterday - EVEMissioneer
- Will there be extra data to describe frontline, command and rearguard for the system lists, e.g. Gallente Federation - EVEMissioneer
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VERY much appreciate the link. I’ve been trying to research various things by flying around the disputed systems and seeing who was in the systems (and corp affiliations) ended up resorting to killmail and that was a nightmare to discern who was actively pursuing FW.
Note: It wasn’t a complete loss of time though. Got a good amount of study in the ships being utilized via the above methods.
This is an incredibly shallow reading of things. Did the game get ‘softer’ between 2011 and 2013, then suddenly spike up again in difficulty for 18 months?
Or has the reduction in PCU been more due to a combination of largely stagnant development, mechanics that added tedium rather than engagement, players getting older and having busier lives as they take on more responsibilities, the video game market in general continuing to mature and more and more options being available…
FFS, the game is almost 19 years old, and it’s been open to ‘WoW folks’ since WoW came into existence. A lot of the people I knew who were playing at the height of the game played WoW. And they didn’t leave because ‘EVE got soft’, they left because it got tedious.
And to a certain degree, for EVE, that was inevitable. EVE is basically a societal simulation. So many of the rules for behavior and what activities you can pursue are left entirely up to the players. It’s only natural that as the game matured, as the players’ interactions matured, they continue to congeal into ever-more-structured forms. That’s what humans do. They make rules and systems so their lives can be predictable, so they can have a regular routine. Well, guess what! Regular routines are boring.
Get up, go to work, do the same damned thing every day, blah blah.
Get home, log in, do the same damned thing in the same damned game every day, blah blah.
For a while there, EVE allowed for potential for expansion and progression… but then people progressed, and at some point, you hit a damned wall. If you’re a small gang PvPer, and you’ve been going out there killing people in small group engagements, solo fights, etc, for 2-5 years… is it really exciting anymore? Or are you just chasing the ghost of an endorphin rush you got the first few times? And when you realize that… do you really have a reason to stay?
If you’re a guy in one of the big null blocs, making money to keep going on fleets to secure space so you can keep making money to keep going on fleets to secure space so you can…
At what point does the ‘I’m hanging out with friends’ in that situation fade before the ‘is this all there is?’ and you go looking for something new? Some new, shiny game that lets you actually have fun without being the same old grind? Even if it’s still a grind, it’s a new grind…
That is what EVE’s up against, and why the community’s shrunk over the years. To offset it, you need new players to come in, and you need them to stay. And CCP keeps telling us their new player retention is crap. It’s getting better, they say, but it’s still crap, so they’re gonna keep working on the new player experience!
They need to work on the ‘what comes after the NPE’ experience. Because the NPE’s really good… and then it dumps you out into EVE, where PvE is functionally 18 years old and PvP is usually a competition to see which sadistic piece of crap can punch down the hardest.
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I unsubbed my accounts because Eve became tedious, however for me personally, it was nothing to do with the age of the game, I still play Anarchy Online and WoW which I’ve been subscribed to for over 15 years and Albion Online for 4 years. I’d still be playing Eve were it not for the changes they’ve been making which have introduced the tedium.
CCP seem set on extending the grind to artificially keep players on the treadmill longer without having to introduce new content. They would immediately get my custom back if they reverted Scarcity, Indy and Ratting changes of the last few years.
I live in hope that they iterate on these designs or introduce new mountains for vets to climb such as T2 caps, but seems they’re looking at NPE and FW related content which is disappointing.
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FW might spread over to sov null, maybe even changing the sov mechanic’s who knows. As for more expensive cap’s sounds cool if they are like 15% stronger but require 5 of the previous hull’s in the build process so that it reduces proliferation in exchange for more power per single account.
But then that might just get people to have 80 accounts each farming to get those ship’s then since they have 80 accounts they might as well get those bigger caps on all 80 while they are at it and then there is a problem again.
I just hope that the next few changes CCP does increase people’s desire to undock and blow ■■■■ up.
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Why does it feel to me that every EVE disease, that then needs to be treated, started originally with multiboxing?
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Parallel is just super powerful in this game its hard to balance around.
The only thing in my head that makes sense is making it harder to do so you are limited by your apm, and that apm gets divided by your char number that you can manage.
It seems CCP had a similiar idea as people are telling me mining is not so much afk anymore as it used to be. But at the same time maybe afk money making is something that is needed to have a balanced work life / gaming thing going on but then again multi boxing coming in and making everything complicated xD man I really would not want to be a CCP dev.
Ha
Hahahahaha
Instanced Themepark PVP ?
Implementing those instant gratification arenas vastly contributed to what made roaming so much harder to begin with, so no, ■■■■ off kindly with it …
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Who knows indeed, certainly not us as paying customers.
T2 caps on their own would be a terrible idea. EVE has hit the point (in truth, it did 10 years ago) where the gap between the ‘top end’ skill point characters and newbies is basically insurmountable in terms of ‘can you fight back?’
Vets, generally, have so many advantages that when the new player wants to come after them, they’re automatically screwed. There are some exceptions, especially situational ones, but the power differential, once the newbie becomes aware of it, is so vast that it’s no longer aspirational, but obstructive—new players are less likely to think ‘I can get there!’ than they are ‘I’ll never catch up, and when I do, they’ll have that much more money/more friends/bigger ships’.
That’s why most older MMOs, in addition to upping their level cap with new content, have done level compressions and adjusted their numbers (HP/Damage/etc) downward. It keeps new players in the range where nothing seems out of reach.
Right now, I own a nidhoggur that is older than my 2010 Ford. The car needs maintenance and upkeep. There are good reasons to trade it in on a new model. When a few more new bells and whistles come out, I fully intend to do so. The carrier requires… nothing. It has exactly the same performance as a carrier built today, when fitted with the same aftermarket options.
I agree that there needs to be new mountains to climb. But there also needs to be obsolescence, so newbies don’t have to climb all of the same damned mountains we bitched about over the years just to get in sight of the new mountains.
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I kind of disagree to a point, people will hate me for using Wow as a reference, but when I joined late into the 3rd expansion already I caught up super fast with everyone else but the problem was I saw the old raids and thought I can never run these, can never experience them as I would own that content super easily now. All that content lost to me.
Eve has the luxury where nothing gets out dated all those mountains are still fun to climb. New players are not alone they can join in with vet’s and tackle things with them.
Right, but that’s WoW. That’s a game where the best content is the content the devs create. EVE’s a fundamentally different beast in that even in the framework of developer-built content, the players are providing most of the action, and most of the engagement.
PvE in EVE is, well… dull. 99% of it is literally ‘lock target, auto-attack, wait, repeat’. There’s no ability rotations, no combos, nothing. Even ‘special’ abilities like roots and snares (web/scram) are just ‘engage module and let it stay on’. The complexity arises from people, from the fact that no two fights are ever the same.
In EVE, the ‘mountains’ aren’t ‘go into a drifter hive’ (though that’s still available!) or ‘do the SoE arc’, they’re ‘get into a battleship’ and ‘engage in fights at X size’. And those kinds of mountains remain. The only old content that doesn’t stay available is things CCP removes, and they already do that whether they need to or not. 
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No for sure, but no new player should just jump straight to cap’s they should start small learn the fleet archetypes try a few thing’s learn/upgrade and so on. I didn’t mean pve content. I just mean content in generally not becoming obsolete.
Which mountains in eve would you like to become obsolete?
You do have to manually fly your ship in abyssals if you want to get out alive.
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No you don’t. You just need to click ‘approach’ on the box while you shoot things, and then go to the gate. I’ve done plenty of L5 abyssals without having to manually pilot a damned thing.
Agree with this. This is why I loathe the recent cap indy changes and would like them reverted.
Are you familiar with the Bartle Types? I wasn’t until Dunk’s blog a while back, but found it such a good read that I started looking into it. For me personally, I have zero interest in skins / cosmetics or climbing social structures, I can’t begin to appreciate how people can be motivated by such things in a game, it just doesn’t compute, but I accept it’s a hook and as such content needs to be provided to cater to such players as we all want a more populated game. What holds my interest, as more of an Explorer / Achiever type is long term aspirational hooks. Original caps were the perfect content for me to chase and I spent years subbing up to 5 accounts realising that dream.
So my main concerns are broadly two-fold:
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Following the cap indy changes, it really bothers me that a newbro today who may be motivated by the same things as I was, now sees a considerably steeper mountain to climb following the recent cap indy changes than those of us that came before. That doesn’t feel fair on the new player and had the circumstances been the same in 2013 when I first looked at the game, I doubt I’d have bothered to embark on the journey. NPE retention isn’t just about a slicker tutorial / early game experience, diminishing caps or making them near unachievable unless you are lucky enough to already have one puts off the Achievers out there like me.
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With that said, having completed the original cap “journey”, I fee like I’ve completed Eve. Supercap battles provided a means to “reset”, however I have been fortunate enough to not lose anything so far. Subcaps have never interested me, whelped so many of them at this point and I don’t really fit into the Killer Bartle Type to enjoy regular subcap pvp. For my personal circumstances I desperately long for a new mountain to climb, hence T2 caps, but I do accept the impact that could have on newbros.
Yeah agreed or, in the case of WoW, when a new pvp season opens, it makes the previous season’s gear available for dirt cheap to help level the playing field. Can’t see either approach really working for Eve, but I’d be happy to see some radical designs that attempted it. Perhaps deprecate current caps when introducing T2 or make T2 have zero application to subcaps in pvp, make them purely infra ships so we have something to strive for that won’t impact new players.
Agree ish here, game needs obsolescence when introducing new mountains, need the newbro to be able to come on the journey too. However, whilst you may have bitched about the original grind, to some of us, that “grind” was the most engaging content Eve had to offer, a genuine long term multi year aspiration to really sink our teeth into and enjoy. I loved every second of it. I skilled up titan/dread, super, fax and 4 rorq pilots across 5 accounts. None of them injected, all patiently trained over time, but with some interesting points where they could each do different things e.g. my titan pilot was originally a dread pilot as the skill train was very similar, my FAX pilot was converted from a second super pilot, my rorqs each skilled up cap indy virtually as part of the rorq train and I started making cap components before I acquired my first titan BPC pack. Very much a case of the journey being better than the destination for me. I miss that multi-year journey and want new content to replace it.
Perhaps you’re more a Socializer or Killer type? Engaged more by social hooks and status or regular subcap pvp? Whatever floats our boats, I just want CCP to deliver more content to all types to keep people engaged as the population is on the slide and the NPE does not cater for all types currently so I can’t see how it can steady the ship, feels more like the water pumps on the Titanic.