After watching the reaction to the video, and being inspired by the passion seen amongst people who really want this game to work… Here’s a few suggestions(or open-ended considerations?) from a humble product/UX designer with over 10 years experience in high-growth startups and long time casual eve player:
Roll back scarcity. This shouldn’t be a difficult change. I saw someone mention “stagflation” - this sums it up well. Scarcity has driven large swaths of people away. The problem that existed prior to scarcity is indeed a problem, but scarcity wasn’t the answer. Just by rewinding to pre-scarcity, you’d instantly gain a bunch of subs back. Will this solve everything? No, but the corporate suits will be happier and the majority of the player base will be happier.
People want to play with their friends. I don’t pay for an MMORPG to grind alone. You should be rewarding people for getting in fleets to make money, not just pvp. This should especially be encouraged for newer players. You currently have significant numbers of new players who join and become frustrated, and older players who may want to return but get bored easily(amongst other problems). Yes there will always be multi-boxers, but letting them hijack your decision making is excluding all the normal players, leaving a lot of money and people on the sidelines. Reward group play, let the multi-boxers get a little bloated in the short term. Scale isk rewards in Combat anoms for fleet size, require some sort of active engagement to power up or buff fleet members, do 4-man instanced, queueable pve, I dunno, something, anything to get people together and forming relationships.
This isn’t my idea, I saw it in live chat (I think from WINGSPAN TT??), but I kind of like it. Introduce asset decay over the long term. So, if I have a ■■■■ ton of stuff in my hangar, for a year, 2 years, without being used, it starts to decay, eventually being automatically salvaged, with a percentage returned to me as isk or minerals. Allow repairing/cleaning of course.
Allow fast travel for new forms of pve. The new fleet finder thing is kind of pointless (except for alliance/corp fleets which is great) without some sort of mechanic like this. Say I join an incursion fleet. Fast travel(some sort of instant clone jump) to incursion with fleet, I now have a 30 minute pvp exclusion, I can only engage pve material. Once the incursion is complete, or 30 minutes pass, I can fast travel back to home. “oh cool 3 incursion fleets, they’re all 48 jumps away” - friction and long “time-to-fun” needs to be solved for newer players, maybe this isn’t the exact solution, but would be an easy MVP to implement.
For god sakes make exploration more content-rich, and team-based. This isn’t hard. A friend of mine stumbled upon the “sisters of eve flotilla” for the first time, reaction was basically “Oh this is cooollllll… now what?” - great example of a missed opportunity, but also an example of easy to do things that you can scatter everywhere, and program them to be a bit random and fresh - just give a small reward/dopamine hit. Doesn’t have to be isk. Some sort of guided checklist per region for things you need to find, maybe LP or SP rewards. Have scanning modules that require 2 people to pair up and “focus” or something. Augment the models you use for rock havens, make a massive one that you need to manually pilot through, avoiding clouds to get to a cache at the end. (should take literally a day to make, you already have all these ingredients). Use the same abyssal site generation for exploration pockets, require D-scanning along with probe scanning to find ■■■■. Instead of killing trig rats to advance, you need to hack cans in the right order, and you still have 20 minutes. These are EASY off-the-top-of-my-head solutions that are low-hanging fruit that would make a massive difference. I would expect pro devs to do much better. People are paying to play Elite Dangerous for this exact reason - simply finding cool ■■■■ in space. Eve is prettier than Elite, so leverage that.
Well that turned into a novel. If you’ve read all this, thanks, and I’m under no delusion that any of this will be taken seriously by CCP, but maybe one thing just might gain traction. We all want the same thing I think, for this game to feel like the endless adventure it’s meant to be.
And since it might be a WTT idea, it’s stupid and poorly thought though. Why should assets decay just because I have not used them? Do you really want to punish people for not playing?
the video is not that bad ,groundskeeper willie did his best
people are over reacting because they liked the trash minmatar one so much
its a small video abou a tournament , just that
Yes, of course. Just trying to suggest lower-friction solutions for newer players. There’s probably a crusty old-player response for most of these problems. Small changes in UX can create massive differences in player adoption.
3 ideas that can be simply translated as “GIV MOAR MUNNY IN MAH WALLET PLS!”
1 idea that is like the worst game mechanic to have ever been invented
1 idea that’s basically “iterate on content” that they’re already doing anyway just in their own way
No thanks.
The actual solution is considerably more straightforward than any of this: perform a comprehensive analysis of EVE’s development track as it was during the 2006-2009 period, and then do that again.
Ah yes, the classic overly-reductive eve forum response. Thanks for your positive contribution.
As I said, most of these were simply riffing ideas, and I expect Pro Devs to do exactly what you said, a comprehensive audit, but the problems I listed still stand.
And as for THE worst mechanic ever - how many times have you had something in asset safety from 5 years ago that you wish you could just instantly liquidate???
Riffing ideas, yiffing ideas, it doesn’t matter what kind of effing ideas they are; if one day I log in after a break and find out that my stuff turned into goo, guess whose house I’m showing up to in a windowless van with a cage full of unfed badgers in the back?
Ok, so if you’re leaving for a long time, you can pay to lock things up or something. I dunno man. Not worth getting mad about. Also, how bout ya just log in once a year? Oh, you don’t care enough to log in once a year? Then you shouldn’t be THAT upset to lose a few things.
You already have fast travel in the form of clone jumps, which arguably helped pvp, the restrictions around clone jumps make sense for pvp but not pve. so give pve its own travel
They make sense for pve too. There is a limit to how fast characters can move around in the universe.
Put some jump clones, death clones, hyperspatial travel interceptors in strategic places and if that isn’t enough, you can create an alt to double the places you can be.
Actually, I’m starting to think that this is a great idea. It could go hand-in-hand with another new paid service from CCP: keeping your real-life personal information private. If you don’t pay, then your name and address appear in your characters’ information panel. Imagine how much revenue they would get just from the ganking community alone!
So, is this like the pro-consumerist bootlicker version of the no true Scotsman?
Again, typical response for long-time players, and yes those are solutions for people familiar with the game. The problem is trying to solve new player friction and time-to-fun.
Overly reductive. You never answered my question about asset safety. You mean to tell me you’ve never had stuff scattered from years back that you wouldn’t mind having automatically liquidated after say 3 years of non-use?
I don’t mind manually picking up and transporting my items to their intended destination (or hiring someone else to do it for me), which appears to me as fair gameplay, and creates content by supporting the courier trade and allowing other players the opportunity to contest the ownership of my assets by various means.
Ok, for big blocks of stuff yes. That’s great content. And what are we to do with the 427 mjolnir torpedoes 40 jumps away? The 3 shuttles, hauler, and 4 empty station containers 32 jumps away, the random ore that never got reprocessed 63 jumps away, etc?
