Don’t, please.
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what does that even mean??
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Fair enough, but that post on C&P was as if it was to do with the recent changes.
There is always competition breathing down your neck, especially if the game have been so long on the market and its age is showing, age not only when it comes to features, graphcs, but also in fundamental goal to design of these features or world building.
I dare to say that EVE is more niche today than it was 5, 10, 15 years ago, relatively to what is there to play on market. And it stems from the very old “hardcore” attitude of this community and designers. Its also contrasting with for example BDO in case of “wardecs”.
Is niche good for business? Not for making cash, no. PA would school CCP in that even when they make a similar game, they make it in different way than CCP always done it: that is HTFU or leave.
Is niche good for players that fit in niche? Always. Just not much of players fit the definition of that player who stays despite everything what world throws at him.
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It means he hasn’t watched the EVE Vegas broadcast (talk on wardecs starts at 45min). Hence does he not know what this is about and made up his own metric…
Obviously does CCP want to increase the activity in high-sec and that’s also what this is about. If this is PvP or some other activity is irrelevant to the goal. It’s not about some “NS>LS>HS” relationship, but it’s about the activity of players within high-sec.
None of this is supposed to make sense. None of it is supposed to be fair.
Just let yourself go and be free, yeah?
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CHEERS DRIVERRR!
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It already is.
yOu SpEaK oF lIeS
sHaME oN YoU
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This whole argument went in the toilet when you started using watchlist as a mechanic that when removed “hurt EvE”.
How can you believe anything someone says after a statement like that?
Its like talking to my dog and expecting great insights.
By the way the first server to die on Ultima Online was Siege Perilous, which was the most hardcore. Because although there was a group of people that said they needed the most hardcore of the hardcore, the playerbase differed and pretty much stopped playing it entirely years before most the playerbase quit.
Also when your response to a change is to threaten everyone that if they do X then you will do Y, then you are a parasite that is threatening the gaming company that if you don’t get your way they will pay. I would point out the obvious of who that sounds of in real life…aka terrorism.
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I think this is great insight on what the general body of consumers looks like. I don’t have CCP’s financials and specifics, but I’m willing to bet that our most “hardcore” players are probably the most loyal. The guys that have stuck it out after years of the game changing, while they grumble in backroom private chat channels about how the game is going to ■■■■.
Then you have the casual consumer that is willing to spend $ on all these neat things like skins, injectors, and event boosters. I’m sure by now it’s evident to CCP that they are probably going to make more money from casuals coming and going.
I don’t like that approach to game development, but honestly it makes sense from a money perspective, if that is indeed how the current situation is. The best any of us can do is adapt to CCP’s changes and continue to find your space in the game where you find enjoyment. Once you stop enjoying the game, then it’s probably best you take a break or quit.
So are you saying they should not be… ganking… the wardec thread?
The “golden age” of this game was back when it was loaded with casuals.
And here’s the funny part. It was not gankers or wardecs that drove the casuals away. As much as people argue that it’s either ganking/wardecs or nerfs to them, in the back channel it was something else: CCP took on a trend against solo play. New content like incursions for example. Incursions started in 2011 and were the harbinger of things to come. Other aspects suffered. Solo roaming and small gangs. Then exploration was entirely revamped to turn it into farming as a precursor to making it group play.
Group play is not inherently evil. You can take it or leave it. Where the issues with wardecs may relate to this is how people are encouraged to join a corp then end up perma-decced in highsec or renters in nullsec. Boring either way.
If you got rid of blue wrecks and ended the CODE tantruim, TEARS alliance can reform and go right back to baiting on wrecks but they’ll find far fewer victims. That’s the rub. Back when the game was full of all those horrible evil casual mission running carebears was when the game was teaming with players - targets, future fleet members, future corpies, lowsec roamers, nullsec roamers, merc, victims, victimizers, you name it.
Heck even the game forums would scroll a topic into oblivion in an hour . Even the Crime and Punishment forum too! Back before it was all “hurr durr my merc group better than yours”.
Except for the great war against the goons, the rest of the game since around 2014 has been mainly bored players getting preyed on. The days of the Casuals were the best days not because casual play is anything to brag about but because every player has potential to be something else and at times they did.
I should stop before I begin reminiscing about those real live events. Let me tell ya…
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As the thread is slowly devolving into less of a debate and more of a mud-wrestling match, I just thought I would post that nobody need fear anything, the answer to WarDecs has been found.
Some clever fellow** found a solution guaranteed to make everyone happy. I noticed it here:
The Mother of All War(dec proposal)s
.
**Note: Any resemblance to any forum-goers, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
you’re one of said plebs
post on topic or don’t post at all
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My prediction to where this game is going is like this. The war dec change is a probably the high sec answer to the null sec change of item safety, probably trying to fix problems at all levels. Its possible you could see this extend to wormholes by either being allowed to clone into or jump into by either means of just a station or some deployable in a system. There hasn’t been anything done to wormholes and it appears attendance in them is way down, which is why I predict this.
I also heard CCP mention at Vegas about possible removal of item insurance to capitals, and I bet there is a likely chance this could happen as this could also potentially address the everyone has too many capitals problem.
Also kind of shocked not one thread on the new mutaplasmids but hey whatever I guess.
Look, there’s only one reason for this change, and it’s not an argument, per se. It’s an explicit change of direction from the leadership. It’s not because CCP woke up one day and realized, “Holy ■■■■! Wardecs are bad for x player group!” But CCP did wake up one morning recently and realize that it’s relationship with the economics of MMOs has changed.
There was never a mass market for an MMO that forced everyone to play on hard mode. EvE has always been niche because of their philosophy that players should be allowed to be the bad guys and that ganking, non-consensual pvp, scamming, metagaming, thieving, and pirating were not only allowed but encouraged.
This had an additional and desirable side effect that it placed an upper bound on the magnitude of the technical challenges that CCP had to solve. If only a limited number of people ever want to keep playing your game, you don’t have to be able to scale beyond that. You don’t have to go into debt for capex to buy more servers that you might not end up needed. EvE was profitable enough to keep the lights on, the hamsters fed, and pizza flowing freely when ■■■■ happened that needed emergency fixing. But not much more than that.
CCP now has a different goal. To not only keep the lights on but to move from a niche game famous for being the only hard-mode MMO to expand their audience as much as possible and maximize revenue, player retention, and engagement.
Hard mode has to go in order to accomplish that. That’s not really an argument. It’s just an economic fact about what the vast majority of gamers find appealing. CCP has deep pockets backing it now. It doesn’t have to borrow money for more servers. PA can buy enough servers to reinforce every node from Jita to NPC null as long as there are players on every node maxing it out and pumping enough cash to make it profitable.
That’s the reality I believe CCP is facing as a mandate from their new owners. Or, I should say, that’s the reality CCP promised as part of the deal. CCP has known what makes players stay and leave for a long time, and they know that they can flip a few key switches here and there that will keep new players and convert them to Omegas. Companies don’t get acquired without being able to project future profitability numbers. Yes, flipping those switches will piss off a certain segment–perhaps most–of the old player base. But those ragequits will quickly be replaced by new subs who thrive in the new easy mode model.
Honestly, I think this is the first of many such changes that will be designed to grab mass-market appeal, and we won’t like the next steps any more than this one. If this has got your feathers ruffled, I suspect there’s a lot worse coming after.
I’m not saying it’s all going to completely suck, and that everyone should just give up and go home now. But presenting these decisions as arguments that can be won or lost based on the principles that defined the game for so long is a wasted effort.
I say this without any bitterness. Our time is over. As we’ve all said to other people at least once before when changes went against their preferred meta, “Adapt. HTFU or get out.” Now it’s time for us to do the same.
EvE was always going to go down either this path or an arguably harder one: withering up and finally dying after decades of being pronounced dead by the players.
o7
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This is like saying any restaurant that wants to make more money should copy mcdonalds. Any restaurant will be sure to make more money by selling mcdonalds burgers right?
Question is, if everything is mcdonalds now. Why don’t i just eat at the original mcdonalds? Why would i goto a copy cat?
Like all the wow clones that come and go, there are restaurants that try to replicate mcdonalds but does anyone go there? Does anyone know who they are?
If anything the trend shows that the more eve copies other MMO’s the less people want to play it.
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But there is no copy of EvE really and surely not one in the forseeable future.
Also I could easily call WoW a Ultima Online clone or a Everquest clone, and look who did better than the other.
Also if your so persistent on using WoW as an analogy im curious as to the population of the hardcore server or servers compared to the rest. I am sure betting the population is far less in comparison. No I don’t have to play it to know this.
Mcdonalds wasn’t the original restaurant either. They found something that worked and ran with it. This is different to copying something already established. Because why wouldn’t i just go to the established provider?
Funny you should bring up ultima online. It was a pvp game, and worked as such. But decided to create a separate non-pvp server to give non-pvp’rs a safe haven and to try and attract a more mainstream playerbase.
Both servers died. The non-pvp’rs were bored and the market didn’t work anymore. The pvp’rs had no one to hunt and got bored.
And what does the hardcore server for wow have to do with anything, except make my point more valid? Wow not designed as a hardcore game, not marketed as a hard core game, does not have hardcore game reputation…any wonder that the server designed as alternative game play to it’s core principles is less populated? Well no…
Everyone thinks that the softer the game gets the more players are going to come. So many in fact that it will make up for the alienation of the core playerbase. But without a crystal ball you cannot say either way.
But i can say that over the past five years ccp have been leaning towards nerfing non-consensual pvp and increasing safety, and they’ve seemingly suffered for it.
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