Ok, this essentially compacts your previous reply to my post, so I’ll just quote it instead.
I do feel I keep repeating myself here a lot over this but,
Have you ever heard of the Star Wars Galaxies MMO ?
It came out shortly before World of Warcraft and was one of your first, typical “throwing you out there” sandbox MMO.
It did so great for the first couple of years. I remember having a real blast, it was sandboxy, it was Star Wars, you didn’t at all feel like the hero at the beginning. anything you did ingame, no matter how small could have some form of impact on someone else or group, if you played smart and had given, no, IMAGINED, yourself a purpose, a goal. You had all the tools at your disposal to research into on your own and achieve them. The sheer sense of reward and long term accomplishment from your efforts were glorious.
Then the first Jedis were unlocked and appeared on each servers, and a lot of balance issues occurred, which led to a lot of moaning from the most vocal pvp playerbase. The problems wasn’t an insurmontable issue at base, and could’ve been fixed with the competent dev team they had at the time.
Yet something else came around that shocked the game’s foundation and obliterated it into something entirely different, simply for the sake of “larger audience sex appeal”, and eventually left it to go die in a corner a few years later.
As soon as World of Warcraft came out, SWG server playerbase began bleeding so heavily, Sony Online Entertainment ordered the Lucas dev team to do something that would fit the current market at the time and modernize SWG into something that could compete with WoW.
What the game got was a complete, and unwarranted overhaul of its core mechanics, and shafted down the playerbase’s throat without warning, litterally overnight, all for the sake of the larger audience, that was clearly going someplace else at the time.
Instead of sticking true, instead of taking an existing game’s strengths and making them stronger and massively advertise and bank on what made it so niche and special and LOVED by its playerbase, they went complete chicken, followed the CEO’s tantrum and overhauled the entire game, and to better advertise it as a simple, “choose your own class” WoW clone. Which effectively led to 80% of its servers shutdown some months down the line from mass player bleed, along with its effective “death” as a sandbox mmo.
Now, after all this, Im not saying this is exactly or even too comparable to what is happening to Eve, or more like, how they’re desperately trying to advertise it nowadays, but it simply reeks of the same panicmode method I witnessed in SWG, and I know for a fact that false-advertising for a game all of the sake of sex appealing to a larger audience, DOES NOT help retain long term followers, nor does it guarantee new ones will even stick around.
It’s like trying to hide your true character with simply soo much make-up and perfume, that in-doing so, will only attract short-term and undevoted relationships…
Moral of the story:
Teach a man how to fish, and you feed him for the rest of his life.