Let’s break this down, and not for the sake of arguing and just argue:
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Funny how 2011 came up, maybe because that’s exactly a decade ago, or it’s a turning point? Back in 2011, we barely just got 1 quarter into Incursion Expansion and followed by largely total failed project called Incarna. With accusations of CCP being “Greedy”…who later come out to explain with a self labelled slogan “Greed Is Good” in the aftermaths of Monoclegate. Regardless, if it meant the survival of a game, and “That Version” of Eve would’ve died today, then how is there no change to the Fundamentals of the Game, what is different in “That Version” made you say so sure that it’s doomed and today’s version is fundamentally the same game as “That Version” or “The 2003 Version”?
(The portion of us have already argued, that the difference is severely weakened sandbox and emergent gameplay from our point of view, but you said it’s hyperbole, so what is different?) -
Onto Incursion itself, I’m a primarily PVE person, I got into Eve late 2008 so I won’t speak about times before nor when I was away from late 2015~2020. I do however think Incursion is a breakaway from the sandbox gameplay elements and started tiering the PVE in Eve into MinMax - Highend, Lowend PVE.
In a sandbox, there shouldn’t be partitions between newbie areas nor endgame tiers, a sandbox’s emergent gameplay is immediately weakened by staged conflicts, whether it’s PvP or PvE.
Since then, we get further out of whack PVE that further partitioned everything into these endgame and non-endgame. From burners to instanced abyssals, super restrictive event sites like this one, not to mention, we are going to be getting Capital Anomalies. Each more and more instanced, less open world, and the only gauge is ISK/Hour.
What is the difference in FARMING WoW RAIDs for gears, and FARMING those in Eve for ISK so you can get better “GEARS” from C1/T1 farming to C6/T6 farming or 24/7 incursion fleets, what does it do to encourage emergent gameplay?
Eve pre-Incursion seemed to be much simpler in my experience, ISK making actually requires players to think and often, creatively. It’s for every career and everyone…as opposed to now, back then, players were given sand (fishing rod) and now players were given pre-molded clays (ready to serve fish and chips) as termed by @Verlyn. -
2011 was the year I was invited to Null, and I joined briefly for a year or so, to my disappointment, back then Null was already boring, and subsequent years of changes didn’t do better, it’s not much different as to “One was told to play the way CCP wants them to play” vs “One was told to play the way their Null Overlords wants them to play” … both hardly emergent, and that blue donut and structure of command and organization so far as I heard, hasn’t changed much. I vouch for freedom and prefer to have my back watched reliably as it mostly doesn’t exist in Null. Below statement is something I like to see less as a gauge of satisfaction because the demographics are arguably biased and dismission occurs, else it would never be an Objective Opinion.
- What makes you think we don’t log in and play and we’re just complaining and not giving “Feedbacks”? were we the ones that are completely dismissed and excluded from your “countless veterans” since we don’t agree with your view? I play almost everyday since I returned last year, and I can tell you, Every Saturday, I get “connection to server lost” issues, and I’m not the only one, here’s one of the many threads about it → Frequent "Connection to server was lost."
The client was not optimized, I could run 10 clients simultaneously max graphics on a single PC 7 years ago, now I get choppy graphics running 2 or 3.
The server (or how Cloudflare and Eve cluster were setup) was not optimized, Jump animation stutters, some 5 seconds freeze EVERY SINGLE gate jump occuring on clients at times. Transferring a few hundred items between hangers / containers took 20s just because some like me, play from Down Under, a clear connection / synchronization issue. Imagine how it is like for us who actually went to your Guinness Record Setting FIghts? I doubt you can, because it doesn’t sound like you actually care for players outside of particular demographics (I know you denied that, but that’s just not the case, otherwise people wouldn’t feel that way when you talk).
- I think every word matters, though I broke your paragraph in sentence, I quoted them all in complete except the last part.
So you don’t feel it’s game breaking and so you are ok with it, especially, it was popular, so popular that you think they (CCP) will do it again. Well, CCP was the one that comes out with “All sticks and no Carrots” approach and you felt this is them putting a tiny carrotlet on sticks? Whereas some of us feared it’s just more of an action steering Eve towards more frequent monetization? Is this why you will continue to mention to CCP that it’s a bad idea?
If not, then why do you think it’s a bad idea if you’re ok with it after it’s rollout and reception. Because rationally people won’t listen if there’s no compelling reason, and right now the arguments hasn’t been compelling. (Though CCP appears to not listen either way). Many of us looking at it negatively says that it is outright wrong by “Principle”, but your arguments so far seemed less focused on “Principle” but more like “They like it! so there’s nothing wrong!”