It is amazing how many times I’ve said the exact same thing, and you’ve come up with half a dozen different versions that I didn’t actually say.
Sandbox, single shard, and emergent gameplay are all still the crux of the game.
They haven’t been “severely weakened.” That’s hyperbole.
It’s like you guys wish the game still looked and played the way it did in 2011, not understanding that we don’t live in 2011 anymore. That version of the game today would not survive.
Not in the first M2 fight. I was in the fight, and I streamed it for 14 hours. There were no node crashes, the fight went exactly how folks expected it to. Almost everybody who walked away from that fight was surprised that it went that well.
If you think the experience was hideous, you are obviously not a veteran of those kinds of big titan battles. I think it was the best one of those I’d been in, and I’ve been in most of those that happened after B-R.
I lost a Titan and still had a lot of fun. Were you even there?
That sounds like the problem is on your end.
I was and I cynod out after a few hours because I do not think that sitting in tidilagfests for hours is a good experience. That cyno out took me 30 minutes in real time to go through. 30 minutes of doing nothing. That’s not better, that’s not good, it’s the same crap as before just with more people. Nothing has improved since 6VDT, ULAX, HED-GP, Asakai, B-R or M-O. It’s just ever more people. If more participants in this madness is the most important data value to say if something is better or worsewe have some serious issues with common sense and perspective.
Sure, CCP only introduced this feature for me. Thank you CCP. 
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You are saying thats what you mean?
Let me get this right, you are actually saying that because it looks better, its a better game?
Wow, ok. Thats… Yeah. Thats very enlightening.
You probably shouldnt presume to dictate to people what you think objectively means in future. You clearly dont know in regards to a game.
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Let’s break this down, and not for the sake of arguing and just argue:
-
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!”
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They did indeed. Slow, Laggy, DC’s. Yeah they call it TIDI, which in itself shows the game isn’t designed for those type of fights.
“Hey look, we set a guiness world record”, pity the game was basically unplayable.
The second fight, Goons decided they didn’t want to fight, so doubled their numbers to stop it before it started.
Are you arrogant enough to believe I’ve never dealt with Tidi and the shite game play that goes with it? Whether it’s in M2 or any other system, Tidi game play sucks.
Why? I don’t play Eve for “pretty” and most of the people I play along side don’t either.
And if anyone is streaming due to the “Pretty” they aren’t playing Eve the way I do. I’ll watch GF’s on social media, that’s wat Eve is about. “Pretty” isn’t in my “must see” list
Lets see…
Your words, NO?
I read EXACTLY what you said… Maybe you should read up on what you ACTUALLY said.
This should be stickied somewhere Brisc is forced to read it everytime before he posts.
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Let’s bring the facts:
- most of the players make their ISK from unassailable instanced PvE
- a lot of high profile former roamers and streamers spend their time in instanced and unscannable PvP arenas
- event sites are micro-managed and accompanied by out-of-game exploit rules enforcing players to interact with them exactly in the one way they are designed
- content is explicitly designed to limit PvP interaction and contests through quasi instances with population caps
- reimbursing non-consensual PvP losses without reason (though anecdotal, the report numbers are increasing)
How can you not see the fundamental changes to the very nature of the game? None of those mentioned measures are necessary to make a better performing or better looking game. They were made to attract and hold a new demography of players which can’t handle the freedom of play also granted to other playstyles.
The sandbox demographic and “fair play only” demographic of players are mutually exclusive. You won’t ever be able to convert a spoilt kid into a self-reliant person by catering to them.
Hence if you want to keep all the spoilt kids, you need to remove more of the sandbox and freedom to play. Do you want that?
EDIT: Your big blocs are part of the problem, because you embrace and cater to the F1 drone mentality with krab brain, and SRP entitlement.
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Does it though?
Prof. Richard A. Bartle
University of Essex
United KingdomMay 2013
Abstract
Ten years ago, massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMOs) had
a bright and exciting future. Today, their prospects do not look so glorious. In an
effort to attract ever-more players, their gameplay has gradually been diluted and
their core audience has deserted them. Now that even their sources of new casual
players are drying up, MMOs face a slow and steady decline. Their problems are easy
to enumerate: they cost too much to make; too many of them play the exact same
way; new revenue models put off key groups of players; they lack immersion; they
lack wit and personality; players have been trained to want experiences that they
don’t actually want; designers are forbidden from experimenting. The solutions to
these problems are less easy to state.
Can anything be done to prevent MMOs from fading away?
Well, yes it can. The question is, will the patient take the medicine?Introduction
From their lofty position as representing the future of videogames, MMOs
have fallen hard. Whereas once they were innovative and compelling, now they are
repetitive and take-it-or-leave-it. Although they remain profitable at the moment, we
know (from the way that the casual games market fragmented when it matured) that
this is not sustainable in the long term: players will either leave for other types of
game or focus on particular mechanics that have limited appeal or that can be
abstracted out as stand-alone games (or even apps).
The central issue is that MMOs don’t actually appeal to everyone. Those whom
they do appeal to, they appeal to very powerfully – even transformationally – but not
everyone wants or needs what they offer. The word massively in the acronym doesn’t
mean they’re mass-market, it merely means that more people can play in the same
shared environment at once than can do so in a regular multi-player game. You can
have a profitable MMO with 20,000 players, you don’t need 2,000,000. However,
developers have in general chosen to make their money from volume rather than
from pricing, attempting to draw in a wide audience of less-engaged players rather
than a narrow audience of enthusiasts. In so doing, they have collectively lost their
hard-core players to single-player RPGs and have slash-and-burned their way
through almost all the casual players they could reach. What’s left to them is an army
of butterfly players, flitting from new MMO to new MMO: engaged enough to try the
out, but not sufficiently so that any particular one will win their loyalties.
former Blizzard President and co-founder Mike Morhaime
“I think that’s a question of accessibility and time investment. I wouldn’t say that MMOs wouldn’t have a resurgence in the future, but maybe there are other types of games that are able to capture the social experience even more. I would also just observe that as World of Warcraft evolved over the years, it actually kind of became less social, because in an effort to achieve more accessibility, we removed some o the reasons why you need to play with the same groupof people over and over.”
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I thought it was a bad idea because it looks desperate. Player numbers are dropping, people don’t like scarcity, so here/s some free isk. I expected more people would call it out and it would feed into the malaise. That hasn’t happened - it was popular, which undercuts one if my biggest worries about it.
No, they don’t. The latest MER:
Most players are making their money they same way they’ve always made their money - market trading, selling blue loot and ratting. Abyssal income is 200 bil a day (6 trillion a month). Blue loot is worth three times that a day (18 trillion a month), and ratting is 19.4 trillion a month.
Like who? Here’s the top ten EVE streamers over the last 7 days.
I’m part of #3 and #4. Mind1 does music and nullsec PvP, Bjornbee does PvP, INN is talks shows, Rampageinc is nullsec PvP (we did abyssals for a week or so six months ago), Docgotgame was mining in null the last time I watched. LastQWERTY is a T5Z cam, Ibeast is a PvPer, Ron is a nullsec PvPer, and Xtrasquishy is also a nullsec PVPer.
None of these guys are doing abyssals.
So who are the guys doing abyssals?
Event sites have always been micromanaged, and since they’re limited time it’s easier for CCP to declare an exploit than it is to change or fix them (until the next time).
How often has this happened? I know you’re referring to the ESS reserve bank key lowsec sites, and I argued against the cap (and am still arguing against it), but I don’t believe that kind of limit is common at all.
This has been a perennial problem, and one I’ve argued against pretty consistently. It’s not something that has just started happening. It’s been on my list for years.
Because they’re not fundamental changes to the very nature of the game. Other than the introduction of abyssals, which is instanced PvE (and the arenas which is instanced PvP) none of the stuff is a big enough change to warrant the claim that it’s a change to the “fundamental nature” of the game. Abyssals were, but they didn’t displace existing content - they’re just other things to do and they don’t appeal to everybody. There is nothing wrong with that.
No, they aren’t, because there’s no “fair play only” philosophy in EVE. If there were, the stuff that has made the game what it is - scamming, ganking, piracy, metagaming, etc - would all be gone, and it’s not.
And no, the big blocs are not part of the problem. We’re the ones using the sandbox most creatively, making our sand castles and knocking them down.
You guys need to take a step back and consider that maybe you’ve got bad information and are thus drawing incorrect conclusions.
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Of course there is and it seems to be growing.
Instanced PVE/PVP for one.
This very thread topic (which funnily enough, no-one is talking about) is about instanced “fair play” game play.
Funny, those sand castles ARE the problem with nulsec.
When a whole coalition can hide out in a single invulnerable system for nearly a year, there is something “fundamentally” wrong with the game play…
I’m can’t say I’m a fan of this ‘Grand Heist’ or not, as I haven’t tried to do it because it seems like a lot of work, but I do like the lowered taxes or whatnot for the next couple months or so.
Also, I’m surprised this thread has lasted as long as it has, being that it was derailed long ago. Nice work!
You missed the point, the MER doesn’t show player numbers nor the full picture of income (only red loot). I’m not talking about the nullsec bot farms, but real players. And the ones who did lower income PvE before I ask are now doing Abyss, except those in Pochven. Every real player leaving the sandbox for income generation is a loss for EvE.
No, they weren’t 2 years ago. No ship restriction, relatively easy NPCs, so you could run the sites in standard PvP fit ships.
It’s not limited time …
… the 4th time? It started with the mining sites, then the mining sites were reused for 2 events (one with exploit warning bot), and now a completely new site design reuses the population cap! Which one will get it next?
Disagree, you are using the sandbox in the least creative way, because you can and will solve all issues with N+1. Plus meta gaming CCP to get the rules in your favor, ok, that’s creative in a way, as is, finding and using exploits.
I told you guys as long as null was making its isk he wouldnt see or care to see beyond that.
They dont want emergent or creative anything, they want unassailable farms.
So ofc they are happy. Of course the game is better.
The MER shows the income sources which are very different from your assertion that ‘most of the players make their isk from instanced PvE’. Not all (or even most) ratters in nullsec are bots - mainly they are AFK ratters which are easy enough to catch if you’re quick. You can change the goalposts to now be ‘most of the players I ask are now doing abyss’, but that’s a very different statement and entirely uncontestable, as it’s your personal experience. However, the MER shows that this isn’t true across the board.
Your link to ‘who is doing abyssals’ is a year out of date. If that’s the best you’ve got (and I strongly believe it is, as that’s the time when everyone was in for the unique rewards on that event), you are cherry picking year old data to support a claim that isn’t correct.
You complain that event sites from two years ago are different to event sites today… Should all event sites be the same, then? Would people (you) not complain that CCP aren’t changing the event sites?
The event sites run for a limited time. What even are you talking about here?
It has happened for the fourth time in how long? Two years? How many events have taken place in that time? Can it not be that different events have different sites? Why does everything have to be the same in your opinion? Isn’t that pretty stagnant, doesn’t changing things up lead to new emergent gameplay?
Some events from the last year:
Crimson Harvest (no cap)
Yoiul Chilling Spree (no cap)
Guardian’s Gala (no cap)
Federation Grand Prix (no cap)
The Hunt (no cap)
To give INIT their due, they’re bloody inventive with their doctrines, and tend to rely more on creative / disruptive fleet comps over numbers as they don’t really have that many members (compared to PH etc). There’s a fair argument to be made that the size of nullblocs is bad for the game - Geddy Lee1 has an interesting blog post on the topic (iskaverse.com) - but these blocs are still players playing in a sandbox.
If you’re arguing that they shouldn’t be able or allowed to n+1 to their heart’s content, then you are arguing for a more restrictive sandbox, not a more open one. Which is fine, and I agree to an extent, but you can’t complain about lack of freedom in general, and also advocate for restricting how certain people use the sandbox at the same time, without seeming at least a little hypocritical.
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Agreed I changed it because it was meant that way in the original post. When I’m yeeting or jumping WH to null I see 1) empty systems 2) systems with intel bots (AFK pods watching gates), people docked, or docked the moment I go to warp. Few people in total.
To repeat, the MER doesn’t give any info about real player numbers.
CCP stopped posting leaderboards, do you have a more recent source? I have no reason to believe that the composition changed.
The only thing they did was restricting access and emergent gameplay by reducing the solution space. This is exactly the opposite direction of “better”.
Restrictions don’t lead to emergent gameplay, they Supress it.
I’m all for freedom inside the sandbox of course, but those blocs don’t exist because of ingame tools but because of 1) out of game access to EvE and 2) monetization of players and EvE content.
Make ESI access strictly 2F for non public data, and EvE assets usage strictly non-profit, the mass anonymous blocs are hedged.
Except for that we can’t do that right now because the Server cant handle knocking down certain Sandcastles. That’s not creativity, that’s plain old stuffing to prevent content. Voting district drawers know that principle very well and use it to achieve the exact same results. That’s not creativity, it’s toxicity.
Maybe you should do the same. You keep refusing every single argument against your flawed and narrow-minded narrative.
The Stargate Trailblazers event had rules in place specifically to ensure fair play. The rules specifically declared all sorts of typical eve shenanigans as exploits and prohibited behavior. The reimbursement of fair pvp losses are another instance of this philosophy creeping into the wrong places in eve
Maybe you really ought to take your advice of taking a step back more serious than us.
So, you’re seeing assumed bots, not confirmed? I have alts used for eyes that have spent a significant proportion of their lives sitting cloaked or in a shuttle / pod off a gate watching for what’s coming. They are not bots, they are active on a second screen. I have also used those same toons as AFK ratters for when I’m doing market / indi / corp stuff on mains. These go into warp as soon as someone enters system (if I’m paying attention). Again, all human-derived actions.
I’ve been doing this in null for over a year, and there are hundreds (and more) of other players I’ve seen doing the same or similar things in that time. This is across several regions of null. I have also been out hunting, and seen many of the same things - and caught those unwary or inattentive. Caught a few this weekend.
As with all of your comments, your own personal opinion may - may - be led by your assumptions and negative outlook on the game, rather than the objective assessment you believe it to be.
This was your claim my friend - ‘a lot of high profile former roamers and streamers spend their time in instanced and unscannable PvP arenas’. It’s on you to back that up. Certainly not been my experience - either in space, or in flicking through Eve Twitch.
Restricted in one or two event sites, out of a great many. You can ignore stuff like the Grand Prix event all you like, but that was the very definition of people developing weird and interesting solutions to both win the event, and hamper those attempting it.
You’re conflating your personal concerns / observations on one small element of the game into something that affects literally everything, when it’s patently obvious that that’s not the case.
Again, as one strawman falls you erect another. So, the problem isn’t the blocs and their engagement with the sandbox now, but their out of game monetisation using ESI. Can you flesh this one out a little more? Specifically, what ESI and player data is being used to make money, how, and by which blocs in particular?
My feeling here is that you are complaining about streamers making money from their content, and then trying to lump in tools like zKill / Dotlan or auth sites into that somehow. Interesting theory, though do correct me if I’m wrong.
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The Grand Prix was the exception not the norm. So yes, I can ignore it. The point I’m trying to hit home is that there is a trend. Also having only one single thing violating the core principles of EvE being put into the game should alert everybody.
Then you have to live with my argument, which I believe is valid and proven sufficiently. 
If you check my arguments with Brisc this is always my same point. N+1 in anonymous blocs is an issue. Entities with 10000s of players would simply not exist without out-of-game automation and people who can make a living from EvE or finance RL infrastructure to manage such organizations.