EVE is EVE, and its biggest problem is itself. Trying to illustrate an “issue of perspective” based on Diablo or LotRO or EQII or WoW or (insert your favorite MMO type game) isnʻt the right perspective to use to begin with; each game is its own worst nightmare.
If you donʻt want to play yet another “hack & slash”, might I suggest Solitaire or Sudoku.
The problem with Eve Online is that it inspires, a lot, but never quite lives up to that inspiration.
Like I said in my original post, PVE (combat sites, anomalies, missions, incursions, abyssal…) is like hack & slash (arpg). You ideally want chances to get good loot, co-op and doing so in a reasonable amount of time. Again, i’m not even suggesting that PVE should be like Diablo 3, i’m merely using a successful ARPG that I know well to compare it with this failing aspect of Eve.
I wish the discussion wasn’t about D3 vs Eve, but since you replied in that manner, i’ll indulge.
In Eve, unless you took the time to find and scan down a DED site, you need to grind SPECIFIC combat sites for who knows how long before getting a rare spawn or expedition or escalation. Then you need the time to run that escalation or expedition. You have 24hour to run an escalation, for most people, no chance to complete it on weekdays. If you get a rare spawn in low difficulty sites, you’ll probably get nothing valuable, maybe a tag + 1000 pirate ammo. I once got a rare implant worth 100m from a rare spawn in an angel den in high sec but it’s so rare that there’s no way it’s worth my time to repeat the experience, running lvl 3 will get you more isk and lp. Even if you find good stuff from a rare spawn, chances are pretty high that you’ll sell it.
In D3, you build your char with the loot you find and that’s what makes it interesting. Maybe you need to grind for hours before getting useful items, but at least you get constant hope and rewards. Salvaging the loot gives you mats so that you can use to forge that item you’re looking for. In D3 you have a dozen or so chars, in Eve you have an infinite amount of ships you could equip with rare mods you find, no chance of accomplishing that with the rarity of spawns and quality of the loot.
I don’t see a downside to get rare mods all over the place and see their value decrease at 10x the worth of T2. More people will use them and they’ve put effort into getting them. As opposed as buying them.
TIDI and 1000s of pilot is all about PVP. I’m talking about PVE here. If you ran with WTM, you know there’s only 3 sites worth running, unless you have 40 very good pilots, it’s still slow grind and after running 3 TPPH in a row you’ll probably die of boredom. It’s still too slow, too predictable and no diversity. I die quite often in Diablo 3 greater rifts, in that regard D3 is much tougher, it’s just that dying in D3 softcore doesn’t have penalties worth mentioning.
Like I said previously, in D3, if you play with others, you’re rewarded with bonus xp and magic find. In Eve, co-op means splitting the rewards, so people are most likely to do stuff alone. If your goal is to make a lot of isk for plex or finance pvp activities then you’ll most likely end up as a carrier pilot running sanctum and havens, alone.
I have nothing against time investment, but reserve that aspect of the game for traders, those who want to salvage wrecks, miners, PI, industry & research. What you’re talking about I’ve already discussed in point #1. If you have a job and you get an escalation on Monday night, good luck fitting that in your busy life. If you get good loot, you’ll probably sell it and that’s probably because you ran the highest lvl DED sites. Also let’s not forget all the time, effort and danger you had to dodge just to get a few rare mods. If everyone would get his own loot from a kill like in D3, I bet more people would run those sites in groups and much faster…
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say, but in my view abyssal sites and greater rifts are very similar. In greater rifts you want the best gear on your char to push as high as you can. In Abyssal sites, you NEED to have as much bling as possible on your ship to get to the highest lvl.
I don’t get why you think D3 has 1 play style. I could say the same for Eve, in PVE there’s 1 play style : a ship with guns (or missiles) and drones that floats (literally) through sites.
In Diablo 3 you get the edge by playing in co-op, that’s how you can get to higher rifts, more xp, more magic find and the reward system is build around co-op. In Eve, how many people with set implants and officer mods actually found those items and equipped them ? The problem is that you have a minority doing the most dangerous and time consuming tasks to get to the valuable loot and they sell it.
The beauty in D3, is that everyone found their gear or forged it. They played to get it, they didn’t buy it.
Nice sales pitch but the majority of ARPG are more engaging than Eve’s PVE.
In Diablo 3 you keep what you earned during the seasons, it’s all transferred to non-season…
Flooding wrecks with rare mods will probably create inflation, because everyone across the galaxy will be able to loot them at all levels. It’s only a problem because T2 mass production of mods is a semi active activity controlled by a few. If 50% of all equipped mods are found instead of manufactured, then I’d say its a move in the right direction because people were engaged in an activity to get the stuff. Instead of starting a manufacturing job, logging off and dumping a ton of stuff on the market for all to buy.
With abyssal sites the ability was given to anybody to forge rare mods. It’s a step in the right direction, but way too conservative and obtaining the mats lacks diversity.
Your thesis was “this is a hack and slash game”, and you proceeded to point by point explain why this is not a hack and slash game. Your conclusion needs to be that your thesis was wrong. This is not a hack and slash game. Thank you for playing.
Right, you got me, you just nailed me to the wall, everything I said is fraudulent and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
By the way, dear accuser, I said “To me Eve Online PVE is like another hack & slash game.”
Eve online, as a whole, is not a hack and slash game. I know that.
You gotta work on your reading comprehension and rhetorical skills. I’m starting to realize why I always scored in the top 1% on standardized tests.
Saying “you kill things, and sometimes loot drops” is not really a basis for a comparison between D3 and EVE.
Games have a multitude of features. They feed different human motivations and desires. They have different forms of gratification, whether it be by ‘loot’, by visceral damage dealing (feeling of personal power), or the satisfaction of planning something complicated and carrying it off.
D3 gratifies the impulse towards personal power through visible violence, stimulates the reflexes through the combat system, and rewards the desire for resource accumulation through loot drops. It does these things fairly well, is successful and made a lot of money because of it.
EVEs’ problem is that the game is a mess of what desires it’s supposed to cater to, what it’s designed to cater to, and what it actually delivers. None of those desires match up, and so the game has always been in a tug-of-war between the developers, the players, and the investors - each trying to get the game to do different things for different reasons.
The primary issue here is CCP: they don’t understand game design, they haven’t defined what EVE should focus on and deliver; and when they do try to create something new in EVE, they usually bung it up through bad design and bad programming.
EVE is marketed as a “dark and dangerous” setting, the rules are loose, the risk high. The attraction is the ability to carve a name for yourself in a semi-lawless setting with your wits and skill and ruthlessness.
However, what is actually designed is a fairly boring grindfest, where engaging in most of the ‘interesting’ content costs a ton of ISK, which you have to find some way to get your hands on. Endlessly spamming scams in Jita, endlessly mining, endlessly ratting, endlessly .01 isking trades in hubs… these and the complexity of the game play are what earns EVE the name “Spreadsheets in space”. Spreadsheets. Yeah. That’s some dark and edgy, ruthless stuff right there, that is.
What it actually delivers is merely an opportunity to compete with other players in a setting that ‘feels’ dangerous and impactful. It isn’t (mostly), but it can feel that way. People get addicted to competing, especially if they can convince themselves they’re “on the edge of the law” while doing it. Or contributing to a larger vision. So EVE does that: it makes you feel like you’re competing in a dangerous setting where risk is real and things matter more than in a “you died, you respawn, you run back out, you die again, no problemo!” environment.
This desire to compete, to be dangerous, to stay competitive with other people, is pretty much (IMO) the primary driver for the success of EVE. It’s been enough to make some whales shell out big bucks, and enough to keep some people paying monthly subs for years and years.
Unfortunately, it’s mostly an illusion. That is the actual “perception problem” that EVE faces: it promises one thing, is designed for another, and delivers a third.
Maybe when CCP learns to align those three aspects a little better, the game will start to grow again.
To be fair, ive killed some players and got some great loot
When I saw the title to this thread, I sure as hell wasn’t expecting a Diablo 3 comparison. I can’t say I agree with the OP, but I can agree with the title of this thread. EvE needs to present itself as a much harsher place to its players so fewer people come here thinking it’s just internet spaceships and they don’t have to worry. I had one idea for introducing new players to this harshness that I think holds a lot of promise: have the tutorial gank the new player on two separate occasions.
First would be a simple scripted gatecamp when the new player is learning about hauling. They get locked, pointed, and killed by a group of CCP-controlled bots, at which point Aura chimes in to let the player know that while high-security space is safer than low or null, players can still be a threat if they’re willing to accept the consequences of their actions. That she’s telling you this as CONCORD inflicts itself upon the gate-camping bots who mock you in local as their pods warp off only serves to reinforce her point.
The second instance would be more involved, and much harder to implement without breaking the game. The mission would involve a player being given access to some very expensive faction/deadspace mods that you’re allowed to fit to your ship for the mission (obviously, measures would have to be taken to keep this from being exploited and someone selling these modules instead of using them). I’m talking about stuff worth literally hundreds of millions of ISK, here. Experiencing the power these modules give the player as they rip apart the mission rats with near-impunity would be amplified by how they were told they would be allowed to keep the modules if they survived the mission.
Naturally, the moment they finish off the last mission rat, a horde of insta-locking Catalysts and Coercers warps in on top of them and obliterates their ship before ignominiously slagging their pod. If that doesn’t teach them never to fly anything they can’t afford to lose, I doubt anything will.
My thought on this is you should get a mission. The mission requires you to mine. The agent says, “Oh, by the way, some fanatic environmentalists require you to purchase a MINING PERMIT for 10 million isk. If you want to purchase the permit, just send me the isk. I don’t care, I just need those minerals!”
If the player does not purchase the permit, they go to mine and they are ganked.
If they do purchase the permit, they discover some ILLEGAL miner has already harvested all the precious ore! When the player returns to the agent, he says “Well, I’ve got another idea…” He then gives you a catalyst, and asks you to go gank the miner and retrieve the ore!
I also think there should be a new player mission, which pairs two new players against one another. They each have a Venture, but there is only one asteroid…
CODE. tactics were the inspiration for what I wanted the new player to experience, but none of you are official representatives of CCP, nor do you determine what the actual rules of hisec are, in-universe or out. The whole “mining permit” thing is just a fig leaf that CODE. uses for their roleplaying; until CCP/the empires say otherwise, there is no such thing as an illegal miner. As such, I’m afraid I can’t support your suggestion.
I don’t need your support friend. As an agent of James 315, I own high sec by proxy. You, it turns out, are the one who needs my support.
You’re roleplaying a devoted follower of James315’s cult of personality. Until CCP says otherwise, you have no more power than any other member of a well-funded alliance. I’d also appreciate it if you kept the roleplaying to the appropriate forums, because right now you’re coming across as a troll.
Oh no, I am devoted. This isn’t roleplaying.
You are roleplaying as a grumpy miner, and I would ask that you obtain a forum permit before you continue posting here. Oh wait, I guess you aren’t roleplaying either. So I guess this is me, in real life, telling you to send me isk, in real life. That’s the law!
A mining permit is not in the spirit of the game. It seems almost hypocritical to me.
The law is the law.
Your opinion of it is irrelevant, as you are not a shareholder in the corporation.
He is relentlessly negative and only ever posts misery.
You are right. I agree with you.
I’m not a shareholder, nor am I a member of CODE. And as such, those laws do not apply to me.
As proxy, James represents you, and you have voted for the laws which govern you.