I miss something odd…
I miss being a noob.
I am not an old player by most people’s standards here, but being totally new was stunning. I miss my misconceptions, ideas like exploration being something other than just running data and relic sites, that I could go somewhere no one else had been (or had left a ton of crap).
I remember thinking that if I kept going in some direction new parts of the map would open up, and when I found that to not be the case I thought maybe wormholes, I found them to be over populated as well, and again, full of abandoned junk.
The longer I play the more New Eden shrinks, I can identify where I am by who is in local, I want the sense that I’m in deep space back, that I am actually exploring, and that I might find stuff someone else hasn’t already found (and worse, made a wiki entry for).
At some point jumping turned from feeling like I was going somewhere to a tedious thing that I have to do to accomplish something that has already been done, the further I need to go the less interested I become.
I remember finding a plasma planet for the first time and thinking that it was the most amazing thing ever, I took screenshots of it and spent the time needed to fly all the way around it to get better angles, the next day I found another just like it in another system. At some point I realized that all systems contained different quantities of the same stuff and Eve shrank.
I remember thinking that when I switched from my civilian afterburner to my first microwarp drive that I could go off into deep space, or outrun anyone, I tried to slow boat to the Eve Gate in my first three days thinking that I was very clever for having searched for “Eve” in the map.
I miss thinking that by playing I would learn the lore of Eve, only to find that the lore is mostly on the web.
I’ve had some ideas about this problem, but now I miss the idea that they would be implemented if they were good ideas, I know they won’t, and I know that if they were someone would freak out and throw a fit, then it would be nerfed, and some gigantic corporation would cause it to become dull and lackluster by saturating it overnight.
One of the CSM people said early on in this thread “I miss hope” and I find that deeply disturbing. The idea that hope it self is dead, and worse, dead to someone elected to influence CCP on behalf of the people playing is an appalling state of affairs.
I still have hope, but with things like that it’s dwindling, I’ve seen how many good things were removed, how many good ideas were abandoned instead of being carried out to their logical extremes, and I’ve seen violent nerfs wipe out months and months of skill training, entire corporations, and have seen people I loved playing with quit because of these.
I miss things I’ve never seen, like Captains Quarters and Dust.
If I were CCP I would bring these back, I would expand them, I would make it so that you could get out of your ship, leave your quarters, and get stabbed in the back in some dingy part of the station you had docked in. I would make it possible to invade planets and take them over, or get killed by people on the ground for flying to close.
I would add gravity so that planets and moons move creating the need for proper navigation and I would make stations orbit these things. I would make all celestial objects procedural so they were unique, each with its own resources in different proportions.
I miss the idea that any of that is likely, let alone possible.
When I see someone from the CSM say “I miss hope” I wonder if I will start to feel like that as well. If the CSM has lost hope we have a problem, not a small problem, a very very big one, we, for better or worse, elected these people to give us hope, and the means to voice it.
I refuse to become a “bitter vet” but I’m starting to get my first ideas of how they come to be. Still, CSM aside, there is hope, or at least I want to think so.