Any focus on new players is going to be ineffective. If you target them, all you generate is garbage like the NPE - its not fun, it’s not educational, and it doesn’t entertain. The focus should be on experienced players, expanding the horizon of “end game” content. New players need to toughen up and embrace the challenge - if you help them, then you eliminate the challenge, and you eliminate the thrill of success.
The thrill, of overcoming difficulty, is what CCP has forgotten.
What’s sad is it does some stuff better than eve, for example, cargo hauling more customization and sometimes it even combat and is sort of at a standstill right now if it gets more players it will hopefully* get more updates but if it stays at this rate the game will die
Agreed, for the most part. I think CCP has focused for way too long on various iterations of the NPE (none of which really work well although they’re getting somewhat better after 10 tries).
I don’t think EVE can make it as a fast turnover, churn through new players, get $100 out of them before they bail and then grab the next batch type game. EVE’s financials appear to have always relied on the long-term players with multiple accounts and alts.
What @Wadiest_Yong was saying about null space, too easy for renter empires, no room for up-and-coming entities is typical of CCP’s design problems. CCP hasn’t designed for conflict, they’ve designed EVE to be “already established players control the game, new guys can join the status quo or get smashed”.
A lot of folks attribute their favorite activity to creating “the golden age” of EVE (jetcanning made EVE great! No, wardecs did! No, it was friendly fire corps and awoxing!) but it’s more likely that what made EVE better back in the day was a galaxy in some flux and being contested, where every encounter hadn’t been solved and youtube’d and there weren’t decades-old veterans clogging up every niche in the game.
FW re-work was sort of a start but doesn’t really go very far in giving long-term players more reasons to engage with EVE.
There’s a lot of EVE vets out there who’ve “won” EVE. The easiest customers to get are the ones you already have/had.
The NPE is complete garbage, and CCP needs to hear that. The current version actually suggests that players are safer in an asteroid belt, because nobody can find them there? It’s clearly designed by people who don’t even play the game.
The most important component of Eve is the people playing it. No amount of fancy graphics or bells and whistles is going to create a golden age without inspiration from the player base. I would argue that the game needs more notorious figures. It needs people to log in to fight for or against actual people, because those people are good, bad, inspirational, or whatever. Nothing motivates people better.
It kinda matters, yeah. The makers are locked into design choices made by the Roblox team and the development will be less serious and less likely to last. I also don’t think any competent developer would choose a platform like Roblox so it likely will be an unbalanced buggy mess. Almost everything on Roblox is garbage.
Not necessarily an Eve Classic, but something where players can go and start from the bottom, using today’s version, where there aren’t groups who still benefit today from well documented and recorded corruption/collusion between devs and player groups. cough Imperium cough.
Maybe a brand new galaxy just as big?
Maybe smaller regions that connect to other regions of players after certain criteria are met? Maybe 200-300 systems each region with a few dozen WH?
Maybe some sort of new competitive style where there are 2 or 3 or 4 small constellations that bottleneck in a nullsec zone and the goal is to conquer the space… but with shorter build times and smaller material requirements and citadels have much lower HP with many servers available where players can join a situation they find challenging or entertaining.
Something needs to be done outside of the current New Eden. It’s just SSDD, more of the same. Same dozen people control literally the entire map. And I mean individual people deciding everything for everyone.
It’s too big, it’s too monolithic. Manufacturing ANYTHING has crossed the line of no return in complexity. If it’s going to continue as is, there needs to be other options for players. The only thing new players do today and have ben doing for the last 5 years is feeding the same half dozen big blocs that have owned everything with their ill-gotten gains for 15 years.
You’re putting the cart before the horse, really. “Better players doing more interesting things will revitalize EVE” is circular reasoning.
EVE already had the better players, doing more interesting things. You can check all their videos and posts from a decade before you joined. They mostly then got bored and left because in the long run, except for a quite small niche of players, EVE just doesn’t have enough interesting options.
Once you’ve done the content you’re interested in a couple thousand times you tend to lose interest. Then you do some other content a couple thousand times. Then you do another. That takes you about 3-4 years maybe and then you’ve pretty much exhausted everything EVE offers to the small niche interested in those things.
CCP simply hasn’t kept up with new options for the long-term players over the past decade.
There is content in FW currently. I don’t know how much will it last (yes, mostly is just farming at times - I am aware and destruction accounts to mostly frigates, destroyers and cruisers), but if they could somehow extrapolate this to nullsec and players would lose capitals at the rate they lose cruisers in FW, I’d say we are at the start of a new golden age. But the equation, in order for this to happen, is a very complicated one… high PLEX and subscription price, high capital manufacturing cost, player retention, etc.
Also - and I might be biased here- it feels like the game no longer provides that immersion for a new player as to the Eve I know, feels like everything is so simple and dull right now. I remember it to be challenging, if I had started this game now in 2023 , I’d just quit in a week. And it feels like due to the changes CCP is doing , the nullsec blocks are no longer at liberty or very limited to create content the way they would like to, because no matter how CCP sets the conditions, ultimately is for the players to create the content, or at least that should be. Better servers would also help, although historically we’ve always pushed them to the very edge each time.
We lack 2 major ingredients… accesible subscription and ships costs, the rest is up to the players imagination.
So you’re saying that mashing d-scan and scouting every gate isn’t quality entertainment in its own right?
They won’t. CCP made resources harder to obtain and there’s a whole bunch of extra ISK sinks, so the amount of effort involved in replacing capitals has gone up, so they aren’t going to throw them away on a whim.
For some weird reason, CCP thought that resource scarcity would create activity even though most players and a bunch of CSM members were telling them the opposite would happen.
We got Pochven. But guess what ? It’s still the same old usual suspects from the game that got their hands on it… I have to agree with you , it is indeed way too monolithic right now.