@QuakeGod I guess you’re too good to reply to me.
I understand, you’re a EVE god and I’m only a puny noob. Fair enough.
I’m not trying to ignore anyone. There have been a lot of posts in this thread. Let me scroll up and find it…
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Gosh, it’s sure a good thing that EVE players don’t do any of that stuff, right?
The point would be that now there would be more competition for those things, and maybe some conflict between various groups vying for top spots.
Any cause of conflict and competition is good for EVE, IMO.
You could also motivate specific behaviors with either leaderboards, or your own suggestion of awards and achievements. Make a public award/board for “Value of Criminal Assets Destroyed” and in no time, you’ll have entire groups of people out hunting gankers and looters.
And more people out in space, destroying assets. “It’s a win/win for everyone…”
The benefit is all in the setup. Having a board for “Most successful Mining Corp” not only gives recognition for achievement, but also puts a target on them at the same time as acting like a recruiting ad. And encourages other corps to compete more.
And before you go back on the “not everyone wants their stats published”, you realize when you made that ‘point’ that in the same paragraph you pointed out that zKill allows opt-out, right?
Just because we’re talking CCP here doesn’t mean they absolutely have to implement it as badly as possible. There’s always a better way to do things, if you care to think about it a bit.
All that changed is who is paying the bills. CCP Devs are still running EVE. Like I said, there are only maybe 5 MMO’s, probably fewer, that have lasted as long as EVE has.
Others MMO’s that may seem to be popular were a failure from the start. Star Trek Online went F2P in less than a year. Elder Scrolls Online went F2P in less than a year, etc…
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I see where you’re coming from with some of that. My point of view is from what I have seen in various FPS type games that have KD/R leaderboards and those absolutely have botters and whatnot in order to stay on top. Maybe CCP could do something about that aspect of it for EVE…
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Now you’re just being either obtuse or actually ignorant.
Star Trek Online made so much money off their F2P they stopped bothering to offer subscriptions. They only have free, and lifetime subs now, and they’re doing better for it.
Pointing out that other game devs make smarter decisions than CCP, faster, and make money doing so, isn’t the same as “failing”.
With half the staff and a third of the income of CCP, Cryptic manages to run and update 3 different games and keep at least 2 of them moving steadily forward. CCP is a fat slow turtle in comparison, depending on being almost alone in it’s niche and incessant price-gouging to maintain income. And even then, they run into financial disaster every 5 years or so.
As for “only 5 MMOs have lasted”, here’s an easy 9, found in 10 seconds with Google. I could probably add another dozen to the list depending what we’re going to class as MMO. Maple Story, anyone?
Hanging around forever isn’t the one true mark of success. It’s more a sign of a company that can’t come up with another or better product and is grimly hanging on…
Yes, that’s the problem with a lot of ideas (and implementations). People generally jump to the conclusion that Concept X is always going to be implemented as Mechanic Y. Designers rarely show true creative insight in taking a concept and tuning it to exactly what their game and their playerbase needs in order to increase player motivation.
A leaderboard is just a public recognition tool to create competition over specific in-game behaviors. As are awards, titles, game unlocks etc. Just because it’s done badly in a completely different game with a completely different set of player motivations, doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to be bad everywhere.
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It’s fine, it’s on me. I should not write when I don’t feel well.
Maybe I’m a bit biased towards EVE, but other MMO’s have left a bad taste in my mouth, so to speak. ESO, for example. I loved that game when it first came out. They did a live dev show on Twitch every week, took questions from players, and interacted with everyone. They were asked if ESO was going F2P and they said that ESO would always be subscription-based. Guess what? Less than a year later it went F2P.
My favorite MMO of all time is Star Wars Galaxies, which can still be played via SWGEmu. But, Sony Online Entertainment screwed that up and sold the license to Disney, and then we got that god-awful mess that is SWTOR…
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True, but PA doesn’t pay the bills out of the kindness of their heart. And to me when a company relies on another company to pay the bills I don’t see it as “done something right”. For all intent and purposes, and maybe I’m wrong in saying this but, CCP kind of went bankrupt even if they didn’t file for it and PA had to come in to keep it afloat. I don’t see that as success.
Yeah, that’s more of a “if you can’t beat 'em join 'em” type deal. EVE is leaning more and more towards convenience these days, and there’s nothing that you or I can do to stop it, so might as well take advantage of it. Someone like me would still have to do the actual legwork to earn that LP. Whether a player got their LP legit or bought it from another player makes no difference to me, just as a player who injects into a Marauder on day one doesn’t bother me as they are more than likely going to lose it anyway…
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This one’s a bit sticky. Yes, travel in EVE takes too long and is too boring and is a barrier to things such as, friends getting together from various places to go on a roam. So it could certainly use some improvements, but we don’t want to make it too fast and easy.
Whenever designing a game mechanic, don’t look at “what does this mechanic do and how can we change it?”. Look at “what do we want to achieve with any changes?”.
So in EVE, we know (to some extent), that having a social group you feel connected to promotes more or longer gameplay. So we want to support social groups, friends getting together, and probably provide more reasons to join a decent corp.
We want people with assets in space that can trigger conflict. We want resource consumption and various sinks (ISK, production etc.). We want to put sandbox tools in players hands so they have more agency in how they interact with EVE.
And we need to keep changes simple, because at CCP, even when new code design is very simple, the simplest things are difficult.
So for travel… let’s take POCO’s and mutate the code into player-maintained jump gates.
Something like 1 player stargate per moon, powered by a facility on the moon surface (using PI code or something). The power facility needs to be fueled, the jump gate needs to be maintained with, who knows, quark paste or something players make. Or something from these cool new blue stars we’re harvesting.
A player can jump from a corp’s jump gate to any other gate maintained by that corp. Corps can set the jump fee for doing so, depending on standings. Some NPC corp takes a cut for maintaining the jump network integrity, in order to sink ISK. Something along those lines.
So you have more convenience, but not effortless. You give players more choice in what they do, where, and with who. You have corps motivated to engage in new projects. You have players motivated to join or gain standings with corps to access their network. You have resource sinks and ISK sinks, and more players in space doing predictable things. You have corps potentially in conflict over limited gate sites, especially in key systems.
Now, after you design a feature according to “what do we want to achieve in the game?”, your next question is: “If we do this, what is the worst possible set of exploits, abuses, side-effects and catastrophes that players (or our code) could trigger, as a result?”.
I’ll leave that one as an exercise for the budding game designer/exploit abuser.
(Edit: filaments, for example, achieve almost none of these benefits, except for solo travel convenience, and greatly expand the potential abuses. They’re an example of “how can we change this mechanic?” type design, rather than “what do we want to achieve for the game?” design.)
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That gate would count as a structure and make their corp available to be war decced, at which point a merc corp would just camp their gates, ensuring that they couldn’t even use their own gates for travel lest they be instantly set upon on the other side. That is the first thing that would happen…
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How about this one: An instanced PVP arena, much like the Proving Grounds (I know, I know, I hate instanced content as much as the next person, but hear me out).
It would take place in an instanced deadspace pocket, not Abyssal space. There would be 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 modes, and ships would be provided for you upon entry. The ships and fits would be determined by CCP, pre-fitted, and your implants and skills would be over-ridden during the match. There could be frigate vs frigate, destroyer vs destroyer, cruiser vs cruiser, etc. Or even a 2 on 1 match where one player is in a battleship and the other two players are in frigates.
Wouldn’t matter if you don’t have the skills to fly said ship, as the skills, ship, and fit would be temporarily provided to you for the duration of the match. There would be no loss of ship, no loss of pod, and no score keeping or stats. Just hop in the match and start blasting.
This would be a good way for risk averse players and those who are just plain scared sh*tless of PVP to be able to dip their toes in, risk-free, learn how to PVP, but with neither reward nor loss other than gaining some knowledge of PVP tactics.
Who knows, some players might end up liking it and decide to join a PVP corp, faction warfare, or just become more proficient at combat in general…
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Streamline the npe and add something like this to the end. Seems that would solve a lot of problems with new players.
Too hard for CCP to pull off I think. Maybe on the test server?
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TBH there should be a segment of the tutorial, or career agents, or AIR, or even just a “Get a free cruiser for completing this training session” that does essentially what you say. I think a lot of new players, for whatever reason, simply never even try PvP because it’s a complete unknown to them.
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Hell, I’d take part in it. I do recognize the need for PVP in EVE, absolutely nothing wrong with it, it’s just not my cup of tea, nor many other players.
Could have different scenarios like a drone boat battleship vs two blaster frigates, kite vs brawl, etc…
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Oh, and the free ship/PvP-training instanced pocket should totally have big shiny video leaderboards. 
I know you’re kinda poking fun at me there, but that may not be a half bad idea. Maybe let other players in the “stands” so to speak as fans or observers to watch the matches?
I want to watch the matches from the big f’in screen in the Pulse bar in Jita, while throwing ISK to make Aiko dance, and getting blitzed on Quafe highballs.
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Very true.
And I was thinking calling it that in game if it were to be an instanced arena. Training grounds sounds better than an arena.
I didn’t see him say that?