I respect you a lot Ashen , but I have to make some amendments here.
Not sure what you refer to as the first Golden Age. I presume 2004 - 2006. I think for that to happen we would need Eve 2.0 on a new server.
I can understand being nostalgic about this. I miss them too at times, but we have to be objective here.
The truth is you don’t want them as they were in their 1st iteration (Apocrypha), it’s just simply overall bad for the game. Granted, the last time they were “balanced” ( 5th time iirc ? ) , they didn’t approaced them properly and they went over hand with it.
I can say the same thing about other ships , like the 1st iterations of the Cynabal and Machariel , but they would simply be OP , just like the Drakes were in their era.
I wouldn’t quite call it stupid. I think “stupid” was the way it was around 2015 - 2016, when you just had everything served on the plate anywhere in nullsec to manufacture supers .
Like I said in this thread earlier, the 1st things that are missing currently for Eve to thrive again , are affordable PLEX prices and affordable PvP, because let’s be honest, these days PvP is a lot more expensive than it used to be, let’s not forget how it is to be a relatively new player to the game that wants to get into PvP. As for PLEX price, I don’t even want to talk or think about it.
I remember when I started. The equivalent of 500 PLEX was just 200 mil per month , easily done in a Drake doing missions and you had enough left over ISK to go on roams with your friends in lowsec Amamake. While it’s true that you can just get a subscription and use all of the ISK for fun, the vast majority of players can’t afford that subscription, specially now with 20$ per month ,that if you won’t get a special offer.
The snipers and floating sharks come later. I figure a 1000 foot long arête, just inches wide, with a 2,500 foot drop on either side, is the easiest possible very first intro to Eve. ( and should eliminate the carebears ).
I sometimes spin up a Battlefield or Squad server and turn off the damage. Then people can just walk around and simulate life in a town. It’s really fun! It fills up very quickly, so there’s obviously a lot of demand for it. As gaming evolves, this is the kind of gaming experience that modern gamers crave more and more.
I like Pub G cuz I can land in the village and get a frying pan and start making breakfast for the family. It’s a lot of fun and I love it, but then the griefers always arrive, they use roleplaying as Soviet paratroopers to HARASS me and trigger IRL EMOTIONAL DISTRESS, but I always have the last laugh because I go to the forums and let everyone know what I think of no life CYBERBULLIES.
I appreciate what you say here and i think we have common ground on some of this.
For me generally i think EVE was a far superior game when it was in its hey-day and affordability is part of that. I think that CCP has made the game needlessly overly complex (it was complex enough!), made bad bad bad changes and now they have increased the prices. Unnecessary complexity + Toxic/unpopular changes + price increases = low player numbers. Surprised CCP?
I honestly dont think things were really that out of balance during this golden age when EVE was VASTLY more popular and populated than it is now. Sure some ships were out of balance (there are always some ships out of balance i think) but overall it was pretty good. Better yet things were COOL, there were ships that were awesome to fly and worth the wait. There’s a lot less of that now and there are whole lines of ships that were great once that are now, well, just bullsh#t.
I think resource distribution and scarcity were TOXIC as F, the industry ‘rebalance’ was one of the worst thought out and arrogantly implemented ‘improvements’ CCP have ever made, these coupled with WCS changes, structure rebalancing, diamond rats/triglavian and sleepers that give players 0 chance have been definitive. These changes have been crushing for people who love EVE and many including me have logged out and never logged in again.
CCP have lost their vision and sold their ground breaking game for cheap short term profit. The numbers dont lie; the player base is burnt, the server breaks what? 25k players? some days and not others? Now consider how fervent and loyal EVE’s players were… how bad do CCP need to screw up the game for them to leave in the numbers they have.
Now that the rubicon of other franchises has been crossed (re. Doctor Who tie-in), it’s time to go for the mother of all tie-ins …
I can see it now … a quantum effect in Genesis, some after-effect of the closing of the Eve gate, tears a small but stable hole in the fabric of space time … intrepid capsuleers venture forth and find themselves … in … a galaxy far far away ™.
I don’t even need to write the rest … if you’ve got this far you’re now either puking or salivating. Either way, the whole gaming world would lose their shii over such a tie-in and player numbers would multiply faster than a record Kessel run.
I totally agree with the fact that there was no need to add more complexity to the industry and also increase the skill ceiling on it. It was already very complex and hard enough to master for someone that wanted to get into t2 or capital production. When these changes hit the server I was getting head aches for a month until I adapted .
The NPC part… To be honest with you, I did not liked at all the trigalvian expansion. Specially the fillaments that take you to instanced PvE , in a space that’s just totally ruptured from Eve in general, just feels like a totally different game. Yes we have got some new ships out of it and the ability to create abyssal mods, but most of them have very niche applications, with some exceptions, like Kikimoras. I ask myself if it was also needed to have Pochven and the jump fillaments associated with it. Was it not enough that we already had Thera and jump clones and now new skills that allows you to have more jump clones ?! Weren’t any other aspects of the game that could have benefited more the game in the long run for that time , energy and $ invested in it ?!
As to ship balance and how it was in the past, you might have a point here when you say that there weren’t that out of balance. To give you an example , the old Machariel had the signature radius and speed of a cruiser (OP in some specific situations), and yet , it did not had enough DPS to break a well fitted passive Drake, and since I’ve mentined Drakes, while it was true that a fleet of them had the most range and DPS for that platform size at that time, it was rendered useless against a firewall battleship fleet.
What Eve no longer has today - at least it’s how it feels to me - is the uniqueness of racial ships, after so many changes to them, they all seem homogenous . Like for example, minmatar was about speed and DPS, but in particular speed, and yet today there are some particular gallente and amarr platforms that are faster than minmatar ones.
Fundamentally, there is a group of people who want to farm noobs. To protect that way of existing (and somewhat justify what is otherwise clearly a factor in new player retention), they pretend that this is just a necessary form of tough love, that being consistently beaten in bewildering combat that they have literally no chance of winning, is the best way to keep them.
It isnt.
If you were suggesting that new players would benefit from fighting increasingly harder enemies, then yeah, absolutely. Giving new players a taste of combat, losing a bunch of ships, winning some fights, having some near misses etc, yep, that’s the way forward. A sense of loss, sure, conversely, that sense of progress and satisfaction that comes from playing a game and doing something well for the first time.
But what the people who farm noobs want is to continue the free lunch. They think that it’s a done deal that 90%+ of new users quit regardless of ganking or anything the veteran playerbase do, therefore they keep taking advantage of the now dwindling stream of potential victims.
I do have a bit more insight than most into this - I joined with around 20 people from a forum of people who liked the look of EVE. I was the only one that lasted longer than 3 months. The others cited the inability to compete in combat as the decisive factor, and the idea of spending months trying to build up skills without being able to know if they actually wanted to play the game at all.
For most of them, their only experience of combat was being ganked while unaware of how to fight back or why they were being targeted by someone in hi-sec. Either that, or tricked into combat with a relatively difficult to understand safety system, and then having to mess around trying to figure out how to recover the ships they’d built. At some stage, they all walked away, mainly because they realised there would be no revenge for them.
That’s why I propose two things:
1 - As before, make ganking fun for everyone, not just the gankers. Gankers should fear the police, the police should be players, and the rewards for both gankers and police should promote combat and be lucrative the more skill is used.
Slow down combat, let people know what is happening, let them feel the fear, have a means to try and escape, sometimes succeed, and sometimes be rescued by passing players who recognise an opportunity for ISK.
2 - Give new players a sense of how combat in the game works against other players, without making them suffer at least weeks, but more likely months of grinding skills to get better ships, only to be told they didn’t need the skills to engage in combat, and the ships are useless by bitter veterans who have countless years of knowledge and understanding of the nuances.
The idea that new players need only a sense of loss, rather than a sense of incremental building of PVP, is what is strangling EVE to a notable level. It’s easy to preach that their Incursus or hauler isn’t valuable when you can buy many of them, but when you’ve researched the best T1 Incursus fit, and then you take it out into lowsec and realise that it’s got literally almost no chance against 80% of enemies, that’s when they walk away.
On the off chance you’ve switched forum alts because your last toxic one got banned, you might want to consider changing your posting pattern a bit there, Gix.
If you’re using a new alt for other reasons, then carry on.
