EVE is a niche game, by design. Changing it to be way more mainstream will never work because it’ll never be as mainstream as actual mainstream games. And even if it would (somewhat) succeed it would then just be like all the other forgotten MMO’s.
The reason EVE is still around is BECAUSE it’s different, not in spite of it. This means that you will never see significant growth unless you “lower the requirements” (make it more fool proof) which then makes it lose its base appeal. What you CAN do is have steady growth over time (which is healthier anyway). How do you do this? By actually leaning into the fact that you’re marmite and telling people upfront.
You’re going to have a lot of people going “eww marmite” but you’re also going to get people who are tired of peanut butter and want to try something different. Beyond that, if you don’t tell it’s marmite people expect it to be peanut butter so when they do take a bite they will get the surprise of their life and just drop it. If they knew up front that “this is going to be different from what you are used to” then there’s an increased chance that people will give it a try even if they don’t like the initial bite.
The REAL issue is that there are people who do nothing but virtue signalling and identity politics where all miners and high sec players are the same, they’re all victims and should be coddled and protected. Does that sound familiar?
In reality there are lazy/afk/bot miners and there are active miners who might be causal but aren’t clueless nor stupid. The first group is going to have issues with ganking/wars/etc, the second will not have these issues or at the very least they will learn, adapt and do well.
The funny thing is that the more you protect and cuddle the lazy/afk/bot players the more you will get and the more difficult it will be for actual players to compete with them. There is a REASON high sec mining and hauling (for instance) pays so little: people have to compete with alt and bot armies. This means that if one would ACTUALLY care about new(er) players doing high sec play styles it actually BENEFITS them by making it more difficult and risky, because that way they can differentiate themselves from the alts and bots.
CCP should lean in to (and be proud) of the origins of the game, that way they have the least competition and it’s probably the best long term survival strategy. That doesn’t mean it should stay the exact same or that BS issues shouldn’t be fixed or changed.
This is insighftul and merits more attention. The easier it is to mine in Highsec, the more isk will be earned by bots, and the harder it will be for new players to compete in the market. Consequently, anyone who cares about new players should support ganking, as it’s the only way to weed out bots. The more challenging the game is, the more difficulty bots have. If we want to help new players, we should want the game to be challenging enough that new players can outperform bots.
If they had implemented a limit on the number of wardecs you can have, combined with a limitation on being able to leave a corp that started a war (to hop into a new one to circumvent the limitation) this would have solved the vast majority of issues.
If you limit the number of wars a corp can have (the exact number isn’t relevant right now but lets set it at 5), then you will not have enough content to “feed the machine” of massive wardec groups. And at the very least you can’t really do frivolous wardecs going “lol it’s x mil who cares, we’re rich anyway”. This would mean that the big wardec groups would dissolve into smaller entities, ones that (to a degree anyway) can be dealt with.
Now what would instantly happen is that the same wardec people would just hop corps to circumvent this x war limitation and nothing would actually change and it would still be terrible. But if you put restrictions on leaving a corp that STARTED a war that would make it very difficult or even impossible for wardeccers to use that escape route.
Perhaps make it so that if you’re in a corp that started war leaving it would take 7 days. Perhaps leaving would be possible but then you’d have a cooldown timer of 7 days before you can join a new one. Whatever the limitation is ON PEOPLE WHO ARE IN A CORP THAT STARTED A WAR, it will all result in making wardec groups much and much smaller.
See this is the thing, I’m not going “lol make wardecs EZ and all focussed on what I want”. I actually thought of the implications of a change like that and because I actually have experience and understand this part of EVE I went “yeah that would be terrible so lets restrict that”. I’m literally advocating against myself because I understand that it would be crap.
Rather than a hardlimit, another option would be non-linear pricing:
First Wardec: 10 million
Second Wardec: 30 million
Third Wardec: 60 million
Fourth Wardec: 100 million
Fifth Wardec: 160 million
Sixth Wardec: 260 million
Seventh Wardec: 420 million
Eighth Wardec: 680 million
They also need to detatch wardecs from structures.
Station timers are not good content.
Isk rarely is a restricting factor and just as how ships shouldn’t be balanced around their cost I don’t think it would be a good idea that would actually work.
But that is to miss the fact that the place where it matters most is right at the start, in the first week or two of a new player’s experience. Of course we all want Eve to remain hard and niche for experienced players…but I don’t think ‘suck it up…its a niche game’ is going to maintain those totally noob players who might have stayed on had they comprehended the game a little better.
On the other hand, those who’ve been in the game 6 months or more and still want the game made easier probably would be better off leaving.
CCP need to strike the right balance, and focus more on the complete noobs and less on the longer term whiny people who will probably never be happy.
The start of the game is horrendous. The starter tutorial it nothing but 1-2 hours of boring verbal diarrhoea that explains very little nor does it entice people to play. For proof of this just watch some hapless newbie streaming his first day on Twitch, they’re literally bored to death with the endless yapping.
Other than “click approach” and “click this to do pewpew” the tutorial teaches them nothing, it doesn’t explain anything about the lore of the game nor its backstory. It’s really just another “we know better than the original devs and we didn’t even read the source material”, like you see so often these days.
The career tutorials have been improved upon over time, while that has been very helpful it’s not really an actual fix because they never touched the core issues it has, some of them which could easily be fixed.
An actual new player who, without help, tries EVE for the first time will waste his first 1-2 hours on stuff that has nothing to do with EVE and the next 4-5 hours on things that make no sense to them at all and, and this is even more problematic, is boring AF.
You would still see your own stats, of course, and you’d be able to track them with some personal tool - same way you track transactions with jEveAssets, evetycoon, etc. How would you feel about exposing your market PVP activity in a public board?
Many people use the status to identify whether a potential target is a challenge or not. I use it often to see what fits a target may be flying…which only shows up when they’ve had a loss. It is vital in-game information.
Glad you brought it up. Metagaming is also a scourge. Just fly a ship and see what happens instead of preparing the perfect risk-averse counter.
What is ‘killing the game’ is not killboard…but precisely the entire ‘leave me alone…I want to do my own thing without interference or anyone even knowing’ mentality that you convey
This is basically “play the game the way I want it or GTFO”. Well here we are - people are GTFOing because they don’t want to play your way.
Very much. It’s completely understandable to be overwhelmed by EVE even if you knew up front it was going to be “different”. If one adapts that’s great, if one doesn’t accept the base premise then just move on.
Well…people sure as hell wouldn’t see me buying any red herrings. I mean, what’s that got to do with a person’s combat record ?
Says who ? Eve is entirely a game driven around information. That information needs to exist in the first place. If someone cannot cope with the fact that everyone can see they have 79,281 ship losses…that is their problem, not a game problem.
No, it’s play the game the way it has already been played for two decades. You are the one with a ‘play it my way’ attitude.
YOUR experience, while valid, is not everyone’s experience. We’re all different and play games for different reasons and have different issues, likes and dislikes. Some people don’t want to play solo for whatever reason, some people like playing solo for whatever reason. Some people might not do well in crowded/loud/busy situations, others might thrive there.
Whatever it is, we’re all different and what works for me might/will not work for you and vice versa.
That’s still your experience. There will be more people in EVE who like big groups (that’s why big groups exist) but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a part of the player population who can’t or don’t want to be part of a big group, or even as small one.
Telling people that playing solo is bad and will make them miserable is one way of making (certain) people leave the game.
I pointed out way earlier that the thread topic is a logical fallacy known as a ‘loaded question’. The topic includes an implicit assertion that Eve is actually ‘dying’. No evidence has been provided to back that assertion. Really, the thread title ought to have been ‘Is Eve Dying ?’
I’d answer ‘no’…but then I’d also ask ’ compared to what ?’ . When was this glorious, non rose-tinted, halcyon days that we’re comparing with. Was Eve really glorious and halcyon back then ? And all manner of questions of that ilk.
i will admit to implying or saying that however, cause its true…EvE is designed for Tribal/Society/Group gameplay…
If a Solo player does not quit, they do eventually try to lobby for stuff to be done to the game to benefit solo only game play…which is detrimental to the core of the game itself.
I know you have seen those attempts as well as I have, prove me wrong.
Part of them will, part of them won’t because they perhaps even like the idea of being a solo in this challenging environment. The problem is not people who want or have to play solo, the problem is people who have main character syndrome.