What is HAPPENING TO EVE?

[Kezrai_Charzai]

@Tessa_Springfield

This is a war game, right? So if you want more conflict, wouldn’t it go to reason that you want cheaper and easier ships to blow up? Even the big ones.
If resource gathering is easy, isk gathering is plentiful, ships are cheap, then it doesn’t hurt as much to go get blown up.

This is a pretty key area in what’s wrong with the base design of EVE - with regards to PvP and conflict. EVE is supposed to be a PvP-centric game, but in fact much of the game design actively discourages meaningful PvP and encourages wealth-building.

@Tessa_Springfield

If anything, all these changes that i’ve been reading and hearing about have put a dampener on major conflicts. People say there was a broken economy in-game, but how was it broken?

Back when CCP started this Scarcity/“the economy is broken, loss is meaningless” nonsense, I posted that it was a crock:

The Economy isn't Broken, and Destruction is not Good

There’s a lot of poorly-informed opinion floating around the forums (and apparently at CCP HQ) lately, about how the economy is broken, loss is meaningless, and what’s needed to fix it is more “destruction of player assets”. Most people simply re-state their preferences and opinions and the mindset they’ve frozen into over years of opposing anyone who thinks differently than they do. Or in CCP’s case, they just don’t understand good game design and ecosystem approaches, and have no clue what to…

CCP’s stance at the time was if they created ‘fake’ destruction (Forsaken Fortress, Triglavian invasion etc.) then the destruction of assets plus re-structured economy (Scarcity, industry changes to ship building etc.) would trigger players to play more and pay more in order to, presumably, recover their losses and “stake new territory” or some such to deal with scarcity.

All that happened was the extremely predictable: activity down in every sector of EVE, players losing faith in CCP, players leaving, subs going Alpha, etc.

The underlying problem is that CCP continually fails to understand what drives players, how the playerbase engages with EVE, and even how their own game actually works. They keep pulling levers, twisting knobs and tweaking numbers hoping they will someday hit the combination that makes people play more and pay more.

CCP doesn’t understand that if PvP is a consistently losing proposition for most of the player base, players will in general avoid it. They say they have a PvP sandbox, but they gave up on actually finishing the game before they got there.

There are ways to make PvP more attractive, there are ways to engage players with the storyline, there are ways to guide players along a path from starting the game to trying PvP to experimenting with small fleet action to ending up in larger battles. But CCP gave up on trying to do those things over a decade ago, because they believe EVE is essentially finished and the way forward for CCP is to use the EVE money to invent “their next big success”.

@Tessa_Springfield

None of that screams broken to me. If anything, that is a healthy market. Plentiful flow of product and currency is healthy in any economy in real life.

Yes, the economy was healthier, as was the player base, before CCP started ‘fixing’ things. It’s pretty hard to fix something if you haven’t any clue what the core problem is.