@CCP_Falcon
I know you are busy making a game but please take time to consider the following
Alright, this post is going to be a bit aggressive toward you ccp guys, but if you read it, and consider it i would have imparted upon you 17 years of experience in game design and heavy research. these are going to be very hard positions for you to budget on, because i know how stuck we designers can get in a games creative direction. please consider these with serious thought and consideration
Player Population Rates
First and foremost, the reason why eve never acquired large amounts of population at the start was due to two factors you did not consider, or did not hold to be of significant value to change the design direction of the game.
Both Requirements, and Complexity Dictate the potential population of a game; Thus if you want to fix population rates by default you need to make the game more “mentally accessible” to other players.
High Sec Griefing War
I do recall being a heavy advocate for issue like war-dec spam and to have some sort of change (like that one which was brought today as “war eligibility”) that would ultimately stop this type of behavior.
I was told “its a stupid idea, it will never work, you will ruin eve, etc” Yet here we are and people are all the happier for it.
> I Want to mention this because there is a very serious problem in eve, and it is the creative direction of the game. constantly we are seeing you development team’s reps propagate this “scamming and cheating, and abuse is good for player retention” nonsense.
I have a list of really difficult questions to ask to debuke this position, but i will leave it for now and only leave ccp with a “slap on the hand” and just say "The truth is that while “grinding for new things” is good for player retention “regrinding for them” is not. I expect inexperienced designers to make that mistake, but now that this is out in the like let me be clear by saying "in absolutely no way, what so ever, under the beautiful blue sky, in the dark of the universe, under a rock is this ever, ever, ever a good thing for players, or player retention
Lets be clear about something as we continue
Either 1. Eve is a game that is realistic or 2. Eve is not a realistic game. I would like, I demand an official reply on this knowing what position the development team has.
Addressing the problems
Now moving on to war-dec griefing like issues in eve
- Allowing people to scam and get away with it is not in any way realistic. There are “punishments” that need to be impediment. IF eve was to be good, we’d need to find a way to bring players to accountability that they CANNOT ESCAPE FROM. For example, if loads of people reported someone for scamming, and then concord came and locked them up for x period of time, we’d have an “realistic” society with “Punishment”. another option is if isk became tainted in some way that allowed the transfer to another toon to flag both accounts as scammers. This would have a huge impact on scamming. These are both impractical solutions to these problems, but something needs to be done about this.
For now what we can say is
- We cannot pod them
- They can simply just make another account and start all over
- On the main account they have no accountability
High Sec Suicide ganking
Another one that really needs to be tackled. Lets be truthful and say “afk mining is a big problem”. It is the reason some entities exist (like code) or claim to exist. However, allowing the players to go around high sec under the “Banner of doing what is good for the game” (which is total BS by the way) is not a proper way to address issues.
This area of the game needs to become stricter, and more harsh replies from concord.
- Increase the rate at which you lose standing for aggression from 0.10 (or what ever it is now) to 1.0 per a hostile action
- Remove “get in ship” option from “open space” (as -5.0 players are using alts to bring themselves ships to suicide gank to avoid the entire mechanic of concord.
> In the past if i shot someone and kited concord around the system, i’d have a gm yelling at me almost instantly. So why is code allowed to circumvent these mechanics?
Nullsec space usage
ok seriously, can you please do something about limiting both the size, and the amount of space a single alliance can control? And work war decs into null sec sov taking. Either make it required (i’d rather have it that way) or make war decs reduce the time to capture space from an enemy (either skip or reduce timers?)
** Corporations**
Oh boy this is one that has been avoided like mining. You need to PURGE. Purge the crap out of corporations with inactive rates. you need to make closed corporations AUTO DELETE after 30 days of being closed. and you need to REMOVE TICKERS, because they are a horrible mess for corporate creation. Also the flag options could really be redone. its horrible, limited, and god aweful looking. break the same base code, it will be an improvement over what we have.
this should be a start in the right direction for serious problems.
Oh and on the topic of retention
The reason why the game is not keeping people is because there is no “demand” for players to have corporations. For example they dont “think” that they “need” a corporation enough. When the psychology of a player is at the point of “dependency” upon corporations, they will need it. when this happens a surge of people will go to create content.
In essence eve violates this by blogging into one group, removing … no… Diluting the need to have a corporation to acquire the content. The population of the alliances is what is killing the games retention, and population. If only you would listen about this how much you’d fix this game.
