Why I'm struggling to engage in the new minmatar/amarr fw story

Fiction Portal EVE Lore Discussion
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Its been noted several times by CCP that the Minmatar supporters haven’t been engaging in the FW Arc.

I want to share with CCP why I feel disengaged from this story and provide suggestions to help.

It begins with Edencom, I was very excited about Edencom and am proud to count myself among the many who fought to save Arshat, and its transmuter from the Triglavians. I did this as part of a pro-Minmatar alliance, EM, but I did so on behalf of all. The collaboration of alliances that flipped the system did so under a banner of uniting to fight off a common foe.

This was both in an out of character our greatest victory of the war, and it was done in character as an act of successful collaboration between enemies.

Now this symbol of our joint victory has become the genesis of our new conflict. The narrative reward for working together successfully is a new narrative about betrayal.

Is it plausible? Yes. But its a fork-in-the-eye for any future effort to engage in the story. If my efforts to effect the outcome simply have the consequence opposite of my efforts why should I apply any effort at all?

What this really leads back to is that there was no pay off for edencom. An Edencom structure was found in the other warzone, but there hasn’t even been an announcement of what Edencom thinks of it being disabled or stormed. Where are the announcements from Edencom NPCs? Where are the reassurances (even if they are lies) from Edencom that technology gained from experiments with the transmuter will be shared with the other empires? Where are those who still want to give peace a chance? Even if a new war must come to satisfy CCP’s plans for New Eden, there is gaping discontinuity here.

At bare minimum I’d like to see some Edencom NPC engagement with the story. This should be doable with fairly light developer time, and would add some welcome flavor to the war! war! war! we’ve heard of late.

What would be more work is some sort of narrative payoff for Edencom that isn’t tainted by betrayal. Do something with the Edencom fortresses. Increase the total number of flashpoints that can be up at once.

I get that you’re telling a new story but its hard to motivate oneself to engage in the new story when the old story ended so poorly.

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Plato’s not wrong.

And Mikal here is kind enough to demonstrate another reason why some people have little interest to join FW as it currently is.

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I mean, if one wishes to avoid spaces where divergent opinions thrive as opposed to being aggressively moderated out of existence by interminable toxic concern trolling, then yes, the FW community probably isn’t the best place to venture.

In regards to Plato’s original point, despite your assurances, I think Plato is very wrong. How exactly does one claim to have saved Arshat “on behalf of all”? Is the pro-trig playerbase included in “all” here, because I can’t imagine they’d have been beaming at the idea of trig NPCs being killed in their name. This of course misses the heart of the issue, which can be summed up in one word: entitlement.

Yes, you sunk time into some couple day pve grind in some no-name system and now you’re super pouty that the storyline coming out of it isn’t going exactly the way that you personally want it to. The consequence is that your entitlement and nauseating confidence in you’ve been slighted has culminated in asking to speak to the narrative manager - because how dare ccp not give a polite nod to your multi-day? efforts that one time in highsec. If there’s such a thing as being a space Karren, I have to believe that this is it.

Imagine if you actually did get involved in a FW narrative on the scale of something like Floseswin, and like Amarrmil, held the objective for months with virtually nothing to show for it. Just another swing of the pendulum. No advancement of the story really whatsoever. You see us making whiney posts about it? To go back to the Karren analogy, you’re asking to send your steak back to the kitchen, which you ordered medium-rare, because it’s still got a little pink in it. Meanwhile, ours is literally on fire, gave the waiter 3rd degree burns on the way to the table, and is now somehow melting the through both the plate and the dinner table. Never mind that though, your predicament is clearly more in need of redress - lets see what we can do about that pink in your steak!

That you think this imagined slight over Arshat is a big deal - and shame on CCP’s narrative team for having the audacity to write a narrative without your expressed approval is absurd to the point of comedy. CCP was pretty clear about their direction in these narrative arcs. It was going to involve Factional Warfare. I’m not sure what about this concept is so difficult to grasp, but FW typically involves is conflict between the empires - not to be confused with the empires all holding hands and singing koombaya around captured trig structures. Like… hello? It’s literally got “warfare” in the name.

If EM and LUMEN want to spend their time playing eve online cooperating and fleeting together, that’s unironically totally fine with me. I have no gripes about how other folks play their spaceship video game. That being said, if you think that a dev-codified head-nod to the continued cooperation between amarr and minmatar “loyalists” is so critical to quality of the gameplay such that CCP should literally retool their FW narrative arc and associated conflicts just so you get some kinda credit for w/e it is you think you did in arshat, then you’re as selfish as you are delusional.

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You entirely missed Plato’s point and you wanting to drag your grudge with LUMEN to absolutely everything and to build absurd strawmen simply proves my point further.

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Gotta love the claim of a strawman being thrown out, bereft of explanation, complete with a “you’re just proving my point further”. I think you’re getting close to winning “I’m in an argument on the internet” BINGO.

Not that this is in any way surprising, mind you. Anyone who disagrees must of course just be arguing in bad faith (my alleged straw man) or must simply not be able to grasp the issue (i missed plato’s point?). One wonders if you’ve ever had an exchange where you considered the possibility that someone might just have a different opinion that didn’t arise out of some cognitive deficit. Sounds exhausting to me.

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I’m going to regret engaging in good faith here, I wrote but didn’t post a similar deconstruction of my misgivings regarding the handling of the Floseswin arc– I find it very easy to understand Plato’s frustration.

What stopped me from posting was the realisation that even were I right, and I believe I was; the whole exercise was petty, the narrative can never support or recognise every facet of player engagement, nor should it.

As CCP Delegate Zero articulated quite well on yesterday’s livestream, a sandbox without boundaries is a pile of sand. I have disliked the particulars of his boundaries in the past and frankly expect to again, but no amount of effort, engagement or protest should mean those boundaries bend to suit us– it would be a genuinely horrible precedent.

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Engaging in good faith to call the concern petty and strawman it into “wanting narrative to support every facet of player engagement”?

Well, you tried.

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To be clear for those who have not been following the above grudge drama:

The current story itself is fine. Amarr turning against Edencom is entirely plausible. FW story playing out in FW is what makes sense. We could join FW to be part of it and if we choose not to that’s on us.

And yes, we in EM are entirely fine when the story development leads us to shoot LUMEN again - we’ve been even looking forward to it. They’re as fun to fight as they are to fleet with. We fought them for fifteen years - the invasions are a blink in our mutual history. Of my top three EVE war stories two feature shooting people currently in LUMEN. That prospect is not what’s keeping us out from FW today.

But yesterday’s stream’s claim that “player actions” decided Amarr, instead eg Caldari, got the transmuter is blatantly false. What was achieved in Arshat could not have been achieved in Caldari space because of how the NPCs were designed/buggy/imbalanced. It is very unlikely it could have happened in Gallente or Minmatar space either.

Similarly, the formation of Pochven was attributed to the Triglavians winning, and the brand director of CCP made a comment that “no one knows what would have happened if Edencom had just tried harder”. This is also blatantly false: everyone knows Pochven was always going to happen, everyone knows there wasn’t any Edencom content developed.

The issue is not that the story is on rails or does not have real room to take into account all player actions. That is to be expected in an MMOG. But it is disheartening to do thing, have CCP institute some consequence you could not have changed, and then OOC attribute that consequence to you as a player.

I don’t mind being on rails. But being put on rails and then being told you should’ve just driven the train somewhere else than the railroad goes if you wanted to have a good outcome is not good for motivation to participate again.

Is that petty? Maybe. I don’t personally feel it’s petty to feel meh about bad outcomes misattributed to your victories, but that’s a matter of opinion. However, EVE is a game. It does not matter if my reasons to feel meh about an event are petty or not, I should still be doing something else with my time that doesn’t feel meh (and I am - EVE is a vast game and there’s a lot to do).

Plato is not whining. He’s brought this up because there was some ??? on the stream about lack of engagement and he explained his reasons for it. CCP seemed to want to know. Now they do (assuming they read it, anyway). What CCP does with the explanation (or not) is entirely their choice.

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Yeah in my experience running and playing homebrew TTRPGs, the absolute fastest way to dishearten and lose players in a game is lie about how important the player’s actions are.

If the DM has on-the-rails storyline and players bend the rails pretty hard, the DM saying “well if only you tried harder” without actually having the intention of ever letting it go off-rails is the kind of meta-comment that gets players to quit. They’ll look for DMs who say that but are then willing to look flabbergasted and actually improv sessions as needed, who actually let players off-rails.

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He wants it to support his engagement, I’d like it to support mine; assuming those things are equal, it’s extrapolation more than strawman.

I also reserve the right to dismiss my own aborted plans as petty

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CCP should not design its narratives leaning on the participation of RP nerds. Us RP nerds do not represent the community of players at large very well in our goals or gameplay.

I’d like to say that we aren’t actually that important, but in the case of Athounon and the Eugidi event RP sentiment did actually drive what engagement there was with the plot. They were initiated by a single Eve mail without any significant gameplay incentives, and on both sides of each respective event it fell to the ‘RPers’ to convince, plead or bribe the rest to participate.

In Calmil, we the people who cared were successful at herding our cats, and when Galmil saw the amount of work required to take Athounon, the few voices that wanted to initiate a hard work campaign of dozens of hours sieging systems were summarily laughed off.

I expect the situation in Minmil was similar, except that declining the engagement was justified differently - “I don’t want to play in this sandbox because Arshat, because I don’t like the way this is set up”. Etc.

In both cases, the objectives given to Gal and Min militias were extremely difficult with no real incentives offered. If this was by design, or CCP does not know or ignored the factor of WZ strategy, I don’t know.

Why exactly it was done this way, I also don’t know. Floseswin was successful as a content generator from RP incentives, so maybe this was a test to see if Floseswin 2.0 could be recreated. Yes, this ignores all of the other context about how Flos worked and why, which is also related to confidence in CCP’s storytelling in other contexts, like the invasions.

All in all: this is not a solid foundation to build on. If this is the model for upcoming narrative arcs, they will continue to fail.

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We were more optimistic; people engaged by the narrative provided more fungible incentives to those who were not.

It’s as you alluded though, not something I believe is replicable in the current climate.

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Trigs are allowed to have their own RP, just not their own structures in pochven :laughing:

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Similarly, the formation of Pochven was attributed to the Triglavians winning, and the brand director of CCP made a comment that “no one knows what would have happened if Edencom had just tried harder”.

It sounds as if CCP should be looking back at their own history concerning Live Events. About a decade ago anti-Nation capsuleers were so successful in beating down one of the live events, preceding the release of Incursion, that the Live Events Team re-ran the live event outside peak hours - in order to claim “victory.”

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Yea well someone could argue that after being here since close to the dawn of the cluster I must be the biggest loser on Earth to still be surprised by these things happening. :smiley:

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Mikal is a man-child even here?

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