Is combat really fair?
Good god no, you could place a 10yr old player and a brand new player in the same ship, same fittings, same ammo, same rigs and say “go go”. The new player would be dead in seconds…
-Evocationz Adhera, Will Eve Online ever really match any other MMO? Honestly, No.
If skill, experience, and knowledge of the game aren’t supposed to lend you advantage, then what is left? Should the random number generator determine all outcomes? Seriously, what else is there that should determine the outcome of PvP, all other things being equal?
Evocationz Adhera is, to use the term of art for the genre, salty about EVE Online.
EVE is, of course, dying, a state of affairs that has been ongoing since not too long after launch. In fact, we’ll be celebrating the 15th annual “EVE is Dying Day!” in just over a month.
First known occurrence of “EVE is Dying”
But if the devs would only listen Evocationz Adhera has all the answers on how to fix the game… not one of which hasn’t been brought up and thrashed out dozens of times in the past. But the amateur outsider always knows better than the devs who’ve run a game successfully for a decade and a half, right?
Okay, yes, there are days when CCP doesn’t seem to be fully aware of what the hell is going on in their game as the combined intellect of the player base finds the loopholes in the system a few devs and designers missed. But some random player complaining that EVE will never compare to WoW and RuneScape is making an exceedingly false comparison. (Not to mention failing to note how many MMOs went down the WoW path and never even hit EVE Online levels of subscribers.)
EVE Online is a PvP game. CCP has been very clear on that. Compare EVE Online to other PvP MMOs and it has done very well. 15 years online and having hit a peak of over half a million subscribers puts it well ahead of perennial sandbox favorites like Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, both of which tried to change course after launch and yet failed to achieve WoW-like numbers either.
CCP has been pretty clear that they are never going to make any area of space completely safe. CCP isn’t doing this out of caprice, but because their data say that people who wander off and play the mission running game, the primary PvE element, generally don’t stick around for the long term.
New Player Trajectory
The details were explained at Fanfest 2014 (recorded here) where it was noted that somebody who gets ganked in high sec is actually more likely to stick with the game.
Which isn’t to say some things are not broken. War Decs have been a bleeding sore for the nearly dozen years I have been playing and no change made has ever made it much better. Even long time veterans start thinking about change… when they lose something I guess. You can go peruse /r/eve or the forums and find many things people are complaining about. But CCP isn’t avoiding radical change because they are ignoring they’re player base. They are avoiding it because one player’s radical improvement is another player’s game ending move. That is the problem with the sandbox. There isn’t a limited set of viable paths in the game, but a multitude of ways to play and killing one in the name of another.
And, honestly, EVE is dying. But it isn’t dying because high sec isn’t safe. It is dying because it is old and suffers from an accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of old vets. It is dying because, as a PvP MMO, it has a limited audience to begin with. It is dying because most people ever likely to invest the considerable time and effort needed to get good at it have already come and gone. It is dying for the same reason every game dwindles as it ages, people have played it enough and moved on. Even World of Warcraft is in decline. Nothing lasts forever.
MMOs are Bizarro World oddities in video games, expecting to live on for years and keep people’s attention in a market that favors new titles.
Anyway, Evocationz Adhera’s comments are hardly new or very moving and seem steeped in resentment. I feel like you get to the real nugget at the end of the post.
Take me for instance, 3 years of Eve Online videos, not once has CCP plugged me. It seem’s CCP cares about money and not it’s player base.
I’m going to guess that is the real salt. Anyway, Evocationz Adhera is looking to provoke, yet cannot abide disagreement, deleting my comment taking issue with a few items in their post. That, of course, is the real tell, somebody complaining about others not listening to them yet having no interest in hearing from anybody else. What goes around comes around I suppose.
from The Ancient Gaming Noob https://ift.tt/2yGOgx4
Comments
Post a Comment