Backstage - OOC Forums
General Discussion => General Non-RP EVE Discussion => Topic started by: Lunarisse Aspenstar on 12 Jul 2017, 08:45
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Whether you Love them, hate them, hope they'll lead to WIS - Captain Quarters will be no more!
https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/preparing-for-the-future-retirement-of-captains-quarters-twitch-integration/
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Well, I won't miss it, chiefly because it has remained a solitary experience all this time. The inclusion of the graphs in the article seems disingenuous since falling use could just as easily be attributed to continued developer neglect, rather than player disinterest.
Anyway, getting a 64-bit client in the bargain seems like a trade up to me. They weren't going to give us avatar interaction in the first place, and now the game should, in the future, run more efficiently.
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:(
My feelings/views. (https://meta.eveonline.com/t/devblog-preparing-for-the-future-retirement-of-captain-s-quarters-twitch-integration/9940/100)
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I typically did all my RPing from the CQ, since being character on the character instead of the ship helped make me feel more immersed in it.
Meh. Oh well. Reasons are understandable. But CCP please try a new WiS at some point. Please.
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I'd like WiS, but I'll admit to not really being immersed in the CQ. I'm too used to forum RP and MUD clients to want distractions from my writing.
Still, corp meetings in a 'physical' boardroom would be dope.
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Imagine the money they'd make from furniture. $60 chair coming right up.
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New table from SPAIKIA: 5600 plex
New chairs from Caldari Furniture Homestores: 2300 plex
Getting it all nicked by a Director level mole: priceless
There's some things plex can buy, for everything else there's griefing
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Alas, poor WiS. I hardly use you.
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So...this thing has stirred up some stuff inside me, mostly because I read an article linked in the forum discussion thread about the death of the WoD MMO and the consequences for White Wolf. I've always known it was bad...but this bad...
:(
I don't think I feel comfortable financially supporting a company that ruins things I love, for what for years has mostly been a fancy looking RP chat client for me. The reason I've stayed with the game is you people, so I feel like I should be paying you instead of CCP.
...
I don't know what this will mean for Ché's future yet. But as the 8-ball says: outlook not so good.
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With all of CCP's failures and shortcomings, they're still a good company run by real people (and god knows how much we mess up). CCP risks a lot by trying to break barriers other companies wouldn't think of going near.
That is something I respect, and that is the reason why I'll be with eve until they shut down the servers.
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The thing is... I sort of feel like CCP has changed a bit, also in the barrier breaking department. In some ways, this is good and understandable, but in some ways I feel like they have become too cautious, too fearful, at least when it comes to ambulation. Since losing the pre-Incarna hubris, PCU has plateaued and then declined, I wonder if there is some correlation.
I'm sort of hoping some people can convince me this article (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/05/world-of-darkness-the-inside-story-mmo-ccp-white-wolf) is pretty biased. Or that things have changed.
I know it's a bit silly, but I feel wronged and abandoned by CCP, and I have lost just about all hope that they'll do anything to make it up to me any time soon, or even any time soon™.
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To each their own. But I'd say that many of CCP's issues come from the community of players who use their entitlement as a consumer to push the company around (by basically crying and flailing like a toddler).
Their fear, and caution is a problem we've helped create. And PCU will always decline, eve is a MMO, and we've been very lucky to have this game for such a long time.
Edit: I want to clarify Che, I'm not saying you were one of these people throwing a fit. Just speaking about some elements of the louder part of the community as a whole.
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Its worth pointing out, if you feel that way Che, just switch to an alpha clone. No paying CCP, and you get to keep the glorified chat client that is EVE.
My 2 ISK.
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Somebody put some polls up on the still growing ambulation/WiS/Incarna/CQ threadnaught #ILostCount:
https://forums.eveonline.com/t/devblog-preparing-for-the-future-retirement-of-captain-s-quarters-twitch-integration/9940/806 (https://forums.eveonline.com/t/devblog-preparing-for-the-future-retirement-of-captain-s-quarters-twitch-integration/9940/806)
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Che has it exactly right re: CCP's lack of breaking barriers and risk averse water treading for years.
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I think it was the monocolegate/Incarna debacle that sort of led to the risk-adverseness. It also communicated to certain parts of the playerbase that they could push CCP in certain directions - and punish them for going in others. That being said, I hope that the moon mining changes indicate that they are not 100% beholden to the large, organized player interests in 0.0. Though I'm not expert enough in moon mining to say 100% that the changes aren't in those groups' interests.
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I think it was the monocolegate/Incarna debacle that sort of led to the risk-adverseness. It also communicated to certain parts of the playerbase that they could push CCP in certain directions - and punish them for going in others. That being said, I hope that the moon mining changes indicate that they are not 100% beholden to the large, organized player interests in 0.0. Though I'm not expert enough in moon mining to say 100% that the changes aren't in those groups' interests.
They are, actually, considering that lowsec moons will be pretty hard to mine after the patch. Directly cuts off an income stream for lowsec entities and makes them less competetive, securing nullsov from their incursions a little bit better.
There is a reason Snuff joined the Imperium, you know.
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I'm sort of hoping some people can convince me this article (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/05/world-of-darkness-the-inside-story-mmo-ccp-white-wolf) is pretty biased. Or that things have changed.
Way late to the party, but that article is more than a little biased. I mean of course it is. I watched dudes who just bought houses weeks before it all went to shit learn they'd lost their jobs after ~20 years at White Wolf because people running the show had no clue what they were doing. I wasn't exactly impartial about the rampant coke-fuelled mismanagement and masturbatory self-congratulating music videos and whatnot...and I spoke for people who still wanted to work in the industry, for people who had signed NDAs (CCP forgot to make me sign one. Woops!). Not everything attributed to me in that article was shit observerd first-hand, just stuff I parlayed on behalf of other disgruntled devs who couldn't risk speaking out.
On a far more positive note, the fact EVE Online is still going to this day suggests they figured their shit out. (Smh @ Captains Quarters being shuttered, though. Seriously. What a debacle, lol). Real talk - most studios don't come back from pushback like CCP recieved (achieved?!) at this time. They obviously reigned the bullshit in, otherwise they'd be dead now. I'm actually kinda proud that the game is still humming along. I'm proud that something I worked on is "hanging" in the Museum of Modern Art. That's a hell of an achievement. It'll probably outlast WoW at this rate. It's longevity and adaptability in the face of insane levels of criticism makes even the bitterest of vets like me give it kudos. I've watched the games industry on a wider level become this awful money-hungry beast, and I feel like CCP learned their lesson well before the current round of MTX-related outrage (see Battlefront II, Destiny II, NBA2K18, etc etc etc). In a way, they pioneered pissing people off with MTX outrage, and learned their lesson well before other studios did (or are yet to ). GG CCP. Keep on keepin' on. I have no clue what's going on with this game anymore, but I suspect they're a far more "pure" games company relative to the utter bullshit going on elsewhere right now. 2017 really was a shit-tastic year for gamers, and we did all that stuff a half-decade earlier. There's almost a level of respect you have to give CCP for fucking up first, and rectifying their shit first. True trailblazers, lol.
This is Nick Blood btw.
xox
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This is Nick Blood btw.
Nice to see you are still around. Unfortunately it seems over the last 6 months CCP has forgotten all those hard learned lessons, some of the decisions coming out of Iceland are back to WTF levels.
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:lol: What are they up to these days?
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Complete lack of iteration on potentially game breaking balance issues, firing the entire community team, selling skins and skill injectors above any other form of game development, community outrage over an apparently blasè attitude to botting, saying they were switching away from "jesus features" only to go right back to them a year later, ignoring FW entirely for years and years, etc, etc, etc.
There's a lot of problems at the moment, and my motivation to play is as low as it's ever been. That said, I do believe that CCP are aware of the general community discontent and will hopefully be able to turn themselves around.
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Holy shit! It's a Dropbear! Now I'm even more sad I missed the AJ days! ;)
That said, on the last-six-months thing, I think the main issue is two-fold: they probably have some new designers they're onlining, and CCP Seagull had a kid in the last year and so probably wasn't exercising as close an executive oversight.
I don't necessarily think the decisions have been terrible, just that some of them (RW LP store, for instance) have shown a disconnect from what motivates EVE players, or the excessive power of nullsec CSMs to pre-nerf highsec content.
Essentially, new and engaging PvE content has arrived, which we've always wanted, and it's harder than before, which we also wanted, but the rewards feel lackluster, which-- matches our constant griping about Incursion income.
Well, shit. ;)
By the way, Dropbear! While your attention is here, check some of this out:
Blackglass Discourse (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwDv77Pf9Fg)
CTR Discourse (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVZy0HoZ5yw)
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Complete lack of iteration on potentially game breaking balance issues, firing the entire community team, selling skins and skill injectors above any other form of game development, community outrage over an apparently blasè attitude to botting, saying they were switching away from "jesus features" only to go right back to them a year later, ignoring FW entirely for years and years, etc, etc, etc.
Did you write this in 2008 or 2018? :lol:
Actually what -are- subs like these days/CCP health? Or are people spending enough $$ on plex that subs don't count? Does ccp make enough money on whales that they can let the rest go to shit like some mobile game?
Also DropBear, I am truly, truly sorry for the way White Wolf was eviscerated (is there a better word for what happened?). What a complete clusterfuck of nonsense.
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Subs are at about what they were in 06-10, which is to be expected. Quite honestly it's impressive considering their like 15 years old?
Their public financials show that they're doing better then the "Golden Era" of 2012, all-in-all they seem healthy all bitterness aside.
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This is Nick Blood
Heh, did I rouse the Bear from its winter sleep again?
Biko boy known to let the Bear
Mmm, Drop! :lol:
Anyway, thanks for sharing, even though it didn't really comfort me.
xox
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By the way, Dropbear! While your attention is here, check some of this out:
Blackglass Discourse (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwDv77Pf9Fg)
CTR Discourse (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVZy0HoZ5yw)
I'm not completely sure what I'm looking at, but it's damn sexy all the same. Some kind of player-driven ARG? Incredible work, if so. Very slick, and enticing. So much nostalgia and happy memories :D
Sorry I couldn't be more comfort Che! (+1 internet points for BBoys joke though <3). I agree with Alex, 15-odd years is impressive. Gotta be doing something right to last that long~
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I'm not completely sure what I'm looking at, but it's damn sexy all the same. Some kind of player-driven ARG? Incredible work, if so. Very slick, and enticing. So much nostalgia and happy memories :D
Essentially, it's a player-run news service! We're keeping the flame alive by doing snazzy event-related lore stuffs, in addition to other ridiculousness we engage in (http://dl.eve-files.com/media/1602/Drifter_Hive_Analysis_YC116-02-01.pdf).
Think of it as a sort of player-run A'J with slick corporate wrapping. ;)
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Amazing / excellent / all the things! This sorta stuff ended up being how I derived the most joy from EVE as a player too. Photoshop, MS Word, Wikipedia...who needs the game client to have fun? :P
That .pdf looks super cool too, and presents like a proper academic paper. Will have to give it a proper read, though I've completely fallen behind all storyline since I left so I already don't understand what are probably key things (Drifters? Sentinels? Oh my). "Tenebrae, C. – Medical Consultation" gave me a shudder-smile to see.
I gotta say, player-driven content so often matches or exceeds what can be produced in-house. A real shame the opportunities with interactive storytelling aren't more fully capitalized upon, both in EVE and more broadly. (Incidentally, I just reached out to a YouTuber a few days ago about potentially doing a video essay on that same topic, so if anything ever eventuates I'll have to share it here).
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:D Agreed! World-building is brilliant fun. And do hope you enjoy the read!
Itsukame-Zainou Hyperspatial Inquiries prides itself on applying the most rigorous and exacting ethical standards to its research projects! Shareholders may rest assured that only the most humane, effective and efficient methods will be used to pursue our scientific objectives.
Itsukame-Zainou: First. Fastest. Furthest.
Excerpt, IKAME Shareholder Handbook
As to the rest, we've been having some conversations lately, and there's on-going concern that the people making strategic decisions about EVE lack a full understanding of the existing ecology. While that ecology needs to be made to evolve, such an evolution should be handled carefully. The fear is that, with a former EA marketing guy at a high level in CCP now, CCP will essentially 'forget' the lessons it learned so harshly before.
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CCP will essentially 'forget' the lessons it learned so harshly before.
Personally I think that ship has already sailed, the lessons have been forgotten (more likely there are few left at CCP who remember them).
I'm waiting to see if the players have enough energy to teach those lessons again or will just say f**k it.
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The fear is that, with a former EA marketing guy at a high level in CCP now, CCP will essentially 'forget' the lessons it learned so harshly before.
When EVE was started, corporate gaming hadn't yet been fully turned into a dlc/pay for things model ala EA's catalog just yet. I think that original crop of CCP devs were of a completely different cloth. EA are poison.
Those dlc marketing guys have a spreadsheet, they've really dialed-in how much they can charge for vanity items or isk or whatever and they know the exact ratio of subs to whales they need / whatever to get the spice to flow. These guys are smart, they know just how much they can hollow out and bleed a property for x-years before they have to move on.
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I thought the EA guy was let go or quit?
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I think that original crop of CCP devs were of a completely different cloth.
That was my impression too, both as an outsider, and also once I got on the inside (but I was in ATL, so nowhere near as valuable perspective on the old guard as if I was in RVK). CCP was almost anti-corporate at times, and proudly so. I used to say "I don't work in the games industry, I work for CCP". That feeling faded somewhat over time :P
With that said, employers had the ability to purchase stock in the company, and the older guard likely held quite a bit of it too, so that would certainly cultivate a bit more personal interest in pursuing financial gain more aggressively. I saw this a bit in ATL with older staff who'd been around longer (the amount of stock you could buy increased over time, and many folks bought the maximum they could each year). Even though they were wary of the pushback we saw at the time (Monocles and all that fun stuff) they were also hoping that this stuff (and also the ambitious expansion of the studio into other titles) would net them a nice retirement fund.
And since I'm here talking shit, I'll get this off my chest too. That whole "Greed is Good" debacle? Man that pissed me off, but probably not in the way you think. That newsletter (I forget its name) was so inconsequential and largely ignored, and it's purpose was singular - to promote discussions; to inform people in different disciplines what was happening more broadly in the company. It was so Jane in Accounting had some basic idea of what was going on, so that Melissa in the cafeteria could grasp the basic landscape of the development going on. That was its purpose, period. Thing is, nobody really read the first few versions of it, and it didn't get much traction internally.
The pursued solution? To hype it up and overplay things more, sex it up dramatically so that people might begin to pay attention and it could serve the purpose it was supposed to. Cue things like the "Greed is Good" release, which did a better job at sparking conversations with its overplayed, tongue-in-cheek approach to discussing the issues. Then, when it was leaked, it came across as as like...a serious document, some kind of blueprint, not the cheeky conversation starter it was intended to be.
I saw the forum thread that blew up about this almost the moment it began to get traction. I wrote a reply saying as much as I just have now, and almost posted it, but then decided the PR folks would probably crucify me for it, and I'd piss off the folks who were putting time into trying to make the project work. I begged the PR folks to just set the record straight and dismiss the importance of this project, but they took a different route (and fucked it up, imo). I wonder to what extent CCP could have minimized backlash if they just threw the whole thing under the bus as the overly-dramatic thought experiment it was. I don't have many regrets, but not just saying "fuckit" and posting my own 2c remains one. Maybe it could've helped. Ah well.
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I got the impression at the time (and I think it might even have been mentioned here and there by PR folks) that it was meant as a discussion starter, not impending policy. I think that leadership in certain player groups were well aware of that but decided to take it and run with it to push their agenda and essentially leverage player outrage into allocating CCP resources the way that they wanted and it worked. I think the Monocle played into that - though really the other items being *somewhat* expensive didn't help, because as far as the infamous monocle goes, if other items had been more reasonable and the newsletter hadn't been leaked then the monocle would have been sort of a outlier status-symbol/joke thing instead of emblematic of all of CCP's 'evils'.
CCP's official response mostly made everything much worse. (Which Ciarente covered at the time, much better than I ever could: http://ciaooc.blogspot.com/2011/06/open-letter-to-ccp.html )
Anyway, that kind of put the spike in Walking In Stations, which is what the above-mentioned groups wanted. Unfortunately it also scared CCP off from even touching Captains Quarters again, like, ever until they finally got rid of them. :(
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Makes sense. Thanks for reply dude. Reading that blog post was a nice angry-nostalgia flashback. :P
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Makes sense. Thanks for reply dude. Reading that blog post was a nice angry-nostalgia flashback. :P
'Angry-nostalgia' is a nice turn of phrase. I feel like it describes so much of what I feel when reviewing my Eve experience. :D
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Come on, guys. Let's stick to nostalgia-and-happy-memories. :p
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Oooh, yes! Let me share one of my all-time favorite memories from CCP days!
So this is back in the Sansha's Nation Live Events era. A quick recap for those who missed it is basically, Sansha's Nation are invading capsuleer space and using wormholes to do so by sending their invasion fleets through them from some unknown location.
We (CCP Headfirst and I) know that at some point, inevitably, people are going to want to know where these ships are coming from - what's on the other side of the wormhole. So Headfirst (I think, perhaps one of our other level designers) starts on that. We build a dungeon/site on our internal servers to depict just a glimpse - but a scary one, we hope - of what lurks on the other side. He spends hours creating a mahoosive fleet. Shit is pretty laggy, I recall, and one of the DBAs in Iceland is like "Why is [internal server name] behaving like shit?". Good times. When it's completed, I take a screenshot, prettify it a little in Photoshop...
...and then, we wait.
In fact, as I type this, I realize that I can't recall if we poke and nudge a little, to imply that it's possible to send a camera probe through the wormhole, or if perhaps this whole idea is originally spurred by players roleplaying trying to send camera probes through. I really can't recall. One of the great things about running Live Events was that so often, we'd be inspired by player input and react to it, rather than go in with our own ideas (or alternatively, we go in with our own ideas, and then the input we get from players improves upon it or outright replaces our own, it was so cool letting things flow more or less organically).
Anyways, it eventually happens. We have this character called Mouse Nell trying to get a glimpse of the other side. We're about to make people's head spin. It's pretty exciting.
One thing about throwing it over to players though, is that it's also a little terrifying. There's so much you can't predict in terms of how they will react and what they will do. As a long time member of the RP community I'm able to counter this somewhat since I know a lot of the self-described roleplayers in EVE, and I can reasonably predict how they might react to things. But, as time goes on, and people of all kinds get involved in these events, it becomes important to involve as many as possible, and not just keep it to the RP community. This "Mouse Nell" person, I don't know who they are, and we have no idea how they're going to react when we send them the image. Will they keep it to themselves and hoard the knowledge? Will they run with it? Perhaps some other unforseen outcome?
The camera probe comes back with the image.
(https://tufl.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/sansha-fleet.jpg)
Image from here (https://tufl.wordpress.com/2010/07/01/wormhole-reveals-true-power-of-sansha-fleets/).
Mouse's first words are "...so many". Headfirst and I are cackling like schoolchildren. So far so good.
And then (I can't fully remember the words, so I'll paraphrase) Mouse says:
"So, I've got some good news and some bad news guys. The good news is that the image is really clear!"
We laughed for a solid five minutes. I'm grinning like an idiot now just thinking about that line. What a response / way to play it! We could've sat in a room with the entire storyline team for a week trying to script this, and wouldn't have come up with anything near as perfect.
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Oh, now that's a story! :D AWESOME! :D
As a turbonerd in the lore community, Mouse Nell and the Prosper Vault image have always been one of those 'important points in recent Sansha/Jovian history,' so it's a story that pops up time and again. Amazing to hear the other side of it. :D
I wonder if the current team have similar things planned for us that we just haven't 'triggered,' yet. :x
So, not sure if it's an internal retcon or some embellishment, but since then there's been a bit more movement on the Jovian/Sansha/wormhole tech front that you might find entertaining.
The story as it goes is that the Sanctuary Sisters, creepy as they are, colonized a WH system that had previously been inaccessible, and they'd been studying Sleeper/Talocan stuff that we'd never seen before. Cut forward a bit (I'm going to skip over some details for brevity), and we end up with a sort of 'second Seyllin event' that further opens up these wormhole systems. In each of these utterly trashed systems, there's what's called an Epicenter-- a set of Talocan static gates and such things, with violent wormholes and such all around. And in one particular 'constellation' of these shattered systems, there aren't any Sleepers. It's all Sansha, all the way down.
Well, except you can find 'Silent Battlegrounds,' extremely difficult to find signatures where the wreckage of Sansha supercarriers and Sleeper enclaves can be found, along with unknown wreckage. And, of course, in the Sansha Epicenters, you find those same Talocan static gates, with Sansha control systems nearby.
Here's an EVE Travel (https://evetravel.wordpress.com/2016/04/03/silent-battleground/) article on the Silent Battleground.
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Oh!
Also, Hilen Tukoss is dead.
Sorry. :x
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With Upwell releasing more and more structures, we need a Concord purge. It'd make more sense if Nullsec sov costs were closely associated with some sort of maintenance upkeep rather than the current flat tax.
Hell, make the ihubs and whatnot burn fuel and the likes.
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Poor Hilen. He had it coming though (and on a meta-level the new team probably wanted a clean(er) state). How'd he go out?
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Well, they definitely made good use of him.
The short: probably infomorph-kidnapped by the Drifters when they podded him, and shenanigans followed.
The long: we started seeing interesting* messages purporting to be from Hilen Tukoss on the IGS, which seemed to indicate something strange was afoot. He requested Jovian bits be brought to Site One for a receiving can that was dropped there. More shenanigans ensued, whereupon it seemed that the entity sending the original messages was likely an imposter, and-- then something? Nothing? In come the Drifters, an apparent Jovian or Sleeper successor group, sort of Jovian cyber-zombies whose exact origins we still don't know yet**, who appear to be attempting to salvage old Jovian hardware, collecting Sleeper corpses, and so on. What we discover, in the end, is that he was probably 'dead' the entire time, as the initial messages almost certainly came after he had his encounter with a Drifter Hive and its fleet.
There's been a lot in this arc (https://forums.eveonline.com/t/arc-drifter-crisis-history-repository/37764), which has been long-running and sort of backburnered while CCP preps the final parts of it, as we guess it's tied to certain long-term development goals.
Probably the most entertaining one for you would be this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i12yk3fZVHw). His part of the Drifter arc effectively spanned eight months. :3 Here's also a trailer CCP did for Fanfest 2015 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqEn49Dqt5o) that's still quite relevant. :3
*weird.
**Oh, but we have guesses. So many guesses.
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Very cool they ran with the arc further! I have warm fuzzies now.
Also shivers. That Scope video (and the trailer) was more than a little creepy :eek:
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Quite so! Next to the Prophecy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFTUazuGdTw), it's my favorite trailer.
The Drifters are sort of the current (potential) existential threat. They were also originally deployed as a new AI test bed, for an NPC that can patrol systems, do non-combat actions, and so on. So, in systems where they operate, there are scouts roving about, scanning objects, salvaging equipment, so on. If they're engaged heavily, then reinforcements will come in, join the fight, and so on. It's been a major step for procedural content generation in EVE, and pretty nifty!
And, of course, happens to be attached to this creepy Jove/Sleeper successor group. The competing theories are that the Drifters are the awakened Sleepers/Others, are the remnants of the Jovian Second Empire Tyrants, or are perhaps the returned 'Caretakers/Enheduanni,' or Talocan.
From my perspective, they complete the Icarian story of the Jove, who flew too close to posthumanism, and so lost their humanity. In the case of the Drifters, they became golems, or the Greek Talos, instead of wasting away.
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(oh, and my headcanon is that he's now 'out of the prison,' essentially, and living in a Sleeper construct with Linda Desktop or whatever her name is, in a simulated life. ;) )
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Okay, unpopular opinion time:
Fuck the Dark Elda... Dark Jo... Derp Jove. Right in the bionic eyesocket. We really don't need more abloobloo spoopy "aliens" and more PvE content that'll be solved within weeks and then put on farm, with no actual development in storyline and setting. Aww, Uncle Kuvakei twirled his mustache, hon-hon-hon'd frenchly and tied some baseliners to the railroad aaaaaand the story actually never fucking went anywhere. The four nations remain in a bubble of status quo and all we got out of that crap was a mediocre grindfest for alts. So what was the next thing? Oh, some crap Blooder band-aid for some more really crap PvE and blueprints.
And in the mean time, what has been going on with the Nations of Eve? Oh, absolutely nothing, you say? Every single piece of conflict and strife has been some 'aliens' shoehorned in to gank an Empress and take a giant eraserhead to the embarrassing old lore? Well that's great, maybe we can have some actual development and progress in the storyliooooohkay you had absolutely nothing prepared for this giant void, so you stuffed more dullard placeholders in to maintain the status quo that hasn't actually changed for a fucking decade now. Lovely. We have nothing whatsoever for the old loyalists to use to get out of the ruts, there's nothing to work for or against, and every effort made is towards some completely irrelevant bloody spooky space aliens that also seem to do pretty much fuck all at this point. Oh, wait, there's a Kyonoke plague. Let's get some stuff up in space, let's get some conflict rolling! This gon b gu... oh, what's that? Oh, what you do in space is fucking irrelevant? You only get to be part of it if you can take a week off work and pay huge sums of money to go to Iceland? Gosh.
Being a Minmatar, Amarr, Caldari or Gallente holds zero meaning at this point. Having any of these as an enemy does nothing either.
The lore/story side of things, and the stuff provided for players to do something with/against is an utter and complete shitshow and it has been since the days of Kuvakei twirling mustaches. Drifters are just making it even worse, adding more pointless useless distraction from the actual setting of New Eden, further ensuring that the big conflicts that have been set up by the storyline and setting for so long remains fucking deadlocked and zero progress gets made.
This in turn makes roleplaying in Eve a seriously bizarre experience. The big and huge conflicts and problems of the biggest four nations in New Eden can't be engaged with, can't be used or pushed in any way that hasn't already been done a dozen times each, so in order to be part of anything you have to throw all of these gigantic things out the window and pretend that elephant doesn't exist, and instead go happy hugglefuckery time with all these people who should be enemies, and bang your head against the Derp Jove Menace. Hmm? Slavery? What's that? Reclaiming? Gosh, never heard of it. Manifest destiny and all these things that we've fought over for a fucking millennium? Nah, let's go find some holes to fuck probe. Yaaay.
Okay, that's off my chest now. God that feels good.
tl;dr, fuck CCP and their absolutely shit decisions when it comes to developing this damned game's story and setting. I could pick any five roleplayers out of the game and within a week hammer out a design and story document that'd allow for years of perpetual progress and player involvement.
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Most of your post is opinion based so I really don't care to try and argue it because well, that's just like your opinion, maan.
tl;dr, fuck CCP and their absolutely shit decisions when it comes to developing this damned game's story and setting. I could pick any five roleplayers out of the game and within a week hammer out a design and story document that'd allow for years of perpetual progress and player involvement.
This bit though.
I don't doubt that you could do that, anyone could, but writing down how your perfect game would work has roughly nothing to do with actually making a game, which takes a few extra things including but not limited to:
- Money
- Time
- People
- More Money
- More time
- Like a whole bunch of people
I guarantee that any "design and story document" produced would be a long list of things that aren't achievable within a reasonable timeframe that reads like a letter to santa more than an actual design document.
CCP have made some baffling choices that I disagree with greatly, but people have this habit of acting like they're actively trying to ruin the game. They're not slow to release things because they're all busy playing PUBG and not working, they're slow because this kind of thing is(despite popular belief) actually really hard.
Also the witch hunt against the EA guy(Sean Decker) is just silly. He was hired five years ago, if he planned on adding gold ammo he would have by now.
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That bit is taking into account the amount of effort CCP has placed upon storyline development and events over the last five years or so. It would require absolutely minimal effort, time and money from CCP to actually progress the storyline. They have several ISD people that could act as the filter and even generator of the actual articles and story pushing. CCP effort: Read, go yay or nay, then post news article. At opportune moments, pit loyalists etc against each other rather than Dev controlled NancyPCs, and include this in the on-going storyline. CCP efforts: Minimal, would make players feel engaged and involved. Continue the articles/news/worldbuilding until the next opportune moment. CCP efforts: Read, yay or nay, push butan. Repeat.
It'd require like... one actual dev event a year, which we've already seen they're willing to dump on the ISD people. and the rest could be done by letting factions clash in-game.
CCP are slow as fuck to release things because they've stopped giving a shit. There really is no excuse, since the time, money and effort required are absolutely minimal once the initial setup is in place, and even that can be reasonably crowdsourced.
Edit: As for 'opinion based', of course it is. Literally all discussion about these subjects are opinion based. Even CCP's standpoint is ultimately opinion based when it comes to this crap.
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Okay, unpopular opinion time:
*LOTS OF GOOD STUFF*
Okay, that's off my chest now. God that feels good.
Reading this I was caught between nodding furiously and giggling wildly. It felt damn good to read as well. Nice to know I am not alone in having these thoughts.
Bravo.
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It would require absolutely minimal effort, time and money from CCP to actually progress the storyline. They have several ISD people that could act as the filter and even generator of the actual articles and story pushing. CCP effort: Read, go yay or nay, then post news article. At opportune moments, pit loyalists etc against each other rather than Dev controlled NancyPCs, and include this in the on-going storyline. CCP efforts: Minimal, would make players feel engaged and involved. Continue the articles/news/worldbuilding until the next opportune moment. CCP efforts: Read, yay or nay, push butan. Repeat.
Disagree.
CCP news articles, are picked up on by rss bots and the like, and posted to things like Reddit.
For every commenter who says "huh, neat" there are more who say "why is this bullshit on the news"
pitting player groups vs other player groups, and having a news article on them, would receive a similarly lukewarm response.
Question: "Why are CCP covering some irrelevant roleplay war when X is attacking Y in Z space?"
Storyline developments that do not lead to new ships, modules, SKINS, boosters, clothes, or other junk, are not popular enough to justify the expense of resources of having CCP staff oversee it.
Consider some scenarios for the ~Internal Conflict~ that used to be a perennial favourite of people wanting storyline development.
House Ardishapur secedes from the Empire, forming the Holy Amarr Empire along with the Ammatar.
Pick a side, fight against players on the other side. OK.
Rewards: ? Outcomes: ?
If the rewards are simply LP to spend in the LP stores, and the outcome is merely a juggling of npc factions, then, what does it actually offer the players ?
Gallente election campaign.
Outcome: the portrait of the President may change, and some ~policies~ are put in place.
consider: what actually changed when President Roden replaced President Foiritan ?
News articles have a high visibility, and due to the nature of the playerbase-at-large there will be plenty of players who will resent the seeming effort going in to create "irrelevant rp fluff", when problems still exist in the sov-war mechanics and so forth.
A news report on a battle between 30 loyalists of faction A and 30 loyalists of faction B, gets on the news. But what about the battle where 500 players turned up to sack some citadel in the campaign of nullsec entity X vs nullsec entity Y ?
Even if it is just one CCP staffer, the public perception would be that it is irrelevant, without there being new ships/modules/skins/clothes or new game mechanics, and they would resent the "dev time being wasted".
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I echo Mizhara's thoughts.
Some wormhole/drifter/jove stuff is all well and good. But it has been so central for so long, to the point that even most empire changes are related to it in some way (Jamyl death, T3D arms race, new titan superweapons, etc), that it's getting very tiring.
Don't get me wrong, I love the new AI, and I'm happy to see its being used to increase randomized NPC space activity in places other than the drifters. That is fantastic progress. But the empire storylines -- their actual, internal/diplomatic issues -- have fallen by the wayside (except amarr, but as said, that was still built around drifter shenanigans. And the other factions really need more, period).
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wormhole
I mean... kinda?
Even the "wormhole" additions to the lore in recent years have actually been Drifter/Jove lore that has been shoehorned in to wormholes as a way of nerfing escalations and using the new AI for something more than the Hive systems. There's been very little specific wormhole lore added, rather they've just muddled the Drifters up into the existing Talocan/Ehenduanidhanidi stuff.
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So, my personal two cents:
I like being able to play in a way that isn't mandated to be GRRGALLENTEHATGALLENTE. Naturally, there's still plenty of room for it, but purely oppositional play tends to devolve into, 'No, but YOU'RE THE BAD,' which so often ends up shallow and, frankly, boring. At the same time, it's clear that it does still matter what you decide to play as, else, Miz, you wouldn't be waging a war against the Amarr.
So, that said, I would like to see more nuanced intrafactional play, tied with greater events, because as the number of moving parts increases the difficulty in positioning oneself and the need for flexibility increases.
It all comes down to time and resource constraints, though.
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The only way to have the playerbase give a shit about the story is to involve the story in a direct way with day-to-day gameplay, both carebears and null folks. Things that will disrupt highsec activity, things that give opportunities for high sec people to be involved, and the same for null.
I still maintain the best way to do this is to use the NPC empires as content generators that effect player sandcastles, breaking the cup into little pieces that the players are so good at putting back together in different ways. Basically they have to be able and given freedom to effect high sec, trading hubs, and null sandcastle empires.
Oh no, the Caldari State is having some huge conflict with 'x,' the State has good intel that JITA and a few surrounding systems might soon be under attack and trading will be disrupted during the conflict, go go capsuleers to help or hurt things/whatever.
The Amarr are getting all uppity again and have decided to annex a few systems in Querious, and capsuleer sandcastles and player owned systems will start seeing NPC gatecamps and capital fleets siege structures.
Omir doesn't like all these heretics in his systems, if your alliance can't pledge your loyalty via x game mechanic blood raider npcs will start shitting on your structures, too.
A Matari splinter group is starting regular raids in Empire highsec space, prove your loyalty with 'x' mechanic and you'll get temporary concord immunity in these systems during the duration of the 'raid' gameplay targetting amarr NPCs and capsuleers with high Amarr relations.
Devs need to destroy/disrupt the blue donuts and entrenched null power blocs, and entrenched high sec trading hubs.
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Also agree completely with the Drifter/Sleeper nonsense; New Eden did not need another high tech Deus ex machina god tier race. Jove were enough.
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Also agree completely with the Drifter/Sleeper nonsense; New Eden did not need another high tech Deus ex machina god tier race. Jove were enough.
I can't speak to the Drifter stuff which I have no clue about but...I'm not sure why you're viewing the Sleepers as "another" race. They're Jovians (the Stasis People faction, specifically). I thought this was a known thing? Or do you mean the storyline as it was originally was fine and didn't need "another" development?
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Anyways, re: Miz's rant and consequent replies, a few thoughts:
I kind of agree with Silas' approach: Storyline should primarily be driven by in-game mechanics and prod/poke/lure people into interaction. Less or non-interactive stuff like news stories / chronicles / etc are good as supplementary material, but they don't drive a lot of wide-scale engagement. So yeah, you can get 5 roleplayers in a room and create a year's worth of articles (or other "fluff" as it's called, no diss intended), but that's about as much as you can do, and it only pleases/engages a fraction of the customer base. Don't get me wrong, I still loved doing that stuff and thought it was important. Before I was in CCP, I was in ISD writing articles and running little events ingame with AURORA (back when ISD did that).
Without wider engagement though, it's hard to justify spending time on "fluff" to the project managers who determine what developers focus on, and the marketing department who want big things to advertise each expansion and drive growth. This is all doubly true when those same developers are also responsible for a range of things that players are vocal about progressing (missions, exploration sites, etc etc). Then there's the issue of how feature development worked. Content Devs were tasked with making the game appear fresh with new PvE features. Our role was never really to advance storyline, it was to bring in customers (if that makes sense - they're not incompatible things, but were often viewed as such). It's difficult to fit much storyline development into a dynamic (and managerial mindset) like that. A large chunk of storyline work was done on a volunteer basis when I was there and driven by passion, not payment.
Those traditional tasks like developing PVE / Theme Park content were to me often too heavily focused upon, to the point it wasted resources. Why? Because they didn't particularly advance the story, and they aren't really amenable to the kind of game world EVE is on a narrative/mechanical level. Take the Epic Arcs for example. That sort of stuff belongs in World of Warcraft more than it does EVE. I wasn't a real fan of them. They have some decent storyline elements in them, but like..it's entirely static. Past a certain point it becomes just a repetetive farm, and in a real sense, actively detracts from immersion and the sense of a living world when nothing ever changes.
I can appreciate that some amount of it is required, and some amount of it needs ongoing development - players need stuff to do other than PvP, it attracts a broader customer base, plays a role in developing player skills before they dive more fully into PvP sandboxes, and so on. Also, of course, CCP needs new shiny features to advertise and promote customer growth. Etc etc. The PvE has its role to play, of course.
Yet I also think there's this fallacious thinking that if we don't provide theme park content en masse in each dev cycle that it will create retention issues. I'm not so sure about that, and I wish CCP experimented (if only for a single developmental cycle) with fully allocating the same amount of resources they normally would to a feature like Epic Arcs instead to live-event-style interactive narratives like Silas describes, where factions respond dynamically to events. The Faction Warfare feature, I feel, demonstrates that you can't really create a standalone "hands off" system that is sufficiently dynamic. It needs a more committed, hands-on development team to truly be pulled off, and it that team needs to operate freely of the 6-12 month feature-release cycle. It was frustrating how CCP would praise agile / SCRUM development and yet deny us this kind of experiment using that exact model~
Of course, an approach like that requires programmers, artists, UX designers...the whole kit. These teams were busy either being committed to the PvP sandbox features (Sovereignty mechanics, for example), or PvE sandbox features, stuff like Epic Arcs (ugh). It was a difficult task trying to sell the concept of "rolling development" (sandbox PvE that is interactive, dynamic, and responsive to player inputs) to the upper management who, for all their praise of sandbox gameplay, were still quite fond of theme park approaches to developing some parts of the game. EVE is a very odd mix of the two, and that does create a bizarre roleplaying experience / world setting, where Player-to-Player interactions are dynamic and fascinating, and Player-to-Environment interactions are anything but.
Storyline in my time there was rarely valued, and when it was, its value was mostly for marketing purposes. The entire Sansha Invasion event was started and greenlight by the Marketing Dept to "generate buzz", not out of any desire to progress or otherwise enhance the storyline (that was seen as an incidental benefit, if that). The resources we were given to advance the feature were virtually non-existent (most of it was done in our free time honestly - not that I'm complaining, it was fun as fuck to work on and I volunteered that time freely). Even with just a single programmer and artist dedicated for 6 months, we could've achieved a lot more and showcased the idea of a different kind of "Sandbox PvE" to the powers that be. We couldn't get that for even a day, though, let alone months~
Maybe part of the issue was the fact the Content Team was separated from the rest of the crew (90% of CCP in Iceland, and the content team in Atlanta). Yet that didn't stop inter-office collaboration on PvE features, so I dunno about that, ultimately. Another issue for sure was that the ATL Content Team was originally a bunch of White Wolf folk, who despite being brilliant storytellers, didn't fully grasp the unique dynamics of EVE and the potential a single-server world offers for a new kind of narrative design.
Also, I can tell you that in my time there as both ISD and CCP, that approving news articles and other fluff was not as simple as push butan. If only! The politics and work processess of the storyline team were often a bit of a hindrance to this kind of streamlined process. Typically, approval was a far more arduous process that involves way too much distrust in people's ability to do a good job (I include ISD article writers here), too much oversight, and too many "little kingdoms". Of course there needs to be someone ensuring consistency and quality, but it all went too far at times, to the point that even fluff development was a lengthy and time-consuming process.
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T-T-Triple post!
Shit like this is why I quit, by the way. It was increasingly frustrating seeing the potential for us to pioneer a new kind of approach to narrative / worldbuilding / PvE design, the kind that if successfull would've potentially blazed trails in the industry...and instead, to be treated like I'm working on World of Warcraft. Other reasons too, but boy that was a big one.
:bash: :bash: :psyccp:
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Looks like I've missed a lot, what a thread~~
Weighing in, the Jove/Sleeper/Drifter storyline is all one and the same, it's not like the Drifters were an amendment just tossed in. The progression from Sleepers "sleeping" to having them finally progress into something more seemed only natural, regardless of whether the Drifters are Sleepers, Others, or Enheduanni.
They're also my personal favorite part of the game lore - that said, it's also pretty obvious that a lot of the "empire" story progression has become really staggered. I wouldn't pin that all on the lore choices by CCP though, more on the fact that the current progression of new mechanics and structures (with the next milestone in the Drifter arc likely coinciding with player stargates), and as a result of that progression slowing down, ALL main lore has been going much more slowly.
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T-T-Triple post!
Shit like this is why I quit, by the way. It was increasingly frustrating seeing the potential for us to pioneer a new kind of approach to narrative / worldbuilding / PvE design, the kind that if successfull would've potentially blazed trails in the industry...and instead, to be treated like I'm working on World of Warcraft. Other reasons too, but boy that was a big one.
:bash: :bash: :psyccp:
Belatedly, hi Nick :) You left CCP before my time (and for good reasons it seems lol), but I just wanna toss in that tons of people are definitely still deeply enjoying the things you were instrumental in setting up~~
The deep-level mysteries and pseudo-alien feel of the Jove & Sleepers are what drew me into EVE in the first place, and they're definitely remained a huge part of what keeps me going. Inter-factional political strife is cool and important too, but you can't say EVE would be EVE without both of these types of lore ;)
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Ah, also (doing my own triple-post here), has anyone by chance thrown the "Hydrostatic Podcast" at you yet, Nick? The show has drastically reduced in frequency, but some of the episodes were probably some of the most informative & fun discussions of EVE lore we've had in a long time :)
These two in particular contained what was probably some of the best back-and-forth on Jove/Sleepers/Drifter lore we ever had:
Hydrostatic Podcast - Entosis Lore Panel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reaTqvczfXg
Hydrostatic Podcast - Tiamat Lore Panel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyT6CbG4LYg
And some voice clips from one episode were actually put into the Emergent Threats trailer Makoto linked here earlier, in fact~ (which was a pretty big highlight in life for me tbh) ;)
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[spoiler]Anyways, re: Miz's rant and consequent replies, a few thoughts:
I kind of agree with Silas' approach: Storyline should primarily be driven by in-game mechanics and prod/poke/lure people into interaction. Less or non-interactive stuff like news stories / chronicles / etc are good as supplementary material, but they don't drive a lot of wide-scale engagement. So yeah, you can get 5 roleplayers in a room and create a year's worth of articles (or other "fluff" as it's called, no diss intended), but that's about as much as you can do, and it only pleases/engages a fraction of the customer base. Don't get me wrong, I still loved doing that stuff and thought it was important. Before I was in CCP, I was in ISD writing articles and running little events ingame with AURORA (back when ISD did that).
Without wider engagement though, it's hard to justify spending time on "fluff" to the project managers who determine what developers focus on, and the marketing department who want big things to advertise each expansion and drive growth. This is all doubly true when those same developers are also responsible for a range of things that players are vocal about progressing (missions, exploration sites, etc etc). Then there's the issue of how feature development worked. Content Devs were tasked with making the game appear fresh with new PvE features. Our role was never really to advance storyline, it was to bring in customers (if that makes sense - they're not incompatible things, but were often viewed as such). It's difficult to fit much storyline development into a dynamic (and managerial mindset) like that. A large chunk of storyline work was done on a volunteer basis when I was there and driven by passion, not payment.
Those traditional tasks like developing PVE / Theme Park content were to me often too heavily focused upon, to the point it wasted resources. Why? Because they didn't particularly advance the story, and they aren't really amenable to the kind of game world EVE is on a narrative/mechanical level. Take the Epic Arcs for example. That sort of stuff belongs in World of Warcraft more than it does EVE. I wasn't a real fan of them. They have some decent storyline elements in them, but like..it's entirely static. Past a certain point it becomes just a repetetive farm, and in a real sense, actively detracts from immersion and the sense of a living world when nothing ever changes.
I can appreciate that some amount of it is required, and some amount of it needs ongoing development - players need stuff to do other than PvP, it attracts a broader customer base, plays a role in developing player skills before they dive more fully into PvP sandboxes, and so on. Also, of course, CCP needs new shiny features to advertise and promote customer growth. Etc etc. The PvE has its role to play, of course.
Yet I also think there's this fallacious thinking that if we don't provide theme park content en masse in each dev cycle that it will create retention issues. I'm not so sure about that, and I wish CCP experimented (if only for a single developmental cycle) with fully allocating the same amount of resources they normally would to a feature like Epic Arcs instead to live-event-style interactive narratives like Silas describes, where factions respond dynamically to events. The Faction Warfare feature, I feel, demonstrates that you can't really create a standalone "hands off" system that is sufficiently dynamic. It needs a more committed, hands-on development team to truly be pulled off, and it that team needs to operate freely of the 6-12 month feature-release cycle. It was frustrating how CCP would praise agile / SCRUM development and yet deny us this kind of experiment using that exact model~
Of course, an approach like that requires programmers, artists, UX designers...the whole kit. These teams were busy either being committed to the PvP sandbox features (Sovereignty mechanics, for example), or PvE sandbox features, stuff like Epic Arcs (ugh). It was a difficult task trying to sell the concept of "rolling development" (sandbox PvE that is interactive, dynamic, and responsive to player inputs) to the upper management who, for all their praise of sandbox gameplay, were still quite fond of theme park approaches to developing some parts of the game. EVE is a very odd mix of the two, and that does create a bizarre roleplaying experience / world setting, where Player-to-Player interactions are dynamic and fascinating, and Player-to-Environment interactions are anything but.
Storyline in my time there was rarely valued, and when it was, its value was mostly for marketing purposes. The entire Sansha Invasion event was started and greenlight by the Marketing Dept to "generate buzz", not out of any desire to progress or otherwise enhance the storyline (that was seen as an incidental benefit, if that). The resources we were given to advance the feature were virtually non-existent (most of it was done in our free time honestly - not that I'm complaining, it was fun as fuck to work on and I volunteered that time freely). Even with just a single programmer and artist dedicated for 6 months, we could've achieved a lot more and showcased the idea of a different kind of "Sandbox PvE" to the powers that be. We couldn't get that for even a day, though, let alone months~
Maybe part of the issue was the fact the Content Team was separated from the rest of the crew (90% of CCP in Iceland, and the content team in Atlanta). Yet that didn't stop inter-office collaboration on PvE features, so I dunno about that, ultimately. Another issue for sure was that the ATL Content Team was originally a bunch of White Wolf folk, who despite being brilliant storytellers, didn't fully grasp the unique dynamics of EVE and the potential a single-server world offers for a new kind of narrative design.
Also, I can tell you that in my time there as both ISD and CCP, that approving news articles and other fluff was not as simple as push butan. If only! The politics and work processess of the storyline team were often a bit of a hindrance to this kind of streamlined process. Typically, approval was a far more arduous process that involves way too much distrust in people's ability to do a good job (I include ISD article writers here), too much oversight, and too many "little kingdoms". Of course there needs to be someone ensuring consistency and quality, but it all went too far at times, to the point that even fluff development was a lengthy and time-consuming process.[/spoiler]
This was a really good reply. Thank you. :)
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Yeah, FurryFromAbove here is right, of course. Pure fluff would never be enough to solve everything perfectly, and I didn't mean to imply that it was. I was more thinking of that theoretical initial work being a road map that could be used as the framework for exactly that kind of more dynamic progression of New Eden. If the hurdles of bureaucracy and corporate politics could somehow be overcome, that storyline 'framework' hammered out by these interested and experienced people could be a driving force for what Nickles and Silly Vitalia is talking about. Raise a little hype and story about X faction and its Y actions through a few news pieces, then in an ideal world it really shouldn't require much dev time to do exactly the kinds of things DropTeddy and Aqua
Velva Vitalia are mentioning.
... however, in lieu of a perfect world, I still think the closest thing to a 'realistically possible' hope we could have would be if CCP made more effective use of the quite significant resource we turbonerds who fucking love this setting are. I mean, look at us. A decade and a half in and we still nerd just as hard about this stuff as ever. We're probably more experienced with the setting than most of the devs by now, and collectively we've probably done more world-building and nerding over it than CCP has.
Best of all, from CCP's side of things... we're fucking paying them to do so. Talk about free labor. It wouldn't be easy, and it probably isn't even entirely possible, for the reasons you've mentioned like personal little internal kingdoms, lack of freedom to do a job without a lot of oversight and so on, but... it's almost depressing how this could be a very huge resource for CCP and the game.
Of course, it's not just 'push butan' right now. It could be, though. I can't even imagine it'd be difficult, if CCP's higher ups aren't being colossal dicks about certain things.
Makoto, by the way, that I'm waging a war against the Amarr bloc right now is in spite of the problems I've been mentioning. It's also damn near impossible to effectively do. This is a bit of a sidetrack, but somewhat relevant: I was talking to a guy in Electus Matari and the war came up, and also some structures I'd scouted out and noticed, etc. I mentioned that as a solo pilot, I'd have to resort to mercs to lay down any pain on those. (As it should be, you should never be able to take down citadels solo, even when unfit I feel.) His response to that was that he'd actually love to help out with that stuff, but most pilots in EM couldn't even enter Amarr space because of standings. It wasn't even that bad before, when you could just avoid the stuff with Amarr NPCs, but now you can't even do storylines etc without incurring negative faction standings.
This game now pretty actively discourage this kind of loyalist play.
All the best PvE rewards in this game? Gotta leave the nations behind for those. PvP on behalf of the nations? Wreck your standings so you can't even do stuff in enemy space really, and limited to a really bad warzone where T1 frigs and dessie is pretty permanently required to be the standard, or you'll be screwed hard. The best industry in the game happens in wormholes and Sov Null.
Loyalist gameplay is pretty discouraged, and pretty much all PvP players who like to roleplay end up in the null alliances, w-space alliances or the few lowsec specialists that still exists but as pirates. I'm not lamenting your ability to play as relatively neutral. I'm lamenting that it's pretty much mandatory if you're not going to be very much stuck in a rut there's no way out of without pretty much having to forgo said loyalist stance.
EDITED TO ADD: Storyline desperately needs more GRRR. Give Catiz a seizure and turn her into Catiz Rex (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us2ylGAwBnk) damn it. This kind of setting thrives on conflict as a driver, and the nations could all be pretty badass in that regard.
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Great points Miz.
What you’re preaching resonates with me a great deal. It’s exactly the kind of thing I tried to push for. There is a dichotomy in how CCP approaches its game that doesn’t do justice to its potential, and it doesn’t just apply to the PvP/PvE split like I was describing previously. It equally applies to the storyline too, as you suggest.
And it is very frustrating, especially given the unique opportunities that EVE (a single-server world) offers up. It makes player-driven storyline significantly easier for one, and profoundly more effective (relative to multiple instances ala World of Warcraft) for another. There’s even potentially the argument to be made this it’s only possible in a single server environment. This could be a huge “comparative advantage” for CCP in the MMO market – the only game capable of pulling this kind of thing off (cost-)effectively, perhaps even at all. It was so frustrating being unable to communicate the potential here to the Marketing guys.
If PvP is the embodiment of EVE Online, then PvE is far closer to World of Warcraft, as I was saying. And if the PvP driven content is the embodiment of “bottom-up” player-driven storyline, then the core storyline is the embodiment of traditional “top-down” narrative approaches – what I’d call the “Hollywood model”.
The Hollywood model is how narrative has been created forever; in film, in literature, and so on. This is almost necessarily how it must be in a passively-consumed non-interactive medium like a film or novel. Games offer the opportunity and potential for a different approach, however, due to their uniquely interactive nature.
In the Hollywood model, the author is the “god-creator” and hands down their narrative from on high like scripture to the grateful peasants (a top-down model). The player-driven model, by contrast, is a bottom-up approach. The role of the author is lessened to something closer to “demigod-secretary-gatekeeper”. While they might still throw down some narrative of their own and do so with a unique authority, they also serve another function: to take what offerings are placed at their feet and put it on a pedestal beside their own scripture.
And perhaps, therein lay one huge obstacle for me in pushing it. Some folks in storyline seemed to like being gods. Some seemed incapable of, or resistant to, imagining any other way. Some outright balked at the notion of giving such “power” to the players. Even White Wolf folks struggled to get it, despite a history of making tabletop games that echo the model of giving players tools to make their own stories.
Ego? Hubris? A lack of imagination? Distrust? I couldn’t ever understand why they weren’t pissing-my-pants excited about the prospect as I was, and I doubt I ever will. I am in no way throwing either of these guys under the bus because both are lovely humans, but I got the distinct impression that Tony and Abraxas weren’t warm to the idea, and they both had a lot of clout. I invoke their names only because it illustrates perhaps an important point. They and others had this whole-hearted embrace of the Hollywood model as the writers of EVE novels (and in the case of other storyline folks, as people who desperately wanted to have a crack at writing a novel too). I don’t fault them individually, but nonetheless was frustrated by the glorification of the novels as the pinnacle of “making it” in the storyline department. To me they were kind of vanity projects, in a sense, that pushed things further towards traditional approaches when we should’ve been boldly going in the exact opposite direction.
In the time since leaving I’ve also wondered if there was a political element I sucked at navigating (I was young and naïve in my time there, now I’m just old and naïve). I’m also pretty sure I did a terrible job of communicating all this. Perhaps the storyline crew felt threatened by the idea, and I didn’t do enough to assuage their fears. Who knows, ultimately.
But the whole purpose of Arek’Jalaan from my end was to demonstrate how this could work, and show just how much could be done with it. It was a rebellion against the traditional approach (hence its name, taken from player-created Caldari language that translates roughly as “to make a rebellion”, if I recall).
With just me, one developer, on the task (and only part time), and my player army of turbonerd content creators (who as you rightly point out are PAYING CCP TO WORK FOR THEM), I wanted to show just how much content we could shit out. The answer? A whole fucking lot. More than I anticipated, and more than I could handle at times, honestly. That’s why I set the EVElopedia project up and encouraged people to create content. I needed a body of work to show around internally. That’s also why, after we had created content, I then put some of it in-game: to show this wasn’t just fluff. Granted, it was in-game fluff, but that was only because I lacked any programming/art resources and not for any other reason. The whole thing was supposed to be a prototype that convinced people.
Even with what amounted to working proof of the concept in front of them, few seemed convinced. I wasn’t taken very seriously in my time at CCP (probably as much my own fault in communicating, as it was a lack of vision). That’s around the time I lost hope and got out. I wouldn’t describe the lost opportunity personally as “almost” depressing. For me it was just…crushing. I was very depressed, very bitter, and so incredibly angry. It took a long time to get past it (years, honestly).
These days I study sustainability and it’s good for giving me perspective. As much as all this frustrates me, I’ve come to appreciate there are bigger problems in our world, and that gives me a strange kind of comfort to know. I may have fucked all this up, but there are bigger challenges, and brighter opportunities, ahead. I learned many lessons from my time at CCP that I think will help with all that.
There’s a YouTuber called CleanPrinceGaming who does video essays, often critiquing the industry. He recently claimed that the failure of Pokemon Go represents one of the biggest public failures of the industry in the last decade. I reached out to him and asked “Do you want to know what I think the biggest private/under-the-radar failing is? Cause I got a story for you!”. Perhaps one day this essay here will be a YouTube video that can inspire other developers and even gamers to push their studios for this kind of model. We’ll see~
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Belatedly, hi Nick :) You left CCP before my time (and for good reasons it seems lol), but I just wanna toss in that tons of people are definitely still deeply enjoying the things you were instrumental in setting up~~
I'm super-glad to hear it! :D I may listen to those podcasts on the bus sometime...or not. Some of this stuff, when I bask into it, it breaks my heart. :P
@Samira, cheers. It does me some good to offload all this stuff. I'm glad folks appreciate the insights, imperfect as they are.
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Don't really have much to add to that, other than looking forwards to the potential video essay.
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There's certainly a balance, I think, when it comes to narrative. On one hand, some of it necessarily needs to be driven by development and production plans; on the other hand, players friggin' love it when they show up in the news, even if it's a casual mention of participants in a CCP-run event that they weren't necessarily driving.
What's more, I'd say the current story developers realize that the existing roleplay and lore communities loved A'J and the interaction it afforded, even as they realize the amount of work that'd go into it.
My hope is that Ragni, CCP Loki, will be able to start back up on the Scope News videos, even if it's at a lower production rate of once every few weeks, once a month. That was an amazing avenue for CCP notices of player happenings, and for pushing major news for development. :x
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This is a really informative conversation, thank you all.
I've always been interested in why game companies don't utilise players for story development far more. As noted above, EvE seems particularly well placed for this.
I then recall that early in Ultima Online we had an initiative that might have developed into a model for this, the volunteer Companion program. That was brought to a screeching halt when some of the volunteers sued Origin for 'avoiding the minimum wage' 'unpaid overtime' and so forth. The program was promptly cancelled.
One wonders if game companies are significantly worried about the precedent, particularly in terms of intellectual property, copyright and the inevitable willingness of somebody to sue for something. If they only use employees, these legal concerns are removed.
I don't know the game industry well enough to claim that this has prevented all player contributions (in a formal relationship sense) but I've not heard of any major game that has that kind of relationship.
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What's more, I'd say the current story developers realize that the existing roleplay and lore communities loved A'J and the interaction it afforded, even as they realize the amount of work that'd go into it.
My problem with A'J was that it forced loyalists to stop being loyalists if they wanted to be part of it, since there was no barrier to entry. The model was fine, but there would need to be some granularity and separation of things I feel. When it's more Angel, Gurista and Sani Sabik involved than anyone else, it becomes a bit of a "How the everloving hell can my character do anything but shoot at this?" thing.
To this day, Miz regrets heavily helping Hilen Tukoss get a defense fleet on his exodus. She wishes she'd shot him and his freighter down instead.
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Miz, you can of course understand the interesting position Itsukame-Zainou is when it had involvement with the remains of Hilen Tukoss. ;)
That said, Dropbear, I think you'll be entertained to hear that we just concluded SeyCon YC120 at the Burreau Memorial Laboratory in Eram today. (yeah, we've moved it from Seyllin! It's a thing.)
Also, I took the liberty of messaging you some questions. Advice on how to organize things/inspire more participation/enable content creators would be much appreciated. :x
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Burreau Memorial Laboratory in Eram today. (yeah, we've moved it from Seyllin! It's a thing.)
Could you like... move it back? So many baddies in my space, unshootable in a Citadel.
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Sorry! Freeports. :(
If it's any consolation, specifically excluded Val until I could do a cargo scan to make sure no JOVE MEME WORMS shenanigans would be engaged in. ;)
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the kind of thing I tried to push for
Nick...stahp! I was and still am sad you left CCP. If you make me miss you any more I'm gonna cry.
:cry: Wait, too late...
But I'm happy that things are working out for you with working on more serious stuff than internet spaceships. Keep it up. :cube:
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When it's more Angel, Gurista and Sani Sabik involved than anyone else, it becomes a bit of a "How the everloving hell can my character do anything but shoot at this?" thing.
Was that actually the case ?
from what I remember, most of the projects were from people who weren't especially "roleplayers".
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What's more, I'd say the current story developers realize that the existing roleplay and lore communities loved A'J and the interaction it afforded, even as they realize the amount of work that'd go into it.
My problem with A'J was that it forced loyalists to stop being loyalists if they wanted to be part of it, since there was no barrier to entry. The model was fine, but there would need to be some granularity and separation of things I feel. When it's more Angel, Gurista and Sani Sabik involved than anyone else, it becomes a bit of a "How the everloving hell can my character do anything but shoot at this?" thing.
To this day, Miz regrets heavily helping Hilen Tukoss get a defense fleet on his exodus. She wishes she'd shot him and his freighter down instead.
You should have! Damn traitor deserved no better then the embrace of space.
That said for obvious reasons I-RED and those involved with us were unable to get involved in A'J, due to our loyalties to Ishukone. Which is how the game goes. :)
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Although it would require a lot of extra behind the scenes work, I've always been a fan of the GM's running A or B scenarios for players to decide and then rolling with the results.
IE for Caldari Prime event there should have been more than one outcome the players determine and then the story moves down that path...
BUT I digress. Speaking of captain's quarters, this is so much of what I had envisioned for EVE 3rd person walking in stations. Sigh. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5rXhAJcSeQ&t= take special look at the station interiors, the shopping, the npc interactions, this with an EVE skin would be quite amazing.
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Vherokior dust masks when?
(https://i.imgur.com/7RfVbn2.png)
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Those people are really bad shots in that video. :P
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Back on the topic of Captain's Quarters...
[–]ccp_darwinCCP Games 19 points 13 hours ago
There isn’t a showcase like CQ right now, but the animation system and the animation authoring pipeline have recently been overhauled so we can do more with them in the future.
[–]ccp_darwinCCP Games 10 points 9 hours ago
I’m a graphics software engineer specializing in 3D character systems. Most of my work over the past year has been to improve and modernize characters, so that they could play a greater role in the game. These are complex systems, but we’re in a much better place with them now than we were a year ago, and I look forward to where we’ll be able to go from here.
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:O
Where was this posted?
This is exactly what I had hoped they were doing when they started ripping out the old systems.
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:O
Where was this posted?
This is exactly what I had hoped they were doing when they started ripping out the old systems.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/7tl925/asking_the_important_questions_why_do_female/dtdmgx0/
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I was there :lol:
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\o/
\o/ \o/ \o/
Hype to maximum levels.
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Oh god, why :bash:
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:eek:
Oh my gerd!
Ship-me-she-pee-pee. YES!
8)
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Did I miss something? They didn't announce new features just better animation tools? For cutscenes or news videos or something? I don't think they are launching any new avatar mechanics?
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Did I miss something? They didn't announce new features just better animation tools? For cutscenes or news videos or something? I don't think they are launching any new avatar mechanics?
They haven't "announced" anything. But they've basically said that the old tech was cumbersome to work with and maintain and that's why they're getting rid of it (which we've all known, incarna flopped because they made the dumb idea to swap to a hyperadvanced but inefficient in-house engine instead of the third party engine they were originally planning to use). So along with captain's quarters, they've ditched PhysX and the in-house animation engine for a third party engine. That's made the character animations less clean and they don't have dynamic cloth/hair/gravity anymore, but this may make it easier for them to expand avatar stuff in the future.
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Let's hope they don't. The less dev time wasted on that nonsense, the better. I play internet spaceships. Put the animators and graphical guys on more/new/better models and textures for ships, stations, visual effects and so on.
The best cutscenes and videos I've ever seen in games have tended to be simple 2D artwork with panning and a good voice over. The universe of Eve is far better served by the gorgeous kind of grim/cyberpunk artwork we used to get for the Chronicles and so on, rather than the ridiculously clean and uncanny valley like stuff we've seen with character animations in some of the trailers. I'll grant you, Birth of a Capsuleer and Wreck their Dreams both had good use of them, but 90% of story stuff that involves actual characters would look so much better as painted artwork.
Let the game remain internet spaceships, and use the correct medium (text and artwork) for the worldbuilding, please. You can't reasonably fit all the awesome of New Eden's baseliner world into 3D animated scenes without investing a ridiculous amount of money and effort into it, and it'd in all likelihood still be pretty bad. That amount of money and effort going into good writing and some pieces of art to go with them would be leading to a vastly greater volume of awesome.
I know today's audience don't have the attention span required to get past the first paragraphs, but those people aren't exactly the ones who'd give a shit anyway.
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"Put the janitor on dog washing duty, I don't pay for this clean windows nonsense."
Also you just cited the two major trailers in the last two years as an example of how good the character animations are for trailers.
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The 3rd person avatar ship has sailed for Eve, Miz is right.
2d, painterly artwork with pans and voiceovers like the old intro are much more bang for your buck so to speak esp in this setting.
That being said they -should- hire out 3rd party for some animated Eve movies or miniseries. People would absolutely pay a few bucks for some great series set in New Eden. Just look at any high production value anime or similar that integrates space/scifi ships and human characters, there are tons of examples.
4 mini series for the 4 races, you could even do an anthology like the Animatrix with variety of stories within the IP at all levels. Hell just animate a few of the Chronicles
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Let's hope they don't. The less dev time wasted on that nonsense, the better. I play internet spaceships. Put the animators and graphical guys on more/new/better models and textures for ships, stations, visual effects and so on.
This argument is about as tired as the "lel hurp durp space barbies" one. I play internet spaceships too. I don't play null sec charades or with capital ships, so, should I then complain about the development time wasted on that from my perspective? Focus on subcapital ships pls. And high and lowsec, only, since less than 20% play outside highsec anyway. (https://imgur.com/a/KOdub)
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Different thing entirely. CQ/Incarna/Animation is very much not part of the gameplay of Eve. Hell, it wasn't even when it existed. The game of Eve Online is internet spaceships. The industry, the bearing, the pewpew, the cooperation and interaction with or against people and so on. Focusing on something that is completely detached from that, adds nothing to that but pointless dev distraction and funding, is very much not equivalent to focusing on either of the secs etc.
As for those statistics, you may have forgotten that this is Eve Online and the norm is having a ton of alts. Pretty much everyone in low and null also has one or more highsec alts for trade, hauling or other purposes while your average highsec bear main will rarely have anywhere near as many. In all likelihood, you'll find that a very significant chunk of your 'highseccers' are actually low/null folk on an alt.
Whether or not an argument is 'old' or not is pretty irrelevant, if you don't have a good counter argument.
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As for those statistics, you may have forgotten that this is Eve Online and the norm is having a ton of alts. Pretty much everyone in low and null also has one or more highsec alts for trade, hauling or other purposes while your average highsec bear main will rarely have anywhere near as many. In all likelihood, you'll find that a very significant chunk of your 'highseccers' are actually low/null folk on an alt.
Whether or not an argument is 'old' or not is pretty irrelevant, if you don't have a good counter argument.
As for those statistics, those statistics display specifically where players are active. And according to that, around 75% of the playerbase is mainly active in high-sec, alts or no. Quick dirty maths even assuming one highsec alt for every null/low/wh player (most likely overestimate, plenty of scout, mining, indy etc. alts reside outside high as well) would make about 55% of eve's players genuine high sec dwellers.
As for "good counter argument", how do you make good counter-arguments for what is essentially an opinion, other than throwing in your own opinion? You can't, and that's why I've been debating Jenn aSide and other regular curmudgeons for eons - neither side won't budge on what the other considers waste of dev resources.
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Opinions are not made equal. The reasoning and thoughts behind them add or remove from their validity.
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Opinions are not made equal. The reasoning and thoughts behind them add or remove from their validity.
Only if you're willing to give those reasons validity. I'm not keen on rehashing the same arguments I, and many others have made over the years once again in this thread, but what always happens is that both sides give, in their opinion good reasons and thoughts on their side of the argument, only to have them summarily dismissed as "nonsense" by the other party. If you truly want to see good reasons why EVE could use avatar gameplay, there are several 100+ page threadnaughts in the old forum and some of them are rehashed in the dev blog thread on the new one.
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This debate might have made more sense during the Incarna snafu time period many years ago, when ccp was staffed-up and cash flush to throw (waste) money at this sort of thing (or fortunately also simultaneously developing a 3rd person vampire mmo they could double up on some development time with).
That ship was set on fire and pushed into a black hole; Eve as currently designed by corporate has more in common with bejeweled or a mobile game, pumping the $$ out of customers in the most efficient way possible. They don't have a former EA pimp in there monetizing/ running shit for no reason.
Let's be real they don't have the resources staffed currently to even cover new feature heavy releases let one am entire 3rd person branch off.
Also let's be real 90% of Eve stations are empty or have 5 afk players docked, things would be awfully lonei or just force even more people into a few locations to not have it look like a ghost town.
Believe me I was All-In for Incarna when I saw those first trailers with the station bars and games and map rooms. That sort of vision does not exist in that dojo anymore.
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I don't necessarily disagree, Silas, I just get inordinately annoyed every time I see the "The less dev time wasted on that nonsense, the better. I play internet spaceships." type of lines touted around. Call it an old habit at this point. Especially as we all play internet spaceships, yet the arguments tend to always devolve in to the "you just want WoW in space, go play that" "ugh no, let me explain" merry-go-round.
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I wanted WIS more than I wanted internet spaceships, hah. It's always been the worst-realized part of Eve since launch; they made no effort to truly show you that sense of scale and world building in the actual game engine.
I would donate one of my kidneys to erase Star Citizen's rather terrible and boring IP and swap in the Eve IP to use with their amazingly strong game engine and gameplay possibilities.
The frustrating part is that eve's rather unique approach to internet spaceships would have potentially been just as unique with 3rd person avatars.
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I remember when WIS started really being a discussion point with all the videos and such, and people wondered how it'd affect RP, both in positive and negative ways - because of EVE's reliance on text chat for communication, and the way channels work.
I've been playing Black Desert for 16 months now, and roleplaying there for 14. I've really yet to see any real negatives to having the physical avatars when it comes to RP. It's amazing for helping visualize a space and the people and objects within it. It adds a whole layer of social behavior out of character, too - even when people can chat to each other from across the entire game world, they still come and congregate together in a physical space.
Honestly, I find it hard to consider going back to having text only without that visual aid.
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Incarna I assume was meant to use voice communication, seeing as it also introduced voice fonts - i.e. lowering or increasing pitch of the voice basicly (I think those are still there, though I haven't checked in a long time).
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Yes, I recall there was talk of being within earshot or not when standing in the same room with others.
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Voice fonts proved they would be absolutely atrocious and detrimental to RP within about an hour of the server coming up after patch day - and we had voice fonts long, long before Incarna's release. At least a year and a half prior, in fact; I was in Ghost Festival at the time, and Incarna released towards the end of my time in Veto.
We immediately played around with them in corp chat and kind of collectively went "LOL, NOPE" at the results - the complete inability to tweak or customize the fonts in any way, shape or form basically killed the feature for RP use before it had a chance to go anywhere.
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the proliferation of alts means that ultimately, rp pvp has no meaning, because nobody puts anything of any importance at stake, because their isk and ship sources are concealed behind the curtains of altery.
"How is X able to afford all these militia losses ?" ponders someone IC. And there might be IC talk of cutting off the supply of materiel to X. But nothing will come of that IC interaction. Because X is supplied by Y alts, and there's nothing that can be done about that.
The only thing that's ever at stake is "face", which can be lost through awful IGS posting, and/or behaving like a cad at rp events. For which incarna might have been useful.
But it was not to be. Oh well.
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because nobody puts anything of any importance at stake
[..]
and/or behaving like a cad at rp events.
Hi! I'm nobody.
Also, can confirm acting like a cat at RP events will hurt your rep at least a little.