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[Jade Constantine]

Been a bad year for eve really. Incarna was terrible for people's interest level and multiple years of CCP failing to provide new content or gameplay for the game came home to roost. This eroded some of our (SF) veteran players desire to play the game. Speaking personally I've been pretty sidetracked the last six months with working on my new fixer-upper house so haven't had as much time as I used to for Eve - but it would be false to say thats the only reason - I too am pretty bored with the current state of Eve and there is a real problem within a roleplay alliance that doesn't really have any more RP targets to involve ourselves with.

We spent last summer in Placid where we had a war with Moira and blew up their HQ.

And then wintered in Otou around Gal/Minmatar lowsec where we established a load of zero tax customs offices and played diplomatic political fixers amongst a wide group of anti pirate interests who had ended up inexplicably shooting each other.

Been okay I guess but the problem is we don't really know what to do with Eve at the moment. All Eve RP seems either forum based or FW and we've done our attempts to intervene with the latter over the last few years and its gotten a bit old.

So currently most SF are training skills - making passive income and playing other games.

It would be the ideal time for somebody to wardec and hound us into oblivion to be honest.

World of Tanks
Wargames European Escalation
Crusader Kings II

Are currently being played a lot.

And we had Skyrim over christmas of course and Mass Effect 3 next week.

***

Realistically at this point I think CCP need to manage something pretty amazing with the summer expansion that revitalizes long neglected parts of the game to get our interest back.

[Graelyn]

I'm not exactly holding my breath on that one, Jade.

[Caellach Marellus]

Bounty hunting is coming... one day.... no really it is....

*twitch*

[Z.Sinraali]

Oh hey it's that guy.

[Lyn Farel]

Yeah yeah yeah let's blame Incarna one more time. T_T

[Hamish Grayson]

Incarna may have got the killmail but it was Empyrean Age that alpha'd it into 10% structure.

[kalaratiri]

Apocrypha got a few repair cycles off

[Jade Constantine]

Tyrannis burnt out the hardeners tbh

[Mizhara]

And players have throughout all the expansions done their best to kill off everything. Let's not put the blame squarely on CCP. The RP community has never stood nor fallen on their words alone.

[Hamish Grayson]

Let's not put the blame squarely on CCP.

Since you clearly have the authority to dictate were we can and cannot put the blame, I guess we have to choice but to obey you.

[Mizhara]

You read a lot into a very simple statement. If you wish to take it as an order, I'm not going to stop you. I do like having minions. If you grow up and read things without running it through some dickification filter however, I'm sure you'll figure out what the post means.

[Jade Constantine]

Well you can certainly blame rp'ers for making mistakes and not dealing with adversity as well as they should perhaps - but on the other hand, CCP do have some significant responsibility for failing to provide an environment conducive to creative RP themselves. The implementation of faction warfare that came to dominate the RP community for multiple years without plot devolopment or iteration has certainly played a major role in strangling creativity and innovation across the player base.

Put simply if you wanted to RP conflict you were expected to sign up to a loyalist group and get involved in FW otherwise you found yourselves in an environment with dwindling numbers of opponents and opportunities for interaction. And of course if you did take the plunge into FW you got to play identikit loyalist stereotypes of the "good soliders" for your respective faction.

Problem is twofold really. FW became everything for the RP community because the free wardec and justification for your RP loyalites was impossible to turn down at the same time it became a straightjacket for RP as you were locked into an endless war that even CCP lost interest in after the first year.

Sure, people do RP outside of Factionwarfare (a bit) but it tends to forum-based or extremely incidental to players who are simply pirates or whatnot on the side.

So @ Mizhara - I don't believe you can really excuse CCP from the blame of what Empyrean Age did to the game from the implementation and abandonment of FW that would ultimately suck in and strip away individuality from loyalist RP while removing credible antagonists from the sights of non-loyalists.

Of course as players we kinda have some responsiblility of our own - fuck, I was head of the CSM when they demo'ed Empyrean age and I got seduced as much as anyone by the idea of roleplay with consequences and the cold war hotting up between empires. But to be quite honest I expected Faction Warfare to be so much more than it ended up being - I believed in iterations back then, I genuinely expected pirate factions to be involved, borders to shift, involvement from opposition forces and occupation to mean something. If CCP had said to us then "this is all it will be for the next five years" then I'd like to hope my younger self would have told them to fuck right off.

[Jakiin]

The problem is, JC, that CCP isn't doing any of this for RPers. We make up a small fraction of the overall community. For reference, I decided to check two chat channels: The Summit (Probably the single largest in-game gathering place of EVE players that RP), and EVE Radio (Probably the single largest in-game gathering place of EVE players that prefer schizophrenic-genre music hosted by people with bad accents over their own music libraries).

The Summit [35]
EVE Radio [414]

Now, let's be extraordinarily generous and say this indicates we make up 10% of the player base. So that means that 10% of the population RPs while they make things, pew pew, grind missions, or play corp/alliance politics, as opposed to the 90% who don't care at all.

Now, when you look at Faction Warfare, don't look at it from the perspective of an RPer, look at it from the perspective of a 'straight' PvPer. It's an excellent introduction to fleet PvP for new players, and allows corps to pew pew without the many and varied risks associated with it before. Faction Warfare, for straight PvPers, works. Adding consequences would only be applying shades of nullsec warfare to something that's right now a beautiful bit of Red versus Blue PvP you just can't get anywhere else. It would be a lot of extra work for CCP to do something that most people aren't really interested in and and goodly portion would be actively against.

Does it suck for us? Hoo boy, does it ever. I see your point about FW's affect on RP, and I do remember the good ol' days where PvP loyalists would do more than just keep fighting an everwar. But at the same time, my individualist friend, that's their call. FW is no longer a shiny, new thing full of promise: we know exactly what it is. If the Pew Pew RPers are wasting their time with it, then at this point that's on them. We can't keep blaming CCP for it, because A) it was never really intended for us and B) it's really up to us, as a whole, to accept that and move on.

[Lyn Farel]

It is easy to put all the blame on CCP. Sure something went wrong with EA, but who honestly would have expected that ? I mean, sure, I am not a big fan of them still doing nothing to keep up with the sparse news we had the first year of factionnal warfare, and not improving upon it over the time. But they are a game company with limited means that have a lot to do. Look at mining. It has not really changed since the very beginning of Eve, and we are still waiting for it to get a little more love, and miners are definitly more numerous than  us, RPers. A lot of sides in the game are in the same situation, including now... FW. After all, they at least partially developped FW for us, the RP playerbase.

I still remember vividly how almost every RPer was happy when they finally announced that the factionnal warfare they had been planning since 2005 was eventually going to be released. Nobody expected the flaws of the plot we know of now that followed after. Nobody expected things to get dull. Or maybe someone did, I dont know. Not me, at least, and a lot of people too. I was not really attracted by FW (the gameplay itself) when it was released and it got me several months before deciding to try it (I had nothing else to do at the time). Weirdly enough, before its release I was very eager to taste the new fresh RP it was supposed to bring (added to that epic ton of breaking news we had the day it got released, I was like a child in heaven refreshing my browser every minute), but I was also not really interested in its gameplay. After, I got disanchanted by all the can of worms the plot brought and that we have already spoken about countless times, and weirdly enough as I said, I found the gameplay damn good and fitting for me, even in its unpolished state it has always been.

So yes I do think that with detachement and now that we have seen what went wrong, it is easy to blame. But when I put myself back that year, I still feel that nobody really expected that. Now then, of course, we can still blame CCP for not having taken the time to make it evolve, but nullsec put aside, everything is rarely put up to date, or very slowly. They eventually did it with exploration, and some other examples, and I still hope that FW and lowsec turn will come someday too, if they stop being so obsessed about nullsec that day.

That is the same thing for Incarna too. They decided to more or less cancel its developpement and it is now in a very unfinished and not really usefull/interesting state that reminds me FW, lowsec, and all these things that need some love. And in that case, I think that CCP screwed 100 times more than the time they implemented EA : at least they did not do the mistake to go for what pissed off most of the playerbase about microtransactions, etc, and all we already know about the Incarna fiasco. Here I blame them happily for btuchering all the efforts of their devellopment team (especially as I am part of that minority that still hope to see Incarna fully implemented and meaningful someday), but the time EA got here, I do not know at all how I could blame them. What they did was pretty cool.

[Silas Vitalia]

Slight Derail:

The funny thing is, they don't need to re-write the entire code for FW to improve it -vastly-.  A few small tweaks and you add some real dynamism, and hence interest.

1. Sort out capture/control mechanics (easy as changing the variables for timers / location spawns / ship restrictions / HP for 'objectives' to be destroyed, etc' A few iterations on sisi to find the right numbers and tweak after revisions.

2. CHANGABLE security status for systems, on all border areas. That .5 system you use to stage out of should not always be .5  If the enemy captures the system next door, it should drop to .4, etc. The 'front' should actually -mean- something, as far as rewards and perils for spending your time there. 

You want to encourage people to pvp in contested areas by offering x rewards, instead of farming sites, etc. There should be tangible ISK rewards for owning an area.

Maybe faction control of an area boosts agent rewards by 300% or something, and only accessible to certain pilots, that sort of thing. Get the PVPers to secure areas for the carebears to make money, and you'd add some dynamics for cooperation and funding of conflicts. This should apply all over the galaxy actually.

Do an expansion where you add facwar/lowec attention to nearly all the border regions. Don't bother with all the mission writing, etc. Just add the gameplay and expand the fronts.