On a side note, I have to agree with Jade...not just in general but also in the context of I truly feel that a massive shake up of null needs to happen. How to do it though, I'm not sure.
Problem is Eve has gotten massively bigger in terms of fleet numbers and what you need to make an impact while not getting massively bigger in terms of how many people are actually playing the game, generating an income for CCP and funding the development of the game, plot, plot, background or interest.
This is a bizarre apparent contradiction but there are design missteps and failures along the way:
Take first 5 years of eve - you had concurrent player numbers of 7000-15000. Game felt fresh and new, as a player you mattered. Fleet fights might be 5 v 5 10 v 10, or an awsome 100 v 100 in early block wars. Most organizations could soak a few battleship losses but would suffer in a prolonged attrition war and fall apart or sue for peace.
Then things began to change, sovereignty models and passive moon income began to make nullsec entities extremely rich and there was no balancing drain on resources. Things like improved server performance made fleets huge, people used passive income to plex for alts, RR removed attrition from fleet fights. Invulnerable outposts studded nullsec making the landscape more and more difficult to re-conquer or change. The rich became richer and everyone else more risk averse.
The Concurrent numbers doubled but fleet sizes went up by 10x - the role of the individual was eroded. In most massive bloc fights you have half a dozen people actually playing the game by commanding and thousands of drones pressing F1 and anchoring on the primary. All big successful alliances essentially became the same - same external logistics, same gaming guild philosophy and atmosphere. The goons were the first really, but they would go on to influence culture and feel across nullsec.
But while fleet sizes and barrier to entry to achieve anything in the game had skyrocketed the amount of money CCP had through subs to spend on anything interesting to the rest of us stayed the same or diminished. We had some astonishing mis-steps from CCP. Wasted millions on the vampire game, wasted millions on Dust 514, abandoned conceptual development, greedy microtransactions, 18 month plans of nothing, player rage and mass sackings of its staff. But nothing really to address the essential core problems which meant that while Eve only had a concurrent user level of twice its golden age it felt like the individual player was nothing at all.
There are some core issues:
Player corporations and alliances are all mechanically the same. This is boring as hell. Aside from customising a logo and name and setting a tax rate they are identical. Some will go on to become famous - but there are 100,000 dull samey corps in the game. If creating an organization involved making choices, compromises, investments and would differentiate your experience and exposure to the sandbox that would be a huge step forwards.
Too much perfect intelligence:
Eve suffers from a hideous disease called perfect standings awareness and local chat as an intel tool. This corrodes the experience from top to bottom in conventional space. It makes fleet battles an excercise in ordering spreadsheets and means %99 of players don't get to play. It means there is no way to avoid, hide, fool, smuggle past, or otherwise evade the eye of the powerful in space. All strategic conflict is timer based and TIDI means you cannot use initiative and momentum to achieve even the smallest objective.
Too little loss:
Fleet RR is a cancer on the game. It means that winners take no casualties as a rule. Its one of the main things that mean modern eve battles are inferior to battles happening in 2003-2004. You can't force a Pyrrhic victory on an enemy, you don't get a hard fought draw, there is no ongoing cost to the side that's winning. And without war costing - funds just increase, more ships, more hardware, more outposts, more grind more ... dullsville really.
Indestructible outposts:
I ran on a campaign to make these destructible in 2008 and won the first CSM with more votes than any other bloc candidate. I told CCP that outpost spam would ruin the feel of 0.0 and by insulating organizations from strategic loss would add to the problem and mean the current winners would be increasingly impossible to dislodge. I got this proposal voted through the CSM only to be told by CCP "sorry we can't do it because nobody understands the code". Now six years on we have a stagnated nullsec full of pointless spammed outposts nobody can do anything about that means it takes 10,000 man days of siege to clear a single region. But still, you talk about making them destructible and the powerful players in 0.0 balk at the idea and warn CCP off.
Too much hiring from the player base:
The problem with eve is its a factional tribal game from the player base and people are loyal to their mates, they want to win and make sure their mate's win. CCP has traditionally been cheapasses, they don't pay well and not many people want to live in Iceland. So they make up their hiring needs from veteran eve players. These people don't come to the design table with fresh eyes, they come from the player community and with the bias and opinions created from that sphere. The devs want to continue being popular with the big fish in nullsec, nullsec tells them not to rock the boat, no design that could possibly discomfort nullsec gets anywhere near the game, and yet nullsec bleats about how boring everything is.
So we've massively increased fleet sizes making the individual meaningless.
We've massively increased wallets of the powerful making losses meaningless.
We've massively reinforced the holdings of the powerful making attrition meaningless (or impossible)
We've increased the amount of hardware needed to host 2000 man fleet fights that look terrible in videos making nobody from outside the game want to play this.
And all the while the concurrent player numbers have barely doubled since 2005.
Active development has reduced. CCP have laid off background writers, events team, creative people. 2 other games have crashed and burned. All we are left with today is minor ship balance changes, some redesign work on industry and a new timeline promising player owned stargates in a couple of years.
But the game is stagnant. Nullsec will not change. Privately the coalition leaders are not unhappy with the prospect of Eve going bankrupt with them in top spot - it would be a kind of victory after all. But in order to get back to the spirit of 2005 and before when we had individuals achieving things, making stories, making names and enjoying the freedom of the sandbox we need some radical change both within CCP management, Design, and also within the player base (which quite frankly will require some of the bravest decision making any games company has ever been called upon to do).
Salvation of Eve is going to require CCP to plan Armageddon for Nullsec and it needs to be so brutal and vicious that in the future it'll take genuine effort, talent and commitment for any power to hold a constellation - let alone 20 regions. No plan that doesn't start with "how will this hurt the coalitions and reduce the effective fleet sizes and super cap numbers three months from now" is not worth discussing in this context.
These plans are being discussed in the player community, but rest assured, if any of this stuff ever gets to within 5 light years of a devblog you will see the Mittani.com making the largest shouts of outrage ever heard in the gaming world to anyone who will listen.
Anyway,
Yeah, that's what is wrong with Eve but the funny thing is - its still the only game that has ever tried for a genuine player led sandbox and even now when it seems to be in a more or less inevitable decline, its the only such game any of us are ever likely to play in our gaming lifetime.
The successor games to eve "elite dangerous" "star citizen" etc etc will be very careful not to tread eve's path in the way its developed in certain important ways, you have only to read their forums to realize how much they don't want another CFS coalition in their stars....
Author
Topic: The State of New Eden and Why It's Stagnating (Split from It's Been 4 Years) (Read 8575 times)