Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Nmaro Makari]

You may remember me from such delights as "IGS Sarcasm 4 -  Return of the Shitpoasting", or "Sansha? Nosha!"

Anyway in case you don't, I used to play EVE, badly. However what kept me coming back was the opportunity to Role Play in a singe consistent universe with a rich background of player-created lore.

Which brings me, clumsily, to the issue I'm having. After a fairly significant hiatus of a few years, I keep finding myself poking my head into the IGS, or the many player channels ingame, and though I am feeling nostalgia and good memories all those times tempting me to play, I am also deeply, deeply sad about what I see.

Now, before I go on, its important to say that this is not so much about changes that have happened to the community or CCP-led changes to lore and attitude, or not entirely anyway. Nor am I saying that new RPers aren't highly talented, or dedicated, or creative, or that the input they have is any less valuable. If anything, new blood can only help the community right now.

No, I feel sad and unable to jump back in because, well, truthfully, in the old book of contacts there are many red dots where greens used to be. Channels that used to be the staple of RP communities, almost guaranteed to light up with chatter when you logged in, where friends and I wrote our stories, are all either empty, or just silent. It's a little like coming back to an empty home where once there was barely enough room to move.

Anyway, to tl;dr this sumbitch, I wanted to ask, is this a common feeling? How have people dealt with it? Does anyone have any advice to overcome it?

[Veiki]

I just assume a mutual disinterest in that others care very little about whatever content or interactions I might bring via my characters; and I don't care enough about the needs of public validation/bitching/woe is me from what seems like the majority of other roleplayers. I just lock my characters out in my own personal headcanon and carry on exploring other aspects of the game that I do enjoy whether it's pvp, industry, or exploring.

The reward/effort ratio due to all the pointless and stupid bullshit roleplayers bring to the table just doesn't really justify more than the random popping into a channel once or twice a week if even that for me these days.

[Lunarisse Aspenstar]

Nmaro! Sending you a mail in game.

[Lasairiona]

I dunno...I have a pretty steady stream of chat going on, but then again, a lot of my chat is private these days.

[Graelyn]

There's just not enough people left to really make for interesting content.

Those who remain have been around a long time, and seem to have simply heard most of what the others have to say by now.

The loyalists still can't do anything for their Empires, pirates still can't harm them. When NPC Organisations exist as window dressing only, it's hard for someone joining an already hard game starting out to get excited and learn more about groups that are eternally and un-changably static.

Eh, the list of reasons gets long, but yeah, we're all aware.

[Ché Biko]

Yeah, my amount of green balls has decreased quite a bit as well (I have like 3 that I see on frequently), although part of that is because the buddy list does not work the same as the watch list. I encounter quite some redballs in RP chat channels as well (Y U NO <3 ME?), on the infrequent occasions that I log into them, and I usually only do that when I'm bored or looking to see if a redball is on. It's either silence, small talk, or the same old discussions.

How I deal with it? For the most part, I don't really care. I still get my fix during RP events and when I have more private interactions with my green- and redballs. And when I do get out and about, I still meet interesting new faces now and again, and there are even some more that I wish I would encounter, but for some reason never do. Veiki here is a good example. I guess hoping that I'll encounter some of them in the future is part of what keeps me in the game.

I can get quite nostalgic thinking about chars I will likely never see again, but I guess I've sort of accepted that they are gone, and more will follow. Sometimes...I can let them live on through my char.

[Utari Onzo]

More and more of late I'm joining the redball lot, atleast in terms of RP.

The investment to return ratio is out of wack and I'm just not seeing the point anymore. I think I may just play eve for the sake of playing eve moving forward.

[Nissui]

Even after trying to make more time, my availability is still shit.

Veik brings up a thought about aspects of gameplay, and I wonder if that isn't the better option for trying to motivate roleplay. Instead of using chat channels, go back to using gameplay as the springboard for interaction. PvP is more or less obvious. There are a number of exploration mechanics that could serve public roleplay, and there's a ton that can be done with industry. Even if you aren't fortunate enough to get the roleplay off the bat, you still got something done in game.

[Morwen Lagann]

I'll admit I've mostly retired. I log in to take care of some administrative stuff and the like every few days or so, but I'm burnt out, and it's largely due to the behavior of certain problem children when it comes down to it. It's tiring, it's wearing, and frankly I haven't got the time of day to waste on them or their ridiculous cognitive dissonance and fuckery. I already live with a teenager and someone who's dumber than a sack of bricks thanks to his Alzheimer's; I don't need to deal with morons over the internet in a game where I'm supposed to be enjoying myself.

It also, admittedly, doesn't help that for my characters here, they've pretty much told all the stories they have to tell, barring some pretty drastic stuff from CCP's end. And while I'm content to remain optimistic that that will happen, the pacing is a bit too slow to be holding my interest for even that - especially when I'm playing another game where the RP community is so ridiculously active, diverse, and healthy that I have to make the choice every single day whether to do personal RP stuff or go to events hosted by other players.

Do I miss most of you? Hell yeah. But I don't know if I'd be willing to give up having rediscovered my motivation to write regularly, and at length, or all of the new, fresh things I'm getting to try just to come back to an environment that stresses me out for content that has, for a long time, felt somewhat stale and recycled.

I'm trying to keep on top of the major stuff, but that's really about all the true bandwidth I've got, at the moment.

[kalaratiri]

I am functionally retired from RP. I don't think I've had a genuine IC interaction since '15. At this point, much like Veik, I focus on my own enjoyment in playing the game the way I want, and add the events to Kala's own personal story.

However, I do find myself nostalgic for the "good old days" of 2011 and 12, and have a yearning for some proper factional competition.

We'll see what Winter brings.

[Veiki]

Personally, comparing now to the past it feels like the overwhelming attitude to RP is like those guys who just spin ships in station waiting for a fleet ping while complaining how it's all CCP's fault that there's nothing to do. Instead of just undocking and roaming out to see what's what by just telling the stories of their own characters.

[Mizhara]

I guess it's time for a brief stirring from the slumber in order to lay out the status quo for perusal. By now, through the magic of attrition, entropy and time I have become one of the old veterans of Eve, even when taking into account the real veterans that started during beta. My starting days are a great deal farther away from this point than the beta, so I feel like I've seen most of what Eve has to offer and its history. So let's cover a few topics in a row, shall we? Oh, and don't worry. This is on topic, once I'm done shaking my fist from my rocking chair on the porch.

Current state of Eve as a game[spoiler][/spoiler]

Eve has never been in a better place, game-play wise, and yet it's fucking awful. Off the top of my head, here's a very short list of massive gameplay improvements/additions we've had recently: Citadels/ECs, Command Dessies (omfg booshes are the best thing ever), Logi frigs, capital ship rework and carrier changes, tidi now allows us to hate ourselves for eight hours but at least pad the killboard instead of fighting the fucking login server or just ragequit for the same amount of time, huge UI improvements, quality of life improvements across the board, Off-grid Boosts got fucked right proper and so on and so forth. We've never had this many tools with which to wreak mayhem, or so many things to wreak mayhem upon. Trade and industry is better than it ever was and things are looking to become even better with the moon mining changes.

And it's still pretty shit. How can this possibly be? Well, when the sandbox turns out to be kitty litter, it's because someone took a shit in it. This we can't lay at CCP's feet. This is on us. From when I first started my very first character in Eve sometime back in 06-07 (I think? Fuck knows.) and until now, I've genuinely never seen Eve be so bloody risk averse as it is now. Players have turned so massively pussified that
there's no real risk taking, no real adventure spirit or willingness to go out and do shit that people can interact with. We've solved Eve. We've played it for so long that there's only two options. Stay docked, do fuck all, or go full try-hard mode and only play optimally. Machariels Online, Shield Supers are Shit, etc etc. NIPs and blue donuts and if we try something new and interesting, we'll quickly discover that it's all been tried before and someone will cookie cutter your ass into ruins and you'll either start doing the same or just... stop.

This isn't even CCP's fault, even if they didn't bloody help matters with horrible half-arsed systems implemented and never properly balanced. This shit is on us. Fucking Eve players, we ruined Eve.

The state of RP in Eve.
[spoiler][/spoiler]

Unsurprisingly this isn't very different from the above. I'll grant you, I wasn't involved with the earliest stuff with U'K and CVA butting heads over 9UY (as AAA pets and so on respectively) and the earliest world-building, but by now I've pretty much seen it all and I've seen how it's developed for over a decade. I saw the gloriously weird and amazing Star Fraction anarchist stuff, the fall of Electus Matari, the stagnation and eventual death of a whole lot of diversity and how now so many names are just attached to wandering corpses that don't actually do much but stagger around and occasionally moan.

RP entities stopped trying to actually play the damn game. Granted, we were never really good at it to begin with, but we tried. Star Fraction was an actually kind of scary force to be reckoned with for a while. Ushra'Khan (again, as a triple-A pet granted) had 9UY and CVA established Providence. Wars were declared all over the place and people tried to achieve things, in the actual game itself. Not just in what is frankly just a kind of shit version of IRC. Literally, if my understanding of Eve's chat is correct. Now, this is happening for several reasons and let's cover a few of them.

Turns out, you can't actually achieve shit in Eve. Oh you can burn other entities to the ground and so on, but after a while that gets a bit stale since you can't actually do it to other RPers anymore. 95% (number pulled wholecloth out of my arse, like all good statistics) of roleplayers hide in highsec and don't put anything at risk, so that's a pointless route to go. You can shoot things in FW, but affect absolutely fuck all. Even if you do pull off burning an alliance to the ground, or at least napalm their regions and watch them scurry off somewhere else (see WWB etc) what we can't actually do is affect the damn story. Our personal stories can only go so far if the world around us doesn't shift a bit too. The few times it does, it doesn't actually shift in any way relevant to us unless you have the real life time and dosh to go to fanfest, apparently.

We've become as much risk averse twats as the rest of Eve, only we go even further and won't even bloody play the game anymore. Conflict is an unspeakable horror to a huge amount of roleplayers, especially if it can't be scripted out beforehand so everyone can come out of it smelling like roses instead of blood and bowel movements. If you want to actually play the game, a roleplaying entity is the very last place you want to be. You'll be stuck ship spinning in highsec or possibly you'll get to go fly T1 frigs and dessies in FW.

We can sort of lay some of this on CCP, because they have pretty much abandoned pushing the story forwards. Every story development so far has been an excuse to slot in some god-awful PvE experience that IC almost inevitably becomes a fucking joke. Uncle Kuvakei mustache twirling while shoving his face into the meatgrinder that are capsuleers come to mind. Drifters much the same. The world doesn't react to us, and we've run out of things to do within the framework we have. The stuff a lot of loyalists are built around can't progress, because the world is stuck in time.

But mostly, it's again on us. We have become so fucking afraid of failure that we don't fucking do anything anymore. We hide in highsec or in FW, because sticking our toe out into the actual game means taking the risk of getting it bitten off. A few go create fortresses in WHs, that are better secured than the bluest of carebear space in nullsec. So if a roleplayer wants to actually play the damn game, they have to abandon the roleplaying entities and go out and fly with the 'bad guys'. The dreaded PeeVeePee bad guys! The 'nulltards'. The people who actually play the damn game and try to put words into action, rather than just hurfblurf about what they do in some chat channel and expecting that to be enough. I mean, I've genuinely never harvested more salt in this game than when I shot up one measly structure over an RP conflict. I've got giant long reams of mails over a single structure destroyed.

Where the hell is the RP going to come from a situation like that?

Fucking roleplayers. We ruined roleplaying.

FC wat do
[spoiler][/spoiler]

Frankly, there's not much we can do. The few people who are interested in both playing the game and roleplaying in it (as if there's really a difference) are massively outnumbered by the ones who just treat it as a shiny chat client, and that means RP entities that try to get shit done aren't going to get any kind of critical mass, and we just have to fuck off to non-RP entities and act as individuals. The culture in Eve's RP community has changed to a risk-averse and conflict-averse soup with no room for characters with complex bits of good and bad in them, willing to outright "lose" an encounter by being the downtrodden good guy, or the successful bad guy, or facing down the fact that they can be horribly horribly wrong. Consequences for actions and words is no longer acceptable.

So FC wat do?

You know, I wish I knew. All I can do is keep undocking and shooting stuff. Play my character as the public asshole she is, with the views she has, and let the few quality roleplayers I know of get close enough to discover the complexities and justifications she has for these things. And let them see the parts that she isn't going to show in the kinds of shitshows the public RP channels are. I'll keep taking a shit on the people who contributes nothing but stupidity and noise to drown out the signal, and encourage those who are doing it right. It's all that can be done at this point.

Until CCP moves the world along, there's nowhere left to go for the loyalists or their personal stories anymore. More to the point, I don't think there's anywhere for the RP community in Eve to go anyway, because it isn't the RP community it used to be. There's not enough doers left who can take on the 'solved' Eve in gameplay, like in the days of Star Fraction etc, and nowhere near enough people willing to take on a bit of conflict neither in space nor elsewhere.

Still, you're not fucking getting rid of me yet. We ruined Eve and we ruined Eve RP, but if it's all the same, I'll go down with this ship. Who knows? I could be wrong and this shit palace can be power washed and become something decent again. Now if you don't mind, I'll get back to my shitposting and killboard whoring.

[spoiler][/spoiler]

[Teinyhr]

TooLong;ButReadAnyway.

Bitterness is strong in you young padawan. Anyway, 1) Null sucks 2) To a lesser degree so does Anoikis 3)edgy5me 4) hurfblurf

----

As for the OP, no, I have not had that problem really. People come and go and I do feel nostalgic about some names faces - some don't even have modern faces - but it's just life. Can't therefore give much of an advice how to overcome it either.

[Syagrius]

Well, look at me being optimistic, but one waits.  I can't help but think that if one is patient one will be rewarded.  Of course, I could be wrong and simply die of old age first. 

I think many of us who have, 'seen brighter days', so to speak, are taking a wait and see attitude.  The problem seems that when something starts to happen those not a part of it often times instinctively try to kill it. 

But hope springs eternal. While I never had dealings with you oocly or icly that I can remember, I hope you choose to return.

[Utari Onzo]

People can, and should, RP how they like. I'm just not getting the kind of RP I'm after, so, unlike Miz I don't really mind/care about the current state of the community so much as look at it and find nothing of interest left to me, personally. I want my space politics, and with a side of warring, damnit!

I have a small bubble of people for my character's personal RP, but frustratingly my timezone is not condusive to pushing these along at any reasonable pace. So yeah, it's not so much fuck everyone else as much as I'm looking for and selling a kind of product that doesn't seem to have enough customers, and I am not pulling all nighters on a work night again to go looking in other time zones.