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[Lyn Farel]

I have heard positive things about the game. Some of its aspects (skill system notably, or housing iirc) reminds me a bit of SWG. Well I don't expect it to broke all the conventions and do something exceptional, but it seems to aim for a better quality than I originally hoped for.

Though it seems like all other MMOs still.

Well, I'll give it some time after it comes out to even out a bit.  I had some hopes, at least.  MMORPGs are such a great concept, they're just so hard to put into practice.  I'm starting to think that developers are just running out of good content ideas, so it's easier to build and balance a PVP-centric game and let your player base essentially create your challenging content for you.  There was a time they made games ridiculously difficult and made you learn to overcome the game, rather than just fearing that your grind would be interrupted by the other players.

Whatever happened to the concept of giving us a challenge so great that only with your four mightiest friends could you conquer it?  Maybe I'm just getting ancient, but I kind of feel like PVE content in new RPGs is being made too easy and RVR PVP is being pushed as a viable alternative.  For God's sakes, if I wanted my content to be player generated, I'd go back to running my own freestyle RPs.  That's what I pay companies for, to make me an interesting game and to keep putting new, interesting stuff all the time to make it worth the subscription cost.

It's a question of time. Video game has become more and more casual and stopped by a niche thing with only hardcore gamers, so it's pretty normal that it comes that way eventually.

Also, one thing that too easy content made me notice in MMOs is that the game difficulty of former titles was actually just hiding how bland and stupid most classic mechanisms are (farming, raiding, etc). Now that it's too easy, it becomes even more obvious.

[Vic Van Meter]

Well, I have played some other MMOs in my time.  Everquest was one of them, but in terms of difficulty, I'd say Final Fantasy XI was the hardest in terms of just how difficult the game was.  WoW raiding was always a little more casual than that, and has gotten at least somewhat more difficult since the end of rotations and the last expansion's newer boss mechanics.  Really, though, I think the problem isn't that games are more casual now, it's that making a PVE game is harder.

I mean, what kind of effort would CCP have to put into story and game development if players weren't essentially making most of the news themselves?  Making a game that is hard in and of itself means coming up with a decent difficulty curve, making sure there is always the chance of something happening that you can't predict, putting you in danger of losing with every mistake, and making sure you have nobody but yourself to blame if the environment kills you.  It's a little easier to just say you can make money killing each other and letting the players take that role themselves.  Then, all you have to do is balance things correctly and the players essentially entertain themselves.

I think that's why so many of the world's biggest releases now are FPS games with short, easy, crap story modes meant to advertise their own particular PVP modes.  It's just a lot easier to make a hard PVP game than a hard PVE game because you don't have to program a PVP game to be hard; difficulty curves are just self-fulfilling prophecies when your only real competition is another player.

Not even just as a gamer that likes challenging games instead of another flavor of Battlefield, I think the reason this trend is so annoying to me is because MMORPGs would be the perfect setting for really, intensely difficult games.  I mean, if you set up some challenge that someone can't complete alone, you don't have to invite your friends over or LAN up.  The other people are right there!  I guess I wish the thrill I got out of Monster Hunter, PSO, Ikaruga, and the like was built into a game where I could group up with other people.  I know that if CAPCOM released an honest to God Monster Hunter MMO that wasn't just sending you out into a piecemeal world with a ticking clock and instead sent you out into a massive ecosystem in which you could very easily find yourself to be food, I wouldn't be anywhere else.

I guess I'm tired of MMOs that play like movies or sandboxes, I want to play an MMORPG where the actual game kicks my ass.  That hasn't happened yet.  I'm tired of developers treating PVP like it's novel; I got tired of it in Quake LAN parties long before I played my first MMO.

[Kala]

I think asking what we individually want out of MMOs and trying to break it down is interesting.

For God's sakes, if I wanted my content to be player generated, I'd go back to running my own freestyle RPs.  That's what I pay companies for, to make me an interesting game and to keep putting new, interesting stuff all the time to make it worth the subscription cost.

I mean, what kind of effort would CCP have to put into story and game development if players weren't essentially making most of the news themselves?

Yes and no.  While yes, I want an interesting game with new, interesting stuff put in, I also (very, very much) want both player generated content and the ability and available tools to create said content.  I want player generated content to be a major part of the games ethos - the impetus on the players to have their own adventures and define their own experiences, rather than being led through a narrow (however cleverly designed) linear rat-race.

That's just personal preference, mind...

And while I know how useful backstory and canon is to rpers, I have to wonder if players were entirely reliant on CCP to make the news if they would cease to make it themselves.  It seems to be a somewhat delicate balance.

I guess I'm tired of MMOs that play like movies or sandboxes, I want to play an MMORPG where the actual game kicks my ass.  That hasn't happened yet.  I'm tired of developers treating PVP like it's novel; I got tired of it in Quake LAN parties long before I played my first MMO.

I'm tired of MMOs too, but for different reasons.  I'm less concerned about difficulty and more concerned about having a layered experience.  The amount of layers I want hasn't happened yet -.-  But I suppose a mixture between EVE/UO and ATITD (which have all gone in the right direction, as far as I'm concerned) with other elements also. More variety, less emphasis on a hero figure (or thousands of them). I explained it to a friend (while ranting) as wanting to sell vegetables.  Or throw them at people I didn't like. Which is not to represent a niche interest in grocery produce ("my cabbages!")  but for the freedom and dynamism to do so if I wished.  (and yes, I know you can technically grow vegetables and sell them in MMOs, such as LOTRO, but not technically what I mean)...

I mean, take Skyrim (bear with me).  You know there's some woman who talks about how she wants to own the inn - that's her goal and...I forget the exact dialogue - but I want to be her.  And the little girl who talks endlessly about selling vegetables? Her too. (I want to be a fucking npc, basically, just not static) But no.  I mean the ability to set and achieve your own changeable goals within the world (however mundane) and for that to have an effect on the world itself (however small).

And PVP isn't novel, no...but when you can just get up and doing it all over again with no real or lasting penalty (such as Quake or UT, or many MMOs) then it's also fairly meaningless to me without loss. In a sense, I think PVP with loss is fairly novel as is the freedom to (negatively?) impact another player by stealing their stuff. Otherwise, it's a competition, but if the stakes aren't high then I'm easy come, easy go.  I enjoy kicking my friends arses, sure.  There is a fun factor, and games are supposed to be fun but...

If I'm honest, I want more than that. I want some kind of depth to the experience I'm having (if I'm going to pour hours into it) and MMOs, as much as anything, are about creating a living breathing world and populating it with people who will then interact with eachother.  Seems to me there is so much untapped potential in that concept that to continually churn out grind-fests is tantamount to criminal 




edit: for full disclosure, this is a vague and nebulous ideal of MMO-dom I've had in my head for years, spawned while playing Daggerfall and Morrowind and thinking about how awesome it would be if they were MMOs; these sprawling worlds (especially Daggerfall) populated by real, unpredictable people, just milling around doing their own thing, same as me.  As such an Elder Scrolls MMO that doesn't live up to that (possibly entirely unobtainable ideal) is going to stick in my craw. You've betrayed me, TES. 

[Vic Van Meter]

All of which I get, these are personal preferences after all.  I think one of the problems is that there is both loss, but not really enough.  While you may lose ships fighting CONCORD and run down your security tally, that's not the same as real bandits that had to live outside civilization and be worried every second that they'd be discovered.

In that vein, I think the idea is that if you want to throw vegetables at people and incur loss, those two things would mean your vegetable character would get fined and thrown out of a market for disturbing the peace.  That sort of thing isn't common in video games.  EVE, for better or worse, is essentially mandating a certain kind of playstyle even though they aren't doing it directly.  All the endgame combat stuff is out in null or in the warzone, to get to those places you've entered FFAPVP, the penalties for engaging in that are relatively light compared to what you'd think would happen in your country if an outlaw suddenly decided to start killing people in the countryside and stealing their things.

It just means you sort of come up with a certain kind of play that doesn't usually involve vegetables.  Unfortunately, I'm not in any better boat.  I've always loved survival type games.  I think the closest game that flirted with awesomeness for me was Monster Hunter (I suppose I shouldn't assume everyone's played it, so if you haven't, go try whatever of them is available in your region).  I played a lot of it on the PS2, but it wasn't really well known in America until the PSP versions.

It wouldn't even count as an MMO, it's sort of a group RPG where you take missions, get dumped into world of little interconnected zones and have a set time limit to finish the objective.  It's a bit more like Phantasy Star Online than a real MMO.  But the elements of it always made me drool with what could be.  Having to not only fight dragons so large you couldn't dream of fighting them alone, but with weapons that actually felt big enough for the job.  Being able to kill and cook your own food before you essentially ran out of stamina and failed.  Having almost all of your stats built up with pieces of the things you were killing and not giving you any other way to collect those items, but also having a ranking system that limits your access until you prove your worth.  Being able to set traps and ambushes as well as sometimes being ambushed by the thing you were trying to kill.

Trust me, every time they announce a "Monster Hunter Online" and it turns out to essentially be another Monster Hunter without a huge, persistent world and a giant ecosystem you are both hunter and hunted in, I wonder whether I should have gone into game design.  Biggest waste of potential for an MMO on the planet, in my opinion.  If they ever did that well, none of you would ever see me again unless you also subscribed.

[Kala]

In that vein, I think the idea is that if you want to throw vegetables at people and incur loss, those two things would mean your vegetable character would get fined and thrown out of a market for disturbing the peace.

Yes, this.  The virtual society and rules governing it don't have to tolerate my untoward vegetable throwing, but I should be able to do it before being carted off 
(though the vegetables was just an example. don't fixate too much on the vegetables  I can live without them)

I suppose it's about there being room for a variety of play-styles and a lot of flexibility - and your actions should have consequences, yes.  I want dynamicism, dammit. (one of the reasons I liked ATITD was the player-made law system and society building aspects to it.  I disliked the lack of murdering and thieving, though >.> give me the freedom to be hateful plz.)

Trust me, every time they announce a "Monster Hunter Online" and it turns out to essentially be another Monster Hunter without a huge, persistent world and a giant ecosystem you are both hunter and hunted in, I wonder whether I should have gone into game design.  Biggest waste of potential for an MMO on the planet, in my opinion.  If they ever did that well, none of you would ever see me again unless you also subscribed.

I felt the same way about an elder scrolls MMO.  Just with the npc guild leaders, vendors etc being players.  As well as other adventurers, bandits - maybe even monsters in terms of vampires and werewolves. I don't think I want any npcs, actually, apart from mobs.  If there need to be story driven characters, they should be acted rather than scripted so they can respond to what's going on. (and killable).

(I guess I associated TES with this MMO as it gave me the most freedom/scope I'd ever experienced from single player game - I'd just wrongly assumed that would only increase exponentially if populated by other people in a persistent dynamic world.)

Maybe it's good that we don't get our ideal MMO, though.  I know I'd take escapism way too far if there was somewhere I really wanted to escape to.

[Graelyn]

Please keep in mind, the only mechanics allowed in MMOs are ones that can't be (easily) 'gooned up'.

There's a million awesome ideas and implementations that game designers know from experience that they have to completely avoid due to the simple fact that a sizable chunk of any gaming population is only there to try to cause grief. The modern MMO marketplace has to consider that griefing isn't just the purvue of lone frustrated virgins anymore; efforts to break games and drain the fun out of any environment have become massive undertakings by clever and motivated organizations.

If MMO mechanics seem repetitive and stale, it's because they're all coated in protective plastic from the ground up.

The statement 'this is why we can't have nice things' has no clearer home than the MMO format. Anyone who plays EVE should already know deep down how true this is.

[Lyn Farel]

You know why I never played an Elder Scroll of my whole life ? Because they look like MMOs and not solo games. What should I do when playing an Elder Scroll ? What is the point to play alone in an open world like this ? I understand why people usually enjoy them so much ; they can play their own little stories. But I don't see the point. Better to do it with other people...

That's mostly why I prefer when my solo games are linear in terms of story. The more they are, the more the story in on rails, the more enjoyable it is to me. Coupled to the fact that the more dynamic a story is, the more it loses in terms of quality and narrative.

Well, I have played some other MMOs in my time.  Everquest was one of them, but in terms of difficulty, I'd say Final Fantasy XI was the hardest in terms of just how difficult the game was.  WoW raiding was always a little more casual than that, and has gotten at least somewhat more difficult since the end of rotations and the last expansion's newer boss mechanics.  Really, though, I think the problem isn't that games are more casual now, it's that making a PVE game is harder.

But most games are more casual. The population has changed. Gamers too.

You just have to take almost any title 20 years ago and compare it with games of today. Sometimes I don't even understand how we were able to take all that cruelty 

But anyway, gaming used more to be about the challenge (I beat the game finally !) and less about pure entertainment (You press a button and it's awesome !). It is however starting to balance itself out with the new emergence of indie games everywhere.

[Arista Shahni]

Edit: Yup +1 to Lyn and my expanded view on that -

I pointed this out elsewhere, but games in general have switched from bachelor-makers and places where only the unemployed can stay afloat or excel without throwing the controller/keyboards in frustration or surrender. 

In other words, you find less and less elements in games that require so much of a player's time and intelligence/problem solving skill/effort to "win", or more specifically to *not lose* that the player has time for *nothing else in life*, and more and more of something where someone can log in for a few hours, still have fun (with fun defined as 'success'/winning), and have the ability to log out without devoting a PhD level of mental effort into it.

The genre has gone more from skill builder (a 'game' after all is usually an emulation of a real life scenario, intended as a skill builder, if you take the basic "why do  humans play?" question) to entertainment and escapism, and this is likely due to the demographics of people that exist with the hardware to run such games, and therefore the potential market of people to buy it and make the developers some cash.  Not to say devs are greedy, simply to say that the bills need paying, and one needs to cater to their potential customer bases.

Therefore if you want to get the money to pay the bills as a developer, it in a sense requires one make games, essentially, "not that hard" in comparison to how they used to be. 

The subculture of people who game has expanded from a very small number of people with PC and console platforms (when once upon as time it was the more intelligent 'geeky' introvert types who bought a new PC before they bought their new car)  to a more mainstream slice of the population (and by slice, now a large number of the population of the 'first world' types buying PCs and playing games and plenty more of the 'second world' types who can get access to them via internet cafe's and the like.)  It's not just the people who are interested in computer science buying computers.  It's everyone.  Everyone. Ev-ree-one.

In other words, gaming is no longer the realm of the intelligent introvert looking for a manufactured challenge at home.  It is now also the realm of the everyone else, like the people who used to beat up said introverts on their way to football practice.

I'd dare even call more than people who just own Wii's "causal gamers" and say the true % of "casual gamers" is much higher and *actually less casual* than it's defined as by market deifnitions or even "today's gamers".  *shakes cane from under her crocheted blanket on the front porch rocker*

It used to be that a "casual gamer" was just someone who just wasn't playing games all day every day and wasn't totally invested in the concepts of numbercrunching or twinking, or even in the RP example, endlessly worldbuilding and fanfictioning and etc.  A casual Asheron's Call player was someone who when faced with the choice of make a four hour run for their corpse or log out for work, would log out for work and take the loss of gear.  Once upon a time, playing "casually" was defined as "real life first".  In the mid 2000's in the EQ2 world, you were playing EQ2 'casually' if you were on less than 10 hours a week and not raiding. 

But hey.  Sony still wanted your 15 dollars a month, yeah?  Easier than making me somehow magically willing to play the 15+ hours a week, using up all of my free time after work and around family to get that extra +4 on some random stat from a piece of gear that dropped from Tarinax, is to make the *game* less strenuous to succeed at, and make that +4 just easier to get in general. 

In other words, the difficulty of games, or at least the difficulty "for median levels of game success", have been set to the lowest common denominators of the target market (which consists of *every* person in 18-24 and 25-34 in owning the hardware capable of running my program, not just the omgsuperleetgamer ones).  As people played MMOS, statistics were generated.  Every game from that point on is shaped by those statistics.  Simply put that means games get easier because more people in the target marker play easy games than hard ones.

Go broader.  Why have games moved from a subscription mdoel to a F2P/microtransaction model, or a F2P/bouns to Sub model?  Wasn't just the moneyrape - that was figured out and that's why everyone else quickly bandwagonned onto it and games themselves got worse and worse with what cost extra.  In my mind part of this is because over the years as us "Oh my goodness what's this? an IBM compatable 8088?" grew up, had kids of our own, and got them new computers for their 13th birthdays, the age demographic of gamers dropped to a bunch of kids with no credit cards (15-18) but an ability to pick up a game timecard at their local retailer, and so now not only do they have the opportunity to keep this kid entertained by something that will likely have to not be a punishing gauntlet of cruelty in pixels, they also have the frazzled parents of said kids, who don't have time to devote to a game that requires brainpower and more hours per day to level in than working their jobs and raising their children.

So when you ead articles about 'people catering to the casual gamer' and going "Oh no we'd never" -- what crap.  They already have, and have been, for years.  in my mind WoW was one of the first culprits of this - as much of a pedestal as it's put on as a "perfect" model, it was the first game I'm aware of anyway that put a question mark over the head of a quest NPC so the player knew to talk to this fucker instead of talking to everyone in town to figure out who was useful and who wasn't.  It purposely made the spec requirements low so not just top of the line PC's but also "that machine you bought your son for Christmas" could also run it.  The list goes on - widening of the possible market and catering to the lowest common denominators in it.

[Jace]

One more aspect I don't think people have mentioned yet (while hitting everything else right on the head), is the progress in graphics and making games "pretty" and "cool". Before, you had to entertain people through difficulty because that's all you had - the sheer immersion and beauty of games was very limited. Now, newer games like the Tomb Raider reboot are almost like watching a movie. Games are sold partly as an "experience" instead of necessarily a "challenge", because they are able to make games like that. For newer gamers, making a game like that difficult would actually get backlash because the frustration would "ruin the experience" and the adventure.

This is also why so many indie games are where to find difficulty again - they don't have the budget or ability to make pretty games, so they have to go back to being difficult or unusual to get an audience.

[Kala]

What is the point to play alone in an open world like this ?

Good question.  And I feel the same way when people say they deliberately solo play in MMOs (but why? there are single player games for that!) 

I guess for me, I played Daggerfall (and to a lesser extent Ultima Underworld) before my first MMO (Ultima Online) and it was the first time I got a sense games could offer more depth of experience than I had previously encountered.  It's hard to quantify exactly why.  I appreciated the freedom and - despite the many flaws - it felt more immersive and in some way credible.  I guess I enjoyed the feeling that I was actively partaking in my own gameplay, somewhere between reading a story and writing my own.

I'm also a fan of more linear rpgs (such as Baldurs Gate and Final Fantasy) and other styles and genres.  But that changed my outlook at a formative time, I think, and redefined my ideas of what a game could be.

In retrospect, now I am older and more cynical, Other People in My Elder Scrolls may well have entirely ruined my experiences rather than enriched them - breaking my immersion by spewing their stupid shit and having retarded names like Bl4d3_M4ST3R -.-;;

(I think the 'playerbase' in MMOs may have both utopian and dystopian potential, depending on how idealistic or cynical I feel at the time)

Games are sold partly as an "experience" instead of necessarily a "challenge", because they are able to make games like that.

I completely agree with you that the emphasis has been on the "ooh shiny!" in getting things to look increasingly photorealistic - which isn't necessarily bad, but other aspects don't seem to have developed alongside the aesthetic loveliness.  I wouldn't form a dichotomy between 'good' high end graphics and "an experience" vs 'bad' basic graphics and "a challenge", though.  While I completely agree that games used to be harder in general (the original UFO!) and indie games are far more innovative and interesting than most AAA titles, it's certainly possible to have a game that looks like dogshit but is easy to play, and one that looks amazing and is hard as hell.  Additionally, I have played games that were visually appealing but just seemed like a pretty cardboard set - empty and soulless - and not offered me an 'experience' or any immersion to speak of.

[Vic Van Meter]

Edit: Yup +1 to Lyn and my expanded view on that -... (truncated)

Sort of this, but also sort of not.  First of all, I wouldn't also associate 'time' with 'hard', though to be fair it is sort of the standard MMOs have been held to.  I remember killing time by playing Minesweeper on expert mode.  It was hard, but it didn't take long to play.  It might be that MMORPGs kind of fell into an old RPG trap by saying that, if something takes 60 hours of playing to beat, it's a hard game.  That's really not true, grinding isn't hard as much as a way to make sure you don't have everything in a game within a few dedicated hours by simply not having a life.

Having said that, I've worked steadily (minus a pair of layoffs last year) since I was 16 and worked full time through college.  My game time became less copious, but I still found time to play.  Maybe that's the answer to the problem, to just have better tools to log off and on and to make games simply difficult to play?  Using the example of Monster Hunter from earlier (now that I've said it, it'll be hard for me to not talk about it), I can imagine a vast open world that it would be very simple to walk out into and pull a Les Stroud, surviving out in the wilderness by your wits, preparation, and whatever you brought with you.  I can also imagine being able to get a mission from a town and that mission having a strict time limit.  When you need to hide to run and take care of something, have a way to take a few minutes to hide yourself and if you need to log out, have a way to make camp.

Honestly, that's one of the things I think EVE does right in their mission structure.  I like the idea that, yes, if I don't have time to do a mission, I still get a reward, but if I have the time and I book it to finish up, I get extra.  That's a good way to both be flexible with people's schedules but give you something of a challenge to work on.

I think the thing missing from most MMOs is the element forcing you to work together.  Usually, I think devs have fallen into the habit of making every encounter with another player a sort of PVP experience that you should be worried about.  That doesn't necessarily encourage you to try and help random passerby out and make friends (one of the things I think EVE doesn't do very well on a fundamental level).  In essence, I think one of the things that might make an MMO a more rewarding experience than a single player game is if players are encouraged to help each other and be polite while they do it.  The focus on being able to solo play a game (thus meaning you can be a complete dick) and PVP (meaning you can dick someone over without necessarily being rude) in modern games does make it a lot harder to get the potential out of an MMO.

I made all my friends here, I never met any in the game world.  Even most of my friends that I've met here I can't play in-game with because of its very competitive nature.  I think that might be something Graelyn was touching on, as well, because devs have a raging hard on for faction-based in-game political systems.  Which means you can't possibly win.  You can only succeed on a very temporary level.  You will never defeat the Grand Empire of Evilbastardstahn because there are players in that faction who you can't just remove from the game.  It makes your game insanely inflexible.  It makes PVP between those factions a complete joke because it's just an arena: you can't ever win or lose the battle.

I'm not saying PVP is always a bad thing or that those kinds of games don't have their place, but seriously, EVERY MMORPG GAME has this bullshit.  You could solve that problem by having it go one way or the other, either having power be so loosely fragmented that every little individual town is like its own nation and to be so spread out that they don't have much to do with each other, or by having one giant government that handles everything in its area and sends you out to handle other issues.

Moreso, I think sometimes people don't know that it's just fun to break even sometimes.  Maybe games, because it's how games have always been, are too process-oriented.  Maybe we just need to have longer-term quest goals or to make exploration, discovery, and randomness more of a driver of game experience than the task-reward cycle. Maybe it would be nice to have a world so huge that, to get to where you need to go to kill something, you have to trek for two full days and survive all the perils of just getting there.

That's another thing!  Why is travel so damn easy and turns games into a connect-the-dots story?  Why can't 'getting there' be just as interesting and you can get sidetracked for days or weeks doing something because you happened to see something on the side of the road?

... I should probably stop.  I could bitch about this kind of thing for hours.

[Lyn Farel]

It's rather funny the way people will spontaneously help each other. Having tried a few beta / early access MMOs, it is often amazing how people will help each other in some kind of synergy as they discover the game together. It is especially true at the release of MMOs, and then, routine takes place and all of this starts to drop progressively into oblivion.

Maybe that's due to routines and nothing left to discover (but rather guides to follow and you will be fine), or maybe that's just the population switching to dedicated, dynamic and enthusiastic players to another kind of consumers... Or maybe both, or maybe none...

Also Vic, there is already a non faction pvp system in Eve, it's nullsec... Its kindof similar to your concept of smaller towns/factions. They used to wipe each other out pretty often in the past. Now, it's more stale....

[Vic Van Meter]

It's rather funny the way people will spontaneously help each other. Having tried a few beta / early access MMOs, it is often amazing how people will help each other in some kind of synergy as they discover the game together. It is especially true at the release of MMOs, and then, routine takes place and all of this starts to drop progressively into oblivion.

Maybe that's due to routines and nothing left to discover (but rather guides to follow and you will be fine), or maybe that's just the population switching to dedicated, dynamic and enthusiastic players to another kind of consumers... Or maybe both, or maybe none...

Also Vic, there is already a non faction pvp system in Eve, it's nullsec... Its kindof similar to your concept of smaller towns/factions. They used to wipe each other out pretty often in the past. Now, it's more stale....

Maybe I just don't remember it to be different.  It seems like it's become organized into factions, as you'd probably figure it probably would.

I think the problem is the prevalence of PVP in modern games not as an option, but as essentially a content mechanic.  I know all the action happens in nullsec, but it happens specifically because of the players.  I think that's fine for some people if that's their preference, but for me, it really removes the concept of the game from the game.  That's sort of a feature of the modern scene, I think because PVE content these days is usually pretty boring.  It's too hard to develop stuff that's always new, always exciting, and always challenging enough to keep a player's interest.  It can and has been done, but the modern devs just can't seem to pull it off anymore.  The only way to get more life out of the game is to engage everyone against each other.

You sometimes see flashes of what the MMORPG genre is capable of, but the next time you have to "kill ten crabs" or, in EVE's case, "do what the corp boss needs you to do" you sort of lose it.  Instead of being happy to see someone else in-game, pretty much all MMOs make sure I don't care or don't want to see them.  Which kind of, for me, ruins the whole point of wanting to hang around in a game where other people are visibly hanging around.

[Lyn Farel]

Nullsec used to be more dynamic yes. When I was in Providence, Bob was the 'big meanie' trying to conquer the world and managed at its peak to control over 1/3 of the whole nullsec. From Deklein to Feythabolis. Providence was the next in line and we got bogged down into a war on several fronts where Bob was also fighting elsewhere against AAA, Goons, etc. Red Alliance was next after that, but Bob failed before, and retreated back to Delve and Fountain after a really immersive and nice vid. It was also the same in the North a bit before, with Triumvirate that got a big threat for a while, then collapsed. The only regions where it has never really moved is in the east. Besides the collapse of Red Alliance (that became Solar Fleet iirc), not much to see. Different mindset. Which makes me say that the mindset of players also plays a big part (cf Serenity on the chinese server, I heard they are a lot less into fighting and a lot more into cooperative building).

Dominion really turned the tide. It changed system upkeep and by its very nature prevents such scenarii to happen again. Somebody more knowledgeable than me will probably correct me since I left null well before that, but well. Dominion was supposed to allow smaller alliances to get into null as their own, but it failed and renters are still the norm. It also helped to create Coalitions to balance all of this out.

You have already seen pve content that does not become boring and stale after a few runs ? Either it's scripted and demands a lot of effort from devs to be designed every month / year to provide an interesting hook, either it's procedural and becomes by its own very nature, predictable, and always the same. Even incursions and sleepers is beaten to death after a few runs. And I still admire these pve high end mechanisms for what they are, but that's it. It's pve, it becomes boring pretty fast to me since it's always the same again and again. It's just farm in the end. And I loathe farming.

[Vic Van Meter]

Nullsec used to be more dynamic yes. When I was in Providence, Bob was the 'big meanie' trying to conquer the world and managed at its peak to control over 1/3 of the whole nullsec. From Deklein to Feythabolis. Providence was the next in line and we got bogged down into a war on several fronts where Bob was also fighting elsewhere against AAA, Goons, etc. Red Alliance was next after that, but Bob failed before, and retreated back to Delve and Fountain after a really immersive and nice vid. It was also the same in the North a bit before, with Triumvirate that got a big threat for a while, then collapsed. The only regions where it has never really moved is in the east. Besides the collapse of Red Alliance (that became Solar Fleet iirc), not much to see. Different mindset. Which makes me say that the mindset of players also plays a big part (cf Serenity on the chinese server, I heard they are a lot less into fighting and a lot more into cooperative building).

Dominion really turned the tide. It changed system upkeep and by its very nature prevents such scenarii to happen again. Somebody more knowledgeable than me will probably correct me since I left null well before that, but well. Dominion was supposed to allow smaller alliances to get into null as their own, but it failed and renters are still the norm. It also helped to create Coalitions to balance all of this out.

You have already seen pve content that does not become boring and stale after a few runs ? Either it's scripted and demands a lot of effort from devs to be designed every month / year to provide an interesting hook, either it's procedural and becomes by its own very nature, predictable, and always the same. Even incursions and sleepers is beaten to death after a few runs. And I still admire these pve high end mechanisms for what they are, but that's it. It's pve, it becomes boring pretty fast to me since it's always the same again and again. It's just farm in the end. And I loathe farming.

Not in EVE, but there are PVE games out there that don't get boring no matter how many times I play.  I could still throw my Monster Hunter game into a PS2 and solo wyverns (servers dropped years ago) and be just as thrilled as the first day I started.

Why that is is probably the nature of the fighting.  Your common everyday Rathalos had a set of a few attacks, not more than your average raid boss in WoW.  I think the reason that, after the hundredth time killing the same WoW boss and after the hundredth time killing the Kutku I'm still entertained by the latter, is because it's so intimately based on your reaction time.  Situations change so rapidly and you needed some pretty extensive gear to turn that fight into a complete cakewalk.

Maybe modern MMOs are worried about alienating their fanbases if they make the games difficult, put in moving challenges that you can't kill on your own, and the like.  In the end, we may initially hate games that are difficult just to survive in, but I've always thought the potential benefit to an MMORPG is to make it almost impossible to survive on your own and to make it worth your while to work together with complete strangers.  It's a way to make friends in the game world and, in a way, turn what was once a rather lonely pastime into a social experience.

WoW makes friends a lot more disposable these days because the game world is eminently survivable solo and if I didn't RP in EVE I couldn't think of a reason to trust or talk to anyone besides my brother.  That's sort of the litany of choices right now in MMORPG-land.  Do I want my games easy or do I want to play another PVP game with ?  Neither is very appealing to me, but the damnable fact is that I think it doesn't have to be this way.  Devs just get into ruts and end up making twinklier versions of the same games.

Maybe it's the architecture background that makes me kind of pissed.  Games have been essentially becoming more like movies these days, but MMOs aren't best served with that approach.  They're essentially games that can be dwelled within.  I suppose I shouldn't feel like I should be designing game worlds instead of health care facilities, but sometimes I just feel like slapping myself from a design perspective.