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[Iwan Terpalen]

I'm more interested in front- than in backstory, these days.

[Vic Van Meter]

Honestly, I have a mild dislike of the lore.  If people here hadn't been excellent RPers and done something with it, I'd probably hate it more.

Either way, it's not really the lore that I find most disappointing in the game.  I can work around that.  I spend a lot more time on the IGS and in private IMs RPing than in the game.  Gameplay is probably why I'm not going to renew when my one-year experiment runs out in August.

[Ché Biko]

my point is I used to feel like the game I was paying for, a lot of the people making the game had a lot of the same interests as me the player.  Lately I don't feel the same way, do any of you feel similar?

Yup, although none of the anwers above apply to me. I used to love EVE and it's future before Incarna 1.0...now...it's mostly just you people and the occasional race that keeps me subbed.
Also, the "new" mining barges/exhumers...Ughh. I know I'm probably alone on this, but that is actually what is still at the top of my immersion killers... Every time I think about or see them I PFacepalm myself mentally.

[Lyn Farel]

Honestly, I have a mild dislike of the lore.  If people here hadn't been excellent RPers and done something with it, I'd probably hate it more.

What is it you don't like in the lore ?

[Saede Riordan]

My first experiences with roleplaying came out of tabletop games, so my perspective on it is that the universe shouldn't be this massive unchangeable thing that swings around the players uncontrollably and there is nothing they can do to effect the outcome of it. The feeling that it doesn't matter how hard you try, what you do, who you work for, the results will be fixed? That bothers me, and in a lot of ways, makes me ask, 'well what's the point then?' it makes me feel as helpless ingame as I often feel in real life, I don't feel a sense of freedom, because macroscopically, regardless of how big I get, how much power I amass, how many ships I blow up, nothing I do will matter. I want to leave a mark, however small, on the universe. I want to know that its not going to just pass me by and erase me with time. I want to be remembered, even if only as a footnote.

I think many of us were drawn to EVE on the premise that the game universe was free, that it wasn't fixed, and that our actions had consequences, had meaning. That if we wanted to change the universe, then try hard enough and we could. In recent years, that has become less and less the case. The Empires have become unchangeable monoliths, slaves to the status quo, and in that way, the game has become like many other MMOs. Fixed, static, unchanging, the universe nothing more then a set of levers and pulleys you interact with to receive funds and items.

I think too, on some level, CCP have realized this. However, because the majority of the game lives in highsec, and would quit if their routines were altered, they have become mired down by their need to turn a profit. The status quo has become god, and I think it could very well harm the long term survivability of the game. The people who demand an unchanging status quo are not likely to stick around long anyway, because frankly, static quickly becomes stagnant. However, marketing is still winning out over game design, so average solo battleship flying level 4 mission runner has to be appeased as they make up a majority of subscriptions. To counter this, the developers try to say 'okay, the empires won't change, but look at what these players in nullsec are doing!' in a lot of ways, its trying to avoid the problem. Focus on nullsec and let highsec be its unchanging fixed place. Alliances will come and go, but Jita will ever remain. I don't think it'll work though. The game cannot be carried on nullsec alone, the universe has to remain a vibrant place in order for people to be able to remain invested in it, and I hope CCP realizes that before its too late.

[Shaikar]

There also seems to be a desire on CCPs part to liberate the game from its lore and make it just about the players. Shaikar noticed yesterday that the Viziam blurb disappeared from the Sentinel, for example. Maybe I am being paranoid here, (and I actually think I am unless it starts happening to more ships) but I can't help but read decreased presence of impactful mentions of background and the horrible marketing events as a "We think the backstory is dorky and want it to be about players blowing up players" on the part of a good portion of CCPs devs. 

Possibly a stupid question, but you did notice they split the per-level/role bonuses into their own tab on the show info windows with this patch, right? Traits and Description are two separate tabs now.

Edit - I happen to like this change, for the record, but I don't care for how it removed the fluff text from the Market entries. Probably worth an F&I thread.

Yep, half the description is no longer on the description tab.

In game now:

Electronic attack ships are mobile, resilient electronic warfare platforms. Although well suited to a variety of situations, they really come into their own in skirmish and fleet encounters, particularly against larger ships. For anyone wanting to decentralize their fleet's electronic countermeasure capabilities and make them immeasurably harder to counter, few things will serve better than a squadron or two of these little vessels.

However the old description (which is still on evelopedia: https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Sentinel) also had this at the end:

Developer: Viziam

Viziam ships are quite possibly the most durable ships money can buy. Their armor is second to none and that, combined with superior shields, makes them hard nuts to crack. Of course this does mean they are rather slow and possess somewhat more limited weapons and electronics options.

I'm almost certain it's just a copy/paste gremlin of some sort, as other ships like the Zealot do still have their ship-specific blurb. It does seem a bit odd though.


I'm ok with the lore. It's not as good as it once was but only because they stopped putting the effort in to give the expansions some sort of plausible IC story/plot aspect. They're now obsessed with a focus on nullsec and capsuleers but not doing it in any coherent way - their expansion trailers recently have all been effectively OOC but with a really bad IC disguise, which makes me sad. Either make them IC and internally consistent/plausible, or stop pretending and make good OOC marketing. Ideally, do both and capture/keep both markets.
It's quite amazing to me that the current WoW expansion has managed to have much more immersive trailers for it's patches than anything EVE has managed recently, given the respective subject matter and the fact it used to be very much the other way around. When kung fu pandas make for a more coherent storyline, something has gone terribly wrong.

(For example, the recent obsession with capsuleers = the players is beginning to grate. The lore is littered with references to hordes of non-player capsuleers, some of which are fairly new, and many of which are part of the various factions, yet story wise we keep lurching between the players being unstoppable, bestriding the cluster as lone capsule-clad colossi, and the various factions puttering along as if those colossi didn't exist at all. It's mad.)

[Lunarisse Aspenstar]

I wasn't here in the "old" days where there seemed to be more of a player impact on the development of the lore, so I guess I don't know what I missed since I am used to online games where the rp is done in a world where the lore and world is shaped by the developers and we're rping in an already painted canvas (e.g. WoW). 

That being said, it is a shame that CCP doesn't seem to appreciate it's rich lore or the possibilities.  More and more it just seems like it's just null this and that with only a superficial touch on other matters and a lack of attention to detail like missions storylines that are woefully obsolete, elimination of "fluff" and the like.

[Vic Van Meter]

Honestly, I have a mild dislike of the lore.  If people here hadn't been excellent RPers and done something with it, I'd probably hate it more.

What is it you don't like in the lore ?

I suppose that, because it rotates around two thing, empires (which can't essentially lose or win because people actually belong to those factions) and nullsec corp politics (which I tried to get into, but couldn't bring myself to really care), EVE wallows in moral ambiguity.  Hell, Constantin Baracca is essentially my reaction to EVE, that there are no good guys, no paladins, and I intentionally put him in the most hated race in New Eden.

I know the moral ambiguity is there by design, and some people really like it, but it hits me with a sense of pointlessness.  Maybe I played too many paladins or gangsters in my RPing days, but EVE lore does sometimes feel like a blob of grey gloop.  Like wall putty, it serves a very important purpose, but isn't especially interesting unless you're into gypsum patching.

There's just no omnipresent force of danger, not a universal villain or even space itself, threatening people.  So a lot of the arguing and conflicts seem very petty and insignificant.  Normally, intergovernmental intrigue is sort of the background ridiculousness that paralyzes great people from acting together against everpresent threats.  Since EVE itself isn't threatening you, those petty disagreements and arguing are the boiling points of the game.

It's not the worst thing ever, people are trying, but man does it feel like I have to work to wring meaning from the game lore.

[Jace]

I suppose that, because it rotates around two thing, empires (which can't essentially lose or win because people actually belong to those factions) and nullsec corp politics (which I tried to get into, but couldn't bring myself to really care), EVE wallows in moral ambiguity.  Hell, Constantin Baracca is essentially my reaction to EVE, that there are no good guys, no paladins, and I intentionally put him in the most hated race in New Eden.

I know the moral ambiguity is there by design, and some people really like it, but it hits me with a sense of pointlessness.  Maybe I played too many paladins or gangsters in my RPing days, but EVE lore does sometimes feel like a blob of grey gloop.  Like wall putty, it serves a very important purpose, but isn't especially interesting unless you're into gypsum patching.

There's just no omnipresent force of danger, not a universal villain or even space itself, threatening people.  So a lot of the arguing and conflicts seem very petty and insignificant.  Normally, intergovernmental intrigue is sort of the background ridiculousness that paralyzes great people from acting together against everpresent threats.  Since EVE itself isn't threatening you, those petty disagreements and arguing are the boiling points of the game.

It's not the worst thing ever, people are trying, but man does it feel like I have to work to wring meaning from the game lore.

I think this part of why you see so many people RP from a very personal perspective with their characters. Everything relates to their personality, their past, their actions, because that's where the impetus lies in Eve since all the factions have their own nightmares.

And this is also why I have found so much enjoyment off and on over the years in Eve, because the universe does encourage (Well, did. This is getting worse) personal arcs rather than each character supposedly their own frackin' hero in the universe (WoW: Every character meets the leader, is recognized for their accomplishments, somehow is involved in the defeat of each boss. rly.).

While this can encourage drama llamas, I'd much rather have that then martyrs.

[Vic Van Meter]

I suppose that, because it rotates around two thing, empires (which can't essentially lose or win because people actually belong to those factions) and nullsec corp politics (which I tried to get into, but couldn't bring myself to really care), EVE wallows in moral ambiguity.  Hell, Constantin Baracca is essentially my reaction to EVE, that there are no good guys, no paladins, and I intentionally put him in the most hated race in New Eden.

I know the moral ambiguity is there by design, and some people really like it, but it hits me with a sense of pointlessness.  Maybe I played too many paladins or gangsters in my RPing days, but EVE lore does sometimes feel like a blob of grey gloop.  Like wall putty, it serves a very important purpose, but isn't especially interesting unless you're into gypsum patching.

There's just no omnipresent force of danger, not a universal villain or even space itself, threatening people.  So a lot of the arguing and conflicts seem very petty and insignificant.  Normally, intergovernmental intrigue is sort of the background ridiculousness that paralyzes great people from acting together against everpresent threats.  Since EVE itself isn't threatening you, those petty disagreements and arguing are the boiling points of the game.

It's not the worst thing ever, people are trying, but man does it feel like I have to work to wring meaning from the game lore.

I think this part of why you see so many people RP from a very personal perspective with their characters. Everything relates to their personality, their past, their actions, because that's where the impetus lies in Eve since all the factions have their own nightmares.

And this is also why I have found so much enjoyment off and on over the years in Eve, because the universe does encourage (Well, did. This is getting worse) personal arcs rather than each character supposedly their own frackin' hero in the universe (WoW: Every character meets the leader, is recognized for their accomplishments, somehow is involved in the defeat of each boss. rly.).

While this can encourage drama llamas, I'd much rather have that then martyrs.

Maybe, but not everyone plays that hero.  On the other hand, there are a hundred different problems to handle, often several at once, without resorting to that.

EVE doesn't really have that, it's just a bit devoid of anything.  I think that's why, eventually, it kind of devolves into a sort of background noise after a while.  Take faction warfare for instance.  The reason the lore for that is so unreasonably stupid is because it completely apes their own logic for how the universe works.  CONCORD can apparently be attacked, dismantled, and doesn't do anything about it afterwards.  Instead, the empires sign a pact sending their people to the middle of nowhere and letting them duke it out in a war that can't end, lest the game mechanic disappear.  But instead of seeing this as a complete P.O.S. waste of time, resources, and lives, we're supposed to treat this like a real war that patriots go and fight in.

Imagine if the US and USSR, worse than just the proxy wars they fought during the Cold War, randomly picked the Yakutsk and Alaska and said, "All of you can go fight over there if you want, but it won't make any difference in the long term.  But you should, it's your duty!"

The problem is, if your reaction to that is, "WTF, that's ridiculous and I'll have nothing to do with it!" your other option is nullsec, where that's essentially been going on for almost a decade.

There's no northern wall to go defend, nowhere to go if you want to be more than a factionalist, unless you deal with one of those two sets of lore.  It really is to the detriment of the lore in the end, I think.  It really comes to a head when CCP talks about giving more control to the capsuleers, and we capsuleers end up against it because even we know we're full of shit.  None of us really want the people in nullsec to have anything to do with highsec, mostly because those of us in highsec right now would prefer CCP purgatory to nullsec Hell.

But because of the ambiguity, there's really nothing else to do in EVE.  The pirates are essentially gold mines for whomever holds their space, the empires hover between omnipresent non-entities or emasculated bureaucracies, and space is a relatively benign place where, unless a player scans you and drops by to shoot you, you can get up, logged in, and wander around for a few hours.  It's not that there are no heroes, it's that there's really nothing to be a hero against.  That's a function of the lore, that all the potential calls to arms aren't worth answering.

Really, in the end, the only reason to do anything is money and power, both gained for the purposes of buying equipment to gain more money and power.  Maybe that's why I prefer WoW's lore to EVE's, it might be the McDonalds of games, but at least it has some substantive nutritional value.  EVE's lore can essentially be like water, a basic substance that, if we weren't adding flavor to it, would taste like nothing.

[Jace]

I think this is just a different perspective on RP thing. I am incredibly glad there is nothing to go be a hero against - that is what has killed RP for me in other games. Films have heroes, books have heroes, real life has made-up heroes, but those are all things orchestrated for that hero. When the hero element is added to RP, the same thing happens: it become orchestrated for that one person and only that one person. You have a whole set of people all RPing as if they are some hero or paragon of justice and there is almost nothing you can do with that except: you save everyone, you become an anti-hero, you become a martyr. And in each option, there is no room for other players.

What makes the Eve universe interesting for me is the fact that there are no heroes, which to me gives more options for possibility - it forces players to deal with the fact that they are just another egger. If they can't handle that and try to be a hero or supervillain, it becomes immediately obvious and they become ostracized. It is its own MarySue corrective system. Do they still exist? Is it still rampant? Sure, but usually in the form of drama llamas that can be easily ignored. Heros and villains has little room for originality in my opinion and essentially devolves into each person going "Mirror mirror on the wall..."

It seems to me that many of the issues we face is mostly from inactivity on the part of CCP. Little news, little change, little development.

Now, all the complaints about the recent turns towards nullsec I completely agree with. Nothing good will come of null becoming more important to lore or gameplay.

Edit: I suppose a less aggressive way to explain my position is that I feel having a collective evil to take arms against is too linear. It is no longer open-world at that point, there is no balance. To me, that's just not what Eve is about. It is what kills RP for me in other games like WoW or TSW. The open-world aspect is a complete misnomer. It is just a large linear game that allows you to skip parts of that linearity.

[Vic Van Meter]

I think this is just a different perspective on RP thing. I am incredibly glad there is nothing to go be a hero against - that is what has killed RP for me in other games. Films have heroes, books have heroes, real life has made-up heroes, but those are all things orchestrated for that hero. When the hero element is added to RP, the same thing happens: it become orchestrated for that one person and only that one person. You have a whole set of people all RPing as if they are some hero or paragon of justice and there is almost nothing you can do with that except: you save everyone, you become an anti-hero, you become a martyr. And in each option, there is no room for other players.

What makes the Eve universe interesting for me is the fact that there are no heroes, which to me gives more options for possibility - it forces players to deal with the fact that they are just another egger. If they can't handle that and try to be a hero or supervillain, it becomes immediately obvious and they become ostracized. It is its own MarySue corrective system. Do they still exist? Is it still rampant? Sure, but usually in the form of drama llamas that can be easily ignored. Heros and villains has little room for originality in my opinion and essentially devolves into each person going "Mirror mirror on the wall..."

It seems to me that many of the issues we face is mostly from inactivity on the part of CCP. Little news, little change, little development.

Now, all the complaints about the recent turns towards nullsec I completely agree with. Nothing good will come of null becoming more important to lore or gameplay.

Edit: I suppose a less aggressive way to explain my position is that I feel having a collective evil to take arms against is too linear. It is no longer open-world at that point, there is no balance. To me, that's just not what Eve is about. It is what kills RP for me in other games like WoW or TSW. The open-world aspect is a complete misnomer. It is just a large linear game that allows you to skip parts of that linearity.

I didn't think the first way was very aggressive.  It's a perspective thing.  I think a big problem with the idea is that being just another person isn't what the game is supposed to be going for; we're supposed to be ultra-rare.  Which it kind of doesn't feel like, but that's probably more of a game limitation than a lore one.  The problem is that we get built up to be amazing and we get catapulted into... well... nothingness.  Storylines against something, or usually somethings (just one enemy gets tedious, I'll admit), at least are a driver for stories.  The thing is, I'm not sure CCP is being lazy intentionally as much as they really don't have any stories to tell without altering something important in their game world.

In other games, if you get a new expansion, you get new continents, tons of new areas to explore you haven't been before.  EVE doesn't have that luxury, really, the cluster can't realistically expand and every system is just another set of coordinates around the sun.  The way they've set up the game is a pretty much constant state of tension, but you can't just remove an empire from the game.  Maybe the pirates are kind of that villain, but they're so neutered in the game world by essentially ending up as farm material for us that they never feel as threatening as they should be.

About the only thing that really seems interesting are Sansha incursions, and I never seem to be near one.

The lore comes off very emasculated considering how hard they're trying to make us feel patriotic or powerful.  It just comes to the point where I'm saying, "Are we rehashing this again?  Does every thread turn into this?"  On the other hand, when I was more active in WoW RP, I've had one character literally running an every Sunday church service in Stormwind and, later one of those Sundays, had my main use carpenter nails to pin a woman to a table and then cut off a tattoo to show her.  Having stuff in the game to do, I don't feel like a linear story since I don't have to actually do it as part of my RP.  But it does give me something to do if I don't feel like going "RAWR, KILL THE HORDE!" every few minutes.

Maybe it's just me, but I feel like, because of the lore setup, it's very hard to make anything happen without engendering some eyerolls.  It's hard to write compelling lore when everything you do will absolutely piss off your subscribers, but since all the in-game movers and shakers are aligned to people the capsuleers essentially work for, CCP kind of wrote themselves into a corner.

[Gwen Ikiryo]

While I was really enthusiastic about Eve's potential for roleplay when I first came in because of it's really sandboxy nature, I've now kinda come to the realization that that kinda makes it no fun.

The game wants you to get invested deeply in it, in it's immersive economy and internal politics - But as a player, not as a character. There's a reason the "Capsuleers being Capsuleers" handwave for almost everything you do in game exists, and that's because neither the story nor the setting make sense in the context of the gameplay. Not only does that mean that the world itself is filled with massive logical contradictions, but also that attemping to play a character who behaves like a normal person means shooting yourself in the foot. The game encourages you to feel apathetic about the world - To view it's NPCs as dispensible money boxes, to view it's factions not as real, concrete entities, but simply tools to earn profit and hop between when it benefits you. And to only really care about conflict between player groups, where the losses and gains are "real".

And by "real", I mean real, again, as a player. Not a character.

In the past, I viewed that fact as something that can be explored interestingly as your character slides between the two extremes, but in retrospect it's a dead end; The only two possible outcomes are that your character goes full Capsuleer, or they don't. In the former case you virtually have to stop roleplaying, and in the latter you remain indefinitely locked out from a lot of content that it isn't possible to justify a rational human being actually doing.

The direction of the background just kinda reinforces this. It doesn't try to work with the setting like most MMOs do. Rather, the setting exists only as a tool of justification - Something to provide a bit of flavour for the direction of the game, not something deep or meaningfully woven in.

I don't think that's bad, per se. It's just what the game is.

[Jace]

I understand the points, but I suppose for me the interpersonal aspects of RP have always been what makes it interesting for me. I do actually view the original lore as backstory for a character that will go out there and make relationships with other characters. Would everything be much easier and more fulfilling if CCP actually kept something as simple as World News coming on a more regular basis? Sure, it would.

And I do realize that my perspective does not help avoid RP cliques, but again, CCP never changing the dynamics or adding new lore is a larger part of that problem in my opinion. In other games like TSW, it is nearly impossible to avoid in-world consequences of the story. You can't actually just be a businessperson if you want. You can't say you killed that boss with those friends, because well, you didn't. He spawned again. The worlds of that style of MMO is so incredibly immersion-breaking for me that it ruins the potential for me.

It is similar with D&D versus say, WoD. If you play vanilla nWoD and not the specific settings, you are an average Jane with a few real-world skills. You are thrown into a story, and let's see what your character does. You aren't a budding wizard on your way to being a frackin' demigod.

So in the vein of that analogy, my current frustrations are not the backstory (for the most part *ahem* Jin-Mei *cough*) or the game mechanics (the arguments against FW are the same for every battleground system in any MMO ever), but the lack of news, lore, and change that CCP releases.

I don't want to seem like I am coming across as defending the current state of Eve RP - just the mechanics and setting of it. I think there are many things CCP could do differently, should do differently: the most important being, well, do something. And I think there are certain aspects of the RP community in Eve that have developed in very unfortunate ways - some by luck, some by the influence of heavy hitters, and often as a reaction to CCP's own mistakes.

Edit: And regarding the rarity of capsuleers, I've always viewed that as misinterpretation by RPers. They are described in these flowery terms in the PF to some extent, but in no way is it viewed as magical, heroic, or anything of that nature. It is just a technological evolution. A big one, a powerful one, but just another technological improvement like the assembly line was.

Edit2 (sorry  ): Also, a lot of the things you are describing such as your Stormwind church are things that are simply limited without station walking. Not to open that can of worms, but a lot of the limitations that frustrate RPers is from the text-based aspect of Eve RP.

[Gaven Lok ri]

Being just a character is what has made EVE for me. I don't like universes populated by exceptional characters.

The trick is to make the 'just a character' interesting for you to play despite not being exceptional.

I do this with Gaven by running a constant study of Amarrian culture and how a relatively bright individual could totally buy Amarrian culture and believe in it. Also cultural questions of what makes a military aristocrat tick, ect. But that is what I find interesting, other people need to find their own interests. EVE offers a wide variety of things to get interested in.

Not everyone has to be a hero. Not everyone should be a hero. The idea that only heroes are interesting to read about is an extremely strange one to me. Also, the sheer depth of player history in EVE means that you aren't going to manage to convince players that you are a hero because you say so, which means that many people who try to be heroic don't end up being happy with the game.