The World of Darkness MMO is dead.

[RadiantPhoenix]

EVE Online is not a very good game at all.

What things do you consider its primary flaws?

[Sakuya Izayoi]

EVE Online is not a very good game at all.

What things do you consider its primary flaws?

The primary flaw I feel is "the big lie", where the game consists of these epic, Star Wars ROTJ style massive fleet battles, heated wars of attrition for territory and survival. But such events are the exception. At any rate, the 99% in EVE don't get to appreciate the setting from such a macroscopic view. The 99% are little more than RTS units, who end up surrendering most of the control over their ship over to a commanding officer, and push F1 to fire at the target their ship is told to automatically lock on to.

In that same vein, if you want an immersive roleplaying experience, you can forget it here. People who name their Male Elf "Melf" are the norm here. And, since the only way to affect the world in a meaningful fashion is through the anonymizing megaconglomorates, choosing not to join "The Something Awful Goon Lords" because you want something in line with the setting fluff can be a very damning decision. And even if you do manage to create your own fluff-based corp, the OOCly named factions can and will wardec you, forcing you to interact with them.

It's hard to get into the idea of your pilot as a character, too. You don't really ever leave your ship (Walking in Stations is not a meaningful part of the game). RPG elements-wise, take all the spells out of D&D, and make every character an amalgamation of feats, and you have EVE's skill system. Characters are defined by what they can't do, what they can't equip, not cool abilities.

Finally, there's the spreadsheeting and the grinding. as Chamomile mentioned. Those are optimization problems, however, and bound to show up in any MMORPG that hasn't been corrupted by the "action RPG" trend, so I consider them tertiary issues that mostly concern the initial barrier to entry of a game.

[DSMatticus]

EVE Online's problems are pretty fundamental. They created a player-driven economy whose most basic tasks are the equivalent of tedious burgerflipping and whose most important tasks are the equivalent of micromanaging burgerflippers. Far, far above the countless serfs slaving away to sustain these burger empires stand a handful of important people who get to make decisions that matter. Those people and their hilarious fuckups make great stories, but that's about the end of it.

Honestly, the entire idea of a player-driven sandbox MMO is sketchy as fuck. EVE Online has hundreds of thousands of active subscriptions. That many people cannot actually be one another's peers. It is impossible. Humans cannot navigate social groups that large. From the word go, you are confronted with the task of dividing your playerbase into chunks small enough that everyone has a chance to matter, and then you're left wondering why you're trying to make an MMO at all instead of something like Minecraft, where people have their own servers with a persistent world and a manageable community, with each player being their own corporation - a sort of multiplayer sandbox space RTS.

[MGuy]

EVE Online's problems are pretty fundamental. They created a player-driven economy whose most basic tasks are the equivalent of tedious burgerflipping and whose most important tasks are the equivalent of micromanaging burgerflippers. Far, far above the countless serfs slaving away to sustain these burger empires stand a handful of important people who get to make decisions that matter. Those people and their hilarious fuckups make great stories, but that's about the end of it.

Honestly, the entire idea of a player-driven sandbox MMO is sketchy as fuck. EVE Online has hundreds of thousands of active subscriptions. That many people cannot actually be one another's peers. It is impossible. Humans cannot navigate social groups that large. From the word go, you are confronted with the task of dividing your playerbase into chunks small enough that everyone has a chance to matter, and then you're left wondering why you're trying to make an MMO at all instead of something like Minecraft, where people have their own servers with a persistent world and a manageable community, with each player being their own corporation - a sort of multiplayer sandbox space RTS.

This hits it on the head pretty much. I meandered around EVE with disinterest for, I think, 2 months and quit the same day a friend of mine tried to get me to join a Corp. They demanded, as a rite of entry, that I train certain skills so that I could perform one of two menial tasks: Scouting or Mining. I was told it was pretty standard. So I quit. Not gonna pay to have another job. I can't even stand grinding in most MMO for any longer than a couple of months, and there's no way I'm going to waste in game time getting the skills to grind for someone else. But, there are a bunch of people that do it and love it.

[Chamomile]

As mentioned, the vast majority of people playing EVE Online are seriously paying to have a virtual factory job. They grind and send the profits to someone else so that they can be a part of (but have no influence over) an organization big enough to affect the gameworld. If you were building a sandbox MMO from the ground up, the simplest of conceptual changes early on would make a world of difference: Make sure that harvesting resources is fun. Instead of mining asteroids, you go blow up aliens with space lasers and take their stuff. The standard MMO murder-based economy is seriously just fine as a foundation for a sandbox MMO. Nothing about being able to take and hold territory renders goblins as primary source of player income undoable or even undesirable. Now, integrating some kind of decent questing into a sandbox MMO is harder, what with it being impossible to tell which faction will control the area at any given time. It'd be weird if the locals were handing out quests to go kill giant space termites who are eating power cables if the area is presently a warzone and they should logically have rather more significant problems. But you could have a questing system where the quests offered varied based on the decisions of the controlling faction. When you take over an area, the leaders get two or three local issues to respond to with a couple of options for each, and their choices affect local quests and have reverberations on the economy, and it probably requires an investment of resources to change the status quo. It could be pretty cool.

[DSMatticus]

You haven't really solved the fundamental problem that most of the players in this player-driven sandbox are still nameless cogs in the machine - you've just tried to make being a nameless cog in the machine less asstastic. That's an improvement, but to 99.9% of your players the game is just WoW and only the remaining .1% get to matter in the game of risk you've built on top of that. That's still bad.

[Artless]

I'll just pop in to say it's a shame that the development team got laid off; I met one of the artists on that team in San Fransisco during WorkshopSF 2012 when I sat next to him on the departing plane. He was a pretty cool dude, and I liked his work, at least what I saw of it.

I won't be able to comment much on the state of CCP as a company. While publicly they do like to put up an image of complicity with their players, they've too often been caught in scandal and their handling of misdeeds or poor judgement has been both glacial and tone-deaf. My roommate was a huge EVE player for several long periods interspersed by years of inactivity, but I never saw the appeal outside of the object lessons in ridiculous economics it very poorly conveyed. The few times I started playing it and whenever I occasionally checked in on his status, it just seemed like the most expensive idle game anyone could encounter.

[Chamomile]

You haven't really solved the fundamental problem that most of the players in this player-driven sandbox are still nameless cogs in the machine - you've just tried to make being a nameless cog in the machine less asstastic. That's an improvement, but to 99.9% of your players the game is just WoW and only the remaining .1% get to matter in the game of risk you've built on top of that. That's still bad.

Fortunately, that isn't really a big problem at all. Sure, 0.1% is a terrible ratio for a significant chunk of gameplay to be reserved for and it would be nice from a development perspective for more players to see that content, but what most players who are in EVE are in it because they like being a part of these stories and the factions within them. They like the idea that their team owns this star system (or possibly a third of the map). Do you really think all 99.9% of the other players only play out of the deluded belief that they will someday be one of the 0.1%? Sure, some do, and it's not even an insignificant number, but the number who play knowing they'll never have real influence over their faction and like it anyway because they are still in a faction that can control territory, that number is also significant.

Even if that weren't true, 0.1% better than WoW is still twice as good as any non-WoW MMO ever made, so your argument isn't super compelling.

[TheFlatline]

EVE Online's problems are pretty fundamental. They created a player-driven economy whose most basic tasks are the equivalent of tedious burgerflipping and whose most important tasks are the equivalent of micromanaging burgerflippers. Far, far above the countless serfs slaving away to sustain these burger empires stand a handful of important people who get to make decisions that matter. Those people and their hilarious fuckups make great stories, but that's about the end of it.

Honestly, the entire idea of a player-driven sandbox MMO is sketchy as fuck. EVE Online has hundreds of thousands of active subscriptions. That many people cannot actually be one another's peers. It is impossible. Humans cannot navigate social groups that large. From the word go, you are confronted with the task of dividing your playerbase into chunks small enough that everyone has a chance to matter, and then you're left wondering why you're trying to make an MMO at all instead of something like Minecraft, where people have their own servers with a persistent world and a manageable community, with each player being their own corporation - a sort of multiplayer sandbox space RTS.

This hits it on the head pretty much. I meandered around EVE with disinterest for, I think, 2 months and quit the same day a friend of mine tried to get me to join a Corp. They demanded, as a rite of entry, that I train certain skills so that I could perform one of two menial tasks: Scouting or Mining. I was told it was pretty standard. So I quit. Not gonna pay to have another job. I can't even stand grinding in most MMO for any longer than a couple of months, and there's no way I'm going to waste in game time getting the skills to grind for someone else. But, there are a bunch of people that do it and love it.

You're missing the other problem with Eve:

Everyone accumulates experience at the same rate.

No seriously. To learn a new skill you click on it. And then go away. When a real-world timer counts down, you get the skill.

Which literally means that even if you play the game 24/7, you will forever be precisely as far behind some other player as you were the day you started playing.

[momothefiddler]

You're missing the other problem with Eve:

Everyone accumulates experience at the same rate.

No seriously. To learn a new skill you click on it. And then go away. When a real-world timer counts down, you get the skill.

Which literally means that even if you play the game 24/7, you will forever be precisely as far behind some other player as you were the day you started playing.

Unless you didn't do the proper calculations before you started, or didn't spend enough money on learning faster, or didn't adjust your queue at proper intervals, in which case you end up farther behind.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

Not to mention, because this game has a permitted form of virtual goods exchange in the form of PLEX (Pilot's License eXtension, an in-game item worth two months of subscription time when you consume it), you can simply buy a Titan pilot or whatever it is you need to curbstomp your enemies. So basically, its as pay2win as all the greats from China, if not moreso.

[RadiantPhoenix]

The way you resolve "forever behind" is not "you can gain XP faster by doing 'things'", it is, "XP cap, with respec so you aren't stuck if you made a mistake" (level cap in level-based games)

[TheFlatline]

EVE Online is not a very good game at all.

What things do you consider its primary flaws?

I'll also mention that googling "eve online" and "Fraud" nets you a rather intimidating number of articles of both players and developers scamming the fuck out of the game.

[Koumei]

Googling "Eve online" and "Fraud" brings up a "Why are you searching for the same term twice?" reply.

[TheFlatline]

I LOL'd. Would LOL again.