Daugar Draaken
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Posted - 2009.06.30 17:01:00 -
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Eve has a severe end-game vacuum. Normally, I couldn't care less, not until those end-game players, soaked to the eyeballs with skills, money, experience and synergy, wander into my neck of the woods and, sipping an espresso and yawning, clicks and send my ship, pod, character and reanimation insurance a week back in progress.
There are solutions to this - an extremely seductive powergame at the billion ISK range player of the eveverse, where players become a "power block" rather than a "ship". Now hold that thought for a second.
This *synergetic" game involves NOT (or less) ship combat - but instead the cultivation of a powerful entity in Eve
- say, a corporation. Or mercenaries, Or a freaky cult. Or a trading block. Or vigilantes. Or a radical political group. Or a rogue (not "rouge") cyborg cult breaking all the laws. Or pirates. Or drug peddlers. Mutants. Or jovian spies. Or a bank. Or the surviving corporate interests of IBM.
Or anything else you cared imagine, and which fits in the constraints of a comprehensive factional strategy game.
This player-genrated power is active, somewhere in eve, maybe on that starbase you know and love, or maybe somewhere in an apparently derelict space station the size (and comtamination levels) of Jersey. And this game incorporates "in role" (consistent, persistent) goals, abilities (a cult has different abilities than a corporate mercenary group). It might work through several facades.
SURE, many current eve players won't see the merit, but many others would. Better still, it would take an hour every day out of the time allotment of high end OCD PK gamers in eve (and that means 10% less people quitting eve online because they got PKed *again* - and it would be a unique way to generate plots.
These organizations (maybe several per system, eventually) might hire low end players to clean up the drone infestation mess left behind by another powerbroker. They would (should) be constructing visible objects in Eve-Space, such as new stations, industrial facilities, occupying abandoned structures. If this additive program is good enough, this device might generate plots and interactivity that no amount of GMs, codemonkeys and writers would be able to generate.
Think about it. Eve is ideally suited for it, and I might argue, needs it. Think something like a very widely dispersed "simcity" interface, right in the eve client, that allows building of structures, the habitation of structures, all kinds of intense commercial and corporate transactions, hiring low-level playes to haul freights or attack other power blocks, move people, create or end wars, loan money, speculate, manipulate, spread a barrage of information and disinformation.
And the game interface and ID should at every turn have all kinds of interesting (NON-PK) implications for players of humbler means.
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