DigitalCommunist
November Corporation
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Posted - 2011.07.31 05:50:00 -
[1]
NEX and Ambulation are only worth rebuking in the sense that they wasted development resources adding things the game does not truly need.
What the game needs in order to have a long-term future is two things:
1. For people to play with each other.
2. For the interactions between people to be meaningful.
That's it. If you have that, you will have a dynamic and fresh game independent of what new features expansions introduce.
And you know what gets in the way of all that? Only one thing:
CCP's willingness to pander to solo play.
I'm not saying playing by yourself is wrong and should be punished (everyone does it (sometimes it feels REALLY good)), but when you don't need teamwork to advance in the game at the pace most players want, it undermines the best reason corporations have to exist and the whole premise of EVE itself.
When a player can stay in high security space and acquire wealth at a comfortable pace on their own, everything else is optional. Corporations, PVP, low sec, null sec, empire building, territory wars, etc become OPTIONAL.
Let me dumb it down even more:
As long as staying in high security space is a valid long term option for the majority of players, interaction with other players is no longer an integral part of the game, and the game proceeds to fail miserably on points 1 and 2 above.
I sincerely doubt one in a hundred people would really understand the truth and simplicity of that. Players have a tendency to either think in terms of how changes affect them personally (even if they don't realize it or won't admit it), or they think in the short term, or they fail to grasp how a change will affect the playerbase as a whole.
This is primarily why I have largely stopped exercising effort into posting like this. It doesn't matter if I have the benefit of knowing how every change affected the game since it was 40 people on a buggy development server in 2002. The number of people who have any frame of reference which could allow them to understand and accept this simplicity only continues to decline. Forum debate centers largely over which rocks are good and bad on the beach, as the island itself begins to sink.
EVE was never 'real' and never will be, but it had a good chance to build on that rare feeling you might get once every few years - until it was something which occurred at much higher frequency for everyone.
I was lucky enough to start playing when those experiences weren't next to impossible, and smart enough to keep chasing them. For that reason, I don't regret the time and effort I've spent on the game in lieu of more 'real' hobbies; I got something unique out of it which will outlive both the pixels I've collected and the memory of my character.
How many people are going to try EVE today and end with similar feelings? I don't see many, and that is a genuine pity.
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