Destination SkillQueue
Are We There Yet
200
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Posted - 2011.12.17 11:30:00 -
[1] - Quote
Ovalteen wrote:
CCP is a business, and they have to respond to the market. Right now there is not a big market for such sadomasochistic games as EVE used to be. EVE Online has always been a "niche" game, and it always will be, but "niche" games are generally speaking not sustainable. The reason being is because interest in them is usually low, and MMOs, being notoriously hemorrhagic, depend on growth for their sustainance - new players are fickle and leave easily. This is evidenced by the following stats: There are 15-20,000 trial accounts per month (at least a Dev told me that), yet EVE's growth is sporadic at best (on a general, slow, upcurve based on QEN data with lots of dips and vallies). The average length of an account on EVE is around 6 months (again, based on QEN data). If you lose more players than you recruit, you're just stuck with "the vets", and "the vets", god bless their loyalty, are not going to play the game forever.
Now, true, there are some very loyal fans who continue to play EVE. But without new players, and this is my main point here so it bears repeating, without new players, an MMO can only get smaller. A 6-month turnover rate is not sustainable - eventually you'll bleed your market base dry. I think CCP realizes that - they've got a large influx of players over the past 2 years due to excellent marketing, and they've reached the "critical mass" for an MMO (250,000 subscriptions). But, again, there are two things that keep an MMO going: Player addition and player retention. You have to get them to play and keep them playing. Marketing gets them to play. Fair, balanced, and fun play keeps them paying for their subscription. Changes like these are meant to make the game more fun for the newer players. Who are these newer players? Well, they're certainly not 3 year vets who get their rocks off on griefing people all day!
A lot of "the vets" want to complain about changes like the above. But these very same "vets" will tell victims of griefing "adapt or die, only the strong survive in EVE." Well guess what: "The vets" need to take their own advice. EVE might not be as harsh as it used to be, but it's still harsher than basically every MMO out there. EVE is changing. It's becoming more marketable to the general public above (or below, depending on your perspective) a certain threshold. And this is a good thing, because growth means more money which means more cool stuff in the game. If that bothers "the vets", then they simply need to either adapt, or unsub.
That's all fine and dandy in theory, but niche games seem to be actually doing much better than mainstream games in the MMO arena, as far as growth curves are conserned and EVE has had one of the best growth curve of any MMO ever made. The only major dip was caused precisely because CCP stopped developing that niche their players came here for in the first place. So there doesn't seem to be any large lack of new players joining the game. The 6 month turnover rate is longer than some of the main stream competition have stayed in business and isn't really informative, since you aren't providing comparison values from other MMOs. That 6 months seems a good number when compared to this news article and combined with the plummeting sub numbers of WoW. If anything it shows it's not about being niche or mainstream, but your ability to provide new interesting content and gameplay, that keeps the game attractive.
I also don't see how a broken wardec system makes the game more fun for new players and why you paint this exclusively a veteran issue. You seem to assume, that new players can't be the ones utilizing wardecs to engage other players and need to be shielded from all aggression as much as possible. Not to mention the NPC corp immunity already protects noobs and people who want to avoid unwanted aggression. To me this seems a clear case of the system simply being broken and people using the loopholes trying to throw in the "won't someone please think of the childred" -excuse in an effort to keep it broken. A new working wardec system seems more fair, balanced and fun to me, than the current broken piece of crap, that can be manipulated to be largely ineffectual.
Your adapt or die comments are also somewhat misused, since the point is that you can't adapt to the changes. You can only keep banging your head against the wall or try to get CCP to look at the system and fix it. The old system wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but the current one is worse. It's starting to increasingly resemble the bounty system, in that it relies on the recieving side of the wardec to be a good sport about it to work at all. That negates the entire point of a war in many cases and makes serious disrupting of corp operations and POSes impossible. You can debate what the correct cost and risk should be in the system for it to be balanced, but immunity should not be allowed for player corporations.
All this CCP is a business and won't someone please think of the noobs -talk is largely besides the point though. The system didn't work that well before and works even worse now. The point is the system is broken to the point of being useless and needs to be fixed. The debate should focus on how the new system should be implemented and balanced, so it wouldn't suffer from the same problems the old system suffered and offered new options for both the aggressors and the defenders to manage wardecs. That discussion can take in to account CCPs corporate needs and newbies, but trying to justify retaining a broken system using the same reasons isn't acceptable. It's not a matter of to fix or not to fix, but how to fix it. |