Morwen Lagann
Tyrathlion Interstellar
1225
   |
Posted - 2014.06.17 18:34:00 -
[1] - Quote
Keeping old players can be pretty difficult, as others have said above. Even if there are some things that they enjoy doing in EVE day after day, they'll still often burn themselves out - and if there aren't, they'll still eventually run out of new things to try doing.
I've been playing since late 2007 from when the Mac and Linux clients were first released (hurr hurr boot.ini), and have tried a variety of things in that time - low/null PVP (mostly piracy, getting involved in tournaments nowadays), exploration, missions, mining, wormhole diving (that is, not living in a wormhole), some industry...
There's a number of things I haven't done yet, but in some of those cases it's an issue of just not being interested at this point - for example, sov and faction warfare, or living out of a wormhole. Things that give the feeling that I would need to invest far more active playing time to EVE than I can really spare.
And that's where I often have problems when I get hit with the "what should I do next" cycles of my time as an EVE player. I work 8 hours a day, have family at home that have issues understanding that online gaming often cannot be 'paused', people who sleep before I do, etc. - so I often find myself having to ask, "can I drop this activity at a moment's notice and not really screw myself over in the process" or "can I actually get some meaningful results out of this with the limited time I have available to me".
Luckily, I happen to (mostly) enjoy the options that EVE provides that meet those requirements, but even that content can get repetitive and stale after a few years of it. (I actually didn't enjoy industry stuff the first times I really played with it myself, but I've got some friends who have been teaching me more about it which has really helped to make it more interesting to me and more enjoyable.) I've also gotten involved in PVP tournaments in the last year and really gotten a lot of enjoyment out of those even with the time investment required. I grew tired of what felt like an almost oppressive state of "blob or be blobbed, lel" growing in PVP in EVE a few years back, and when some friends poked me to come play in the SCL last year, it was definitely not a mistake to say yes.
So one thing I would hope to see by the time I get to the point where I'm bored enough to consider letting my sub lapse, is that the content that 'works' for people who have more casual playtime/styles, be more varied and not as predictable/repetitive as it is now. Some examples from PVE content:
- Individual missions and combat exploration sites should have more variety within them. Don't always spawn the same set of rats with the same predictable triggers. Fewer, more difficult rats. Or a huge swarm of less difficult rats. When it's always the same number of the same kind of rats it just becomes a case of muscle memory.
- Perhaps have optional 'bonus' objectives for extra ISK or LP or standings for missions, like running the mission in an undersized ship, or for killing specific 'special' rats that aren't normally part of the mission.
- Right now the only real source of variety in PVE content is either due to player interference (not inherently bad), or deliberate choices on the part of the player to do things in a more or less 'optimal' way. Randomized hacking minigame grids don't count. 
So, I guess in short: the more different things there are to do, and the more those individual activities have internal variety and randomness not provided through the interference/involvement of other players - that is, through EVE itself - the better.
Morwen Lagann
CEO, Tyrathlion Interstellar |