Zachri
Brutor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
0
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Posted - 2014.07.22 08:39:00 -
[1] - Quote
Taking on elements like sovereigny, supercapitals, pos and such is interesting, but it's merely addressing symptoms, not structural patterns in the emergent dynamics that comprise EVE.
It's about human behaviour on a group level, and about human behaviour on individual pathways, both of which CCP did a remarkable job of understanding during the first years when they still realised how very much they are an inclusive element to the whole (that is bigger than the sum of parts), but which got forgotten later on as part of CCP took distance, while the workfloor of CCP was increasingly required to look at matters on a level of detail, sql and abstracts.
It would be of severe interest to stop looking at features and content on those abstract & detail levels, but to step into the shoes of the next series of customer archetypes and approach it from a behavioural angle.
New Eden has grown quite a bit, and while there is a limit to that growth due to the battles for retention, conversion & return (which should be CCP's Holy Trinity of Marketing but alright) it still faces the same structural challenges which any human community does when it exists for extended amount of time. Things like the economics of it all are derivative elements, something CCP's economist finally figured out just a short while before he quit. The foundation is the frying pan of baseline human behaviour, both content and features are instruments, not pathways.
Only a few things make human communities tick enough to nurture growth: the ability to build, the ability to burn, and the ability to breed.
Now unless CCP comes up with a way for us to have kids (I'm not sure that is wise, incidentally), we're left with burning and building. One might think that we can burn plenty in New Eden, but when you look at it on a behavioural level it becomes clear that really we can't. What we perceive as burning is a recycle/replace layer of interaction, it transpires on the individual and group level, but does not rise beyond it.
CCP might want to have a look at the retention and conversion figures during the times where - albeit within much more limited feature sets - folks could both really build and burn out there. It's the fringe that grows the dynamic, not the foundation, humans got to go somewhere, reach out to somewhere. The foundation follows, even if it cracks sometimes.
Have a look at the days where folks built trailer parks of giant secure containers in nullsec (after you removed arkanor from empire). People didn't have much, nor could they do much, and when **** happened they lost much which couldn't instantly be replaced - but it did seduce people to get out there. Look at the days where folks were enabled to build homes out there, and look at how that has changed the map. See what happens when you entice people to build, but forget the basic premise of the underlying system (growth requires limits to resources but no boundaries to behaviour and geographics).
You'll quickly see that we've hit the walls, and our resources are known and keep on giving. On a behavioural level, you're dealing with a decline in incentives towards excesses of behaviour - and it is that which creates the deepest narratives, which is what creates the best marketing (by both customers and CCP). I realise that's a bit tough to contemplate following the IPO dream drama and the restructuring, but now that there is one horse (IP dude aside) one really should look at it from a behavioural level. When those who became CCP mortgaged someone else's house to start things off they didn't really know that they were on the right track, but they worked it on the behavioural level. Once they stopped doing that, things stumbled. Not a lot, but increasingly often. There's a very simple lesson in there.
I read a lot about the POS topic. I remember how during early CSM days people found out that some CCPians had done the work to replace it all, including testing & scaling, in their own private time since nobody understood the existing codebase. I'm glad to see something finally on the roadmap, but it is once again focusing on challenges from an externalised perspective, addressing symptoms and not the disease - proverbially speaking.
The same with the entire debate of supercapitals and sovereignty. You already know that volume and time beats all in New Eden, welcome to the human species - it's no longer about altering details or pathways, take a look at how ideas and memes (no, not the funny gifs) spread between subgroups. Take a look at what makes us tick behind the pixels, so our drive to overcompensate can create its own pathways. Otherwise you'll end up with a second decade similar to an arms race of constantly having to come up with new content and feature revisions while the archetypes you require to suck in for sustainable growth see not just EVE, but by that time competing entertainment as well. I'm certain Marketing has already done its strategic mapping of those.
It's pointless to argue symptoms. Go back to where things began, learn from that. Remove the walls, allow things to really burn, and consider how remarkable human growth is when one has to rebuild. Incidentally, please take a solid look at one of the factors that most affects the resource strata of emergent dynamics: point income / resource elements. They really should deplete, tech for it should be open to innovation, new sources shoul |