Commander Spurty wrote:Posting in the thread that dropped PCU a bit more and all the stories about how this is clearly a sign no one is playing anymore
/me rolls eyes and facepalms all in one fluid motion
Well take a moment to think about a couple of things here.
- the model of "one big MMO" on the order of WoW may be to MMO games what AOL was to email in the 1990s. Back then everybody and their mother had an AOL account. That was the mainstream. But now there are other email services out there all vying for the pie, and they are free too. Of course if you get your own web hosting or server you get your own email addresses and as many as you want too. So maybe the advancement of technology will see to it that no game will ever have as many subs as WoW and that what we see in Eve Online is the future: a wide variety of games with lower subs catering to smaller audiences. We need to stop thinking it has to be like WoW to be a success, as that model may no longer exist.
- it used to be that if you had an online presence you logged into some forums or "nets" (I'm thinking of usenet for example) and a centralized "go to space" was where you meant to communicate. For me and other old timers it's still like that. This is why a teenager today might have an endless track of chat rooms, boards, and a wide ranging Wordpress and Disqus presence while their parents who started out on the internet in the 90s is stuck on "Facebook and Twitter". So too then, why not the model of "one place to log into the game" be the case? The overall technology and habits of the new generation has a much wider scope. I'm sure Eve Online with the limited API and "one place to access" looks archaic to them. Since you are talking about "PCU", would it not be wise to consider that? Or should CCP stick to the ways of the late 90s so that Eve Online eventually becomes that "Old Geezer" game? Spreading access to Eve Online over numerous points would be in line with the way younger internet users already use the internet as a whole. Look at CFC for example (not Imperium they say). They have a very large internet presence. no alliance could manage that without a "meta community". There's something to be learned in that.
- Social media is basically the big thing now. Would it not be better for the game if it had social media elements about it that broke away from the game client and these forums (forums that are along the old ways of centralized web forums to boot)? Giving players ways to communicate and interact with each other and their corp through the game outside of the game client and through the other tools that they use, tablets and phones, could keep them involved more often.
These things should be considered lest Eve Online reach the status of that dominoes game we see old men playing on their front porches.