Macdeth
Ephemeral Misgivings
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Posted - 2007.12.08 14:58:00 -
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In my opinion, based upon playing EVE and several other PVP-heavy persistent online games for better than ten years now, experienced players with abusive tactics relating to logging in & out (and similarly, in eve, cloaking) eventually do prove completely gamebreaking, and eventually do frustrate enough of the PVP-oriented players into quitting that this does cascade into the death of the PVP-related portion of the game among all but a small set of addicts who simply can't let go, whose experience gives them a nearly insurmountable edge over any newcomers.
In EVE, this has been happening to a lot of the oldtime players, but because of the game's much publicized 'slow burn' launch, the effects haven't really been felt yet and probably won't for quite a while yet. It is entirely possible that with empire providing a completely viable stomping ground that players need never venture outside, that it won't spiral out of control and kill the server population as typically happens elsewhere.
The only fix to this kind of issue is leaving the player-controlled entities exactly where they where when you disconnected, and in EVE also making cloaked ships scannable with great difficulty as was bandied about back with Revelations 1.0 ... If by misfortune you lose your internet connection, or real life interferes and you die, that's simply the price you pay. It's just another component in the risk vs reward evaluation for every decision you make during gameplay.
The huge scams and high stakes 0.0 political endgame are what brings people into EVE, even if they don't partake themselves, and these are what are endangered. All things eventually come to an end, but CCP can certainly prolong it by shaking things up even more radically than they have with all the changes in Trinity that everyone is presently crying about.
Excessive use of risk-averse tactics such as logging & cloaking are a couple of the biggest problems EVE has going, while untouchable accumulated wealth that reduces the cost of losses to triviality is another, though a tiny bit's been done on that front lately.
(I stayed up all night and am now writing long meandering posts on the forums... I should probably stop that.)
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