Hawk Firestorm
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Posted - 2007.12.08 10:12:00 -
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I'm a long term player too and for many years now have tried to get CCP to look at themselves and the approach they have taken to developing the game for many years now biggest problem is they have lost their way.
A while back I made a post regarding this and how on a fundemental level how CCP hadn't changed the Core fundemental gameplay or improved it one iota since the game was released which spawned a post from the developers that we'd forgoten the changes made etc.
A big part of the problem is that CCP has grown there's many new younger faces there developing a game where alot of the players playing it are mine and hillmars age in our 30-40's who have very different wants and likes but also a lack of design in the sence of it being more than a job title.
When eve first stated out it was fairly simple but diverse, loosing a ship then hurt but nothing like it does now once you ground your way up some to a certain level things were far more diposable than they are now which was good, you could go out and play have fun and if things went boom you didn't have to hamster wheel your way back for months to replace your loss.
Now things are very different they put in high level content which requires masses of man hours from a group of people which is good in the respect of teamwork and having group goals to work to, but also has massive gamestopping events upon it's loss, a good example of this is outposts and titans, I can tell you each corp is basically a micro community, with players playing with friends and making new ones loosing your home or something of high value that required massive input from many can be a game stopping event utterly trashing a entire community.
And in this respect CCP has failed miserably on the design front while they have added new wings dings and swings they've gotten fixated on the content and the overall design and core gameplay as utterly gone by the wayside, and by that I mean how people interact with the game, and improving the CORE gameplay elements which haven't changed one bit despite the content.
For many many years I've gone on and on to them about going back to basics and utterly redesigning the fitting system and how ships are upgraded and finally setting clear roles to ships and their place in eve and completely tying down what and how many modules and indeed what type of modules a ship can fit, no negative database tweaking or bending but actually properly setting out from scratch that defines everything in stone.
The other being to actually work just on improving the gameplay, how ships move combat especially, even something as radical as getting shut of manual Z axis and putting everything on a 2d plane, with a slice the pie UI adding shield and wep arcs and making combat far more fun and tactical and put in proper dogfighting instead of the unrewarding blob fest it is now.
And this is what I mean by Core gameplay how the player gets about, how he makes isk the UI and having the understanding that if the key elements of the game like the fitting system which was a last resort thing placed in beta last moment is lacking which it has always been requiring constant tweaking which overall has wasted more time than actually doing the job properly and going back and redesigning and doing a full rebalance properly.
As of now the games very diverse which is good, but there are some very BIG issues one being there's far too much grind and alot of hamster wheeling in game now, both skill wise and isk wise which is very bad, add in high content loss and the devasting effect it has on players and more importantly their community it makes for a sorry state of affairs.
It's kinda like a artist that just doesn't know when to quit fiddling with a painting and has lost the feel of the overall picture.
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