Qduhaf
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Posted - 2008.05.30 17:17:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Daelin Blackleaf
I'd say it's not ready, but the only way to find out exactly how broken it is is to throw several thousand players at it.
I think that the major issue with this release is that it doesn't address the incentives issues, why are people going to stick with FW after the initial rush. First 2 weeks will see large amounts of empire dwellers get into it, but even more pirates and alot of the 0.0 alliances as "pirates". Then 2 weeks later the empire dwellers will bail, they won't have isk to continue, causing pirates and 0.0 allainces to go back to what they were doing before, and potentially even lower levels than before. Just as we saw surge of players after the last graphics release, bu a month later number of players online was flat.
Level 5 missions appear to be the same issue, good idea to build a system that encouraged team play of missions, but unless you pay out at higher or even similiar level then take up is going to be limited.
For missioners FW is way too high risk for reward, for casual PVPers that don't have/want to spend hours looking for fights it offers nothing more that what low sec already offers expect you don't take a security hit for a subset of targets, and for pirates it doesn't appear to change any of the mechanics expect to make missioners easier to find and add number of smaller ships that you can kill.
Its clear that CCP has some levers that they can pull, significantly increasing the mission rewards is clearly the simplest. The 0.0 alliances have a major isk engine already in moon mining, a good region brings in tens of billions a month that can more than support heavy PVP losses, mission rewards in FW can't and without this people will stop missioning in FW.
Unclear how PVP will change with FW as what happens on SISI is not at all realistic, but since again there are no rewards associated with PVP (isk for station control as there is in 0.0) and no mechanisms within FW that control blobs/unfair fights then I don't expect that anything will change. Its not like PVP is hard to find now, there are any number of systems camped by pirates/alliances in lowsec and 0.0 already, what is hard to find is PVP that both sides want to engage in.
There are aspects of EVE that the sandbox environment is perfectly suited for, but that play style takes a very large time commitment to achieve and rightfully exists in 0.0 and to a certain extent within empire industrial players. But there are also people that would like to engage in the real losses of EVE PVP that don't want to spend 8-12 hours online looking for these fights. FW doesn't offer these people what they want, and I would say they are an important people to address as they are the ones buying GTCs to play.
Bottom line - it is very unclear who the target market is for FW outside of hardcore RPers. But its also very clear that CCP wants to release this, and will probably be talking up the record number of people online for the first 2 weeks.
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