Bomberlocks
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Posted - 2008.10.17 01:06:00 -
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I don't think I'm really wildy excited by this announcement at all. This is a long post, so please bare with me.
I (as I've pointed out elsewhere before) am a fairly new player to eve, with about three months on the ball now, and while I am seriously addicted to the game some of the design decisions and the way they are implemented really, seriously puzzle me.
The main thing that puzzles me is communication aspect of CCP where you have the macho bragging that CCP's CEO has done at various game expos, while peddling the in-station walkabouts or the planetary landing ability, but then never ever actually doing anything about it again after getting some popular press, and the way that dev's communicate here on the forums in a way that mostly seems to give people the impression that they don't give a flying f**k what their customers think.
Consider that one of the devs (or was it the CEO?) claimed that the station walkabout was simply to attract woman players because woman players didn't like "being ships".
Consider the same person making somewhat vague claims that eve's supposed superiority over other MMOGs was its lack of sharding and that the very steep learning curve for new players were somehow "elite" and that CCP didn't actually want players to have it easy in the game, that they only wanted the elite who would perservere until they had something that wouldn't drop dead at the sight of a tricked out AS. The guy was actually proud of the fact that they then had only 300 000 subscribers as opposed to WoW's 8 million or so.
Today I read the QEN, the eve economic report, only to discover that eve has never had 300 000 players, but has been inching up from 200 000 for a year or so. Today I read about this new patch which will introduce yet another level of complexity to what is already an extraordinarily complex game (certificates) in what is supposed to be an attempt to make it easier for new players to figure out what skills do what.
I wonder what exactly is going on at CCP? To me, the real problem with eve seems to be an utter lack of focus, with developers and producers attempting to balance out features which can never be balanced, since every single change seems to bring other imbalances into the game. Introducing new levels of complexity does not make the situation any simpler, and each new change only seems to anger more and more people, as people who have been playing and training skills for months and years are left with nothing except their real life money ($,ú etc) gone with not much to show for it.
Eve is still VERY hard for new players, and suggestions like official PvP duels (to allow people to duke it out earlier in eve) or dummy ammo go unanswered, as do improvements in the help system and online game info.
Eve was, is, and will always be unbalanced as regards to race, ships, modules and other features. It's like a neural circuit that someone is trying to balance by tweaking things, but the long requested features and player suggestions are simply left unanswered (except for occasional bored dev wisecracking).
CSM is simply a joke, Period. CCP does not really make much of an attempt to get player feedback in any useful sense (polls, votes, forms etc, i.e. METHODICAL feedback as opposed to the anger fest that these forums degenerate into).
People are cancelling subscriptions (and my new second account, Gallente, nerfed before it even gets off the ground makes me feel like cancelling mine too, along with my newly nerfed Minmatar 1st account) because they are frustrated and because, as the Icelandic CCP probably knows very well, the real life economy is on the way down and people are not inclined to waste money on things that only frustrate them.
CCP, listen to the players, do feedback and communication in a methodical fashion. Demonstrate that you care about your players, because, ultimately, we pay your salaries.
I apologise for this long rant. Had to get it off my chest.
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