Category: EVE Online

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Comment Spotlight: Fun Economic Activity

sid67 comments at Hardcore Casual:

My criticism here is that [developers] usually don’t try to make the getting or the making [of items] itself very fun. For example, EVE has a great economy but the *doing* of it is about as fun as pissing on a flat rock.

This is the other reason I do not play EVE. I could have a merry time being a middleman and playing the spreadsheet. You see a 20% price differential between stations five jumps away, and you can capitalize on that. The actual gameplay involved in that is filling a cargo hold, waiting for a half-dozen jumps, and emptying a cargo hold. I decided not to pay to pretend to be an intergalactic trucker (in an environment where pirate attacks on your truck are surprisingly common).

Before that, I was drawn to the notion of mining. It sounded like a rarefied version of the MMO crafting I often enjoy, being the backbone of the economy, and potentially going from the very rocks to final production. The actual gameplay involved in that is activating a mining laser and waiting for the hold to fill. I decided not to pay to be mostly AFK (in an environment where pirates make a hobby of harassing miners).

And I have paid to pretend to make charcoal, flax, and linen in A Tale in the Desert. The actual gameplay of Facebook games often rivals the crafting in most MMOs.

: Zubon

Design of Theme Park MMOs

Yesterday I accepted the suggestion that design should lead users to the right action. If what feels intuitive is wrong, change whatever part of the game is encouraging failure. I was talking about interface design, but this is how we get theme parks, isn’t it?

The trail of bread crumbs leads you from ride to ride. Follow the big symbols over NPC heads and then arrows to whatever they want. One ride sends you to the next. “The right thing to do” is so obvious that we strongly notice sub-optimal ordering in quests and trip combinations.

We can complain about dumbed-down design, but it is good design in the sense that it provides good guidance, works with users’ intuitions and expectations, and is a big improvement over games that have one “right thing to do” but hide it behind an illusion of freedom. We expect games to have a goal and a victory condition and something to do, rather than toys or worlds where we expect to make our own fun.

EVE Online is a wonderful sandbox with entirely user-defined victory conditions. Those design decisions go well together: there is no way to “win,” so there is limited guidance about the “right” path to take. (It is an improvement that certificates help you figure out the steps on common paths.) World of Warcraft is a wonderful theme park with very clear paths and velvet ropes to make sure you stay on them. The middle ground is harder to establish.

: Zubon

A Kestrel for a knave

The news that a pilot in EVE was attacked by other players who not only destroyed his ship, but also the PLEX (Pilots license extensions; in-game timecodes that can be traded between players) worth an estimated 22 billion ISK that he was carrying proves once again that, for me at any rate, it is far more fun and interesting to read about what goes on in EVE than it is to actually play the game.

Account-Level Rewards

I am interested in seeing more factors tied to the account rather than the character and in the form of unlocks rather than items.

Most MMO elements are tied to the character. Your level, skills, reputation, achievements: all of these are character-specific. You may be able to trade money and equipment between characters. Some games are progressive enough to let you share a few items like a friends list, chat channel, guild affiliation, or key bindings across characters.

Some of my interest comes from being an altoholic. If I have a dozen characters, a bonus that applies to all of them is more interesting than a single-character upgrade. It is secondarily of use to the hardcore with multiple level-capped characters, less so to players who devote themselves to a single character. It makes it a lower-investment decision to try new character options, and it retains the illusion of progress and permanency rather than making each character feel like something entirely new. Continue reading Account-Level Rewards

On the Need for Empire Space, Even in PvE

One of the secrets of EVE’s success as a PvP-centric MMO is that most of the sheep are safely in the pen. Sure, some folks engage in daring raids in high-security space, but it is mostly safe, and the vast majority of the playerbase is there. Those massive 0.0 empires are funded (probably in-game, certainly out-of-game) by the safe sectors.

SynCaine discusses more or less what the undead horde in Horizons was supposed to look like, in contrast to the more moderate Guild Wars 2 plan of hyper-evolved public quests. One can imagine the potential hell of server divergence if you actually let the game run wild like that; some developers would be happy to see such big differences across servers, expansions could not be planned linearly, some players would love it, some players would claim to love it while flocking to the safest server… I kind of like the idea that what server you play on really means something, but SynCaine circles back around to the problem with having meaningful consequences: it is not safe:

I agree that most WoW-type players don’t actually WANT dynamic content as defined above, which is more than likely the reason its not more common. In a way, what GW2 is trying to do is make those type of players believe the content is dynamic, while still ‘safe’ enough so their individual nightly plans don’t get too disrupted.

Well, yes. I really do want to be able to log on for an hour twice a week and have fun. Well, perhaps not me personally, since I am insanely obsessive like the rest of you, but as a developer you do not want a game that alienates people who will give you a full monthly fee for minimal access (in favor of the guy who plays 40 hours a week and complains on the forums another 20). I do not want to come back from a month away and find myself unable to escape from the undead-infested city that was safe when I logged off. I do want some safe, formulaic options that are available at all times, and if I re-join in an unsafe area, I want a button to get me somewhere stable without forcing me to spend a whole night doing it. Because you or I may be excited about checking the progress of the war every night before logging in, but with my work schedule, I want to be able to play when I want to play. You can tell me to go play something else for a night if I need that safe option, but if you tell me that very often, I am taking my subscription dollars with me.

So we cannot turn the whole world over to the risk of undead hordes without narrowing our little MMO niche. Instead, we keep some completely safe, static areas. We should have this even to the level cap, to keep those long-term casual players who are happy to run their daily heroics. But I agree, we could go a lot further with letting events play out in the wilds.

: Zubon

PS: Is that the core plan for GW2 PvE: “public quests plus a deed log, go!”? That sounds better than most, actually.

Early, Middle, Late

For a game that depends on a stream of income from subscribers or RMT shoppers, the first hour of play must be the top development priority. This is where you hook players. After that, the endgame is important because that is where your players will be spending time indefinitely and where your game’s chatter will come from in the long run. Next is the early game, when you build momentum. The mid-game has already fallen this far down the list, as you have certainly seen in a lot of MMOs, and frankly few care much how good the late-game is because they are already fully committed and racing for the end-game.

I stand by my repeated claim that optimizing the new player experience is of paramount importance. You must grab my attention within five minutes, and you must deliver a satisfying hour or two for my first play session. Without that, any free trial is worthless, and you may even lose some people who have thrown down $50 for a box. This is the part of the game that every single player will see on every single character, and if you cannot do a good job here, I have no hope for the rest of the game. Yes, it is hard to make things interesting while giving the player only a few buttons to play with. Suck it up, we all have hard parts in our jobs. That’s why they pay us. Continue reading Early, Middle, Late

Horizontal Progression

EVE Online is a PvP game where you can never catch up to players who started earlier. Skill points are time-based, the older characters have their attributes and learning skills maxed, and someone starting today will always be millions and millions of points behind veteran players. How do you avoid bleeding newer players under these conditions?

First, it is a big universe. Who has the time or interest to go swat newbies? The most powerful players are effectively dragons, out there in the reaches of 0.0 space, waiting for dragonslayers or fools loaded with coin. Or perhaps they are corporate managers, working safely in corporate space, more likely to exploit your labor than destroy your ship.

Second, even if you are in direct conflict, only so much force can be brought to bear. All those points in Caldari ships only matter if you are flying a Caldari ship. Those millions of points for flying your Iteron V (a hauling ship) do not do you much good in combat, nor do your trading or research skills. Furthermore, each skill has five ranks, further limiting the force available. Each rank of a skill may be worth the same bonus, even as each successive rank costs many times what the previous rank did.

You can be 100 million points behind but only 5% down in this particular combat. As long as you have the relevant skills maxed, you are on equal footing. Sure, he is equally good at flying a dozen different ships, but he can only fly one at a time. Of course, all his mining and production skills let him build ships faster than you can destroy them, but that’s his reward for having spent $500 more than you on the game.

: Zubon

Dust 514: Sounds like a great idea

EVE is going to mix things up a bit. Soon, there will be planets that need to be controlled in order for the rich to get richer. Who controls which planet at which time will be determined by a new FPS / RTS game called Dust 514. The announcement was a while ago, but I didn’t hear about it until my husband saw it on EQ2-daily.com.

Continue reading Dust 514: Sounds like a great idea

Happy Belated 6th, EVE Online

EVE Online turned 6 on May 6th. Congratulations to CCP!

A 6 year persistant history. A living history where truly brilliant strategies have unfolded. Truly terrible betrayals unveiled. We are excited to see what will happen next.

This year has been very successful for EVE Online, thanks in large part to the Apocrypha expansion and a return to retail. We started out the year with around 244,000 subscribers and in five short months we’ve had a 22% growth in subscribers. In the past couple days we surpassed the impressive milestone of 300,000 active subscribers.

We’ve broken our peak concurrent user record 3 times this year alone, standing now at an impressive 53,850 in the same universe. That is exponential growth. We couldn’t think of a better birthday present than having more people playing EVE Online than ever before. It is another sweet reminder of EVE’s boundless potential.

As always, we encourage you to bring your friends, family and even enemies to New Eden. Cheers to that.

– Ethic