f13.net

Inspired by the wall of text responses to one of Lum's posts (http://brokentoys.org/2008/07/21/a-brief-history-of-time/), I wonder how EVE managed to avoid falling into the pit traps that appear to have captured Shadowbane and Pirates of the Burning Sea (POTBS). In theory EVE is just as hardcore PvP orientated as Shadowbane and POTBS, but it appears to be able to keep players instead of losing them the first time they get ganked.

What is it that keeps EVE players coming back that Shadowbane and POTBS don't have? My perception is that EVE is even more hardcore gankage than SB or POTBS are, but it's become a genre success rather than just a niche title.

(As a shortcut - yeah, SB had SB.exe. But that can't be the only reason SB failed in the hardcore PvP audience stakes - EVE flopped at launch too and had its own issues.)

For reference, release dates:

SB: 25 March 2003
EVE: 6 May 2003
PotBS: 22 January 2008

SB and EVE launched when the expectations for the market were small, and, well, EVE's been out for five years and is a relatively small (yet successful :drill:) game.  PotBS simply didn't stand much of a chance of getting sunlight.  (Five years from now?  Considering this is SOE we're talking about, I imagine it'll still be around on life support only.)

The interesting comparison is then between SB and EVE.  In light of Flagship's recent implosion, it probably has to do with surviving the eventual dumping by your publisher/big corporate backer more while still being able to put out an improving product than anything else.  I can't even say "distinct lack of SB.exe" as launch-era EVE wasn't all too stable itself...

I don't know much about POTBS, but I suspect that one big difference between EVE and SB is the existence of Empire space.  Specifically how it gives the losing side of a war somewhere safe to pack up their shit and flee to, at least for a while, rather than get completely pwned out of the game.

EVE also has a very deep economy and supports serious crafting. Not fun crafting mind you but people with that kink do get into it.

The amount of attachment you can get when you invest time into politics and community will keep you attached to a game long after you realize there's no fun to be found. See: SWG. Really, that's all there is to it. Create something that fosters such a community that leaving is hard and change is feared and you get a game with decent retention. Of course, I've always been of the opinion that if key people left Eve or certain Corps broke up, their sub number would go from whatever it is now to about 10% of that.

I wouldn't call this a serious analysis of Eve though - as it wasn't fun enough for me to get that far. It's just how things went for a lot of guilds in SWG. Though the development team had as much to do with ruining that as the players did.

I believe Eve had some big problems at release, including the loss of their publisher, who either abandoned them or was reorganized out of existance (Second is CCP's version but I remember it slightly differently).  CCP basically bought the rights to Eve back from it's original publisher at fire sale prices, which allowed them to continue to run it and profit from it in the long term without the need to pay for the original development.

Also, I'm curious which pitfalls you think Eve has avoided? Their patching history is a bloody mess. They may be the only MMOG that managed to delete the ability to boot Windows from a large number of their customers, their lag problems are legendary, bugs go unfixed for years. Should we even mention Dev corruption?

 

The people that play eve are addicts and are rewarded the longer they play with more and more power, and they rather cleverly keep moving the goalposts of power further and further back. I played it for 2 and 2/4 years and frankly I got maybe 3 to 4 months total of what I could call fun. I quit when I realized that I was playing other games to relax and to have fun. Its like Scientology. You keep investing more time and money and and you feel that you might as well keep going that little bit more chasing the rainbow. And of course you can be so much better off if you have a second account...

Plus they whole society of eve is really monkeys on higher rungs of the ladder smacking the heads of those monkeys lower down that take it out by smacking the heads of people lower than them. I am convinced that most people who play eve dont give acrap about the "great storylines" but are just trapped there. Hell the "tactics" make no sense at all so its not even satisfying in that regard. (I'm a wargamer that has won several battletech tournaments and run several Babylon 5 Wars tournaments and rarely lost private games. Minbari/Abbai ftw.)

Eve is the Lucas of MMPORG. A corrupt ugly fat kid that got lucky. And even then can only manage to be a very small game as the vast majority of the people that try it quit inside 2-3 months.

Eve was the biggest waste of time I have ever done. And to this day its actually a physical effort not to log back in.

Why Eve is successful:

* Eve is deep.  Very, very, very deep.  There's YEARS of skills alone, and every activity provides advancement and branching
* It has the DIKU reward spacing down to a science.  You get a new reward every few hours initially, then it slows down to every day, then every few days.  You're sucked-in without realizing it.
* It has Empire space - this is key as it allows PvE AND pvp players to exist under the same ruleset.
* Advancement isn't mandated on PvE grinding. I'm not just talking skill but cash advancement. Most folks still do grinding since it's easiest and less time-consuming if you want to pew-pew but there ARE other ways.
* It's the only decent sci-fi game out there.  I can't recall ever hearing good things about AB&B or Jumpgate.
* It's stable and relatively bug free.
* It hides just how time consuming it is very well.  All you hear are the stories, you don't piece together just how very, very long in terms of real time things took until you experience it.  Hardcore Eve players are poopsockers to the degree most percieve FoH or oldschool EQ guilds, but nobody mocks them for it publicly.
* Player owned objects and territory and support for actually controlling it.  Limited access and choke points to this space.
* Slower paced combat.  Means that you don't have to be a twitchy 10 latency redbull addict to win.

Why SB failed for me:
* Buggy as shit
* Did nothing to allow actual zone/ territory control. (Open trees at min. distance from a guild's capitol? Nobody saw this as a problem? REALLY?)
* Stupid as shit pvp tactics worked too well.  - Stacking
* Combat was so fast in some cases I was dead before I realized I was targeted.
* Long PvE grind to be competitive - UNLESS you were in a guild that would exploit the AOE grinding silliness
* Long PvE grind after the fact for gold to gear up
* Long PvE grind as the ONLY advancement mechanic
* If you lost your tree/ city or your guild broke-up you were fucked. 

PotBS:
* Shit was just boring.

Eve has a fundamental connection between every asset in the game in the form of them all breaking down into a percentage of resources needed to be mined in order to make them in the first place. That allowed the creation of zone control that mattered, complemented by the openness of the universe. That in turn created the foundation for player grouping and societies, complemented by everyone playing on the same server and eventually needing to be aligned in some form. And that in turn created the depth of personal tangible achievement obvious to players each time they log in.

What Eve lacks is that very specific connection between player input and onscreen action. That filters out a lot of people.

All of this makes it very different from SB and PotBS by nature. SB was a combat game with some light justification for burning down enemy's stuff. PotBS started a bit like Eve in primary motivation, but I think the critical part of their non-success has to do with not having a uniserver.

Sharded worlds don't have the total playerbase competing for the same resources and forming socieities as a result. WoW can be as big as it wants, but like EQ1 and most other MMOs, the on-the-ground reality is that only a few thousand players ever matter to any one character. That's still alot, but even in western galaxy, Eve is fundamentally the most singularly massive game on the market. In this way you lose a lot the meta connections between players. Climbing the DIKU social ladder with other folks achieving the exact same things is a heck of a lot easier than becoming a part of a society populated by widely-varying roles and therefore people. There's a lot more drama in a DIKU because there's a lot less connection between players. In Eve, you just shoot them until they and everyone else become so wary they don't whine about every little stupid thing that happens.

PotBS had other issues too, from technical to the silly AA-esque slapped on ground game. But I think it was the lack of a uniserver behind the unique resource-to-combat meta society that only Eve has is what prevents PotBS from growing into that critical mass.

This is a very fancy way of saying the game is too complicated for the usual griefers to get anywhere. And that's my opinion, regardless of all the positives and negatives that the game has going for it, it's the community that is categorically different from any other PVP game I've ever played. The usual crew of sublimated serial killers and sexually confused angry 12 year olds who infest every other PVP game simply can't understand or cope with Eve.

I disagree with this statement completely.  The only real difference is that CCP makes it clear from the beginning that players have no protection from griefing other than what is provided by Empire space and that even there, if the mechanics of the game allow it then it's fair.

This puts the burden on the griefee, he/she wasn't taken advantage of by a griefer, he/she was just wasn't as clever or capable.

See Eve's long history of cons, rip-off, protection rackets, suicide ganks, can-flips and etc...

Levels killed PotBS.  Eve also has 'levels' of a sort, but it gives you an incredible amount of freedom to choose your own training path.  PotBS just had agonizing, pointless level grind.

1. Economy
2. Unlimited instant travel.
3. One world... TONS of people.

Economy is one of the biggest differences between SB and EVE.  Even in the latest iteration of SB where they have mines and resources that lead to gear... it just does not MATTER all that much.  Numbers, templates, and to an extent player-skill have always been the key factors in SB.  Territory control and resource control were always just fun little mini-games to give you something to do.  And, that was the real problem... finding something to do.  I think something is terribly wrong when you can run across a world map littered with ghost towns because nobody actually LIVES in the territory that they "claim".  I think the unlimited summon spell (not limited by numbers or distance) and the later ability to tree-hop all across the map helped kill SB too.  That as much as anything made it impossible to escape and rebuild.  It also made territory control meaningless.

EVE has managed to capture the casual and the hardcore, the crafter and the PvP maniac, and keep them all satisfied in the SAME WORLD.  That is probably the other key.  EVE can manage to allow all of their players to live in the same world.  Who knows what SB would have been like if they could have kept the hamsters running their servers with more than 1,000 people online at the same time. 

Just for the record... Wanderer's wall-o-text about SB from that Lum link:

I agree that CCP makes it clear.

However, I'm not any more capable in Eve than I am in SB or Lineage 2. All games in which it was made clear it was full griefer PVP. But I never get griefed Eve. Yes, there are occasional scam artists or suiciders. But the kind of incessant can't step out of the city griefing you find in other games? I've probably put in 5 or 6 months total in Eve and I can't say that I have ever seen the kind of stuff there that I did in other PVP games. I was griefed within five minutes of logging into the US version of Lin 2. Though not for the two weeks I played in the Taiwan L2 version--which is part of what led me to concentrate on community attitudes rather than game systems in regards to pvp.

Have I died from other players in Eve? Yes. Often. Spectacularly. I've fought and died. I've run and died. I've been one shotted. But I've never had some asshat mocking me in chat. I've never felt like I was griefed. I took risks, high profit transits in lowsec empire, trying to get through to a station in 0.0., etc. They didn't pay off.

I think the community is a huge huge factor in Eve's success.

... and Vetarnias's wall-o-text on POTBS:

The fact is that despite these things - a patch that breaks your computer? dev corruption in a hardcore PvP game? suicide ganking? - EVE has managed to keep its player subs growing.

POTBS has said (according to the above post) that ganking is a-okay and part of the game. Both SB and POTBS seem to say / have said a number of things that put it pretty close to EVE, but neither have really caught on to the same extent.

I was wondering how much having a single server helps that - I'd say everyone being stuck with everyone else really helps, because there is none of people fleeing one server because one side is dominant only to find the next server empty. Also, perhaps EVE was lucky in that no one corp has dominated in an over-the-top fashion (although I remember someone saying something about EVE's China servers having this issue?) which meant that players could still see a reason to stick around despite not siding with the most powerful corp.

Some awsome reads here thanks.

My main thought, is "any PvP game should go through an additional 3 month beta to shake out game crushing features like this."

Good luck paying for that.  And God knows what you do when you find our your design sucks.

You're going to call me crazy, but I think the thing Eve has going for it is a never ending meta-game of catassery that resulted in a giant campaign by SA to recruit as many scrubs into the game to fly a Frigate as possible.

BoB and GS happened to Eve, imho. 

Shadowbane was "winnable" and by being such, the mega guilds came, saw, "won" and then when the server cowered in fear around them, had nothing to do and logged off and went on to the next big thing.  When Shadowbane was one server (during beta) so that the catasses were forced to fight one another and meta game about who's dick was bigger, the game was fun.  When release happened everyone who was anyone was so tired of being awake 24/7 to defend their city from Ninja raids, and thus they all split up and took over their own servers with relatively no competition, the game died.

If someone had been capable of winning Eve, we'd never see it in the state it currently is (i.e. thriving), instead everyone would have gotten bored and left.  But CCP has done a good job with creating a system (perhaps unintentionally, seeing that they seem to cheat for one side occasionally) that lets the game continue on for forever without one side or the other "winning".  In fact, it seemed for awhile that someone was capable of winning Eve (BoB) and there wasn't a lot of buzz around it, then suddenly a scrappy handsome and daring young up and comer (who's hobbies include copious amounts of fisting videos) showed up and spamed it's way to victory in local chat and inspired the world to play Eve.

Either that or people just like space games better.

Eve players work hard to get their friends in the game -- corp recruitment threads like the one on this board make the game look awesome.  It looks like existing players are highly incentivized to recruit and support new players.

This was not the case in Shadowbane.  New players weren't treated well by the game or the players.  So as players left, they weren't replaced, and as the playerbase became increasingly more hardcore and insular, the game and community got even harder for newbies to get into.  The game didn't scale to lower populations particularly well, and that didn't help.  These factors contributed to fewer subscribers, and less money, and fewer resources for the live team, compounding the problem even more.

Some newer games appear to have missed this lesson.

EVE has sheer scale on it's side as well. There is ALWAYS some corner to hide in and do your own thing in EVE. I don't know how PotBS works, but SB had its "You lost? Might as well quit the game now."

You have a very, very good point with this.  Sure, 99.99% of that area is empty because it's space, but it reaches a scale that dwarfs any other MMOin terms of sheer "zone" numbers.

Pirates of the Burning Sea would have been far more successful if they had focused the game entire to be "EVE, on oceans, with boats".  The graphics and play of the sea battles was well done.  The game failed horribly once you grappled and went deck to deck, and when you went into the dreadful "on foot" quests.  If they had ignored ports beyond making them a 3D representation of the EVE space port interface (you should be able to go to a tavern, gamble, etc etc), and stuck with working more on the sea battle portion of the game (and economy and trading)...

Well, maybe we'll get lucky and they NGE the game, only doing it right and rip out the standard MMO quests and levels, replacing it with a more EVE like structure.

I don't like EVE much... but I'd play PotBS if it was EVE, on oceans, with boats.

PotBS originally got me fired up when they were talking about "EVE in boats" during the design phase. Then they went to level-based advancement. And then added the abortion avatar combat. And then made it a fucking hideous grind to get to 50, which about the only time you can PvP. Even then it takes hours of mindnumbing PvE grinding to be able to afford ships for PvP.

Large volume of shit to do, the starting (t1) economy was amazingly deep and never suffered much inflation (when I left, t1 frigates were expensive, especially the nicer ones. When I came back, the nicer ones were cheaper due to volume produced. Normally in an MMO low level good items go Up in price)

An ability for low skill players to still help (look at what goonswarm did prove, that you could throw new players in cheap ships to support better skilled/equipped players), a feeling of Victory for griefers (ship destruction! Podding!) that really doesn't matter (t1 ship insurance! t2.. not so much)

No matter how stupid CCP is about changes to things, they've created a system that for the most part everyone can participate in. The only crippling issue (game balance opinions aside) is the horrible idea that Learning Skills are, and the effective barrier of entry they represent. Also, the delve information in items not being universally ordered. Hello related stats being in random fucking places on random fucking items.

That said, it has me playing again, even if I just fuck around in missions and play with faction warfare. For some reason the game just amuses me when I avoid 0.0 alliance crap.

I dunno.  There are plenty of miners getting can flipped, haulers getting suicide ganked, corps being infiltrated and cleaned out, mission runners getting probed down and smashed, 1 ISK buy offers for battleships and 1 billion ISK sell offers for shuttles out there that I have to think that the only reason you haven't been griefed is just that you are aware of the risks and don't classify that as griefing.

Which, my point was, according to CCP it isn't.  Hard to have griefing when anything goes.

Mission probing and whatnot aren't Horrible in empire, all they can do is try and steal stuff in hopes you jack them, then come back with something big and hope you don't just warp out. I got my first mission prober ever last week, came in with a destroyer and started looting wrecks, so I had drones kill all the wrecks. Wastes both our times and doesn't give him the fight he wanted. *shrug*

WTZ fixed a lot of gate camping barring full on dictor camps.

Buy/Sell order asshattery is just if you're not paying ANY attention, since it has bright red/green marks and warnings for if you're getting jacked compared to the regional average.

I'd imagine miners getting can flipped would suck, as would corpmates cleaning you out, but yeah CCP endorses the metagame, which seems to interest people who like that level of being a dick. For your average uninvolved party, it's shockingly easy to not get griefed if you stay out of the hell that is 0.1-0.4.

So, how do we make the post-EvE game that out EvE's EvE?

Ideas that EvE can't do because it's too..settled. You need a new game to do it:

1 Person, 1 account. You can have as many clones as you want but they all have the same name (ok, surname). You want to scam, fine, but your name is on it forever. Reputations should be meaningful.

PvE space that losers can go to build up their fortunes again. Note: this needs to be interesting. Eve PvE  is not interesting.

Area's of PvP space that you can strike back from: ie: forests, mountains and deserts. Places were you won't make much money (so the big empires won't gain anything from taking it) but smaller groups of players can defend with low costs and large cost ships such as Battleships/carries/Motherships are actually at a disadvantage. A place to earn how to run small kingdoms/corps/groups without worrying about needing 3 Titan's to defend it. Low-sec space in EvE does not do this.

This thread was a great read.  I played POTBS for a week, and it was awful in exactly the way WAP described it.  I never touched SB except recently just to see it. 

I've tried to get into EVE 4 times.  Could never get passed the dull gameplay.  It's always more fun to read about than actually play which is why I'm hoping that one of the newer sci-fis coming out will be good, like Jumpgate, Blackstar etc.

I think that depth and realism will always fly in opposition to pure fun.  Finding the balance between these two extremes is where the difficulty lies.  EvE has captured the realism in as much as ship/combat build complexity, social complexity, and economic purpose at the cost of fun combat.  Shadowbane had potential for finding the fun but were crippled by their mechanics (winner getting too large a portion of the spoils) and their software design decisions.  I think that all of us that had played those two games were hoping that PotBS would find some middle ground in a new setting.  Optimism brought expectations that were perhaps higher than could ever be met.   

Hell, can't we also add ATitD to this discussion?  It's a worldly PvP game that suffers from similar yet unique failures as well. 

Raph? Is that you?

More on topic -- it's interesting to note how EVE worked out for the main server, and how it worked out for the Chinese server. I suspect that if EVE were rebooted today, things would turn out differently.

Goonswarm is a horrible example, there an exception, not a norm. What Goonswarm showed was that if you have a pre-existing community of Tens of Thousands, you can carve out a chunk of EVE for yourself. Once again, it's a question of scale.

Random opinions time?

1 person 1 account will never be enforceable. Though I like the idea of surnames so you'd need to burn an entire account/subscription to have a lolzspiez.

EVE PvE suffers from one amazingly stupid issue: their AI is so basic it lacks even aggro mechanics. Whoever gets initial aggro keeps it. So you warp in a tank, shit attacks it, you proceed to warp in dps and logistics to kill and heal. A primarily PVP game with a PVE side aspect needs to mesh them better. NPC ships should aggro support, NPC ships should try to run when damaged heavily(forcing you to learn to web/scram the target). They should be fit and follow the same rules as players (no 100km light missiles, jamming should work on them, etc) and change ammo if they're hitting a resist wall. PVE shouldn't be massively challenging in a game like this, but it's current situation churns out people who have No idea how to fight real ships in their passive tanked raven of cruise missile doom.

Small ships: they used to have a point, that got messy. IMO Dreads/Carriers and up should never have hit the game. Battleships are large enough, and create a circle of life only slightly messy due to destroyers not really having a place on it. Make nice lowsec space where the anchor points for player structures (smaller ones or something) are in asteroid fields, and thus your larger ships won't warp into them due to no space to maneuver or something silly.

You can never really fix blobbing or zerging or whatever said game will call it, but you can try and stop EvE's tech2 and beyond mudflation, which as it goes on makes it increasingly hard to start something lowsec. Getting into structures without a dread fleet is asking to be shit all over.

FW is a step in the right direction ish, but it needs actual rewards for claiming space, and a better system to find allies with if you want (these are newbies, they need some form of "these gangs are flagged as accepting members in your militia within 4 jumps" thing.

Oh, I don't mean new players can own parts of 0.0, historically goonswarm got STOMPED for trying to play that.

What they did was show that if you have a corp, you can pick up random 2 week old newbies in frigates and they perform a useful role in a fleet (tackling requires nearly no skills or gear) instead of the say, DAOC equivalent of some level 10 jackass in Emain.

Alone, however, or in a small group.. 2 week old newbies are fodder.

I really think the scale, both the topological size of the world and the fact that everyone was in the same one, was the key.  If your alliance got its ass completely kicked, you could pack up and move across the map, often as separate corporations.  That let you keep your social circle and the associated loyalties, while escaping from your defeat.  You simply couldn't do that in other PvP games.  That reduced the amount of "this game sucks, and I'm going to say so on every gaming forum in creation" backlash from the losers.

--Dave

Disclaimer: I started up playing SB again 2 months ago after a 4+ year break, and I'm having a freaking blast. I wanted to comment on three specific points made as cons to SB, which I personally feel (at least now) are much more appropriate as cons in Eve:

* Long PvE grind to be competitive - UNLESS you were in a guild that would exploit the AOE grinding silliness
* Long PvE grind after the fact for gold to gear up
* Long PvE grind as the ONLY advancement mechanic

Pretty much no real "PvE Grind" any longer, in either leveling or resources/gold. At the individual level, you can level to 55+ (competitive in PvP, if not powerful) without a guild, without even access to anything but open trainer cities. Sure, it's longer (took me a week on each server, with an understanding of game mechanics) without a guild, but it's no longer required.

With mines that produce gold, you can (with enough skill) control a mine or two for a few days and have enough gold to keep a city afloat for a reasonable time with just a group+ of players.

Now, in Eve, the PvE grind was simply horrendous--literally weeks of farming--either rats or missions--simply to get enough ISK to buy even a primary ship and a backup that was anything more than a tackler. I made one tactical mistake when farming, just one, and lost 3 full weeks of work on my primary farming ship, and was looking at either a loan, or another 4+ weeks of grinding work just to get back to where I was.

Not to mention the fact that to be fully PvP competitive in SB 1v1 simply required finding a decent to good template on the public forums, leveling for maybe a week, farming for maybe another week, and I could be fully outfitted with at least a tier 2 template that I could work with for months if I felt without ever farming again. Repairs could get a bit expensive, but an hour of farming and you were covered for 20+ deaths...where in Eve, just one death could set you back months.

All other factors ignored (and there are significant differences in other areas for sure), I'd completely reverse the argument--the required PvE grind, and the incredibly poor risk versus reward in Eve makes it an absolutely terrible game for PvP, while the ease of leveling and equipping a highly capable toon, combined with the lack of serious risk in PvP'ing, makes SB a much better game than Eve today in these areas.

Good thread. 

I think one of the major reasons for Eve success is technical.  They obviously have a very solid run-time environment and data architecture that's allowed them to scale and increase features at the same time.  Rarely do you see that.

And that may be obvious. But honestly architecture is deeply underrated.  Having a stable infrastructure means you don't need to spend cycles on things like disappearing inventory and rubber-banding.  You can allow your teams to build more tools to support more features.  That allows for faster fixes, balances, and enhancements.  So, /agree with everything so far but I want to highlight the investment CCO made (over the years?) on the stuff we don't see.

Eve Online:  Developers made the game they set out to make unencumbered by years of fanboisms and pleadings from the "community" for this or that.  It released generally in good shape and CCP had to fix issues, not overhaul game mechanics or try and add on new game play.  Either you liked the game or you didn't.  You were able to base your decision on your subjective thoughts of the game more than objective i.e. it just not fucking working.

SB:  Developers kinda made the game they set out to make.  Instead of fine tuning the existing game on release, they had to fix the damn code before anyone could decide whether or not they even liked the game.

PotBS:  Developers released a product so far away from where they started I'm not sure FlyingLabs had any clue what systems where what, let alone how they would interact with each other.  They got sucked into trying to please everyone, allowed forum static to drown out what they set out to accomplish.


Too many games are not giving themselves a chance to be liked or disliked.  They are so fucking broken at release neither the developer or the gamer knows what to make of it.

That about sums up why I ditched POTBS after a week.

This is simply not true. When did you last play Eve? A Hurricane costs 34M and insures for 40M with a 10M investment. T2 ACs cost about 1.3Mx6. In general, T2 mods cost about 1.5M on average. Hurricane has 8+4+6= 18 slots, or 27M at most (probably much less cuz you'll use some named or get corp mods). Initial outlay then is 27M+34M+10M=71M. When you lose it, you are out 31M, which is essentially all the cost of T2 mods. With full T1, you lose 4M. Anything in between is possible, too.

I have made 31M doing PvE for one night, in Syndicate, for a couple hours. A good system with BS chains would net you 30M/hour. So that's between 8 and 1 death for an hour of PvE. If you were inclined to lose a lot of ships, you might choose a small hull which willl do even better.

Also, in Eve you can salvage/loot PvP kills and make some money.

Eve was a fun game when you installed it.

I get the feeling Stephen wasn't in 0.0.  Yeah, its harsh in Empire when you die if you're new.  On the other hand they've given new players a big step-up and a better frigate if they do the tutorial completely.  If you're dying a lot in Empire, then you're really bad at fitting ships for PvE.  It's not a crime, I am too and so I just steal setups that work from other people.  Makes things go a lot more smoothly.

The PvE missions in EvE also require a lot more player knowledge.  You can't just run in and shoot things up.. some missions that kills you quick.

Only if you didn't figure out that flying a rupture could be Really Fun. That's a huge difference right there.

I am curious why Empire space worked for EvE and Trammel failed to work for UO from PvPer's point of view. Risk vs. Reward was balanced in EVE and absent from UO?

That seems to be a broken part of EvE though- Once I found the external websites on what offence X and defence Y I needed for mission Z the PvE was very straight forward, boring and ONLY purpose was to get money to buy PvP ships or a slightly better PvE ship or mod.

If I didn't read the offline guides the PvE could be exciting, explosive and very very short when tacking PvE ships would prevent my escape from overwhelming odds. Not to mention the level 5 Missions that were brought in and involved scales of battle like the Battle of Endor, whose reward would be 2 credits and 100 light missiles (I never went near them, too many horror stories).

Have they made PvE missions any more interesting? The best time I ever had in PvE missions were doing level 3s in an assult frigate Juaguar in low sec space, and even THAT wasn't for the cash, it was for the research points.

I agree with the poster above who commented that if EvE rebooted to it's current gameplay state like the Chinese server did, it would have the same amount of players as the Chinese had last I heard (I think it was less than WW2OL gets).

I never played UO, so you've got me. Near as I can figure the whole "there is no alternative for spaceship pew-pew" is the only thing that keeps the EvE carebears there.  Open up a good PvE sci-fi spaceship game, and I don't know that you'd have any Empire space players.   Comstar's right, it's boring as fuck once you get the hang of it.  People complain about WoWs pve but EvE wasn't tolerable by even myself, who  :heart:'s most pve.

Without reading most of the thread I'm going to point out the only reasons:

1.)  EVE IS ACTUALLY FUCKING PLAYABLE.  Shadowbane crashed on me left and right.  And when ever you managed to get any sort of city siege, or large battle, the game shit all over itself with sb.exe and destroyed the battle.  This completely ruined the game, and was a major reason why I quite (the game also had an amazing ability to run like shit and be laggy when hardly anybody was around and I'm playing on a computer that was pretty top end for the time).  Ignoring ANY gameplay differences between Eve and SB at all, if SB was the exact same game in every way, but didn't crash when you got more than 12 people on the screen, it would still be around today.  I don't know now successful, but potentially, very, if not solidly holding its own in its niche.

THAT is the most important one any analysis between the two should focus on.

2.)  Empire space.  You don't actually need to take part in any of the warfare, ganking/griefing, open PvP, or anything.  You could stay in empire, become very space rich doing PvE and Trading like any Diku.  SB had no such option.

3.)  It's pretty.  Game is pretty cool looking when you first start, sort of like a Homeworld Online.  This plus all the "depth" it seemed to have keeps you wanting to try to enjoy it longer than most might give a game.  Shadowbane (beyond some cool textures) looked like shit.  Even for the time.  You couldn't be wowed into ignoring flaws by pretty graphics like you can in Eve.  In SB, it was only the gameplay you could go by, and you couldn't go by that, because every fucking time you tried to play the game it shit all over itself with sb.exe.

IMO, that's all there is to it.  You can't compare SB to EVE simply because EVE is a functional game and SB was not.  Any gameplay differences between them are a moot point and not the reason SB failed.

Thanks, that was part of the original intent.  - love, the designer.


A brand-new, fresh-off-the-street player would not be able to reproduce your success.  (Barring any really significant changes in the last couple of years that I'm not familiar with.)  In Eve, while that process might suck more, you're probably joining an existing corp because you saw recruitment threads like the one here on F13, so you have a guild, and they're giving you stuff, and answering your questions in guild chat.  There are no SB guilds recruiting on the boards I read, and there haven't been for many years.

I'm not saying that social systems failure is the entire answer to this thread's original question, but I still think it's a very significant contributor and one that new PvP games will ignore at their peril.

I wonder if EvE's economy would survive if (once?) all the empire PvE'ers dump it and went elsewhere, or if the amount of new players stopped growing.

Hmm, mabye when that happens CCP will introduce Social Security money for all the PvPers.

At some point though what the community wants (or, more importantly, how it behaves) starts to impact on the design - EVE getting ambulation, or how things have changed. POTBS devs would probably argue that they did launch the game they set out to make and that a sea-going MMO should have sword combat and avatars and such.

SB was kicked around by its bugs, but it is stable (mostly) now, according to Zepp. Yet players who lost out haven't come back. EVE sees whole corporations stripped of everything, only for a bulk of players to pick themselves up and try again. I was part of SB Asia - it took one guild about a week to dominate on my server and that was that. The other main opposition guild quit because they could never come back.

Also, EVE at launch had afaik a lot of problems - and still does - when groups of players gather in the one area. Sync problems, whatever that issue was with 'bumping' other ships off their course, etc. Also: real-time travel in space. Again, EVE got over it.

The more I think about it, the 1 single server with enough space for everyone to play as they want together with meta-community politics really seems to be where EVE has gathered its strength from. I've been thinking for a while that PvP really needs a much greater critical mass in player numbers than PvE to be effective, so every server you split out into just dilutes your PvP base further (even if you have 'dedicated' PvP servers, because that attracts only the hardcore, not the 'I might PvP occasionally, or join a zerg group'-style player).

ATiTD is another relevant title (as mentioned above) but it is probably less popular because you can't take to your opponents with your flax sickle.

Anyone have a good link about how EVE in China is going? I had a quick look but couldn't see one that looked particularly useful.

Serenity (EVE China server) population graphs (http://eve.coldfront.net/status/serenity).

Interestingly the 12 month graph shows a very similar effect to Tranquility (main EVE server) - i.e. a slow but steady increase in subscriber numbers each month, it's just that it's at about 1/10th the population still.

I've not played POTBS or SB so I don't feel qualified to say anything about them compared to EVE. One thought I have though is that maybe there's just a very small market for these kinds of games with such a strong emphasis on PvP and that there simply isn't room for 3 such games? There's a set of forums called scrapheap challenge (http://www.scrapheap-challenge.com/) that are EVE-orientated and when POTBS launched there was a big flurry of SHC interest. Same when AoC launched, but neither game held the interest of them for long and they mostly eventually drifted back to EVE.

Any pvp-centric MMORPG launching now has to try and drag those "hardcore" pvp types away from the long-established example of EVE, with it's very stong hook in the form of it's skill training system, that as others have pointed out, is very good at making it harder to break away the longer you've been playing.

EvE pvp combat has a place for new players. T1 frigates are useful.

EvE zone mechanics encourages very large groups of players to make certain pvp areas relatively safe for pveing. There are plenty of mechanisms to help you avoid fights you don't want.

Death penalties aren't that harsh - worst case for me would be being caught by a pvp team in my pve ratting battleship, that would set me back a few hours, but so far that has never happened.

Key resources are mostly found in 0.0.


All of this means the relative population in 0.0 is higher than it was in Felucca. I'm not sure the UO devs could have achieved the same thing without fundamentally restructuring the game.

Getting 4 mill in empire means doing a boring multi hour mission Yes that the general payout. 4 hours work for a measly 10 million isk payout. Saying you can make X amount of money easily is crap. Maybe if you are sitting in the most juicy areas of 0.0 seeing 1.8 million rats spawn occasionally, but not all 0.0 is created equal. Someone mentioned Syndicate. Syndicate was a hellhole. If you were not part of the local blob you could measure your lifespan in minutes if you started hitting the crap rats there were in most of syndicate. You could get better ore in low sec that you could in most of 0.0 syndicate. Literally. So mining there was pointless. Ratting there was pointless in most of it as the rats were barely better than mission rats (300k battleships! woohoo!), and the risk of dying was huge. Sure if you were part of the blob that owned some of the good spots you could enjoy the thrill of fighting with everyone else for the good stuff. And as for "chaining" gimme a break. Talk about basing your entire money making scheme on a bug.

By contrast my old alliance in low sec earned maybe a billion isk every 2 months (and that because we had the best moon in the entire region) and we were constantly harassed by dicks with faction fitted unkillable ships. Oddly when we reached the skill level that we could kill them and we had clawed together enough t2 they suddenly stopped coming near us.

And people can mouth on about t1 frigs having a role in PVP.. but noone ever asks for ti frigs bar gooswarm. Unless you have a year in the game and can fly t2 don't bother applying for a 0.0 alliance. If in reality people are only interested in people flying t2 ships or high skilled characters then the propaganda is false. I saw a big nasty alliance crumble when the 10/10 complex they had total control over was taken over by the red alliance. They were gone in literally 3 weeks as they could not afford their hot shit anymore despite their talk of their PVP skills.

I really wonder if people out there actually play the same damn game I did. I've seen people griefed out of the game, being trapped into stations by people and constantly harassed by people there was no way they could kill. When you go 10 on one and cant break the guys tank whats the point?

And yes there are show stopping bugs that are never fixed. Can we say fighter lag?

And from what I've heard from talking with people is that what happened with POTBS is that the big eve guys went there, started getting their ass handed to them and went back to Eve where their "true skill" was on view, I.E. that they had the massive advantage from their rich high skilled characters rather than being on a level playing field where they would lose due to their lazy tactics they had learned from having a massive advantage. It was rational that they would go back to Eve. The thought of a level playing field was far more desirable than the reality of them getting constantly killed in one.

Eve is newbie friendly only if you're the type of player that wants the socioeconomic meta. If you're just looking for the gear grinds of DIKU, you'll not make it to the second day, much less the end of the 14-day trial. Eve is to MMOs what Sins of the Solar Empire is to 4x strategy: a game that was designed for a specific sub-market. Unlike DAoEQSBWoWoC, it's not trying to be everything to everyone.

Eve players can make buckets of ISK hourly. But they don't do that on day one. And they don't do that easily without the backing of a Corp. Yes, it's doable solo, but you're a very unique type of player if you solo Eve for multiple years, one who wouldn't be serviced well by any other existing MMO.

A next-gen Eve-like game has the first very important task of lasting long enough to become what Eve became. I still think that SWG NGE did more for the Eve playerbase than the recent spat of TV commercials. SWG could be play in some ways like how Eve is currently enjoyed. The NGE killed that portion of the game, or was the final straw.

But in order to even bother considering an Eve like game, you hafta figure out what to do better. That's easy with a DIKU: more content, higher polish, some more theme parks, etc. But Eve? Maybe having Freespace controls for your ship and multiple stations like bigger SWG ships? Maybe a different theme altogether?

Main reason that PotBS lost people, is because the rules associated with port battles, PvP, and what caused PvP areas to show on the map changed every 2 weeks. The patches immediately preceding each subscription renewal for PotBS drove away players instead of retaining them, and the PvP system breakage, focus on being max for PvP, the grind associated with it, plus lack of players staying or returning after Conan, made it's niche status disappear. The game being plagued by numerous annoying little bugs, UI glitches or missing features, with the devs forcusing on everything but those (including changes to skills and balancing) caused players to leave en masse. Probably didn't help that everyone felt pressured to "Max grind", that they removed half the rewards for newbies, and kept causing easily exploitable PvP port battle mechanics. I still play this game as part of Station Access, and liked (still like) their ship combat mechanic, but it definitely is on SOE life support (I'd guess maybe 1k players max on 5 servers at prime time).

As far as I'm aware, EVE didn't have massive changes to the PvP system, had less pressure to grind, and did offer more non-PvP activities to keep players involved. I personally never liked what EVE offered when I was in beta, but the game did see numerous patches that brought balance, community requests and STABILITY... and those right there are reasons PotBS and Shadowbane failed in the PvP market. Community involvement and stability were Shadowbane's failing, and PotBS community people dropped the ball as well.

I completely agree that you need a guild to get you over the starting hump, and get you into 0.0.

Happily nobody here has that excuse, and anyone who joins tomorrow can, within a matter of weeks, be flying a well equipped battleship, fully able to rat for circa 15 million isk per hour in Providence, and getting invites to fleets for all the PvP ops they can handle.

Yesterday evening in Providence:

(http://img65.imageshack.us/img65/3333/cvafleethl7.jpg)

Two weeks in a noob can be part of that fleet and contributing.

But I completely agree that it is much harder for anyone without corp support.

Are people having success with Myrmidons in fleet combat? I love how the ship looks, but it always seemed to be a PvE boat to me. 

UO was never an empire-building game, and never really had a "PVP system" to speak of.  It wasn't even so much a matter of risk and reward as it was a matter of there not really being any PVP game beyond randomly killing whoever happened to end up in front of you.

I think they had the faction system in mind as a remedy to this, but it didn't debut until quite some time after the Trammel expansion.  Even so, I can tell you a lot of roleplayers and carebear types were surprisingly excited about the factions.  For a little while, until it was revealed to be shallow and pointless.

It's changed quite a bit--and there are quite a few guilds on Thurin at least that will guild invite trivially (of course, they have dozens of spies, but aren't really factors at the tier 1 or even tier 2 bane level).

Back to the Eve PvE--I was in 0.0, chaining 800-900k rats. My ratting ship cost a total of approx 130-ish million (including mods), and I could rat at 10 million per hour. That's 13 hours of farming for a ship loss (not counting insurance), as well as probably 4-6 hours of finding the modules I needed to get back up to speed (simple shopping).

The point though is that to PvP in Eve, you hunted the enemy for sometimes hours for a single engagement or two, and if you lost, you lost big (which is why it took so long in the first place). In SB, you can have 10 engagements an hour, at the cost of 30 minutes farming to cover losing every single fight.

Of course, there are downsides as well--open tree pvp'ing is stealtherbane, and you can't do much without a scout in your group...but the same thing exists in Eve as well--and you don't have to chase for an hour to find the only enemy to fight.

I just got finished fighting 5 different nations for 2 hours, after an hour and a half bane. The bane was 40v40, with very very few crashes for our entire force (some lag deaths, some people needing to relog after death for various reasons). Afterwards, we took 10 people and fought 10 v 20 v 15 v 5 for 2+ hours--and the only down time was running back (5 minutes, including death shroud time), or a single summons back.

In Eve, during those 5 hours (at least in my 3 solid months of play time), I might have targeted an enemy ship once or twice, and maybe gotten a point on a ship or two before dying to focus fire.

Regarding new player experience, we just recently recruited a player (female as a matter of fact, not that it matters in the big picture) that has been playing for a month. She had 4 max level toons, learned how and was able to farm some of the highest value dropped items (they added drop only gear with a low random chance of spawning) on her own, and has only just now gotten solid with a guild.

Now that she has joined our guild (we're rated approximately 4th in total power projection on the forums), she's leveled 3 more toons to max level in a week, is fully geared out (equivalent of T2 ships/modules), and contributing more than just "get a point on the target" to our fights. To me at least, the new player experience is an order of magnitude better than it was for me in Eve--and I had F13 behind me from the beginning.

Reading back over my post, it sounds like I'm trying to convince people to play, and that's not really the case. I am however trying to contrast my experiences in the two games, and no exaggeration, I'm having at least 10 times more fun playing SB than I ever did in Eve.

Primary role for a battlecruiser in a large fleets is to be hard to kill while running gang booster modules from the fleet command positions.

Myrmidon does that as well as most battlecrusiers do.

I am highly amused by the fact that Zepp just hates Eve but still uses his character as his avatar.

:awesome_for_real:

Eve is not fun.  It is extremely difficult.  Don't play it.  Go away.  For real.

I don't hate Eve at all--but in comparison to SB, the pure pace, risk vs enjoyment, and sheer number of PvP fights pale in comparison.

I'm not an avatar junkie--going on 4.5 years here on the forums and only changed my avatar once, and I only picked the current one because it was cool that the guy did it for us. Haven't been bothered to worry about it tbh :)

Um... so, is no-one going to mention the obvious?

There are fantasy people...
and there are Sci-Fi people...

While Fantasy people do like Sci-Fi to a certain extent...
Sci-Fi people DESPISE Fantasy.

There are like 3 Sci-Fi MMO's out there, they all suck...
Eve is the best, most hardcore, Sci-fi game there is.

If you doubt any of this, doctor up a screenshot of the Eve character creation screen with "Elf" as a playable race. Post it to the eve forums and say you got it because you're in beta for the next patch or something... the thread will hid 20 pages in about 30 seconds. Eve is a success because it has no competition.

I think the LoTR movies and success of WoW kind of fly in the face of this.

Maybe Sci Fi people are more vocal about their dislikes without, you know, acting with quite the same vigor. 

Two other things I don't think anyone has pointed out:
 
1) in Eve the DPS is moderated based on your skill level and ship type.  Your ship is your avatar -- it is harder for a larger ship to target and deal with smaller (lower leveled) ships.  Someone currently playing should chime-in, because while you still can get ganked easily enough, I remember playing in lowbie ships in fleet PUG's that allowed new players to contribute quickly.


2) why has no one else copied this design?  shardless, sandboxy, deep detailed but balanced.

I'm totally a sci-fi person, played EVE for 4 years so far but I'm also happy to play WoW and have no problem with fantasy. The EVE forums are, like pretty much all MMO forums a poor example of, well, pretty much anything tbh. The rampant hordes of fanboys and trolls just don't represent a good cross-section of the players, at least not the ones I've known :)

Soln: yes absolutely new players can contribute in pvp ops. The Factional Warfare that was launched a few weeks ago is great for new players since there's a lot of organised pvp going on at all times of the day that they can join in with and a lot of the complexes in FW are limited to small ship types. That said however, outside of FW, as with most things in EVE a good corp is essential if you want to be given the chance to be useful in pvp as a newbie.

Also nobody's copied the totally shardless design because it's difficult! It's also self-limiting to a large extent. EVE has *always* had serious lag and server performance issues. Large fleet battles are painful, hateful, godawful slideshow lagfests where module activation and grid loading times are measured in minutes and in the worst cases 10s of minutes. PvE in busy systems at peak times also suffers from regular and crushing lag. Oh and ship losses due to lag aren't reimbursed at all.

Your statement proves you are a "Fantasy Person"
Didn't you read the above rules I posted? Pffft...

Gated content is easier. Easier to implement and easier for players to understand.

When you're staring at a several millions dollar budget, effective shortcuts are (I imagine) damn tempting.

World of Warcraft.

By all accounts Potbs was going to be EVE in boats, then the publishers turned around and said fuck this, I want some of that WoW money.

(not shardless, but the rest applied)
 

Who thinks EVE is detailed? The game is almost totally devoid of content. It's one of the main reasons I always get driven away from the game.

Wow, yet another space station... around yet another featureless planet. ooooo.... some asteroids. There's nothing to see in that game. And when you are fighting other players, they are just some way points on your screen with a name tag. The only detailed part of the game is the damned graphing calculator you have to use just to figure out how to sell the ore you spend 4hrs farming.

I'm as sci-fi as it gets and I still can't bring myself to play EVE. I'll play the shit out of EQ2 and AOC though....

Like the thread says, Eve succeeded in being the best Empire building game out there so far. In that arena, it's hellaciously detailed and full of content. If you don't like Empire building, it's going to be another PvE snorefest with spaceships instead of rats and bats. Moreso, since that isn't the prime focus of Eve.

Content is the other people. I'll take your sci-fi people hate fantasy and raise you with most MMOs not being all that actually massive.

Lookit what's been happening for 10 years: smaller content, compartmentalized encounters, fewer choices. Giive it another five years and we'll be playing Mass Effect with a monthly fee. The market itself doesn't want the "massive" this genre is capable of, as proven by it only existing in a few hardcore titles of which Eve is far and away the biggest.

The market want's the option of 'Massive', not the requirement.

You should play WoW: The Burning Crusade. I can has goat on spaec chip?   :awesome_for_real:

How so? I mean, that makes very little sense without explanation.

Example: While lots of people enjoy 25 man raiding (in WoW), few enjoy it being the only route available. The reality of organizing and gathering 25 people at the same time/place is quite daunting for most folks. Having the lesser/smaller routes to follow, especially the solo/small group routes is very much desired.

The Idea of a shared space is very alluring and interesting. The Idea of playing along side dozens if not hundreds of other people at once sounds grand. The practicality of doing so limits the exposure. The compartmentalization of game play, isn't so much a sign that people dislike the 'massive' game play, but rather that they want something to do when the massive route isn't realistically feasible for them a great deal of the time.


I like going to the park. I would enjoy the park much less if I was required to join/bring 10-20 odd people every time I wanted to visit the park, so we could play Baseball and only Baseball.


I suppose it's a question of inclusiveness.


PS. Go go needlessly wordy reply me!  :awesome_for_real:

-edit-

Basically, giving people shit to do when they can't commit to the larger game play, be it a dungeon raid, or a EVE fleet op, doesn't mean people don't want to do those things.

This is not true.  There were a plethora of goon corps and even alliances before goonfleet/goonswarm.  They crashed and burned time after time, despite the huge reservoir.  The achievement of The Dear Leader was to provide a cultural environment that could bind goons together and exploit what was a key resource, but not by any means a cause, of GF's success.

More than that, I'd say that the contribution of SA is to pre-filter a key cadre efficiently, rather than to act as a newbie hose.  From what you say, you might be surprised at the balance of membership.

TL;DR: the key cause for GF's success is cultural, and not entirely different in that respect from what made BoB so successful.

This isn't really true, either.  Bat Country's 2nd top killer, Phildo, flies frigates and cruisers, and very effectively (I have sat in IAC's teamspeak server when people wondered who the Bat Country guy in the vexor 2nd top of the battleship kill is).  His killboard stats for the past few months are:

Damage done (ISK): 5,554.81M
Damage received (ISK): 195.8M

In other words, every ship he has lost in pvp since we moved to 0.0 five months ago adds up to about 3 hours a month of money-making, after insurance.  Or, for those who really don't want to pvp, half of what he'd get from a 60-day timecard.  And Samson gets salvage and sometimes loot from his kills.  And being in a corp helps, too, in that I gave Phildo cash for more ships: I had cash, and he had the time to pewpew.

Just to emphasise this, here is the top killer, Amarr:

Damage done (ISK): 6428.12M
Damage received (ISK): 283.2M

Amarr flies pricier ships, but not much more so.  A conservative thirty hours of PvE over the year he's been in Aegis Militia.

Point being that Eve only costs a lot if you want to fly prestige ships.  Phildo's Vexor is as deadly, flown well, as a lot of the pricier ships in the same gangs.

And not to jump on the "It's not the game that sucks, it's just you" bandwagon, I personally had a problem with AM/Bat's role in the game; I suspect you didn't really get into it much either.

I disliked NRDS and the endless hours of waiting just to get a fight against people who won't engage unless you are vastly outclassed. I suspect this may have been the case for you as well. Being in GF (or another larger alliance) is much much different. It's not necessarily better, but it fits my playstyle a lot more. I'm still a member of BAT with my alt, and I may play it from time to time, but fleet fights, large scale combat, and clearly defined constantly changing objectives on a corp and alliance level are what I enjoy.

As for the ISK issue, making money either clicks for someone or it doesn't - I did missioning until I got up to a battleship, decided I hated that aspect of the game, got an additional datacore alt, then lived on the proceeds of those for a while. Honestly, though, my most expensive investments are my implants, as I generally fly the blackbird - a ship that costs 5m to replace including modules. Recently, I ran out of cash, but I was ready for that - I was training up a mining character in my spare time and sold him for 1.5b which should last me at least through the end of the year.

There are tons of things that I would improve in EvE, but I'm happy enough as it is. I got through the vertical learning curve and found a niche. I never got into PoTBS.

Pretty much, you don't fly a faction ship into PVP unless you're out to brag or stupid. T2 sucks a bit more (yay shitty insurance) unless you're building them at home.

In general (from a last page post) the circle of life is still intact. A ship class above you will MAUL you, while two classes up will have issues hitting you. It's a little complicated by things like situational ammo for killing tiny ships and the fact that tiny ships need to play inside web range to kill a battleship, but whatever.

In general, pre T2, EvE had a circle of life that allowed frigates to sit around and beat up on battleships that lacked support.. or weren't droneboats. Post T2 there's a lot more problems with that, but now the circle seems to be primarily Cap/BS based, with small gang combat still being pretty normal. I still wish assault frigates didn't suck though, they're fun :(

I played WoW. For 20 minutes. Then I realized I'd been playing the same thing for the last six years when it was called EQ and promptly uninstalled the fucker.

Offtopic but the way people are proud of hating WOW is an interesting mindset.

Same reason folks are proud to hate Microsoft or the iPhone or whatever. No one cares if someone roots for the guys that make billions, it's the underdog everyone likes to root for.

You guys do recall how long it took Eve to crawl out of the hole....right?

If disliking something I think is derivative and incredibly well done but still gives me a feeling of "been there, done that" is rooting for the underdog, then guilty... My dislike of MS on similar grounds notwithstanding. And I'm posting this from an iPhone ...  :drill:

That said, I really, really wanted to like EVE after hearing so many good things about it, but as someone else said earlier in the thread, it's not for the casual. It seems more seductive with the ability to gain skills while not even logged in, but everyone I know that's played it has sunk way too deep into the world of spreadsheets and soulgrinding number-crunching.

I adore the iPhone purely as a machine, but it's too expensive, too fragile, and has a lot of features that could be trimmed. I love Linux (and not in a platonic way), like Windows, and Macs make me want to practice the disappearing pencil trick on the local Genius Bar staff. I despise WoW because it is poorly designed and yet has a wide appeal; I think misguided MMO developers will draw the wrong conclusions from its success and continue to make bad games in an attempt to cash in on it.

All of these are my opinions, not necessarily correct, but they represent a more valid mindset than "OMG I POSTED A LINKS TO ME WEBSITES." Popularity (by extension, "great revenue") IT'S RAINING RINKS is not evidence of good design.

I also find it interesting the way people feel the need to point this out whenever someone states why they personally preferred game X to WoW.

I find pie interesting. Fuck you cake-loving assholes.

No, pie is a greedy dessert giant with an unattractive front end. The cake's icing is nice, but inside it's porous and insubstantial. Soufflé is where it's at.

[deleted]

Great question. I think a big difference is the worth of the space you are reduced to in Empire space. The NPC killing (ratting) pays like 5% of some of the 0.0 (free for all) space. You can mine in safety, but the profit/hr is way lower. So the PVPers in Eve joke that when a corp or alliance gets there ass kicked out of some of the better space, that they can go mine veldspar in Empire (veld being very cheap ore). There is also the option of mission running, which can be great money but nowhere as lucrative as the 0.0 space.

In UO, they split the worlds and gave no incentive to go to the free for all area. If they would have tripled the resources per hour, or had certain expensive gems or some shit drop in Feluccia dungeons that were needed to make GM armor, then you are approaching more what Eve does. Oh yeah, that would be if players controlled and actively fought over those dungeons. They are just way too different, even if they had similar qualities like 'sandbox' and item loot and near FFA PVP.

They did add double crafting resources to Felucca, and the scrolls needed to raise skills past 100 only dropped from bosses in Felucca dungeons.  Thing is, that stuff didn't come in until about a year after the facet split.  By then a lot of the PVP types had bailed, and after years of Raph fiddling while UO burned, we PVE types just wanted to kill monsters in peace without participating in any more kooky PVP social engineering crap.  So a handful of large zerg-gank guilds fought over the Felucca dungeons, and sold the skill scrolls to carebears rich with monster loot.

The cake is a lie.

Souffle is too fragile.

Give me ice cream.

I'll take glutten-free brownies.  Mmmmm.

I like my glutens where they are, thankyouverymuch

Pamela's Ultra Chocolate Brownies?  I took some of those to work once and people stopped pitying me for being allergic to wheat.

I haven't seen that brand.  Red Mill is what we have.  Those are some damn fine brownies though.

It's a mix.  Bake em yourself type.

I think this is truly the allure. It's like the wild west out there, spaceship style. True, hands-off, player-driven world with pvp content.

Oh, and there's stuff for PVErs to do -- so they can brag to their friends that they were there. (At least that's why I played!)

Western players want the opportunity to interact with others, not the absolute requirement. This is proven by the market. The games that have forced you to do so have been niche. Meanwhile the games that merely compel you to try at some point to talk to someone else have been huge.

So developers have rightly shifted focus from making games that support hundreds of thousands of accounts on a single server in a massive socioeconomic sim of moving parts requiring someone with a PHd in Economics be on your staff to manage the whole thing.

Because right now there is exactly only one game that does that right now.

There's a game that has someone with a PhD in Socio-economics!?!

Unfortunately "required" doesn't mean "actually staffed".

Explains a lot, eh?

IMO, Darniaq is talking about the Economist CCP hired for EvE.

Oh. Eve?  Darn.  I thought he was talking about TSO.  :grin:

And seriously, I'm not even a crafting or PVE or 'any of that shit' kinda guy and there is something about having such an in-depth market that keeps me intrigued. Over the yarrs I have learned the value of items, what they do, the quickest way to offload them, safest way to transport them...all from being on the nefarious side of things.

There is so much I still don't understand about the research, invention, manufacturing, exploration, production, trading side of things...it is really what bring it in common with UO to me (though obviously UO was way simpler). The guys that did all the trading, GM crafting, resource gathering, etc were able to do so because of the PVP guys like me. It is the coexistance of both in a SOMETIMES hostile environment that seems to mesh it all. The other part is item loot...but if I start talking about that I'll be berated and called names so I will avoid it this time around.

No, please continue. :grin:

To the OP: I finally found that discussion you were referring to on the Broken Toys blog.  I hope it's not too late to comment.

I think my post on that blog fully explained a few of the shortcomings of Pirates of the Burning Sea, but I realized afterwards that I had left other areas untouched (as I figured it was already longer than enough).

(First, a caveat: Though I have heard plenty about EvE and its major scandals, I have never played it, though the comments in this thread are very enlightening as to the origin of its appeal.  But I don't think I'll be subscribing to that game any time soon, if such things as scamming are seen as perfectly acceptable in it.  Besides, joining a five-year-old game is a bit futile if having a head start is all that matters.)

There is one thing about Pirates of the Burning Sea that I think summarizes it all: I remember reading a comment on another forum that said the game looked like it was released in 1999, which is quite accurate, but I prefer to say that it feels very much like a board game, with each faction starting out in roughly their corner of the map, with wild liberties taken as to historical/geographical accuracy to develop a certain approach to strategy.  As an example, Cayenne, which was and still is a French port in real life, was, in the game, eventually given to the British as a starting city during beta because it lies right next to British strongholds and reportedly always immediately fell to them.  In an even more ludicrous case, rivers were supposedly valuable resources (as they could increase production, though the increase was so insignificant as to be worthless, especially in a game where everyone is a crafter), so the developers decided that people would want to fight over them and restricted them to the Antilles, meaning that not a single continental city -- New Orleans among them -- had a river in the game.

On top of that, the goal of the game, just like an old game of Risk with an earlier cutoff, was for every faction trying to accumulate enough points to "win the map", after which everything returns to status quo ante bellum.  Those who play MMO's for the "persistent world" aspect are bound to be disappointed by such mechanics, really.  How much appeal is there in a RvR game where the map is reset every 6 weeks to 2 months on average, and all cities returned to their original owners, as soon as one faction reaches the maximum number of points?

I do recall that this idea of map resets was originally designed to avoid a scenario where one faction would take over a server early on and leave the political map lopsided beyond the possibility of correction, rendering the conquest game meaningless (as Wanderer noted, Shadowbane is a typical example).  But the corollary was by necessity that nothing obtained by said victory should confer too much of an advantage upon the victor for the next round, so the rewards (better outfittings, etc) were essentially meaningless by design, although even that turned out to be too much in the long term.

As my initial post on that other blog tried to explain, the developers were also facing a major problem with faction imbalance, with Britain and Pirates getting the bulk of players, and Spain and France being condemned to perennial loser status.  To be honest, I don't think they could have done much to correct it, as it was pretty much caused by real-life identification with Britain (for its linguistic affinities as well as its strong naval tradition) and Pirates (for all that romanticized aspect of the life).  Yet they did have some solutions in mind. For months before release, they were talking about underdog tools (more XP / loot / reduction of defensive unrest for the losers), to help the weaker/underpopulated nations get on their feet, but they only added them to the game a couple of months after it went live.  Then, unintended consequences being par for the course in this game, the underdog tools had the most pernicious effect, in a "Brewster's Millions" moment, of seeing factions which could not ever hope of winning the map aim instead for last place in order to get the most effective underdog tools for the next round.  Then the devs realized they had gone too far and slashed them, but it didn't change much to the game, as they were essentially meaningless at every stage of their existence.

Speaking of unintended consequences, the best source of revenue in the game was known as "mission farming".  Normally, missions were a one-time-only affair (with a few exceptions): You accepted the mission, you carried it out, and you came back for your reward.  But here, there was more money to be made by farming the ships in the mission over and over again than in coming back for your reward, so a few select missions (such as "Woes of Santo Domingo"; that it was widely known as "Woes" should give you an idea of how popular that method was) were accepted, deliberately failed (for example, by not protecting a designated NPC vessel) while sinking enemy ships, cancelled and accepted again.  This was PotBS's idea of grinding, frowned upon by developers, who would have had players grinding on the open sea instead of in missions, but everybody used it.  While the game seemed empty in most towns, the docks of Santo Domingo, a Spanish backwater of otherwise little importance, were swarming with players.

Which brings me to the question of the economy.  The amount of grinding in the game was phenomenal (I tired of it just after reaching level 45), but the economy was always moribund.  I left the game in June, but I probably stopped caring about the economy, which had been my main attraction, around the end of May, when the economic climate became one of both rampant inflation and depression.  I sold goods at outrageous prices, but at one point they just stopped selling, despite being the cheapest across the ocean and being heavily used in shipbuilding.  I remember reading a spot-on analysis (http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2008/05/the-cookie-mons.html) of the economic perils of PotBS over at Terra Nova, which pretty much described what happened: Because the business model did not require players to actually craft items on their own time (they would just need to erect a structure, and then their "workers", a predetermined amount of labour, would do the rest), the most successful societies started producing all of what they needed internally, with no need at all for the market, because it was the cheapest and most reliable way of maintaining a shipbuilding operation.  This more or less doomed the economic players in the game -- that is to say, those who had not been driven away after a few months of being treated like second-class players because they had very little interest in PvP.

Another main problem with the economy was that it was entirely fueled by shipbuilding.  It was the only thing to which the economic model catered, and was completely dependent on ship loss to keep it going, never mind that it was completely unrealistic for the trading patterns of that time period (even with slavery wisely left out).  This had the unfortunate result of making the economy completely subordinate to PvP, and at one point the lead designer even admitted that: "The truth about the economy is that only a third of it is implemented. As originally designed, money entered from ship kills, and exited through three sinks. We only implemented one of those sinks: ship loss. The other two – port governance and social spaces – were postponed. They’re on the schedule, but won’t show up for quite a while. In the meantime, the economy is entirely balanced on one solitary leg, instead of the tripod it was supposed to have."  Not that it mattered much, because everybody was broke anyway unless they went grinding to replace lost ships, but it gives you an idea as to how finished the game was when they released.  (It took them five months to add insurance into the game!)  And as the next paragraph will make clear, the economy did not offer much justification to engage in the RvR struggle, since you really didn't lose much politically if a port flipped to the enemy, but you, the player, had to personally incur steep losses if you happened to be the loser, giving the result that, in the words of another player, it's "a PvP game where most people do everything they can to avoid PvP".

I don't know how it works out in EvE, but PotBS had major divisions between the economic and PvP players, although most PvP players also had some economic production going, out of necessity.  I cannot remember how many times I read that economic players would prefer having a port given over to a more powerful enemy than see it constantly put inside a PvP zone.  After all, with the proper reputation level (which all players of the Freetrader class started out with anyway), the only thing that would change with ownership would be the taxation rate, going from 5% to 40% -- and the latter number could be cut in half with the Tax Evasion skill. For most items, basically everything except the largest ships, the tax increase was so small as to be insignificant.  This just gives you an idea of the divided loyalties affecting the game.  By my reckoning, the economic players were among the first major group to leave the game -- they just weren't needed, not to mention that the old "Port Royale" game, with its automated supply and demand, had more depth.

I'm not going to delve into the subject of constant class tweaking, buff this, nerf that (and not just minor changes but complete overhauls), except to say that it really showed that the developers had been remiss in the quality assurance department.  They kept on adding ships into the game well past the point where everyone stopped caring because almost all ships, short of a few favourite choices (such as the inevitable lineships for port battles), had been discredited as viable PvP choices.  I talked about how lowbies were essentially useless in the game, and much of it had to do with the ships they could use.  The best choice of ship a level 20ish player could make, for example, would typically feature 8- to 10-pounders, while a level-50 with a ship of the line would have 20-pounders or more, not to mention better armour and several skills, making a fight between them completely lopsided.  In combat, lower-level players would be unable to do more than a slight dent into the level 50 hull, all the while being in the Level 50's range long before they could fire a shot. Port battles thus became the exclusive domain of the level 50's.

So many other things I could write about.  Just a few of them in passing:

--The map, which takes 45 minutes or so to cross from one end to another, which makes logistical planning completely superfluous. With a larger map, maybe long-distance traders would have had a purpose, but no, here I could produce goods and post them in Bartica in 25 minutes, perhaps less with favourable winds.  Even port battle invitations were valid wherever you were on the ocean.  You could be in Mexico and immediately be whisked to a port battle in Guyana the next.

--The silliness of red circles as the only PvP zones.  The entire map is theoretically non-PvP unless an unrest circle springs up around a town, which means that it's actually safer to sail far from land instead of hugging the coast; does that make sense to you? Furthermore, is it logical that one circle encompasses not only the town being targeted but also three other very peaceful towns on your side?  Limiting the PvP in an already tiny map just concentrated every act of PvP within a very restricted area easy to avoid, which most people did unless they actively wanted to PvP.

--The complete lack of interaction with the world (port governance has been promised, but has yet to be introduced).  Economic domination is impossible.  Societies have no political power whatsoever.  If you were to ask me why EvE players stayed away, regardless of their performance in PvP, I suspect this has much to do with it.

--The restrictions of PvP.  Running aground by mistake is impossible -- you just bounce off.  Entering a battle in which your own side is being attacked is impossible unless you are part of a pre-made group with the ship in battle, and within the first 30 seconds of the encounter.  I can understand that this was done to prevent ganking, which was prevalent enough, but if a four-frigate French squadron passes by a lonely sloop getting attacked by British privateers, couldn't they and wouldn't they generally come to the rescue? In this game, they just can't. Friendly fire is impossible, much less attacking your own side, so the general tactic for griefing a player on your own side is to join in a group with him, pin him down in battle, and let enemy captains fire at him.  This complete lack of methods for fighting your own side makes me think that "port governance", if they ever bring it in, will not amount to much, as it is (1) if that earlier quote is to be believed, a money pit in a game where everyone already grinds for revenue (Shadowbane at least gave you the satisfaction of running your town as you saw fit) and (2) a potential source of division among players on the same side.  I know that the French on Blackbeard were divided between those who wanted to attack the British and those who chose the easy path against the Spanish, and that the Rackham British reportedly had the "Eastern" and "Western" British (depending on where they had their shipbuilding operation) who did not care about one another.  Introducing port governance in a game where you can't fight your own side is just too unrealistic.

--Other restrictions, on the number of ships you could own (first four, then five), or the impossibility of "re-deeding" or transferring a ship to another player, probably out of a desire to stimulate economic activity.  So if your society collectively funded a 10-million-doubloon First Rate, and that the player sailing it decided to quit the game, it went out with him and was lost forever.  If you wanted to get a new ship with all your slots full, you had to trash one.

--Skills that resembled so many magic spells.  I've always had a soft spot in my heart for "debuff" skills, whereby your opponent is made more incompetent, and stealth that made a ship completely invisible on the map.  Also of note: the highly realistic notion of stackable skills.

--Cookie-cutter missions, well-written but essentially following the same four or five patterns.

--And yes, the complete absence of a cohesive vision.  It attempted to please to PvE, PvP and economic players, and in the end satisfied neither category.  The PvE players felt bothered by PvP players, PvP players felt limited in what they could do (they would have had the entire map FFA PvP if it had been left to them, and had it been so it might have worked), and the economic players were very quickly made redundant (in some cases, they were actually asked to serve as wealthy victims in red circles).  You should take a look at the PotBS forums on occasion, and look up some of the more "hardcore" societies' position on the game.  Some of them actually take pride in driving "unworthy" players from the game, along with all the "carebears" who thought PvE was an appropriate gamestyle; in one post, a hardcore player just said he'd prefer to play with only 100 like-minded players.  I'm wondering what the developers think when they read that.  I hope they see, as I do, little wings being pinned to dollar bills.  Oh, and now, said hardcore societies are proudly announcing they're going to Warhammer and that PotBS is dying.  Well, it is dying, I have been saying so for a few months; but it is quite self-serving for them to make such an observation at this point, as the game started dying when "no crying in the red circle" was still the mantra of the day.

So, in a nutshell: Major faction imbalances that made the result of RvR a no-brainer; lack of impact of RvR upon the world, culminating in map resets; exploits, such as night-time port flips or economic unrest bombing that required no PvP, and unintended consequences of game mechanics; lack of interaction with the world; dead economy due to in-society production; compromises on the core nature of the game; lack of a collective risk regardless of outcome despite a huge individual risk for taking part.

I hope that clarified a few of my earlier points.  And sorry for the new wall of text.

That dude's first post has more words in it, then like, all of my posts ever here.

And more interesting content too!

Seriously, it is worth reading if you want to know the issues POTBS has, I saw most of the same ones although I didn't stick with it nearly as long.

Too Long, Did not Read. Original topic question was flawed to begin with.

awesome essay

(http://visionaryrevue.com/webmedia/350.manifesto.cover.gif)

Don't worry. Nobody expects a 77 year old New York Jew who doesn't know how to use a computer to have an attention span long enough to read an essay like that. The constant ups and downs to urinate would make that almost impossible.

That might have been good.  I dunno.  I'll never find out. vOv

A very thoughtful summing up of PotBS. Thanks!

Yes Vetarnias, a very interesting post.

Glad I took a pass on this game.

Sounds like a lot of unfulfilled promise, some great ideas, but a poorly thought-out game model (or execution of the implementation). And then having to jury rig the model to even more ludicrous extents because of the short-sighted (or incomplete implementation) gaffes…

Veta's post was very comprehensive, but left out my two main complaints with Pirates, the total crap UI and the changes to the PvP system every 2 weeks. Much of the rest of what he posted bothered me, but honestly the grind present, the PvP exploits and changes, plus not fixing glaring problems (like the UI) were what really caused people to leave. The ship balance, economy, and graphics, along with parts of PotBS that didn't synch with history, were not reasons people stopped playing.


The lowbies were not completely useless, especially in making the PvP areas appear (contention points), but in PvP there was little that could be done when low levels faced off against a higher level (or multiple higher levels). There was a recent patch that made smaller ships harder to hit though, and this had made tiny ships too powerful, even against lineships. Some high level players I knew were taking out Mastercraft Cutters as a group, and were destroying level 50 lineships with ease. It wasn't hard to power level, if you sailed with a higher level in a lower level ship, but as you progress in levels the ships get progressively expensive and the gold grind is where most people burn out.

I never had any issues with the graphical look of the game, or with the actual combat mechanics, but the majority of broken things has made it a very hollow experience (even more so with the dwindling populations). I never wanted to get a 12 million doubloon ship anyway though. The main complaints from former members of my society who left was either: the grind, the PvP issues, or the lack of things like a workable UI, shared warehousing for guilds, and people!



It's definitely not the ship fighting MMO game that it set out to be, but I still enjoy the combat, an occasional PvP skirmish or duel (just added finally), and still log in every once in a while. The national PvP battles are getting more and more lopsided as the population dwindles though, and I can't say that it's easy to participate in defending your nation when there aren't enough people to attend port battles. The only nations that ever have higher than "light" populations, regardless of server, are the Pirates and England, so Spain and France are pretty screwed.

If you wanted a free trial Naum (or anyone else) I still have a couple of buddy keys available, to at least see all the shortcomings and mis-steps of what was a halfway decent Age of Sail combat simulator. PM me if interested.

*snip snip*


Buggy in terms of stability, mechanics, and exploits.  Stacking was the cherry on top.

From a design POV, my takeaway from PotBS is that combat clouds still suck (many of the things being bitched about have been around since The Realm, didn't get any better with The Matrix, and this just confirms the pattern), pre-defined sides always degenerate into one winning side and depopulated punching bags (3 sides is the ideal number for putting that off as long as possible), and you can't have a capital-intensive PvP game without a lot of scale and a single world.  Explicitly separating trade, manufacture, and combat characters into classes doesn't seem to work too well, either.

--Dave

Where EVE appears to have got it right and POTBS got it wrong is by pre-setting sides. In EVE, your corp is a side and you can switch (in theory), form alliances, etc. In POTBS, once you pick a side, that's it, you are locked in to the fortunes of that side forever. Sucks to be you if you choose the Spanish side.

And yes about combat clouds - for a long time I thought they were a good idea, but playing MxO destroyed my belief on that.

I never played PoTBS, but from what I've read in this thread, it seems the issue is once again, scale. One side can actually 'win' in PoTBS. The economy is too narrow. The population on servers is so small the imbalances can be crippling. etc.


EVE doesn't solve these issues as much as it just powers straight through them with sheer size.

Exactly.  If PotBS societies could get together and create some sort of foreign policy, it could work, but the game system makes such dealings impossible.  Let us assume that the British create a PvP zone around a French port, and that the most influential French societies have an alliance with the Spanish. All the Spanish can do to help is jump in the PvP zone and attack British players.  The Spanish cannot attack British NPC's to reduce unrest, as the French could, and regardless of which type of British ships the Spanish fight, NPC or player, it garners points for Spain, not France.  So the Spanish are condemned to fighting British players just to keep them busy while the French attack British NPC's.  France and Spain could not enter a battle together to fight the British (so forget Trafalgar), because all battles have to be one faction against another.

Becoming a turncoat was not an option, so the entire "Privateer" class was a misnomer (not that classes actually mattered; the first question asked about the "Freetrader" class was inevitably, "How good is it at PvP?", never mind economic advantages).  Many a privateer in real life would have no qualms about attacking their fellow nationals if a foreign crown offered a lucrative letter of marque, and in the absence of such documents would often turn pirate.  It further limited roleplay; if you wanted to play a Scotsman loyal to the exiled Stuarts who only lived to see the British Navy sunk until they were restored to the throne, you could not choose the British side then attack your own vessels while being handsomely paid by France. As you could only attack British vessels if you were a member of another faction, you had to roll on the French side while calling yourself Angus MacTavish.  Such refined treachery being impossible, the idea of false flags, which I would have loved to see in this game, was completely out of the picture.  No, instead every ship, its nationality and its owner were clearly identified just by clicking on them.  So you could not even attack a player without knowing whether he was a fearsome PvPer or just some stray merchant.  In a WWII context, that would be tantamount to giving the captain of a U-boat clear knowledge of what ship is a British destroyer, and which is a freighter camouflaged as such.

Pre-setting sides in this case was also a mistake, actually made worse because unlike EvE or other games, naming sides after real-life nations (with pirates thrown in out of necessity) just added an element of real-life identification, which the developers should have seen coming.  France is not only seen as a military loser, but as arrogant and having not much of a naval tradition.  Spain used to be a naval power, but the defeat of the Armada put an end to that, and Trafalgar proved it again.  That's the equivalent of creating one noticeably weaker class in PvP and then wondering why nobody picks it.  Roleplayers might, only to be constantly defeated in combat by people who don't care how many "n00b" and "lolz" they can drop in a conversation.  All factions, however, being equal in PotBS, you often saw some players who liked a challenge pick France or Spain knowing that they would be underpopulated.  In fact the Spanish on the Antigua server were famous for their ability in battle to such an extent that by the second map reset, they decided the game was becoming too easy and decided to take a break to let somebody else win. 

That worked for a time.  But with declining numbers, it had become impossible for smaller factions to even reach critical mass in port battles.  If you had 200 Spanish players to 1000 British players, it was still possible to hold your own in PvP if you knew what you were doing and find 24 players to fill port battles, but when you dropped to 50 Spanish to 250 British, with only 15 Spanish players capable of playing at the time of a port battle, you could do nothing to defend yourself.  Then the possibility of abuse became immense.  After the first round of server transfers, several North Americans joined the designated European server, Roberts (even though it's in Seattle like the rest of them).  Then they started timing their port flips so that port battles could take place in their prime time, which happens to be in the middle of the night in Europe.  It's one of the major scandals on the official forums these days, and despite having been privy to this complaint for months, the devs are still regarding it as something rather inconsequential.

But there were other tactics as well which didn't even go towards winning the map.  At one point, the French faction on one of the now-closed servers decided that getting enough points to win the map was so counterproductive that they just decided to take over all enemy deep water harbours (the only ports where lineships could be built) and sit on them, making no further effort whatsoever towards winning the map.  Crippling the opponents to force them to quit the game, instead of winning a pointless map, had become their priority. 

Another common tactic, in PvP, was for a player to take a speedboat (a lightweight and fragile but uncatchable model like a Hermes Sleek Packet-boat) and attack heavier enemy player ships like frigates.  The purpose was not to win the encounter, but to prevent the other player from exiting the instance.  As there was a two-minute timer during which a ship had to avoid damage before the player could exit the instance, the speedboat captain would constantly sail ahead of the slower vessel, turn to fire broadsides at the bow, turn and continue firing every once in a while, knowing full well that the frigate player could never catch him or get away from him if the speedboat captain knew anything about navigation.  The general idea being that while you kept that player busy, your side could go on grinding contention or gank the rest of his group.  Even in so-called ideal "gank groups", the general idea was to take five heavy ships and one speedboat tackler, whose job would be to prevent enemy ships from exiting the instance.

End result of several months of exploits and limited game mechanics: The players are now taking to the forums, asking for a second round of character transfers; and even though FLS is still going to maintain four servers at present, the players have taken it upon themselves to transfer to one or two servers.

But enough about PotBS.  I'm curious as to how EvE manages with its own factions and PvP. 

Factions are irrelevant in EvE PvP.  0.0 is unaffected by the Empire stuff, and you can have Amarr aligned with Minmatar, Gallente and Caldari within the same corp all flying each other's 'racial' ships.

The only 'factions' are whatever the players decide they are.  One day you're aligned with a corp in a common endavour, the next you may be shooting the snot out of them because that's the direction your corp directors decided to go.

Speaking of privateers and factions. Pirates of the Caribbean Online (http://apps.pirates.go.com/pirates/v3/#/players_guide/privateering/pg1.html&mode=pgByUrl) just added them, to facilitate PvP.

Better to not force the faction split at all. For one, there'll always be players who ignorantly land on the perennially losing side. For another, forcing players to make the choice has generally coincided with preventing them from changing their side. That's really never fun, and only has worked when the actual amount of interaction between the arbitrary factions (whether two, three, four or more) is funneled into narrow engagement opportunities that specifically don't affect the faction at large.

Eve got it right by not overtly forcing NPC factions down peoples' throats (though I haven't kept up with the new Factions stuff). Players created their own sides and then took over their own space. Yes, there were periods when "one faction" could control a good chunk of the game. But this gets right back to the other requirement for a Eve-like game:

Uniserver. You need that size of a galaxy, that many people in the same one, and that much of a 24/7 game to allow for the ebb and flow of alliances and interests. When I played there were two multi-thousand-player alliances that dominated half or more of the galaxy. My Corp had some part of that and our Alliance had a bigger part. But I as the player and the few folks I traveled with weren't affect by it if we chose not to be. Because there were so many people. Because there was so much space.

Arbitrary factions, small server populations and the inevitably small percentage of people that want to engage in truly immersive land-owning PvP all create contradictions in a game trying to appeal to more than the SB crowd. That is my impression of where PotBS went wrong. They did the wrong things to try and make it have more appeal than the original design ever would have had, but in the process lost the core that would have sustained them if the development resources were scaled to match them.

One thing EVE did right was to choose a world that is inherently easier to create than the standard MMOG. EVE instances (star systems) are pretty simple graphically. Slap up a skybox and few round planets and you are done. Just add ship models.

NPC (ship) movement in EVE is Newtonian mechanics, which computers do really, really well. Compare that to moving a Mob over rough terrain with a bunch of collidable objects in the way. Computers do that really badly.

If PotBS had stuck with “EVE at sea”, they would have had these advantages too. They even got the players to build their ship models for free. Having a ship as an avatar loses something in immersion, but it is easy for a computer to make it move realistically. A much better resource match for an indie game than the land world they tacked on. 

Forcing the split means you always know who the enemy is.

And it means there is always a number of ubers on 'your' side.

This is a big part of what makes the RvR concept work for people who are not confident in a full on eve/sb environment. So much so that EVE recently introduced a lowbie RvR mechanic for lowsec.

But for end games intentionally aimed at the hard core like eve and sb, I completely agree with you.


No it isn't.

No, there are plenty of enemies on your side, in the form of griefers, market competition, and assholes in general. You just can't attack them.


Yeah, ship mechanics are pretty non-Newtonian, otherwise you could accelerate to infinite speed in a vacuum rather than having a cap.

so LOL I cancelled my WoW sub this week and I"m not in the WAR beta yet so I figured I'd login to SB.

All my old toons were gone.  I was faced with a character creation screen where I needed to select traits, stats, class, runes blah blah. A million ways to perma screw up your character as a newbie.  I can't believe I ever dealt with all this template crap before.

I LOL'd (IRL), turned it off, and fired up TF2. 

Yep, Shadowbane had server wipes a few months ago.  I wonder if it solved anything, or if the game is still a lopsided exercise in futility.