f13.net forums - How did EVE avoid Shadowbane's and POTBS' problems?

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July 25, 2025, 11:45:48 AM

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Inspired by the wall of text responses to one of Lum's posts, 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 DRILLING AND MANLINESS

) 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.

Quote from: caladein on July 24, 2008, 11:14:26 PM

) 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.)

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.

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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.

Quote from: Numtini on July 25, 2008, 04:08:36 AM

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:

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Shadowbane didn’t fail because open PvP was a bad idea.

Shadowbane failed because its developers not just drank but slammed their own Kool-Aid.

They built a world with medieval-looking components and issued its inhabitants abilities straight out of Star Trek: Transporters, phasars, shields, etc. Then the devs were surprised that the players (and more important, their battles) didn’t play along with the medieval pattern. Why, for instance, slowly hammer your way through city walls when you can do an alarm-clock raid, or summon people inside and form a zergball? Because it’s a castle, so you’re supposed to besiege it instead of just flying over the walls, because that, um, looks better in the screenshots? The devs produced this medieval-themed world and expected that the appearance, rather than the reality, of the world would cause players to follow the patterns of medieval history and warfare. We weren’t, though. We were modern players with a huge arsenal of weapons and abilities more from the future than the past, and we used them accordingly.

They wanted a heavy penalty for the losers of PvP fights. Because, y’know, being punished in a game is just so much fun. That penalty was primarily financial. In an equally-matched fight, theoretically you have a 50% chance of having to pay that penalty — in other words, having to go out PvE’ing, in one of the most mindless and boring PvE environments ever known to gamer-kind, in order to pay for that PvP’ing. “Lose a fight and we’ll make you grind undead for 20 minutes”, in a game where losing fights happened on a regular basis, was a surefire way to drive the people who didn’t want to grind undead to another game, any other game. So there were very few equally matched fights. People hid or fled from higher-level individuals and possibly dangerous groups, and ganked weaker people instead, and of course anyone higher level was doing the same to them. Except for city battles (and there were damn few of those, especially given their tendency to crash client, server, or both) combat was almost entirely ganking … which, honestly, isn’t a whole lot of fun whether you’re ganker or gankee.

There was also no reason not to gank newbies. So people did, in huge numbers. This crimped the newbie hose. People could make it to level 20 in a day or two, and spend the next week trying to get to 21, ending up naked, broke, and no further along than they’d started (though there was fun to be had in ganking the newbie-gankers). No new players joining the game and leveling up meant no replacements for the people who made it to the top, got frustrated and bored, and left.

The devs thought the world would be one of constant battle between guilds. They forgot, however, that it is human nature to form alliances against a common enemy, and they forgot how everyone wants to join the winning side. This led to the almost instant creation of uber-guilds. Since nearly every server quickly came under the control of an uber-guild, boredom set in equally quickly. You could either be in the uber-guild, with almost everyone you encountered off-limits to PvP, or you could be outside of it, and ganked by almost everyone, and neither one was much fun.

There was no mechanism to deal with griefers. The devs said “it’s your world, stop them yourselves” but there was no way to do so. When the city of a griefer guild on my server got Baned, blood enemies fought side by side to tear it down. The griefers didn’t care; they’d already leveled up, so they just bound to a Tree in a trade city and continued annoying people, and particularly ganking the characters of new players trying to join the game.

In short, they had this idea of how people would behave in their game: They would build medieval cities, they would march armies overland to other cities and besiege them, they would nurture and protect newcomers to the game, they would willingly PvE to pay their repairs after even a brief fight, they would choose to engage in constant free-for-all warfare (no matter how great the penalty for losing) instead of banding together for strength, and a whole lot else (and they would, of course, do this in a bug-ridden, unstable, and just plain user-unfriendly game). When reality and their “vision” did not coincide, they decided it was reality that was wrong.

Add to that things like massive exploiting, the Rolling 30’s discovering a CSR-mode switch in the client for the love of God, gold-duping on an unprecedented scale, game managers who thought that giving one of two equally-balanced warring guilds an unconquerable demon city was an “event” that would somehow add fun to the game (see above about ganking, scale from player to guild), login times of an hour or more on a regular basis (note to newbie coders: remember to release your damned sockets!), a 3D engine that had more bugs than a pet store’s cricket bin, refusing to allow respecs because the launch-day players deserved to have gimped characters because they should have guessed right about what abilities they would have available, how they’d work out, and what changes the devs would make in the future, and a total arrogant attitude of “Our game is perfect; it’s just you crummy players who are coming here and messing it up.”

Shadowbane didn’t fail because it was open PvP. Shadowbane would have failed if it had been the most carebear game in the world, because it was designed by people who were so fixated on their pre-set ideas that they ignored reality entirely. Their minds were made up, and they weren’t going to let anyone confuse them with facts. They would have made different mistakes if they were creating a competitor for ToonTown, but the mistakes would have come from the same root cause, and they would have had the same effect. The game didn’t fail because of PvP; it failed because of incompetent developers and managers. The fouled-up PvP was just one expression of their incompetence.

Shadowbane could have worked. Shadowbane probably would have worked, if they’d launched the game they talked about in developer diaries for years, the game we were expecting, the game it should have been. That steaming pile of suck they pushed out the door when they ran out of development money would not have worked no matter what its PvP rules were, because it was crippled at birth. But that’s not because of PvP.

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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:

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I wasn’t around during Pirates of the Burning Sea’s formative years. I just joined the game on release day, so I don’t know what happened during closed beta, but the prevailing impression of players seems to be that it was better way back then (perhaps for no other reason than because it was free).

Right now, the game is a mess, a sheer mess, and I could not avoid thinking, while reading Wanderer’s text on Shadowbane, that it was exactly what happened to PotBS. (This is probably gearing up to be another wall of text.)

At launch, the game didn’t have many bona fide bugs outside of a few minor annoyances, but it had extremely exploitable mechanics. While such exploits occurred on most of the servers, Blackbeard in particular, where I played (French faction), became notorious because of the widespread exploits made by the British faction. One particularly noteworthy exploit abused mechanics that allowed to use economic unrest supplies to bring a perfectly peaceful enemy port (zero unrest) to a battle (10,000 unrest points) in a matter of minutes. So all British players would gather at one port, drop their unrest supplies at exactly the same time, and even before the defending faction could do anything, the matter had escalated to the point where a port battle was inevitable. All the British needed to do was rinse and repeat, which they did.

It all came to a climax when they flipped three French ports in a matter of minutes, with three port battles to be fought concurrently. This was already bad enough, as the British were basically using their numerical advantage over the French, who could only defend one of the three ports. The problem was compounded because this particular case occurred right after the devs themselves had posted an entry saying this was an abuse of game mechanics, and right before the introduction of a patch that was supposed to solve the matter. The French faction took to the forums, only to be told by the devs that the two ports they lost as a result of the exploit would not be returned, on the grounds that “the port battles themselves were won honestly” — never mind that we could not fight three at once. I always thought that was akin to saying an election where one candidate posted goons with baseball bats before the polling station to only let in his supporters was valid, because nobody tampered with the ballot boxes themselves…

A good chunk of the French faction on Blackbeard left the game right there. Those who stayed, seeing there was no hope in fighting the omnipotent British juggernaut (who continued to concurrently flip two French ports at once, even without the instant zero-to-10,000 mechanic to help them, in full knowledge that the French could only defend one port at a time), turned against the weaker-still Spanish for some easy pickings. So on Blackbeard for a while, the pecking order was British-French-Spanish, with Pirates themselves fitting in no place in particular as they could not retain towns they captured and were basically irrelevant to the conquest game because of a point-counting disadvantage that would give them a nearly guaranteed second or third place; “nationals” themselves often saw no reason to fight them and thus just stopped defending their ports against them.

Fast-forward to the night of April 15th, when two-thirds of the game’s servers were quickly condemned to extinction (fittingly enough, this was also the night the Titanic went down with two-thirds of its passengers). With character transfers implemented for *all* servers (this turned out to be important later on), every surviving server, Blackbeard among them, attempts to recruit players from the doomed servers. In this task Blackbeard failed miserably, despite having a decent community that included three player newspapers for that server, precisely because the entire player body knew about the dominance and underhanded tactics our British faction. Worse still, the British made their own recruiting effort by vaunting the large number of ridiculously expensive ships of the line (ten million doubloons for a First Rate) they owned, which sent a message to every non-British player that transferring to Blackbeard was nothing short of a death wish, and to every British player on other servers that they would almost certainly be shut out of port battles, limited to 24 players on each side.

In the end, the bulk of the Blackbeard French faction, seeing how hopeless the situation was on the server, took advantage of the fact that character transfers were available to all players regardless of where they played and transferred out of Blackbeard to Rackham, my society among them. The ironic conclusion of this little story, not surprising perhaps given the circumstances, was that the major British societies on Blackbeard who had done all the bragging (also who were also singled out by the community for the exploits they used) also transferred to Rackham — the next day. Blackbeard never recovered from the dual exodus; in the meantime, the Rackham French then started winning the map, while British ranks in particular started to suffer numerous casualties against Conan and his fellow cimmerians.

Back on Blackbeard, the tiny French population that stayed behind was moribund and the British who remained found themselves impoverished and without leadership. Spain, formerly guaranteed to always finish in last place, started winning the map, until they got bored and started leaving the server and sometimes the game altogether. Then the Pirates, who were never supposed to be able to win a map under normal circumstances because of adverse game mechanics, steamrolled across the server.

So it’s very similar to what Wanderer was saying regarding Shadowbane: the PotBS devs put a system in place and the players ran with it. Except that Shadowbane was pretty clear as to what it wanted to be, while PotBS seems to be built on a series of compromises to attract both the PvE and PvP crowd. Even more troubling is that the devs have been sending very contradictory messages about what they wanted their own game to be.

In early March, when the issue of ganking was coming to the forefront, one of the devs posted this: “Open Sea PvP is a very low restriction PvP system. Characters can be attacked by virtually anyone, and they can most certainly be ganked. That’s the nature of the system, and we’re not changing that system. So we don’t want to hear any crying about it. War’s not fair. Open Sea PvP is war. Open Sea PvP is not fair. I recommend trying to figure out how to make it not fair in your favor.” In another thread from roughly the same time period, Flying Lab Software CEO Russell (”Rusty” ;) Williams commented that Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” (which everybody was merrily name-dropping at the time) “should be called the Art of the Gank”. The first quotation in particular has been mentioned by a few players who quit the game, and by some prospective players who decided to stay away.

Then there was that “no crying in the red circle” business, which apparently started as a tongue-in-cheek reference to hardcore players but which quickly became co-opted by them, all the while remaining in widespread use among the developers. Then in June, right after that seminal devlog entry on “Ambush gameplay” which boldly promised to make ganking go away, “no crying in the red circle” quickly faded away as far as the devs were concerned; it was even dropped from the masthead of PotBS producer Joe Ludwig’s blog. The only place where it remained widespread was in the forum signatures of some of the more hardcore players. But by then, it was too late.

And yet, amidst all of this, FLS lead designer Kevin “Isildur” Maginn had commented on this very blog (which is how I first encountered it) in July 2007 that: “The people who want to gank are waiting for the Next Big Failure to come along, to let them grief noobs for a few months before it shrivels up and dies. This is because every sane developer has learned this lesson: griefing and ganking doesn’t just lose you the $15/mo from the person who was griefed. It has a multiplicative effect, creating an environment in your game, and a reputation outside your game, and people tend to steer clear. ‘Play to Crush’ as a selling point and marketing slogan probably lost SB twice the players it ended up bringing them.”

When I first read that I could hardly believe it. Here was the lead designer of the game, six months before release, saying that ganking was bad and a sign that a game was in trouble as a result of bad design choices. Six months later, his fellow developers post on the game forums arguing that ganking is part of the game. Here he was, warning against hardcore slogans as selling points because they drove people away, while the dev team wrapped itself in the “no crying in the red circle” banner.

I hope Pirates of the Burning Sea survives and thrives as a game, but were it to die, I think that Isildur’s words should serve as a cautionary epitaph. I once cited this quotation on the PotBS forums, with a link to the appropriate blog page here (so Mr. Jennings, if you were wondering where all those page views on that older blog entry came from, here is your answer) in the hope that Isildur would comment. He did not respond directly, though his “Ambush Gameplay” devlog might be seen as an indirect confirmation of his earlier beliefs. All of this suggests either that FLS was and perhaps still is profoundly divided internally on what their game should be, or that they never had a serious or consistent vision for their game past a very distant and vague initial intent.

There used to be an unusual level of interaction between the FLS devs and the community in early months, but now it has more or less dried up. Nowadays, the only dev who seems to bother commenting on serious game issues, while being an intelligent fellow, happens to be a recent hire into the company (as in a few months after release), so it gives an impression that because he cannot be linked to the initial mess, he can “think outside the box” while being limited by what is in front of him and by whatever company politics might be at work around him. What is troubling is not that he might lack the general experience baggage within the company to be commenting on such matters, it’s that Isildur and the others — those who should be discussing core issues with the community — are essentially missing in action.

And in another respect, PotBS also echoes Shadowbane: Lowbies are useless. Just as guilds in SB avoided recruiting lowbies because they were seen as a liability, the port battles of PotBS (limited, as I mentioned above, to 24 players on each side) have become displays of elitism at its worst, not only level-based (a month after release, people who were not level 50 were already being asked to pass) but, more and more by the time I left (in June), wealth-based. Sooner or later, anyone who does not show up in an expensive ship of the line will be blamed for showing up at all.

Last I heard, PotBS was supposed to benefit from a new advertising campaign, but unfortunately if new players show up only to fall victim to six-ship ganksquads while being asked to pass on port battles until they’ve reached level 50 (a matter of two months or so) and then told to pass in favour of more experienced players, I fear FLS might just be wasting their money.

Quote from: Phred on July 25, 2008, 02:18:46 AM

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 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."

Quote from: Fordel on July 25, 2008, 08:50:14 AM

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.

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.

Quote from: Numtini on July 25, 2008, 06:31:05 AM

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.

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.

Quote from: schild on July 25, 2008, 01:17:48 AM

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.

Quote from: kildorn on July 25, 2008, 10:00:54 AM

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)

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.

Quote from: Comstar on July 25, 2008, 11:15:38 AM

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.

Quote from: Fordel on July 25, 2008, 11:53:28 AM

Quote from: kildorn on July 25, 2008, 10:00:54 AM

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