How did EVE avoid Shadowbane's and POTBS' problems?

[Stephen Zepp]

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.

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.

[Soln]

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.

[Tige]

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.

[Ratman_tf]

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.

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

[dwindlehop]

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.

where in Eve, just one death could set you back months.

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.

[Musashi]

Eve was a fun game when you installed it.

[Merusk]

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.

[Numtini]

where in Eve, just one death could set you back months.

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

[sinij]

* It has Empire space - this is key as it allows PvE AND pvp players to exist under the same ruleset.

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?

[Comstar]

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.

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).

[Merusk]

* It has Empire space - this is key as it allows PvE AND pvp players to exist under the same ruleset.

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?

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  's most pve.

[Teleku]

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.

[Lietgardis]

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.

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

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.

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.

[Comstar]

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  's most pve.

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.

[UnSub]

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.

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.

[apocrypha]

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.

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 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.

[eldaec]

* It has Empire space - this is key as it allows PvE AND pvp players to exist under the same ruleset.

I am curious why Empire space worked for EvE and Trammel failed to work for UO from PvPer's point of view.

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.

[Sir T]

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.

[Venkman]

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?

[taolurker]

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.

[eldaec]

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.

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:



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.

[Fordel]

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. 

[WindupAtheist]

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?

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.

[Stephen Zepp]

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

[eldaec]

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. 

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.

[Grand Design]

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



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

[Stephen Zepp]

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



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 :)

[CharlieMopps]

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.

[Nebu]

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

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. 

[Soln]

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.

[apocrypha]

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

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.

[CharlieMopps]

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

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.

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

[Ratman_tf]

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

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.

[eldaec]

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

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)
 

[CharlieMopps]

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.