As for the comunity, it’s brutal. That is wonderful too, though I didn’t see it so at first. I love being the guy who wiill warp into a belt and completely erase whatever hapless soul was peacefully npcing there. Then! being the guy who talks to the ones that don’t freak out, explains how I found them, why they lost and what they can do in the future to be the hunter instead of the hunted.

That is the new player experience in a nutshell, you get totally rolled and are thrilled to have seen the bright lights and ask how and when you can do that to someone else. Or you get totally rolled, freak out that you’ve wasted your time and either move back into empire or quit entirely.

Eve Online is fantastic. I found the free trial so stultifyingly dull that I went and did my accounts instead.

Destroyers of procrastination FTW!

Why Eve is better?

The problem of any A ranked MMO is born from how WoW employs exploitation of subscription based gaming. A game should be involving enough for a grand variety of species (male, female, casual, hardcore and so on), the main goal is to keep their subscriptions rolling for long enough; therefore there needs be an interactive community, easy playability, clarity in UI, simple game mechanics that nonetheless allow for ‘experienced players’ to master. The exploitation part comes from the SET amount of time one is required to play until he or she reaches the ‘real’ part of the game (level cap) whereas quests serve their purpose for setting short term goals, the long term goal is always to reach the highest level and acquire level cap items. Because these mechanics are there, they can be exploited, quests can be stretched (in time) as long as the reward is great enough, leveling can exponentially take longer (as long as the reward is great enough).

The linearity of content always reaches an apex of some sort, when hitting the level cap and acquiring the top level items, the game plummets and uncovers it is solely based on a grindfest and item acquisition. If there is enough social friction most active players will persist for the sole reason of aspiration (the show-off-to-your-mates complex), new players are easily put off.

In the end, Warcraft fails to deliver content, it delivers repetition, according to Dante the first hell, is repetition.

Eve is in fact not better, it fails miserably in game-play and interface design, the game is overly complex and not welcoming at all. Actually, of the two games, World of Warcraft is the best, even though my sentiment and my love for Eve really does not like me saying this.

What IS better about Eve, is players. Insert Steve Ballmer running around shouting ‘players, players, players, players’. Players run, players create, players are the game, Eve is the shell that defines the rules and boundaries. This offers total non-linear (and thus infinite as long as there are enough players) content, defying the problem every A-MMO has. Eve is a sci-fi Ultima online, with improvement on many levels. I must say, even though Eve’s most important aspects of interaction design fail (interface, welcoming, ease of use), biting through this and tasting it really shows you how impressive such a world can be. I told you about my love for it, and I am not trying to be unfair, Eve just has enough major flaws that will keep it ‘fanbase-only’.

I think the golden rule for future MMOs is:

Players want a sense of purpose, humans create their own purpose.

Roburky’s right–write this topic up; it needs to happen. And you know it will get linked to all over the ol’ blogosphere. It something that needs to be said, and in words that game developers and game players will understand.

KG

Do this now. Because it needs to be said, and maybe hopefully some designers of future MMOs will read.