Following on from this thread, some MMO theory gibber.
So here’s the thing: Eve Online is a better model for making an MMO than World Of Warcraft. If someone, right now, was looking for a way to create an interesting MMO they should take Eve as their mechanical gameplay model, and not WoW.
Now that doesn’t necessarily mean that Eve Online is a better MMO than World Of Warcraft. Eve is messed up and broken in all kinds of outrageous ways, and the PvP-heavy spaceship-centric world design puts most people off the idea completely. What it does mean is that there’s the potential for a better MMO to be built using the principles that Eve has pioneered. So forget what you know, or think you know, about Eve Online and imagine instead what World Of Warcraft would be like if it were designed with the same principles as Eve Online.
This is a thought experiment. It requires that you try to imagine what the most successful MMO in the world would be like if its design principles were quite different. (Less successful, probably, but still…) It would look similar on the surface, and have the same fantasy-world design that we all know and love, but its innards, its workings and functions, and the experience of playing it, would be rather different.
First and foremost:
There would be no levels. You would not level up, you would simply collect skills over time.
Eve does not have a level system. Instead it has a huge range of skills that allow you to use a range of equipment proficiently. You train these up over time. Easy ones take a few minutes, advanced ones take days or weeks. You cannot grind skills, only money.
So if you were, say, a World Of Evecraft paladin, you’d slowly master a huge range of paladin-relevant skills with perhaps some crafting skills thrown in for good measure. Older paladins would be slightly more proficient in combat than younger ones, but their true value would be in their versatility. A paladin character created just a few weeks ago might be able to fight with a one-handed sword at the same level as his older friend, but he would not be proficient with heavier armour, or horses, or axes, and so on. The older character would also have some crafting skills under his belt, making him wealthier, and some magic, making him handy in a tight spot. He’d probably be able to afford better equipment, and there would be nothing stopping him giving a decent sword to his poor and lowly newbie friend. He couldn’t give him a giant warhorse, of course, because the newbie wouldn’t have trained to handle it.
This has some other ramifications, the most significant of which is that there’s no gulf between low level and high level characters, and they are not separated by an artificial vertical barrier. You’d never need to ‘catch up’ with a friend who had leveled beyond you. He’d simply be better at dealing with the problems you tackled together.
This means that if an experienced character is going out to kill a tough dragon then younger, weaker characters can still tag along to help. He might “LFG” and settle for a couple of younger healers instead of one older, richer one with good kit. Because there are no levels for characters, there are no levels for monsters, they are simply tougher, or weaker. Tougher challenges require teamwork.
This means there’s broad scope for PvP too. If you’re going out to fight other players then the younger, weaker characters can still contribute to the overall potential of your group – an older character might mince the newbies with his greater range of skills, but he’ll still be vulnerable to their attacks once the fight starts. In a level-based system it would be almost impossible for a bunch of level 3 characters to take down a level 60 character. In a flat, skill-based system, a wide range of weaker characters could indeed kill a lone, powerful older character. It’s not only more realistic, but it breaks down the kind of weird, artificial structures that are formed by PvP in a level-based game.
This means there has to be teamwork, and there has to be co-operation between older and newer players.
Money would be the main driving force in the game, not XP.
Because there’s no level-grind, money becomes ever more important. It can buy you the rare weapons and the decent armour. If there is real loss and destruction of property – as there is in Eve – the need for money becomes ever greater. The drive for money also creates some immediate and important goals, ie: securing resources. While World Of Warcraft’s PvP servers do see some fights over resources, they’re nothing compared to Eve’s vast territorial conflicts. In our imaginary Evecraft game you’d be riding out from the safe regions of Ironforge and Ogrimmar to try to secure mining resources, or lumber, or alchemical ingredients. You’d fortifying, driving off raiders, and exploiting the resources while you controlled them. The places where these things appeared would be fought over by players in long, drawn-out wars. Mutual-interest alliances would form naturally among the players (as they have in Eve) who would in turn spend on infrastructure to defend their investments. Evecraft creates conflicts that far outweigh the arbitrary Horde vs Alliance struggle. This is a struggle for livelihood, and the ability to craft magic hats.
The lack of levels would mean that WoW’s many regions would not be off-limits to anyone (as they are now if you’re not the appropriate level), and your safety in a particular area would depend entirely whether you were likely to fall foul of local player alliances, or whether you were canny enough avoid the gangs of player-brigands who would no doubt appear on the roads between important resources centres. Of course there would be safe areas, instanced dungeons, missions and crafting you could do without risking your neck – but heading out into the big bad wilderness would be where the real rewards could be reaped.
Suddenly, with some rather different design principles, the traditional fantasy MMO starts to look a little more like a palpable, “real” world. No longer is there level 35 cake you can’t eat because you’re only level 30 (which must be one of the weirdest things in WoW), simply some more expensive cake that you can’t afford unless you’ve managed to hook up with the guilds who control more lucrative areas, or you’ve managed to corner the market in crafting charmed socks.
This is how the principles of Eve create a compelling world that people can’t leave alone: by supplying them with the tools to create goals they can set for themselves – something beyond simply completing quests or repeatedly defeating dungeons. It’s a world where you can follow the quest arc, but it it always points to a big bad world of risk and adventure beyond the horizon. (Eve players call this 0.0 space.)
What Eve doesn’t do, of course, is create a world that is as compelling and immediate as World Of Warcraft. And this ties in to my final point.
You might respond to all this and say: “but levelling up gives us something to aim for, the skilling in Eve is so much more nebulous, so to speak. It’s better to have quests and a magic horse at level 40 I can aim for. That is why WoW has some many millions of people playing it.” This is correct, and it’s another reason why the principles, rather than the execution, of Eve Online are worthy of copying. If you were to base your game on Eve you’d make skills, items, and equipment both aspiration-worthy and customisation-friendly. It’s about presentation as much as mechanics. Many of Eve’s skills are little more than percentage stat increases, so any game wanting Warcraftian appeal needs to make more of these skills have direct and obvious ramifications on characters – pets, mounts and transport, even player owned structures and one-off items. One of Eve’s failures is the obscurity of its aspirational targets – any game wanting wider appeal needs to present this more clearly.
Of course I don’t actually give two hoots whether a game is appealing to a wider audience – my criteria is whether it’d be fun to play: and a “flat”, open world in which players can feel like the are able to set their own goals and surmount significant challenges is the kind of game I want to play. I don’t want to be cut off from older players or newbies by the level-divide, and I don’t want to feel like the world resets no matter what I do it. I want to see real change. I already play that kind of game in Eve, but I know that the game I’m playing is far from perfect. Nevertheless it’s an admirable set in the right direction and one that I’d like to see mimicked and perfected, just as the games that followed Everquest did for the linear level model.
There’s a load more stuff about Eve’s semi-real time combat, trade and politicking I should add in here too, but actually I’ve got to play TF2 and then head to the pub. More on this subject, I suspect, later on.
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Funny thing was a few days ago I was imagining myself what if there was a fantasy game like this. I would instantly subscribe!
I play eve myself and also played a few level based MMORPG’s and tbh I found level grinding sucked alot, it turned into a “lets see who can get the highest thaco(hehe I miss dnd 2nd edition :) / Ab and AC” which made you completely unhittable by new players.
Eve did it differently where skills came with time and you needed to grind money to afford to buy new items (more realistic imo) and new players could still hit and dmg the oldest of veterens.
I do of course miss playing my drunken dwarfen character :) so if I game was developed using eves skill system overlayed on a fantasy world where death meant complete item loss and we could fight over teratory and build our own outposts and colonies I would be there in a flash :)
You know, I find myself thinking how things change.
Pre-WoW, people would think that 250,000 subscribers was an incredible achievement – only Everquest had that 500K in the western world, and everyone was noting how rich THEY must be. Now, with the ceiling raised by WoW, people think that somehow the same figures of hundreds of thousands of people giving a monthly cheque are somehow… well, not important.
Just because Blizzard have redefined how much money you can make from an MMO doesn’t mean that somehow people who *aren’t* Blizzard aren’t making an impressive profit.
I digress.
KG
Sumo, i quite often pack my trusty vexor and roam low sec, u can do a hell of a lot of stuff solo in eve. Keep in mind, that with 6 months of playing eve, chances are very very high, u havent seen everything that you can do in this game.
And i would really like to see how in WoW youd take down a lvl70 char while beeing maybe lvl20 yourself, in eve, thats very possible. Got ship setups go a long way, and nothing cant be counterd and beaten.
The real beauty of eve is however, it does hurt you when you die. And thats a good thing. While in WoW you get your top tier armor set, fine, whats next ?
In eve you may get your top tier stuff, and its omfg expensive, but you risk it each time you undock, you die its gone. While in WoW you get punished by walking to your body from the next graveyard.
Danger makes a Game intresting, and more fun on the long therm, at least to most of the eve players.
Oh and pvp is a lot more fun when beeing able to loot your opponet *fg*
On a side not, i was 3 weeks old and moved with a great bunch of guys into 0.0, died countless times, but i learnd and saw more than empire huggers see in 2 years. And im today fighting big war in the south, which includes 10´s of thousends of players. You can form your own world in eve, and you personally can make the games story, u take part, you create it.
btw, i think anyone has complained about repetitive missions in eve… errr …. yeah, “go there, kill 50 and bring me their !” is a lot more creative and non repetative eh ?
Eve is great because its all about what you make of it. If you carebear around empire grinding for cash for some ships to run missions and sit around mining all day, yeah its going to be boring. If you get into a good corp, jump into 0.0 and get in on the action right away you have a completely different experience. With a good group of players to help you when you start its such a different game. Far more hardcore than anything else since when shit happens, your fucked, you need new ships, more gear, you learn quick what to do and not to do when you throw yourself in the fire. Plus its the kind of game where a 2 day old character can have a positive role in the game providing assistance to 2 year old characters tacking or scouting, doing their part till they can fly around in a battleship and fuck things up.
Once you get past the curve if your with a good crew its a great time, even the boring parts and the grind can be fun with a good group on your side.
As a person who isn’t really that interested in MMOs, EVE was one MMO that I played and enjoyed and had a lot of respect for. I only played for a couple of months, and then I stopped for the same reason I stop playing any game; a lack of a desire to play the same kind of gameplay repeatedly for months.
But in that time I did learn a fair bit about EVE, and about why it appealed to me when other MMOs failed to.
EVE is more of a shared sandbox game than anything. It provides the players with a world and allows them to essentially do whatever they like with that world, with few exceptions. While virtually all MMOs play like single player RPGs where the NPCs are mostly played by humans, and the story is unchangeable and the world is unchangeable, EVE allows people to change the face of the EVE world.
The economy, the world, it all revolves around the players. The vast majority of your enemies and your allies are, in fact, people. And even aside from the lack of leveling which you mentioned, this is where online games need to go.
In a standard MMO, you are largely playing a single player RPG; you are out there doing set quests, killing set NPCs, reading the same set stories over and over again. When you introduce another player with the ability to kill you, or help you, they become kind of an artificially necessary element of the game. It doesn’t feel like it fits in. But with EVE, the importance of the players around you makes conflict and mutual reliance with them a far more appreciable feature.
EVE elevates the importance of your fellow players, by making them both more threatening and more valuable as allies. EVE as a concept doesn’t even exist without that factor, and that’s why other games need to think about emulating some of what EVE has done.
Remove arbitrary levels. Add real, tangible risk: as in the loss of valuable resources(this really eliminates the ‘griefer’ problem of MMOs rather effectively), and forces people to play more intelligently. And give people a good reason to band together that doesn’t just amount to a people having someone to talk to and ask for help with quests. Give people the opportunity to work together toward goals that a single individual could never achieve within the game, and you will create an environment of players who are largely serious, mature, and involved in the world.
And yes, the skill system is vital. In EVE, once you become great with, say, Frigates, then you will always be great with frigates. You reach a plateau with that particular skillset, and with a few exceptions, you could be able to fly a Titan into combat and still not really be better with Frigates than someone who just finished their last relevant Frigate skill.
In essence, you are both equal Frigate pilots; one of you just also happens to have more advanced, unrelated skillsets.
And because EVE is set up so that Frigates on their own are always a viable ship to fly(they have uses that larger ships are not as useful for), a really great Frigate pilot is still valuable to a fleet, even if someone else in the fleet is flying a battleship. And that’s important, because it gives all players a valuable position within a group, regardless of how long they’ve been playing.
EvE is what you make it. WOW makes you play a specific path every time.
The differences in both games are so extensive and basic that it is really a bad idea to try and compare the two, and god forbid someone try to combine them. I’ll take my hardcore EvE 100% hardcore thank you.
The great thing about EvE is that a 1 day old player can have a decisive influence on the battlefield against a three-year-old player, due to the way that EvE skill training works. Yes, the three-year-old player will fly a faster, stronger, more damaging ship – but a handful of 1 day old players can easily take down the older player if they know what they are doing.
In WOW, a level 10 player can literally NOT DAMAGE a level 60 or 70 player. To get to level 70 and join the “endgame” requires hundreds of hours of mindless grinding, and longer if you like to play solo. Even after you hit level cap and run around killing other people, there is no tangible risk or benefit. If you die, you lose nothing, if you kill your enemy you gain nothing.
In EvE, if you blow up a big expensive ship flown by an older player, you are permanently destroying that ship and some of the equipment put on that ship – and you can then loot the remains for anything that survived and sell it or use it. Conversely, if you get blown up your ship and all equipment on it is GONE (unless you have friends to chase away the other player before he loots your flaming wreckage).
I tried WOW and hated the linear, repetitive, unrewarding grind. After playing EvE for one week, I got blown up by an older player who declared war on my small corporation and ripped us apart. Seeking revenge, I enrolled in a PVP Class run by the great crew at (www.agony-unleashed.com) and had more fun and a stronger adrenaline rush than I have ever experienced in any game I have played. It’s been pretty close to two years since I started playing, and I still learn some new tactic or detail about the game nearly every day.
EvE has ruined any other level-based grindfest MMO for me, I cannot play them anymore when I know I can’t gain or lose anything, cause any lasting effect in the game world, or just run around causing havoc because it’s fun.
I hope that future game development will lean toward the incredibly rich and rewarding “sandbox” approach that EvE has mostly pioneered.
EvE = hardcore, player defined gaming experience
WOW = more casual, NPC defined player experience
to each his own
Sumo said, “but while in wow you can perfectly fine lvl to 70 solo or in group, in eve you are DOOMED if you try to solo…”
Oh, really? I’ve been DOOMED this whole time in my Vaga and didn’t even know it! And the Rapier. DOOMED, I say. Nobody told me. I thought I was doing rather well, too!
And then he said, “most of my gametime i have grinded the same missions over and over and over, to afford ships for pvp i lost in fights that didn’t even last 3 minutes.”
You know how in WoW, you don’t sit around grinding the same NPCs over and over for tiny bits of experience, but you go do the quests and get much better experience and, thus, faster levels? Grinding the same missions over and over in Eve is like grinding those same NPCs over and over. Sure, you’ll eventually get where you’re going, but it’s slow and boring and a common newbie mistake. I’d tell you how you should be going, but… competition sucks.
I just wanted to say a few words about PlanetSide, because someone claimed that it aint “flat”.
If PS aint flat nothing is. In this game you can kill a 4 year veteran with a char that has just been rolled. Someone stated that older players do twice the damage and tank two times better: That is plain wrong. The 4 year vet will have exactly the same amount of armor on his heavy suit as the new guy, and he will do exactly the same amount of damage with the assault rifle.
So everything is down to your FPS skills.
Granted, as a vet i can summon a phat orbital laser, but that is every 3h. And it doesnt help me in pvp, its only usefull for the rvr aspect. And also granted, as a vet i can choose from a wider variety of weapons to be more flexible, but thats something everyone can achieve in a short time.
As for World of Evecraft: I dont think something like that would work. The completly different aproches of those games wouldnt fit together very well. It has been said many times and it shows where you really cant combine these 2 games: EvE is what you make it. WOW makes you play a specific path every time.
An aspect that might be interesting for future mmos though might be the “One Server(cluster)” concept of eve, as it makes the world much more authentic.
Just my 2c.
I rather like the idea.
I am a veteran of the mmo genre, from ultima online and meridian days till now, I have played almost all the mmorpgs that have come out. If I had to associate myself with just one of them i’m an everquest nerd.
I did the wow thing, beta and release up to farming Ragnaros a bit. I am an elitist powergamer type, to give you an idea i was the Tauren Shaman with maxed engineering that used grenades and all sorts of toys and broken abilities at the time to curb-stomp multiple people at the same time.
I quit WoW because I was in full molten core / onyxia gear (best available at the time) and the no-loss pvp was really getting to me. I would find 3-5 people 55+ and fight them, by the time I was done killing the 5th person, the first would already be respawned and I would essentially be bindrushed to death.
In comes EVE. I hate sci fi and space and all that jazz. The game felt boring, and the old tutorial system was horrendous when I started playing (fall 2005). I stuck with it because I had a roommate who played at the time, and it looked like a lot of fun when you got into it. Now, I have 4 accounts and do just about every kind of gameplay it has to offer, from 0.0 politics and pvp to mining, killing npcs, and playing the trade and stock markets.
While EVE is all about the community, and it is a huge sandbox where almost everything is player driven, I still find it a bit hard to relate to random people I meet. In games like EQ or DAOC it was easy to just walk up to someone and practically befriend them. The environment of EVE just feels too cold and sterile. Maybe it is because I am a D&D nerd and love my elves and dwarves, and this isn’t a problem for sci fi fans. Still, I forced some friends to stick out the first month or two of training learning to up their attributes, and they all love the game as well.
I would never go back to WoW, but I would still lower my eve down to one account if something else came out that was worth playing.
In WoW getting to 70 can’t really be called a mindless grindfest as some of the EVE preferring players seem to think. The incredible amount of quests in WoW can get you to 70 in a month, or three months if you’re completely new to MMORPGs. At the same time the quests tell a story and take you around one of the most impressive worlds I’ve seen online.
Now I wouldn’t agree with the WoW begins at 70 bullshit because what really starts then is the grind. You can choose to grind battlegrounds, arena, money, reputation or just the high end pve. But in the end it all aims for getting the best gear possible. So apart for a couple of nice moments capturing the enemy flag in WSG or killing Kael’thas the first time, there’s really nothing much than grinding after you’ve dinged 70. Now some might argue that PvP isn’t grinding but after almost totally dominating WSG with random guildmates over 2 years ago the PvP experience in WoW got dull and repeating. All the other battlegrounds have not convinced me, AV being a PvE battle, AB being a total rape with randoms vs team or often a boring and long survival battle, EOS I don’t even want to talk about. Besides, what else is getting reputation, the old honor ranks, or the new honor and arena points besides grind?
Following my friends recommendations I started the EVE trial period last week and I’ve get to know the game and the direction it has taken. There are many good things that EVE does well (including the economics and the space control) but I’m really not quite convinced by the real time based skill system. After 15 months of active hardcore WoW’ing and 18 months of on and off playing I got really used to the idea that time invested in gaming will equal character progression. In EVE this is only true money and knowledge wise, but not “level” or should I say skill wise.
In WoW you can begin at lvl 1, and be at the same level as high end players in just a month. Of course you won’t have the top notch gear that the raiding people or top arena teams have amassed but Blizzard has made acquiring epic items very easy in TBC and with a month of active PvP’ing you could have very good gear. That’s just two months to get decent gear and not be that far from people who have played the game for three years.
The time based skill system in EVE I see as a way to let people experience other gameplay styles without the need to create alts, just start training a few different skills. This has obvious benefits to having to spend another month or so leveling your alt to 70 and realizing you need to gear another character but it comes at the cost of the existance of top players which can buy any ship and hop onto it, knowing how to use the specific guns, or just getting that capital ship going and changing the outcome of the battle.
The leveling from 1 to 70 in WoW serves as an excellent tutorial to the game world, skills and even professions (which are badly implemented tho). It also let’s the player know what he is doing and what is happening in the world (even if this really doesn’t happen). Unfortunately EVE seems to be too noob unfriendly (not saying this is a particularly bad thing) for the developers to include a similar system to EVE. Gaining the starting skillpoints in a week of very different quests wouldn’t hurt the game at all. The quests could range anywhere from mining, production and ratting missions to PvP.
As it stands now, I’m not sure if I’m going to continue EVE after my trial ends, or if I’m going to renew my WoW account at some point. WoW has all the friends I’ve made over the 2,5 years and a familiar world of constant grind, which I once enjoyed. EVE on the other hand has chosen to rely more on PvP and player relations, but doesn’t have the magnificent world to enjoy (all that space is dull, walking around stations will definitely be an improvement). Perhaps Darkfall will turn out to be more than just vaporware so I don’t have to choose between WoW and EVE.
There is an element here that has been overlooked, I think; community. It is one of the main reasons I didn’t manage six months in WoW, but have just racked up my second year in EVE.
In WoW, a level 70 player is almost useless to a level 1 player, and vice versa. The +/- 5 level xp block means that WoW players are funnelled by necessity into grouping with players only of similar XP levels.
If a lvl 10 and lvl 70 player were able to group together to do instances and kill NPC’s (for argument’s sake, VS. level 45 NPC’s), the level 70 player gains virtually nothing, whilst the level 10 player would be impotent.
WoW instils a mild form of elitism in it’s playerbase because of this.
In EVE, this is not the case.
As an example, my corp is actively recruiting ‘newbs’.
A 3 week old player can gang up with a 2-year veteran, head out and run level 4 missions.
The vet can handle aggro and dish out the majority of the punishment, as you would expect. But the newb can still assist in this, as well as providing a faster ship to hunt down distant foes and loot.
The benefits of this are two-fold; the team can get through missions and loot them fully far faster than the vet could do on his own, so more money is earnt.
Secondly, the newb makes more money in a few hours than he could have managed solo in a month with the same type of activity.
This pays off – the newb ‘advances’ far faster, and it creates inter-player relationships.
As for the vet v newb pvp aspect; one of my friends, many moons ago, had been playing for 4 months when we got wardecced by a ‘griefer’ corp of 8 players, all over two years old. In one encounter, he took on two of them in his brand new battleship that he had acquired the skills for only the previous week.. His opponents were flying a battleship and an electronic warfare cruiser. (In general MMO terms, a warrior/tank and a rogue/de-buff combo).
Both opponents were ‘tech 2′ fitted versus his tech 1 fit.
So they had sextuple his skill points EACH, greater numbers, and better equipment.
5 minutes later, the opposition limped off. The fact they weren’t destroyed was simply down to his lack of experience at the time.
This is a story that repeats itself across EVE regularly.
More SP =/= better player.
True, being an older character usually weights things in your favour; but luck, forward thinking and tactics from a younger player can ruin your day at any time.
I’m not saying this means WoW is worse or that EVE is better.
But to me, it’s what makes EVE shine. It’s got greater depth and almost limitless possibilities when compared to the vast majority of other MMOs.
WoW does make it unfortunately difficult to stick with your friends, especially if you don’t start all as a group on the same server at the same time. But it seems to me that City of Heroes has a better answer to that problem than EVE’s divorcement of progress from gameplay in their sidekicking system. It’s not that WoW could coopt that mechanism given their current game design, but I think it’s something future competition should definitely keep in mind.
I really have a hard time seeing a decent PvE WoW/EVE fusion given how intrinsic open PvP is to EVE’s world setup, and I have absolutely zero interest in PvP (which is why I quit EVE), so that’s one reason I wouldn’t want such a thing. Another is that while I definitely prefer to group in MMOs, I don’t want to have to have an extensive social support network (such as a guild or, in EVE terminology, corporation) to enjoy the game because chances are I won’t. That’s why EVE’s players-make-the-fun philosophy doesn’t work for me. I prefer to rely on developers who get paid lots of money to do that professionally. If I do happen to be able to bring friends along, they’ll still enhance the experience. Always do.
As an aside, I’m more than a little puzzled by the assertion that the potential for real loss of game possessions eliminates griefers. If anything I’ve found that it acts like a powerful lure.
Your logic is broken. Saying that there is tough monsters and less tough monsters is exactly like putting a “level” on them, may be less levels (low medium high) but still a level.
Same thing goes for the abilities.
I started eve a little over a year ago, I did the tutorial and started doing the missions, for 6 hours I bought skillbooks and left them in my hanger, not realising you were ment to “right click” and train them >_> . I did discover later what to do thankfully and i’m still in game now with 4 accounts.
Best Advice I can give to anyone thinking of starting eve is start with a friend or a group of friends, that way you’ll discover alot of things you wouldn’t have discovered on your own. I was lucky to bring a few clan mates from bf2 with me =)
Nice article … it’s like you are describing … Monster Hunter (the capcom game) …
@Trooper6
Just a quick fyi on Eve Online, they’ve brought out clients for the Mac and Linux os.
Thanks for the very interesting read; I too have played both WoW and Eve; I enjoyed each one in a different way but I ended up getting tired of both.
There’s an MMO being developed right now which might fill in some of the gaps that have been discussed here but which also adds another layer to the MMO formula which is the removal of the Auto-Attack button.
The game is called Jumpgate: Evolution and its a space combat MMO. The game is a re-write of the original Jumpgate MMO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumpgate:_The_Reconstruction_Initiative) that was released around the same time as Eve-Online and contains a lot of the features that made Eve succesful but it has a twist, you fly your ship with a joystick.
The skills you learn in the game improve your ship, weapons, armor, etc but the actual combat is decided by the skills of the player.
A system like this can easily kill the gap between noob and veteran that has been discussed so much.
Great idea.
The difference between Eve & WoW, and why WoW has more customers?
WoW caters to the lowest common denominator, which is to say, the younger player.
Eve does not. It is far more complicated and in-depth than WoW and therefore takes a lot longer to ‘get’, you have to think more.
People who play Eve like that fact. I suspect Wow players also like that fact. Oopps did I give away which I play ;)
Is Fantasy more popular than Sci/Fi? Probably, but I suspect, debatable.
The main reason that WoW is more popular than Eve is that you don’t have to think.
You can just log in, run around and kill s**t.
You can, indeed, do this in Eve, but not in the same ‘instant’ way.
The main problem with Eve is once you become immersed in it it is difficult to do anything else, even if it lets you back to RL whilst you ’skill up’. There is so much depth to what is going on in Eve that if you are only a ‘bit player’ you instantly miss out on much that transpires. This is also one of the biggest hooks as far as Eve gos.
Skilling in Eve is far more exciting than WoW. Ok you have the ‘Ding’ factor in WoW but when you read through all the skills in Eve, of which there are many, (and believe me, once you ‘get’ Eve you will want to read through all of them) you will find that pretty much all of the skills will appear essential for your characters development. Can you have them all, maybe but you really have to specialise to get anywhere. Once you have the skills you want/need suddenly a load more are produced as new ships and mods apear on the market.
In WoW if you are not playing you are not leveling. If you are unable to play due to RL intervention then it has to go on the back burner as it were. With Eve, if you are unable to play you can still be skilling and this is the single biggest hook.
Admittedly a lot of Eve players do take the game far to seriously but i suspect that is because they like to play games that way.
At the end of the day both Eve and Wow have been sitting at the top of their genre’s for quite some time now and need some competition out there to rival/out do them so that the games will evolve to, cater to and please us, the public.
The absence of a level system is a detriment, not an asset. I couldn’t play Eve, because my primary play experience was logging in to punch a clock and selecting the next skill to pursue. Even when I was playing actively, my experience was largely idleing for long periods while my ship flew somewhere. The monetary, pvp-focus (and relatively strict death penatly) made me feel always vulnerable to loss.
As to staying with friends of different levels of progression, I think a much more profitable model to follow would be City of Heroes, with its Sidekick systems– the real trick is figuring out how to apply that to a setting which has a more gear-intensive component to player capabilities.
There is real brilliance in Eve, in the player generated economy and the sheer openness of the world– but it’s a poor model to base the next generation of MMOs on.
so basically what you want is “monster hunter” MMO because that would be awsome as cake if they did that without all the loading screens and small areas.
Eve has the most brilliant models yet seen in an MMO. To reach the end game content doesnt require you to play 25+ hours a week. And while the Eve model has some definite drawbacks and failures (like initially spending a week training learning skills, lack of a ‘twitch’ control mode, extreme complexity) the model itself has too much potential to ignore. It’s a real (and working) player economy with political entities, a reality based system controlled by the players with a few grounding exceptions and set in a sci-fi universe. And while the real lack of popularity might be just as much due to the setting as the initial difficulty of getting the game moving, I think that Eve is the a very large first step in the evolution of MMO. The Eve model is the future for MMO’s.
What is the life cycle of an MMO? Already WoW is experiencing symptoms of what many of us experienced MMORPGrs recognize as the beginning of the decline phase of an MMO. Ultima Online, Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, and others have been examples of the traditional lifecycle of an MMO. A big, highly advertised and anticipated release, then growth as the bugs are worked out and players rush towards the finish line. Then there is a period of stability as the game grows and the community develops. After some time though all the artificial level barriers are overcome and the majority of the player base is involved to some extent or another in the ‘end game’ content. At this point an expansion is released giving the players ( and thus the game’s lifespan) a little more mousewheel to run in. Inevitably the process is repeated multiple times until even back to back expansion releases cannot keep the community interested and servers are combined, clustered and eventually closed. WoW released in late 2004 and released its first expansion in early 2007, seven months later they are announcing another planned expansion and servers are experiencing population loss. It would appear to be the beginning of a decline.
While Eve has not rushed to millions of players it is continually growing and will probably outlast any traditional MMO. The Eve game model has inspired a highly dedicated community. But among other things I think it is worthy to note that CCP seems to have extended it’s own lifespan by implementing a system of advancement that not only allows both newer and older players to collaborate but also serves to keep player progression from outpacing the developers and their plans for the game. Less of a population explosion, but potentially longer game life and stability.
Probably the most important thing CCP did with Eve, is designing a successful advancement system that allows players to keep the pace without requiring those players to dedicate all their time to playing a game.
“Money would be the main driving force in the game, not XP.”
Nothing wrong with that, but then you also need a money sink (destructable property). If not, inflation will go trough the roof
Doesn’t get any easier that this. Time invested is all it takes
I think many of you who don’t like WoW, don’t like RPGS either. What is a MMORPG?
Think back to the old-school Japanese RPGS. I’ll take the Dragon Quest series as an example. It had a simple storyline, but a TON of the progression is completely around grinding. And grinding. And more grinding. If you were level 1, you had no stone’s throw in hell of beating a level 5 monster, and quite frankly you’d have to venture out way further than you should have – with many warnings abound which tell you NOT to unless you were strong enough. If you died you knew exactly why. Because you’re not strong enough.
The Dragon quest games required an insane amount of grinding to get anywhere near where you needed to be in order to progress. WoW’s grinding is paltry by comparison. That’s why many of us old-school RPG’ers don’t mind the grinding at all. Because as mind numbing as it is, we’ve been through far, far worse in the old days. Then after all that grinding, you grew strong enough to a dungeon, and finally strong enough to kill the boss. It was immensely enjoyable, so much so for many Japanese gamers that these types of games were a sure sell in Japan, every time. The Japanese “get” it. As for many of you? I’m not so sure.
I get the sense from many of you that you hate the grind. The grind is what you don’t like. But that makes me question whether you even enjoy the “RPG” aspect of it, never mind the MMO aspect. One of the joys of an RPG is witnessing your character grow stronger, little by little, in extremely incremental amounts, until one day you step back and see what a huge difference 3 levels truly made.
Maybe the traditional RPG just isn’t for you, never mind MMORPG.
As some of the above posters have stated, http://www.darkfallonline.com is pretty much exactly what you have described.
It could be a beautiful thing.
EVE’s somewhat challenging entry requirements are what makes it such a great game.
MMOs are social games. Warcraft, being accessible to all, is full of idiots. Sorting the wheat from the chaff is a nightmare.
Remove the IQ barrier to entry and EVE would lose a lot of it’s charm.
“Eve doesn’t manage very much of that. Yes, it’s a player-driven universe, but you know, truth be told, the average player is bloody boring. They just don’t do that many epic things.”
Great Northern War?
GHSC Heist?
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=9026939
^ address links to a changeable video of eve’s political map, that has changed throughout the years – ownership of region is *entirely* player driven through war and diplomacy.
And yes, in terms of individual events or roleplay stories there’s probably few and far between that could be called epic. But I think it’s more about the whole – and having something so player controlled, is, I think, more epic than kill this, collect this, deliver this… (which eve also does in it’s ‘missions’, eves answer to quests, which I think is a mistake – eve does not deliver on the pve)
I’d agree with what people have said – conceptually your world of evecraft is similar to ye olde UO…in the non linear approach and customisable skill system rather than levels (though these skills were accumulated by using them, rather than passively, so there is still the ‘grind’ aspect)
The odd thing is, world of evecraft is what I had initially expected from world of warcraft, (though *my* world of evecraft rather than yours – I had different aspect in mind I think, though definately the ‘flat’ openess) and what got me excited about it…well sort of. I was concerned in my first WoW pvp encounter that my stuff would be stolen from my corpse if I died, after being reassured it wouldn’t my first thought was “oh good.” followed by “oh, whats the point then?”
The idea of actually owning territory, physically, with many wars and skirmishes between the horde and alliance over these territories appealed to me – the splitting of the areas to ‘contested’ on the pvp server seemed to suggest this. But it never developed; there is no ‘effect’ the player can have on the gameworld.
I think that’s ultimately what I’d like to see – a fantasy game which has a wide scope, is player driven, and players can have an effect on the devopment of the world (and the other players they interact with, in terms of pvp) – a call for ‘realness’ I suppose, or at least depth. That’s the combination of eve and WoW that I’d like to see.
Other than that, what eve brings to the table (and some smaller niche MMOS) is innovation – the willingness to explore, and sometimes fail, but to explore different formulas and come up with something different to break the mould. I’d like to see that in future games rather than WoW being repeated consistantly under different themes, simply because it’s a successful business model.
On a side note, the 14 day trial isn’t really a good way to get introduced into Eve simply because the game is tremendously deep, and often times overwhelming to a new player.
This was certainly the case for me, but all things said, I’m very happy I stuck it through with EvE Online.
The reason so many people can’t get into Eve is the learning curve. The tutorial was beefed up some time ago but you need a brain to really figure it out. I had a buddy that couldn’t get into it 3 times. Finally I sat him down and explained things to him, trained him the basics and then answered questions he had along the way. He is now at around 3mil SP and is heavy into PvP. So much so that he is on just about every kill we have in gangs. Not to mention, by explaining that Eve is so vast and he can do anything, he has a second account that he started training to do industrial and trade with to support his PvP habit. He told me the other day he had canceled all his accounts with other MMO’s he tried and wished he would have just started with Eve. So the lesson here is, join up with a good corp such as Eve University and learn the ropes. They have lots of instructors for anything you want to do in game.
The real problem is RPGs are hampered by arbitrary systems like skills with percentages or levels with numbers. The only reason statistics exist in RPGs is because for so many of the abilities they wish to represent no satisfactory control system currently exists in computer gaming – take melee combat for an example. No game has even come close to representing what an actual close-quarters ruckus is like, to do that the player would need absolute freedom of movement and control over their entire avatars body – then it would be about mental ability and skill through ‘real’ experience of previous in-game (or even real world) fights on how to attack someone so they leave themselves open for a follow up attack. Furthermore the physics of a game would need to be immense, it would need to be able to calculate the physics behind what makes a sword or an axe effective in terms of its mass, the shape of its offensive edge, the physical force put behind it and the properties of the material it comes into contact with (ie: how they react to those combined properties of the weapon and attack type). An in-game character would then be better than another in-game character because one player is actually more skilled than the other and their equipment might be of better quality or design, or better suited to the way they play. This would absolutely work. How do I know this? Well we already have such an approach to other in-game systems that are more plausible with current computer technology; it is present in first person shooters. People are quite happy with people being better than others in online FPS because they play more or have a better understanding of tactics, or are so well versed with a particular set of equipment through using it repeatedly.
RPG means Role-Playing-Game and it means it regardless of the game mechanics. If you can take on a certain role and be immersed then it has succeeded. Lets stop thinking of it as meaning ‘Statistic-Based-Game’, (unless we want to start calling them SBG instead) and perhaps think of better ways for people to take on those roles through better control systems that allow them to have skill as players rather than skill by numbers. That would kill the level grind, remove a stat-based level divide and allow better open-ended gameplay by taking what EvE does to the nth degree.
The reason I stopped playing MMOs is that combat in them is generally boring and other systems within the game were made secondary so they are less than satisfactory. If combat is boring then I need a damn good reason to do it, like player-driven politics and resource competition rather than to get a level up. Outside EvE there are no MMOs which allow the same scope for player-driven elements as motivation for competition.
I wholeheartdely agree that the arbitrarity of current MMO’s needs to be eliminated. I like teh EVE skill-system, and just left wow and LOTO because of the skill grinding: “no lvl 35 potion for you lousy lvl 34 gnome!”
I also agree that the arbitrarity of current MMO’s needs to be eliminated
I think this is a great idea for an MMO and I would like to add a few thoughts.
If gold or in game money is going to be the only grind why not make an in game option to sell gold legal? That way the gold sellers would have a lot of competition from players so it wouldn’t be as lucrative for them. They could do it in an auction house/currency exchange where players could sell other players gold or items for real money or even game time. This would give players a safe and reliable way to make these transactions and reduce spamming.
Another option I would like to see in this game is passive experience and active experience. Passive experience would be skill training and active experience would be time spent. They could affect different things to even out extremes. In other words you might have a character with a lot of passive experience in sword fighting. This would give him access to different and better techniques and abilities with swords. On the other hand you would have a player that is constantly in game fighting pvp or pve this would give him battle experience that improves his survivability and offensive capabilities in a much more general way like making him able to attack faster and do more/take less damage than someone with the same skills and gear but less experience using them in actual combat. This would also allow players to feel progression weather they are online or off. This could be added to crafting skills too. You could have the passive skill weaponsmithing. Trianing this would give you the option of making different and better types of weapons. Then as you make more and more weapons their quality goes up.
One of the most important aspects of eve that they should add to an MMO is the enourmouse amounts of gear options and having those options come with bonuses and drawbacks. They also need to learn from eve how to make top end gear nice to have without making the lower end stuff useless.
They need an in depth crafting and market system that makes a difference in the world. I think this is an area that eve has done better than anyone else. It allows people who like to play different noncombat roles just as important as people who excell in combat.
Even though I don’t really like WoW it has a better interface and it’s world is more alive than Eve’s. Eve does look like a screen saver a lot of the time. If I could remake Eve I would have made the interface look like a cockpit with all the little crosses, squares and numbers in a smaller heads up display type thing with the ships targets shown on the viewscreen so that you could watch the ships take damage and play with different camera settings. I would have added a ships communications interface where npc/pc quests would come up in space and you could set quests for the system you were in without having to constantly redock and travel to different systems unless you wanted to. A WSAD or arrow plus mouse control option for manuvering your ship would have made EVE much more fun. An open nonmission deadspace for ratting, pirating, mining and exploring in would have been more fun especially for high sec areas. An outside alien threat that forces all Empires to work together to fend off would also make Eve more fun.
I think most MMOs are flawed in very serious ways especially WoW, but the one good thing about WoW is that it shows that MMOs are capable of making huge sums of money and that means that they will be making bigger and better ones for a long time.