Rock, Paper, Shotgun

19/10/2007 at 17:18 Kast says:

This… sounds perfect to me. Delicious, moist MMO cake.

Who do we need to [beg/kill/give foot rubs to - delete as appropriate] to get this game made?

19/10/2007 at 17:28 Heartless_ says:

Take note as well, EVE’s developers take the game way too seriously and it trickles into the player base at such a rate that it alienates almost any new players. The idea that you need a “thick skin” to play EVE is another failure in execution.

But that brings up the question of whether it is really execution or the basic principles that EVE is built on? Talking about the need to fight over resources, whether it is mining nodes or NPCs to kill for cash, it definitely alienates players that can’t compete. And those players very often just give up and leave the game.

If I had the time and skills, I would throw up my own personal WoW server and give some ideas a spin. I have seen some servers (shotdown now) that have tried to just start everyone at level 60 and every NPC to level 60 and then start everyone at 0 skill and cap the number of skill points you could get. It was killed fast unfortunately with a cease and desist order.

19/10/2007 at 19:00 Kelduum says:

For anyone starting Eve, look up Eve University, a 1400+ member corp dedicated to training new players, and showing them the ropes. And yes, those are active members.

19/10/2007 at 19:25 stark says:

I really admire the EvE-Online folks for their persistent skills-based system, I just can’t seem to stay interested in it past the 14 day trial. 10-20 minutes of intense action followed by 90 minutes of stargate jumping, repeat.

SWG had the skill trees before the dreaded ‘NGE’. They had weapons you couldn’t equip until you learned the skill, etc.. It was a sandbox environment.

I have some hopes for the new generation to implement these types of systems, but people seem to flock to the ‘level’ experience. Nothing compares to a , I suppose.

19/10/2007 at 19:29 tom says:

Gah i could rant on for years about this sort of stuff. On the whole I totally agree, but there are some points that niggle with me. Eve isnt quite as flat as you suggest, it still suffers from one of the main problems that wow does, the itemcentricity of the MMOG. Essentially a level divide still exists, its just measured in gear rather than level. Even the skillset isnt really flattening because better gear requires higher level skills which require the player to have been training up longer.. At least the skills system does accept that like most MMOGs the main way to improve your character is simply to spend more time with the game. Where most games this might mean killing 200 rats to get that next skill level , Eve admits this is boring and lets you go live in RL while you ding virtually.

In many peoples eyes WoW only begins at 70 anyway, XP is often a long lost memory for many players and the issue becomes gear and money. Eve is different in that gear and money is player controlled, not locked in instance grinds.
I dont think you can ever eliminate some form of levelling and with any sort of levelling there will be inequalities in player level. (I use level here to mean a stage of character progression). People want these equalities anyway, they want to outgear/outlevel/outgold their fellows. GW took and interesting step by only allowing a limited skillset to be taken by players ‘in the wild’, but even here elite skills and better gear control a levelling mentality.

Personally im quite interested to see if a system would work where game mechanic level is as flat as possible and rewards only exist in an RP fluff sort of mode. This kinda works already with some MultiFPSs, online ranking, player titles and fancy outifits. But would it be enough to motivate players to form 40 man raids just for fluff without any statboosts?

anyway as you can tell i could drivel on for days, better get back to farming primals instead :)

19/10/2007 at 19:51 Craig says:

I’ve always wanted something like this. Basically this Evecraft was Ultima Online back in 1997. IT was all skill based and everyone was on an even playing field. no levels, just magic weapons and armor found from killing dragons, and then player made weapons and armor. It was such an awesome system.

I want to see that remade again now but in 3d. Level systems are just so old and been done before that skill systems are the new way to go.

When UO 2 is released, thats the day I quit my job.

19/10/2007 at 20:53 Aimless says:

I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy Tactics on the PSP recently, and I think the Job system in that could be very interesting in an MMO.

Basically your characters can change Jobs (read: Classes) at any point in the game bar during combat. With each action they gain Job Points, or JP, and these have the dual purpose of being the currency with which to ‘buy’ new abilities and levelling up that particular Job when your JP reaches certain lifetime totals.

Generally new characters only have the two starting jobs available, Squire and Chemist, but they quickly gain access to new classes by reaching certain level requirements in the previously mentioned Jobs: a level 2 Squire can switch to being an Archer, a Chemist to a White or Black Mage. To be able to train in the more advanced Jobs you would need several different level prerequisities in lower tier positions; the Ninja Job requires players to be a Squire (lvl. 2), Archer (lvl. 4), Thief (lvl. 5), Knight (lvl. 3), Monk (lvl. 4), and a Geomancer (lvl. 2), for instance.

The part that makes it ideal for an MMO is that you are not constrained in what you learn, so if you had gone down the melee route but fancy giving casting a go, you can simply go back and unlock the magic orientated Jobs with the same character, forfitting none of your previous abilities and not having to reroll as a seperate entity.

Furthermore, whilst a character can only have one active Job at a time they are also allowed to access to one other’s skill set. So if my character was a Knight, for instance, I would be able to use any of that Job’s abilities and would have the option of being able to also cast White Magic so I could heal myself and others. Now I wouldn’t be a great healer, partly because the active Job affects a characters statistics and because I would be wearing caster-unfriendly plate, but it allows players to essentially create their own classes.

Sorry, I know that was long and I probably didn’t describe it very coherently, but I think a similar system would fit perfectly with Jim’s EveCraft idea. There is obvious character progression as you gradually unlock the abilities of different Jobs and indeed new Jobs themselves, but at the same time you aren’t becoming a one-hit wonder, so to speak, just a player with a far greater roster of abilities.

19/10/2007 at 21:05 MPK says:

“In many peoples eyes WoW only begins at 70 anyway”

I always took great offense at this. If life begins at 70, what am I doing for the rest of the time? What’s the worth in playing to 70 if the self-confessed “best bits” are after I hit that and can no longer progress as a character (at least until the next expansion). Why can’t I just start at 70, get the best bits straight away and do all the rubbish 1-69 bits at my leisure?

At least, before I quit, I took a character to 40 solo. That’s quite an achievement, I feel, in a game that tends to punish the lone player. I’m not saying I didn’t spend time in PUGs, but I was never interested in being in a guild and being locked into the respawn cycle of the higher level instances.

19/10/2007 at 21:34 Zell says:

“If life begins at 70, what am I doing for the rest of the time?”

The people who say this have most likely played the game for a long time, probably seen the early content more than once, and are more interested in the social aspect of doing multi-player content with a reliable group of people. They would also, perhaps, argue that 1-69 is when you learn how to play your character.

Note that “The game begins at 70″ is another way of saying “The most interesting portion of the game doesn’t have levels.” At 70, the game is indeed flat; anybody can play with anybody else usefully.

19/10/2007 at 23:16 Kast says:

Ditto everything Garth said.

I hate groups. I hate guilds. I hate raids. I hate battlegrounds. I’m not quite sure WHY I play MMOs, except that perhaps they’re the only games out there that offer the ‘epic’ scope I’m looking for. Other players mix things up and give a world life, but I’d never actually want to play with them. Eww.

20/10/2007 at 01:08 malkav11 says:

FFXI implements a job system that’s very similar to the Tactics job system and somehow manages to make an MMO using that idea really terrible. Go figure.

I have to say, I’m not convinced. EVE’s biggest problem for me was not that the skills didn’t give out visible benefits. It’s that the learning system completely disconnected my advancement from my doing things in game. It made the game intrinsically all about money and loot and that’s exactly what doesn’t compel me in a game. Now, the player-generated content (i.e., the trading and politicking and so on), that part of EVE is really neat. But I’d have to have a bunch of friends already playing for that sort of thing to keep me in the game without compelling developer-generated content. Or maybe no monthly fee.

20/10/2007 at 09:26 Martin says:

A very interesting read, Jim, and I agree to a great extent.

Please revisit this topic again.

20/10/2007 at 10:49 Pete says:

Disagree. They’re my two favourite MMOs, in fact I’ve tried and quickly hated most other MMOs. However EVE and WoW are utterly different and should never be compared or conceptually merged.

How about comparing it the other way – imagine EVE but with imaginative and varied missions instead of mind numbing courier or kill missions. Imagine EVE without this stark divide between carebear-land/Empire and the deadly wild west/0.0. Imagine EVE but without the steep learning curve and pratical REQUIREMENT to join a gang/guild to get anywhere. Imagine a game where the fun is around every corner rather than having to be found in a vast emptyness. Sounds great at first, but if you think about it it just wouldn’t be EVE anymore and said “improvements” would have damaging knock on consequences to the gameplay.

It’s like, I don’t know, comparing a giant funfair to paintballing for cash, then trying to borrow good bits from both.

Now granted – skills over time, the superb economy, territory control, fleet warfare… all brilliant, and I love both games. EVE is also the first and only MMO to truly break the mould and I cannot wait to see their WoD game. However both have their place and audience due to their almost entirely opposed designs. I really don’t think World of EVECraft would be that interesting, however all credit for kicking off a bloody interesting discussion.

I may have slightly missed the point here. I can definitely say that now WoW has, arguably, just about perfected the first generation, traditional EQ-style MMO that we really should see more companies REALLY break the mould like EVE did. Not just giving us WoW with cars, or lasers, and then tweaking some peripheral details like PvP/RvR/leveling etc. It’s like all these MMO designers have spent so long playing in these other MMos that they don’t even know how to think any differently or take risks, just how to improve slightly.

20/10/2007 at 16:58 Martin says:

Ok, a somewhat longer rambling about why I think World of Evecraft is a great thing. I’d especially like to reply to Pete who I also feel has missed the point slightly.

The reason why World of Evecraft would work is because it borrows the free-form, skill based gameplay from Eve while using WoW’s (in many ways excellent) presentation.

Imagine a world where you have a plethora of quests – as in WoW – that do have prerequsites, only not based on levels. In order to be able to take out that band of thugs you need to be a good fighter, that is, have a high skill in melee or ranged.

If you don’t meet this requirement you train, or take on other quests, until you do. This is what Eve can learn from WoW, how to give players goals and guide them when needed.

What WoW can learn from Eve is how to allow players to achieve these goals on their own, without forcing them to level up per se. Sure, a skill might be seen as a level but if you have designed your skill tree good enough this is a moot point.

WoW could be just as fun or, in my opinion, more fun than it is now even though it was based on a skill tree system instead of levels.

Let my thief, whom I’ve played for 10 hours, group up with my brothers paladin whom he has played for 100 hours. Of course he will be better at chopping up bad guys and he might have a means of transportation that I can’t afford or even know how to use but we can still be able to go out and have fun together.

I would *love* to see a game like this, especially if it’s as polished as WoW is.

20/10/2007 at 19:18 Zell says:

“Eve however doesn’t have a track, players need to create their own fun, they have to set their own goals and find out for themself what gives them satisfaction.”

I’d say this pretty much summarizes one of the big questions in our field. To what degree do we take the player through a linear plot, usually as the protagonist — vs merely presenting them with a world, with a set of laws (physical, social, heuristic) and initial conditions? I’ve seen endless discussion threads on this matter, and they are usually good reading.

In my opinion, neither extreme is desirable. We grudgingly accept Half Life’s complete lack of interest in triggering the next plot step until you’ve accomplished a precise and usually obvious objective (only the physics puzzles help you feel like the world matters much). The same degree of linearity in WoW chafes even worse; especially since you’re surrounded by other people supposedly going through the same epic storyline as you are.

But too much simulation isn’t desirable either, especially in a graphical setting where you need to worry about things like art budgets. You really do need players to stumble upon the lost ruins of Zub because you spent a lot of bloody effort on it. It’s incredibly difficult to write a captivating plot without the players feeling herded through it.

The thing is, I love content. I will even accept WoW’s ridiculous quest lines, because as shallow and forced as they may be, they are still fiction; there is prose, there is a story arc. 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.

20/10/2007 at 21:24 Aimless says:

“The problem with “flat” MMOs is that when you just have “skills” instead of levels is that there’s an even bigger penalty for not getting in with the first wave of players – because you can’t catch up that time on someone who’s been playing the game for three years before you started.”

I disagree. If someone can start a character and have a few hours of training quests that explain the basic mechanics of the game and upgrade their stock skills a bit, and then be able to jump straight into helping their friends that might have been playing for months already then players are at least useful from the get go.

In WoW you won’t be able to take down a creature 10 levels higher than you no matter how good you are at playing your class; players are always hampered by level disparity. Now if a 2-hour-old character is fairly proficient in their basic sword swipe, at least they can contribute to any group even if their contribution would be meagre to that of a player that had maxed out every ability. They might not be sought after players by randoms, but they’d be able to join up with their friends questing straight away.

Furthermore you could have it so that there is a fast-track system for those grouping with their more experienced friends. For instance if a new swordsman joined with a friend that was a master of the blade, the lower skilled player could passively gain skill advancements simply by fighting along side and ‘observing’.

But all talk of character progression aside, I think the easiest way to keep people playing is to simply make the game enjoyable. WoW is very compulsive and constantly dangles the carrot of progression in front of the players nose to keep them going, but so long as something is entertaining people will play it anyway; I don’t play Team Fortress 2 to become the best in the world at it, I load it up to have a good time.

Now maybe I’m just naive, but I think a bit of imagination and trickery can go a long way to transforming a chore into something enjoyable. As an example of the latter, you could have player actions be ‘remembered’ by NPCs. So, perhaps when you first meet a quest giver they’re pretty cold toward you, but after you’ve done a few tasks for them they start using your first name and being a lot warmer. I’m sure it wouldn’t be that much of a technical jump to have them name drop you to other players as well: if you did something particularly quickly a NPC might mention your good example to other players that want to try their hand at it. It’s great to leave your mark on the world, even if it as a soluble one.

Imagination is also very valuable. Imagine Portal without GLaDOS or the personification of the WCC: it would still be a good game, certainly, but I doubt we’d see so much heartfelt enthusiasm and goodwill surrounding it. These periphery elements, whilst not essential to the game mechanics themselves, are often what makes a game. So, to give yet another example, perhaps there is a minstrel that wanders about town that will compose ballads about players for a donation, with the contents based on character variables such as their reputations with certain factions, or proficiency with certain skills, and the overall tone being more positive the larger the donation.

And don’t even get me started on how moribund MMO quests are and how easy it would be to tweak them.

Anyway, sorry for wittering on again; this is a subject I have rather strong opinions on.

21/10/2007 at 03:37 Eschatos says:

I normally hate MMO’s, but this week, I’ve been feeling in a mood for them, so I started up WoW on a private server I know of. The game feels fun, but it’s completely broken by the fact that there’s almost no one on the server and that there’s an insane XP and gold multiplier. Maybe I’ll try paying for it, see what it’s like.

21/10/2007 at 08:53 Galan Amarias says:

There was a player above who made the mistake a lot of us EVE players fall into calling the WOW loving comunity dumb or stupid. The games are different. About as different as possible while still both being MMO. For my part I played WOW to 60, mostly solo, before there was level 70 content. I loved it intensly as it was everything I’d ever wanted EQ to be and all that SWG had failed so very, very horribly at. Then I hit 60 and I ran out of things to do, there was no compelling casual content left.

Some time later I saw a banner add on an online comic for EVE. It had space ships exploding and I’ll tell you I was hooked right there. When I realized that I would be able to skill offline and the only grind was money, I loved it even more. I poured over the forums to learn how to fit my ships, where to go what to look out for. I was in geek heaven. However this is why EVE wonderful as it is, is a nitch game. Bless it for not trying to apeal to everyone.

That being said the notion of a skill system and especially learning over time rather than by squishing monsters could work well in a fantasy game, a car game or whatever. The notion of compition for resources and threat and compition generated by other players and not by the NPC could also go well in a fantasy game. However these things do not seem to apeal to the majority of mmo players. For me, they are now a requirement I won’t be leaving EVE anytime soon and I’ve already stayed longer than any other MMO. Still an MMO like all games is ment to be recreation, people will do what is consistantly fun and it’s tough to be new in EVE. So, while I’d love to see a game like the OP described, for my money I’m already playing one and I’ll not be quick to trade my lasers for a sword and horse.

Finally, a note on the skill sysem and younger players competing. It is true, young players will never be able to do all the things that an older player can do. They will not have access to the bigest ships or the best guns. However with very little time in game they can match an older players skill in the initial ships. For EVE that’s the Frigates, Cruisers and Battlecruisers. Those “lower skill point ships” are always useful. A young player can join in and participate usefully in nearly any activity with less than a week of skilling. More preciously, five three day old players working in a team can kill any player in any battleship if that poor older sod tries to fight them alone. You just don’t get that newer player usefuless in a level based game.

Also thugh an additional 5% incriment in tracking speed or dammage may not seem like much when you put it into pratice and see just how much more dangerous/profitable you’ve become you get a reward much nicer than hearing the bell and setpping up a level.

-Galan

21/10/2007 at 10:43 Gargy says:

I’m a longtime player of both eve and wow, but i’m currently only playing eve.

I dont think that world of evecraft will work for the masses the way world of warcraft does. In world of evecraft pvp with real losses in terms of equipment would be necessary, but for the large majority of casual mmo players this is problematic.

In wow you can happily kill npc’s all day and level up without any real understanding of the game, yet never loose anything. In eve that can get you killed with significant financial loss. That does not appeal to everyone. Wow is mainly a PVE game with some pvp tacked on, while EVE is mainly a pvp game with some pve tacked on. Even playing the markets in eve is pvp.

Your wish for a world of evecraft game may come true with CCP’s next project. They are developing a world of darkness mmo.

21/10/2007 at 10:54 Ghiest says:

Sounds allot like UO, rather in UO the skills are trained by using them rather than just setting them to learn over time. Not that I liked UO that much really, I still think EQ was far superior. But then again that is another topic.

21/10/2007 at 15:47 Nick says:

GW is closer to a single player game with multiplayer options in it’s feel. Which I like. It’s the only “mmo” with a pre-written story your character is actually part of rather than hero number x standing in line to kill big boss y, which is a commendable effort I think as there are no real heroes in standard MMOs. Things like EVE make their own stories however, which is also a good thing, a proper living world.

The Problem with SWG is that it was a bit clunky and it wasn’t Star Wars, it had the skins, models and whatnot, but it was just all wrong. It was quite fun and certainly had some great ideas (until they destroyed all of them in the NGE).

21/10/2007 at 16:40 Tr00jg says:

Although your idea of such an MMO sounds just too good to be true, it could work.

Something I don’t think you took into account is why WoW’s leveling system is so friendly. It IS because of the “proverbial” dangling carrot in the form of knowing that when you reach a level, you WILL get a new spell or that mount everyone is running around with.

But it is also because it IS structured and more concise. If you give a player too many options and less structure (like EvE), the player gets lost in doubt… What is this? What is that? Should I train this or that? Will I regret making this choice?

In WoW, there is only one way, so the player don’t have to worry about making decisions that will cost him time and money (if it doesn’t turn out the right way).

It is simplicity that makes a good game. It is twisted logic. The more rules and constrictions there are the more people will play and find it fun.

Look at Tetris/pacman/chess and board games. It has simple and concise rules that make it good.

21/10/2007 at 17:32 Jens Arnesen says:

Kim, how can you argue WoW is dying? It’s got more subscriptions running than ever, several times of what the original Everquest had, and that’s still alive. Not as many people do endgame raiding any more, but that’s because it’s no longer a requisite to be able to mash things in PvP, with the arena sets introduced. Old servers are dying, not the game. I think we can safely say WoW will not die until at least another five years has passed.

22/10/2007 at 00:19 Doug says:

It’s strange how all MMO’s have some kind of grind which must be completed before you can access the rest of the game. Why is that the case? In every other genre, this process is simply called playing the game. When I play Half Life, I don’t think to myself that the time spent in the first stages was wasted, or somehow boring, just there to put some subscription time between me and the fun stuff. It’s actually engaging and fun.

In WoW, the game starts of fun, then there about 200-300 hours of boring (levels 20-70 are pretty much unnecessary time wasting), then you hit the level cap and you can start having fun again by doing proper PvP, or by raiding, whatever floats your boat. My point is that the process of going from 1-70 needs to (a) take less time, and (b) be more engaging. If exploration of the world and helping PCs and NPCs in meaningful ways were the focus, rather then slaying millions of stupid, unchallenging wandering enemies, the word ‘grind’ would not exist, because you would have to pay attention to actually play.

Now I love WoW myself, but you’d have to be stupid not to see it’s faults. The infinite grind has made me quit a few times now, but I keep coming back to PvP. Other MMO’s take note – the play experience of WoW PvP is a nearly perfect implementation (provided you picked a good class for it, of course. Referring to class differences in PvP as ‘balance’ is a fun little joke players like to have with each other, because we’re all aware thats entirely the wrong word to use).

22/10/2007 at 04:28 Coherent says:

This guy is an idiot. If money, not XP, is the driving force in the game, then goldselling becomes a dominant force in the MMO! It’s hard enough to stop goldselling in WoW… Imagine if money were the only way to get ahead in the game?

Apparently this guy hasn’t thought that deeply about the criticisms of EVE’s no-level model. IT’S INCREDIBLY BORING. Time spent maintaining an account is the only thing that matters in the game! You get ahead better when you’re NOT playing than if you are!

I quit EVE because it would be years before I could do anything I was really interested in. Compare and contrast that to WoW, where anyone can make a character and three months later be running an endgame guild. The whole POINT to WoW is that you progress as fast as you want to. If you want to power to 70, you can do it in a month, nothing holding you back.

So, yeah: “EVE’s collecting skills over time” = MASSIVE FAIL

I terminated my account rather than participate in a system that artificially limited my progress. When I play a game, I want to reap skill increases commensurate with the effort that I put into the game.

22/10/2007 at 10:56 madhaha says:

Its interesting that people often bring up Planetside and EVE in the same discussion. Planetside and EVE are my two biggest disappointments when I’ve taken PCG/RPS advice. Planetside is far from flat. It takes a big time investment to level up to a competitive level. Otherwise you’re doing half the damage of everyone else and taking twice as much. Every battle was a logistics exercise to fill more of the pop^n cap than the other side. Not so much “our commanders used superior tactics that lead us to out manuver and out fight the enemy so we won an area” but “our foul mouthed command channel spammer warned us earlier than yours so now we outnumber you 3:1″. Big lousy deal. I would take Tribes or a Battlefield game over Planetside any given day and I won’t be paying a monthly fee for the priveledge. A 300 play battle should be truly epic in scope but it never really gets more frantic than Unreal 2 except half your team are busy trying to stockpile enemy equipment.

EVE is fun in that there’s a lot of risk involved. With the right contacts and friends, you can be well on your way to dying horribly and losing everything in a week. But where it falls short is a serious lack of depth. The combat system while theoretically complex, basically devolves into “show up with what you can afford to lose and make sure we’re all shooting the same guy”. Combat is generally decided more by the coffers of those involved and the ability to use exploits than any real skill. Was the first Titan (ridiculously time and expense heavy “ships”) taken down by a mob of people forcing the ship to stay online after the pilot had logged off? How’s that for anticlimatic. Sure good scouting and outfitting have a role, but for the vast majority of players its a simple case of “this is what I could afford at the time”. Mining is a joke. If you’re paying a monthly fee to go read a book while waiting for any alarm bells to go off in order to reach your goal of spreadsheet calculated perfection then maybe you’re better off with the new champ manager. “Exploration” is paying to roll a dice with low rewards. Piracy is not really profitable and bounty hunting is basically non-existant since the devs heavily support the use of alts. Set a high enough bounty and someone will deliberately kill themselves and collect the cash. How rewarding. Trading, manufacturing and being a courier are fun in principle but you’re fighting the terrible auto-pilot and slow travel times every step of the way and essentially doing the same job over and over again. Mission running? The missions are more or less the same and barely worth doing. The writing is incomplete and the game mechanics are often broken (this gate isn’t working because they haven’t fixed this mission yet? No drops again?) Everything seems to be in varying states of broken. So this week salvaging is redundant and I should spend 5 days retraining for something else? Something has just been nerfed and my inventory has just halved in price? This isn’t a beautiful player ecology I’ve been lead to believe! This isn’t an epic storyline I’ve been invited the participate in. Its all a poorly staged sham.

The underlying principles behind the games are sound. But the game designers themselves haven’t really found how to make it fun yet.

22/10/2007 at 20:09 Coherent says:

Madhaha says it better than I have the patience to. He is exactly right. I experienced the exact same issues when I was playing. EVE is a pathetic excuse for a game.

But the real issue is that the “accumulating skills slowly over account lifetime” artificially limits your progression in the game. When you fall in love with a game, you want to throw effort into it and see measurable gains. But when the game can not reward you with achievement progress on a daily basis…

You might as well try to get entertainment value out of being an office drone, it’s exactly the same. You don’t see progress on a daily basis, but if you spend years at your job, you will eventually gain new responsibilities. EVE’s skill model is basically the same reward system as real life. Real life is boring and unrewarding, which is why we’re all playing WoW.

As for the idea of using monetary gain as a motivation system to substitute for experience rewards, again the comparison to real life is completely apt. I don’t suppose you’ve noticed: MAKING MONEY IS BORING – THE MOST PROFITABLE ACTIVITIES ARE THE ONES THAT NOBODY WANTS TO DO – WHICH IS WHY THEY’RE SO PROFITABLE.

That’s why it’s called “farming for gold”, genius.

I think Jim Rossignol just fell in love with the “ideal model”, the same seductive concept under which communism is a viable economic system that can “bury” capitalism in goods and services. Nuh uh. In the real world, things don’t work like you think they would when you came up with the idea that a piddly ass game (30k subscribers, OMG it’s a WoW-killer!) like EVE contains the gameplay future of MMO’s. It just don’t work that way boy.

The skills-over-time model sucks, it is the antithesis of fun, and nobody* wants to play it.

*statistically speaking, of course.

22/10/2007 at 21:33 Coherent says:

@Galan Amarias; to address your question about why Blizzard charges $40 for their content while EVE introduces new content for free: economics. Blizzard’s new content is more in demand, so they are able to charge $40 for it, while EVE must release new content just to maintain their existing subscriber base.

Besides which, Blizz does have free content – Patch 2.3 brings Zul’Amon into the game, along with a host of improvements to old areas. And 2.4 has the Sunwell instances and quests. So there.

BUT this discussion isn’t WoW versus EVE. WoW and EVE serve only as examples of the relative to-date success of the various models. The real questions here are about whether the incremental XP approach (where you can complete quests and level up on a daily basis) or the continuous time-based skill accumulation model is more rewarding for players.

And I disarm your argument that RL _IS_ sufficiently rewarding by posing the question, if RL is sufficiently rewarding, why are we paying $15/month to participate in the artificial conflict-and-reward system of an MMO? RL has plenty of conflict and reward. If you maintain that RL has an engaging reward system, I question your logic in discussing the merits of MMO’s because you’re defeating your own point by being interested in them.

22/10/2007 at 22:19 Coherent says:

Ahh yes, such a cogent response. Surely my arguments are completely undone! If that was from the EVE fanbase, then I see your reputation is well-deserved. :)

Thank you for the amusement you have just provided me. :)

22/10/2007 at 22:20 drunkymonkey says:

Mmm, I’ve always seen RPS as the kind of place we get less that sort of thing.

22/10/2007 at 23:07 Evorath says:

Just answer me whats the different between levels in wow and having an MMO based on having tons of skills, armor, credits that the newbie doesnt have? Rather than having a number of shame hovering over your head to quickly give a way to size you up, you instead have an invisible factor being the amount of money you have accumulated. This exists in other mmos, but to solely base your mmo on money just means a great day for the mega-guilds and gold farmers.

Are you really saying in your MMO that a new level 1 guy has any chance at all against a guy that has tons of skills armor, etc? Sure you may not have levels, but I am pretty sure if you’ve been working months to buy the “EVE photons torpedos” or “paladin armor of I never die” that the “level one” guy doesnt have have a chance of competing in pvp or pve. They are a major disadvantage (just like a level 20 player compared to the level 1 player).

If the skills are meaningless and dont give you an unfair advantage as you imply then whats the reward in earning them? Why would I want all of these skills that don’t help me beat the mob or newbie into submission (ie the guy with no skills/items/whatnot).

Grinds are core to mmos. Whether you grind levels or items or money or skills it’s all roughly the same.

While removing the level limits on grouping and such sounds really good and I’ve seen it done well in a few games, in practice you’ll still end up being power leveling the guys with no skills (ie the level 1 guys). They are still just level one, are are just under the delusion that they dont have that number of shame over their heads.

I do like some of the aspects of non-level barriers and I’m looking at any reason to leave WOW. Hopefully Warhammer Online will handle this better, but time will tell. One of my biggest hesitations on joinging a game like EVE now is being so far behind the curve and joining the game late with roaming bands of people with too much time and wealth built into their avatars.

Good post on the major problem I see with mmos, though I think it’s not an easy problem to solve.

23/10/2007 at 00:26 Coherent says:

As far as WoW being shallow and restrictive and not wanting to grind to 20 or 40, it’s hard to believe that EVE would be an acceptable alternative. EVE has nothing but grinding. There are no meaningful quests at all (meaningful = being a part of a deep and engaging storyline) and while playing it you will often run the exact same mission 30-50 times before you outgrow it. IF you outgrow it.

Also as far as expansion packs go, WoW’s patches also contain game balance adjustments and often contain new weapons or areas or quests. So it’s hard to say who wins out on the free vs paid content scale. But that’s okay, since it’s irrelevant. I don’t mind paying $40 for an entire new continent full of new quests and themes and PVP options.

But EVE was ALL grind. The times I tried PVP after six months of playing, I got my ass handed to me more often than not. The game is absolutely dominated and controlled by established accounts. You will ALWAYS be at the mercy of older accounts.

If that appeals to you – endless weeks of mining or running mindless missions or burning money and ships in pvp for absolutely no reward – then it’s clear that we have a completely incompatible sense of fun. Or, perhaps, you _are_ one of all-powerful older accounts trying to temp new victims into your world. :)

23/10/2007 at 08:52 Galan Amarias says:

Coherent: Briefly on free content. CCP content upgrades are nearly always free. The only content they have charged for is the EVE Voice feature. This feature is irelavant if you have friends with TS or Vent. EVE releases balance patches and bug fixes regularly. In addition there are three, count them three, free major content upgrades every year. Tell me if I am wrong but I beleive that BC was the only major content addition to WOW; and they hit you for the cost of an entire game or three months of play. Yes they are able to charge for it. That doesn’t mean they ought to.

I think you are misplaced in your assement of the real argument. It is not the debate betwen skill over time or level bassed skilling. The OP was postulating that the next big MMO will likely be some blend of the mechanics in EVE with the play style of WOW. His main reasoning was that a WOW clone can not beat WOW. Therefore the next big MMO won’t be a WOW clone. If they make a WOW II instead of upgrading the origional I suppose he could be wrong but he has a point. To beat the champ you have to break the mold.

As for your “disarming” my argument that real life is sufficently rewarding. That was not an argument. My statement was that RL is rewarding. That making money there can be great fun and that aspects of it are vastly better than any video game. I stand by those words. That dosn’t mean that I can’t have fun with a videogame as well; anymore than it means I can’t enjoy a lively debate here. Saying that you can’t enjoy RL and play a MMO is like saying if pizza is your favorite food you can never enjoy a steak.

Evorath: There are two differences between the Skillpoints gained in EVE and the Levels gained WOW. The most obvious is points/items gained in realtime vs the same gained by playing the game. This could be done with a skill system or a level system. SWG had a skill based system which required ingame play to advance. They even rewarded active players with faster pet development. I don’t know of any MMO where you gained levels by ammount of realtime the character was live but such a thing would be possible.

The argument for a gain from “time played” is that time online should be rewarded more than time subscribed. This allows players who can devote 8+ hours a day to advance vastly faster than more casual players. Many people feel that they should be rewarded by the game for spending their time there. Others feel that they spend the same monthly fee as the highly active players and that they should not be penalized for not being able to dedicate five or more hours to a game in a single sitting. They can further argue that since they spend less time online they are a lesser drain on system reasources (expense) for the same gain to the company (income).

WOW adresses the casual player with the Rest system which allows casual players to gain more EXP per kill than hardcore players. They also address this with the battlefields loyalty points which allow max level casual players to advance in gear with quick pickup groups as opposed to spending five or more hours on a raid.

EVE adresses the hardcore player with income. An active player will be able to make significantly more money than a casual player. It is possible to make fantastic sums of money by activly playing the comodties market and moving items from where they are cheap to where they are expensive. This can be done with very low skill points. Additionally skill learning time in EVE is bassed on character attributes. These attributes can be raised with skill gain over time and they can be raised instantly by spending money on “implants”. The casual player will not have the money to buy implants until later in the game where they have a higher base income available; however they will still be pleased to be gaining skill points no matter how they are occupied IRL. Finally it is legal by EVE’s EULA to purchase an ingame time card from another player using ingame money. A hardcore player can thusly reduce the subscription cost for multiple accounts to zero real world dollars.

The bigger difference though isn’t the method the skill points are aquired in. It is the result of obtaining those points. In the level bassed system a young player, level 15, has put a significant time investment into the game. Possibly several weeks depending on success, advice recieved and time online. This character has litterally zero chance of defeating a level 30 character in any form of combat, even if the level 30 character makes no agressive action and removes several defensive items.

In EVE the skills are designed to offer incrimental but significant advances in stats which aply to the ships flown. They also open up larger and more complicated vessels. I say more complicated because they are not necessarily better. It is a fact that any five brand new characters, 1 week or less of skill point accumulation, flying frigates, the smallest combat ship class, can defeat any single player, reguardless of that single players age or total accumulated skill points, flying any non-capitol vessel. Capitol vessels are part of the late endgame, require over a year to skill into and can still be defeated by a small number of battleships. Battleships are the largest of the non capitol vessels and can be skilled into within three months if the player is focused on obtaining them.

So if new players can kill you why bother getting skills? Because the ships and abilities the skills give you are very useful and fun for other aspets of the game. New tatics are also opened with skill points. A young player may have to rely on speed and firepower. An older one can use electronic warfare and a host of specialized toys. They will also be individually more dangerous than younger players, just not enough to offset overwhelming numerical supirority.

Groups of players young and old can use younger players for many useful things. The two most common are tackeling and bait however those are just the tip of the iceberg. The difference comes down to this. Young players can be useful to old players, not exp hogs but genuinely useful, in a skill based system like EVE. In a level bassed system like WOW young players can not assist older ones in any meaningful way and in the case of both young and old gaining exp the older players gain is hampered by the presence of the younger ones. (If you don’t believe me feel free to convo me in game. This is the name of my main character)

Coherent: (Your seccond post) “Meaningful quests” The NPC content of EVE is lacking. This is intentional. In EVE, or an EVE style game, it is the player base with whom you are ment to work with and against. I never took the NPC mission content past level 2. (For those of you not familiar with EVE missions have levels 1-5 with level 1 being absurdly easy for any player and level 5 requiring the co-operation of many players experienced in game mechanics with excelent communication.) On the other hand my Alliance (A collection of Corporations “guilds” working togeather) owns a sizable chunk of space. (It belongs to us, if you visit you will see our name on your display.)

Recently our neighboring alliance, who had split from our group and with whom we had significant animosity, decided that we were weak and tried to counquer our teritory. Over the course of the next week they were completely routed. We destroyed large quantities of their assets, siezed their space station and all the space it used to control and sent them packing to safer space. What NPC quest could possibly be as epic as that? Moreover the engagement was minor on the scale of some of the wars which have raged between player groups. EVE allows player actions to significantly alter the game’s virtual landscape. You can not tell me that running the same battleground/dungeon over and over can compare to that.

You said you could not win after six months of playing. I have to ask how were you skilled and how did you choose your fights? If you spent that six months focusing on a single race, combat skills and a specific class of ship you should have been able to be very dangerous. Of course you would also have to know how to fit the ship, what tatics work well with it and what targets you can expect to be able to beat. Especially if you worked solo. In EVE numbers mean more than nearly any other factor in combat. Skill can offset them but it has to be both ingame skillpoints and skill at playing the game. The later comes only with pratice.

It is true that the game is dominated by established Alliances and that these alliances contain many players with established accounts. Many of the corporations which make up those alliances have skill point requirements which are beyond newer playes. However the game is not “totally dominated” by the oldest players. If a group of younger players learns to play, focuses their skill point aquisition and works togeather they can, and often do, challenge even the oldest of Alliances. Furthermore if they form a corporation and establish a name for themselves they can join the old alliances, or the new ones fighting them and contribute significantly to the conflict. This allows newer players to join in the fun while still giving the older players some advantages which keep both the low end and the high end rewarding and fun.

PVP is best learned young and in cheap t1 ships. These ships are useful to groups and can be dangerous on their own. They are also easily replaced. Not everyone in the pvp regions is a combat monster and there is good money to be made attacking the industrial characters, or just attacking the NPC and having a good time playing cat and mouse with the more dangerous combat speced characters.

In sumation, (and thanks for reading this far) WOW style games provide frewquent tangable reward, “ding”, for time played online. They also guide your online time showing you exactly where the fun is to be had. This is relaxing and entertaining to many people. EVE style games provide a place and tools and expect the player to find his own fun. Hours must be spent learning the nuances of the game and how to use the assets available to you. This information is presented in the online forrums and help doccuments but it is a lot to absorb and turns off many players who want to jump in and don’t want to have to think too much about it.

Wow style lets you keep whatever you have gotten with no chance to lose powerful ingame items, but prevents you from claiming real estate. EVE style makes ingame posessions fleeting and easily lost, but allows for the aquisition of teritory and for meaningful player conflict. This provides a sense of risk that many players find they can no longer play without.

A new generation MMO will probably be some terribly clever blend of both, while finding a genre which appeals to millions. It will be interesting, perhaps a marvel of it’s time but it probably won’t get me away from my space ships.

-Galan

23/10/2007 at 09:20 arqueturus says:

Has anyone seen the legend on some First Person Shooters like UT2004/BF1942? The one that says:

WARNING! Player experience may change during online play. (or somesuch)

Never has that applied to any game more than Eve.

@coherent

I seems that Galen has said it far better than I ever could.

@Galen

Very well said there.

23/10/2007 at 18:28 Trooper6 says:

So Eve is to WoW as D&D is to GURPS.

I love GURPS.

Eve has been sounding very interesting for quite some time to me. Unfortunately, Eve is currently PC only (though I’ve been told this is going to change sometime soon). And for me, the thing that most makes me happy about WoW, is that I can play it on my Mac. Once Eve comes out for Mac, then I’ll immediately pick it up, and if I like it, recommend it to all of my Mac pals. Until then, I’ll have to put it out of my mind and get back to Azeroth.

23/10/2007 at 19:45 Jayad says:

Comparisons between EVE and WOW is risky,

Ive seen many magazine reviewers size eve using wow yard sticks and end up publishing a string of useless arguments of why eve fails. In respect, eve players often size up wow unfairly highlighting its trivial and shallow gameplay. There is disagreement of what a game should provide and specifically the validity of ‘virtual’ competition in this instance. Just how seriously can you take virtual actions? is it all meaningless? CCP doesn’t think so and neither do the universities studying Eve-online’s complex market.

The sandbox MMO is still an emerging concept really and the idea is not yet mainstream. Players migrate from well understood gaming formats to eve and get confused. Questions like “So what do i do now?” and “whats the point of all this?” get asked too many times. This sandbox stuff is at odds with the pick-up-and-drop disposition of gamers that dont want video games to be their hobby (or maybe feel a video game is not socially acceptable as a hobby).

Where fun is directed and organized in wow, eve staunchly resists with only token support. Its a situation where traditional gold farming wont get you anywhere in eve, you have to approach it in a more human more opportunistic way to ‘get’ it. Somehow this point gets lost in translation for many but this will change as awareness increases. I partly blame CCP (eve developers) for their poor introduction to the game concept.

So If you want to show off your organizational skills, have the ability to manage and lead people, find business fun, your’ll love eve. Of course its becomes alot more personal, its interlectual warfare and can get extremely harsh.

24/10/2007 at 01:30 Chulo says:

“We destroyed large quantities of their assets, siezed their space station and all the space it used to control and sent them packing to safer space. What NPC quest could possibly be as epic as that?”

So there is a bit of a grind before we get to the fun part in Eve, huh?

“You’re as meaningful in this world as you want to be.”

Sounds like the lies military recruiters tell under-privileged kids in high school. You wouldn’t perchance be in need of noobs to fill out the lower ranks of your corporation, would you?

Here is the defining argument in this Eve vs all others thread:

“Where fun is directed and organized in wow, eve staunchly resists with only token support.

Actually, in Eve the fun is directed and organized by other players meaning new players have to be someone’s bitch to get by. And those that remain part of a gang can progress to the more fun parts while those that go independent are marginalized. Surely you can see why many players choose the individualism and egalitarianism of a game like WoW vs. the hierarchical organisation of Eve?

24/10/2007 at 07:46 Galan Amarias says:

Scott: I think your memory is flawed. I played SWG from day one. Actually day two since on day one the login server tanked and no one could play. There were a lot of things that were unique and good about SWG, but two that were trumped massivly by EVE. First to get your skills up in SWG you had to “use them” it ment that if you wanted to be good at grenade throwing you had to throw grenades. Shooting the monster wouldn’t do it. Want to be good at baking? Now you needed baking exp. They didn’t even use “gun” exp it was “pistol, rifle flamethrower…” Seccond SWG capped you at a maximum number of skill points, I believe 250, and forced you through trees. If you wanted to try out something else you had to forget what you already knew and if you wanted to go back you had to relearn it all again. Once you have a skill in EVE it’s yours, unless you die w/o an updated clone. Even then you lose points not the entire skill. Though the effect can be quite punishing to older players.

Chulo: To rout another alliance yes you would need to be past day one. Not necessarily as far as you seem to be suggesting though. Newer players were involved in the fighting. If you read the entire post instead of just selecting a few lines you’d see where I make the case that younger players in groups can be more than a match for experienced players. However there is some end game content that requires you to gain skill points. Flying the capitol and supercapitol class vessels would be a good example. Mind you this dosn’t prevent you from flying along side one of those giants and helping in a fight. In fleet battles the carriers (Huge ships capable of launcging fighter drones) are very weak to enemy counter attack, thus they often sit several thousand kilometers from an engagment and assign their drones to be controlled by other players who can get into the middle of the fight. It is possible for a 1 day old player to control up to five of those drones, the same as any more experienced non-capitol player.

More importantly the time spent between your youth and the endgame is not a grind. Certainly there are things that you can’t do but there are far more things that you can engage in and they are often as rewarding an experience. In EVE the game dosn’t start at 70 as people say of wow, it starts at day one. New experiences open with time but you can have a rocking good time right on day one, and you can do it, usefully helping your friends who have played for years.

You do not need to be subserviant to old players to be allowed into the fun. You do need to be working in a group though. The “high end” content where you are contesting space is not something a single player can engage in. A single player can play in the high end regions solo but they will not be able to compete with alliances who can count their members in the hundreds or sometimes thousands. Would you want to play a game where one player can dominate hundreds? Remember you probably won’t be that one player.

Finally, even in it’s endgame WOW requires that you spend time ingame to advance. You stop grinding exp and begin to truly grind instances or battlefields.There aren’t that many of them which means you are doing exactly the same thing over and over and over in the same place over and over, and if you get tired of your role, you can’t simply begin skilling for another class the way an EVE character can skill into a new profession, you have to completely re-roll, regrind to 70 and regrind instances for gear. This is why WOW lost me at 60. I enjoyed the leveling and exploring to get there, hit the wall and realized there was no more engaging casual content.

25/10/2007 at 07:40 Galan Amarias says:

@ Winterborn

I loved CoH/V while I played it. They have bar none the best character gen system ever. They have one of the only level bassed games which allows younger players to come along and be useful with the older ones. They have player owned and decorated structure.

Sadly they have terribly ballanced PVP and when it comes down to it all they have is splat the monster, over and over and over.

Excellent game, I’ve spent hours just enjoying bouncing arround on skyscrapers. But when it comes right down to it, the best 1player content on a game comes from RPG not MMORPG. I like my MMO because it’s got people and I find interacting with them to be the best part of the game.

Mind you a lot of that “interaction” is me hunting them or them hunting me. A really good small engagment in EVE is more fun than any other game I have played. Ever.

25/10/2007 at 19:07 Thaliost says:

I think this article defines pretty much a dream MMORPG (which I expect Age of Conan to provide at least partialy).

Eve is complex, interesting and compelling. It bases itself on human interactions, and these ofc are never ending. But it is sometimes too slow to provide fun.

Wow provides instant fun, but it is dull (imo) after a while. It deprives a player of any impact on the game, and makes him do things over and over again.

Eve’s complexity and dynamic environment allied with Wow’s more instant gratification, would therefore probably make a very good game (makes me think of UO).

People however, don’t always want complex things. Maybe they just seek a simple distraction that lets them enjoy the little free time they may have.
What is weird in all of this, is that the share of players that want an evecraft should be far sufficient for game developing companies to invest in such mmorpgs.

I blame it on the risk of such an endeavour. Making a game like that is far more harder than to make a linear game, where the content is defined by the devs; instead of providing tools to allow the players to create their own destinies.

Hope some day a company will be brave enough to invest in such a project and realize there is an avid segment of players waiting for it.

Nice article btw :)

27/10/2007 at 12:58 Santa says:

The game described in this article has existed. It is called Star Wars Galaxies.
When the game was launched, we can only train skills, but from all the professions, without restrictions. There was no level. We were able to harvest in the wild in order to build stuff usefull to other players.
Unfortunately, when they introduced the NGE (New Game Experience), they added level, meaning that I cannot anymore go on mission with my mates (as being a crafter, you were a level 1). And the stuff that crafter were making were less effective than what you can have as loot in the new expansions.
And so I resigned and went to EVE where I’m still on.

28/10/2007 at 07:02 Rienholt says:

I became greatly annoyed with WoW when I found that I “saved the world” by killing a dragon and then finding I needed to go kill it 10 more times to get loot so I could advance. The overall idea of hundreds of people “saving the world” by killing some arch enemy every few minutes was the heart of the matter.

In EVE the missions are along the lines of “pick us up supplies,” then “get us these supplies,” “oh look we need more of the first supplies,” etc. That makes sense.

I also like EVE because of the excellent points mentioned above.

28/10/2007 at 17:13 Matt says:

The makers of EVE just bought into White Wolf and are planning an mmo using the World of Darkness setting.

World of Darkness doesn’t have levels only skills points, as anyone who played the old Vampire Bloodlines game no doubt discovered, so maybe something good will come of that union. It would be nice to think they choose a more sandbox type of route than most current mmo games.

28/10/2007 at 18:42 Gadzuuks says:

You’ve described very well all the reasons I left Eve. I don’t play for realism, I play for escape.

05/11/2007 at 05:17 Rich says:

I started playing Eve ONline day 3 after it’s release. 6-months after I was “hooked” and bought 2 additional accounts.

I would alt-tab between these 3 accounts and built up a reputation within my corp as the “uber” miner and industrialist. I forged out on my own after a rift in the corp and started my own corp. This corp grew to over 100 characters, then I started and authored a website and forums for my corp – and then eventually the alliance in which our corp joined.

By that time I was playing 8-10 hours a day. Being self-employed I could handle it, but over the next year my real-life business suffered and I was eventually evicted from my apartment and had to look for a “real job” again.

It consumed my life – I had a problem.

I decided to quit – gave alot of my valuables to corp members and sold my accounts on e-Bay. 2/3 of my accounts sold for $2000 combined, my main characted for for $3500 (was #12 in the game for over all skill points) but the GMs caught me before the character transfer and I had to return that money.

MORAL: If you have self control and plenty of time, Eve is definately THE BEST game out there – so good that it will pull you away from real-life if you are not careful.

05/11/2007 at 17:09 VJ Metal says:

The thing about EvE that is both most appealing to some and repulsive to others is its utter brutality and lack of compassion for the weak. And by “weak” I don’t mean the new players. I mean the weak-minded players. You absolutely need a thick skin and nerves of steel to play this game well. It attracts a certain breed of MMO player. That’s why I feel at home in EvE like I never did in WoW.

05/11/2007 at 17:22 Sumo says:

lol@those who complain they’ll never see wow endgame (lvl70) … lol@those who want to play SOLO… it’s a MMO damnit, not baldurs gate.
i’ve raid and guild lead in wow for over 2 years. a guild that raiding 4 days a week 3-4hours each day has been in every single instance that exists so far and killed most of all the bosses (still progressing)

now i play eve for last 6 month. i have to say the mechanics are the best i’ve ever seen: manufacture, trade, skill… 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… not only will you get killed and lose your beloved ship, but it also gets insanely BORING. 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. ofc i win fights too, but the reward is much less than what you lose when you get killed. most of the time i just log in to switch a skill, then log off again.
eve is like playing diablo2 in hardcore mode. and as the subscription proves (eve 250K active accounts, wow over 8M.) it’s not the favourite type.
yes, wow is a grind fest at the end of the day, but at least you grind in different locations with a nice background, different NPCs or whatever… eve is a grindfest with a total of 4 different background pictures, loads of stars in heaven and no backstory whatsoever (except the 2 lines of yadda yadda from the intro)

we should not really compare eve to wow… but i can clearly say that i have had fun much more fun playing wow than i had playing eve so far, and the only reason i keep playing eve is because once my character is good enough, i want to try 0.0 space and see if i finally get fun.

what good is a game with superb mechanics like eve, if it’s “poorly sold” to the new players.

05/11/2007 at 17:37 Sumo says:

oh, wanted to add this:

- in eve even a noob counts in pvp, in wow not: WRONG. the lowest lvl rogue can sap the highest level . in wow spells are lvl difference limited, but not totally capped. a lowby affliction lock can course of exhaustion a lvl70. besides, in wow are many protected areas where pvp can NOT happen and newbs can play there savely. in eve, you can get screwed over even in high-sec areas (and u know why? coz veteran players get so bored of whatever they’re doing in 0.0 that they come over to other system to scrwe noobs)
- 40$ for a patch… LOL what? please learn difference between PATCHES and EXPANSIONS. and as some1 said: if blizzard can charge 40$ to 8M people, it’s because they have a good game… while CCP has to give free content if they dont want to lose the miserably small playerbase they have. and this comes from some1 who’s playing both games.

06/11/2007 at 01:05 madd0g11 says:

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.

06/11/2007 at 02:45 Harle says:

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.

06/11/2007 at 05:47 pie-rat says:

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.

06/11/2007 at 18:33 Naurhir says:

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.

08/11/2007 at 01:32 Superbeast says:

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.

09/11/2007 at 09:11 Ant says:

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.

10/11/2007 at 00:30 pikatos says:

Nice article … it’s like you are describing … Monster Hunter (the capcom game) …

12/11/2007 at 16:22 AW_MOE says:

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.

15/11/2007 at 01:42 Anthony Damiani says:

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.

01/12/2007 at 06:00 7thSign says:

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.

17/12/2007 at 17:05 DM says:

Doesn’t get any easier that this. Time invested is all it takes

01/01/2008 at 08:57 LanMandragon says:

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.

26/02/2008 at 02:28 kalaway says:

“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.

07/08/2008 at 02:28 Chap says:

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.

15/09/2008 at 12:14 myname says:

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!”

23/05/2009 at 12:16 David says:

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.

19/11/2010 at 09:45 R4 says:

You have some unique ideas here and I hope that more articles ray ban you.
Thank you very much for sharing some great ideas in the R4 ban us, they are useful.
You have given us some interesting points about
PS3. This is a wonderful article and certainly worth reading.
This prohibitionps3 key jailbreakof the item for sale is certainly revealing and inspiring.
We share the opinion of the ps3 breakstore and I love to read your article.
Good job for writing this brilliant article by DSTT. .
Glad to read some M3. item like this one.
resources of Great shine! Thank you for sharing this with us.
I benefit greatly from your articles every time I read one about glasses. Thanks for the info Kunststoff-shine, helps a lot.
Excellent point here. I would like are more and more items gleitsichtbrille well.
Gleitsichtbrillen I love this article because it is one that really convey useful ideas.
This vessel is the best article I found online.