CruchGear, which describes itsefl as a blog covering gadgets, gear and computer hardware, has an interview with CCP’s Arnar Gylfason who is a senior producer on EVE Online. I find myself wondering why CrunchGear would be interested in an MMO, as it is neither a gadget, peice of gear or computer hardware. Read on for my impressions.
Overall this looks like simply a peice of marketing fluff, there are no new insights and no new information. It seems, from first reading, to be an attempt to introduce EVE to people who may not have encountered it before. Which is all well and good, a growing subscriber base is good for EVE (read on before hurf-blurfing all over that). New people should be encouraged to play EVE. But…
Arnar’s first quoted statement:
“We provide the tools and the players provide the content. That means we provide the game’s mechanics, and we invite players to take part in that. They usually find new and exciting ways to do so.”
So CCP provide tools do they? Tools which let players make content? When was the last time you saw any player made content in game. The player created stuff is mainly in the meta-game, which a new player is not going to encounter straight off the bat. Also with games like APB and less recently Second Life, there is a picture in people’s heads of what ‘Player Created Content’ is, and EVE offers nothing like it.
This is misleading. If there were tools in game which allowed us, as players to create our own Epic Arcs (as was rumoured to be happening before Apocrypha came out) then, yes, you could market the game as having ‘Player Made Content’. I would be better to describe what the players have created as being a ‘Rich Meta-game Experience’.
So thats strike one. As soon as a new player gets in game and finds out that they can’t paint their spaceships then thats the first point against CCP right there. EVE can no longer be marketed as a game with ‘Player Created Content’, simply because, in the eyes of the gaming public, it doesn’t offer anything of the sort.
The article goes on for a bit about the fluff surrounding creating a character, which is nowhere near as important as it is in other MMOs. Too much emphasis is given to this, it doesn’t matter what race you are in EVE as we all know, everyone can train every skill, there are no restrictions. Its better that a new player understands this from the outset and is aware that their initial choice of race and bloodline is a purely cosmetic one.
The characterization of each race is off kilter as well. I’m guessing that the warlike race is the Minmatar and the spiritual race the Amarr. Do those descriptions fit? Yes, up to a point. The Minmatar would be better described as tribal, and the Amarr as Theocratic. They’re both warlike, just like every other race in EVE.
The writer describes himself as as explorer in EVE (for the few days that he’s played it that is) but obviously has no understanding of how exploration works. The way he describes it, he’s simply running missions.
“…being an explorer entails traveling around the universe and discovering different anomalies, then reporting them to an Agent at a space station. Then you get paid. The further you progress, the further you’ll have to go to find new, uncharted territory. No worries, though: there’s more than 5,000 solar systems in the game to keep you busy. More are added all the time.”
You can probably see the errors there straight off, without me having to explain them to you. I’m going to anyway:
- Exploration in EVE does not require you to ever have any contact with an agent in a space station, mission running does.
- You explore wherever you want to, you do not have to ‘go’ anywhere, though it can get a little boring if you don’t. Whats the point of exploring if you’re not going anywhere?
- The last time any solar systems were added to EVE was back in Apocrypha when Wormholes were introduced. None have been added since.
No mention of probes or scanning, no mention of the different sites you have to scan for. Personally, I think he’s just doing missions and has confused that with exploration. The main problem I have with this section is the statement that more solar systems are added all the time, they’re not, that is patently untrue and again misleading. As soon as a new player joins the game and finds this out thats another strike against CCP.
Now we come to the next quote from Arnar:
“Well, that may be one of the areas where we need to improve, we may not be doing a good enough job of hinting to people where they could go next. We absolutely don’t want to lead players into specific routes or specific locations. That would be against the open world, sandbox feel. But that may be one of the problems Eve faces, figuring out how to guide players to new content without specifically pushing them in one direction or another.”
One of the areas that needs improvement, no mention made of all the things that the CSM and the rest of the playerbase have been clamouring at them to fix for years. But of course there wouldn’t be, they’re trying to sell this game to the wide-eyed newbie instead of trying to hang on to us bitter vets. There are plenty of areas for CCP to be improving the game, the fabled NPE is not one of them, or at least it should not be at the top of their priority list.
CCP has an amazing community in their game, and they don’t seem to realise what a resource this could be for them. There are tools, blogs, guides, and more tools that a new player would find incredibly useful, but CCP don’t promote these apart from allowing them to be advertised and posted about on the forums, which many new players don’t even read. They make such a big thing about their game’s community (it won an award from TenTonHammer earlier this year) but don’t really do anything to promote it beyond a few select sites.
The article then goes on to talk about something which is not particularly relevant, but goes some way to revealing the whole endeavour’s true purpose. CCP are trying to capitalize on the recent RealID furore that engulfed Blizzard and tempt disgruntled WoW players into EVE. Even if they do come over for a look, they’re not going to stay long. They don’t want EVE, they want another game like WoW (Aion is that way folks, have fun). EVE is about as far from WoW as you can get in the MMO genre, as is mentioned previously in the same article, there is no hand holding, no ‘go here, do this, get this shiny thing’ and no PvE only servers.
The harsh and gritty world of EVE could not be further from the soft and fluffy world of WoW. In EVE you can be attacked by another player anywhere, and at any time, its the way the world is. An awful lot of WoW players don’t understand this, and don’t want to escape into a world which is just as unforgiving of mistakes and ignorance as the real one. AS soon as they see this they’re off, either back to WoW or one of its clones.
So going for disgruntled WoW players is of next to no use to CCP, very few of them will stay and even less of them will encourage their friends to play.
And thats about it for that article. As a marketing effort it may encourage people to give EVE a try, but is so misleading that many will leave after discovering that most of what is said in it is inaccurate or downright false. Is it damage control? They may also be relying on the bloggers at CrunchGear not being all that up on the current controversies and will not ask difficult questions as the probably would at somewhere more gamer oriented like Massively, MMORPG.com, TenTonHammer, Kotaku, Joystiq, and the rest. CruchGear is a safer option as they can feed them marketing speil and not get called on it.
After the furore over the CSM summit minutes, CCP may be looking for a way to bolster their subscriber numbers as they predict that alot of us bitter vets will simply give up and go somewhere else to play. There is alot of competition on the horizon for the sci-fi oriented gamer to have a look at.
Games like Jumpgate Evolution and Black Prophecy will compete almost directly with EVE in that they’re mainly space based where you as a character identify more with your ship than with an avatar. They also offer something EVE does not, which I know will appeal to a great many of the friends I’ve had try a trial; twitch controls. Then of course we’ve got the grand-daddy of all modern sci-fi, a franchise that basically wrote the script about 30 years ago and has been a yardstick ever since. Of course I’m talking about Star Wars: The Old Republic. EVE subscriptions are going to take a huge hit when this game drops and CCP would be fools not to realise it.
If Bioware have put as much into polishing this game as they did KOTOR, Neverwinter Nights, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age, then SW:TOR is going to be a very slick game. EVE is beginning to look a little frayed around the edges in comparison Whilst still graphically impressive, EVE’s age is beginning to show in its backend. Lag, buggy and unfinished features, balance issues and a clucky and unintuitive UI will make it look like the poor man’s SW:TOR.
A dark horse in this equation is a little known Eastern European game called Perpetuum. The only way I can think of to describe it is EVE with stompy robots. The economy is there and player driven, the open sandbox world is there. the variety of unrestricted options is there, the crafting and industry are there. Its looking very interesting and I will be watching its developement with great interest.
So over the next 18 months or so, competition in the sci-fi MMO sphere is going to be feirce, and if EVE doesn’t measure up to the newcomers then we can probably wave goodbye to New Eden. This is why their attitude during the CSM summit was so incomprehensible. I can see how their execs are looking at the bottom line and buying the whole “New players make us more money than working to keep old ones” line. But the point is that keeping a hold of new players is a lot harder than keeping longer term players happy and willing to keep forking over their subs, especially as alot of the things that you can do to keep old players will make it easier to keep the newer ones.
Sorry for the rant, I had a short comment set up for posting on CrunchGear but their comment system either isn’t working or they’ve disabled them. I started a short post on this blog and got a bit carried away.
M out
5 Comments
the exploration he was referring to was the NPE career agent teaching you how to scan
I can see what they were trying to say, but yes, their phrasing makes their statements sound more loaded than I think they intended them to be. Something like, “We provide the medium and the players provide the content” is probably closer to their intended message.
Its the idea of content that is tricky though. In many people's minds 'content' is 'things in game than the player can manipulate' and EVE doesn't have the obvious 'content creation' tools that will be expected.
People think 'content creation' and they don't think of something as nebulous as 'The Downfall of BoB' or 'The Guiding Hand Social Club Story'. They think in terms of actual physical things they can create and manipulate in game, they think of painting their ships or designing their clothes.
“keeping a hold of new players is a lot harder than keeping longer term players happy and willing to keep forking over their subs,”
I really see the world quite differently. I think it is much, much easier to keep new players and there are a lot more of them. Simple stuff with the UI, NPE, maybe not making it quite so easy for them to be griefed away. Plus there are so many more new players – 350k players who average 7 months mean about 50k players join (and leave) every month. Which means several hundred thousand new trial accounts each month. If 5% more of the trial accounts stuck and 25% of the 0.0 population left, it would clearly be in CCP's short term financial interest. You can argue that it would not be in CCP's long term interest, but the short term is clear.
Great summary of the article, its stuff like this why I come back to your blog. Credit to you for pointing out the bullshit when CCP's tries to spin it, we need more of this!
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