Shadow of Cerberus EVE Community Forum

Blog banter 50: Changes

This one slipped past me without noticing (I only noticed it as other blogs started responding to it), but Kirith Kodachi has another blog banter out, and it's a bit of a doozy.  Here's the text:

With the Rubicon expansion being announced and the SOMER Blink scandals (or non-scandals depending on your point of view) that have erupted on the community at the same time, it truly feels like an age of EVE has passed and a new one is dawning.

But which direction is it going? This blog banter can be about several different topics:

• Where do you think EVE is going? Is it a good or bad vision ahead?
• If you were EVE's new Executive Producer, where would you take the game?
• What comes (or should come) after Rubicon in terms of the mechanics and ship balancing we've seen? (CSM8 not allowed to answer this one!)
• Is there anything in EVE's ten year past that should be resurrected? Or buried and forgotten?
• What is the future of the community? What should or should not change?

And since I'm joining this one a little bit late, I think I'll answer all the questions (at least as much as I'm allowed to).  But I'm going to change the order around to the order that makes sense to me.

Oh, and fair warning: it's just possible Garth snuck into my office between editing passes of this post and inserted a few of his own thoughts without me noticing.  Ready?  Here goes.

• Where do you think EVE is going? Is it a good or bad vision ahead?
• What comes (or should come) after Rubicon in terms of the mechanics and ship balancing we've seen? (CSM8 not allowed to answer this one!)

Easy one first.  For ship balancing, I don't think it takes a clairvoyant to realize where that's going.  We're marching right up the tech tree now, with interceptors and dictors being the key focus for Rubicon.  Even the CSM hasn't been told which ships are next, but I certainly have my guesses about it and they're probably about the same as yours.  Most of them are cruiser-shaped.  As for the rest...

Obviously, as a CSM member I know where EVE is going, at least for the next few years.  That's where Kirith's reference comes from.  Still, for a change as an EVE player, you know where EVE is going too!  CCP Seagull laid out her vision at Fanfest this April, and updated and reinforced it during the video dev-blog a few weeks ago where the Rubicon features were announced.  So if you've been paying attention at all, look at the materials that she's released, and think about the things that have to happen between now and then to make that vision a reality, you could put together one version of where EVE is going over the next three years.

Of course, the devil is in the details.

Once you lay out a destination, there's a lot of little paths to get there, and one of the things that really impresses me about Seagull is that she gets buy-in from her game designers and developers at each stage.  She lays out the vision but then will accept a lot of input in terms of specific features and game-play mechanics that drive her narrative forward.  Each game designer and dev who wants to gets to suggest a path to the final destination.  Since the narrative is "space colonization", just about any proposal that advances that long-term vision would get a hearing.  It'll be Seagull's call which ones actually make the cut.  There were some interesting presentations at Fanfest about feature ideas that didn't make the cut for Odyssey, for instance.  But they could have and they got a hearing because they advanced the vision as it existed for that expansion.

Is it a good vision?  I personally think that it is.  There's lots and lots of exciting possibilities in the vision that I've seen, particularly in the sense that capsuleers will be "taking space and making it their own."  That's at the heart of the space colonization vision and there's a lot of really good directions it could go.  There's no question in my mind that EVE needs a major shake-up in the status quo.  I'm again not going to use the word "stagnant" because that's the wrong word.  But the key players in the EVE narrative have been locked in for far too long now and the relationships between them are frankly no longer interesting to me.  So yeah, a tactical nuke needs to be tossed into the middle of that and damn the consequences.  Which brings me to...

• Is there anything in EVE's ten year past that should be resurrected? Or buried and forgotten?
• If you were EVE's new Executive Producer, where would you take the game?

This is gonna get me yelled at.  In my view, the fundamental nature of EVE itself has been forgotten and needs to be resurrected.  I continue to think the game needs to be greatly simplified and taken back to its roots:

• Death has consequences; and,
• space is cold and harsh; and,
• this is a game about spaceships!

So if I were given the EP job and I were Seagull's boss, I'd tell her to start flattening and simplifying every structure in the game.  Make it easier for new players to understand what is going on.  To that end, I'd start ripping out every passive income system in the game.  Moon mining?  Either require active participation, or gone.  Planetary interaction?  Either active participation, or gone.  I'd flatten most of the manufacturing chains: the idea of a zillion little unique reactions needed for each race for each little sub-part that actually goes into ships and modules was a cool idea in theory but in practice it over-complicates what should be a relatively simple part of the game.  As it stands, you practically need a Master's degree in Economics to know when it's smart to build ammunition versus ship mods.  It's insane.

Ship fitting should be likewise simplified some.  Multiple metas of the same basic item was again a cool idea in theory but in practice it takes months or years to learn the differences between them to no other purpose than to make the game needlessly complex.  I'm definitely not saying the game should fit ships for you, but do we really need 14 types of rocket launcher and 18 types of Invulnerability Field and 37 types of EANM?  Do we really?

So yeah, the game needs to be made a lot more accessible, and if we have to murder some of our darlings to get there, I'm in favor of that.

Would there be space riots?  Probably.  I'd double down on the policies because they'd be policies worth doubling down on.  As an EP, my eye would be on the prize: using explosives on the learning cliff and trying to attract a new generation of EVE players instead of cannibalizing the existing player base over and over, trying to sell them more and more accounts and more months of training for their alts.  This is a really really cool game, and most people who would love to play it dismiss it because it takes years to learn. 

I guess I would make a very poor Executive Producer, so it's probably best that I not be given the job.  But if the community is going to riot anyway, wouldn't it be nice to make the riots actually meaningful, and about the real future of the game?  Which brings me to...

• What is the future of the community? What should or should not change?

OK, this one's really gonna get me yelled at.  For this question, I am simply going to state what I see happening.  I am not not not going to attempt to judge whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, nor am I endorsing any particular position or strategy.  I am simply going to answer to the best of my knowledge what I believe is the future of the community.  Got it?  OK, here goes.

Over the next two years, I believe the EVE community is going to become less inclusive, even more divisive, and more given to bitter-vets saying "fuck you, I've got mine" as they drive more and more newbies away from the game.  But most of all and most important, I believe the community is going to become even more insular, primarily driven by EVE vets marketing their services to other vets.  CCP, meanwhile, will find themselves more and more hamstrung by majority stakes in the existing player base who are fearful of any change.  Each time CCP tries to break down the walls, they'll get yelled back down.  This will prevent them from having a significant impact on the nature of the community.

Before you start to argue with me, I invite you to take a second and remember what drew you to this game in the first place.  Does it still exist?  And once you learned how hard this game is, what prompted you to stick it out and stay with it?  Does that still exist?  I'll bet if you're honest with yourself, you'll answer "no" to both questions.  With a few shining counter-examples, that's how it is for new players joining EVE today.

Meanwhile, over much of this year, player discontent has centered on telling CCP how much they can help community leaders, and just how they can.  I'm not saying this isn't a conversation worth having -- it definitely is!  But would you want to jump into the stew as a community leader today, as things are now?  I suspect the answer is "no", you'd want to keep your head down and stay out of it.

So shall it be.

Large blocks of the community which were previously so helpful to new players will break down as they are forced to turn to advertising (to the very small EVE player base) or to donations to stay alive.  CCP, meanwhile, will be prevented from assisting them in any meaningful way other than exposure.  Free services to the community will be replaced by "pay to play" equivalents, which themselves will fail as they realize most EVE players don't want to pay to play.  This will reinforce the community's already insular nature.  Without new blood injected into the mix, each community leader that falls by the wayside will not be replaced, or will be replaced by a homogenized equivalent which is less helpful and/or less interesting, and more than likely a propaganda vehicle besides.

I don't know... hopefully this viewpoint is overly bleak.  This is a prediction that I would welcome being dead wrong about.  I'll revisit it in 2015.  If I'm still around myself.


Whew!  Rereading, that came out way more negative than I intended it to, but Kirith is absolutely dead right about one thing:

...it truly feels like an age of EVE has passed and a new one is dawning.

And like all new ages, this one is incredibly fragile.  EVE players do not welcome change, and that's all I see on the horizon for the next couple of years.  So we're all gonna have to hang on and see how it goes.  Thanks for tossing that grenade over, Kirith.  Remind me to send you an equivalent return present, a puppy with diarrhea or something...
Source: Blog banter 50: Changes