An old article I wrote many moons ago.
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So here’s the thing, before we go into the point of me being here I want to paint a little
picture for you all.
In terms of eve I am a casual player, I do not claim to be professional neither am I any
good. What I play for is the community/playing with your mates environment which
mainly related to fighting and disrupting all things “Power Bloc” as people seem to put it.
The game itself offers a learning experience, you understand how to manage ships
better, a few people (not everyone) are incredibly helpful in terms of offering advice and
help to progress at the game and most importantly the company of people from all over
the world through.
Now onto my point. I wanted to offer a more light hearted and less involved opinion
which is devoid of stats, pie charts or graphs.
You come home everyday from work/university/being unemployed everyday and you
look for your source of entertainment, you look to eve online. You are a member of one
of the dominating corporations, you log in to find yourself sitting in an Avatar, you then
await instructions to drop into a situation where a capital industrial ship that has been
attacked by a small group of bombers, the rorqual ignited the cyno and you press two
buttons, you subsequently bridge yourself into the position where the attack is taking
place and the gang of stealthy vessels calmly withdraw from the field. The bombers
move to attack somewhere else, a 200 member harpy fleet is mobilised to deal with this
threat, they are able to achieve this objective quickly due to positioned ansiblex gates
allowing easy movement, the location of the bombers is easily tracked due to the
monitoring local chat. The fleet of attacking ships have to quietly withdraw from the
situation due to all these factors being stacked against them.
CCP claimed that there was a concern that this aspect of the game was rapidly becoming
stale, the above certainly serves as evidence to justify the concern.
What would be a solution?
Cynosural changes were implemented which was a start, a point of excitement that got
the communities attention, then came the drifters and blackout, both experiences
offered hope that the stale was soon to be written into the history books. The drifter
attacks created genuine worry, owners considered the violence problematic at first then
once a resolution was found it was concluded that they were simply an irritation. Then
local was withdrawn, finally an opportunity to capitalise on the stale environment, this
created an authentically dangerous time in null sec, limited ways to track locations of
enemies and weak responses by the dominating alliances as the stale routines left them
void of decisions as the mindless simplistic bridging option at a seconds notice was no
longer an option. A gift from the heavens for someone like myself, who very much enjoys
being part of a fleet, the teamwork and collaboration to achieve the larger objective to
ruin someone’s quiet day in their capital ship.
Finally a decision was made to change direction, a solution to a long standing problem
for a developer who has a reputation for lacking in long term planning. Personally I
found it strange that there was such a contrast in opinion, but when there is such strong
reaction then this should have served as a warning that players were getting too used to
what they were doing every time they got into the driving seat.
Now the dreaded local chat has been restored, so the question I would ask is what was
the point? You now find a significant percentage of a player base that have enjoyed the
excitement of a fresh player versus player experience only to have it sharply taken away,
industrial groups of dominating alliances having their safety restored and now more
acutely aware of other tools in game available to improve their safety further
So dare i say that this game, which takes great pride in its long term existence, has
inadvertently signed its own death warrant?
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