Tuesday, August 3, 2010

A bittervet pill to swallow

Man, I don't blog for a week and look what happens.  Apparently Eve's on the Verge of falling apart! (again)

Yeah, that recent patch, you know the big one, the one that changes a bunch of things... yeah like last week.  What do you mean there hasn't been one?  Look, with this level of bitching there has to have been one.  Haven't seen tears like this since... well, the Nano Nerf!

Look, I'm not kidding.  It's not like CCP suddenly and drastically changed eve by any stretch of the imagination.  Problems that people are on about today are the same problems they were on about when I first started playing.  Swallow this pill carefully.

Sure, there's Lag, it's a problem that just won't be solved for so many reasons I can't and won't even take the time to point them all out here.

Sure there are blobs, no encouragement to do small gangs, no tactics > bringing more people (for the most part).  Lowsec is a mess.  Seriously!

Seriously NOW all this crap is suddenly game breaking?  It's not mattered up until right damn now.  Right when CCP's working on two other major projects people were CRYING about...  Boohooo why can't we get Incarna now, we've been promised that for YEARS.

I blame blogging for the band-wagon negativity, I blame the CSM for trying and succeeding to publicize them not getting their way; and honestly I blame the poor souls who spend their time bitching about it.  It's those who add to this fire.  More power to them, they are expressing their views, but are they going to make me all EMO and mad at a game that's still fun?  ummmm, nope!

I'm a skeptic about change in general, and always have been, did I think that the NanoNerf was going to suck, yes!  Did it end eve for me?  No.  Eve's a simulation of real life, learn to adapt and overcome.  It's like all the fun's gone from eve, it's not, damn it's still there, just like it was last week and the week before.  Did lag stop those delicious tears of Hulkageddon 3 Helicity?  Is lowsec suddenly that much worse because they aren't patching it tomorrow?

Oh wait, more ships killed than ever you say?  That can't be!  HG3 a smashing success, piracy on the rise?  FW bringing people into lowsec even if it is for lame blobs?  People loving PI and writing constant (and irritating since I don't PI) blogs about them?  More blogs every week, video's released for eve action?

Right now activity in eve seems low, but hey!  It is summer.  Every summer I have played eve things get slow, real slow, down from 50 man gangs to 3 man gangs slow.  This summer it's even worse than usual!  Thanks 2:

SC2 just releasing, there are a variety of other good games out there right now pulling from the eve player base, like Red Dead Redemption, NCAA 2011, soon Madden, plus older games that are still good, like Dawn of War 2 : Chaos Rising.  Those are just the games I can think of from the US.

If you are going to leave and you are an alliance leader, the guys who support EFT, or any other out of game mod, Corp CEO's etc.  Then I am sorry to see you go, but it is your choice.  If it's not fun, go find something fun.  Don't leave eve because some noteables say it's terrible, leave when you stop having fun.

It is almost as if some people think that Eve was a desolate wasteland before THEY got there, so when they leave it's gonna return to it's ugly state.  Eve's no more broken than it was 6-9 months ago.  No less, but by god you would think it was the worst game ever the way some are going on about it!  To further burst that bubble, when you leave I'm sure no less than 5 people will want your job, begrudgingly maybe, but they are there too.

This all reminds me of when I had the most fun in eve...  When there was 14k concurrent users.  Why?  Because you could still solo and find more soloers, you could engage in fights and be sure not to see a 60 man blob land to kill your 5 man gang, sure 10 or 30 might show up and do the same, but not 60+.  Otherwise everything was the same, we still had lag, we still had bad mechanics, we still had all the problems we have now.  I lived with them then, I'm sure as hell gonna live with them now.  Maybe as drop in subscribers returns us to that era, I for one can only hope.  In short; my Eve is still fun.  When the 30 factors needed combine for a good fight, or a good roam, it's the same game to me it was 2 weeks ago or even 3 years ago.

Here's to seeing a wasteland! Yes that is CCP HQ

Sorry to see you go, leave your keys on the way out so someone else can pickup where you left off if they like.  I'll still be here.

For other great posts on the HTFU subject check out

EVEOGANDA
EVE SOB
Letrage's EvE Blog

18 comments:

  1. So you're bitching about peoples bitching?

    Well, it's well deserved and I couldn't agree with you more. I'm sick and tired of people who are honestly trying to make the game better, getting the short end of the stick. The people at CCP (and the CSM) really do care and honestly TRY, and getting smacked in the face by the community at large is insulting and demoralizing.

    Silicon Buddha

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  2. I totally and utterly agree with everything you said.

    Lets also hope Elvis comes and plays a cowbell tune to please the potatoes.

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  3. Preach it BBW!

    thx for the linkage as well.

    Cheers

    EVE SOB

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  4. Thanks all! I just had to rant and since I had no other material I thought I would go with what was pissing me off the most!

    Silicon, CCP seems to be getting it from all angles like they don't care, but I agree with you on this, they try, often and hard but not always "on time" for the vocal among us. love me some CCP

    My pleasure SOB enjoyed your post as well!

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  5. Truer words were never blogged. I've been echoing these sentiments whenever I talk to people and nobody seems to get it. It's like all of a sudden people think the game is hopelessly broken when it's stayed the same.

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  7. If you think lowsec piracy is related to hulkageddon you're pretty ignorant.

    And i can pretty much assure you lowsec "piracy" is not "on the rise".

    What you are seeing is a large group of customers being brought to the realization that they are NOT satisfied with the product, and the lack of effort being made to correct it. And just now they realized that YES, they CAN speak up.

    It's overblown obviously, but it's not invalid and it's not "crying". What you're doing there is "oh look at me I R TUFF TALKIN DOWN TO U" that plus a little Ad Hominem on me.

    I though you were better than that tbh.

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  8. Helicity,

    I like to think I am a bit better than that so after writing it all down and having had it posted for the past few hours I have had time to simmer down, so I re-read my latest post.

    http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html

    That being said, I never said HG3 == Lowsec. My opinion of lowsec and piracy being on the rise is there are more piracy related corps operating in lowsec now than there have been in at least the last year to two years. I've gotten more combat in lowsec around TXW and recently Saranen than flying in Syndicate and Pure Blind combined, well, unless you count being chased by blobs in PB or being the blob in Syndicate as PvP. That's my basis of how lowsec is doing, just the numbers of people I see in local, the fights I can get into, and the numbers of corps I see in the area, pirate or otherwise. I later or actually earlier say that lowsec is broken. It's been like that from the get-go though, think finding targets is bad now, go back to when the best thing you could shoot in the belts were cruisers.

    I'm sorry you took this as talking down to you(the reader who dissents with my opinion), I take it as my opinion, stated straight forward. Other than leading one of my paragraphs with "look," that IS a crappy way to state something since it automatically puts the reader on the defensive, I don't really see where the down-talking voice of my post gets to you, can you let me know where? ANYWAYS I was trying to say, if the game is so broken it is no longer fun, not only stop playing BUT also gee funny you mention that NOW since it's been this way for longer than even I've been around.

    Since when has the EvE customer had a problem with speaking up? This isn't a sudden realization for us, _certainly_ not for those of us who write blogs, sit on the CSM or read and participate on the forums.

    I'd like to hear what you think of this response, until then, o7

    Logan

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  9. Excellent post m8 and I share your sentiments, although I suspect you already knew that.

    On the other hand, reading your post and the comments here has got me thinking. Something here doesn't add up and I think we are all skirting the edge of something bigger than we think... I'm not 100% sure what it is yet, but my mind is churning.

    The thing is, this doesn't add up. So what is the new factor involved here? What changed things? Because, to your point, Eve hasn't changed fundamentally in the two years I've been playing it. (Besides the obvious new game mechanic features)

    It is making me wonder. And I don't think I like where my thoughts are taking me.

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  10. totally agree, add my name to the anti-bandwagon bandwagon list plz

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  11. totally with you on this, I especially like you choice of pic to illustrate how overly emo people are being.
    I'm still having an awesome time soloing around lowsec, despite the fact that SOLO IS TOTALLY DEAD IN LOWSEC QQQQQQQQ AND EVEN IF IT WASN'T THEY WONT FIX LAG!
    srsly people need to remember its an awesome game that their totally addicted to, to the point of writing blogs about it, and because things won't change for a bit doesn't mean its suddenly rubbish.

    some of us are well looking forward to Incarna btw despite the haters

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  12. I think what changed is that we have a more vocal and much more visible CSM this time around (thank Mynxee for that). This factor caused CCP to put out more information (the dev blog about resource allocation) which was, I think, widely misinterpreted.

    The dev blog provided fuel in the form of key phrases such as "18 months" and key ideas like "of the billions of developers working on EVE only one team is working on the core game" -- when in reality the 18 months is tempered by the fact that there is still a team working on the flying in space features and bug fixes and the billions of developers were largely stolen from other projects outside of EVE.

    Negativity is always louder than positivity. Always. And once the bandwagon is rolling, you can't stop it.

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  13. Helicity is right.

    Meta-whining (or counter-whining, however you want to describe it) is just as much whining as first order whining.

    So, instead, let's be mature adults and discuss the merits of the arguments.

    *Is EVE more broken than it was 6-9 months ago. Did you fight in any of the big NC/SC battles, before and after Tyrannis? It got worse. Did you fight in Insmother recently, when PL and the Russkies didn't even have the chance to take C-J because the servers can't handle the fleet? Lag was not always this bad, these types of fights can and did happen relatively well around apocrypha, an expansion crafted by 300 devs.

    *eve isn't broken for all playstyles, I'll grant.
    -mission runners don't care. their game has not changed in a couple years. ditto industrialists, miners, builders, etc.
    -you say lowsec and WH small gang pvp peeps are having a fine time; i've heard others say the same, and i've heard yet others disagree.
    -how many capital ship pilots are happy with the state of the game, do you think? how many titan pilots? how many null-sec sov-holding alliances, or alliances that seek to have good fights with the same? add up membership in those, it's at least 50k. a lot of these people have multiple accounts, multiple toons, empire alts, etc. It may not be objectively the 'end game' like level 80 wow content or anything, but a lot of people spent years building up characters to aspire to participation in it, egged on by CCPs own marketing (see, e.g. Burn Them All vid). I think they have a right to be unhappy and a right to express that unhappiness.

    *Eve is a sandbox. I'm glad you're still having tons of fun making castles in your little corner of it. But, for lots of people, including many of the most active in the game, we're having a lot less fun than we used to, and we've invested a lot of time in the game with the reasonable (and cultivated by CCP, until quite recently) expectation that it would be continuously improving.

    So, I guess I don't understand what you're "blaming" people for -- negative blogs? It's strange to me that you think people are /evequitting because they read negative press even though they, themselves, are having fun, and that you need to remind them that they, themselves, are having fun.

    It's as if you think Ix Forres (who runs eve-metrics) is stopping development on his site because he read one of Helicity's posts, and not because he, himself, is frustrated and having less fun. I think he's well aware whose choice it is, don't you? He is an adult, right?

    And as an aside, just because people have made how-tos for PI doesn't mean everyone loves it. It's pretty much universally acknowledged to be carpal-tunnel inducing, came out two weeks late, and its flawed implementation initially produced such severe balance-breakage that it required an emergency patch.

    wr3cks

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  14. lol, loving the anti-bandwagon bandwagon.

    The players love EVE, they have been in a loving relationship with EVE, that relationship turned sour and went into a relation-SHIT.

    People kept on logging on and things are still ticking along just fine, not great, never the same, but fine.

    Plenty of other stuff out there if you are not enjoying EVE, it should be here when you come back for the angst ridden players out there.

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  15. wr3cks,

    Okay, let's talk like mature adults then.

    6-9 months ago, Dominion had already released. So since that is considered the breaking point, then why the outcry now 6-9 months down the road from the expansion that is being hailed as breaking it all? Why the huge delay?

    I never said that Eve was a, or is a what I would call "finished" product, meaning a game without bugs, balance issues, lag etc. I did point out the inconsistency in the sudden revelation that it is so horrible. That the game is suddenly so game-changingly broken that people can no longer play and enjoy.

    I blame the sudden "bandwagon" of blogging, forums posts, and negative press in general with convincing people who were otherwise happy and enjoying the game that Eve has somehow become irrevocably broken. Some even comparing it with SWG type fail. Especially when nothing has changed in game recently to cause such comments.

    Eve has problems, I know this, I'm not disputing this fact. Because it is a fact! I'm just saying that if you want to leave then go, don't waste your time by further trying to sour the game for everyone else who plays. It's as simple as that. People are leaving the game but on their way out are trying to convince everyone they touch how horrible the game is using accusations of "Lag" and "blobs" etc like it's this giant new concern.

    You see a linear path for "improvement" one that favors what you think needs to be addressed first, usually things that directly effect you. It's possible that CCP see's a different path, and since even if those two paths are different you assume you are on the right one and they are on the wrong one.

    I disagree when you say eve's not improving. I see attempts by CCP to fix current problems now and in the past with sisi testing, Dev's in space at large fleet fights, as well as improvements to the client to try to make things run smoother. In addition to that they are also working on 2 major expansions.

    I just said at the end of my post "leave your keys on the way out." I didn't say gee how about making the biggest scene and try to draw as much attention to me leaving as possible in the attempt to convince other people to leave.

    as an aside, I make general comments like "people loving PI" and you interpret them as "everyone loves it." I don't really know how to clear that up for you.

    rantuket, totally agree with you,

    Parity, thanks for linking me on your blog :)

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  16. This game is broken, even the 0.0 blobbers are complaining.

    And the keys? Leave them and someone will pick them up? Don't think so, the new player experience is so bad in this game noobs very rarely hang around. Don't expect many keys to be picked up.

    People are just wising up and realizing this game is a broken time sink and there are FAR BETTER ways to spend your time online these days. Me being one of them.

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  17. The new player experience in this game is around 5 thousand times better than it was when I joined. People seem to have stuck around since then so I think Eve's still got a fighting chance.

    In any case go have fun with yourself, cause clearly you are taking the time to read about eve.

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  18. I agree with what you have said and cos you have put it soo much better than i can i'm gonna link you in my blog :)

    ps: I'm looking forward to incarna and the character animation video ccp have released for WoD is actually very impressive

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrtwESnTOwY

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