It's pretty common knowledge that playing anything that SOE has a hand in is like intentionally sticking your penis in a meat grinder. So I am not worried at all that Vanguard will take players away from EVE.
The formula is different in EVE, that's true. Here you have taken away the requirement for players to know what they are doing. They can simply work through the skills available one by one and they will get training. Players having played longer will be better than those who have only just started and player skill is non-consequential. So in effect, in EVE you get your experience points by paying your monthly fee and selecting new skills as the old ones are getting maxed out.
EDIT: I figure you just badly worded that and what you're trying to say is that the accruation of skills is passive and time-based, therefore the development of the character is passive and time-based, that two people can train equal sets of skills and one not know what he's doing while the other actually used those skills and does know what he's doing. I think you're trying to say that players in eve can gain skills without using them and thus using them is inconsequential to the act of advancing the character. However, eve isn't an easy game. A level 60 character in WoW would be able to kill a level 30 character pretty damn quickly but that doesn't work in Eve. Having tons of skills is not an easy-mode and eve skills do not equate to a level-based system such as is found in WoW.
If you think that player skill in eve is inconsequential, I highly doubt you've even played the game for more than a few months or got heavily involved in pvp. The skills you train in-game allow you to use certain ships, modules and processes (manufacturing, research, refining etc) and increase the bonuses you get to those things. They do NOT make you good at eve. Out of two players, the one who has been playing longer is absolutely NOT guaranteed to be better than the other at anything.
For one thing, the skill system is built with a lot of breadth but not very much depth. You can only train so much in one specific field. For example, my three year old character can fly caldari and gallente battleships, gallente dreadnoughts and carriers, gallente Tech 2 cruisers, amarr tech 2 frigates etc, can mine like a champion and can build with perfect efficiency. However, while collectively those skills took me 3 years to accrue, individually the skills to use each of those types of ship don't take long to train. I'm usually using less than 10% of my skillpoints at any one time, while someone who has specialised in, for example, gallente battleships, could reach the same skill level as me in them in a matter of months. Yes, I have more skillpoints in total but that doesn't mean my three month old enemy doesn't have the same amount of skillpoints in gallente battleship skills and support skills as me.
Additionally, the skill system runs a system of diminishing returns where each successive level of a skill from 1 to 5 requires more skillpoints and therefore takes longer to trainbut provides the same bonus. A player who has been playing for a year may have several skills trained to level 5 but a two month old player could get right up behind him and train them all to level 4, giving the older player typically only a 5% increase over the younger player in whatever that skill does. For example, my Dominix (Gallente Battleship) gets a 10% drone damage bonus per level of Gallente Battleship skill. To train that to level 4 and get +40% damage takes less than two weeks. To continue to level 5 and get the remaining 10% takes 45 days in comparison. I trained it to level 5 even though it was an ineffecient use of training time because I'd trained everything else that would help me fly my Dominix to level 4 or 5.
Essentally, the first 80% of a skill's usefulness can be trained in a very short amount of time but to gain the remaining 20% requires obscene amounts of time. This lets players who are just starting specialise in one thing and within a few months get almost as much benefit out of the skill as someone who's put a year of training into getting all the relevant skills to level 5. There are few things which actually require level 5 of a skill in order to use (mainly tech 2 ships and guns). My little brother started playing eve around 6 months ago. He can now fly Interceptors and Battleships with almost as high a bonus to those ships and the modules used as I have. He has, for all intents and purposes, caught up to me - a three year old player.
To get back to the topic at hand that started this debate, player skills are absolutely paramount in eve. If I handed someone a character with all the skills maxed out (not possible to achieve but it's a theoretical example), they wouldn't have a clue what to do. Even if I gave them a few billion isk to buy ships, they would just keep getting them blown up. They would fit them badly and most of all USE them badly. Unlike other MMOs where the combat consists of standing face to face with your enemy and pressing buttons to activate skills, eve combat involves a lot of strategy and is all ranged - ships attack each other from a distance. How you control your ship can determine whether you survive a gatecamp or not, or whether you manage to catch a target or he gets away. I am, of course, referring to PvP encounters, as that is what the game is pretty much based on.
Even if I gave someone a maxed out skill character and fitted their ship for them, they would not perform as well as someone who is experienced at flying that ship. That experience is, by definition, player skill. You don't click a button to train your character to know to warp scramble your target before webbing them, there's no skillbook in the game for knowing to look at your enemy's ship hull to recognise what guns he has fitted and thus what range he is likely to be fighting you at, no skill will tell you not to get within 10km of a thorax or that the dominix you're pirating in an asteroid belt is probably armour tanked to the local NPC damage types.
The type of skills you train are completely useless without the kind you don't.
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I can safely say that when Vanguard dies, EVE will still stand.
I would take that bet in an instant, and I would win......
Sigil has their game planned out for 10 years down the road and they built it with that in mind...and the game will only get bigger and more epic. Already the replay value with all the different classes and races(all play different and have completely different feels to them) is enormous, and the content as you progress only builds up and becomes more and more addictive so once your hooked, you'll likely be playing a loooong time. Such are the advantages of being experienced devs.
Actually, to the contrary of what your saying, i think Vanguard will be the first MMO to actually age very gracefully and build up its subscription base over time as the turnaround rate for players is designed to be very low. Will it ever dethrone WOW... well all I can say is that you can never predict whats going to happen even 5 years down the road so in 10, you never know... how popular will the genre grow? I think WOW is the beginning.
I can safely say that when Vanguard dies, EVE will still stand.
I would take that bet in an instant, and I would win......
Sigil has their game planned out for 10 years down the road and they built it with that in mind...
And CCP have eve planned until they die of (hopefully) old age. The game is constantly evolving, it's almost a completely different game to the one we had two years ago or three years ago. Patches in eve are not a matter of just content and bugfixes, they also add new game mechanics and alter existing game mechanics in the large patches. Most MMO producers are reluctant to change game mechanics majorly because of the outcry that usually happens. They prefer not to rock the boat in case some subscribers fall off and instead, they simply release new content for the current mechanics.
I'd also like to point out that CCP is their own publisher while SOE games are (obviously) published by SOE, who almost always have a major say in the direction of the game. If the game developers want to make a big change, even if they feel it neccecary, there has to be a risk assessment made to predict if any players may quit over the issue. If too many players might quit because of it, a change is scrapped. Otherwise, SOE would lose profits as a direct result of the game developers and there's a whole host of legal shit they can pull on that as publishers. Quite simply, it's just another MMO designed by committee. SOE can literally kill the game in spite of the developer's best efforts.
This cannot happen with Eve, they have no oversight committee approving changes, they have a bunch of guys sitting in a room drinking beer talking about how great it would be if you had a giant ship the size of a moon that could blow up fleets with a superweapon.. then six months later we have it! Big changes happen in Eve as a matter of routine with a large patch, which keeps the game fresh but does cause some players who do not like the changes to quit. In other MMOs, large changes are frowned upon because they don't want any players to quit. Unfortunately for those MMOs, the game goes stale no matter how much new content is put into it because the game mechanics themselves never change. Patches with big changes may cause people to quit in the short term but not changing the game will result in players quitting in the long term.
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(I snipped some, nitefly) Additionally, the skill system runs a system of diminishing returns where each successive level of a skill from 1 to 5 requires more skillpoints and therefore takes longer to trainbut provides the same bonus. A player who has been playing for a year may have several skills trained to level 5 but a two month old player could get right up behind him and train them all to level 4, giving the older player typically only a 5% increase over the younger player in whatever that skill does. For example, my Dominix (Gallente Battleship) gets a 10% drone damage bonus per level of Gallente Battleship skill. To train that to level 4 and get +40% damage takes less than two weeks. Two weeks?! How do you get from starting character to Gallente Battleship level 4 in two weeks? I have cancelled my EVE subscription but asked two of my friends who still play (and have played for more than my 6 months) and they didn't have an answer for that one. What "race" / build would you need for doing that? And would you be able to use that Battleship for anything? To continue to level 5 and get the remaining 10% takes 45 days in comparison. I trained it to level 5 even though it was an ineffecient use of training time because I'd trained everything else that would help me fly my Dominix to level 4 or 5. Essentally, the first 80% of a skill's usefulness can be trained in a very short amount of time but to gain the remaining 20% requires obscene amounts of time. This lets players who are just starting specialise in one thing and within a few months get almost as much benefit out of the skill as someone who's put a year of training into getting all the relevant skills to level 5. There are few things which actually require level 5 of a skill in order to use (mainly tech 2 ships and guns). My little brother started playing eve around 6 months ago. He can now fly Interceptors and Battleships with almost as high a bonus to those ships and the modules used as I have. He has, for all intents and purposes, caught up to me - a three year old player. Which at its core is the same as it takes no time to get to level 50 in WoW and quite some time (comparatively) to get from 50 to 60. I haven't played Burning Crusade outside of Beta, so don't know about getting from 60 to 70.
The next part in your post was about specific elements in EVE that a starting player couldn't know. That's true and that's true in every MMO that has even a shred of content (including WoW). Practice makes perfect, it is of course true that if you don't know how a specifc piece of equipment works (or skill/talent) then you're not exactly any worse or better off with or without it.
What I (poorly) tried to make a point about in the time vs. skill vs. ability part of my original post is that EVE forces the time aspect on you no matter your intention or capability as a player. Let's say you have 10 hours spare time that you want to use for your favourite MMO. In EVE that does not matter, your dedication to the game might make you more acquainted with the controls, equipment and so on, but your effort will not reflect in your character's development. Whether you actively train the character or is logged off is the same in regards to character development.
In Vanguard (since that's the other game mentioned in the title) you have to train your character. If you have never felled a tree, you're just not very good at it. If you have never used a sword, you're going to be very poor with that sword. On the other hand, if you have spent hours reaping plants, creating cloth, dying it and sewing it into shirts, bags, whatever you're one mean bastard with a needle about now. And if I spend my 10 hours in Vanguard, my character will have progressed A LOT. My personal skills, knowing my own abilities, knowing the abilities of my opponents and general use of interface/game controls has also risen, although that's a lot harder to quantify.
In EVE there is no way around the "keep up your subscription, wait time to get better" formula.
I was in beta for vanguard, and got bored of 'testing' it, so then I moved to EVE and am loving it.
Basically put: Good for you. Anyone who finds a game that brings them fun and enjoyment has found "their" game. It might be for 14 days of trial or several years of full-hearted involvement. But the time you spend with a game being happy, entertained and involved will never come back to haunt you.
I played WoW for about 14 months split into three sessions with a longer or shorter break in between. Right now it is not fun anymore for me but it is still quite an achievement Blizzard pulled off regarding MMOs and public awareness. And the hours I had fun was not ill spent.
Two weeks?! How do you get from starting character to Gallente Battleship level 4 in two weeks? I have cancelled my EVE subscription but asked two of my friends who still play (and have played for more than my 6 months) and they didn't have an answer for that one. What "race" / build would you need for doing that? And would you be able to use that Battleship for anything? Which at its core is the same as it takes no time to get to level 50 in WoW and quite some time (comparatively) to get from 50 to 60. I haven't played Burning Crusade outside of Beta, so don't know about getting from 60 to 70.
In EVE there is no way around the "keep up your subscription, wait time to get better" formula.
You misunderstand me. Gallente battleship levels 1, 2, 3 and 4 should take less than two weeks wth decent perception and willpower. I never said a character could be trained to that in two weeks, there are various pre-requisite and support skills, I was specifically referring to the battleship skill itself as an example. The same would apply to any other skill. 80% of the usefulness can be extracted in a small amount of training time while the remaining 20% takes more time than the entire levels 1 to 4 combined. You can almost catch up to the veterans in a specific field and be 80% as effective as them in a fraction of the time they've spent training.
You don't NEED to train for 3 years to get as effective as someone else who has, far from it. Catching up to any old player about 80% of the way is a matter of a few months if you specialise and that 20% doesnt make a huge difference. For example, guns deal a base damage based on Damage mod of the gun and damage amount of the ammo. You get bonuses from various skills. A pilot with all the relevant skills at level 5 would not deal 20% more damage than a pilot with their skills at level 4, it's more like 5%.
Eve does have a way around the waiting for character advancement thing. There is the rather shady, but perfectly acceptable, method of buying game time codes for money, selling them for ISK then using the ISK to buy a character. This is both allowed and scam-protected by GMs but I personally disagree with it and it's not a good argument for my case, I'm just bringing it up because it disproves you on a technicality.
A more reasonable way to explain it is that eve is one of those MMOs which require teamplay in order to exceed your collective abilities. Most other games do this too, for example Everquest 2 has a lot of dungeons which require teamwork as no class can reasonably complete them on their own. Most games call it "group content" but they're thinking specifically of PvE content such as dungeons. While eve's PvE (missions, exploring etc) are geared toward solo play, with only some (high level complexes and the toughest exploration complexes) being geared toward co-operative play.
Eve is a PvP game, so primarilly it is balanced toward pvp. A player who is 1 day old has value to a pvp group, perhaps as much value as a three year old player in an expensive high damage fitted ship. A newly created character can pilot a frigate and with less than a day's training can be specialised in the pvp job of "tackling", which involves getting to your target fast, warp scrambling them to stop them warping out and webbing them to stop them getting out of your warp scrambler's range. Without that one day old pilot, the group would either lose their target or one of the pilots in damage dealing ships would have to play the role of tackler. Therefore, that one day old character allows the group as a whole to deal more damage.
So as long as you are playing in a group and you're into PvP, your skills aren't important. Everyone is useful in a gang and players with few skillpoints are just as useful as those with a lot of them. The point I'm trying to make is that player skill is much much more important than the kind you train by clicking a button. Practice at tackling will make you a better tackler. There are skills that will help and even advanced ship types you can train for to specialise in it but a new player can very much participate and be a useful tackler. Similarly, any player within a month can be a useful damage dealer or production character or miner or anything. Specialising could take a very long time but it's not required to compete with other players because you're not playing a 1 on 1 game, you'll usually be in a team fighting another team or single person.
The bottom line is that a ship with an experienced pilot behind the helm is effective as part of a team even with low skillpoints because the ship itself and modules have a base effectiveness and the skills usually only increase that effectiveness by 5% per level. While in Everquest 2 or World of Warcraft you would use spells to deal damage and that damage is based on your spell's level, in eve you use modules and their effectiveness is not very dependant on skills. It's more dependant on how you use the ship and modules, based on experience and player-skill rather than the skills you train.
"Getting better" and "training skills" are not synonymous in Eve. I'm three years old and I just commanded my corp against a single one year old pilot who outsmarted and beat us. We lost two ships and he got away. I learned some things from that. Today... I got better.
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I can safely say that when Vanguard dies, EVE will still stand.
I would take that bet in an instant, and I would win......
Sigil has their game planned out for 10 years down the road and they built it with that in mind...
And CCP have eve planned until they die of (hopefully) old age. The game is constantly evolving, it's almost a completely different game to the one we had two years ago or three years ago. Patches in eve are not a matter of just content and bugfixes, they also add new game mechanics and alter existing game mechanics in the large patches. Most MMO producers are reluctant to change game mechanics majorly because of the outcry that usually happens. They prefer not to rock the boat in case some subscribers fall off and instead, they simply release new content for the current mechanics.
Yes that is exactly what i was referring to as well actually. Vanguard has NEW mechanics planned out for years and years down the road and the thing that i think will set it apart is that they will not have to be altering the existing game to make room for these mechanics, thereby alienating the existing player base who have grown attached to the way the game is played. This way the game sort of exponentially grows in depth in a streamlined fashion. Every system in the game is built to either accommodate the new systems to come and is scalable for the future. After they get the games released state smoothed and polished out (since it WAS forced to released about 3 months early by SOE due to lack of funding [more on this later to address your points]) the newest features that will be rolling out are things like player built and run cities(think SWG but with extra functionality and purpose due to innovations like the diplomacy sphere of play). They are creating mechanics and systems for sea combat and indepth ship to ship combat not to mention some functionality for possible expansion in underwater content like fully opertaing underwater cities (also remember a mention of possible amphibian race to make added use of the games vast oceans). Then there will be the mounted combat mechanics including flying mounts (will be interesting to attack a galleon off the back of a drake for example). Anyways im just giving the examples i can think of right now but the point is that all of this is new gameplay features and mechanics that the game is already ready for, it just needs to be made.
If you consider that all of that (save for probably the aquatic race) has been stated for release before or included in the first expansion, then you really begin to see the scope that game could build up in many years from now and because the transition will be so seamless (according to their plans at least) the players will not be turned off but instead will continue progressing throughout the games life and IMHO will become more attached to their characters (and consequently the game) than in any game to date, and that is why i stated that player turn around rate should be very low in Vanguard SOH if things go as planned. If they pull it off then this game will simply be EPIC after a few years of development past launch!
I'd also like to point out that CCP is their own publisher while SOE games are (obviously) published by SOE, who almost always have a major say in the direction of the game. If the game developers want to make a big change, even if they feel it neccecary, there has to be a risk assessment made to predict if any players may quit over the issue. If too many players might quit because of it, a change is scrapped. Otherwise, SOE would lose profits as a direct result of the game developers and there's a whole host of legal shit they can pull on that as publishers. Quite simply, it's just another MMO designed by committee. SOE can literally kill the game in spite of the developer's best efforts.Yes but "almost always" isn't always... Sigil was very careful this time around in keeping creative control over their game. As part of the contract with SOE Sigil were very clear to establish the ground rules and who is handling what. SOE has the servers and technical side of CS and they also have the big budget marketing stuff to deal with. Of course Sigil will never be as independent as a self publisher unless they can buy back publishing down the road (which has been hinted as a possibility), but they still have full control of what counts. I think Sigil is very committed to making this game a success no matter what it takes and they will do it their way no matter what it takes. They even left Microsoft for SOE (fully aware of the backlash that would ensue) because Microsoft were starting to pressure them into things they weren’t comfortable with including wanting them to launch last year!
This cannot happen with Eve, they have no oversight committee approving changes, they have a bunch of guys sitting in a room drinking beer talking about how great it would be if you had a giant ship the size of a moon that could blow up fleets with a superweapon.. then six months later we have it! Big changes happen in Eve as a matter of routine with a large patch, which keeps the game fresh but does cause some players who do not like the changes to quit.[yeah the atmosphere at the Sigil offices are much the same I believe, if the old Vanguard site was any indication, with picture of the days always documenting some mayhem they were getting up to, it seems like a genuinely great place to work] In other MMOs, large changes are frowned upon because they don't want any players to quit. Unfortunately for those MMOs, the game goes stale no matter how much new content is put into it because the game mechanics themselves never change. Patches with big changes may cause people to quit in the short term but not changing the game will result in players quitting in the long term.I think its safe to say we are pretty much on par with our opinions here and that is precisely why i stated what i did about Vanguard. As stated above though, I think the advantage they have in being experienced developers (having EQ most notably under their belts) is that they know the way a game is likely to age and have already made accommodations to keep the game on top and fresh for decades basically down the road without implementing ideas on the fly that will potentially require reworking of many game mechanics already in place, or neither shutting off other features that may be possible later in another expansion or patches.
I hope I didn’t sound like a complete fanboy but I am genuinely excited about this game and where it may go in the future. It already plays great (apart from the few bugs still around) and is so addictive that i can't possibly see it going down in the next 20 years or more especially once they start layering on the game year by year and it evolves into something truly epic.
PS the maturity in this thread is refreshing to see on MMORPG.com
I voted no, but I'm heading over to Vanguard to give it a try and not going back to Eve.
There are some new online SciFi oriented games coming sooner rather than later, so I think Eve will take some hits in the not too distant future, but not from Vanguard.
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EDIT: I figure you just badly worded that and what you're trying to say is that the accruation of skills is passive and time-based, therefore the development of the character is passive and time-based, that two people can train equal sets of skills and one not know what he's doing while the other actually used those skills and does know what he's doing. I think you're trying to say that players in eve can gain skills without using them and thus using them is inconsequential to the act of advancing the character. However, eve isn't an easy game. A level 60 character in WoW would be able to kill a level 30 character pretty damn quickly but that doesn't work in Eve. Having tons of skills is not an easy-mode and eve skills do not equate to a level-based system such as is found in WoW.If you think that player skill in eve is inconsequential, I highly doubt you've even played the game for more than a few months or got heavily involved in pvp. The skills you train in-game allow you to use certain ships, modules and processes (manufacturing, research, refining etc) and increase the bonuses you get to those things. They do NOT make you good at eve. Out of two players, the one who has been playing longer is absolutely NOT guaranteed to be better than the other at anything.
For one thing, the skill system is built with a lot of breadth but not very much depth. You can only train so much in one specific field. For example, my three year old character can fly caldari and gallente battleships, gallente dreadnoughts and carriers, gallente Tech 2 cruisers, amarr tech 2 frigates etc, can mine like a champion and can build with perfect efficiency. However, while collectively those skills took me 3 years to accrue, individually the skills to use each of those types of ship don't take long to train. I'm usually using less than 10% of my skillpoints at any one time, while someone who has specialised in, for example, gallente battleships, could reach the same skill level as me in them in a matter of months. Yes, I have more skillpoints in total but that doesn't mean my three month old enemy doesn't have the same amount of skillpoints in gallente battleship skills and support skills as me.
Additionally, the skill system runs a system of diminishing returns where each successive level of a skill from 1 to 5 requires more skillpoints and therefore takes longer to trainbut provides the same bonus. A player who has been playing for a year may have several skills trained to level 5 but a two month old player could get right up behind him and train them all to level 4, giving the older player typically only a 5% increase over the younger player in whatever that skill does. For example, my Dominix (Gallente Battleship) gets a 10% drone damage bonus per level of Gallente Battleship skill. To train that to level 4 and get +40% damage takes less than two weeks. To continue to level 5 and get the remaining 10% takes 45 days in comparison. I trained it to level 5 even though it was an ineffecient use of training time because I'd trained everything else that would help me fly my Dominix to level 4 or 5.
Essentally, the first 80% of a skill's usefulness can be trained in a very short amount of time but to gain the remaining 20% requires obscene amounts of time. This lets players who are just starting specialise in one thing and within a few months get almost as much benefit out of the skill as someone who's put a year of training into getting all the relevant skills to level 5. There are few things which actually require level 5 of a skill in order to use (mainly tech 2 ships and guns). My little brother started playing eve around 6 months ago. He can now fly Interceptors and Battleships with almost as high a bonus to those ships and the modules used as I have. He has, for all intents and purposes, caught up to me - a three year old player.
To get back to the topic at hand that started this debate, player skills are absolutely paramount in eve. If I handed someone a character with all the skills maxed out (not possible to achieve but it's a theoretical example), they wouldn't have a clue what to do. Even if I gave them a few billion isk to buy ships, they would just keep getting them blown up. They would fit them badly and most of all USE them badly. Unlike other MMOs where the combat consists of standing face to face with your enemy and pressing buttons to activate skills, eve combat involves a lot of strategy and is all ranged - ships attack each other from a distance. How you control your ship can determine whether you survive a gatecamp or not, or whether you manage to catch a target or he gets away. I am, of course, referring to PvP encounters, as that is what the game is pretty much based on.
Even if I gave someone a maxed out skill character and fitted their ship for them, they would not perform as well as someone who is experienced at flying that ship. That experience is, by definition, player skill. You don't click a button to train your character to know to warp scramble your target before webbing them, there's no skillbook in the game for knowing to look at your enemy's ship hull to recognise what guns he has fitted and thus what range he is likely to be fighting you at, no skill will tell you not to get within 10km of a thorax or that the dominix you're pirating in an asteroid belt is probably armour tanked to the local NPC damage types.
The type of skills you train are completely useless without the kind you don't.
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I would take that bet in an instant, and I would win......
Sigil has their game planned out for 10 years down the road and they built it with that in mind...and the game will only get bigger and more epic. Already the replay value with all the different classes and races(all play different and have completely different feels to them) is enormous, and the content as you progress only builds up and becomes more and more addictive so once your hooked, you'll likely be playing a loooong time. Such are the advantages of being experienced devs.
Actually, to the contrary of what your saying, i think Vanguard will be the first MMO to actually age very gracefully and build up its subscription base over time as the turnaround rate for players is designed to be very low. Will it ever dethrone WOW... well all I can say is that you can never predict whats going to happen even 5 years down the road so in 10, you never know... how popular will the genre grow? I think WOW is the beginning.
~Dunadurium
"Silly rabbit, WoW's for kids"
************************
I would take that bet in an instant, and I would win......
Sigil has their game planned out for 10 years down the road and they built it with that in mind...
And CCP have eve planned until they die of (hopefully) old age. The game is constantly evolving, it's almost a completely different game to the one we had two years ago or three years ago. Patches in eve are not a matter of just content and bugfixes, they also add new game mechanics and alter existing game mechanics in the large patches. Most MMO producers are reluctant to change game mechanics majorly because of the outcry that usually happens. They prefer not to rock the boat in case some subscribers fall off and instead, they simply release new content for the current mechanics.
I'd also like to point out that CCP is their own publisher while SOE games are (obviously) published by SOE, who almost always have a major say in the direction of the game. If the game developers want to make a big change, even if they feel it neccecary, there has to be a risk assessment made to predict if any players may quit over the issue. If too many players might quit because of it, a change is scrapped. Otherwise, SOE would lose profits as a direct result of the game developers and there's a whole host of legal shit they can pull on that as publishers. Quite simply, it's just another MMO designed by committee. SOE can literally kill the game in spite of the developer's best efforts.
This cannot happen with Eve, they have no oversight committee approving changes, they have a bunch of guys sitting in a room drinking beer talking about how great it would be if you had a giant ship the size of a moon that could blow up fleets with a superweapon.. then six months later we have it! Big changes happen in Eve as a matter of routine with a large patch, which keeps the game fresh but does cause some players who do not like the changes to quit. In other MMOs, large changes are frowned upon because they don't want any players to quit. Unfortunately for those MMOs, the game goes stale no matter how much new content is put into it because the game mechanics themselves never change. Patches with big changes may cause people to quit in the short term but not changing the game will result in players quitting in the long term.
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I was in beta for vanguard, and got bored of 'testing' it, so then I moved to EVE and am loving it.
What I (poorly) tried to make a point about in the time vs. skill vs. ability part of my original post is that EVE forces the time aspect on you no matter your intention or capability as a player. Let's say you have 10 hours spare time that you want to use for your favourite MMO. In EVE that does not matter, your dedication to the game might make you more acquainted with the controls, equipment and so on, but your effort will not reflect in your character's development. Whether you actively train the character or is logged off is the same in regards to character development.
In Vanguard (since that's the other game mentioned in the title) you have to train your character. If you have never felled a tree, you're just not very good at it. If you have never used a sword, you're going to be very poor with that sword. On the other hand, if you have spent hours reaping plants, creating cloth, dying it and sewing it into shirts, bags, whatever you're one mean bastard with a needle about now. And if I spend my 10 hours in Vanguard, my character will have progressed A LOT. My personal skills, knowing my own abilities, knowing the abilities of my opponents and general use of interface/game controls has also risen, although that's a lot harder to quantify.
In EVE there is no way around the "keep up your subscription, wait time to get better" formula.
I played WoW for about 14 months split into three sessions with a longer or shorter break in between. Right now it is not fun anymore for me but it is still quite an achievement Blizzard pulled off regarding MMOs and public awareness. And the hours I had fun was not ill spent.
You misunderstand me. Gallente battleship levels 1, 2, 3 and 4 should take less than two weeks wth decent perception and willpower. I never said a character could be trained to that in two weeks, there are various pre-requisite and support skills, I was specifically referring to the battleship skill itself as an example. The same would apply to any other skill. 80% of the usefulness can be extracted in a small amount of training time while the remaining 20% takes more time than the entire levels 1 to 4 combined. You can almost catch up to the veterans in a specific field and be 80% as effective as them in a fraction of the time they've spent training.
You don't NEED to train for 3 years to get as effective as someone else who has, far from it. Catching up to any old player about 80% of the way is a matter of a few months if you specialise and that 20% doesnt make a huge difference. For example, guns deal a base damage based on Damage mod of the gun and damage amount of the ammo. You get bonuses from various skills. A pilot with all the relevant skills at level 5 would not deal 20% more damage than a pilot with their skills at level 4, it's more like 5%.
Eve does have a way around the waiting for character advancement thing. There is the rather shady, but perfectly acceptable, method of buying game time codes for money, selling them for ISK then using the ISK to buy a character. This is both allowed and scam-protected by GMs but I personally disagree with it and it's not a good argument for my case, I'm just bringing it up because it disproves you on a technicality.
A more reasonable way to explain it is that eve is one of those MMOs which require teamplay in order to exceed your collective abilities. Most other games do this too, for example Everquest 2 has a lot of dungeons which require teamwork as no class can reasonably complete them on their own. Most games call it "group content" but they're thinking specifically of PvE content such as dungeons. While eve's PvE (missions, exploring etc) are geared toward solo play, with only some (high level complexes and the toughest exploration complexes) being geared toward co-operative play.
Eve is a PvP game, so primarilly it is balanced toward pvp. A player who is 1 day old has value to a pvp group, perhaps as much value as a three year old player in an expensive high damage fitted ship. A newly created character can pilot a frigate and with less than a day's training can be specialised in the pvp job of "tackling", which involves getting to your target fast, warp scrambling them to stop them warping out and webbing them to stop them getting out of your warp scrambler's range. Without that one day old pilot, the group would either lose their target or one of the pilots in damage dealing ships would have to play the role of tackler. Therefore, that one day old character allows the group as a whole to deal more damage.
So as long as you are playing in a group and you're into PvP, your skills aren't important. Everyone is useful in a gang and players with few skillpoints are just as useful as those with a lot of them. The point I'm trying to make is that player skill is much much more important than the kind you train by clicking a button. Practice at tackling will make you a better tackler. There are skills that will help and even advanced ship types you can train for to specialise in it but a new player can very much participate and be a useful tackler. Similarly, any player within a month can be a useful damage dealer or production character or miner or anything. Specialising could take a very long time but it's not required to compete with other players because you're not playing a 1 on 1 game, you'll usually be in a team fighting another team or single person.
The bottom line is that a ship with an experienced pilot behind the helm is effective as part of a team even with low skillpoints because the ship itself and modules have a base effectiveness and the skills usually only increase that effectiveness by 5% per level. While in Everquest 2 or World of Warcraft you would use spells to deal damage and that damage is based on your spell's level, in eve you use modules and their effectiveness is not very dependant on skills. It's more dependant on how you use the ship and modules, based on experience and player-skill rather than the skills you train.
"Getting better" and "training skills" are not synonymous in Eve. I'm three years old and I just commanded my corp against a single one year old pilot who outsmarted and beat us. We lost two ships and he got away. I learned some things from that. Today... I got better.
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I just bought Vanguard, played it ate my entire inventory, clothing, and took my weapons away as a level 10 warrior... seriously... wtf.
Meat grinder... I'll remember that next time
I would take that bet in an instant, and I would win......
Sigil has their game planned out for 10 years down the road and they built it with that in mind...
And CCP have eve planned until they die of (hopefully) old age. The game is constantly evolving, it's almost a completely different game to the one we had two years ago or three years ago. Patches in eve are not a matter of just content and bugfixes, they also add new game mechanics and alter existing game mechanics in the large patches. Most MMO producers are reluctant to change game mechanics majorly because of the outcry that usually happens. They prefer not to rock the boat in case some subscribers fall off and instead, they simply release new content for the current mechanics.
Yes that is exactly what i was referring to as well actually. Vanguard has NEW mechanics planned out for years and years down the road and the thing that i think will set it apart is that they will not have to be altering the existing game to make room for these mechanics, thereby alienating the existing player base who have grown attached to the way the game is played. This way the game sort of exponentially grows in depth in a streamlined fashion. Every system in the game is built to either accommodate the new systems to come and is scalable for the future. After they get the games released state smoothed and polished out (since it WAS forced to released about 3 months early by SOE due to lack of funding [more on this later to address your points]) the newest features that will be rolling out are things like player built and run cities(think SWG but with extra functionality and purpose due to innovations like the diplomacy sphere of play). They are creating mechanics and systems for sea combat and indepth ship to ship combat not to mention some functionality for possible expansion in underwater content like fully opertaing underwater cities (also remember a mention of possible amphibian race to make added use of the games vast oceans). Then there will be the mounted combat mechanics including flying mounts (will be interesting to attack a galleon off the back of a drake for example). Anyways im just giving the examples i can think of right now but the point is that all of this is new gameplay features and mechanics that the game is already ready for, it just needs to be made.
If you consider that all of that (save for probably the aquatic race) has been stated for release before or included in the first expansion, then you really begin to see the scope that game could build up in many years from now and because the transition will be so seamless (according to their plans at least) the players will not be turned off but instead will continue progressing throughout the games life and IMHO will become more attached to their characters (and consequently the game) than in any game to date, and that is why i stated that player turn around rate should be very low in Vanguard SOH if things go as planned. If they pull it off then this game will simply be EPIC after a few years of development past launch!
I'd also like to point out that CCP is their own publisher while SOE games are (obviously) published by SOE, who almost always have a major say in the direction of the game. If the game developers want to make a big change, even if they feel it neccecary, there has to be a risk assessment made to predict if any players may quit over the issue. If too many players might quit because of it, a change is scrapped. Otherwise, SOE would lose profits as a direct result of the game developers and there's a whole host of legal shit they can pull on that as publishers. Quite simply, it's just another MMO designed by committee. SOE can literally kill the game in spite of the developer's best efforts.Yes but "almost always" isn't always... Sigil was very careful this time around in keeping creative control over their game. As part of the contract with SOE Sigil were very clear to establish the ground rules and who is handling what. SOE has the servers and technical side of CS and they also have the big budget marketing stuff to deal with. Of course Sigil will never be as independent as a self publisher unless they can buy back publishing down the road (which has been hinted as a possibility), but they still have full control of what counts. I think Sigil is very committed to making this game a success no matter what it takes and they will do it their way no matter what it takes. They even left Microsoft for SOE (fully aware of the backlash that would ensue) because Microsoft were starting to pressure them into things they weren’t comfortable with including wanting them to launch last year!
This cannot happen with Eve, they have no oversight committee approving changes, they have a bunch of guys sitting in a room drinking beer talking about how great it would be if you had a giant ship the size of a moon that could blow up fleets with a superweapon.. then six months later we have it! Big changes happen in Eve as a matter of routine with a large patch, which keeps the game fresh but does cause some players who do not like the changes to quit.[yeah the atmosphere at the Sigil offices are much the same I believe, if the old Vanguard site was any indication, with picture of the days always documenting some mayhem they were getting up to, it seems like a genuinely great place to work] In other MMOs, large changes are frowned upon because they don't want any players to quit. Unfortunately for those MMOs, the game goes stale no matter how much new content is put into it because the game mechanics themselves never change. Patches with big changes may cause people to quit in the short term but not changing the game will result in players quitting in the long term.I think its safe to say we are pretty much on par with our opinions here and that is precisely why i stated what i did about Vanguard. As stated above though, I think the advantage they have in being experienced developers (having EQ most notably under their belts) is that they know the way a game is likely to age and have already made accommodations to keep the game on top and fresh for decades basically down the road without implementing ideas on the fly that will potentially require reworking of many game mechanics already in place, or neither shutting off other features that may be possible later in another expansion or patches.
I hope I didn’t sound like a complete fanboy but I am genuinely excited about this game and where it may go in the future. It already plays great (apart from the few bugs still around) and is so addictive that i can't possibly see it going down in the next 20 years or more especially once they start layering on the game year by year and it evolves into something truly epic.
PS the maturity in this thread is refreshing to see on MMORPG.com
~Dunadurium
"Silly rabbit, WoW's for kids"
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I voted no, but I'm heading over to Vanguard to give it a try and not going back to Eve.
There are some new online SciFi oriented games coming sooner rather than later, so I think Eve will take some hits in the not too distant future, but not from Vanguard.
- Stray