Community Driven Game Longevity

Great info and insight. I never did play EVE but it sounds pretty good. Is eve an open pvp game?

 

It's far more than that.

The Golden Rule is: "don't fly anything you're not prepared to lose". I have even a t-shirt with this motto.

And it's damn true: even if there are safeR areas in the game, no area is safe. As soon as you leave your station with your ship, you CAN (and will, if you make yourself a too juicy target) be attacked and destroyed, even if the "game guards" will swiftly retaliate against the aggressor. The police doesn't prevent, but punishes. Preventing is up to you.

And since EVE is based on free choices and forced consequences, the destruction of your ship:

1) destroys your ship (duh!). Lost forever. You can salvage the wreck for some bits and scraps. But usually your aggressor - or his friends - will do that before you'll be able to.
2) destroys roughly HALF of your ship equipment. Some items are always destroyed, period. The rest of what's fitted on your ship is either lost forever or...
3) drops roughly HALF of your ship equipment inside the ship wreck, and anyone can loot it (in safer areas, there are some caveats). Again, your aggressor or his friends are already vulturing over your wreck.
4) destroys or drops with the same 50% chance whatever was in the ship cargohold (the inventory). Again, half is gone forever, half is up for looting.
5) exposes your control capsule to the space, and since it's a mini-ship, either it's given the coup-the-grace by the aggressors (if they can catch you - then you start anew from the respawn station, which can be on the other side of the galaxy!), or have you run for your life looking for another ship to board and control.

And PvP is used loosely as any Player versus Player activity ingame. Mining the best asteroids under your enemy nose is PvP. Undercutting your market adversary with subtle trading tricks is PvP. Finding the best systems to craft and make a better profit or wipe your competitor's marketshare is PvP. Stealing the best PvE loot after your opponent does the dirt work is PvP. Spying, infiltrating, turncoating, metagaming, demolishing trust from within your enemy's group is PvP (at its finest, I'd say). And every competition between players is not only tolerated, but actively encouraged and endorsed by developers. Only what's prohibited by EULA is actually frowned upon and punished: griefing, harassment, RL threats, and the like.

By design, it's a dark, ruthless world.

But with some extremely valid ideas and tools. And a longevity that's hardly surpassed, even if it's clearly a niche product.

But I'm off topic.

 

I guess my point in asking if it was pvp or not is that SotA is consensual. If the base premise is different then it will have to use different methods. I know what you are saying and I agree with the open world idea of the community policing itself. Its when you have consensual pvp and you cannot police anything and if you are getting griefed you have to use other methods. Again, if this was an open world pvp scenario game I would agree totally with your idea for shroud, but its not, and it has to be thought through in a different way unfortunately.

 

EVE is absolutely non-consensual. I'd say it lives off that. The example of Goons being griefers is true because they can leverage its non-consensuality; they would have a very, very bad time here on SotA.

Said this, giving tools to enable players to write their own narratives, set their goals and reach them is what I was interested in discussing. Non necessarily against other players, or not in a strict PvP sense. Even rivalry can be a powerful motivator, without shedding a single drop of blood.

 

Yes, the tools. I think that is an excellent point. Even in Single-player games, it's the tools that players are given to create new content and share it with each other that brings in the most longevity for any game.

Any game with strong mod support will last longer than a game without it, is just one example.

The more tools players are given to play with, allowing them to create some form of new content that can be shared with others in-game, the better.

I know mod support was a stretch goal during the kickstarter that we didn't quite reach. But its very existence is evidence that the developers are on the right track. A lot of the content currently in the game is community sourced. I can pick up a book off the shelf and see a story I wrote! And I don't see that changing.

So do we have more ideas of content we'd like to create for the game? These ideas might help the Devs decide on what tools to provide us.

 

great thread by the way Ravicus!