After 9 years of play I can honestly say that EVE the game is in the best place its ever been.
But EVE is dying.
I don't mean "hemorrhaging blood from a gaping wound on the floor" dying. EVE's death is not imminent barring a sudden unexpected disaster in Iceland. I mean "we're over the hill and entering the golden years" dying. EVE's most vibrant and alive time is in the past and I don't think its coming back. We are fully in EVE's twilight.
I don't know when exactly we entered this phase of EVE's life. Was it way back when the Summer of Incarnage raged and video cards overheated in a flame or hubris? Or was it recently when the sovereignty changes came and the null sec overlords discovered that getting what they asked for gave them something they did not want? Or somewhere in between? If that "18 months" had not happened and EVE in space had been given all the attention, or if that time period had delivered compelling avatar game play, would EVE's twilight still have come now? I don't know, but regardless here it is.
This period could last another decade or more. There are online games out there still alive long after entering their twilight ages. As long as people enjoy the game and the owners keep the lights on, there is no reason EVE couldn't still be a game I'm playing in another 9 years. It will never have that vibrancy and optimism of 5 years ago when subscription numbers were announced at higher and higher levels every fanfest and we watched with fascination as the concurrent player count edged closer and closer to 40K, 50K, 60K... but the game can exist quite happily at lower levels of participation.
We are already seeing the necessary contraction of players to certain areas, and these migrations will continue. There will still be new players coming in and there will still be veterans leading corporations and alliances, but the numbers of both will dwindle over time. There will still be awesome fights and newsworthy clashes, but we will never have the wave of new players that join up en masse and make a splash.
Couldn't EVE regain the glory days and subscription growth? I don't know, the world has changed a lot in the past decade and the potential pool of players has different expectations and that critical mass of players that grew like a black hole in a dust cloud has shed enough bitter veterans to poison the well just enough to break the feedback look. I think we still have enough to stave off immediate collapse, CCPs actions for the past two years have assured that, but we are never going to grow significantly again.
My biggest hope is that CCP has prepared for this eventuality. That CCP has accept that EVE's best before date has expired and that they plan financially for a long twilight and not betting heavily on a resurgence that I feel is not coming. If the former, we've got a long time to enjoy this game and the ongoing development roadmap and Drifter storyline for years to come. If the latter, then the catastrophic end of our beloved game could be closer than anyone wants.
Some people might read this as a pessimistic doom-saying post and I want to assure you that its not. I'm very optimistic that I'm going to have fun playing EVE for the foreseeable future. What this post is is a statement trying to set expectations for you who is reading this. Consider it counter-programming perhaps.
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One of the biggest reasons was the wiping out of high sec industry at the behest of the null sec cartels. That was the final nail in the coffin when even the most blind realized that the cartels totally control the game, and people don't want to play a rigged game, where they have no way to ever achieve the dominance that Eve advertises.
ReplyDelete... Dinsdale, is that you?
Delete"Wiping out of high sec industry" ... hyperbole much? Do you have any evidence to back up your outrageous claim?
This wiping out of high sec industry is no doubt why null sec pretty much supplies itself out of Jita, a key system in 0.0 space.
DeleteEVE is certainly a different place than when I first logged in... or did my mission running... or did my industry and mining stuff... or when I first went to null sec... or at the height of the war in Fountain... or any one of a dozen more landmarks I could probably come up with. No man can step in the same river twice and all that.
ReplyDeleteEVE is a strange bird though, as it has ever been. It can't play the nostalgia server card, as EQ and some other games have done in their golden years. I can't go free to play. It still bears the burdens of decisions made years back. Super Caps sure seemed like a good idea back when CCP though people wouldn't make very many of them.
But I think most of all, it is no longer such a mystery. It reminds me a bit of TorilMUD, which I played through the 90s and up until about 2004. Back in the early days groups were struggling to figure out how to do things, fight certain bosses, get special gear. But over the years people figured things out. Zones that took hours back in the old days were honed down to 45 minutes. Gear and money accumulated. The only thing that would revive the game every so often was a pwipe.
I think that will be EVE's last hurrah. Eventually they will need an incentive to get people back beyond the shrinking group of hangers on and they will mothball tranquility and launch a new server, and there will be a huge spike in players as we all rush back to live those glory days and it will be huge and exciting and a final time to remember... and then it will taper off and the game will slowly fade to black.
You can always go home again so long as you understand home is a place you've never been before.
ReplyDelete