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Magnus Amadeuss
DUST University
Ivy League
66
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Posted - 2013.10.04 05:57:00 -
[1] - Quote
So I think a few of you are under some serious delusions when it comes to eve online and CCP as a developer, so lets set them straight.
The game was broken for the first 6 months after release. Just go to the old eve forums and look around. The user interface was horrible, the balance was incredibly off, and the ship selection was very thin. I remember hearing about all the messed up stuff from the eve early days when I first joined in late 2005. In the short span of two in a half years, eve had gone from the mess of 2003 to something that I thought was amazing enough to play for 5+ years.
So let me list a few of the cool things about Dust.
- The core concept is cool, basically it is like eve (the training/fitting aspects) without the immense boredom. Seriously eve is boring, I played it for 5+ years, I should know.
- One of the only games that gives you something to look forward to when you come back. Since your character continually earns skill points, you can take a break and come back to a nice chunk of SP to spend. Not many games do this.
- Free updates is awesome. So eve gets an expansion every 6 months that is free to all of the players which is amazing. I believe that CCP will continue to do this with dust which means the game you end up with in a few years will be nearly unrecognizable to the game you have today, for free.
- A developer core that communicates. For the longest time in eve the developers only had distant contact with a few select members of the community through informal means (like IRC with BoB peeps). Through a big scandal involving the aforementioned alliance the CSM was made and we now benefit from the CPM as a result. The CPM can and will be a powerful tool for CCP as it has been in eve and they know this.
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Magnus Amadeuss
DUST University
Ivy League
71
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Posted - 2013.10.04 13:47:00 -
[2] - Quote
Even though eve is boring, it has some redeeming qualities. It used to have an absolutely top notch community. There was also a lot of stuff to understand (steep learning curve) so at first you are overwhelmed and want to understand it all. Plus the real sense of loss made every encounter much more exhilarating than other games. Of course for those 5 minutes of pleasure, hours of boredom were required.
Eve came out at a tumultuous time in MMOs. Star Wars Galaxies launched right along side it and was many times more popular, then the following year the juggernaut of World of Warcraft launched. Eve had tiny online numbers then (sub 10,000) but CCP kept iterating and chugging away and they are doing fine today. Those other two MMOs clearly outclassed EvE at the time, but CCP did not give up.
Basically 10 years ago was the time of a few MMO giants(everquest, SWG, WoW), not like today when the market is so fragmented.
The point of it all is that CCP has a track record of starting out with a sub-optimal game and iterating on what they have over and over until quality is achieved. It wasn't until like 2009 or so that I stopped hearing "Eve is dying" from the forums. So everyone stop freaking out.
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Magnus Amadeuss
DUST University
Ivy League
73
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Posted - 2013.10.04 15:13:00 -
[3] - Quote
Canari Elphus wrote:No matter how you compare DUST to EVE's development it doesnt change the fact that people are leaving the game. Sure, DUST may be an awesome game down the road but that doesnt mean anything if there are only a handful of people that play it. Unless CCP is commited to using EVE money to pay for DUST's development then they are going to run into some issues.
There have been many great products that have failed because they couldnt gain traction with consumers.
Apple Newton - First PDA
Xerox Star - First major GUI before Microsoft and Apple
Sony Minidisk
Compaq PJB - First hard drive based portable music player (3 years before ipod)
Product development and marketing are both essential features. One cannot exist without the other.
Its not like the opposite hasn't happened, and for an example of that all you have to do is look at EvE online, made by the very same developer. The point is there is an historical example of an MMO starting out slow and then iteratively getting better. This just so happens to be from the very same developer.
Also, online game experiences dips around back-to-school time. Go to the same place you get the numbers for dust 514 and look at eve online, it is experiencing the very same dips(as it does every year). So either both games are dying or there is a market trend here. |
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