Wow, Telc, you've really been downing the SOE Kool Aid.

If you think for even a second that SOE is capable of building Planetside 2 up into a space game good enough and with enough depth to be an EVE killer, you're being rather blind to their long history of making either broken games, or good games that they break later with terrible updates.

We all know what happened to the first Planetside, after all. There's a reason John Smedley is referred to as "The Lord of Lies".

After playing through the Tech Test, the Closed Beta, and then more than half a year of the release, I watched them push cosmetics while putting any new meaningful content on the back burner, and watched them get sales on new weapons by nerfing old ones.

I'm as bitter as I am on this subject because I was a complete Planetside 2 fanboy. When people tried to warn me not to get my hopes up, I just laughed and pointed to all the cool fights I was participating in, and all the posts they made on the forums about cool content that was coming soon.

I believed, and I got burned. Planetside 2 was my second MMO, and I wish I'd picked a better one to get that invested in.


Now, before you just reply back that I think Dust is great because I suck, or something, this game isn't at all what I was hoping to be a part of either.

The sum-total interaction between the two is orbital strikes, which I had some guy in SI tell me was worthless because EVE players can't be trusted to push the button fast enough.

You can say that the POS tower bonuses to PC infrastructure is a link, but no one really gives a **** about that. It's not enough of a bonus to make an EVE player want to drag all their production out to low-sec where it can be attacked.

Orbital Strikes, lauded as a game-changer, are just me whoring myself out for a Dust player's killstreak.

There's no ISK flow, no industry, not even a social space we can share. You don't even get a change of Local channel when you join a battle in Dust, so a lot of EVE players never even see a Dust player.

I get that they wanted to go for what Torfi said about "if all the EVE players were to die in a meteor impact, Dust would still go on, and vise versa", but what we have now is proof that that doesn't work.

If you want the two games to cooperate, you have to not just try and prod them to do so, but either provide new content that relies on that connection, or adjust existing content to make them more dependent on each other.

I got into Dust thinking that Districts would be the PI colonies you could set up on planets, so that when I set up a colony, I was making a map for Dust players. Districts don't even show up in Planet View in EVE, and I could put a PI colony right over where the District should be and it doesn't mean anything.

I also got into Dust hoping to spec into Fighters and take on enemy Fighters or provide close air support over large-scale battlefields. These maps are barely a kilometer across, and flying even a Dropship is like asking to die.


The reason I'm never getting rid of my character, even if I may spend time just accruing Passive while I pursue other things, is because while CCP stumbles, breaks things, makes grand pronouncements they can't back up later, and sometimes just leaves me scratching my head in bewilderment with some of the decisions they make, EVE was my first MMO not only because of the world it represents, but because I fell in love with their vision.

There's a lot of that vision that's still yet to come, but over the last few years they've been working on delivering it, especially now that they're working both on that and fixing things that were left broken for years.

I'm with the CPM on this one. If 1.4 doesn't go well, CCP is going to have a ***** of a time trying to salvage this project. However, I have confidence that CCP Shanghai is no happier about this game being what it is right now than we are, and that they're working their asses off to fix their mistakes and get back on the right track.

At the end of the day, I'll pick CCP over SOE anytime.