Suppose for a few minutes that you were a veteran EVE player with six or seven years experience. Maybe you even are. You might have a super-carrier, a jump freighter, a good size capital fleet with a half-dozen carriers and a couple of dreadnoughts, and a very large selection of sub-capital ships scattered across three or four home systems. You’ve also got a large inventory of assets scattered across space and even if you don’t use them all, you probably would have become very comfortable with all of your ships, assets, and potential capabilities.
Now suppose that CCP came along and told you that in order to balance the game for newer players, they were going to take away two thirds of your assets. Super-carrier? Gone. They’re going to take that away. You can keep the jump freighter, but you have to give up most of your carriers and all but one of your dreadnoughts. Then you have to give up a large swath of your sub-cap fleet and your stored modules. And you have to downsize to only a couple of locations instead of three or four. Anything that you’re not actually using disappears and you only get to keep those things that you undock in every week.
Wouldn’t care for that much, would you?
The simple truth is that humans are humans and we’re all genetically wired to expect uninterrupted growth… expanding empires… expanding capabilities. Nobody wants to downsize and people become downright resentful if they’re told that they have to. If CCP tried to do this to players, there would be a howling from the player base that would dwarf the summer of rage. People get used to having a lot of toys, assets, and capabilities and don’t want them taken away.
And this is why people who say “If DUST 514 fails, CCP should just cut it loose and concentrate on EVE” (and with it, strongly hint that CCP should cut loose their staff in Shanghai along with DUST) are kidding themselves. You would become resentful of CCP tried to take away a few internet spaceship pixels. So you can imagine how CCP probably feels about people who think they should drop half their company and what they’re working on.
Last year at Fanfest, grand dreams were painted by CCP of possibly needing multiple venues to hold all of the fans that would be coming to Iceland to celebrate EVE and DUST 514 for their tenth anniversary Fanfest this April. It isn’t going to happen. Sure the tenth anniversary Fanfest will be a very important event, and sure there will be some DUST 514 fans in attendance. But they’re not going to eclipse the EVE crowd the way I think some people at CCP thought they might. Last year at this time, I was concerned that DUST might very well become the tail that wags EVE’s dog. That doesn’t look likely to happen, either. I still think DUST is going to be at least somewhat successful and CCP is an incredibly patient company who have shown with EVE that they’re willing to wait and let a market develop for their products.
But at the end of the day, CCP also reports to investors, and those investors expect results. And this is probably why we’ve heard CCP talk a couple of times this year about doing an IPO. If DUST 514 were a massive success, then an IPO would spread out their investment base so that CCP executives weren’t answerable to such a small number of people. But even if DUST isn’t an immediate success, spreading out the investment base is desirable for exactly the same reason.
In the meantime, if DUST 514 doesn’t deliver on its promise of a greatly expanded player base in the combined EVE Online universe, that means CCP has to turn back to EVE to deliver on it. Because otherwise, they’re forced into a situation where they have to downsize (again). And as I covered at the top of this piece, they won’t want to do that. You wouldn’t either if you were them. They want to keep the staff, assets, and capabilities they have today, working to make DUST into something that can be successful. They just need a way to pay for them. That means more revenue coming in, and if DUST can’t bring it in, EVE has to.
This is one of the reasons why I think we’ve seen such a focus this year on trying to draw more new players into EVE Online. In an unguarded moment in conversations between matches during the New Eden Open, CCP Fozzie let slip that one of the goals of the ship rebalancing this year has been to “narrow the gap” between T1 and T2 ships. We’ve seen greatly expanded capabilities from the T1 frigates and cruisers, and when we see the rebalancing hit the T1 battle cruisers, I think we’re going to see the same thing there. Meanwhile though, I’m not holding out a lot of hope that the T2 ships, when they are eventually rebalanced, are going to be receiving such revolutionary changes as their ancestral counterparts. We can probably expect them to be 20-25% better. But not very much more than that. The veterans are just going to have to decide if 25% better is worth four or five times the cost.
As I mentioned when I posted my favorite Thorax fit, if any of you out there are looking at that ship and thinking “if this is what they’ve done to the Thorax, I can’t wait to see what they do to the Deimos!”, you might want to rethink. The Deimos refit will probably be pretty good. But amazingly good? No. CCP wants to narrow the gap between veterans and newer players. That means keeping the upgrades to the Deimos and the other T2 ships to a minimum.
Now this isn’t anything new with other MMOs. Lots of other MMOs try to balance their game between newer players and veteran players so that they can jointly enjoy the experience. EVE has never bothered. Two players in the same ships can have markedly different success with them in the same situation. We’ve all been told for a long time that one low SP player that specializes in a Rifter is going to be just as good at it as a high SP player with lots of skill points spread broadly. But I think we all instinctively realize that isn’t quite true. The veteran player is going to have much better fitting skills, more ISK for good implants, and if he is veteran enough, has probably trained support skills to Level V that the new player can only dream of.
I can easily see CCP wanting to narrow that gap, too.
In short, if DUST 514 struggles to find an audience, CCP is going to do everything they can to keep the DUST 514 development staff working regardless. That means finding the revenue that they need to support those developers from other sources… namely EVE. That means increased and continuing efforts to bring new players into EVE even if they have to do so to the detriment of the investment of veteran players. It’s going to be a tricky balance to master: some veterans are already grumbling about running out of things to do. In the meantime though, we can see the first steps: newer players encouraged to get into T1 support cruisers that are nearly as good as their T2 counter-parts. Even with the down-grade, a Scythe which takes a few months to master is about two-thirds as good as a Scimitar which takes a couple of years. And some of the e-war cruisers are arguably better than their T2 counter-parts. Whether this message can be delivered to potential players is going to be a marketing challenge… which brings me back to that previous couple of posts where I argued that CCP is probably looking for a Jesus feature for 2013 so that marketing will have something big to work with.
Yeah, this stuff is all connected. It’s hard not to see the connections.
Don’t get me wrong: the news for veteran players certainly isn’t all bad. If CCP can succeed in bringing in a lot of new players wanting to take advantage of this narrowed gap, then that’s a lot more content for those of us who have been here a while, right?
At the beginning of 2012, I said that this past year was going to be CCP’s most challenging yet in terms of striking a balance between these competing factors. Like DUST 514 itself, that prediction is going to be a little delayed.
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At the end of the day I pay a sub for EvE and not DUST.
My expectation as a customer of CCP is that EvE is improved irrespective of the existence of DUST.
Could not agree more. I've seen it and it looks good, but regardless, I am not playing it. CCP are not FPS gamemakers. They shouldn't need to lower their standards to something so common and worthless. Eve is the only game that I keep coming back to, year after year. From what I've found out is to accept all the changes CCP do, but when they stop changing the game and do stupid things like implementing a FPS game in an MMORPG… They just show no will to keep progress focused on Eve. This half-assed expansion shows this too. They have started making Eve more and more like a FPS, implenting incoming DPS and round HP-bars. Eve was never supposed to be easy. Why do they want to make the game something it is not?
Don't get me wrong, changes are good and awesome, but changes that move Eve away from CCP's ingenuiety and base principals are way beyond me. They aren't just greedy bastards anymore. They are greedy bastard who wants to make a second fortune, nomatter what it takes.
TL;DR Fuck CCP
If Dust will be success, Eve will benefit from it too. Not because of potential new players but because it would make CCP financially more stable. And a financially more stable company would mean that they would be able to hold on to long term projects more easily.
Agreed. If DUST influences eve to the point it becomes a FPS in stations and takes players out of spaceships my subscription will end. I came to eve for the spaceships, the sandbox and the harshness. I wouldnt mind bombarding some planets but beyond that I don't see myself playing dust. Thats what BF3 and COD are for.
CCP took a risk with dust.
It was a gamble that didn't pay off.
I've played it and its as if a group of uni students tried to make a futuristic game
What the actual fuck dude, you're writing in past tense. As in it's already failed, despite not being fully released yet. Never mind uni, you need to get the fuck back to school and train up Reading Perception 1, clearly you wasted too much time on Arrogant Illiterate Prick 5.
heh your over thinking it. ccp went into ship balancing for the sole reason it needed it badly for years. that and the playerbase was mass unsubing over ccps blatant lack of…i dunno delivering a finished product. the ship balancing should have been done several years ago. retribution is the first expansion where i can say i wasn't disappoint, I was actually excited and satisfied. but even with the new balancing you can see the capabilities is limited to working with what is already there. adding brand new content in eve ccp has yet to deliver something that could be classafied as successful. with this in mind what makes you think dust has any chance at all at becoming a successful product? It wont because the integration of dust into eve may not have been grand enough. we shall see how it turns out.
you're
Speaking of "genetically wired to expect uninterrupted growth," businesses are pretty much hard-wired that way, too. Grow or die.
The unpleasant reality of CCP's current situation, one veteran players pleased by the demise of CCP's Incarna move are reluctant to face, is that core EVE subscriptions more or less plateaued back in mid 2010, after the long steady rise upon which CCP built its distinctive reputation in the gaming industry and, no doubt, its finances.
Important to note: Incarna did not stop EVE's growth. Growth stopped the year before. What Incarna did was fail to remedy the halt, as, too, has CCP's subsequent tail-between-legs retreat to iterations of "spaceships, spaceships, spaceships."
Since mid 2010, CCP's core business EVE Tranquility has, with a few bumps up and down, fundamentally failed to attract subscribers faster than it has lost them. A marked turning point, if one were looking for it, in EVE's and CCP's history, and not a good one, however improved the game from the veteran point of view.
Any appearance of EVE growth since then has been an artifact of mixing the flat-lined Tranquility subscriptions, hovering in the 350,000 range, with figures from the on again off again China operation, which has provided various boosts, now, with much misleading ballyhoo from PR releases and friendly press, to cross 450,000.
Compare the hype: http://www.ccpgames.com/en/public-relations/press… http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/12/17…
With stats through March 2012: http://mmodata.blogspot.com/ http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-2.png
The failure of Incarna's play for a broader subscriber base, and of the "spaceship iterations" as well, means a huge leap in the stakes for DUST, not simply to generate MT revenues on its own terms, but to serve as a recruiting mechanism to put a stagnant EVE Tranquility back on some kind of a growth trajectory.
If DUST fails in this regard, CCP's situation becomes quite dire. Thus, the warning note dropped at the recent summit that "iterations" are well and good, but must be balanced with major expansions to expand the player base significantly.
Fundamental design flaw in EVE is that ships that are stored passively dont require any upkeep. A carrier should require upkeep costs! In Fact, any ship should!
Pray tell how would they implement this idea? a ship flying around in space would require more maintenance than a ship docked in a station, a ship that spends most of it's time sat in a pos such as a rorqual would require more maintenance than a ship docked in a station, but less than a ship constantly flying through space, are you suggesting they introduce some kind of odometer for your ships, and you need to book it in to the nearest dealers when an amber light on the dashboard comes on?
Hmmmm…. You might have something there. Of course that could mean trouble for my Special Edition Ships collection (of which, I am only missing the Freiki, and Gaurdian-Vexor).
There is no design flaw. Your ideas is stupid.
If CCP ever delivered a finished product I'd unsub, eve evolves and so do the players. If dust works and adds another layer to the sandbox while also making CCP more secure and able to add more features to eve, brilliant! I still won't play it, some people like MMORPG, some like FPS, some like both, who cares as long as nothing stagnates.
If CCP ever declared eve "finished" then you'd play for a couple of months, beat the "boss level" then move onto something else.
All of the f&$@ CCP posts that litter the forums and eve news make me sick, and if that's you're attitude to the game take up chess, it went alpha years ago
I think it's coming down to a point where CCP is going to be forced into becoming a professional management and developing organization. There are simply too many things going on that would never happen in other games. The leader of the player management council in a drunken rant at an official CCP event encourages people to harass someone so that person will kill themselves. Exploits where the people in the know make hundreds of millions of isk while others are struggling to get a new T1 cruiser. CCP employees giving out impossible to find and very valuable materials to their friends. The list goes on and on.
It's a simple fact of business that if you provide good service and a nice product, your satisfied customer will tell around 8 to 10 of their friends about you and perhaps encourage them to use your business. It is also a fact that someone who feels they are wronged will tell everyone they know about it and actively discourage their friends from doing business with you. Now which group of people do you think the person that has been playing for 10 or 12 days and gets ganked and told to go play WoW would fit into?
More powerful ships to rat with, simply to get the merger offerings that has become what they call loot now days? And I can't see any one believing that putting a new player in a stronger ship would make any difference at all in pvp, except maybe in blobs. Does CCP even understand their game. I once read a study of the population distribution of players in eve, it had 8% of the population in null and 3% of the population in low (as I remember anyway). Have they really done anything about trying to balance this out, or do they even know what is going on in their game.
Lots of people have answers. I am sure everyone that bothers to read articles like these has opinions. But in truth, it does not matter. CCP is the one that needs to understand the questions and find the answers. You can only re-balance the items and make it prettier so many times. Eventually the loss of the older players will not be made up by newer players and the slide to the end begins. Eve is a great game. It is well thought out and had managed to create an economy that is far beyond what anyone else has been able to do. You would think that attracting and retaining new players should not be that hard a thing to do.
The fact here are this:
EVE continues to be a unique, challenging and emergent MMO and still wins awards and accolades ten years after launch.
DUST 514 is a boring, generic, Halo-lite sci-fi shooter in an already saturated FPS market and will end up in bargain bins in under 3 months after release.
CCP needs to sort its shit out.
Take a look at EVE when it first came out, it had next to nothing. Just like how DUST is. People figured EVE would die due to lack of content yet here we are ten years later with tons of stuff to do. Don't put DUST in that "gonna die soon" category already, give it some time to see where CCP takes it. It has the potential to be like EVE and become a massive game with a following ten years down the road.
PC (EVE) != PS3 (DUST).
How many people do you know own a PC? Pretty much everyone, right? Its easy to go over a friends house and insist he installs this internet spaceship thingey, there's a trial so why not? Pew pew time engaged!
How many people do you know own a PS3? Pretty much nobody, right? I know a few people will buy the console JUST to play DUST, hell I probably would if it wasn't Sony (I don't ever buy their products). My point is that it cannot go viral like EVE did and still does so the likelihood is slim. And since CCP is doing free-to-play + micro-transactions, population is everything in terms of the game's success.
Its either canabalize EVE income to prop up DUST, or release it for PC. I would love to see CCP team up with Valve and make a PC release reality.
If you haven´t played Dust, do.
If you did, you know it´s going to be interesting the symbiosis.
Should have set to release it on the Xbox 360
They can't as microshite want a their large slice of rhe pie and would not let CCP host a.server. It.all had to run through xbox live. Screw that.
The biggest dillema CCP faces…there is an exponential revenue difference when comparing bittervets to noobs. __As a bittervet I personally own 6 accounts While this is high it's not uncommon for older players to own 2,3 or 4 accounts. Personally, when the balance swings to what i feel is unacceptable (and it's on it's way IMO as the new toys are geared towards lower skilled pilots….and of little interest to me) – CCP will need to find (and retain) 6 noobs to replace my revenue stream. CCP would do well to analyze and better understand their customer base. Investors are much more tolerant of revenue growth challenges when compared to declining revenue.__It's a business, and businesses have to grow. I get it. However, if that growth comes at the cost of alienating their best customers, they deserve everything that's in store for them. __
Dust will fail. I've been looking at everything they've released on the ps network + my beta key. It reminds me of a mix between Halo and Warhawk. Which are fine if you're fifteen.
Knowing that it will fail, one thing is certain. CCP will be giving another too little too late apology for all the great things they've been nerfing this past year in an attempt to boost sales and save their ass.
I actually think CCP will go public after this embarrassment. Kind of like a desperate attempt to bring money in and prevent them from going belly up. But considering a stocks price is based on it's perceived value not its actual value. I think they'll go bankrupt or get bought out by some big name.
It'll be an almost exact replica of valence technologies w/ of course the exception that CCP has a semi working product that is worth something.
"Dust will fail. I've been looking at everything they've released on the ps network + my beta key. It reminds me of a mix between Halo and Warhawk. Which are fine if you're fifteen."… why would CCP target the same age group? To pull players from Eve to Dust. Robbing Peter to pay Paul fails. They need to and should target a different age group with Dust.
"Dust will fail", "Knowing that it will fail"… I need your crystal ball… for real world investments purposes
"I actually think CCP will go public after this embarrassment. Kind of like a desperate attempt to bring money in and prevent them from going belly up. But considering a stocks price is based on it's perceived value not its actual value. I think they'll go bankrupt or get bought out by some big name."… You know they bought thier game back from a big name right?….. They won't repeat that mistake again.
Everybody but noobs want new content. I'm not a fan of FPS's but I am looking fwd to Dust being integrated into the EvE universe. I do a little of everything in Eve – mine, manufacture, mission, WH's, lowsec and null, etc… With Dust I'll have at least one more thing to do – bombard planets in a rain of fiery death.
Meh, the more different things I can do, the better. It will give me more options to do when I'm bored of doing what I'm currently doing.
Dust will be ok i think , pointed already out on other article , i know ppl in my surroundings who started play dust beta and most like it better as planet side 2.
That said 2 of them already started a eve account to be on "both" sides , and enjoying themselves in Fw.
I hope more dust players will do it and my geuss is tey will..
Always a pleasure to read your articles Jester — keep up the good work.