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What Game Devs Should Learn From EVE
An anonymous reader passes along this excerpt from Gamesradar about EVE Online's Council of Stellar Management (CSM), a group of elected player representatives that serve to facilitate communications between the developers and the community:
"On the last day, the devs announced that after the earlier discussions about improving the CSM’s ability to effect change, the CSM was being raised to the status of its own department within CCP. This is revolutionary; in one swift move, the CSM went from what could be considered a glorified focus group to what CCP considers to be a 'stakeholder' in the company, given equal consideration with every other department in requesting development time for a project. That means the CSM — and the entire playerbase it represents — has as much influence on development projects as Marketing, Accounting, Publicity and all the other teams outside of the development team. This is, of course, the stated intention. But has any developer gone to such lengths for its fans?"
Maybe if we ask people what they want and then give it to them, they will tell their friends, blog positively, continue to subscribe to our subscription-based service instead of wandering off in boredom.
The Internet makes a lot of things possible when it comes to unprecedented communication between suppliers and consumers. Of course, this only works if you believe your users know what they want.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Reading through the logs of some of the CSM meetings, they actually do work like a normal division, just without the teeth. hopefully this will fix that. On a side note.. why does it take 15 seconds on my i7 machine to preview my post?
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
EVE is so popular. It's not a game (anymore). Everyone takes it very seriously.
CCP even hired economists to be able to cope with in-game markets...
The only problem is the CSM has no mandate. They do not represent the players. They're elected by 4-6% of the player base.
The whole thing is widely viewed with scorn by the player base. Election turn outs make the states look good. Most candidates are viewed as fanboys wanting a free trip to iceland.
I find being offended by me offensive.
I believe this is the first time in its history that a videogame focus group has been given an official role within the Chinese Communist Party. Congratulations comrades!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
A lot of game designers have had elected teams facilitate communication between the dev team and the player base, for example DAoC with their Team Lead program. But $$ will win out, so in the end this will just be a glorified move to make people think CCP is really listening to the playerbase.
Shame that good MMORPGs don't make financial sense and MMORPGs that make financial sense aren't good.
Eve is a very hard game to play. There are almost no other games with a learning curve as steep as Eve's, and certainly no MMOs. This has as a consequence that Eve has a relatively small player base. A further consequence of the small player base is that CCP, the company that makes Eve, needs to make sure that they can retain as many players as possible and not run the risk of making the player base so angry with any mistake so as to lose a significant amount of players. In a bigger MMO, this would perhaps be less consequential, but in Eve it would seriously damage the game.
The CSM (player voted representatives) came about as a consequence of the discovery by an Eve player that Eve devs were seriously cheating in game, aiding their own side with expensive items. The player reaction to that one, in a game which is already very hard, threatened to torpedo the game. So CCP created the CSM to represent player issues to CCP.
However, CCP never took the CSM seriously, resulting in the current lack of trust in CCP's willingness to take its customers seriously (CCP actually told the last CSM that they were not actually interested in the majority of the players but only in a subsection that lived in a specific "elite" part of Eve space). The resulting lack of belief in CCP and the CSM has led to widespread protests against voting for the CSM and CCP has once again relented by now making the CSM a "stakeholder" in the game.
This is, however, cosmetic, as there have been no commitments by CCP to actually take the player wishes any more seriously than they currently do. I personally would not hold my breath to see if anything positive comes of this. CCP has downgraded the CSM before (from its original oversight function to a merely representative one) and will very likely do so again once the current bad PR dies down again.
This happened months ago. How is this news?
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. Winston Churchill
There is a reason democracy works with majority rule, because if you had to listen to every single individual, every stakeholder in the country, you would never get anything done and run a real risk of ending up listening to the loudest party.
In MMO land, the loudest party is often the Player Killer. PK ala Ultima Online, so beloved it was ripped from that game and every western game released after it that didn't have it did better. Yes UO fans, UO might have been first, it might have done things no other game has done BUT it also didn't manage to get a large number of subscribers. According to wikipedia it PEAKED at 250.000. Eve claims to have reached 300.000 and that game is considered to be niche. So a small game by a no-name developer working with its own IP has reached more subscribers then a triple A title working with a well known IP. That should tell you something.
Of course, UO did launch before broadband connections were common and was exploring newer ground, and of course popularity says nothing about quality, but read posts about MMO discussions sometime. Just how can it be that so many claim UO is the best when so few played it? More people have played EVE. A SHIT load more played Everquest. Even Star Wars Galaxies reached more people.
If the PK in UO was the thing to have, then UO would have reached more people. In fact, if PvP was so popular, then pure PvP games would do better. But Darkfall, Age of Conan and indeed EVE aren't doing all that well compared to PvE heavier titles like Lord of the Rings Online and of course World of Warcraft. So do you as a developer listen to the countless forum posts demanding unrestricted player killing and full body loot? They are certainly vocal, so surely that is what the players want? Well yes, on the forums, not when it comes to actually playing and PAYING for the game.
I have made the mistake of following the forums of several games in the past before I grew up and you can see a certain trend, the people who are playing and PAYING are to busy to be on the forum. EVE might be an exception here, because it is by its nature far more of a game where you organize outside the game world, it is a business sim to many and so the forums might actually be useful for other things then ranting. But this is not the case on many game forums. If you go to the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic site you can find half the posts demanding it to be free-to-play or else the poster won't play it without paying for it (the horror!) and the other half trying to come up with someway to make it seem attractive for other players to be their content (bounty hunters wanting PK but having wised up that they need to wrap it up in a pretty package). Real players have got better things to do, the game won't be out for a year, and really, Bioware probably already made their mind up about the game. Even if they wanted to listen to the forum posters (who are unlikely to be their full audience), where would you find the resources to implement everything? What do you pick?
Oh, the thingy that the forum posters wanted and you already wanted to do? Listening to your users, you run the severe risk of listening to yes-men. Just see the actions by people on this site. Don't like what someone says? mod them down. As a developer, if you are told by one person that you are doing the best job ever and another comes out with a detailed plan of how the game could be far far better but everything the developer believes and stands for is wrong, who does he listen to?
EVE might be in a luxury position in that it grew slowly and might have attracted an audience that wants to play the game that it is. But many titles, especially big budget ones attract all kinds, including people that should just play a different game. You probably won't find many EVE players demanding the game to be more solo friendly and that everyone should be able to afford the biggest ship after soloing for a month and then be able to do everything in the game. But that is EXACTLY what people demand in every other MMO.
Read some MMO forums, then tell me that listening to your audience is a good idea.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Sony have a pretty decent program in this regard to for their games.
They don't have the visibility (in notes/meetings), but appear to have a good connection to the devs and are able to channel feedback from the forums well. Should there be more 2 way back to the community? Yes, but NDA's and the sensitivity of issues/sploits/future estimates are understood.
Overall though, pretty good program.
that the easiest and cheapest way of finding new ways of pleasing their customers is listening to their opinions. The only difference between this and a traditional focus group is the size of the population sample.
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
They don’t know how to make it fun. They are no experts in it. You know: Those who can’t design, play. ;)
They don’t know about the balance between too hard and too easy. About how changing something that people will think is stupid, will make gameplay more fun. After all it’s still supposed to be a game right, not just a simulation.
You obviously still have to listen to your players. But you have to interpret it trough experienced game designers, to find out what they really want and how to really make that happen. (As it will often be counterintuitive to the players.)
But oh well... as I said, I’m not really sure EvE still is a game, or rather an alternate reality, complete with everything. (Not that that is a bad thing. Let alone an uninteresting one.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Eve is very unusual for a computer game; firstly it has an extremely steep learning curve and like chess can take years to master. It offer players a huge range of gaming options, PvE both blitzing and exploration/discovery, RP gaming, business strategy game play. You can play a deep strategic game, including meta gaming, propaganda and spying, some alliances actually have spys, spy masters, and counter intelligence divisions and all legitimate within the EULA.
It's economy and crafting system is light years ahead of anything else out there. You can be a pirate, a solider, bounty hunter all requiring different approaches to PvP. You can be a miner harvesting resources and evading pirates a scientist developing blueprint for ships, modules and weapons, or an industrialist building the ships. You could be roaming trader hauling that production to distance regions, or a market maker at Jita (Eve's equivalent of Wall Street meets K-Mart/Tesco). You can join an existing corporation (clan/guild) or you can run your own businesses. There are secondary markets and venture capitalists for investment. Scamming is within the EULA and raised to the level of one Ponzi Scheme that earned ISK, the in-game currency, that would have taken tens of thousands of pounds/dollars/euro to buy.
The scope of Eve are just not available in any other game I've ever played. Eve is chess to WoW as draughts. It has the most elaborate economy of any game. CCP have an Economist on staff to design/develop those parts of the games. They also have an Astrophysist who has just reworking all the planets to make the solar systems realistic for the up coming Tyrannis expansion. They run Events with Devs as player character that you an PK and PC's do.
That's not all. In the summer CCP are launching Dust 514, a FPS entirely within existing game. When you invade a planet the boots you put on the ground will be real gamers fighting each other. Next year they are planning Incarna, the ability to Walk in stations and explore, think second life in space with full motion captured avatars.
...and the only thing that could only really vindicate this method of player-consultation is to come back in five years and see if EVE still exists, and if CCP is still in business.
Otherwise? You're all just talking crap, for and against.
where you character can improve their skills without you even playing.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
But has any developer gone to such lengths for its users?
Yes, pretty much any development shop that does anything other than COTS product development.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I played eve, not too seriously but I managed to be involved with some pretty epic battles. The main differences between Eve and other MMORPH are the following:
1) Space setting (100%). You are in a ship, when you move around
2) The economy is extremely advanced compared to other games. Meaning there are players who run banks, companies who produce ships, products etc, players who have to help move the product between systems... etc. It's all VERY player involved. If you are smart, you can make tons of ISK (their form of currency) easily and quickly.
3) The market is extremely advanced. Like the economy there are companies, banks, corporations, investments, shipping lanes, protection rackets, security companies, armies, etc... all dependent on player interaction. One would think it would be fragile but in fact it's one of the strongest points of the game. Think location vs supply and demand. You're in a deep system where there aren't too many places to find ammo, weapondry, supplies... things sell at a premium.
4) The skill required to play this game ranges depending on what you do. If you are part of a pvp squad or army the skill curve is immensely difficult. It gets down to tiny differences in ship equipment and configuration... as well as sheer numbers. Don't let that fool you though. Numbers don't mean squat in some situations. However if you aren't really into pvping in ships there are politics on a whole other scale than other PVP's, as well as economic. Be a banker, or trader, or manufacturer. Sounds boring but the interaction with players is pretty deep so you aren't just sitting there hitting a button over and over again.
5) Creating things - You don't sit there hitting a button or "farming items" to make this next weapon for yourself. You can buy and sell everything you need to make things...
6) What you do can affect the game. Since player interaction is so deep... what you do can often affect the games outcome for everyone.
7) Training skills does not require you to play. Just planning ahead as you can set it to train these skills over a set amount of time.
EVE allows someone to play for 10 minutes a day or 10 hours... that is why it is unique and amazing.
Until now, it has always been a toss up whether to blitz missions or to salvage them and loot them. Well, obviously, in future the looting bit will no longer be worth it in terms of isk/hour so players will simply be enticed to use Marauders even more than they do now, so as to speed up the process.
Personally, I think it's nice for miners and t1 industrialists, who will finally make a bit of money.
Ummmm.... No.
EVE has maybe 300,000 active subscribers currently. Ok no problem, that's plenty of people to make the game worth continuing development on and making a profit. However that's not popular, by any stretch. EQ2 has over 500,000 players, Star Trek has a million players, Aion has 3.5 millions players, WoW has over 11 million, Linage 2 has around 20 million. So while EVE is in no risk of drying up and dying, it isn't popular compared to other MMOs, it is rather niche.
The reason is the one you already talked about: People take it so seriously. Most gamers do not play a game for a serious experience. They play to escape, to have fun. If a game requires you to be serious and is full of people for who it is a very serious life substitute, well a large amount of gamers won't be interested.
If that's what you like, wonderful, I am not going to tell you that you are wrong in what entertains you. However please don't try and sell it as being really popular or big, because that is just untrue.
Oh noes, cat is here too, we're doomed
we need to look and see how this goes.
Read radical news here
And this is why I love stand-alone games. I don't like where the developers took the later Soul Caliber games but no worries, I'll always have the first one.
No worries, you can count on new form of DRM to definitely ruin that for you too.
Enjoying "Soul Calibur 2012" and considering as the best single-player fighting game ever ? Too bad that when they crappy 2015 edition comes out, they will shut down their older game server. Not only disabling internet-enabled multiplayer in this process, but also preventing the atorcious Always-on-internet DRM scheme from even starting single player games.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Asking your player what he wants when you sell them a "normal" game, i.e. one that generates revenue at sale and never again, is pretty stupid. He already bought it. Changing a game to suit his needs is pretty much a waste of time. He will not buy it again. On the other hand, someone else who WOULD have bought it might not when you make the change.
MMOs on the other hand make most of their income from recurring subscriptions. Thus changing the game to make people play it longer does indeed give them a lot more money. So yes, it is very much in CCPs interest to do what its players want. Maybe not to the whole extent (hey, which player would refuse a few billion ISK? I guess that's something every player would enjoy!), but making changes that makes a lot of players play longer, or even make players who stopped playing to return, is a pretty good idea.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
MMO games are driven by subscription fees. Without fans who keep paying, there's no point.
This doesn't really apply to other sorts of games. Developers can listen to consensus, but they don't really have to enact community change.
They're using their grammar skills there.
"That means the CSM -- and the entire playerbase it represents -- has as much influence on development projects as Marketing, Accounting, Publicity and all the other teams outside of the development team."
Remember that simpsons episode where homer designs a new car to appeal to the average Joe ?
Sometimes people shouldn't get what they want.
Hey lets give CCP yet more free publicity over another completely pointless PR stunt. CSM was setup to deal with the companies own internal corruption. It was an empty gesture then and its nothing more now.
This is just the Student President scam. Let the children elect a representative, give them a neat title and even let them sit at the table with the grown ups. Heck, use them as your mouthpiece, and ask them to canvas their constituents if you like. But you don't have to actually listen to them. Why would you? They're just an annoying selfish greedy know-nothing kid, representing a group of annoying selfish greedy know-nothing kids. All they're there for is to act as a buffer to keep the baying and howling at a tolerable distance.
I've seen this faux consultation happen in other games through the years - Netrek, Navy Field - and here's the skinny: he who controls the server rules the universe.
Can this EVE council actually modify the server source? Can they even see it? No, of course not, because they're not really grown ups, or worthy of trust.
Judge them by their access, not their title.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Anyone who plays EVE knows how ineffectual the CSM is and how irrelevant their existence is to most normal players. If you get super into storyline missions or want to do events, it may make a difference, but for a PVP player or someone who just plays for the sake of playing it does not. I've been playing for 5+ years now and I have never benefited or lost something because of the CSM.
In terms of relationships with their players, CCP does a much better job through their Fanfest conventions. They easily put similar relational events to shame. Their constant expansions and upgrades to their systems are a top-notch way to keep players involved and bring in new players. The game isn't as mindless and grinding in some aspects as games like WoW or EQ2, and in some ways it is even more so(mining, ugh).
"Harden The Fuck Up" -CCP Games
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
The nice thing about EVE is that it's not grindy like WoW and other MMOs. The only thing that affects your rate of skill point acquisition in EVE is which skills you decide to train. You don't have to hunt for XP to level up. Somebody that "grinds" all the time in EVE has no skill advantage over the casual player.
But has any developer gone to such lengths for its fans?
Seems to me like they're taking the easy road, by putting project management partially into the hands of the players rather than doing it by themselves. A more interesting question is if it won't end up hurting the game rather than improving it.
I gave up playing Eve Online for two reasons:
1) It takes hours of time to accomplish even simple tasks.
2) There was a body of dedicated roleplayers who were carefully organizing in-game events and ongoing plot-lines in accordance with the published and frequently updated back-story. The developers made it clear, however, that they didn't care about anyone but the gigantic "alliances" that ignored roleplaying entirely and concentrated on their massive pyramid schemes that allowed a handful of players the opportunity to control thousands of other players.
3) The short fiction they published to establish the setting and backstory, which had been edgy, complex, and interesting, suddenly shifted towards badly written, insipid good-versus-evil plots, which was compatible neither with what the roleplayers were doing nor with what the powergamers were doing (although the latter group, of course, didn't care.)
As I've often found with MMORPGs, at some point I realized I had more freedom, agency, and opportunity for excitement and adventure in real life than I did in slogging through an MMORPG. Eve Online is a game whose gameplay foundation is players sitting around watching the animation of lasers striking asteroids for hours on end.
Yes, CONCORD is the "police". They're basically NPC "town guards".
As for heroes: it's worse than that. Any player character is, pretty much by definition, a mass murderer. According to the published setting, even the small ships have large crews, so any time you destroy another ship, you're supposed to be killing several thousand people. Almost anytime you do destroy another ship, it's for purely mercenary reasons. Some of the published setting material explores the significance of it, but generally makes it clear: pod pilots are unfeeling killers who have lost touch with their humanity.
It's pretty tough to roleplay that, so few roleplayers really engage with that, and very few EVE players roleplay at all.
People need to get some perspective on what a "niche" MMO is. When UO scored 250,000 players, or DAOC got up to comparable numbers, or EQ got to 500,000 subscribers - those were MAJOR SUCCESSES. No one could believe how popular those games were, with subscriber numbers like that, they were assured of long lives (and in fact DAOC is still hanging on by its fingernails, barely).
WOW came along and completely transformed the market. 11 Million subscribers as a base has so totally distored the market - and new player's understanding of what "successful" means, that now the old numbers cannot be seen in the correct perspective. Now, they look like "niche" games with barely acceptable numbers to people.
When Warhammer Online came out, people were saying if it didn't get at least 1m subscribers, it was a complete failure. I believe it got up to around 800,000 (in other words about as many subscribers as the original EQ and Starwars Galaxies ever had, at their peaks, combined). It was labeled a massive failure on the forums. People started saying they were leaving because it was a failure.
What changed? Just player's expectations, distorted by the juggernaut that is World of Warcraft. WOW has been so successful that the old stats from old games cannot be used when making measurements. The market increased in size immensely with WOW. A better way to look at things (but less immediately recognizable to readers) is to use market shares. Then at least the size of the total market pre-WOW and post-WOW is irrelevant.
EVE is doing just fine from what I can see. They identified a market, produced a game for that market, and they have 300,000 intensely loyal, paying customers. I am not sure what the subscription rate is, but assuming the standard $15 or so, that's about 4.5m a month. I dunno bout you but $54m per year looks pretty decent to me, and not very niche to be honest.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
It's really hard to define EVE as popular - but I don't know how else to describe it.
When you walk up to a random Stranger and ask if they've heard of World of Warcraft, you'll get quite a few people who say they have. If you take those people who know of World of Warcraft, and ask if they've heard of Eve Online, you'll get at least a quarter of them (in my personal experience). So while EVE may have less than a million active subscribers, it does have quite a bit of popularity.
In fact, you grazed Eve's seriousness: And that contributes to both Why it makes headlines but also why the player base is so small. Their bonus is that Eve is revolutionary in that it takes gaming to the next level because it integrates human interaction far past any other MMO out there. Problem is, not everyone wants that.
But to be a hero in EVE you actually have to heroic. You actually have to do stuff that really is difficult and dangerous, not kill 10 orcs that some game guide tells you the best way to beat, and then a cut-scene tells you you're a hero.
Seriously, what?
Back in the days of Asheron's Call, Turbine didn't go as far as the developers of EVE, but they went way out of their way to interact with and respond to the player community. Their customer relations were far ahead of their two competitors, and for their efforts they were rewarded with being #3 out of 3 in terms of active subscriptions.
Cryptic recently tried a similar "player council" idea, and the usual whiners on the official forums exploded with rage at the very idea.
So no, this kind of behavior by devs is not always rewarded with increased sales. Developers are the way they are because of the purchasing decisions made by us.
The short answer: in EVE, when you die, most of the stuff you were carrying is destroyed, and if you were killed by another player, that player usually takes whatever stuff you were carrying that wasn't destroyed.
The most expensive gear represents hundreds, even thousands of hours of in-game labor -- and can be destroyed in seconds. There's nothing like looking away from the screen for a moment, only to look back, and find a gang of (player) pirates is destroying your ship. Basically, most wealth produced within EVE ends up spent on ammunition (which is consumed in combat) and ships (which are frequently destroyed).
Come to think of it, this resembles a staple of Marxist theory, that booms and busts are inherently part of the economy. In a boom, too much capital has been invested in too much productive capacity for further investment to be profitable; further profits aren't possible until a whole bunch of capital has been destroyed in a bust. There are other ways to destroy capital: dropping bombs on factories is one. There's an addendum to Marxist theory called "The Permanent Arms Economy," which explains the "long boom" from the end of WWII to the mid-seventies, by the massive destruction of WWII being extended by the global arms race, in which war-time proportions of wealth spent on arms production continued into peace time.
League of Legends (free, decent quality, DOTA knock-off) from Riot has a similar system of communication between developers and players
Was the original article to long for your WOW twitching addled mind to comprehend?
EPIC Fail.
Somebody that "grinds" all the time in EVE has no skill advantage over the casual player.
They don't have a skill advantage in WOW, either; they have a cash advantage. This isn't supporting your claim that EVE doesn't require grinding. In WOW, legitimate skill can be had by level 20. Most people never get skilled, but nevertheless many people achieve guild raiding status through sheer dedication [grinding], cover themselves in purple, orange, or whatever the color is now, and kick everyone's ass regardless of skill level.
If you are claiming that skill affects your EVE performance much more than time invested you might have a point, but you aren't stating it very explicitly and your comparisons to WOW are misleading.