Che Rolls In 0.0 Space

I would warrant the reason most of those players didn’t stay is because the combat is ‘boring’ by modern standards, and because the client and UI are total trash. Let alone the physics. The game just isn’t intuitive in the most basic way. It’s painful to play and harder to understand, long before you ever get out to the PvP areas.

I’m willing to bet a retooled game which where the smaller ship classes operated under standard spaceflight sim fly-by-wire controls/weapon systems, larger ships using a similar to EVE tactical simulation via a WoW style customizable UI, and the EXACT same socio-political-economic-pvp-whatever implementation could easily get 1 million players. Add a sensible, well designed addition of ground and space infantry combat and you could possibly get even more.

They’ve always been pretty pretty serious about the game, and EVE is a pretty serious game. It’s just that it has a SERIOUSLY bad interface, and I don’t just mean the UI elements. The entire set of methods through which the player interacts with the game is flawed.

You don’t have to play EVE to play EVE. Just do what I do, log in, set your next skill to train, log out. Maybe do a mission if you’re really bored and don’t have any other games to play. Hell, you can even set skills to train while your account is closed.

One thing I will say about EVE, its one of the few MMOs that actually gets better with every patch and not worse.

It doesn’t jive with my cache at all. I have to reload the page 3 times to get it to show correctly anytime I want to view the front page or comments.

I don’t think they ignored the feedback. I think they are just fundamentally incapable of coding a decent interface ontop of the framework they have set up for the game. The forum software runs directly off of their central game database server, and they’re just NOW getting around to fixing that fact. They obviously coded themselves into corners they just can’t code themselves out of early on in the development of the game.

EVE is a lot of things, but certainly not a time commitment based game. You can easily progress a character playing as little as 4 or 5 hours a week, because your skills train when not online.

We’re just saying that it’d be a lot more popular if it actually played like a video game in a way that people are familiar with. That’s why WoW works, it plays like its actually a video game like Zelda, not a MUD with a bad 3D interface tacked on. It’s fast paced, the controls are responsive, and the UI gives good feedback.

And I’m not saying take the tactical scale combat out of the game, just restrict it to the larger ship types. It makes no sense that frigates fly the way they do, or are even called frigates, when the carrier drones called ‘fighters’ are actually much much bigger than frigates. If I was to create a similar game I’d have fighters, gunships and assault ships that used a piloting interface, replacing the frigate and destroyer classes (and their variants) in EVE entirely. Some of the cruisers and smaller industrial transports too. Then start the tactical interface with the battlecruisers and up.

As for the technology, I think its definitely there and just not being utilized. Almost 10 years ago, Microsoft made a game called Allegiance, which used a very interesting physics model and allowed players to play a fast paced FPS style space flight sim, over dialup, and a 200 player game could be hosted on a single mediocre server that was available at the time.