Sunday 2 March 2014

Not as Fin as I was

  I couldn't help myself.  I'm back in the space lanes flying around.  The Corp I was in is no more but I think I like this better.  No concern about war decs or low sec PVP.  Just logging on and doing what I feel like without having to worry about devoting resources to an endeavor I don't truly support. 

  Today was a little interesting, had a discussion about PVE, PVP and how the devs could cater to both styles more than they currently do.

  I have distilled my hopes for PVE into two changes I'd like to see happen although I doubt they will happen.  The first is make a flag so a person can agree to PVP in hisec or not.  This won't change anything to people who prefer the risk, but for those who just want to relax and do some spaceship flying it will mean a lot.  This will never happen in the game, but I can only imagine how many gamers would play Eve if this was an option.  The second change is make another level of difficulty into missions so that they require 2-3 ships at minimum.  Some missions already have this type of requirement, but they are sometimes few and far between.  What I'd like to have is the ability to only choose this type of mission to provide more difficulty when I'm in the mood and push me to get better at playing the game outside of PVP.  Currently incursions are the only other option and they just require too much time to run consistently.

  I know this is a short post, but I wanted to get it onto the blog.

Friday 31 January 2014

Fin

I quit Eve a few months back.  No announcement or anything like that, just cancelled my three accounts and like a ship without power I faded into the darkness of space.  Then I saw the recent news about the biggest fight in Eve history and I read Jester's take on the even so now I want to make a post.  No it's not about the fight, but rather why I left Eve.

The biggest reason I quit my accounts is simply that I was not receiving enough value from the game to justify the cost.

I played the game because I enjoyed the sci-fi aspects, I liked having a challenge, and I liked the idea of a sandbox style.  I left the game because I ran out of the challenge.

No not the challenge of PVP because that was very challenging but rarely was I involved in a fight that was fun.  Either we had more numbers or the other side had more numbers and eventually the other side escalated to capital ships (to include supers once) and there wasn't any true fun in getting roflstomped.  I didn't PVP to conquest new territories or to wrack up a kill count.  I PVP'ed because it was fun and I liked helping out my Corp and Alliance.

The challenge that I ran out of was PVE.  Incursions just weren't that much fun due to the distance needed to travel and the coordination required.  Sometimes I felt like going through the effort but most of the time I just wanted to spend an hour or two completing missions by myself.

No it's not very MMO, but that's how I wanted to play and plenty of other games cater to just that very notion.  Then again, how MMO is being out in a belt somewhere ratting or mining?

When I look at all of the MMO's I've played over the years the single biggest difference between them and Eve is the fact the other games provided lots of solo PVE content.  Now I realize some people will immediately point to missions and say "you can do lvl 4's solo easily".  And I will agree with you, lvl 4's can be completed by a single ship, but it's not all that fun and it's definitely not profitable enough to enjoy the game.

Which is why I flew three ships at once, to make missions profitable, but in so doing they also became incredibly boring.  So I was left with nothing but monotony when I yearned for challenging escalations in the missions.

I wanted to have something that required multiple ships to complete.  I wanted to have a mission that truly challenged me, rewarded me, and didn't force me into low sec.  I also realize that is a lot to ask of the Eve developers because they don't like players like me.  They only want "hardcore" folks who are all about turning on your friends, blobbing, piracy, and pretty much anything else that is considered inappropriate behavior in most games.

So instead of hardening up, I simply quite, and took my three accounts worth of monthly payments elsewhere.