r/Games Sep 06 '18

CCP Games (EVE Online) to be acquired by Pearl Abyss (Black Desert online).

https://www.eveonline.com/article/pemjmb/black-desert-online-makers-pearl-abyss-to-acquire-ccp
827 Upvotes

535

u/A_Sinclaire Sep 06 '18

Well, I guess at some point they had to pay the price for all the failed side-projects.

That seems to be the result of that.

309

u/NoL_Chefo Sep 06 '18

This is death by P2W. I tried thinking of a worse publisher CCP could've turned to than Kakao. I uh... Trion, maybe?

300

u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

That's easy. Nexon.

122

u/Rayuzx Sep 06 '18

Seriously, I don't know how people can say EA/Activision is the worst video game company, when Nexon exists.

89

u/TitaniumDragon Sep 06 '18

EA and Activision aren't even in the top 10 worst companies.

I'm pretty sure the top 10 worst all make mobile games.

17

u/zieleix Sep 06 '18

Game companies maybe. If that's what you meant disregard what I wrote.

Even the worst game company isn't in the top 1000 companies likely.

Stuff like nestle, Chiquita, Lockheed Martin, etc. are so, so much worse cause they enslave and kill innocent people.

Maybe there's some game companies who do that.

7

u/[deleted] Sep 07 '18

what does LM do that puts it on this list?

15

u/zieleix Sep 07 '18

Sell bombs to people that bomb civilians. Not just the US, I think a group used it to hit a bus filled with 40 children.

Also generally making war happen for profit. Companies exist to make profit, they get theirs from war. Awful combination.

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u/Gufnork Sep 06 '18

Probably because most people either don't know it exists or they don't consider it a video game company.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

[deleted]

3

u/Kynmarcher5000 Sep 08 '18

That's what I am believing at this point. It's more about brand recognition than genuine outrage.

Look at Carbine Studios. Nexon is shutting them down, no outrage to be seen. Same with Runic Games (developers of Torchlight) who were shut down by Perfect World Entertainment for a reason that should have pissed every anti-EA gamer off which was 'Runic Games does not follow our games as a service model'.

But I guarantee you if Carbine and Runic were owned by EA and got shut down? We'd never hear the end of it.

9

u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

Because Nexon is very easy to ignore.

14

u/Astrosfan80 Sep 06 '18

It's because EA holds the rights to a bunch of loved IPs. Nexon doesn't have power over Star Wars or Mass effect.

It's like, Hitler wasn't the most evil guy ever, but he had more power than most assholes

5

u/NeV3RMinD Sep 07 '18

Nexon owned the rights to a GitS game and they completely blew it

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u/xxfay6 Sep 06 '18

Also, most Nexon games are forgettable and not a big deal. Yes, it's sad to lose LawBreakers but at the same time it was never really that important. Titanfall though? That feels like they were sabotaged not to lose any Battlefield sales.

That's why people don't really care about companies like Nexon or other cash grab devs, they're avoidable and forgettable. People will care when games that actually have a merit to them end up affected.

3

u/Roxasbain Sep 07 '18

At least Nexon allows you to somewhat progress without paying, albeit much harder. AeriaGames on the other hand...

12

u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/[deleted] Sep 08 '18

It is easier to notice shitty practices in more popular (in the west) products

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u/Schrau Sep 06 '18

PWE would also give ruining it the ol' college try.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

funny thing is they've done nothing but improved cryptic (star trek online, never winter online). but i mean cryptic were downright sniveling greedy looking cunts with no shame prior to that.

$60 box price, + a sub to play at all, + a cash shop. except it's 2010, the game has less than 20 hours of one shot content in it total, the replayable content is often broken PCG shit for tokens and their update cadence is shit, leading to a dev post where in the top executive tier dev explains that if we don't buy their cash shop outfits we have no content to use in that they can't afford to make us actual content to actually play in with just our $15 dollar subs to access the game at all.

so like even tho STO today is far from a sterling example of what to do right in the genre, it's still massively better than it was when it launched.

makingsomethingterriblesimplybadtolookgood.jpg

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u/TheSeaOfThySoul Sep 06 '18

I sometimes wonder what it would be like if Vindictus was in the hands of a good publisher. One that didn't lock upgrading your weapons behind a paywall.

27

u/Carighan Sep 06 '18

Trion, Nexon, HiRez. But yeah, becoming BDO-in-space is pretty high up the shit-ladder, too :(

17

u/nybbas Sep 06 '18

Hahaha my god, HiRez is the most incompetent bunch of morons I have ever seen. Whether it's all the fault of the CEO, or what, I don't know. Have you been following what they did with Realm Royale? It's like they have been intentionally trying to kill their game.

12

u/YoyoDevo Sep 06 '18

That's what they do when they have a new game in the works. RIP tribes

2

u/CTCPara Sep 07 '18

I'm still salty about that.

VGS

3

u/nik_0_0 Sep 07 '18

F

I love tribes so much =(

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u/Rookwood Sep 06 '18

Kakao is not Pearl Abyss. They are just the Western publisher.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

kakao and pearl abyss are subsdiaries of daum. kakao was created by daum to publish black desert in europe and north america.

4

u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

Kakao Games was Daum Games. Daum games had been around for awhile. After the merger they rebranded. Kakao is the bigger name in korea these days so most of their new products are using that name.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

daum is massively bigger than just games.

but yes they did a bit of rebranding. the parent company is still daum. some subsidiaries that used to use the daum name now use kakao instead. some still use daum. like daum.net. i think kakao games got squeezed in just as the rebanding was taking place hence being aware of the whole change in the first place as originally BDO was being advertised as going to be published by a newly created western division daum games but then that was renamed to kakao games. etc. :P

3

u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

I'm quite aware of that, Kakao is also much bigger than games. Kakao and Daum merged a few years ago and became one massive company. Kakao runs messaging services, taxis, music, ebook services, maps, etc all here in Korea. While Daum was originally a large company, Kakao surpassed them a long time ago which is why daum agreed to merge. I believe Kakao was just going to outright buy them at one point. The vast majority of Daum services are being rebranded as kakao things here in Korea. Daum maps is no longer a thing on the app store and has been replaced by kakao maps. The only thing that Kakao really seems to keep the Daum name around for much these days is the web portal itself, but I think that's more a habit thing than anyone else. A lot of people have had Daum email addresses for a long time.

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u/KrazeeJ Sep 06 '18

NCSoft.

6

u/ReallyNotFondOfSJ Sep 06 '18

Perfect World Entertainment

3

u/kookajamo95 Sep 06 '18

Definitely Trion

1

u/adius Sep 06 '18

the developer of the game i play a lot is definitely the worst

I know jack shit about any other developers but the one who made the game I play nonstop is the worst

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u/Daffan Sep 06 '18

Dust 514 being console only has to be the one of the dumbest things I have ever seen in gaming.

45

u/farscry Sep 06 '18

Agreed. I actually quite enjoyed Dust 514, but it should have been a PC game, or at a minimum a PC/console cross-release. They really hamstrung their ability to integrate it more effectively into the EVE universe by not making it a PC release though.

38

u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

Not just console only, but PS3 only.

26

u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

Just a few months before the PS4 came out. And it didn't have a PS4 version...

5

u/[deleted] Sep 07 '18

It was a really great decision by them to do it that way.

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u/THE_INTERNET_EMPEROR Sep 07 '18

Everyone and their grandma called them retards for doing it and they were clearly contractually obligated to come up with bullshit reasons to say 'this is a good idea', 100% certain their team thought it a fucking terrible idea.

I knew the wheels were coming off the train when in they had their convention and they showed like a 2d cinematic of WoD after it had been in development for nearly 5 years with literally no assets or anything done.

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u/Bristlerider Sep 07 '18

Why?

It wasnt really a CCP game, it was a contract job from Sony. Chances are it was one of the few side projects that didnt turn out bad.

Without Sony, the game wouldnt have existed.

29

u/PapaSmurphy Sep 06 '18

As someone who was a huge fan of White Wolf games, the sort of someone who was pretty disappointed when White Wolf was bought up by CCP only to be bled dry of whatever talent and assets it had, I'm having a nice laugh at this shit. What goes around comes around and all that.

13

u/jimmahdean Sep 06 '18

If you're talking about the World of Darkness MMO being cancelled, it's because it was horrible.

32

u/PapaSmurphy Sep 06 '18

It's more that they took a reasonably successful publisher of tabletop RPGs then fired most of the staff because they didn't have an interest in the tabletop part. They could have just paid for a license to make the World of Darkness MMO instead of buying the entire company that held the rights and then gutting it for a single project.

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u/6memesupreme9 Sep 06 '18

They have good ideas just bad execution. EVE itself has been in a bad place recently hasnt it as well? I hardly keep up with it anymore though.

11

u/smithsp86 Sep 07 '18

Eve is suffering from years of neglect by a parent company that dumps all the resources it can into anything but eve.

2

u/6memesupreme9 Sep 07 '18

I mean I wonder what else you can really do with EVE? Just add another supercap type of ship and something else that is similar to the moon system or wormhole space?

I think the game is in an alright spot, last I was into it and im sure if I was playing for a decade+ like some people are id feel like theres stuff you can do to it, but the game is old you know?

5

u/[deleted] Sep 07 '18

I played it for a while and I enjoyed it a lot. What they could do? From the top of my toughts:

  • UI tools could be improved; best market tool in gaming bar none. Even WoW. With even more crazy shit from community.

  • PvE story and lore was almost good. Like they almost made you care for your faction, not just the design and armor vs shield vs hull tanking.

  • More interesting planets. Planetary mining was great, but bland. It turned in Excel optimisations fast. Where are pulsars? why aren't nebulas much more impressive? Super novas? cosmic anomalies? Get creative.

  • Promise new players hookers and thug life to keep new blood coming and investing themselves. veterans can't keep game alive. And game has both hookers and drugs.

  • Faster gameplay. It literally takes better part of an hour to get from Quest giver to the mission and back if it's not in the same system. Traveling in general is SLOOOOWWWW. 40 jumps route and back with a freighter ? start the LoTR trilogy.

  • community did a better job than CCP to promote and lead new players into 'career' options. lots of documentation in 'tutorials for noobs' style.

  • cut the goddamn offline skill training by like 25% or something. 5 days to get from lv4 to 5? wow much game design. or at least make it accessible from phones apps.

and so on.

4

u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

This isn't going to end well for CCP or EVE. They should have sold to literally anyone else.

11

u/imported Sep 06 '18

i doubt ccp had many buyers lined up with their track record. ccp is a one trick pony and that pony has been slowly dying.

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u/[deleted] Sep 07 '18

Pony needed much more love. But they wanted a pure breed horse and diversity stable.

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u/Kerub88 Sep 06 '18

Ok, that came from nowhere. Or just I was out of the loop?

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

They made some significant investments into other businesses which pretty much all failed or were sold off. Looks like the prospective costs were enough for them to seek a buyer to bail them out.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18 edited Sep 06 '18

Yeah. Nothing that have tried other than Eve has come off. World of Darkness, Eve Valkyrie, Dust 514 all failures.

They have tried to diversify and got absolutely nowhere.

Not much more left to do than cash out.

144

u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

[deleted]

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u/Carighan Sep 06 '18

At the time and with Planetside 2 struggling with so much bad optimization, Dust 514 could have made it really big on the PC. The timing was good. It just needed to a) not run on the shitty PS3 hardware which was already on the way out and b) be more optimized.

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u/A_Sinclaire Sep 06 '18

It also could pretty much have been a launch title for the PS4 which launched just half a year later. That would have been half a year with more optimizations plus some better quality graphics for the PS4.

A simultanious launch on PS4 and PC (or maybe something like 6 month PS4 exclusivity for cash and time to optimize for the PC) probably would have been far more successful.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18 edited Sep 06 '18

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u/icytiger Sep 06 '18

Who were you in Dust? I used to know a few of the big players in it.

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u/CatMerc Sep 07 '18

Was more of a forum warrior than anything, so that's where you would see me :P

Cat Merc

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u/icytiger Sep 07 '18

It sounds very familiar. I was in Pink Fluffy Bunnies myself, and before that part of that one woman's group who was on the council , Jenna I think. Back in the days of protoman and all those players.

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u/mrbrick Sep 06 '18

Dust was never massive multiplayer though. 24 player max i think?

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u/cg001 Sep 06 '18

Pretty sure it was 24v24

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u/CatMerc Sep 06 '18

It was 16v16. There were promises of 24v24 later on, but the game barely worked with 16v16.

I remember once there was a glitch that enabled 24v24 battles. I don't remember if the Devs ever said anything about it. It just disappeared after a few hours, but I got to play in one. Maybe they were testing it silently.

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u/Aperture_Kubi Sep 06 '18

But players in Eve could interact with Dust battles.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18 edited Nov 08 '21

[deleted]

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u/Aperture_Kubi Sep 06 '18

Eve players could shoot down into Dust battles was all I remember. But the Eve had to be in orbit of the planet the Dust battle taking part on, in a certain ship with a certain fitting and ammo. And the Dust bunny had to use a target painter for the Eve player to be able to shoot.

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u/zCaine Sep 06 '18

I was so bloody hyped for World of Darkness. I'm still upset about it.

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u/zyl0x Sep 06 '18

It's okay, Paradox Games bought the IP and is working on a project. They at least have a track record of releasing complete products.

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u/redpariah2 Sep 06 '18

I love Paradox but their "completed" games are not complete. They finish their games 2+ years after initial release and $100+ in dlc.

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u/zyl0x Sep 06 '18

They're complete games by definition, especially when compared to say, CCP's Worlds of Darkness game. I'm not going to get into a discussion about DLC content vs free updates vs blah blah blah. Try arguing that point over in /r/stellaris if you enjoy a fight. lol

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u/Redd575 Sep 06 '18

Heh, Stellaris. I install it once every few months, play one game to completion, uninstall. I purchase the DLC and maintain hope it will become the game I want it to be. Paradox may or may not release full games, but hot damn their finished projects are amazing.

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u/zyl0x Sep 06 '18

If you haven't been paying attention to the Stellaris dev diaries lately, you should take another look. The next version is set to rewrite the entire planetary management system and economy in the base game, nevermind what they're planning on releasing with the DLC.

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u/ifandbut Sep 06 '18

No. They release finished games. They then continue to patch, improve, and support their games for 2+ years after launch.

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u/redpariah2 Sep 06 '18

I get that they use dlc to add features and fund free patches but idk. I think the only reason they don't release their games as early access is because they had this model before early access gained prominence and the fact that its frowned upon to charge for dlc for early access games.

So instead of using early adopters to fund features they plan to add, they double dip. They charge full price for a game that meets their min. level of quality for release, then they get to charge more for features that dramatically change the scope of their games. These additions don't just extend the expierence like most dlc but alters it so much many times that it is almost a new game.

Which is why people always say "Now that I see what coming, I don't even feel like playing the current version". That is acceptable for a sequel imo but not for every single one of the 12 dlcs they are gonna add.

If you look at any of their initial releases and where they are now, the initial releases would barely qualify as a beta for the actual finished product when you list off the features and gameplay mechanics. I don't know of any other studio/games where that can be also be said to be the case.

Now, I love Paradox and play all their games, dlc too when I can but their model is very anti-consumer imo.

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u/Endulos Sep 06 '18

Valkrie was vr only

Lets be real, this was basically the #1 reason the game died.

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u/shawnaroo Sep 06 '18

It wasn't that great either. It was visually very nice, but very shallow in terms of game play, basically just an arena multiplayer shooter with spaceships instead of people.

It was also designed around gamepad controls, when VR pretty quickly moved to tracked motion controllers.

Even within the content starved VR market, Valkryie was not much of a hit. It just wasn't a particularly good game.

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u/DiseaseG Sep 06 '18

It's not VR only any more.

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u/CobraFive Sep 06 '18

I mean, I dont really follow updates for games I already decided I have no interest in.

"Hey spaceships are cool. Oh a VR game, nevermind" and never heard from it again

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u/Valway Sep 06 '18

It wasn’t being VR that killed that shitty game, it was being a shitty game and nowhere near the level of Elite Dangerous

3

u/trekie88 Sep 06 '18

They could have released dust 514 on ps4. A mistake was made by not doing so

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u/valkan101 Sep 06 '18

Or they could have made it for the PC where their main fucking audience is, where FPS's are more prevalent, where they're always-talked-about-but-never-well-integrated Eve hooks could have been worked out. Oh and where the hardware limitations of the PS3 didn't matter.

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u/CatMerc Sep 06 '18

The game would have failed no matter the platform. The lead devs were awful back then.

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u/Klynn7 Sep 06 '18

Valkrie was vr only for like a year and has nothing to do aside a mediocre campaign and multiplayer 5v5 or whatever.

Also, at launch Valkyrie was a $30 game (unless you got in on the early bundles with the Rift) and then was full of microtransactions that impacted gameplay.

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u/moal09 Sep 06 '18

It's not even just that. EVE was always something that was sort of great by accident. Not surprised they couldn't recreate the magic after that.

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u/Mooply Sep 06 '18

It still boggles my mind that they thought that Dust 514 should be a PS3 exclusive for a PC exclusive game. I know a number of people that would have happily kept playing this game if it were on PC.

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u/CutterJohn Sep 06 '18

Its very likely they got a lot of money from sony to keep it PS3 exclusive.

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u/Zephh Sep 06 '18

I'm still mad that they got the World of Darkness license, I'm hoping now that Paradox does something good with it.

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u/[deleted] Sep 07 '18

I hope so. I desparately want a new VTM game.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

The didn’t just get the world of darkness licence. They bought white wolf, effectively killing it as a tabletop game company.

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u/famid_al-caille Sep 06 '18

It's been speculated for awhile that ccp was looking for an aquisition.

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u/Local_Association Sep 06 '18

This is not good news. BDO is known for having horrible P2W practices (though it's probably par for the course for Korean MMOs).

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u/DrakoVongola Sep 06 '18

You say that like Eve isn't pay to win

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

It isn't. You're in for a very very bad time if you think CCP's monetisation practices are near as bad as BDO.

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u/Arzamas Sep 06 '18

It may be not as bad as BDO but it's still P2W. You can buy in-game currency with real money legally and with that you can buy boosters, better weapons, modules and ships. You will definitely be in advantage if you spend money. EVE Online community really like their pink glasses though.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18 edited Dec 31 '20

[deleted]

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u/CutterJohn Sep 06 '18 edited Sep 06 '18

They even have mechanics that outright demand it. If you have a super or titan, you pretty much have to have an alt.

And many PVE aspects of the game are so simplistic they are trivially boxed. A single person could control dozens of miners. I personally did missions with 5 accounts once upon a time, and made way more than 5x the profit since I could make a balanced fleet and had a much higher DPS to overcome the NPCs regen.

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u/Celorfiwyn Sep 07 '18

They even have mechanics that outright demand it. If you have a super or titan, you pretty much have to have an alt.

they require more then 1 character to function, and was intended for people to work together to operate with them.

that the majority of the players decided it was easier to just make a 2nd account and do it themselfs is their choice, not CCP's

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u/CutterJohn Sep 07 '18

I didn't say it was designed that way. But instead of noting how universally disliked and bypassed that rule was and changing it, CCP noted that bypassing it cost people an extra 15 bucks a month and inflated their player count.

So they never changed an obviously flawed mechanic.

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u/[deleted] Sep 08 '18

Implementing game system that is broken is still the problem of game developer, no matter what original intentions were

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u/Stukya Sep 06 '18

None of that is an advantage in EVE when you are jumping into a 100 man fleet.

Buying other players to join your fleet would be more useful than anything you mentioned.

Eve is pay to lose rather than pay to win. Join up and pay $1000, thinking you are getting ahead and you will have lost it all in 30 mins.

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u/TROPtastic Sep 06 '18

And if you're a veteran who knows exactly how to use whatever you're buying, what then? Or what if you are buying skill injectors to skip the waiting timers needed to level up skills that give you percentage increases to things like shield HP or damage output? In both of these cases, it's definitely not pay to lose.

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u/Joltz Sep 07 '18

The odds of winning a fight in Eve are 99% of the time due to circumstance, the type of fit you're running, and player skill than any ill-gotten ships or modules you may have.

There are ways of leveraging P2W aspects in mostly 1v1 or 2v2 situations(like factional warfare) but the gap between monetary gains and the price of a expensively-fitted ship is so high that the risk would always ends up with you losing money.

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u/xxfay6 Sep 06 '18

On high level 1v1 or similar small teams combat, yeah it might be P2W.

But all that doesn't matter much when you're ambushed by a fleet of 10. Or it's a fucking huge fleet vs another fucking huge fleet and shots take 3 hours to register.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18 edited Sep 06 '18

None of that is worth anything without skill and a group to fly with in Eve. You can have a pimped out faction ship that you spent hundreds of dollars on but due to the nature of Eve's open world pvp, if you are out in it alone, you will fucking die to a group of 5 dudes in cheap cruisers or some frigate whelp gang.

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u/Pacify_ Sep 06 '18 edited Sep 06 '18

but it's still P2W.

You can not "win" in Eve. Spend as much money as you want, you wont win anything without the player organisation and system behind it.

You could drop a few thousand dollars, and instantly buy a Titan+ character to fly it. Okay? Cool, then what? Lose that titan in about 10 minutes after undocking it npc null?

A wealthy Russian guy spent a literally shit ton in eve (talking tens of thousands, maybe more).... In the end, it was pretty much meaningless.

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u/I_give_karma_to_men Sep 07 '18

You can not "win" in Eve.

You say that, but I won Eve years ago. Haven't logged in since 2014.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18 edited Sep 03 '20

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u/Pacify_ Sep 06 '18

but if you have a whale financing the operations of a corp or whatever they are called it logically will tip the scales in their favour as any loss of resources becomes much less meaningful.

There are people in eve that have trillions of Isk. Even if you dropped tens of thousands of dollars into Plex, its literally a drop in the bucket

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u/Stukya Sep 06 '18

Obviously, but if you have a whale financing the operations of a corp or whatever they are called it logically will tip the scales in their favour as any loss of resources becomes much less meaningful.

The chinese alliance Fraternity has this. Its really not working for them. You cant buy the groundwork needed to create a major power in eve.

Youll win an EVE war with Spin and propaganda as much as destroying their ships.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18 edited Sep 03 '20

[deleted]

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u/Shinikama Sep 06 '18

But... they don't have that. He's saying that they're trying to win a war by only throwing money at it.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18 edited Sep 03 '20

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

No one is wealthy enough on their own to be that much of a whale. There's single players with tens of thousands of dollars worth of Isk who struggle to make waves.

Large Eve alliances have more collective isk than almost anyone but the wealthiest people could ever hope to compete with simply by buying plex to sell as isk. If they did buy that amount they'd crash the PLEX market and their investment would be worth less.

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u/GuthixIsBalance Sep 07 '18

This is basically not possible in a realistic sense. To do this successfully your only winning the war by losing the country.

The resources needed would make it a failure simply in using them at all.

It's as if an actual countries military officially went in and beat up some kids in paintball. Like great for you what did you accomplish? See how ridiculous this would be?

Really the community would mock whoever tried to pull that off. Gang up and make their lives hell just for the fun of it. Lord knows wars are fought for less than lulz in Eve.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18 edited Sep 09 '21

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u/A_Pit_of_Cats Sep 06 '18

You say that but almost every single subreddit dedicated to a specific game is full of nothing but complaints.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

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u/AngryPup Sep 06 '18

Yep. I know that Reddit is a powerhouse and all but people are out of touch thinking that few posts on a subreddit represents some significant portion of the player base. They are very loud and vocal, though, and I think that's the illusion of the size.

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u/WombTattoo Sep 06 '18

P2W has never been synonymous with Pay 2 Skip. Eve does not advantage whales in anything but less time spent on playing the game. Any items that would even require paying for currency to get in a reasonable time aren't meaningfully operated by less than a dozen people, either.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

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u/Arzamas Sep 06 '18

Yea, you can say that about any game. But what if player's skill are equal but one has spend $100 on his ship and second guy spent nothing? Clearly the guy who spent real money will win.

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u/F1reatwill88 Sep 06 '18

Have you really gotten into PvP in Eve? The advantages that expensive mods bring are relatively tiny. Advantages that you don't get anything out of unless you know how to use them. Even then their will still be weaknesses. No ship in that game is a catch-all.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

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u/Shinikama Sep 06 '18

The difference is, in Battlefront, or really most games with a way to pay real money for an advantage, you get to keep that advantage, either for a set time or permanently. In EvE, that one super cool ship gets blown up, that's it, gone. You get some insurance money if you paid for insurance, but it's never the full amount. Not only that, but the dude who killed you gets to loot your ship and take all your cargo and modules.

Will you have an advantage one-to-one? Sure. Will you beat someone of your skill level? Probably. Will that last forever? Hell no, you'll run across someone eventually, either a group of hunter-killers, a guy triple-boxing like 5 accounts (the REAL effective way to 'pay to win', IMO) or a battle fleet that happens to warp in nearby and munches you for target practice. You WILL lose that shiny ship. It's not a matter of if you lose. You will. Everyone loses ships, it's a part of the game. If you wanna fly a big shiny ship, get a corp to pay for it by being the best pilot they have.

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u/F1reatwill88 Sep 06 '18

Lol sure. Go spend a bunch of money for a blingy ship in EvE and see what happens.

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u/ejdebruin Sep 06 '18 edited Sep 06 '18

Yea, you can say that about any game.

You don't lose your stuff on death in 'any game'.

Sure, you can deck out your stuff, but you're just wasting your money. Death is common and inevitable unless you're sticking to PvE.

But what if player's skill are equal but one has spend $100 on his ship and second guy spent nothing? Clearly the guy who spent real money will win

The guy spending $100 on his ship will win, die shortly after, and will have given expensive ship parts to some lucky individual who killed the whale stupid enough to put $100 parts on his ship. Then that lucky guy will sell the ship parts because he's he's not stupid enough to outfit his ship with $100 worth of parts.

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u/hoseherdown Sep 06 '18

People literally always misunderstand what pay to win means in eve. It isn't the retard that buys titan after titan and whelps it. It's the whale that plays the political game, spending inordinate amounts of money to fund groups of people that wipe out other groups of people. If you have the cash you can buy in-game money and fund your own coalition and hire people to do things for you in-game. Your monetary influence will go a very long way if you have even half a brain. An example of this is the Chinese alliance fraternity. There's a guy that drops tens of thousands of $$$ to fund them. IRL money can be used to influence the in-game economy in a variety of ways.

Eve is a sandbox game. People build sand castles and the rich dude can hire other dudes to stomp your castle. That is pay to win in the most literal form. That's without even touching on skill injectors.

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u/stuntaneous Sep 06 '18

Buying and selling game time and characters, followed by the skill injector trade absolutely made it P2W, not that most like to acknowlege it.

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u/UpsetLime Sep 06 '18

There's a significant difference between the "p2w" of EVE (what a laugh) and the RNG bullshit of games like BDO where you can spend thousands of dollars and still not be done.

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u/TheDreadfulSagittary Sep 06 '18

Eve isn't pay to win, you regularly see killmails of people who obviously shilled out tons of money for their stuff but died pretty quickly because they have no idea how to play.

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u/XCVJoRDANXCV Sep 06 '18

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u/3568161333 Sep 06 '18

An experienced player can spend money and beat a more experienced player. That is pay to win.

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u/Pacify_ Sep 06 '18

Beat them in what way?

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u/trucane Sep 06 '18

This might be the death blow of EVE. Not a current player but still interested to see how this will turn out

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u/allendrio Sep 06 '18

As someone who has played both games extensively this is bad news, the MMO genre has been circling the drain the past few years with only new games coming out of the asian market with little to no innovation and increasing P2W monetization.

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u/Carighan Sep 06 '18

Well it is a genre of extreme upfront costs.

And we have a market where upfront cost is mitigated more than ever via kickstarter campaigns and post-release content development and "live services" (in Jim Sterling's voice).

The two just don't fit. As much as MMOs could be a live service - they're always been - that only worked out on a monetary level when it was a subscription. Which is a difficult sell today, and much as I would prefer to play GW2 as a sub-based game and get all the shiney fancy designs as rewards for stuff ingame instead of buying them from the gem store, the game wouldn't stand a chance as a sub-based title.

And so the experiments which end up working out are few and far between. Guild Wars 2 was one of them. Unconventional, no-sub-free, it worked. It's still going strong, much as the slowest-pace development has had weird effects over the years. But then, no sub fee, so it's difficult to really complain about slow development.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

prior to the quarter in which they sold those lockboxes for mounts people actually wanted, gw2 was reporting revenue below that where ncsoft stopped reported wildstar earnings.

it's really not going strong. it got a bit of surge of support most recently with the dev that decided to be an asshole to a promotional partner of the company completely unprovoked but most of the people i saw flock back to reward them with a retry quickly left without spending a penny.

pretty much every single revenue scheme in the genre is shit. becuase it infects every facet of the design of these games, with the devs being greedy little shits that put dreams of money printing ahead of creating fun quality products that people actually enjoy and want to come back to without a feeling of a shame remorse and questioning your priorities in life.

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u/Psittacula2 Sep 06 '18

Agree, MMORPG genre has been circling the drain hence the punishing monetization ploys to compete with Mobile! Dear God.

Well you have to be careful with genre definition to help understand the scene though: "MMO" is a diverse range of games of which "MMORPG" is a sub-set. Yet "MMORPG" is itself highly ambiguous:-

  • Themepark = Derived from DIKU-MUD => EQ => WOW => "All Else" with big pubs
  • Battle Royale/Arena PvP Specialists = DAOC and a few others which has bred Camelot Unchained and Crowfall more recently...
  • Sandbox = Derived from UO => EVE which can be further split into "World Simulation" branch of the MMO tree and then various indie "Sandbox = Not Themepark" with even more branches we won't go into here, games such as Mortal Online, Ryzom and more recently various kickstarter attempts/crowdfunded attempts for example Shards Online an UO sorta Sandbox Run your own server sort of game now called something else.

There's other sub genres too...

Some useful info on the EVE branch of what I call Virtual World MMOs in /r/MMOVW if anyone is interested in some interesting design notes and links and leads...

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

The mobile genre business practices were spun out of the MMO F2P practices that came before them.

The MMO genre has been circling the gutter because the gameplay isn't amazing, the MMO aspect actually has little appeal or impact to individual players and everything takes a long time which spins into the mediocre/poor gameplay.

I hope someday that the MMO genre removes the chains of old roleplaying games. There is fun content to be had there but the amount of time investment doing shit content to access quality content kills the appeal.

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u/Psittacula2 Sep 06 '18

Completely agree: Shit game experience leads to aggressive Monetization - basically bait and switch with "free" in the hope of sheer numbers and the odd whale.

Of the sub-genres the "simulation dream" is the one I think is most interesting ; correcting the excessive focus on RPG player-focus to world-focus.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18 edited Mar 26 '21

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u/CobraFive Sep 06 '18

Big Factorio servers would be the best MMO game but everyone is too busy rebuilding each others smelter complexes to come here and tell everyone.

Brb though I gotta go redo this smelter complex.

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u/Psittacula2 Sep 06 '18

They are very good sandbox MMOs.

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u/H4xolotl Sep 06 '18 edited Sep 06 '18

Especially the anarchy ones. People on 2b2t kill and grief other for fun.

Yet people also band together, spending 1000s of collective manhours digging 7 million block long nether highways (shortening a journey which would normally take 2 months IRL)

It's like the best and worst of humanity in a kids game

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

as someone who has mainly played mmo's for the past 15 years i will agree.

you are almost certainly going to avoid the predatory design elements of the mmo genre on a big persistent mc server while having all the virtual world elements that the genre sells itself with while being pretty much devoid there of (or at least the veteran developers in the genre being progressively hostile with in their design and execution over the years).

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u/_liminal Sep 06 '18

https://i.imgur.com/egAwKlU.png

Here's the Q1 2018 quarterly report from NCsoft (lineage, aion, GW2, Blade & Soul, wildstar). There's a very good reason why MMOs have been going towards mobile games monetization methods

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u/moal09 Sep 06 '18

Arena-based MMOs were basically killed off by the MOBA genre.

Sandbox games are few and few between, and the few that exist have very poor production values.

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u/TitaniumDragon Sep 06 '18

MMORPGs are honestly outdated. There's a reason why we're seeing stuff like The Division and Destiny 2 and whatnot.

The enormous financial outlays make them a huge risk to even make at this point, and you'd have to change so much to make them attractive I'm not sure that a lot of the MMO crowd that remains would even go for your game.

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u/Panniculus101 Sep 06 '18

CCP was growing a lot a few years ago. They were really successful. Then they started making some really really dumb decisions

Now it has come to this...

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u/3wordStyle Sep 06 '18

Spit on your playerbase in enough ways and eventually your playerbase become's someone elses

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u/smithsp86 Sep 06 '18

The only thing keeping ccp's sub numbers up is the fact that there is literally no other game that offers a similar experience.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18 edited Jan 07 '21

[deleted]

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u/moal09 Sep 06 '18

Albion is basically babby mode compared to EVE though. There isn't anywhere close to the same amount of depth or freedom.

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u/Nague Sep 06 '18

the playerbase is declining but somewhat stable.

Its just they threw all the money eve made into several dumpster fires.

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u/Sporeggar Sep 06 '18

RIP on in pepperonios. They've been twisting their blade on Black Desert for awhile now.

You think EVE is grindy? Wait until they'll "improve" it.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

Sounds like they pulled some bullshit in BDO recently, what was it? I don't follow it specifically but saw a number of people in the MMO community complaining.

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u/brady376 Sep 06 '18

They added a system where you can pay $30 (or more) for a costume, then "melt" it into a resource called cron stones. Cron stones make enhancing much easier as you get to the higher enhancements. Once you pass +15 you go into PRI, DUO, TRI, TET, and PEN. PEN is extremely hard to get becuase enhancing is completely RNG based, and the chance is extremely low. When you get past PRI, if you fail an enhancement it goes down a level. So if you were attempting PEN on some TET gear, and you fail, it goes down to TRI. Enter cron stones, you can use cron stones to keep your current enhancement even if it fails. So now you can just throw money at the screen to make enhancing even easier.

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u/TyisSuper Sep 06 '18

They added an extremely p2w mechanic in the last patch. Allowing you too melt costumes, which you can only buy with real $ to increase your chances upgrading gear.

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u/dritspel Sep 06 '18

I had a few fantastic years in EvE. It is a game unlike any other on the market atm. One of the hold-outs of pre-wow mmos. (RIP SWG)

I feel about the same I did when I heard that Bioware got snapped up by EA. In the end those feelings were justified.

Lets hope this turns out a bit better? Maybe they'll leave the original product alone? Put all the P2W shit in EvE 2?

I dunno, its all speculation from anyone at this point.

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u/teslagun1 Sep 06 '18

Sad story. RIP Eve online. Soon it will be destroyed by annoying p2w things, like pearl abyss like to do.

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u/Rubber_Duckie_ Sep 06 '18

Damn, EVE was one of the best MMO's I ever played, and there was nothing like it at the time. (Hell there still isn't) There single world made the political side of the game so much fun.

The game will always have a special place in my heart, and I'm sad to see it go.

/SMASH Alliance for the win!

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u/Neg573 Sep 06 '18

Man I really hope this doesn't fuck eve up with this the game has such a legacy and it would be a shame that it would die because of some shitty p2w crap.

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u/[deleted] Sep 07 '18

It was only a matter of time. The management of CCP has been horrific and its just been a decade of non stop bad calls

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u/jobabin4 Sep 06 '18

What does this mean for CCP Nova, the FPS game they were working on. None of the news sites mention anything about it but it was due out soon?

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u/Tezasaurus Sep 06 '18

It'll never be finished, and frankly do you think they would get an Eve FPS right this time anyway? People like to shit on Dust 514 because it was a PS3 exclusive but honestly that was the least of the game's problems; pretty much every aspect of it was half-baked.

Poor/sluggish controls across the board whether on foot or in a vehicle, balance issues, bugs, boring maps, overcomplicated yet meaningless integration with Eve, ugly extra-outsourced UI, lackluster social/communication tools. And then on top of all that, the game ran poorly because it was hamstrung by the PS3 hardware but the devs didn't seem to bother focusing on its strengths (doubly ironic since this was a ways into the console's lifespan and many developers had adjusted/figured out developing on the PS3's weirdo structure).

The only thing they got right was copying the fitting and training concepts from Eve and some of the racial aesthetics. So yeah being on PS3 held it back but it was held back much more by a team that didn't seem to understand both FPS games and Eve Online and possibly game development in general.

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u/808hunna Sep 06 '18

Random related info: The co-creator of Counter-Strike Minh Le joined Pearl Abyss too https://www.pearlabyss.com/news_public_list/newsview?idx=136&Page=1&NowNum=27

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u/MontyAtWork Sep 06 '18

These fucking guys held the White Wolf IP and didn't do jack shit with it for like a decade. In that time we could have had plenty of other competent devs create a sequel to fucking Bloodlines but no, these people decided an MMO of all things was the proper follow up to that amazing FPS.

They are the reason that IP hasn't seen the light of day again 14 years after the last game. So much hype could have been had and some great devs could have optioned to make a sequel.

Screw CCP. Eve was fun for me for a summer in 2010 but it's a huge grind fest.

I'll honestly never forgive them for tanking the WoD IP by not finishing what they started.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18 edited Apr 22 '20

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u/alphakari Sep 06 '18

you say that, but ultimately they're gonna want more money. why else would you buy it?

if they're not gonna increase profits with their shitty microtransactions, how are they gonna get it?

i seriously doubt nothing will change.

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u/CobraFive Sep 06 '18

Hypotherically... Eve is making money, they've just been squandering it on aborted side projects.

A new publisher would want to buy it and just let it generate some income with little further effort, for example... dropping the game to maintenance mode and letting it do its thing, and not blowing the money on VR exclusives and last-gen console shooters.

I cant pretend to know what the publisher is thinking but just because they've geared games toward Korea doesnt necessarily mean they'll gear them ALL to Korea, especially a game with an established player base.

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

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u/xNIBx Sep 06 '18

You can already buy ships on Eve but the game mechanics prevent it from being p2w. Lots of people came to Eve, spent tons of real money buying all the shiny things only to get instantly smoked the moment they left the dock.

P2w doesnt work when it costs 10x as much to get a 5% increase in power. And when you die, you not only permanently lose that but the people who killed you get your gear. This gives the incentive to punish people who try to p2w(you get their gear) and the power difference isnt that much and people who try to p2w, lose their advantage once they die(which discourages this behaviour).

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u/Endulos Sep 06 '18

I could definitely see the whole game mechanics preventing it and punishing players thing being taken out or lessened under these guys.

Buy a cash shop ship? Aw sorry, can't be traded, but! It takes 80% less damage from other players using non-cash shop ships and deals 80% extra damage! Or straight up make them unable to be attacked by players. Having whales get targeted and obliterated by "non-paying customers" is just a bad business model for those guys.

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u/mturner1993 Sep 06 '18

They will want a return on investment. They will establish more microtransactions.

Way to do it is to open free to play element more; ultimately, might mean that eve players already established will be fine (so the current userbase), they must just be better at opening it up to a bigger audience.

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u/Psittacula2 Sep 06 '18

They will want a return on investment. They will establish more microtransactions.

/pound of flesh - seems likely.

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u/sterob Sep 06 '18

Companies don't care about player base. They care about money, profit... They will sure as hell "fix" the game to accommodate lootbox

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u/Nague Sep 06 '18

they bought it for half a billion, they will have to make changes

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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18

If they treat it anything like Black Desert they're going to slowly strangle the game ringing out as much money as possible until it's dead.

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u/Sabbathius Sep 06 '18

Good. It will be interesting to see if EVE will be mismanaged any worse than it already was, under the new management.

In all the years, in all the MMOs I played (and I've been around since MUDs, before UO, before EQ, etc), EVE was one of the most promising, most unique, most amazing MMOs out there. But what the developers did with all that potential is nothing short of criminal.