You sort of know when a TV show has passed its best when it kludges together an episode using clips from previous episodes. The producers know the writing's on the wall so reusing old content avoids the need to invest in new scripts and develop new plotlines.A cheap way to leverage the brand which gives the networks something to fill their schedule with and to hold on to advertisers.
Fake Plague
This was one of my idle thoughts as I headed home after my brief re-engagement with Eve. I had been in the Postouvin system orbiting the fake Keepstar and fake asteroid mining colony. This as it transpired was the peak of CCP's in-game involvement with the Kyonoke Plague event at Fanfest. More has been promised but nothing happened for the 70 or so people hanging around the system. Just a little bit of in-character dialogue in local would have been sufficient but it was not to be.
The really frustrating aspect was lack of acknowledgement of the players who had dutifully turned up. It wasn't as if this was a low profile event. CCP Seagull's opening Fanfest Keynote topic started with the Kyonoke Plague and she insisted "Parts of this story will unfold inside the game as well and your help maybe needed" It wasn't.
My grumpy knee jerk view was to take it as a lesson learned. It turns out Eve lore is a parasitical activity. It feeds off the game but gives nothing in return. When you think about it, that is pretty Eve like behaviour but like a Jita scam I won't be seduced by that again. Give me time and my view might mellow.
The keynote itself appeared to echo the Kyonoke Plague. Lots of noise, good presentation but fundamentally little in the way of in-game substance and a nagging doubt that there were things CCP didn't want to tell us. I say "appeared". It actually did look like that but it seems there is more to the story beyond the keynote itself. Let's start by picking over the bones of what was said.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be
So after the Kyonoke Plague (non)event topic, Seagull moves on to the achievements of the preceding year. Cue a video that gives us the following highlights:
- Force Auxiliaries
- Fighters
- New Doomsday Weapons
- Citadels
- Serpentis Capital Ships
- Multift
- Billboards
- Purity of the Throne
- Coronation of Empress Catiz
- Crimson Harvest
- New Explosions
- Command Bursts
- Fitting Simulation
- Alpha Clones
- Porpoise
- Engineering Complexes
- Guardians Gala
- New Skins
- NPC Mining Operations
"What a year huh?" enquires Seagull. Well since she asked...
Obviously, much of this was announced at last year's Fanfest. For many, including myself it didn't go down well and there was an obvious reason for that response. That list only ticks the boxes of a very narrow (but important to CCP) Eve demographic.
What are you (and do you matter)?
Most people frame Eve players in terms of the space they reside in (LS, HS, WH or NS). You can use that generalisation to an extent but it misses the point. Players reside in a particular area(s) because it suits their playstyle. To use a mad example, a person who likes playing electric guitars loudly is not going to feel comfortable playing in a symphony orchestra or a gospel choir. But they would more likely be comfortable in a punk band, rock band, or (insert noisy guitar music genre here). Telling the guy or girl to HTFU and get gud at playing the oboe isn't going work. They will just move on. But that was what the Wrecking machine trope was doing.
“From our research, there are five key personas,” he says. “There’s the professional, who’s the most elite player, involved in almost everything in EVE. Manufacturing, PVP, mining, and social activity. Then there’s entrepreneur, who’s similar, but more focused on industry.”
“Aggressors are what most people would consider pirates. They’re highly engaged with the game and more focused on PVP than the other personas. And social players spend most of their time interacting with their friends, and they aren’t really that active on top of that.”
“And then there’s the biggest chunk of the playerbase, which are the traditional players. They’re not really seeking out group activities. They just want to mind their own business, either in small groups or alone. They only play EVE for an hour at a time, without having to rely on the social side of things.”
"And traditional players are the kind most likely to have periods of high activity in EVE, then long periods of low activity. “It could be their personal life gets in the way, or they just get bored. And these players don’t really leave, they just go dormant for a while. Then they’ll come back a few months later.”
So in CCP's own terms, last year's keynote was pitched at the "professionals", "entrepreneurs" and possibly the "aggressors but excluded and to a degree adversely impacted the majority "traditional" players.
From a financial perspective this isn't the worst idea as "professionals", "entrepreneurs" are big spenders. So we had the conflicting indicators of CCP's increasing profitability yet player activity crashing after the Citadel release. Cue the mandatory player activity graphs:
Eve player on Tranquility since last Fanfest
The introduction of Alpha clones was well executed and mitigated the activity crash but it hasn't addressed the cause. More on that later. Anyway, the impression possibly taken away from this review of the year is not necessarily positive one. In my case it reminded me why I had stopped playing.
Eve player activity on Steam since las Fanfest
Alpha Clones
CCP Seagull then talks about Alpha Clones. She is rightfully proud of their introduction and declares it a great success. But is it? Really? It has not been a failure certainly and has been implemented seamlessly into the game and she and the team deserve credit for that. It could have gone badly wrong. But they haven't been a runaway success either. If you have the "professional" mindset you can probably make them work but other than that they are a bit meh. Alpha's are barely discussed now.
Book
Next up is the new book. Well presented and looks a quality product. Great for the lore parasites but does nothing in game so let's move on.
LARP
aka CSM. CCP's plan to make it a solely Nullsec body was largely successful. The odd streamer still gets in so they will have to try harder next year. Reducing to members down to 10 from 14 clearly wasn't enough. Personally, I think the less CSM members the better so 4 down, 10 to go.
Project Discovery.
For science with planets! This is amazing but it is an iteration rather than something new. A different episode of the same show so the novelty is not as striking.
Eye Candy
The same could be said of the next Topic. The look and feel of Eve. New graphics and rendering demonstrated by the model of the Vexor over time. This is all good and who doesn't vote for goodness? But a bit of a reality check is needed. Apart from the new suns, this investment in eye candy is to sell skins primarily. Eve's look and feel to the average player is a visual car crash of the Overview, HUD, Market, Local, Scanning, tripwire and multiple blinky flashy things. On a laptop there is no screen estate left to look at the magnificence of Eve. You could really be in real space and not know it. Maybe we are, but more importantly, what is that Sabre on the overview about to do.... File this under beautiful but useless.
The Big Reveal - for NullSec
This this point we nearly halfway through the keynote. A keynote is supposed to set the future tone or direction of the subject of discussion but nothing substantively new or different has been shared. This changes when CCP Larrikin waltzes onto the stage. He announces something genuinely new. PVE. My ears prick up, New smarter PVE. It really sounds interesting. But then you realise it is for Alliances or large corps and for Nullsec. Panic over, the majority of players can dismiss this because they will probably never see one of these sites. This is one for the "professionals" only and therefore just a continuation of CCP's existing policy.
And besides, CCP Larrikin is... well how can I put it? Well he is an Australian. Nothing wrong with that. Someone has to be. But when an Australian says it is "Part of our push for immersive, reactive, dynamic, playerverse environment content that contextually fits with your location!" you have to pinch yourself. It would be like Trump reciting Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment in the original Russian through the medium of Twitter. It is just wrong. Fortunately, this section only lasted 6 minutes. Existential crisis averted.
Structures
Next topic was a look back at structures and the new moon mining platform. Again a lot of time being burned for a small demographic. It is all good and clever but for most irrelevant and for some a disincentive. Another addition for the "professionals" and "Entrepreneur's" playpen though. Again this is not anything substantively new in any case, just a previously announced creative iteration of what has gone on before.
New Ghost Experience
Time for CCP Ghost to talk about the New Player Experience. But CCP Ghost decided to talk about CCP Ghost again instead. He does it engagingly and I guess his new found understanding of gravitational forces is a good thing but it takes while to get to the point. "Players need a purpose!" he declares. Actually players want CCP to stop nerfing their purpose into the realms of impossibility but it amounts to the same thing. Or at least it might do. We will never know because it turns out that what looked like a profound insight was actually just a cheesy segway to the next video. The video was quite good which is unfortunate because we have now forgotten what CCP Ghost was talking about (Players need hands? Squirrel!).
Eve Aurum is Dying
CCP Seagull returns to the stage to snap us back into reality. Aurum is dying she tells us. We know but we don't tell her. She probably suspects though. People are looking at their watches. It has been one hour and 6 minutes of a non keynote keynote speech. This could be a record. Finally she caves in and boots into keynote mode.
Finally the Keynote
Phrases like "Empower capsuleers to take over more of the universe" start pouring out her mouth. Now if there is one thing we have learned over the course of CCP Seagull's tenure (apart from her being extremely good at her job), it is that when she says "capsuleers" she really means alliances and large corporations. The more she says "capsuleer" the more the average player should worry.
She also says moar structures and moar ships in case there was any doubt. We already know who they are for. It looks bad. It then looks doubly bad because the route map has vanished to be replaced some banal illustrations of moody Eve spacescapes. Capsuleer (Alliance) stargates? "Not now dear" Seagull scolded, "When the time comes". Frankly, for a keynote - all 8 minutes out of 82 of it, it was vacuous. And that is triply bad because you just know that CCP will be introducing features that they don't want to talk about. Skillpoint extraction, Alpha Clones, and the death of Aurum are all examples of non-trivial game changes that haven't been announced at either Fanfest or Eve Vegas.
Almost as a side note CCP Seagull mentioned there will be an expansion in Winter that will be PVE in empyrean space. That could mean anything or nothing and I took it as the latter. And that was it.
Conclusion Part 1
So as you might have grasped, my very partial view was the coming year will be a rinse and repeat of the previous year with a new PvE opportunity for Nullsec thrown in.because PvP is so hard in Nullsec. And the previous year hadn't been a good one. What would happen next is predictable. CCP continues to make money as player activity continues to decline. The worry being they have already played the free to play card to bump up the stats. So like the tired old TV series you make the mental note to not by the next boxed set....
Conclusion Part 2
But then something odd happened. At some point after the "Keynote" CCP Seagull had an interview with one of the gaming press -
MassivelyOP. You really should read it. It is not that it contradicts what she said but it does shed a completely different light on the new PVE functionality and the Winter expansion in particular. Her cagey and cryptic keynote performance is replaced with narrative that is far more engaging and forthcoming. But most importantly there is a coherent vision that actually ties it all together.
For example, when asked:
MassivelyOP: "We’ve heard about the Blood Raider shipyard, this alliance-scale PvE that mimics PvP. So obviously the next stage for this is to scale this down and roll out more of this type of PvE. Is there any kind of time scale for that?"
CCP Seagull said: "That’s going to be, in some form or another, a big part of the winter expansion. We want to bring this type of content to highsec in a distinct way where we want to make something for highsec first, which is something we haven’t done in a long time. We have a bit of a history now of many developers’ hearts kind of living in nullsec or lowsec, and of course we get a lot of community feedback from there, and I think it’s time for us to make something for highsec first. Of course that’s also a way for us to engage with all those new players out there, by bringing the content to them rather than waiting for them to find their way to the content on the fringes.".
She then goes on to say a lot more but like I said, you really need to read the article for yourself. There you have it. A high sec expansion coming this Winter. Of course, there are a multitude of questions this raises. Alliances and large corps in Hisec are a rare commodity if only because wardecs don't make them viable for example. But the fundamental question has to be why on earth couldn't she have said that during the 1 hour and 22 minutes of not-a-keynote speech we had endure? Worth buying the boxed set do you think?