Re: EVE and getting new people to play

On Mon, 12 May 2025 08:46:05 +0100, JAB wrote:

On 11/05/2025 23:55, Ant wrote:

JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:

On 10/05/2025 14:20, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

So there's this article, discussing the problem on getting new
players to invest their time in EVE, the long-running sci-fi MMORPG.
One of the issue the game has is that many of its current players
have been playing the game for literal decades, and -as such-
newcomers are at a distinct disadvantage when starting up their
virtual empires. There's just much less room for newbies to manuever.

 

It's something that World of Tanks also suffers from. As they added
more crew skills and equipment types for tanks in an effort to give
long standing players something to work towards the gulf between them
and new players has significantly increased.

 

I kinda feel sorry for new players who are encouraged to get to the
higher tiers as fast as possible (that's where WG make their money)
and they encounter players with maxed out tanks that will just shred
them to pieces before they even know what's happened.

 
Don't they have limits on what levels players can play with? I only
played WoT @ E3 back in 2014 briefly. It wasn't a bad game, but I
prefer playing Battlefield 1942, etc.
 
 

Nope, as soon as you've researched a tank at any level you can take it
out for a spin which is made worse by you have to grind out a tank
through play to get it to its top configuration which depending on the
tank tier could easily take fifty to hundred battles unless you want to
use real money to skip that part.
 
They did try to partially mitigate this by providing a system that
protects newbies from experienced players until they played a certain
amount of games, have some unknown skill level or researched a certain
tank tier. The problem is one of their big money spinners is tier VIII
premium tanks which are available just by opening your wallet and WG
want you to play higher tiers so that's what new players are pushed
towards.
 
It also doesn't help that WG have a habit of selling what are over
powered premiums and it's just not fun realising that you have an
in-battle disadvantage just because you didn't open your wallet.

"pay to win" sux.

When Elite Dangerous started allowing early-access and pre-built
ships with ARX (their money-based currency), a lot of people yelled
it was "pay to win".  I never saw it that way, and the community
seems to have accepted it.

It's handy.  When I set up Mrs. Vallor's ED account, I "opened my
wallet" and bought a Cobra Mk V, which is one of the nicest small
ships in the game.  It basically skips some of the grind of working
her way up to an Adder, where she could make space bucks for getting
the Mk V anyway.  Note that the latter isn't engineered -- there's
no way to skip that part (gathering materials and unlocking engineers),
so it's still not "pay to win".  (But, it is a slight advantage to avoid
some of the grind).

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