With the Rubicon expansion being announced and the SOMER Blink scandals (or non-scandals depending on your point of view) that have erupted on the community at the same time, it truly feels like an age of EVE has passed and a new one is dawning.
But which direction is it going? This blog banter can be about several different topics:
– where do you think EVE is going? Is it a good or bad vision ahead?
– if you were EVE’s new Executive Producer, where would you take the game?
– What comes (or should come) after Rubicon in terms of the mechanics and ship balancing we’ve seen? (CSM8 not allowed to answer this one!)
– Is there anything in EVE’s ten year past that should be resurrected? Or buried and forgotten?
– What is the future of the community? What should or should not change?
First of all, let’s stop endorsing Eve gambling sites and let the community itself decide what sites and/or services they like. The PR department has too much power, let them leave the game alone.
Having said that, let’s focus on the game. One of the big problems I see with Eve is that there are a few separate games going. There is the 0.0 power blocks / politics game, and there is highsec PVE / industry, wormhole exploration and PVP (including Factional Warfare) in losec. Somehow these should be more united. Maybe make it easier for smaller entities to enter 0.0, make losec more worthwhile to go there, and give pirates something to shoot at. Problems is, I don’t really see the answer. But that is where I would like to take the game. This is about as vague as CCP approach though.
We got the very vague speech on where we’re going from the senior producer a few times now, about more player build things and going where no one has gone before, but I am not quite sure she even knows what that means. The player constructed POCOs are apparently a first step in this direction… I’ll take a ‘wait and we’ll see’ approach there.
The community is fine, though the time where blogs were king and we initially had the blogpack going was fun. Every pilot and their dog had a blog, and it felt like a happy family of bloggers. Fun times ! But that won’t come back. #tweetfleet on twitter has the same sort of feeling to it, so that’s nice. Times change 
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The other participants can be found at BB#50 – Changes
The language coming from CCP is very vague, isn’t it. It makes you wonder who they’re trying to convince; us or themselves? The possibilities and opportunities are certainly there to be developed, but do you think they’ve hit a point where they’ll stick to the safe path and just coast?
I’m also interested in your perception of how the community – particularly with regard to bloggers – has changed. You seem to be suggesting a decline.
CCP’s ambitions are probably bigger than their development resources allow. That’s probably why we don’t see big additions to the game any more. There are simply too few teams, to make that happen. That’s a bit of speculation, but devs have been moved to World of darkness and Dust and maybe downsized. At least that’s how I see it.
Regarding the blogging community, we had a discussion about this earlier, in this article I was referring to the golden age of Eve blogging, which was probably 2008 – 2010 or so ? There are still plenty of good ones around, but the time where there was a load of them certainly had it’s charm :).
Heh, I recall that Golden Age. It was that period that I discovered the blogs of yourself and others through the Capsuleer iPhone app. I was in awe of the eclectic reading material and it inspired me to give it a go. I salute those titans of the Blogging Golden Age and props to you for staying the course for so long. 2005?! How did I miss that?
Hehe thanks ! There are a few gaps here and there if you look closely though ;).
While everything being intertwined is a bit of a pipe dream, I agree they could try to incorporate the various play styles a bit more. But there is a reason these play styles have evolved this way. While you may voice a differing opinion, people will slap you with a label and ignore your argument (especially if you’re from high-sec). But if you drill down through all the propaganda there really are valid reasons why certain styles dislike each other so much, but a lot more of the arguments stem from a perception issue. Which is probably why CCP is so vague on everything, that, and the backlash when they hype stuff up too much.
As for the community, I’ve seen and heard about it pulling together to do some amazing things. I find that sometimes thinking straight and realizing some things aren’t that big of a deal, doesn’t always happen. Blogging may have declined, but that could just be because of how the world is constantly speeding up and there isn’t time for much else.