Empire Building Game Mechanics, EVE
Feb. 21st, 2009 03:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bolsonI've ranted before about EVE and WoW and how they were not the games I wanted to play. I kept playing EVE and just hit one year since I started playing it. I've run into the usual MMO problem that it has boring repetitive grinding. The scifi candy shell has worn off, and it's getting boring.
I haven't quite quit yet, and I still have some things cooking in game to optimize the experience. They have an expansion coming out soon (they always do), but I'll probably take a peek at that content and decide the whole system is inherently flawed and quit it then.
Analysis
MMO empire building can be pretty neat. You can build a pretty big virtual empire. There might actually be dozens or hundreds of people (real people) in it. But it still seems to require a lot of grind suck to get there.
The interesting part of empire building is decision making. What should I build next? What resources can I trade to get there? What alliances can I form? Which players can I prey on?
This works pretty well in most good board games that have an empire building component. Why not in MMOs? Maybe it's the second half of MMORPG, the RPG. In role playing you have to be doing something. Oh look at me, I'm out in space, mining asteroids. Great, well done, but I got bored.
Given that decision making is the interesting part, I want repetitive actions to be automated. That's what I do in real life pretty often. I write up some program to do the same thing a million times, [step 2], profit! Despite being against the terms of service, people do this for MMOs too. It shouldn't be against the TOS, it should be part of the game. If I can write a better AI mining script for my character, I win. (Ok, I am nakedly slanting the game in my favor here. I'm sure there would be some kind souls to post decent open source scripts.)
MMO environments are long lived, this is awesome because it gives you time to build awesome things, but there is a disparity between new and old players simply in the amount of amassed wealth and other things. There can be simple game balance things done to make a scale of diminishing returns where getting the 50th thing is much harder than getting the 10th thing. That way new players can get pretty close to catching up, and if they're clever maybe even surpass older players. Ikariam does this pretty well, but the falloff can be pretty steep such that after advancing to a certain point it seems like advancing from there becomes nearly impossible. They've rebalanced recently and it's a bit better now. EVE has an additional problem preventing newbies from catching up in their skill system. EVE skills are always on, learning, in real time, even when you're not logged in. This is pretty neat compared to some other systems in that it does not encourage unlimited time sink into levelling up. It also becomes a rate limit on your progress. The skills I need to get the next better ship cannot be learned in less than two months of real time. That kinda sucks. I'm ready to move on but the game won't let me. There is also no way to catch up with a player who has been in the game a year longer than I have.
I haven't quite quit yet, and I still have some things cooking in game to optimize the experience. They have an expansion coming out soon (they always do), but I'll probably take a peek at that content and decide the whole system is inherently flawed and quit it then.
Analysis
MMO empire building can be pretty neat. You can build a pretty big virtual empire. There might actually be dozens or hundreds of people (real people) in it. But it still seems to require a lot of grind suck to get there.
The interesting part of empire building is decision making. What should I build next? What resources can I trade to get there? What alliances can I form? Which players can I prey on?
This works pretty well in most good board games that have an empire building component. Why not in MMOs? Maybe it's the second half of MMORPG, the RPG. In role playing you have to be doing something. Oh look at me, I'm out in space, mining asteroids. Great, well done, but I got bored.
Given that decision making is the interesting part, I want repetitive actions to be automated. That's what I do in real life pretty often. I write up some program to do the same thing a million times, [step 2], profit! Despite being against the terms of service, people do this for MMOs too. It shouldn't be against the TOS, it should be part of the game. If I can write a better AI mining script for my character, I win. (Ok, I am nakedly slanting the game in my favor here. I'm sure there would be some kind souls to post decent open source scripts.)
MMO environments are long lived, this is awesome because it gives you time to build awesome things, but there is a disparity between new and old players simply in the amount of amassed wealth and other things. There can be simple game balance things done to make a scale of diminishing returns where getting the 50th thing is much harder than getting the 10th thing. That way new players can get pretty close to catching up, and if they're clever maybe even surpass older players. Ikariam does this pretty well, but the falloff can be pretty steep such that after advancing to a certain point it seems like advancing from there becomes nearly impossible. They've rebalanced recently and it's a bit better now. EVE has an additional problem preventing newbies from catching up in their skill system. EVE skills are always on, learning, in real time, even when you're not logged in. This is pretty neat compared to some other systems in that it does not encourage unlimited time sink into levelling up. It also becomes a rate limit on your progress. The skills I need to get the next better ship cannot be learned in less than two months of real time. That kinda sucks. I'm ready to move on but the game won't let me. There is also no way to catch up with a player who has been in the game a year longer than I have.
