I really should know better than to read the 'General' board at any MMO website forums by now. A great deal of what I see there makes me alternately angry and sad, and the worst part of it is that it often has no bearing or basis on what the Developers and Producers of said MMO have in mind for it's future at all. Mostly it's just a lot of anonymous hotheads trying to create the impression that if the game is not already a thing that comforms exactly to their own ideas, it will enevitably become so very soon.

This particular battle for the Hearts and Minds of Anyone Who Will Listen is brought to me courtsey of EVE Online today (no link...homework exercise), and essentially it's a variation on the tired old theme of Carebears (Meaning players not interested in PvP) vs Greifers (Meaning players who are interested in PvP). The basic arguement is at least four times as old as the sun, and will most likely outlast it by a similar span, and is essentially the two positions of:

  • "Please make it so people can't kill me if I don't want!"
  • "Please make it so I can kill anyone I want!"

Textbook stuff, but the most exggerated hyperbole springs up around these two core tennets; huge psycological essays, economic white papers, all manner of confused statistical analysis, and of course "STFU n00b!!1! kthx~", but beneath it all are the two pleas, above.

I'd imagine this causes quite a headache for the developer. On the one hand, theres a lot of evidence to suggest that the Carebear type is a generally more abundant than the Griefer, and is considerably less disruptive, but prone to Casual Gaming more. On the other hand, the so-called 'Greifer' type is more likely to stick with the game and won't get bored in a hurry, as long as there is fighting to be done. Human opponents are undeniably more sophistocated and challengeing, providing a huge amount of 'content' if the system is designed right.

The problem comes from the fact that the one type has to feed off the other, who somewhat understandably, doesn't really enjoy beaing eaten. Personally, I've always thought that this problem only exists in game worlds where both types have to exist side-by-side. Everquest II works. Planetside works. In each case, only one type of player exists at all.

One of the core problems with EVE at the moment is the increasingly hostile polarisation of players into one of these two camps, as evidenced by the messageboards. EVE is a PvP game, but the trouble is that this fact, either through ommission, or deliberate misdirection, is not apparent to the new player for a very long time, and by then, they've already formed quite solid opinions of what 'their' game should be like. I found this myself, and it begins to worry me somewhat.

PvP in EVE is essentially regulated by geography; different star systems have different levels of law enforcement response, ranging from the 'Insta-Kill' ('1.0 to 0.5 Security Status'), through 'Avoidable' (0.4 to 0.1) down to 'Lawless' ('0.0'). The galaxy map places the 1.0 stuff in the middle, and ranges down toward the rim, at 0.0, but is deliberately designed to produce 0.4-0.1 bottlenecks between safe and unsafe space. The in-game map-tool, (itself a thing of great beauty), has a population overlay and one glance at this at any given time shows around 95% of all players busily doing various NPC things in the saftey of the core, and the rest waiting for the new/stupid/unwary at these 0.4 bottleneck systems. 0.0 space, the supposed new frontier that the whole 'Exodus' expansion concept hinges on, is practically empty.

Various board posters, (usually form the Pro-PvP lobby), ask 'How can we get more people out into 0.0?' Well, a good place to start would be 'Try not to gank them before they get out there', followed up with a healthy dose of 'Put something out there they want/need'. But the problem remains; providing any kind of reason for the average PvP inexperienced player to risk signficant time investments for no real precieved gain. Of course the other option is 'Use the Stick'...remove the things they need in Safe Space and make them go to the badlands for essential goods and services. Probably not a popular move.

I wonder if there is anything they can put out in the wilds that will be worth the very high risk of losing two weeks of progress in less than two minutes, along with acompanying smacktalk and humiliation? Call me fuzzy, but I severely doubt it.

But, and here's the important bit, I don't care, and will keep on paying my sub as long as I'm allowed to do my own thing in Safe Space. Is that so unreasonable?

CCP have some big ideas about filling up 0.0 space with players who ordinarily can't (or won't) cope in the current PvP system, so at least they must feel that something isn't right with the current system, but it's a delicate thing to get right. Already EVE exists as a 'niche' game rather than a contender, and it would be so easy to terminally upset one camp or the other, or even both. Interesting times ahead.