Meanwhile, in EVE Online:
OGRank: New EVE Content Patch
(Found via Prognosticator’s excellent new ‘news.VirginWorlds.com’ online news roundup service – do check it out.)
It’s a long running in-house tradition at CCP. They do expansions, but they don’t charge for them, and give them out for free, and this seems to work well, serving to keep the brand undiluted, and most likely avoids any number of ‘What if they don’t have [expansion]?’ development and design problems. Having abandoned box sales entirely, in favour of digital download, they don't really need to keep a 'shelf presence' either - one of the main jobs of an expansion for other MMOs.
Their latest one is codenamed ‘Blood’, and seems to be quite a minor expansion, mostly concerned with paving the way for the next one after that, ‘Kali’, which looks to be a massive rework of faction PvP. Blood does contain two interesting changes though.
Finite item storage is to be added for the first time. The actual limit seems very high, based on my experience, but then I was ever the anally retentive ‘Stack All’ fetishist. At a guess, this new 1000 items in one place limit is mainly aimed at a very small minority of out-of-control packrats who were making the database to awkward things, and lagging it out for everyone else. Seems fair.
The big change though, is the new bloodlines. A bloodline is what passes in Eve for a racial choice, but is more like being American or Russian, than an actual species choice, like being an Elf or Orc. The Galaxy of Eve is home to five main human nations, four of which are playable, and each of these four is further split into two bloodlines – slight variations in culture, history and ethinicity
Functionally, this manifests in different starting stats, based on which race you picked, and whether you went for their ‘combat’ bloodline, or their ‘scientist’ bloodline. Each blood line has an interesting and different RP backstory too, for those who care about that sort of thing, although EVE has very few roleplayers on the whole though, since really, you are your spaceship.
The new Blood patch is about to add four more bloodlines – one for each race, and already there’s trouble. The stats in EVE, (Memory, Intelligence, etc) do nothing to affect actual gameplay – this is run by skills – both character skills, and player tactical skill. What the attributes do is determine how long it takes to learn each of these character skills, under their much documented offline/online constant ‘levelling’ system, and these skills in turn, allow use of better equipment, and grant larger ship bonuses. A high Perception, for example, helps train weapon skills faster.
Naturally, some of the skills are more useful and desirable than others, and already, it seems that one of the new bloodlines in particular not only outstrips the others in combat related training potential, but also outstrips most of the old bloodlines too, giving rise to calls for nerfing all ready, and accusations of a new ‘I win’ race.
(Imagine the uproar if WoW Blood Elves were given +10 to all weapon skills, and the new Alliance race was given +10 to all crafting skills instead. All the Alliance would be pissed off, and most likely, so would all the other old Horde races. It's that kind of fuss.)
Much of these calls are the usual hand-wringing hyperbole, and the reality of it is that while combat training becomes marginally faster into the very high ranks and skills, it still remains very much a matter of ‘what you do with it that counts’. It does somewhat dredge up a long running and unresolved concern about EVE in general though – that a new player can essentially NEVER catch up with a From-Release player. While in the usual MMO, rate of progress is largely down to how much of a catass any given player is prepared to be, in EVE, training rates are pretty much out of the player’s hands. Implants can help a little, but on the whole, most players plod on at a set rate that doesn’t vary that much, and they only really lose ground by forgetting to set the next skill going when the current one finishes.
Add to this the fact that no-one in EVE has ever ‘finished’ them all - the usual ‘Max Level’ win condition, and you end up with a situation where new players can feel somewhat disenfranchised, especially given the hard PVP nature of the main part of the game.
The attribute distribution on some of the new bloodlines is being regarded by some as an attempt by CCP to offer a ‘fast-track’ for new players, to let them catch up with the bulk of the population, who now have years of skill training tucked under their belts, and not everyone is happy about the idea of new folks getting a free ride.
It’s an interesting debate though. Do older players have a right to be better off in the game, purely by virtue of their time served? Or should an online game be a place of constant renewal, where a player’s status must be continually earned on a weekly or monthly basis?
EVE never fails to interest me, even when I’m not actually subscribed. It’s probably time for another go soon…