+1 for jphacks summary
+1 for codebots commentary
I agree with every word, this is how i percieved it, too.
TL;DR
the game was very much fun in march, even if unbalanced, since you were constantly rewarded, tested out new ships, and still had to find “unique” stuff. credits were the only shortage, which you could circumvent with golden ships. even those who didnt want to spend much time playing enjoyed it.
Maybe we also lost a small percentage of players, who were misled by the word MMO to find a twitch based Eve Online; Nobody really cares about that bunch.
most of the players in my peer group had distinct exit reasons:
- buyers remorse and loss in confidence as the patch back then autosold ships with items; while I always had the position of “forged aboudid”, it sticked; I hope the lesson is learned there.
- loss of casuality in the game by introducing severe grind factors, in a fashion, most actual players seem to be people who went into tier 2 or 3 back then.
- Tier mixing. It made it hard to help lower players in T2 to play together as a group, since however most T3 players were hardcore, T3 seemed to manage the mixing better, but it was still sometimes really annoying to have ceptors with good fits fly faster than anything you equip in T3 and similar.
- Waiting Times. As lots of people left, waiting times increased naturally.
- Sudden massive Reputation decrease. Made it really hard to catch up to older players.
- Less reputation in lower game modes, while the needed points to reach the next level actually increased; forces you to grind on your level.
Almost nobody complained about having less strong ships in the same tier, or lesser equipment, or the imbalances. They were met with “ok, maybe I should try this other shipclass” as remark, however, since credits became grindy, switching ship types became a never ending story, and the complaints about imbalance increased mostly as a byproduct of “not having too much progression” to keep up with the always higher tiered enemy.
Of course, the people mentioned are only a very small representation of the sum, all with a specific mindset of being open about new games, but I feel at least I can speak for our experiences.
I did understand the part of loyality grind; It values green items. However, together with the “10%” loot they are only credit boosts. Luckily, I was there when Loyalty rained from the sky, and since I had most of my T3 and T2 fits back then, I didn’t look for that, or find it adequate if you play with license and dlc.
I’d whish there was a way to increase a specific income with some strategy independent of what you play. It would be fine, if everything stays at a specific grind level, even the one used now, but you could influence one of the incomes to boost up - even to a point where you slow down in everything else - so you can meet a specific goal ingame in a reasonable time, instead of an overall slow progression. A crafting system would be also expandable for this. Refurbish loot to build weapons, or goods to sell for credits, or extract evidence or rare materials for increase in reputation or even loyality, repair your own ships or set yourself up to build missiles; possibly all from the same kind of materials, so you can decide what to do, by how you recycle them, with a mini-game of some stuff being better for one or the other thing.
This would help to catch up Reputation for new players to be placed into higher tiers with their friends, or even buying the golden ships for their sorta gameplay, or help people to get enough credits to keep up repair costs or buy new ships, or increase their loyalty gain - in a completely in-game manner, no GS strings attached, but of course, GS is fine if it speeds up all things in general.
I’d also whish, Licenses would at least benefit other players or could be given away, to at least keep players going up, growing them into the game.
Balancing issues really only concern those who like the game despite everything; but the rewards and changes in gameplay really caused a directly viewable loss of playerbase. It is specifically hard to understand, since the game is not finished, even if most of the patches seemed to be scripting the engine or media, and should at the moment even be cheaper and easier, than in the future, to gain massive momentum.
Bearing in mind, it is summer in the North, so many people are on vacation, while gamers have big opportunities in lots of other games on sale, so there might be a “re-migration” in August. I don’t like the future to be black.
Also bearing in mind, that f2p has a really hard position on the market at the moment, being loathed by some people because of other companies’ abuse of that model. They fear this game will end up a money sink and crash.
And bearing in mind, we have a patch in front of us and it keeps emotions boiling.
