(allow me to correct your spelling)
No, you may do it only once you are using your third language to communicate to me.
Your above answer shows you do not know what I am talking about, so I'll explain : NONE ARE FORCED it is as you say consensual - ARENA'S and BATTLEGROUNDS are PvP specific area's that exist in ALL servers; PvP, RPvP, RPvE and PvE - that you can join and leave as you please and also from 7 years experience of WoW I can assure you there is a great deal of people who take part on the NON PvP servers.
Yes, and they do it on battlegrounds which are in no way connected to rest of the game. If that is way PvP is done, in dedicated areas, fine. But that is not how ED wants to roll.
If it is out in the gameworld and you cannot opt out of it, it is always forced.
That is what is being visioned for ED right now.
Unknown to you maybe, but I have a lot more experience of this - every single one of the private servers that I mentioned, and I know for a fact there are dozens in freelancer alone for the various flavors of mods, are paid for by people willing to run them to ADD PvP flavour to the original PvE only game. There are X-universe mod servers, Freespace servers, etc etc etc, are they all here? I doubt it.
And are they running anything in scale of ED? Of course not. We are talking about completely different costs. Also, people running servers for hobby may do it at loss, once Frontier starts running games for us at loss, they are doing something economically really stupid unless they know they can recoup the costs somewhere else.
Do not mistake hobby for actual enterprise. One can cost without making money, but running a business without making money is way to go bust.
I didn't say they were, but if you accumulate all of those that bought all of the games I listed (which btw a lot of them have a great deal in common with ED - space based, flight, trading, piracy, questing games - which is what the core of the Elite franchise is all about), even if you include the crossovers of people buying more than one on the list, you WILL get a number in the MILLIONS, not copies of the games - PEOPLE.
Except you forget, that people often buy multiple games. Thus even if each Freelancer, X, Freespace and something else sold say 500 000 copies, it does not mean 2 million people bought them. It could just as well be that same, eager 500 000 person group bought all four games. Reality would be somewhere between. And then you have to factor in how many of the people who have those games play them for PVP.
I have latest versions of X series, got Freelancer. Even Freespace. But NONE of them I have played for PvP.
I'd given up on ever seeing E4, which means that there's a high chance there are other previous spacesim fans who have moved on, grown up, got lives and kids n such who are utterly unaware of ED's development, but who might buy it once it hits the mainstream press in a fit of childhood (or otherwise) nostalgia.
Your dogged determination to cling to the fallacy that 360k is all there is for the spacesim cake, while laudable, is frankly borderline OCD and still wrong. Now that's the last time I'm going to try to say this in the politest possible way I know how.
YOU ARE MISSING THE POINT! Point is that there is far smaller market for pure, unlimited PvP game than there is for game which enables you to DISABLE PvP completely, without losing any other part of the game.
You cannot assume that each one of the people you mentioned who might want this game also want to PvP! Hell, this poll shows that huge percentage of people do NOT.
"Just PvP" group will turn into a "bring more" arms race or be killed. When game death has a penalty you won't get those cannon fodder PvE'ers that are ok with being killed over and over and over and over, such as you get in battlegrounds and arena's. PvP servers will become the domain of the blob, players that band together for guaranteed superiority - I've seen that and it's not good for anyone, PvPer's feel they have no choice but to do it or die, and PvE'ers who are trying a bit of PvP action won't come back more than a few times, if that. It will stagnate.
So you want to make sure that PvE people have no right to enjoy their game so you can have your fun by shooting people who have least possibilities to defend themselves?
Tell me, why the hell would I pay for this game to make YOU happy instead of wanting to make ME happy?
Let PvP stagnate I say! I do not care! Aren't you getting that? I do not bloody care. If you PvP people cannot keep your own gamestyle alive, then it is unworthy to live!
Eve might have been static in very recent times, but I know that even during the shortish period I have been away, reports of population have gone up. Is CCP lying? Who knows; but you do know that exaggerated claims in advertising is illegal right? Something I'm certain CCP will be aware of and thus avoid - at worst it's a minor stretch to include ALL accounts including the multiples; although multiple accounts have been active in Eve almost since inception, and thus factored in on all previous population reports too. The percentage of alternates has gone up of course, but I greatly doubt if there has been a sudden massive surge of existing players buying ever more accounts - thus leaving just ONE option, that the higher numbers are from NEW players (because even old inactive accounts are still in the system already), a limited few of which may be running alternate accounts, but think on this; even if you went at breakneck speed and managed to get to a stage of having monthly sustained disposable income of 300 mil isk, (the cost of the plex to pay for the alternate account) inside of 6-8 months normal playtime (which I can assure you is an almost superhuman feat without expert help), only a few out of every hundred manage it, and running just 1 account in Eve can become a fulltime job on it's own.
People were running multiple accounts back when I played Eve and that was when plex did not even exist. Again, for some people it is a hobby and they do not mind paying for a hobby, as it is not necessarily supposed to be profitable.
Again, EVE is very much stuck with it's population. It grew steadily, but after peak in early 2011 it has been keeping numbers even and that's it.
Reality is that there are only so many people who like sandbox space world with forced PvP. And Eve has apparently tapped that resource now pretty much completely. It is very small niche.
I've had to repeat myself as some seem to have not read or fully understood the thread, or points made therein *cough*, plus I've continually tried various ways to make my points in the hope that one of them might actually get through - Like I've had to again in this one.
Problem is that you think through very narrow tube and assume that all there is around is just like that. You look through eyes of PvP-player, assuming that everyone else wants same things. Which is very, very wrong.
I understand some won't like my comments or ideas, but the longterm survival of the franchise is all I'm interested in, now that the dream looks to become a reality. Whether you believe and understand what I write or not, regardless of if you agree or not all of it is based on truth and experience - I have been a gamer since the binatone machine - to mean I started playing Pong and "shoot the dot" on the TV at home in the 70's and didn't stop, through the Intellivision console machine, BBC Micro and pretty much every console since - with "modern PC" (intel 80486 machine lol) gaming running alongside that for .... 22 years since the days of F117 Stealth Fighter sim (1991), Transport Tycoon by Chris Sawyer (who later worked on Frontier) and X-Wing.
I have made an almost lifelong career of sorts out of playing games, I have played all types extensively, I have been involved in the multiplayer scene for almost 15 years now; I have been involved with almost a dozen different MMO's, some of which I have played for many years; several side by side, and was there at the launch of many (right now on my machine I have WoW, Lotro, Rift, Evochron, Fallen Earth, Eve Online and Age of Conan installed and up to date). I have personally met hundreds of RL human players and witnessed the full gamut of what they are capable of when they are in a virtual world whereby almost everything they do harms none.
This is the experience I bring to what I say and from where I can look across the horizon to see how things might go - I've seen all the paths and the endings before, Humans are, after all, pretty predictable and while all the basic ingredients are the same the only Souffles that rise are the ones baked properly, the rest...... pffft.
How I've never worked in this industry is something I often ponder. But there's still time, I hope.
Am I supposed to be impressed?
My first computer was C64 sometime in 80s. Been gaming ever since. I actually know all those games you mentioned, played them all and huge amount of other games.
Was in couple points playing in ranked clans games like Day of Defeat (ah the days of beta) and Battlefield 2.
I've seen it, played it and so forth, Ultima Online, Anarchy Online, LOTRO, WoW, Eve Online and few obscure ones on top of that.
Seen it all and noticed that most players do NOT want PvP. They do NOT want someone to come annoy and pester them when they are trying to have FUN. People do not find being ganked, robbed, griefed and abused fun.
Thus, game which is based on idea of unlimited PvP is very, very bad idea unless you are making another twitch FPS like Battlefield, CoD or such. There death is 5-10 second inconvenience and new round resets it all.
In game like ED, where losing means loss of ship and loss of potentially hours of work it is idiotic and economically stupid. Because the market for that kind of games is damn restricted.
If ED decides not to make split of All into PvP and PvE groups, it is committing possibly fatal blunder for franchise, because then it is looking for very limited market segment, which WILL be competed for by Eve Online and Star Citizen.
