anothing thing to consider: the average lifespan of an eve online player who engages only in PVE is about 2 years. the average lifespan of a PVP player is -- they tend to never fully unsub, most have been playing for 10 years. The PVP crowd has a lot of loyalty to a game, long term if things are done right. PVErs will jump ship for the next shiny thing (star citizen) as soon as it hits the shelves.
Another thing to consider in EVE: according to the devs, of every ten players that join, only one goes to the PvP side of the game. Four other become long term PvE players, and the remaining five leave the game during the first month after purchasing it.
And another: historically, between 65% and 80% of the active players remain in high-sec space, with a large amount of them never having ever gone into low-sec or null-sec.
The PvP crowd might be loyal and loud, but they are also smaller. And yep, at least one MMO dev has confirmed that PvPers are far louder than their numbers should allow; Turbine has, in the past, confirmed that PvPers plus raiders are less than 10% of the LotRO player base, but more than 50% of the players active in that MMO's forums.
let's use wow as a benchmark, as it's the oldest most successful MMO's. it was also squarely designed as a PVE game, with minimal/afterthought PVP. fully 40%+ of the us player population is on PVP servers. That does not include people on 'PVE' servers who still participate in PVP arena matches on those servers. On the european side of the fence, about 55-60% of the player base is on PVP servers.
source:
http://realmpop.com
And, from the same source, most of the PvP servers have a severe faction imbalance. Pick the US realm list, order it by population, consider only the PvP ones, and the first one that doesn't have an imbalance worse than 2:1 appears in the ninth spot. Do you really think meaningful PvP can happen when most of the players in the server happen to be locked to the same faction? Take Sargeras (with almost 14 alliance for each horde), Kel'Thuzad (15 alliance per horde), and Illidan (about 24 horde for each alliance), all among the most populous PvP servers; can those even be called PvP servers?
The PvP/PvE divide isn't as easy to gauge as merely looking at server numbers. Those are useful, but you need to look at other things — such as imbalances, players changing factions because they are more interested in winning than in fighting, or the fact most high-end guilds play in PvP servers — to get a better picture.
right, you want it to be a slaughter house only when the mood strikes you -- and guess what, you can do that in private groups with like minded people, amazing!
No one is asking to eliminate open. What you have here is a good number of players that don't want open to be made artificially more enticing through bonuses.
After all, if people truly prefer open, they will be there anyway; bonuses in open would just serve to bring to open players that don't actually want to play in open (and to spread the knowledge of how to manipulate routers and firewalls to control who you see, which I don't think is something those that defend open want).
If this doesn't tell us that FD screwed up royally on the multiplayer design, I don't know what will.
This I agree with. They had the same delusions about player base behavior that Richard Garriott and his dev team had when they created Ultima Online, a game where the devs were forced to create a parallel world with PvP disabled (that characters could freely travel to and from) in order to bring it closer to their original vision and prevent the player base from imploding.
Though Frontier had the foresight to provide a similar mechanic to allow players to opt out of PvP from the get go, so ED shouldn't have as large an issue as UO had.
Single player games do not last as long as multiplayer games do.
Tell this to the original Elite. Heck, currently I find OOLite, the free clone that uses some of the capabilities of modern computers, to be more worth playing than ED.
Besides, how do you even count the longevity of a single player game? Is it as long as people are playing? If that is the case, given that there are people still playing a few 30-years old games, they take the crown. Is it while the game is still being developed? There are open source games still being developed that were created over 30 years ago. Is it while you are still selling commercial expansions? Then not only games like The Sims make a good showing among single player games, you need to take into account that where MMOs use expansions, single player games tend to use sequels, in which case numerous franchises — Mario, Zelda, Sims, Need for Speed, FIFA, Pokémon, GTA, Elder Scrolls, and so on — make a very strong case for single player game longevity.
Trying to directly compare the longevity of a MMO and a conventional game is like comparing oranges and hand grenades. There is no direct equivalent, and for each feasible way to compare where MMOs would come ahead, you can find another way where single player games come ahead.
Also, if you think being in development that long will allow ED to just keep adding new systems willy-nilly: feature and complexity creep. There is a reason old, long-running MMOs like UO, EVE, and WoW aren't constantly expanding their scope, and resort to systems simplification and consolidation about as often as they add new systems. While some players can deal with, and even like, complexity creep (about everyone that plays Dwarf Fortress is like that), for most players this tends to drive them away.
Solo is here as a mode, but Open is the crown jewel of the game.
Well, some devs do see it like you do, judging by interviews. They apparently saw that unwanted PvP is the surest way to completely ruin a game for a large number of players, though; for someone like me, the only way open could ever be worth playing would be if it had a PvP switch. Since the devs didn't want to implement any kind of damage limitation that would allow a true PvE-only mode to exist, they made available game modes where players would always be able to escape any and every kind of PvP, and seem to have decided to fully support those modes (and the free switching between open and them) for the life of the game.
I might also add that a large part of the player base disagrees with you. I, for example, see open as a mostly unwanted game mode that took resources better applied elsewhere and forced design decisions that did more harm than good to the game. But then, I got the game for its offline mode.
A large amount of posts on a single topic only say that there are opposing views and the debate continues, it certainly doesn't say that a majority want a certain thing.. There will DEFIANTLY not be a change in Solo,Group and All as a play style.. it was introduced very early on and taking it away will only alienate players who wish to play 'Their Way' .. all I was saying is get used to the way the game works as it is staying.
If post count in a small time period was a metric for change, offline would be first in line. It dominated the first page of the forums for a while until thread merging started, then filled two threadnoughts in short order until Frontier decided that new threads about offline wouldn't be allowed.
Hey, Diablo 3 came to consoles with an offline mode; perhaps the same will happen here?
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