So you and you're friends will leave over this change but the PvPers are fair weather friends?
If the game changes to favor PvPers, no sense in PvE players remaining.
Or, at least, no sense in remaining without using some kind of network trickery to get the benefits of open without having to actually open oneself to PvP. If open is given any outright advantage, rest assured that I will then never log into solo; instead, I will be playing in open but outright manipulating my connection to either never meet other players or to turn them into laggy sitting ducks. With the appropriate software blocking or degrading specific connections is easy-peasy.
I mean honestly, does anyone from solo want to be completely separated from open as far as goals and background sim goes?
If it comes together with making offline mode available, yes, so much this. Solo online is but a shallow parody of what a truly offline game could be, a pale substitute while I wait for something from other companies that actually respect their customers and at least try to keep their promises.
Otherwise, no. While I'm forced, against my will, to be online in order to play the game, I want full parity with the players in open mode and full mobility between the modes. In other words, no extra limitations, no restrictions, no penalties for solo or bonuses for open.
If you want to nitpick, community goals were never mentioned during Kickstarter. So basically it's a new feature and has nothing to do with the pledge.
Actually, they were, just not with that specific name.
Dev Diary Video #2 is specifically about them, and even includes the promise that solo players would be able to take part.
Which is why the game needs to be designed in such a way that we don't have to always wonder.
Never was the intent. It's why peer to peer networking was chosen; the disadvantages of peer to peer mode were mostly in places that didn't matter for the game they wanted to make, while the advantages were quite meaningful.
On your first point, i will give an EVE example. Different game diferent setup but same principle in a SANDBOX
50% quit eve in 2 months
40% do missions and PVE and quit in <12 months
10% do corporations, groups and proper sandbox activities (Craft/pvp/market pvp) and last 3+ years. (Source: EVE Dev conference 2014)
PVE is garbage for retention, its gamed, no diversity, not as competitive, automated, scripted. WoW needs constant raids to keep PVE alive for example or else people start dwindling fast, as any Singleplayer PVE story game would.
In other words, even in EVE, which is widely advertised as a PvP game, PvE players make up for a large part, perhaps the majority, of the revenue (40% x 12 months versus 10% x 36 months, disregarding the ones that leave in 2 months). Kinda eye opening. Makes one wonder if, should EVE actually care about those PvE players instead of doing its best to shove them into a PvP gameplay they dislike, perhaps the game could keep those players for longer and be more profitable.
And that doesn't even take into account that most pilots stay exclusively in high-sec space. Even the PvPers are playing a lot of PvE, likely they spend more time in PvE than in PvP.
I would love to see new subscription numbers for EVE, BTW. CCP stopped publishing those numbers a few years ago, when subscriptions seemed to have hit a plateau and the available data about concurrent players started to show a decline.
Another thing, raids have little to do with WoW player retention even now, and were even less meaningful half a decade ago, when WoW was experiencing its largest growth. Up to Burning Crusade raiders were a tiny minority of the player base, the ones that raided on a consistent basis less than 1% of the player base and the ones that had completed even one raid in the past less than 2%. Raids only became important for the common WoW player when Blizzard added the LFR tool (which allowed getting into a raid by just hitting a button on the UI), together with a raid difficulty so easy players have to make an effort to actually lose. Heck, a different MMO, LotRO, cut out raids from its roadmap because there were not enough raiders in the game to even justify making that content; instead, LotRO got instances that scale with the number of players, from solo to raid sized, which are far more successful in engaging the player base than raids could ever be.
I think Frontier need to have some faith in the playerbase.. we aren't all out to behave like a douchbag you know
Having faith in the playerbase is what got UO to the point it was heading to the chopping block, with 70% of new players leaving within two months, until the devs decided to create a separate world where PvP was by consent only.
So, sorry, I don't trust the playerbase. If my choices are to either trust the playerbase to behave in an acceptable way or to stop playing, I will stop playing. In fact, I have vowed to never again give a chance to any game where I can't just opt out of all PvP, had only bad experiences in over a decade of trying to make that work.
Oh, and BTW, the day I have to pay another player to help me in order to get something done is the day I leave a game. Feeling like I can't get things done by myself is truly awful, and a game that makes me feel like that doesn't deserve to be played.
