I'm not dismissing concerns, and if you did find some good raids, I withdraw my pity. I'm making the point that large numbers gameplay isn't necessarily the horrible no-fun-allowed reward driven experience you were describing earlier. And I'm not talking a few Quake games, I'm talking thousands of hours in mass pvp, between mostly LotRO, Planetside 2 and GW2. What I describe was the rule, not the exception, or I wouldn't have kept playing.
I have no clue whether CIG will make it work. I just know that it can be done. Some games have managed it, while others have failed. And yes, performance is always part of the equation, although there's generally a substantial tolerance for bugs once you're no longer in reward-driven or e-sport gameplay. LotRO, to this day, still is insanely laggy to the point where the entire raid can have skill bars frozen for 10-20s if too many players crash into the same place at the same time. GW2 used to have even worse performance issues as it does today, and used to try and mitigate it by "culling" random players to lower the load, meaning you'd regularly die to invisible players while facing 50 players that looked like 10 a second ago. Planetside 2 has an infamous client-side hit detection which causes some utterly insane lag-induced and rage-inducing double kills. It also culls out players, but in a more subtle and less infuriating way than GW2. Even more hilarious was Archeage's infamous archery skills whose DPS was inversely proportional to your server ping. And yet, we kept coming back. Because as infuriating as the performances were, the fun of being a small cog in a bigger machine was great, from the humanoid vs humanoid battles, to the combined arms PS2 operations and the ship battles of Archeage. Even with not much to show for it in terms of reward compared to PvE activities and raids.
Obviously, SC is a different context. First because right now, it's not even achieving the networking performances/stability of the games above even at their worst. And then because there won't be any quick rejoining the action available, meaning any lopsided balance will dramatically cut short the fun instead of being a hilarious wipe leading to a better prepared rematch. And balancing multi-crew ships against single pilot ships is a nightmare since there are no good solutions, just design choices that will infuriate someone no matter what. But again, and you mention it, Eve has that kind of costly one-chance-only engagements with ships of vastly different value, and manages to make it work, so it can be done. But it will take someone to make a call and decide what the game will be like, instead of promising that it'll be everything to everyone. That can't be done, and at some point CIG will have to cut out the bullpoop and make design decisions.
I have no clue whether CIG will make it work. I just know that it can be done. Some games have managed it, while others have failed. And yes, performance is always part of the equation, although there's generally a substantial tolerance for bugs once you're no longer in reward-driven or e-sport gameplay. LotRO, to this day, still is insanely laggy to the point where the entire raid can have skill bars frozen for 10-20s if too many players crash into the same place at the same time. GW2 used to have even worse performance issues as it does today, and used to try and mitigate it by "culling" random players to lower the load, meaning you'd regularly die to invisible players while facing 50 players that looked like 10 a second ago. Planetside 2 has an infamous client-side hit detection which causes some utterly insane lag-induced and rage-inducing double kills. It also culls out players, but in a more subtle and less infuriating way than GW2. Even more hilarious was Archeage's infamous archery skills whose DPS was inversely proportional to your server ping. And yet, we kept coming back. Because as infuriating as the performances were, the fun of being a small cog in a bigger machine was great, from the humanoid vs humanoid battles, to the combined arms PS2 operations and the ship battles of Archeage. Even with not much to show for it in terms of reward compared to PvE activities and raids.
Obviously, SC is a different context. First because right now, it's not even achieving the networking performances/stability of the games above even at their worst. And then because there won't be any quick rejoining the action available, meaning any lopsided balance will dramatically cut short the fun instead of being a hilarious wipe leading to a better prepared rematch. And balancing multi-crew ships against single pilot ships is a nightmare since there are no good solutions, just design choices that will infuriate someone no matter what. But again, and you mention it, Eve has that kind of costly one-chance-only engagements with ships of vastly different value, and manages to make it work, so it can be done. But it will take someone to make a call and decide what the game will be like, instead of promising that it'll be everything to everyone. That can't be done, and at some point CIG will have to cut out the bullpoop and make design decisions.
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