After 11 years in EU (actually, 12 if you include closed beta when nothing worked well haha), I have seen every change this game has gone through, good and bad. After some chatting with friends and soc-mates, I decided to compile a list of game mechanics that changed or were added which contributed to issues within the EU. After the following list of problems, I'll also throw in some of the really positive changes :laugh:
The Bad:
#1 Planet Partners: This has the biggest problem, in my opinion, for the Entropia Universe. I understand the need to expand the actual universe with more planets and space exploration. However, the novelty of having all kinds of whacky, themed worlds owned by people outside of the original company is just not realistic. We had a game of small popularity that tried to expand too quickly. The people who bought in as Planet Partners have mostly failed.
Why is this a problem? It creates a VERY bad image for new players who come in on failed planets. The advertising the Partners did reflects on the game as a whole, and when new players are seeing failures it creates a bad image for Planet Calypso.
MindArk, you want to expand the Universe and the player base? Do your OWN advertising and create your OWN Universe. We had CND, CP, and Planet Calypso, all developed initially by MA. They should have just developed more planets on their own with the care that was put into Planet Calypso. On top of that, their own high-quality advertising would have been sufficient for bringing in new players into a working system. All new players would have started on Calypso, and eventually could find their way to other MA-owned planets.
#2 Amped Mining: Honestly, I despise mining amps now. Why? It leads to ridiculous ATH finds (see the following section). The market becomes flooded by tens of thousands of PEDs worth of ONE ore in a short period of time, which creates a negative flux in market prices during that period of time. A new Chevy Corvette (in the US) costs $50,000. What happens if Chevy decides to manufacture hundreds of thousands more of these cars and they are just flooding the car lots? That price is going to get hacked to pieces.
FOMA/CND and Hell are fine. It's cool that finds are a bit harder to get, but they are usually a bit bigger than normal. Nothing wrong with that, but the scaling of FOMA/Hell with amps is outrageous.
What should we do for mining? Increase range and depth/rarity chances with amps (see why tiers are bad in section #4). Ugh, and separate finder types again (ores, enmat, treasure).
#3 Ridiculous ATHs: Of course we all hope that we'll be the next person to see 6-digits, but it's nearly impossible, and when it does happen we see the loot returns swing very low for most of us. What happens when a player, especially a new player, is lucky enough to pop huge swirlies? A large chunk is withdrawn (therefor removing PEDs from the system) and they go back to playing with very little. Later I'll go into past systems and why they were good.
#4 Tier System: Is having 20 more DPS or 300 more depth awesome? Yes, of course. Is the tier system the way to do it? No. We have amps and plating, leave it at that. As I said in section #2, mining amps should be for range and depth, not size. Tiering leads to lack of interest in higher-level items (not always of course). But without tiers, we could work on having more items to fill in empty areas between other items, and even higher level items past what we have. This would make medium level-gear more accessible and allow uber players to have new, higher level items that don't exist. 30,000+ PED for a level 50 UL/SIB handgun is... silly. I don't say this out of jealousy or anything, because I have owned a tier7 X5 at one point, so I've been there and done that. It's still ridiculous. This is not a complaint about the cost of actually tiering items.
Instead of items stalemating at a certain point on the higher-end, we should have item drops of stronger items for the higher end players to increase their DPS. This means that I'm not looting silly EC-100s from level 82 Vanguards (or Quasar for that matter. Why is a level 540 mob dropping an EC-100?). That doesn't mean every high level loot should have uber items either, of course.
#5 Removing PEDs from loot: This one, to this day, still bugs the hell out of me. Every loot is flooded with materials that aren't worth selling at 101%. This also hurts crafting. There is a recent post on these forums about how the crafting system is jacked up, so I won't go into it. But that thread is dead-on. Basically, as you go up into higher levels of crafting, less materials should be used and more assembled components need to be used. Add PEDs back into loot, make materials worthwhile in loot (they don't need to be 150% or anything crazy, but finding a way to make materials worth selling, even at 105-107% for basic materials would balance the go-between for the professions). HOWEVER, as I said with amped mining, we also shouldn't be getting tens of thousands of oil in an uber loot.
#6 Limited items: AHHHH! This is another awful system. Nothing wrong with SIB, but (L) is painful. I believe it was Kim who even agreed with this. Limited items were supposedly intended to be rare and strong. THIS makes complete sense if you ask me. Limited items would be strong for their level, and not a common sight in loot, which means the markup would be higher and give a boost to the economy. Hunters would find rare gear worth selling and buying for a fair markup and crafters would get the occasional (L) BP for mining and hunting gear. These would have higher crafting costs because of the strength-per-level of said item. With my previous views on UL items being more common (at the lowest level, but getting rarer at higher levels of course), this system of rare (L) items would work very well.
Let's say we're using level 50 weapons. On that same level: UL items < Rare, stronger UL items of the same level < Rarer, stronger L items of the same level.
#7 ESI's/Selling Skills: Just... bad. But why? New players who come into the game, drop insane money into the game, and eat their way up to the ladder from one person's skill sell-out. This is perhaps a personal issue when it comes to games, but it becomes a very "Pay-2-Win" format. But on top of that, I think that having a player who is interested in the game deposit slowly over time is better than a quick influx of money. HOWEVER, the idea of looting ESI's is not a bad plan... BUT what if they weren't ESI's? What if the chips that dropped were skill chips? Kill a Prot, and boom, 10 PED of Rifle! These could still be sold. Same for mining and crafting, their loot could also include the occasional skill chip, allowing them to add into the economy of skill sales.
For those who wish to "sell-out" could do so through a MindArk sanctioned avatar sale. This keeps shady business from being done out-of-game where unknown people are quietly selling avatars and buying avatars. MindArk could also post avatar sales so that we know, as a community, that a new person is now controlling whichever avatar. This, in the past, had create ways for people to scam because people on their friends list didn't know it was a new player.
#8 CLDs: Not much to say here, but I think this was a bad idea. It gave MA a huge, initial influx of cash, but the people who bought them and are idly collecting PEDs without paying back into the game are taking money from the game. I can't say I know the small details of how this system works, but it just doesn't seem like it was the best course of action. I could be wrong on this one.
#9 Miscellaneous: Not sticking with the roadmap, adding new features before fixing old features, server instability still an issue after so many years (client-side vs server-side tool function, creating fails), increased creature evade on top of misses, poor advertising, and ABSENTEE LA-OWNERSHIP, shared loot (really bothers me that most ubers recently have gone towards shared loot), etc.
The Good:
#1 Events: Events are a great addition to the game over the years. Shared loot is fine in this case, but only within events. SGA and TEN were solid as one-time events.
#2 Missions: Another fine content addon. It also benefits players off all levels. I would like to see all missions updated to kill-points instead of kill numbers (like some of the original missions). It's quicker for me to blast through 10,000 Atrox Young, but I don't particularly want to kill the smallest maturity to burn through a kill number.
#3 Cryengine: I don't think I need to explain how awesome it is that EU still has some of the best graphics I've ever seen in any MMO.
#4 Custom Social Interface: The new UI with custom social interface is great. Being able to filter chats, create new windows for specific uses, the player registry, etc... awesome.
#5 SIB: A great way to help with skills but also a good way to measure what level you should be at.
The Conclusion:
There have been some very good changes to the game, I won't deny that. But there are a lot of looming issues that spawned from poor mechanic implementations. I come from a time when average loot return was fair, and HOFs in the several hundreds were a sight to behold and ubers (upwards of 2-3,000) were amazing. This was, of course, in TT value. But items were more common in loot, and the economy was far more stable. Loot was also better scaled compared to mob levels and player levels. I don't care about chasing some 6-digit ATH and would be more satisfied with average loot being stronger and items being more meaningful, yet accessible (to a degree). Withdrawing was less common 7-10 years ago because people kept their earned PEDs and worked towards moving up.
It felt more like a game and less like a gamble. For those of you who are familiar with casinos and slot machines (yes, that tired equivocation)... EU went from being a penny-slot to being a $5 Progressive Jackpot slot. And for those of you who do understand what that means, it's not good. Regular gamblers know that Progressive slots are the WORST thing you can do. More people play penny slots than Progressive slots, and overtime, that leads to more money spent and more people spending their time in those chairs.
11 years of money put in and taken out, ammo burned, and trades made. I have PEDs on my card and gear that I'm satisfied with. I'm not speaking as a man on the end of my rope. I just miss PROJECT ENTROPIA and would love to see us return to a version of it with what it used to represent.
I hope you're listening Mindark/First Planet Calypso.