Catering the hardcore

Completing my comments about Eve-Online last patch (I canceled my sub again one week after the patch, as expected).

Right from a forum thread:

Invention is only for the elite with enough ISK to buy the BPO outright (so why need invention), super huge alliances camping 0.0 complexes 23/7, and all that.

Invention is not for the average player, or even above average. It’s only for BoB.

An invented item, once produced, would cost 1000 times more than an identical item produced from an unresearched BPO. Apparently CCP is very, very anal about protecting the ISK printing rights of the BPO cartels.

As I suspected, much of the “content” of this last patch is nothing that the infamous “casual player” can hope to ever see.

Last thing I remember that vaguely affected *me* was the introduction of the asian races one year ago and, recently, the instant bookmarks, the new character creation and the new map display. All features marginal to the gameplay and involvement.

CCP is doing near nothing for new players approaching the game and needing better “hooks”. For now it’s working for them, a week ago the concurrent number of players was near 32k.

But I still believe that they would be much more successful if they started to design the game also to “bridge” that gap between casuals and hardcore. This is another of those themes that is becoming common across titles and genres.

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