I’ve posted this stuff before, but so long as the idiot train is running full steam in the Massively comments section, I’ll keep linking to it.
My favorite out of this batch:
It’s not just the gameplay though it’s the people, you can’t play EVE without joining a corp and being on TS or Vent, it just doesn’t work, and the problem is that usually these people are so SO far ahead in whatever they’re doing or they’re already balls deep in some espionage thing you can’t make heads nor tails of that after a couple of weeks it just fades into irritating background noise, then I mute them, then I just don’t log in any more.
Totally agree with this guy. The problem with EVE is the people.
People that mute their Corporation and then find they have little reason to login once they are done ship spinning or derping around in high-sec.
Edit: Bonus quote:
and that is the sort of attitude that could ultimately spell Eve’s downfall.
Wrong for ten years. Odds of this guy being wrong another ten? I’d say high, very high.
Hardcore Casual 
I wouldn’t even agree with that. Not fully at least. I spent a couple years of my EVE career pursuing solo activities. No corp, no coms, just me. It isn’t impossible or close to it.
It is, however, something that requires self-motivation and drive to actually figure things out, line them up, and accomplish them. Aside from maybe running missions, the game doesn’t hand you a solo activity every time you log in. You have to have a plan and a goal.
So, for him, I would say that the problem with EVE is that it isn’t WoW.
I like both games and am playing them both currently, primarily because they deliver very different experiences for me in a way that, say, Rift and WoW would not.
The real problem with the EVE community is evident any time you happen to sit on comms with Goons, FA, test, or for that matter any of the large alliances. The amount of blatant race-baiting, antisemitism and open racism is appalling. I know that its mostly cyber geeks trolling for cheap yucks amongst their on-line cyber geek friends, but god help me, I would never let my kids get on comms with those folk. In a nut shell, current eve community is a drag that keeps eve from ever being a general interest title.
“I would never let my kids get on comms with those folk.”
As you have correctly stated the EVE is not a game designed for kids, so what’s the problem? Besides, “those folk” in RL might be very nice and polite.
No problem at all. I am only pointing out that the Massively quotes arent as off base as is being made out. Eve is a niche game, and it will remain a niche game mostly because of its community.
If you’re definition of niche is second largest subscription MMO, then yes, its niche.
I am amused by the phrase “second largest subscription MMO”. It’s true for Eve in a way that “MMO with the second largest number of subscriptions” is not.
Very clever parsing of words. Almost politician-worthy.
What is the MMORPG with the second largest number of subscriptions?
(I ask because I always used to go by mmodata.com, but I see that in the chart they released just a few months ago, they say that most companies stopped releasing sub numbers a year ago, and so the numbers there are quite old for many games, mid 2012. Is there another site whose numbers people trust, now?)
Al, you’re running into a chicken and the egg problem here. You’re saying that the reason the community is bad, is because no one wants to play EVE, because the community is so bad. I’m sure you see now how this is a chicken-egg dilemma. It’s not a real one, either, because there are plenty of other causes for the ‘bad community’, as you see it, that one could posit. One of those causes is…the gameplay. The gameplay, along with the actual and promised rule enforcement in EVE, fosters a community. Yes, this community, as all communities do, quickly begins to exercise a feedback effect on new members of the community. To assume that this feedback effect is the ultimate cause, of itself, is both naive and logically unsound. It’s theoretically possible for random chance alone to cause something like that and for feedback to then continue it, but in practice there’s nearly always an important effect from the initial conditions.
I take it you’ve never experienced the company of men. Men as a group tend to tell crude jokes, make statements for the shock value, and rib each other. We do this to bond, toughen each other up, and to have a good time.
That is a cop out and bullshit. Real man respect their fellows. Effeminate losers hide behind their computers saying things that they could never say in real life for fear of being pummeled.
And yet, you say “effeminate losers” as a derogatory term. Why are you insulting people that may be of that persuasion?
If you think racism is “a good time”, then you’re not a man. You’re scum.
So you’ve never been to a comedy show?
@SynCaine next to me (since, for some reason, it doesn’t have a reply button)
I’m not carson, but I’ve seen (generally recordings of) a comedy show or two like that. I think those “comedians” are scum, and frequently not very funny, either. Did not enjoy; would not see again.
It’s all context to me. For instance, I find the Comedy Central roasts hilarious, even if a lot of what is said during that in a vacuum is horrible. I also find someone like Lisa Lampanelli funny in context, and I’m always amused when someone goes to that show and then finds her offensive. That’s exactly what you signed up for.
I would respectfully suggest that the EVE community is not at all unique in having problems in that regard and that if bad behavior on coms was actually a barrier to mass appeal, then Halo or League of Legends or any number of other games with competitive, online, PvP oriented elements would be similarly constrained. (And you left out sexism and linking porn in fleet chat, which probably means you haven’t been on enough ops with TEST.)
Your statement also seems to presume that, in order to play EVE, you have to be in a big null sec corp. Most of my EVE career has been in small corps with friends. You can choose who you play with in EVE and don’t have to run with people you find offensive. My own null sec corp is very chill as we’re mostly old farts with kids and such.
But I know what you mean. Our alliance is in the CFC. I’ve been in those fleets. They have been more of the exception than the rule for me, and there are some FCs that will kick people for going over the line, but I cannot deny what you mention occurs regularly.
I think the issue is pretending EVE is some unique snowflake in this regard, or that the behavior in EVE is worse than the average. Barens chat was barens chat for a reason. One quick pass over LoL’s Tribunal will make you wish you were in a CFC fleet.
An easy argument could be made that the EVE community is in fact far more mature, given the nature of the game, which is why the Massively comments section continues to entertain me.
Personally, I’ve found both the most mature chats in any MMO that I’ve played in EVE(because it attracts those players due to it’s nature), and also the most offensive chats of any MMO in EVE(due to its nature, and also the looser moderation than some other MMOs). If someone can’t handle the task of picking which chatroom to make their home, than they’re not ready/right for EVE, I’d say.
Pick any online interaction, of any kind, game or no game, and you will have those people trolling and otherwise being not very nice. Agreed.
EVE isn’t special in this regard, but there are plenty of companies that are more proactive in policing this sort of thing. It took CCP forever for a dev to come out and say “jewgold” was offensive and had no place on the forums. Similarly CCP is slow as hell responding to race baiting character and ship names. One thing that a company can do to grow its subscriptions is to make sure that it has a friendly welcoming environment for all its players – CCP has historically winkwink nod noded at the childishness abuse that is thrown around in local, etc. . . The excuse they give is that this is supposed to be a mature title – but in my opinion, that is nonsense and counterproductive to their bottom line.
“One thing that a company can do to grow its subscriptions is to make sure that it has a friendly welcoming environment for all its players”
That’s simply not possible. You can’t please the person who wants a polite game, and also the person who wants a cutthroat game. You have to pick and choose what your target audience is. Once you acknowledge that obvious fact, then you have to look at what the audience that your gameplay will attract is, and consider how that specific audience wants to be treated. That’s exactly what CCP has done. Their advertising, as is said over and over, has often included the phrase “Be the villain.” If you’re attracting players with that phrase, then you can’t over-moderate without causing a lot of player rage.
there is a difference between have a cutthroat game and condoning/tolerating racism.
“there is a difference between have a cutthroat game and condoning/tolerating racism.”
Who said there wasn’t?
Any game that condones or encourages ass-hattery limits their potential audience. I don’t have a problem with that. It’s naive to think that what happens in EvE is actually reflective of society.
I’m going to use a real life example. A close friend was one of those GIFT folk, a complete idiot online and said the most insane things, similar to what this thread alludes to. Mid 20s. He always had backup in real world but he’d pull the same stuff in public. A couple years back, he stepped out for a smoke, talked some smack, ended up in emergency ER and spent 3 weeks in the hospital.
People mature enough to see the difference between a game and the real world are not as common as we like to think.
Al, how do you deal with people who make racist/sexist remarks in real life?
Rammstein:
” You can’t please the person who wants a polite game, and also the person who wants a cutthroat game. You have to pick and choose what your target audience is.”
Why not? I mean, are any keen EVE players actually going to quit if they’re told they will get infractions if they get caught calling other players racist or sexist names?
Fact is, CCP are lazy and simply left their sandbox to become a Lord of the Flies cesspit. You can tend a sandpit game and the gameplay doesn’t magically become less fun.
What’s racist and sexist to you might be normal or funny to me. Depending on where you fall, maybe what you find offensive the majority finds normal, and it’s you who is the problem vs the content. We see this all the time with fringe groups like crazy feminists or PETA.
Clearly what CCP has done up to now has worked for them overall. Perhaps not perfect, but certainly not a big-enough problem to harm the game. Not everyone wants to play in a whitewashed environment where everything is super clean and PC. In fact, a lot of very popular forms of entertainment are such because they don’t do this.
EVE threads usually provide a rich vein of “that will kill the game!” comments about mechanics that have been in place for the entirety of EVE’s decade of constant growth. It’s just background noise now.
@Al
Bad behaviour isn’t exclusive to EVE Al. COD has some of the most vile players of any online community and some of the worst are in the 12 to 18 year old age group.
Every community has its bad eggs. Have you not played other online games? I am assuming you have had a direct bad experience in EVE?
The key is finding like minded players in a corp/clan/guild that follow your ideals. You would be surprised where you find “civil” minded folks.
@spinks
“Why not? I mean, are any keen EVE players actually going to quit if they’re told they will get infractions if they get caught calling other players racist or sexist names? ”
Perhaps, although that’s not really anything close to what I’m talking about. Here’s an analogy: games are like cities, and where you put your city is like your choice of game rules/regulations. There’s a vast territory of possible regulation, hundreds of square miles. You’ve pointed out that you could be here, or a few hundred feet another way, and are asking “is anyone really going to quit because you moved the spot a few hundred feet?” That’s completely beside the point. If I’m looking for a spot ‘here’, and you put your game down 50 miles away, I won’t want to play it. Your example is totally irrelevant to that fact. my point was more that some areas have different terrain, and different industries/crops grow better in different terrain. The gameplay of your game is analogous to that. Your example is even ‘more’ irrelevant to that point.
The racism point is a nonstarter. No one, that I’ve seen in this thread, is saying “racism is A-OK!”, people are just saying that certain groups of players are more resistant to regulation than others, and that it becomes a balancing act for developers . But even on that one point, which is basically a red herring at this point, because it’s being blown out of all proportion considering it’s just one issue out of many, there’s still a gray area, even though we seem to be agreeing it should be regulated. How much should it be regulated? How should it be regulated? If you say it’s simple and clearcut, then fine, anyone who even mentions the concept of race gets banned. That includes you spinks, you used the word “racism”. Banned for life. Oh, that’s not what you meant, you only meant it’s banned if used in an insult? Gray area. Punishements less than lifelong bans, to cover mistakes? Gray area. etc. This is pretty much just an expansion of what Syn was saying, he said people don’t want to play in a whitewashed environment, and this example is just illustrating why that’s so–because the whitewash is inevitably laid on with a very wide brush, and in order to cover up that one topic that you just can’t bear to ever see, you end up covering most everything. If you want to play in those whitewashed environments–they exist. But they don’t exist just a few hundred meters over from EVE, sorry. You have to go 50 miles. To continue the analogy beyond all reasonable bounds, there are rough and tumble mining towns up in the mountains, far from civilization. Then there are more polished cities on the floodplains. But if you tried to build a city in the ravines between the two, they would be washed away by a flash flood in the first storm. A flash flood of whitewash. (p.s. don’t ban me and Syncaine for saying ‘whitewash’, it’s not a racist term, but a literally white substance made from a mixture of calcium hydroxide and calcium carbonate, commonly known to people of this age from the novel which has absolutely nothing to do with racism or prejudice whatsoever, Tom Sawyer) In the sequel, Tom Sawyer Online, Tom paints the fence with whitewash, instead of by tricking friends to help him, by quickly graffiti’ing the fence with the phrase “Tom Sawyer is a (racist term redacted)”, and then waiting for the inevitable whitewash flood to come down the ravine and coat the fence for him. 2000 experience and the start of an epic questchain. Sadly, this is classed as an exploit, and Tom leaves to play EVE online, becoming the most famous scammer that game has ever known.
“Fact is, CCP are lazy and simply left their sandbox to become a Lord of the Flies cesspit. You can tend a sandpit game and the gameplay doesn’t magically become less fun.”
Tom Sawyer is lazy. CCP releases free expansions twice a year. One of these things is not like the other.