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“EVE Online is a unique piece of science fiction that is ‘participatory’.”- CCP Seagull, December 2012
EVE Online is heading into its Second Decade with renewed vigour and a new development strategy. At the CSM Summit in December, Executive Producer CCP Unifex and Development Director CCP Seagull explained how future development and expansions will be broader in scope than recent “collections of features” stating that CCP “want to create something more inspirational, that players aspire to play.”
With the return of Live Events such as the Battle for Caldari Prime, clearly the prime fiction of EVE is back in favour as part of this new thematic approach to expansions. However, EVE’s story is very much a tale of two playstyles, with an entirely player-driven narrative unfolding daily in parallel to the reinvigorated backstory. Often, they do not mix well. How can these two disparate elements be united or at least comfortably co-exist in a single sandbox universe?
An interesting Blog Banter from Stan. So, I did this interview..
Which was ALL about what we are discussing right now.
I got that interview because of this post.
In that post I show that both can exist, and even support each other. But you gotta drop the old playbook.
What is the “old playbook” you may ask? It’s the book where the following things happen:
- The event starts in one location
- Everybody is invited
- The ending is pre-determined
The is Eve. There is every reason to up the game, to trash the old playbook in such a way that game like WoW or Lotro will NEVER be able to compare or compete.
The old playbook doesn’t work here because, as I mentioned before:
- In other games, it takes a few minutes to go from where you are to the event site, then a few minutes to get back again. In Eve, that’s just not reasonable.
- In other games, what you are in is good enough. That again doesn’t work for Eve Online, because ships have different roles and a big battleship isn’t the best ship for everything.
- In other games, what you are currently doing isn’t so important you can’t step away from it. In Eve, that is certainly not the case.
To see what the playbook could really be, check out my original post.
2nd Anomaly From the Left 
Eve players should have influence on the story, but we should not forget that we can only operate as long as concord permits it. If certain factions of players think it is a bright idea to attack politicians of a nation in high security space they should think about what concord could do.
You violating non capsuliers in empire space? Ok, than we just revoke your pilot license for 60 Days. Effect would be the same as a ban but certainly an organization as powerful as concord would use that technique to prevent politician slaughtering in high sec.
There will never be enough CCP live event actors to prevent such kind of thing but that doesn’t mean that the storyline of eve should always go like: “there was this famous politician who did […] and got killed by capusliers”
That wouldn’t be a good storyline and enough entities in eve wouldn’t care about it even if it would lead to the end of eve for capsul pilots as concord pulled the plug.
As much as I would like to see another eve novel it is difficult to write a story that should happen in the future but is influenced by players. So a new novel would have to focus on past events and is maybe written while the live events occur.
As far as I recall, Lore regarding Concord is expressed as a deterrent not against Capsuleers, but against the Four major nations. Thus, Concord has no direct authority against Capsuleers per se. But yeah, it can’t all be the same “Politician X goes from point A to point B, wonder what will happen..”
As far as a new book, I do tend to agree with you if you try to do it on the same scope as the capsuleers, but it isn’t all that hard if you just go below the first vantage point. There are a myriad of lore opportunities that one can grab if you are creative enough to see it.
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