Earlier today, EVE Online studio CCP Games released a dev blog on the next leg of its resource distribution plan. The studio aims to “create room for a better geographical distribution of minerals,” shifting ore spawn types and quantities in an effort to push people into more dangerous, low-security areas of the game for harvesting the most valuable items in the largest quantities, and by extension, reducing the amount of material in the game, increasing ship losses, and improving the ore market. (It’s not unlike the system in fellow sandbox Ultima Online, come to think of it.)
But as fellow MMO blogger Wilhelm Arcturus of The Ancient Gaming Noob pointed out to us, nobody seems to love this plan, largely because it’s all nerfs and no actual fun gameplay. Reddit is especially unimpressed. As former CSM member Dunk Dinkle put it,
Meanwhile, the servers of EVE Online have apparently been groaning under the strain of large fights to the point that even time dilation didn’t help, at least if one player’s telling of events is to be believed. The write-up – by a member of Imperium, which is under intense fire during this war – recounts crashes, entire ship and defense systems not working or failing to load entirely, and actions taking as long as 180 seconds to initiate for a battle that reportedly didn’t reach 4,000 players. And while several server calls evidently kept their queues intact, the entire experience was a mess, and not just for those participating in the fight:The Resource Redistribution update is more "weaponized inconvenience".
No innovation, no new gameplay, all stick, no carrot…
— Dunk Dinkle (@DunkDinkle) September 25, 2020
“This isn’t even the Götterdämmerung, the Ragnarök, the Armageddon of this war. No titans were dropped; no one was hurting for a week. Fights will get bigger. And if the node keeps crashing, people are really going to ask if they want to keep playing EVE.
“I’ve been told by people that undock for other things than giant fights that the servers have been pretty bad all around New Eden. Look, when the high sec people start to notice that the server is lagging, things are really bad.”
As for those who do want to keep playing EVE, especially in Japan, there’s good news on that front as CCP Games is working on Japanese localization efforts to better support and expand to the Japanese Capsuleer community. A timeline for when this complete localization wasn’t given, but the header image of the post notes that it should be completed this winter.
