At EVE Online's yearly Fanfest in Reykjavik, Iceland, developer CCP Games announced the 22-year-old MMO's next expansion, Legion. In addition to new ships and quality of life features, Legion looks to offer one of the most creative solutions I've ever seen for getting new players invested in a complex, long-runner MMO: Just put the veteran players in charge.
Members of EVE's player corporations will be able to create missions—collect so much of a material, eliminate players of an enemy faction, etc.—and post them on a "Freelance Jobs" board for unaffiliated players to pick up. Speaking with EVE senior brand manager Ingibjörg Lilja Diðriksdóttir at Fanfest, she called it a "player-driven, player-created gig economy."
There's an element of self-service for the corps: Getting extra help in areas they aren't specialized to handle, or farming out grunt work to freelancers (just like real life!). But the real coup is how this will, hopefully, allow the corporations to recruit new members, while inexperienced players will be introduced to EVE's player economy by the game itself.
Instead of jumping from developer-made tutorial missions straight into a Discord full of strangers, you'll be introduced to them through in-game objectives that benefit both sides of the relationship.
CCP knows it makes a challenging game—that's a major part of this rigorous, economics-focused space sim's enduring appeal. But that also compounds the struggle of attracting new players to an MMO with so much history already under its belt, and combatting any perception that the party might already be over.
"You're not catching up," said Diðriksdóttir. "You don't have 20 years of catching up to do. You can start now, you can still make your mark, and you can still make a real impact from day one."
Corporate grindset
EVE has an outsize reputation for massive conflicts and audacious intrigues perpetrated by its player-run corporations—to compare them to other games' guilds does a disservice to their professionalized organization both in and outside of the game. Their spreadsheets, payrolls, and communication long ago expanded beyond the in-game tools offered by CCP and rival honest-to-god businesses that bring in real dollars.
They've become the main selling point of the game: Prove yourself in a singular PvP sandbox, and potentially form the sort of friendships that will have you shipping off to Iceland for a convention multiple times over the course of 20 years.
Speaking to players at Fanfest, including longtime EVE streamer Rahne, I got the impression that getting fresh faces into EVE and, crucially, keeping them there, was a major concern among veteran players. Rahne in particular thought that hooking them into EVE's ecosystem of corporations and alliances as quickly and smoothly as possible was the way to do it.
And CCP seems to agree: "If you make it into a player organization, your chance of surviving EVE goes up tenfold," said EVE creative director Bergur Finnbogason. "There are two moments like that: Getting into a player organization, and the other is, if you die flying with another player, and that player tells you why you died."
Many MMOs have problems with tutorials, or let you breeze through levels 1-40 until you smash headfirst into the far more complex endgame or "real" part of the experience. That's very much the case with EVE, and CCP's tutorials are no substitute for a player with thousands of hours of experience as your copilot.
"We want people to experience the beauty of EVE. And the beauty of EVE is when you fly with others," Finnbogason said.
Finnbogason and EVE game director Snorri Árnason characterized CCP's experiments with onboarding new players as a "pendulum" that has swung between careful hand-holding and absentee parenting over the years, never quite finding a way to consistently get newcomers over the social and mechanical gulf before joining a corporation. At a keynote presentation at Fanfest, Árnason told the crowd, "We're 100% sure that you will do a better job."
"I think every idea from other games has been brought up," said Árnason. EVE's economy fundamentally limits how much CCP can intervene and "baby" new players by protecting them from financial consequences or offering them safe, PvP-disabled spaces.
That's actually another area where Diðriksdóttir thinks shortening EVE's time-to-corp might help: In addition to having backup to prevent disasters in the first place, a corporation's financial resources mean the loss of a ship might not be as much of a death sentence.
Mod madness
This new initiative in EVE is also just inherently cool for anyone interested in live games or modding: An MMO where players create the quests, and are so supported by the developers that in-game progression can be tied to user-made content from the moment you boot it up.
I can't remember anything like this outside extremely niche or otherwise fully DIY games: Some Multi-User Dungeons, Neverwinter Nights' "persistent world" mini-MMOs, and fan servers for mothballed games like Star Wars Galaxies or City of Heroes.
CCP has said that building out this capacity in EVE resulted in an overhaul in how it designs and implements new story missions internally—basically, it sounds like the tools are now much easier and more intuitive. While Diðriksdóttir and EVE producer Ed Smith wouldn't definitively say these tools would come to players, it certainly seems like that's the way EVE is heading, potentially allowing for even more complex community-made missions in future expansions.
Player-created missions seamlessly integrated into EVE on equal footing with CCP's own, working together to drive future player-led wars? That strikes me as potentially incredible innovation out of a game that's already been kicking for nearly a quarter-century.
Even more traditional games might have something to learn from how EVE is handling its player retention/new player conundrum. Destiny's weekly grind of repeatable activities always felt like it was in an entirely separate sphere from its challenging, brilliantly designed dungeons and raids—the best part of the game is the least approachable, just like EVE's corporations and fleet battles. Bungie's statistics have shown that only an estimated 11% of players ever completed a raid.
Everyone I spoke with at EVE Fanfest was excited about getting new players into the game, and they seemed on board with the Freelance Job board as a way to do it. So if you've ever been EVE-curious, maybe just wait a few more weeks to give it a shot: The Legion expansion and its Freelance Jobs arrive on May 27.
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