EVE Evolved: The secret of EVE Online's success, part 2

Server model (continued):
It's no secret that I play a little Everquest 2 now and then in addition to EVE. Over the weekend, I met another Everquest 2 player at a party but soon discovered that we play on different servers. Unless one of us pays cash to transfer to the other server, we can never play together. I think this is one of the big points that developers need to get and it's one of the main failings of the ageing sharded server model. EVE Online's single-server world allows every player to potentially interact with every other player, so if you find someone that plays EVE you can always play with them.

It's been known for a long time that having friends in an MMO is a strong barrier to exit and most people play MMOs with real life friends and family. A sharded server model can prevent friends from playing together and limit the potential for making new friends in-game. But what if a game's server model could have the best of both worlds – sharding the server to provide scalable server hosting while allowing all players to play together. Surprisingly enough, Runescape hit on this idea during their early development too and use a server model that achieves just that.

While Runescape has hundreds of separate servers, players can log into any server they like. Not only does this mean that the marketplaces are more price-stable across the game since items can be transferred between servers but it means you'll always be able to play with a friend who plays the game. If current MMO developers aren't willing to subscribe to EVE Online's server model, they could at least take a cue from Runescape and stop tying players down to one server. If that happened, I think we'd see less players quitting and even more playing with their friends.

Staged delivery:
Like all game developers, CCP are big thinkers with big ideas. Their original plan for EVE Online could fill an entire book and contained such wonderful things as planetary flight, mining rogue comets in space and, of course, walking in stations. They recognised quite early on in development that this plan was going to be far too much work to feasibly implement all at once and so they opted for a staged delivery process that is still ongoing to this day. This process involves identifying which things are feasible to do now with the current resources and which will become feasible in the future. It eliminates the problem of having to spend an inordinate amount of time and money trying to deliver an infeasibly large amount of content and gameplay at launch.

As each part of the master plan becomes technically feasible, CCP set about making it a reality. Walking in stations was thought completely infeasible but as computers began to get faster and CCP began to gain the capital necessary for such an undertaking, it suddenly went from the wish-list to the development table. Walking in stations is likely to take up the bulk of CCP's focus once the Apocrypha expansion goes live and could be ready as early as winter this year.

Summary:
There are people out there that think EVE Online's success has been a colossal accident and proclaim loudly that the game is going to die in the near future. This has gone on for six years running and by now it should be clear that CCP really have hit on some important winning formulae and game design concepts. The developers themselves put it down to the player community that's built up around the game. In addition, I think ideas like offering free expansions and constant evolution of the game world have been major factors in EVE's success and the constant increase in size of its subscriber base.

There are of course other major contributing factors to EVE's success such as their committment to providing real PvP but the ones I mentioned in this article are those that could be easily applied to other MMOs. I think it's a real shame that they haven't, what do you think?