The thing I love most about this story is that the developers (CCP) added a feature with zero documentation or explanation of how it works. Players were left to figure it out on their own (and subsequently many of the player groups who have mastered this feature have kept the knowledge to themselves, only making it more alluring).
I remember when a TON of games worked this way (not always by intention), and it's one of the things that drives me nuts about gaming today. Everything has a guide, maps, tutorials, and you are essentially told exactly what to do every step of the way (especially in MMO's). There is absolutely no sense of exploring the unknown or messing with the system and game-play mechanics to figure something out.
This is also an integral part of the appeal of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. Even if those games aren't mass market, the developers were clearly surprised by just how many people enthusiastically responded to being handed a game and told 'here, figure it out. we left you lots of clues. also, you'll die a lot.'
That's impressive, I didn't know they had sold so well.
What I meant by 'not mass market' was more the developers' reckoning of the game's appeal. In practice, a lot of people imported the game from Japan to play it in the US because they didn't even think it would get released here! Then, when it came out, IIRC sales dramatically outpaced the publisher's expectations and they had to rush to make and distribute more copies.
Given that Demon's Souls was conceived in Japan, I would describe it's mechanics as very fitting to the huge group of core-gamers there. The western success is surprising, I give you that, especially considering the rather meager marketing of the first.
There is plenty of exploration in modern MMO's if you sit at the top of the player curve. Unlike single player games they often have vary little documentation or handholding it's only the shear number of players that makes most secrets leak so fast and more importantly you dont't need to read all that player documentation of you don't want to.
A great example of this might be haste vs crit vs power. There are generally trade offs between them and the game in no way says which is more useful per point. In large part because the math depends on play stile, spec, and the dynamics of a specific fight. Still players often spend a lot of time trying different optomizations and building different simulations based on different assumptions. End result tens even hundreds of thousands of hours of experementation that ofen gets tossed out after each patch.
And because players will find this crap out on there own games have become vary vague with exactly how things work or what they changed. Aka "spell power less useful for ability X" which says vary little overall.
One of the nice things about not having documentation is that only those that take the time to explore and learn can exploit the feature. On the contrary, when documentation exists, not reading it would put you at a disadvantage.
Nobody said anything about a massive time investment. When I said "take the time to explore and learn", I just meant somebody who does it, as opposed to someone who doesn't.
In my opinion, putting options in a game for people who want to discover mechanics on their own and be rewarded for it is appealing. It goes along with the hacker mentality.
It's a subjective opinion...you don't have to agree with me.
There is a huge difference between figuring out what the best balance of stats is for min-maxing compared to the actual exploration that takes place in EVE. Seriously, it's no comparison.
It took vary little effort to understand that eve wormholes are mass limited the popup even tells you when they are about to destabilize due to traffic. On the other hand figuring out the cap recharge equation was significantly harder and far more useful.
If anything the difference was fewer players cared about wormholes and people where far less interested in sharing info about them.
Just an aside - Fez and The Binding of Isaac are 2 recent examples of games with lots of hidden content. Nifflas' (http://nifflas.ni2.se/) also often have plenty of hidden stuff for the players to find out.
Of course, the rogue-like scene is also as strong as it ever was -- and it's definitely got a ton of hidden content/game-play mechanics.
I wish I saw more games like one Ragdoll Invaders, though.
The reason I say this is that much of the hidden game-play/mechanics was emergent from the simple basic game-play -- you controlled a ragdoll shooting and avoiding a series of progressively more difficult enemies.
You could use the physics to, for instance, somersault gracefully through oncoming bullets (reducing your surface area), keep your body tightly curled into a ball if you moved slowly enough, continue to play with just one arm (the other would continue to shoot) so you could make the decision to lose an arm in order to survive.
This struck me as being really cool, and I wish there were more games which did allow 'special moves' as a natural side-effect of the physics they were using.
They were not, I assure you. Indeed it was months to get to even partial documentation of the system publicly available. Tactics were refined, information spread, and some bugs were found and exploited#. Information is always a closely guarded secret in eve.
#negative penalties from the highest level of wormhole could be used along with player used module debuffs to reduce values below 0 - on an unsigned value which then reverted to being incredibly high.
Since everyone in EVE is primarily competing against each other, this type of information is often kept close to the chest and used as leverage against others.
Since I miss eve wormholes so much I thought I'd entertain myself with some reminiscing. Heres goes.
I was amongst the first people to take up living full time in a worm hole in eve. We got stranded, and while getting ourselves out we stumbled onto some corps in the middle of a war dec and stole a tower off a freighter pilot that exploded right in front of one of my corp mates, who stole in and docked up, waiting for the cool down timer (or so the tale goes, he showed up with a small serpentis tower so no reason to doubt him). It was like an act of god to set up a base and we spent almost every day over two years in wormholes hunting other players, raiding, laying traps, and generally just being the unseen death of hundreds of players.
There where days when between 5 of us we would get 20-30 kills in a few hours, especially if we got a Jita opening. One weekend we managed to two down two towers between about 7 of us (by controlling the collapse of wormholes so reinforcements couldn't be brought in by our targets, effectively stranding the targets) just using Battleships, took forever but was heaps of fun.
I would describe living in a worm hole more like hunting than anything else, spending heaps of time trying to create a bait scenario, then releasing the trap. Nothing funnier than having the a covert ops ship accidentally bump into few retreivers, decloak, and watching them scramble in panic before we can drop on them. As must people are aligned to warp, when that happens you only have the time it takes to warp a barge to get the drop down.
We eventually got our comeuppance though. Lost something like 20 billion worth of ships, probably about 8 capital ships atleast, as well as a tonne of T3 stuff, one of the players came online outside of our normal hours with a bunch of mates... and just stole everything. Left us unable to defend against the C6, 20 strong cap fleet came in, towers fell within a fortnight, ordered out by the new occupants, and we I went back into 'normal space' and hated the game.
Within a two month most of our core group quit. I went back to boost some indy guys I was helping from within teh hole, and sent my main character to join up with a null sec group. A few months later I lost totally interest, and quit.
I still miss the wormhole days TBH, the amount of laughter, emotions, hours sitting around trying to release a trap talking on vent. I feel like signing back up now, but I know it wont be the same.
Wormholes are definitely one of the most interesting parts of EVE. Even if you're a player with powerful ships and allies and money on your side, going in and exploring one comes with the palpable risk of getting stranded inside and having to surrender all your stuff, or suddenly getting ambushed by people you didn't know were there. CCP does a nice job of making it worth the trouble, by putting all sorts of interesting stuff in wormholes that you can't find anywhere else and making the built-in AI residents more dangerous than other enemies. The fact that the connections change all the time means that it remains interesting to pop into a wormhole and explore it. On the flipside, when a wormhole opens up in comparatively 'civilized' 0-security space, sometimes wormhole denizens pop out and wreak havoc, which is fun too.
Reminds me of a higher-tech version of Chaos Zone in Continuum/Subspace. All formal etiquette was out the window, it was always funny to see zone newbies complain until the penny dropped.
I remember early on in eve (I joined pretty much when it launched) there were hidden asteroid belts in various systems that didn't appear on the maps. You instead had to warp into planets/moons, sometimes other belts if memory serves and then use the "scanner" to try and find them. I loved doing this, you'd spend a load of time constantly narrowing your scanner down to a particular direction then flying off in that direction, constantly rescanning to make sure you weren't off track.
Eventually there was a website setup by another player who'd buy the locations I and others had found and sell them on to others, since the hidden places often had better loot, or sometimes asteroid belts with no enemies.
I used to run my own wormhole when I played—the threat of losing my stuff was such a thrill it kept me playing. Of course, I mostly lost my stuff due to stupidity.
I remember when a TON of games worked this way (not always by intention), and it's one of the things that drives me nuts about gaming today. Everything has a guide, maps, tutorials, and you are essentially told exactly what to do every step of the way (especially in MMO's). There is absolutely no sense of exploring the unknown or messing with the system and game-play mechanics to figure something out.