Blog Banter SE: I wish my wife played EVE

Todays banter comes from CK himself:


What could CCP Games do to attract and maintain a higher percentage of women to the game. Will Incarna do the trick? Can anything else be done in the mean time? Can we the players do our part to share the game we love with our counterparts, with our sisters or daughters, with the Ladies in our lives? What could be added to the game to make it more attractive to them? Should anything be changed? Is the game at fault, or its player base to blame?

I wish my wife played EVE

Recently I read something about helping people jump to conclusions, this one example involved pretending to be a time traveler to garner the love from the girl of your dreams, but since this method cannot be used enmasse we must look at our other options.

Marketing, where does CCP spend their marketing dollars? I have no idea but it seems like most of it goes towards advertising on banners for various websites. Which websites? Male orientated ones! Go wack a 30 second advertisment during a girly talk show, tell them they can be the CEO of a galactic empire from their home or a mogul that controls the EVE economy and if that fails tell them about the pretty ships.

Give them something to be excited about, because lets face it EVE can get boring and then without warning be interjected with moments of face melting awesomeness. Like the butterfly effect video, highlight the awesomeness without the dodgy 'evil' Russian overlords.

What can CCP do directly? Hire Adrianne Curry and several other nerdy hot chicks to promote EVE. In Australia almost no one has heard of EVE let alone thought about trying it out. Of the people I have attempted to bring to EVE the learning curve aggrivates them to no end and the time requirments to actually learn just what is required to properly fit and fly a ship seems to instantly turn on the 'boring' switch in their brain.

If you have not seen the theme I am running with here, it is almost about taking the interesting bits to the market place then following up with an exciting community that is spurred on by CCP. To start with CCP can do the following for the existing community to get them excited enough to bring other people into the game:

• More DEV blogs and more response, when they release a devblog organise an interview on one of the many podcasts out there or release one of their own.

• Get better forums, if you cant create a decent set of forums whats the chance of your game being any good?

• Scream out your initiatives, CSM? FFS a member has to use their own webspace to publish the minutes in PDF form.  Give these people some more loving and spend as much money as you do on their flights back and forth towards support infrastructure within the community.

• Get the Chronicles out there, CCP you started with a single podcast for them then let it die in the ass - something like that is very cool but the uptake might be slow at first so dont just stop after one. Most people give no thought to the back story and universe events because it is something that can be easily ignored. Make it fun and entertaining and something easy to find - give everyone a bookmark to the chronicles on the IGB! Let the jukebox play the audio version of the chronicles.

I could go on for pages but what is the core of the problem is the interest that is created when seeing EVE, show someone one of your trailers and they will install the game. Get them logged in and once they log off I doubt you will see them again. Deliver on the promises of fun and adventure and the masses will come.

The good news is that my wife can change the skills for me in game now and I think with a bit of fun teamspeak banter she might have a laugh or two and miss the boring bits as she finds something she enjoys doing.

So getting back to the questions presented by CK, who is to blame?  Can you really blame a player for the game they are involved in?  Nope, you can ask them to contribute to and build a community but the responsibility must be solely placed and balanced precariously on CCP's head.


You can find other banters at:

Arukemos
Starfleet
Ghost Report
Astral's
Cataclysmic Variable

And a full list from CK's site.