Then when they changed to Amazon Web Services for chat they turned off local for a while (blackout) and that didn't help have people want to undock in some places they couldn't tell how many or who was in local.
Topic keeps coming up in these threads, particularly the Ashes of Creation and Pax Dei threads, about play to crush and shit and people keep comparing those games to Shadowbane and claiming they are doomed to fail, so im gonna wax nostalgic a bit about Eve and what makes (made?) it work.
"local" was always looked at as a problem or something that needed to be changed or gotten rid of (like in WH space) but people who think that really do not understand how games like this work and why Eve is the only successful PVP game or what is needed for "play to crush" to actual work in a video game.
There are two primary reasons why Eve succeeded while all other games of this style (from shadowbane and on) have failed. One is risk assessment, ie "local", and the other is size of the game world.
Eve is designed in such a way that as long as you are paying attention the "hunted" can always escape from the "hunter". This is from several factors primarily of which is "local" provides instant intelligence about your surroundings and enables the player to make risk decisions based on that intelligence,
before the aggressor has an opportunity to react. It puts every single player on a level playing field with the same base line intelligence. From there each player is also equipped with a directional scanner (like ranger tracking from EQ) which gives you an additional tool to help manage the risk. As you step up your activities into more complex/higher population activities you have access to additional resources such as corp/alliance chats, scouts, etc. Now in many cases the "hunted's" activity is designed to be so boring/relaxing/tedious that they occasionally let their guard down. This is what allows hunters the opportunity for success and is part of the balancing act between wolves and sheep.
Even activities like "logout" camping still provide the hunted the opportunity to escape from danger thanks to e-warp mechanics. That means that with an ounce of preparation and paying attention to the game you are guaranteed to never, ever, ever get ganked in Eve online. The sheep can always evade the wolves, and by and large most players recognize this, realize the implication that they are responsible for their losses, they accept responsibility for their failings and seek to improve to prevent future losses, which is why the playerbase as a whole doesn't cry, whine for nerfs, etc or shrivel up and die just because they get killed like what happens in many other pvp / play to crush style games.
You cannot have a game with real risk/loss and allow situations where players can experience unavoidable loss. All deaths must be avoidable if the player must pay a penalty upon death (loss of gear/items/money/durability/whatever death mechanic you have). This is such a basic concept that everyone instinctually understands as common sense yet still every game developer other than Eve Online implements no local/no intelligence tools and adds in some sort of "rogue" class with complete stealth/invisibility and give them bonuses to alpha strike/1 shot kill abilities and then lets them roam and around with zero counters or ability to avoid and then wonder why the player base keeps shrinking.
The second reason, Size, is just as important, not from an individual stand point, but from an overall game health perspective. While Eve started with like 5k zones and has doubled that or more over the years, they can do so because it's space and space is completely fucking empty with basically 2d cosmos/nebula art as background image which allows you to create basically infinite amount of zones. Note that a "zone" in Eve online is in many ways, larger than entire MMO game worlds of other games.
Fantasy MMOs however always insist on hand crafted worlds/zones and thus are infinitesimally tiny in comparison. Until procedural generation came around it was impossible to create enough zones to support a Fantasy PVP MMO and now, even with procedural generation, nobody is actually using it correctly to create worlds large enough to support play to crush PVP.
Fantasy worlds are, fucking tiny. miniscule. Take EQ or WoW for example. both of which may "feel" like they are large worlds but the truth is that they can be crossed from one side of the world to the other, without mounts/fast travel mechanics, in an hour or less. 1 hour to walk from one side of the world to the other, avg movement speed of a human being is 3mph so congrats, Norrath or Azeroth are literally 3 miles wide. That isn't' a world. it's not even a city. it's barely even a town, with a like a single stop sign at the sole intersection because there isn't enough traffic to justify putting in a stop light. Like 1 gas station and 1 diner. and maybe 30 houses. That's how big those "worlds" are so it's no wonder when one side ends up "winning."
When dealing with such tiny "worlds" then it becomes absolutely trivial for a small faction to "take over" and "win" the game world. How many people do you think it would take to "take over" a 3 by 3 mile "town"? like 5-10 dudes with a couple of shotguns could take over and rule that town indefinitely (until outside forces ie federal law enforcement arrived). When you add in mounts/fast travel it becomes even more trivial for a small group to end up controlling the entire map. The ability to teleport your forces practically anywhere on the map in 10-15 minutes allows the winning side to dominate the entire server and prevent anyone from challenging them. This leads to stagnation and of course server death.
Fantasy MMO worlds aren't big enough for the logistics of running/controlling/ruling the zones to be large enough to force control out of the hands of a small few and into a collection of officers/leaders to allow human nature to have a chance to take over and allow for internal conflicts, betrayal, etc to happen which is how you keep things fresh. This is why in Eve you can have alliances of tens of thousands of players fighting other alliances of tens of thousands of players and half the time defeat comes from within, internal squabbling and betrayal rather than outside conquest. Nobody is too big to fail but everyone is too big for a one man show to run everything, shit must be delegated, people must be trusted to get things done and either they do or they don't, they are held responsible for it or they take off with half the guild bank's assets in some grand heist. The game world is so fucking huge that wars take weeks if not months of planning and logistics, movement of troops and assets into position in staging areas.
The game world is so big that, in order to actually control large parts of it, you have to become so large yourself that you inevitably collapse from your own bloated bureaucracy and infighting. No in game organization can survive the number of ego's needed to herd the amount of cats you need to actually own that much of the game world.
so yeah, TLDR: Risk Assessment and size are the two ingredients needed for play to crush style PVP games to succeed. Until recent advances in procedural generation, it's been impossible for fantasy MMOs to make their worlds big enough to cover the size requirement, and even now they are still going for hand crafted tiny towns rather than actual worlds. also nobody designing these games understands risk assessment since they all think "local" was a mistake and keep thinking about the "correct" way to implement rogues. Ashes of Creation is at least delaying rogues until after alpha 2 but I doubt they will learn the lesson they need in time. Pax Dei I am hoping will step up their use of procedural generation and exponentially increase the size of their world
