HonestJohn

True enough, they could have had player groups grabbing land claims on a mostly land-based map, raiding BPC villages to take natives captive to work at crafting/gathering tasks, while fighting against other player groups to expand and hold territory they'd stolen to being with, and called it a nation building sandbox game. Might have had trouble marketing that too, but they can do anything with their own game.

Pirates had few if any laws keeping them from doing whatever they wanted, and without laws and consequences for your actions you cannot have a successful community of more than a few people. There's no way enough pirates could ever have worked together to maintain anything for any amount of time. The whole basis of piracy is taking things others have instead of making/earning it yourself. The exact opposite of the kind of mechanic this game is built on. This is a sim of European Colonialism in pirate clothes. Would make more sense if they had us running around in red or blue coats and those ridiculous powdered wigs, with NPC slaves instead of NPC crew, plantations instead of farm plots, mines instead of metal/stone nodes.

You can't really say it's PVEers versus everyone else - it's PVEers versus PVPers. Funny thing is, you rarely find any PVEers who want to log into a PVP server to do things that mess with the PVP players, while it's very easy to find PVPers running around the PVE servers making life miserable for PVE players. But to answer your comment, it's because you shouldn't have one set of rules of both PVP and PVE versions of any game, it's foolish. They are not the same game with a few limits added, they are different game experiences and styles with different goals and reasons to play. You can't tell me it's hard to have different mechanics in place for them, that argument is just an excuse for developers not putting more time and work into creating both versions of their games. I don't expect that at EA launch, but after a lot of work has gone in they should be able to start working toward good experiences for both types of players, it makes financial sense and they are doing this to make money.

Okay, trying to be neutral but I think there's some flaws here. You seem to be having more of an issue with companies that have large claims where resources are located that only claim the area for the purpose of taxing anyone gathering those resources. First thing, the devs sold the game as being about taking control of lots of territory and making profit from it. One of the only ways to do that currently is taxes. I wish you could sell crafted things to traders or something similar to make money but we can't. Second thing, the game caters to the largest companies, which obviously isn't your play style. Mine either, I switched to an unofficial PvPvE where PvP is only in certain areas and the rest is true PvE. Moreso, I don't think many players want to log in once a day to reset claims, collect taxes, and log off. Not really much fun in that. Obviously there are some, just like the trolls who play only to overload rafts, lead alphas to your base, and use other exploits solely to ruin the experience for others. Can't avoid them in games any more than in life. There's always someone who doesn't care or just gets their kicks making others miserable. I think the bigger issue for most of us is the fact that the game caters to groups that take so many claims. Like someone else said in a different post, it's EVE in pirate skins. It is not a pirate MMO. Pirates would never form such large companies, and never try to hold and maintain such large claims. It's an identity crisis. If you want a pirate MMO you need to rely on unofficials and the modders. The official game here is just a new flavor of what you find in so many other games.

The official page talks about building a raft, joining some friends, and setting sail for adventure. Not at all the actual experience. I think a lot of the problem is the image versus the reality. I never played EVE, wouldn't as I don't enjoy the PVP game, and was looking for the calmer PVE game which was sold as part of Atlas. There is no official PVE, and I don't think there's a PVE in EVE either from what I've seen people saying, so again it comes down to an identity crisis. As usual, the problem is that PVP and PVE are too different to be built on the same game platform with just a few changes.

The taxation idea makes perfect sense if you have a PVE game where a group of friends has found and claimed a small area for themselves and has limited resources there for them to use to build their base and ships. Without it, as has been shown again and again, they will constantly have people coming from other areas to strip away the resources on their claim and will not be able to make progress themselves. The whole reason for a claim is to have a place to build at with some resources to use. We had a 2-flag claim for a group of several players on a small island and all we wanted was to harvest the trees and metal there to build with, but every night we logged in to find rafts on the shores and all the trees and nodes gone. Without taxation we never would have had enough resources to do anything ourselves but build rafts. Of course it can be abused, PVE is half full of people who abuse every aspect of the game, but the intended use is completely valid and correct.

You don't make sense, you play on PVE but you want to be able to steal someone's claim? That's the number one problem with official PVE and why so many leave it for unofficials. IN a PVE game nobody is supposed to be able to steal from you, it is supposed to be you versus the environment/NPC/game mechanics. Nothing another player does is supposed to be able to have a negative impact on your game. That would be PVP, so maybe you are in the wrong game mode.

A lot of the problem that leads to these ongoing debates is the way this game is marketed. A lot of people see it as a pirate game, where you and some friends can get a start, build a ship, sail out and find a place to lay a claim, make a base and advance, then go out and have adventures. This sadly is not how the game is actually made. No small group of friends can do this as they will get rolled over or gobbled up or constantly lose any progress either to larger groups in PVP or to exploit players in PVE. The only place you can find that type of gameplay is on an unofficial with a like-minded admin group. The base game isn't a pirate game at all, since it caters to people who tribe up in large companies and claim large territories to take resources from and fight over. That is colonialism, most of us learned about it in school - think of the British Empire. The game has an identity problem. It could easily have been made into two games, one being the pirate game focused on the small group of friends banding together to form a company with a few large ships and one base that goes out to adventure together. The other game could be the Empires game, where people band together under a few large flags and fight to take and hold and exploit the colonial areas that have the rich resources. Sad truth is, you can't make one game that does both. Maybe some conversion mods will aim to fix that, but for now the official game we have is not a pirate game at all, it's an Empire game in pirate clothing. Hopefully change will come in time, till then find a good unofficial if you aren't looking for the Empire experience and you can have a great time with the game.