Honestly, I couldn't care less what it borrows from Eve.

It does a lot of things right that put it ahead of Eve in my book. It's a fun, complex and interesting sandbox MMO. Who really cares about anything else? Play it and have fun. There is plenty of room in the MMO stratosphere for all of us without getting caught up in the mess of intellectual proprietorship.

The more you play it the more you can see the differences. But obviously if your going to group MMO's together Perpetuum and EVE would be the Walter and Perry of the MMO world.

1 NIC to whomever gets that reference.

Every time I see this argument I say we need more games in the style of EVE. And then I ask people if they would rather have more WoW clones?

And they say "yeah, good point."

P.S. Neoxx you looked better with more weight on. Eat cake! Diets are overrated.

as said mmo's copy left and right since nearly forever.
most of us are just so used to that theme park mmo's did this since their beginning (first they evolved out off stuff like EQ and since WoW it's more copying without innovation i'd say) as this is where the masses will play and thus most publishers just care for that stuff.

so we the more sandbox loving ppl also deserve a few games that evolve of the goods of our genre like UO, eve..:)

it's about damn time someone took a closer look at eve or was "thinking the same" and made something out of it that was not there before..just 2 facts i can tell so far that make me like perpetuum over eve so far: no local chat radar and no endless gate camping being 99% of the pvp (hopefully )

None of the above.  This game shares none of the source code with EVE, so there is no legal grounds for CCP to sue.  I have no doubt the developers of Perpetuum have played EVE for years and are intimately familiar with it's flaws and virtues.  It has taken more than inspiration from EVE, and in the process has improved on the gameplay significantly.  This game stands on EVE shoulders.  We are talking Progress with the capital 'P'.

And this entire thread is being responded to with only my alts.

I'm concerned that some of the parts of EVE that I quite disliked (for instance, the fact that playing the game consisted primarily of waiting because of how many set-and-forget mechanics there were) are in Perpetuum.

Sandbox PvP tends to be a bad idea in game design because it ensures the least fun battles are those that happen most often. In a PvP sandbox, there's no reason to fight when you can't win (unless you can't escape). The game naturally devolves into what is essentially ganking because it's pointless to fight when you have the option of safely retreating in the face of even (or worse) odds.

I've made a couple of blog posts on this topic that, if you're interested in a critique of open world PvP games, you should check out:

Why Open-World PvP-Focused MMORPGs are Dead
Sandbox MMO Design Problems

Those concerns and criticisms aside, there should definitely be more MMOs similar to EVE in terms of complexity and depth.

Yeah I'm quite pleased that once you engage/see someone as long as you have at least a few folks who are faster than the other side's slowest bots there will be losses.  It's not like eve at all in that respect.

You should have honestly read my post before responding to it. I said I was "concerned". I have not played the game enough to actually make factual statements and I made no such statements in my post.

What you say sounds promising. Unfortunately, the earlier part of the game you need to grind through to get to the fun PvP stuff that you describe may be too boring for me to bother going that far. I'm still in the process of giving the game an honest shot. I do not have time to put more than an hour a night into this game. There are more fun games to play (at least for now, I anticipate Perpetuum will get more interesting as I play more) and other things to be done.

What a croak of horse manure.

It was a "this genre is broken and this game isn't doing enough to fix that" post. There's a reason why most EVE players stick to empire space and Darkfall hasn't increased its sub numbers above (IIRC) 30k. Open world PvP is a very small niche and for a good reason.

I also was not talking about "instant escape". If someone is capable of assessing the threat level posed by an enemy force, he can easily pick to avoid all fights but those in his favor. I'm not sure what mechanics Perpetuum has in place to avoid this situation, but if it isn't avoided most of the PvP in the game will be ganking. What mechanics are in place to prevent you from accurately estimating the power of your enemy and just avoiding all fights you won't obviously win?

(Notice: I'm not making a point that Perpetuum is broken because of this, I'm asking what mechanics does Perpetuum have that prevent this. I'm not speaking out against the game, I'm wondering if it gets around a problem I see in other similar games.)

Actually, an hour or two in Perpetuum worked hard to convinced me that the game "is just like EVE". It seems to have copied much of the style and interface of eve with only minor alterations. The easiest way to have people assume (erroneously, in this case) that you are a clone is to clone immediately visible and prevalent parts of the game, like the interface.

Perpetuum certainly has plenty of its own mechanics and ideas. It's not an EVE clone, it just borrowed heavily from parts of EVE. It's good that there is another game that aims to be as deep and involved as EVE.

Please make an actual argument or do not bother to post. There's enough trolling/flaming/general idiocy on the internet already.

Also, it's "crock" not "croak". If you're going to waste everyone's time, at least use your insulting metaphors correctly.

The genre isn't broken. Niche, yes, broken, no. The main trouble is that companies who want profit will make themepark games. Sandbox games end up being made by indie devs who lack funding, or experience, or both, and the games they make tend to launch with bugs, memory leaks, client crashes and server instability. (Perpetuum is doing amazingly well here).

Open world pvp doesn't equal sandbox, nor does it have to. All those EVE players living in high sec are still playing a sandbox game, albeit most of their combat is PvE. I can't attribute this fact, but I once saw a statistic that null sec space hosts about 50,000 of EVE's players. That's a pretty respectable proportion if it's true.

Darkfall is (arguably) not a true sandbox* it's just (or was at launch) an open world PvP game and therefore does not support your argument that the genre is broken because open world PvP is broken.

There are two mechanics which do this in games in general. The first mechanic is the carrot, which lures people into PvP zones in the first place. The second mechanic is the lack of either the will or the ability to disengage.

The carrot can't just be mobs that drop better stuff, or better mining yields. It has to be something that players want, and that they will be forced to protect otherwise they risk losing. Such as owned outposts or player structures - which also serve as the second mechanic, because they have to be captured and defended.

I can't really talk about how successfully Perpetuum has done this, because I haven't played long enough to know. The ingredients are there (or in the case of player built structures are in the pipeline).

You can't really prevent people from avoiding engagements they think they won't win. It's human nature, and game mechanics need to work with human nature, not against it.

P.S. Sorry Neoxx for not trolling in your stEVE thread

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*By "sandbox" I mean a game that tries to simulate a world where players take on social, economic and military roles via their interactions with each other, where the content is largely produced by the players themselves using the tools at their disposal.