We all dare to dream of ‘EVE Forever’, but first we need to get to EVE 2033. With EVE in its 20th year, we wanted to look forward to the ways the game could grow by the time it’s 30. According to 89% of the Just About EVE Online community, New Eden’s best days are still ahead. What should they look like?

We set a bounty asking our community members to write essays about the EVE they’d love to see. The authors of the three brilliant winning essays take different approaches; where Salartarium and orik Kado reach for the surgeon’s scalpel to make small changes with big consequences, Zap reaches for the flamethrower.

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‘A look to the past’ by Salartarium

@Salartarium's **essay** is a thoughtful and thought-provoking proposal for additional financial tools that would add new depth. They go on to explore changes to structures and NPCs, as well as other balancing recommendations. If this were a dissertation, we’d give it a first class with honours.

My dream for the future of EVE Online involves looking to the past. One of the major problems with the game’s lore today is that so much content has been forgotten and removed, and so many story threads did not reach their full potential. Whatever happened to that Drone Mind that you retrieved an embryo for? What EVE needs is a restoration of disabled content. We need the SoCT missions back, we need COSMOS, lvl.5 Distribution and Mining Missions, Endless Battle, and Resource Wars. Though it would require resources to restore the content, so much of EVE lore currently has to be read online rather than from playing the game.

Though I have hope for the relaunch of the tie-in FPS game, I have realistic expectations. At the very least, CCP should bring back orbital bombardment and tie it into the current Faction Warfare Frontlines system. The system already exists and contributed to a more realistic sense of war.

Though it is a minor mechanic, corporation stocks could be expanded upon. For one, corporations that use stocks as a management tool would benefit from settings that can vary how shares affect corp mechanics, from different rights for shareholders to automatic dividends and the ability to change how long votes take.

Other financial tools could be established too. There should be in-game tools for bonds, loans, and collateral in contracts. For example, a corp should be able to create war bonds with automatic payouts that would even make wallets turn negative if funds were too low. There would still be ways to avoid paying out, but it would help to facilitate a common practice that is currently done entirely out of the game. Having contracts with set terms for loans and the ability to attach collateral would still allow for loanshark metagaming, but add a further veneer of legitimacy to the practice and make it much safer to partake in. Finally, such systems could lead to automatic SRPs (Ship Replacement Programmes), whereas now only big corporations can automate this bureaucratic task.

My next change would be to structures. I think the game needs small Citadels and more variety. I think replacing POS (player-owned starbases) with the capsuleer outposts from EVE Echoes would be a drop-in replacement. They allow a player to set up a quick base, and they also have some unique functions that would help EVE. They would organise and simplify PI (planetary industry) while still requiring investment. Also, it would make Sovereignty warfare much more interesting. Though POSs are no longer in the meta, it would concentrate structures at a few planets and would create soft targets, allowing small gang Sovereignty warfare to have much more content. Big groups would want to defend their PI and could protect a few small areas if they brought in more ISK, yet it would be a lot easier for a filamented fleet to pop in and actually destroy things.

To recreate the niche usefulness of POS and their durability, I believe there should be Tech II versions of the Citadels, another higher tier of defensive fittings, and a few unique service modules that would allow a few Citadels to have a reduced backup functionality of certain FLEX structures and IHUB upgrades. For large groups there is too much structure spam, and staging Citadels don’t feel like the fortress they should be. This plays into a few balancing ideas I have.

There should be no damage cap on structures. Reinforcement timers allow fair play, and damage caps are a necessity since most large coalitions are able to spend way more than it costs to max fit a citadel. ADM (Activity Defense Multipliers) should have to double the requirements for each level, but the capital should get a bonus for the total number of systems held to make it harder to headshot a large empire and reduce the need for a defensive rating in a war. With the increase, a counteracting +1 bonus should be given for holding an entire constellation which would stop some of the metagaming there is with Sovereignty and make the initial battles more contested to create momentum.

POS guns should be added to citadels based on size, yet they should be destructible without Citadels having to go through timers. This would allow for a sort of automatic defence of structures while simultaneously providing another soft target that fleets could come in and damage. As an extra cost, staging Keeps would be more vulnerable due to removed damage caps; these would allow for further engagement based on player actions rather than artificial limitations.

Finally, I believe CCP should add more NPCs with better AI. NPC activity in game is greatly limited by server resources but is needed due to the shrinking player population when compared to the population the map was designed for.

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‘Burn it to the ground. All of it.’ by Zapatero

Before you read the title and assume the next essay is the rantings of a bittervet, read on, for @Zapatero’s **essay** is philosophical, considered, and forward-thinking. What they’re suggesting isn’t just a renewal, but a gateway to something new that would rival the EVE Gate itself. And moreover, it comes from a place of love.

There is this thing called the circle of life. You may have heard of it. Everything alive must die and from death comes life, or something like that. It’s easily confused with a product’s life cycle, which sort of says the same thing. However, when applied to a product, it’s bizarrely reimagined as some kind of machine on which it’s believed that ‘if you pedal hard enough, the inevitable end can somehow be kept at bay’.

EVE is a product that CCP has been sweating over for more than twenty years. And while the end has been successfully delayed, it has got closer. It is closer at the start of the game’s third decade than it was at its second, which was closer than it was at launch. How close? That’s not for me to say. My task here is to offer a vision for the fourth decade, which, assuming EVE hasn’t met its end by then, I believe requires CCP to embrace the circle of life – to let the life cycle complete and begin anew.

A sequel, basically. But not just any sequel.

Gamers of a certain vintage will remember how disastrously most MMO game sequels have turned out, with Asheron’s Call 2 being about the best example of how not to make one (also EverQuest 2 to a lesser extent). More recently, Blizzard made some of the same mistakes with Overwatch 2, as did Taika Waititi’s character in the movie Free Guy. That mistake? Don’t be a d*ck and destroy everything your players have created in one game just to release another that isn’t sufficiently better.

Players have created a hell of a lot in EVE Online. Probably more than in any other game that has ever existed. You might reasonably argue that there’s so much player content that it would take Star Citizen levels of investment combined with Call of Duty turnaround speeds to make an EVE sequel good enough that players would be willing to let 20 years of shared history end. I would agree with that wholeheartedly. But what if they didn’t have to? What if CCP made a sequel in which players could take all their stuff with them?

EVE is a game of systems built on systems built on systems. Some have taken the added weight. Others, not so much, causing CCP to spend more and more of its time buttressing them. Therefore we can all imagine the features of an EVE 2 without the need for it to just be bigger and better. Done right, it would be bigger and better by default.

The key to everything is EVE 1 existing for long enough for EVE 2 to have a chance to thrive, and the gateway between the two remaining open. From a lore perspective, imagine some NPC scientist bringing about the end of New Eden, requiring the empires to come together to engineer a mechanism to open a new EVE Gate to a hitherto unknown galaxy (lots of potential for events and community goals there, too). A date is set, upon which it is predicted that New Eden will burn out (or up - the technical term alludes me), and prior to which the gate to EVE 2 will open. Players can begin to pour forth and settle ‘New’ New Eden, all without losing the riches they accrued in the old one.

Maybe the status quo would continue, maybe not. The point is that players will have new tools, new possibilities, and a whole new galaxy – all without losing everything they’ve built. And being a new beginning, it means there is a jumping on point for new players to make their mark. Because without them, the circle of life will just get smaller and CCP will have to pedal that much harder.

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‘More lore, more ORE’ by orikKado

@orikKado 's **essay** explores four new features ranging from a functioning stock exchange to a Star Trek crossover. Word on the street is that CCP Burger is a huge fan of The Expanse, so perhaps that would be the next logical stop after EVE x Doctor Who. Each of orik’s suggestions are achievable and could help take EVE to the next level.

Thinking about EVE’s future is always interesting; many crazy ideas come to mind. However, some of my less wild ideas are as follows:

First, I want to see a fully functional stock market, ideally including the acquisition of shares in one of the Caldari mega-corporations or maybe even with the good folks at ORE (Outer Ring Excavations - the largest independent mining corp). This market should react positively or negatively based on in-universe events like wars. Additionally, players should be able to list their corporations on this galactic stock exchange. It would be very interesting to see the ISK flow it could generate.

Secondly, I would like to see more lore for ORE. I believe it’s one of the less-developed factions with a lot of untapped potential. More ships, more technology, more events – they are a mega-corporation, and the possibilities are endless. As a bonus, they could introduce more apparel options, not just for miners but also for executives and suits. After all, they’re handling a lot of ISK to be in overalls and boots all day.

Thirdly, I want there to be galactic expansion. That could be done through lore and introduce new, unclaimable systems that offer good profits for those who know where to look. I envisage something like the Abyss but with permanent access. It could feature changing weather that would wipe out your ship if you failed to identify the signals announcing a climatic event.

My final suggestion would be a new collaboration with another science-fiction franchise. Something like Star Trek or even the old and forgotten Stargate Atlantis. Collaborations like that could breathe new life into the game and, most importantly, generate maximum hype.

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Some text has been edited for grammar and brevity. You can find the submissions in full at the original bounty post.

Image Credit: Razorien on Flickr