Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Well, maybe not cake. Let's be honest, you knew that already. So lots of people people complain. Fewer have solutions. Even fewer have solutions that don't mega-fail and cause much lulz on the intar-webs.

Well, in this case I think I might.

First, gates suck.
1. In a world of awesome, they're kinda lame. Half the time you come out of warp and bump in to them.
2. After you kind of just "stop", your ship poofs into a gloooorrrpppphhhhhhwwoosh
3. You appear on the other side, cloaked (?!*)
4. All suspension of disbelief is broken
5. I realize I'm at home in my boxers with Cheetos on my fingers playing with internet spaceships and NOT commanding a badass interstellar war machine.
6. Gate camping sucks
7. From a strategic/logistics standpoint it grossly inverses classical defender/attacker dynamics in vast combat theaters in favor of the defender, when realistically the opposite should be true given the scenario. (More on this later!)
8. This is EVE, we're the best at everything right?

So, I've fulfilled the first tier, complained, but now the magic happens (or doesn't). Oh whatever can we do?

First: The Approach.
-What if you weren't simply dropped out of warp and bubbled away, what if you blasted out of warp, maintained high velocity in a wide arc to align with the jump gate, the hull of your ship energized, and space/time/reality bent backwards around you as you were violently catapulted across the universe?

Second: The Landing.
-Here I'll admit this is a shameless rip of another popular scifi series, but I think it works well and from a science-fiction standpoint makes more sense. We're launching massive objects thousands of light-years across space. This is a big deal.

-Drift. I propose a spherical region around the receiving gate, no closer than 50km and no farther than 500km. In it, the game randomly selects where you spawn inside this region. This achieves a few things. Notably, it significantly increases the ship requirements to effectively gate camp. It also allows small ships to pass into low/nul sec and explore with a reduced (albeit still inherently risky) chance of getting atomized. "But, won't that make defending borders from large fleets impossible?" and "What about small ships spying?" See answers to that below.

-How you spawn. Again, you're being catapulted across the galaxy mannn. Instead of bubbling in, what if a small explosion marked the collapse of your hyper-luminal energy waves re-condensing into matter resulting in a burst of gamma rays as your exit velocity trickled down from 5000+ m/s? This was of course directly proportional to your ships tonnage. In turn, this lets off a detectable signature. Massive/significant fleets create more substantial signatures. Checks and balances can be made.

Concerns:
"Gates are cool and all but they're really loading screens for the next section, with all this stuff going on how does the next area get loaded?"
-I'd propose rather than "poof" the ship, you stay with it sort of like you do when you warp. Rather than see around you though, you're in a blueish hyperspace tunnel while the game caches the next stage's resources. By entering this "tunnel" (a very sexy, shiny, sci-fi one) the previous stage can be purged from memory.

"If I come out of the Gate 1500Km away what happens if I want to turn around?!"
-Click gate in overview, "jump", and you're done.

"But bro, brooooooo, that would totally blow my 15 mil/day noob camp in 0.4!"
-Maybe that's not a bad thing. Perhaps you should try a Van. I hear free candy signs work (got you here didn't it?!)

"I don't like it, it makes it much harder for corporations to defend their regions in low/nul sec. Perhaps impossible"
-I wouldn't say "impossible", if anything, perhaps re-balanced. Guys, space is VAAAASSTT. Granted, our ships are huge, but still. Let's do an example. I'm gonna give you and 35 of your best friends semi-tractor trailers (lorries for you British scalawags) equipped with machine guns, missiles, and WARP DRIVES (don't ask how that works). Now, I'm gonna need you to spawn-camp America's border along the pacific ocean. All of it. From china. GO!

Let that sink in. The funny thing is, even that sense of scale isn't big enough. Really, expecting to be able to have the mother-of-all-choke-points isn't just nonsensical, it's childish.

So bottom line, something like this could be:
-far more aesthetically captivating.
-let you maintain a sense of velocity and exhilaration with an otherwise mundane task
-The game doesn't get caught in an awkward position with it's pants down
-The mechanics of it are more functional/sci-fi worthy than the current system which pops you out with a cloak and says "have fun"
-Makes travel slightly less dangerous and newbie accessible without compromising core-players
-rebalances defender/attacker dynamics to more accurately depict deep/open space conflict.



TLDR: I made you a video full of shiny:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtQNZtKAIug

So, feedback? GTFO troll? You gonna spit in my lunch? I'll be the first to admit it may be a horrible idea (but hope it's a great one). I'm down to talk about why either is true.

*modified distances*

Awesome jump graphics would be... awesome. Not sure how I feel about the mechanics change though.

Your proposal pretty much breaks the game completely. Most interaction happens in and around gates. If you have people randomly landing miles away from gate then that will break the interactive level the game currently has.

If you wish to do away with gates you need to come up wth a concept that replaces them that doesn't break the interactiveness caused by gates.

I will support everything except the distances you gave us for exit points. the distances should be kept the same (around 15 Km). Im not entirely opposed to the Idea of not being cloaked after a jump, all it would do is speed up gameplay with gatecamps which is not nessisarily a bad thing.
Im mean if you jump in a battleship, your going to end up uncloaked anyway and the gate activation gives you away so the campers know you are there. People would just have to adapt and improve thier reaction times. A bomber will still be able to engauge its cloak, a battleship will still be able to crash the gate, an interceptor will still be able to warp off. the waiting game is just removed from the equation, which may be a good thing.

This idea is quite awesome..

I do think its taking the change a bit to far for most players comfort, and disrupts the continuity a bit..

However.. there was a few details that could really improve existing system, and maybe be small steps towards something like that video you linked.

The exit randomizing.

Since EVE gates are sort of artificial wormholes it would make a lot of sense that the exit was hard if not impossible to predict and the rather close relation to size and mass. The volumes and the weight of the ships should be directly used in the exit location math, and the randomizing element should be calculation of the cargo mass/weight. This would make it possible to camp for different types of ships, and the smaller the ships the hard it would be.

There should be one way I would prefer it could be countered. Since ships would still approach and activate on one side, if you scanned the ship you should be able to send the location pretty close to accurate to camps on the other side. The accuracy would be depending on the range of the the person scanning. If totally at a stop and the target was also parked, the result would be 100% accurate. The uncertainty should compound depending on relative velocities and distance, further randomized for scanner quality and skills. Result would be it would be possible to camp, but would need more preparation or be more fishing with rather bad nets..

Further to not entirely break current mechanics it might be important to boost scanning and its effectiveness.

My suggestion would be to get ccp to make it possible to directly link scan results and any bookmarked location via chat, so we would not need the bookmarks feature for anything except storage.

A minor update to the map function would also help a lot. We need a smaller "HUD" version of the local area while inflight. The current F10 version have needed an upgrade for quite a few years.. A small tactical map for some changes along the OPs suggestion would be about time.

Things along this direction of thinking might get activity off the gates and stations, and out into actual space. Without tactical and ability of pursuit that will never happen.

Which makes it effectively impossible for small groups to defend a system, or for small gangs to harass stragglers of large fleets, cut off allied systems by sitting on a bottleneck gate, or even to shoot idiots moving through unscouted. Removing gatecamps does kind of have far reaching effects I don't think you're really considering.

Sorry, the post system is acting weird. I wrote a long post, posted it, and it was gone! Couldn't get it back either, had to re-type it all.

You've...never actually been in a large fight, have you. They won't go like that at all.