Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I recently started playing Eve, and to be honest the Game Launcher (my first impression of the quality of the game) itself almost made me uninstall and move on. It's seems very beta. Thankfully I stuck around, the game is great, but I do have some suggestions.

In every other major MMO I've played over the last 6 years it works like this:

1. Launcher pops up. Hit PLAY. Launcher instantly disappears, never seen again.
2. Login Screen appears.
3. Character Selection screen appears. Can back out to Login Sceen.
4. In game "Log Off" actually brings you back to Character Selection screen, useful for switching characters.

In Eve, the Launcher pops up. You hit PLAY, but it never disappears, and has about a 5 second delay, making you wonder if you should hit play again. Can actually hit PLAY multiple times, launching the Login Screen several times. Whoa, now I have 3 Eve Login Sceens on my taskbar! Huh?

If you "log out", you actually exit back to the Login Screen. How is this useful, unless perhaps you have 2 accounts? Far more useful would be the ability two quickly switch between your 3 characters.

Also, because the Launcher never goes away, when you ALT TAB in Eve you have two items in your taskbar instead of one. Kind of annoying. Do I really need the Launcher open indefinitely?


Regardless, thanks for a refreshingly sophisticated game, a nice departure from WoW.

You can also just make a shortcut for eve.exe, and launch the game straight away. Then if a patch comes up, just launch the launcher, patch, close launcher and use the executable.

As for your complaint about logging off, it's actually much more common for players to have multiple accounts as opposed to multiple toons on one account. With the way training works, you can only train one character at a time on an account, so it's more efficient to train two separate accounts than alternate on one. As for the starting multiple clients, that's actually a benefit for most players with alts. If you're mining/hauling, missioning/salvaging, or any other combination, you can run two clients at once as long as your characters are on different accounts, as you can only access one character per account at a time. Being new, I don't expect you to know these things, but EVE is a bit different than most other MMO's in this regard. But for those of us who use multiple toons on an account for things such as PI, maybe a "Character Selection" option would be a nice alternative to logging off.

The "only start launcher if there are updates" is slightly misleading, although it works like you'd expect.
It starts the launcher, quickly checks for new patches, and if there are no new patches available, it will then immediately launch the game.

I explained why I care in the OP, and I'm not suggesting you shouldn't have the option, it just shouldn't be the default behavior.


As a side note, I have to say it's pretty shocking to hear that you have to have multiple accounts in order to effectively have alts in Eve... so when they say "400,000 subscribers" what they really mean is "1000 people each with 400 accounts". :P

Clearly the solution would be to allow separate training queues for each of your account's 3 characters... again, a little shocking that isn't already the case, though it's pretty obvious why they'd prefer the way it is now I suppose.