EVE General Discussion

While I see your point, I will have to disagree. Yes, Eve has a great graphics since V3 came in, that's a great selling point to MMO players these days. The thing is, without them, Eve is, in a way, screwed.

See it from a new player's perspective. The UI is bad (in comparison to the actual ships in space and omgthosenebulas even with the actual game content), it's in no way easy to use, it's a damn spreadsheet in space, enough said; the game itself, Eve is probably is the hardest MMO to learn today; the world itself, the environment, the community, the way the sandbox presents itself to new player is very harsh (it's actually not a bad thing, but we're talking about new players here); and many more.

Gameplay and depth means nothing to new players, while they are the things that keeps people to continue playing the game, they're not a main attraction for new players. A guy who just started the tutorial won't care if they can do incursions, explore wormholes, do smallgang pvp or delve into nullsec politics. All they care about is how to play this game, what should I do now, what then? how do I do this? what skills should I train? what is this big list of stuff on a huge table displayed on my screen?

Tutorials, graphics, and UI are those things that helps new players learn what Eve is all about and the things that attracts new players to try out Eve. Content is for those who decided to stay in this game and subscribe.

I like my space to be like space.

of course not - but the system requirements were significantly bumped (above the level of WoW ) with Incursion 1.1 (requires SSE2, i.e. no 32bit Athlon's allowed) which was not so long ago.

I'd like to see CCP run on a pre-defined cycle when it comes to updates of hardware requirements to increase predictability and avoid running into situations where the requirements on different hardware components change for unrelated reasons within a short time.

Risking a situation where you tell your customers "for this expansion you need a better CPU" and then half a year a different team realizes "actually you'll need a better graphics card for the next expansion" and then during a point release memory usage goes through the roof .... would be pretty bad and imo it would be preferable to freeze a minimum hardware profile for at least 2-3 years and postpone anything that would require changes to the hardware profile until the next scheduled update.

What use is it to know that you can run the game at minimum requirements right now if you don't have a minimum guarantee on how long you will be able to run EVE on that hardware?

People who talk about lag, fps and hardware, internet connections are usually the ones who are buying a computer from say dell and expect it to run anything right out of the box at high speeds. Sadly the way that Microsoft likes to design there operating systems does not seem to account for how most users use their computers.

The heart of a computer is the cpu which processes all data (The engine of the computer), ram is like a offloading point for the computers memory (I see ram as the gears). Then a graphics card is what processes the graphical data (The wheels?). Your internet connection is what passes data from one place to another (The road). Actually the way windows works is to dedicate a lot of its power to useless processes. Imagine your car had air-conditioning, a game system for the kids, a heated cup holder, a gps system and other nifty stuff all switched on and taking up power. Even the internet is often doing other things while your playing your games; downloading updates or even sending out spam emails if you have caught some kind of virus. Your internet provider may also like to limit the amount of speed is being used by each customer to save cash.

So if you make sure you dedicate your computer to running a game such as eve there is no real need to update your system. The most important thing for games is actually your graphics card because this is doing most of the work to render objects onto your screen.

To the people who think that putting more interactive objects in the game will significantly slow down your gaming experience there is the fact that what is on screen is the only thing being rendered. This maybe the closes object to you and your ship. There is a nifty thing called LOD factors: levels of detail rendered on screen. What this does is only render certain objects in high detail while rendering lesser objects in a lower detail.

As with the UI I would enjoy seeing a more animated UI especially for use in combat. Since we are meant to be genetically modified pilots hardwired into our ships then shouldn't out view on the world be a little more than the name of our ship and how high its shields are. Take Scaleform gfx ui, these produce a 3d ui which rotates according to your view. Scaleform I think these are what are being used in Dust at the moment.

I always enjoy how trolls put so much effort into their intelligent responses.

A couple points for clarification:

1) WinTel Computers bought or built six years ago likely had Windows XP Home or Professional with perhaps a coupon for a Vista upgrade.

2) GPUs from six years ago may not be able to acceptably run the EVE client when a ship is undocked and in a populated system.

IMO, CCP must have internal guidelines and business decision criteria in-place to decide when to cut off support for dated hardware and OS capabilities. At some point, CCP will need to "terminate" some customers because their current hardware / software is simply too far out of compliance with current technology and market standards.

Considering that Windows 7 and DX 11 support has been in-place for nearly 3 years, CCP is well-justified in making use of available technologies where they make sense. For example, putting in too much eye-candy for the sake of visual bling just to see their customers' clients grind to a halt in large battles is a poor decision.

In a way he is right though. I started playing the game just when Incarna was released, so have pretty much no first hand knowledge of a single expansion to the game that actually involved actual new content apart from couple of new boats in the tier 3 battlecruiser line. As much as I've liked the fixes and graphical improvements that came with Inferno, the balance fixes and all that, it still brought us no new content which by definition is required for a patch to be called an expansion. To me those were simply larger bug fix patches and game modernizations via better graphics. That said, I still love the game, otherwise I wouldn't even be here. Still would be nice for a change to actually see something completely new instead of glorified bug and balance patches.