EVE General Discussion

Wait, you're telling me I can't trade with other players in space, I can only drop a can?

Have two fleets ever really coordinated shooting? Even when you have two on the same grid, I doubt they are all doing the same thing...

You know how Boat always yells, "Shut up!" at a really weird time over and over?

That's command attempting to accomplish this.

It almost never works out.

Yep, this pretty much. I've talked people into trying EVE and had them walk away from the game because of this. Long before they got into serious combat, or got ganked or swindled.

Typically it goes like this (pre-Incarna, last time I tried):

They log in, look around. Graphics are amazing, immersion is definitely there, music varied enough to suit most tastes. So far, so good. UI overwhelming and clunky, but manageable. Tutorials are OK. Too much data to assimilate it all in one sitting, and a lot of stuff is not explained at all. Like why looting a wreck is bad, salvaging a wreck is OK? Why? Makes no sense.

But eventually they all get to the point of asking "OK, what will my character (ship) be like at "max level"?" And they go and look at battleships, marauders, etc. You know, the whole "bigger is better" thing? Which makes perfect sense. And then they ask how long it'll take to be able to fly a ship like that. And you tell them...180 days...230 days...etc., depending on the ship. And that's usually JUST to fly it! I'm not talking about flying it effectively or efficiently. At which point they laugh and walk away.

And before you ask, yes, I explained to them that they can PvP in a frigate and all that. But when they ask "OK, so how long before I can max my frigate?" the answer is once again "too frackin' long". Considering they need to max the hull, tank type, weapon type, navigation, drone skills, capacitor, targeting, etc.,etc. Basically all relevant skills at V? Takes a good, long while. Now, compare that to just about every other MMO out there where, at most, you're looking at 3 months of play before you're as good as a character that's years old.

And it is just that simple.

And yes, before you ask again, maybe that means EVE isn't a game for them. And you're probably right. But you have to ask yourself (or rather CCP does), is the skill queue worth losing all those potential players?

That's what they do for like 9 years, and EVE still have a ton of space with little to no content. So maybe adding some amount of non-player driven stuff that isn't stupid grind won't hurt the game.

If you're talking about graveyard camping like gate camping then all Eve needs is an arena.

Yeah. Given that they try to stamp on what players do, I think we can all say op success. Enjoy your buffed mining barges, your nerfed ganking, your messed up wardecs that get you trapped in a war with hunters instead, etc etc etc

There are many creative ways in which they could have dealt with this issue.

For example, they could make all weapons (guns and missiles) projectiles have a travel time. And give smaller ships (frigs, cruisers) an ability to do a barrel roll and avoid all damage. That's what they did in Guild Wars 2. No matter if you're having a sword swung at you, or a bullet fired or a spell cast, if you time your roll right, you avoid its damage. But you can only do so many rolls before you need to recover. Worked just fine for that game.

They could add modules that grant temporary invulnerability. As in, you activate it, and for the next X seconds, you are immune to all damage. MMOs like WoW, GW2, AoC, etc., have these mechanics. Easily counters focus fire. You see a bunch of fire coming your way, and you have that module fit? Pop it. Now artillery needs 16 seconds to reload, and you can move away.

Another thing they could try is very basic collision detection. Which is to say, if there's an object or a ship between you and target, you don't hit the target, you hit whatever is in the way. More load on CPU? Yes. But so worth it in terms of immersion. This is what they did in Pirates of the Burning Sea. If you took too much damage, you could always duck behind a friendly or a hostile, and try to recover while the enemy tried to get line of sight back.

Another possibility would be to allow people to choose shield position. I believe X-Wing and Tie Fighter games had that. Wind Commander too? Can't honestly remember. AoC definitely had that as well. If you knew the bulk of damage was coming from the front, you could realign your shields to the front. In AoC, if you knew the big attack was from the left, you stacked all 3 shields left, and mitigated most of it. Or you could choose to maintain one shield on each of the three sides (there's no shielding at the back, ever) and "omni-tank" it. Something similar could be done in EVE. That way, if you are ambushed by another group from the rear, you would crumble fast. But if it was a line battle, it would last considerably longer as you'd present your most armored side to the enemy (and thus be difficult to alpha down). I believe in AoC each shield reduced damage 25%? So if you hit a triple-shielded side, you lost 75% of your damage.

There's quite a few other things they could do. Because if you think about it, actual combat mechanics in EVE are incredibly weak and outdated. Look at "newer" games, like PotBS and AoC (both 2008), GW2 (2012), etc. Combat there is actually heavily skill-based and interesting. In EVE, it's rather bland.

Stop being bad. You should be broadcasting for reps when you are yellow boxed, not when you are red boxed. When DPS is being applied it's already too late. If you broadcast during the yellowbox phase you should have a cascading layer of reps washing over your ship before the shots land. As the shots ramp up logis should be transfering multiple cascading reps onto you.

Maybe... I dunno... suck less? You could try that.