Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I'll put a TL:DR, then give my feedback.

First idea: Separate the universe into PvE theme-park and PvP sandbox.

- Create two different areas. One PvE theme park, one PvP sandbox.
- Non-consensual PvP is impossible in theme park space. Null sec is just a place with tougher NPC's.
- Sandbox space is just the current null-sec, but all over.
- Allow the two worlds to occasionally cross over via WH's so, and i quote,



Second idea: Ship upkeep, breaks and ramming.

- Make ships degrade over time.
- Allow this degradation to be slowed by maintenance and upkeep which comes in the form of big station bills (so expensive a battleship cannot be maintained by 'high sec') and/or salvaging parts from other ships.
- Give all ships a free cloak so we can take breaks, but it takes two minutes to engage, and two minutes to switch off.
- Allow ships to ram eachother. (but not in theme park space)

Third idea: Ship crew and boarding

- Add crew to each ship type that gain rating when that specific ship type is used, and lose rating when you lose that ship type.
- Add boarding crew. They also have a rating that goes up for successful boards, and goes down for failures.
- Boarding is worked out by playing rock paper scissors every 'few seconds' (not exaggerating).
- If the attacker wins, the defenders capsule is ejected and his ship can be 'dragged' back to station by the winner.
- If the defender wins, the attacker is disabled for a short time and his ability to make boarding attempts denied until he can be repaired at a station.

Fourth idea: Space weather

- Space weather.

Fifth idea: Bigger, bolder and better PvE

- Procedurally generated missions that get bigger and harder based on the amount and size of ships in fleet.
- Bigger incursions

1: No this is hilariously against the type of game eve is and won't happen. You want PvE stuff that others wont mess up play WoW. There is no safe place you learn to live with the danger and if not im sorry but you're playing the wrong game. Not to mention they somehow still connect? You're asking to create a mirrored game that is still somehow connected. Do you have any idea the BS they would have to go through setting up new servers and running another seed of the game just to give carebears an everyone is safe zone? Not to mention keeping it connected via WH space. Further it's a slap in the face to EVERY SINGLE PLAYER who has played this game. Their history, the **** they did that still reverberates to this day and with one update you want all that to disappear.

2: What is degrading in a ship and why? When my ship gets damaged I have to repair it one way or another so this technically already exists, further so with heat damage on modules, running out of ammo, repairing/replacing drones ect.
All ships a free cloak so you can take a break? If it takes 2 minutes to de/activate just log off and log back on it's literally faster and far less abuseable. And finally ramming but NOT in safe space. The only place ramming for damage could work is in safe space where it's the only offensive measures one can take. In non-safe space it would be a nightmare. The fact you proposed this shows you have never been part of a fleet or fleet battle. The amount of chaos this would bring is astounding.

3: This is the only minorly good idea. People have suggested a crew for ships before as well as boarding other ships. Most have come to the conclusion that either CCP won't do it because it adds far too many variables and or that boarding ships will take place souly on the DUST 514/Legion platform.

4: Space weather exists in WH space and given the hints from CCP titans might gain powers similar to WH space anomalies.

5: Drifter incursions are likely coming.

First, EVE is a full-time PvP sandbox. This is THE core principal that the game is built on. If you dont like that, you are simply playing the wrong game.

Other games that were also full time PvP sandboxes have tried to create PvE areas to accomodate theme park players with the goal of increasing subscription membership. It instead killed the games when most players put their money making operations where they are invulnerable and treat the PvP area like a mere arena, rather than full time sandbox. How would you truly attack someone if all you can do is destroy their throw away assets like PvP ships, and never their core industry, staging areas or logistics?

The kind of content that EVE was designed around is where risk is real, losses are harsh, lessons are hard and PvP is almost always non-consensual.



Second, i dont like the idea of ship upkeep because it introduces the concept of Cost to Play. Whilst buying ammo is a trivial amount, entirely avoidable and serves the purpose of giving fights longevity and creating meaningful choices, your talking about adding a cost to simply flying a ship, which we almost all must do, all the time. For many players, maintaining an arsenal is all the upkeep needed and regular PvP'res are not always space rich. They may have a large fleet of ships to maintain, and need to replace losses often. Some regular PvP'ers dont really like PvE much either.

So whilst it may be an interesting extra challenge for a carebear to have additional upkeep because they're often space rich and only have a few ships they ever use (if more than one at all). Its a bit crappy to add additional and unavoidable costs to the space poor and regular PvP'ers.



On ship crew. Usually no. Probably no. But what does a ship rating even do?
On boarding parties. Definitely No. Pirates did in fact blow things up and the scoop what they could find from the wreckage. With how quickly ships die in eve, who is going to use a boarding module that starts annoying rock paper scissors mini-games when the ship you are trying to board, and all his friends, are still shooting you?


On space weather, sure.


On BBB PvE, yeah, as long as the high paid stuff involves actually putting your ships in harms way. And group PvE in hi-sec thats not as exclusive as incursions would be nice. But it shouldnt pay huge amounts. There is a thread with similar thoughts here.

1. My procedural approach to design's a bit different than the political bases most people use for determining courses of action. What I want isn't necessarily at issue here. Some kind of PVP separation has recurred as an issue all through the game's history and remains today one of the most widely stated complaint. To not address it seems to be somewhat ignoring it as a problem, and I can't say I could do that. Obviously, quite a few people have left over it, so I would hardly say it's slapping every player in the face who's played the game. Largely, most of the players who've played the game are gone. Even now, the issue hasn't gone away despite attempts to say it isn't an issue.

So I included it. I included differences setting it apart from PVP space that should draw players in, I've done my best to make it no less dangerous (as CCP are on record saying that the people stating PVP is a huge turnoff aren't likewise stating ship loss.

More importantly, I simply think there's more to the game than that idea presents. There are a lot of PVP sandbox games out there, but few are like EVE. There's a lot more unique features to it that simply aren't being well-leveraged.

2. I added degradation specifically to make sure that ships have to be maintained at a far higher rate than they are currently. Today, if what I've read on these forums are to be believed, ships aren't meeting their ends at a prodigious enough rate, especially in nullsec. The materials haven't ever been consumed fast enough. More importantly, EVE relies on nullsec's players to provide a sense of isolation, danger, and especially long term tactical decision making. As this appears to not currently be seen from players specifically, I wanted to posit the risk of simply running out of fuel.

Also importantly, people will float around ratting in supercruisers, making pirate sites essentially NPC mining locations. Players think this is boring, but more cost-efficient. That seems to be because, even at those scales, it's sometimes better to make money by overwhelming targets with superior force. The point was to make it, for one, impossible to do at the largest scales, and two not particularly profitable to highball content.

In a PVP sense, the idea is more simple. At some point, especially with fluctuating resource levels I've proscribed, you will be maintaining a peak amount of capital-sized ships. Once you don't have enough to do it anymore, it provides an impetus to invade your neighbor.

3. I chose that particular reason (boarding) to use it as an example (to show that it can be done to make combat more complex by compounding layers without necessarily making you play the minigame alone. I fear that Dust 514 might have served that role well at one theoretical point, but it is going to have a major issue even in the best of times providing enough players for a boarding crew. Capsuleers vastly outnumber DUST soldiers. I wanted to make something that works throughout.

4. I'm proscribing something a bit more violent than that, something that might require a decent amount of attention to deal with in addition to what's going on around you. Players complained that space felt empty and vacant. Warping into a system-wide storm (especially given that your ship degrades over long, uninterrupted flights under stress) would be a bit more entertaining, I think.

5. Something likely is, but I'm looking for something a bit more complex and threatening than that. A lot of it relies on the former points, though.

On ship rating, it would be primarily to scale, underscale, or overscale missions. Players complained that PVE can't be difficult enough. I beg to differ, but the game needs to be able to tune the difficulty. It does mean larger ships and larger fleets will need to deal with a larger bevy of potential targets, ones they can't predict the makeup of. That's key to creating a more dangerous PVE scenario.

I'd like ship weather to be a little naster than a space anomaly, especially in treaty space, where I expect some of it to be lethal to inexperienced pilots (this might be a bit much for the PVPers).

And, finally, the entire point would be to make all PVE FAR riskier than it is right now. Essentially, once it's not a burden to the PVP players, there is no reason not to crank the difficulty knob as high as it will go. After all, people said they don't want PVP everywhere, but they don't mind ship loss. You can make PVE pretty destructive if you're not handling players with kid gloves, especially in unsafe space. Right now, players fill that role, and their track record is mediocre. They pick targets in their interest to attack, it's in their nature. They don't attack for the sheer sake of blowing up a ship, simply because it's there, even if they have no chance of surviving the full battle. PVE NPCs can, you just have to make them a bit meatier than CCP has so far.

Yes. Source


The best way to make sure that the danger is always there is to throw other players into the mix and face them off eachother.

Players are the most creative.
Players are the most adaptive.
Players are the most unpredictable.
Players are the most immersive.
Players are the most interactive.

Sure, PvE can definitely be improved upon. But other players are the most interesting challenge you will ever face and the most interesting allies you will ever have.

Unfortunately, I disagree, and you've got the forums at your disposal. That's where I got the information from. Everywhere you look, players are complaining that players are not creative, they are doing only that which is best for their bottom line.

They say they aren't adaptive, they constantly say that new changes are a reason to quit.

They are not unpredictable, when you can readily quantify just about everything they do save their annual hisec burns by their own self interest. They rarely surprise you, unless you're surprised that people search space looking to limit their risk.

Players aren't the most immersive because players don't immerse each other, they simply cohabit space. Otherwise, you wouldn't have hisec be both the most populated and sport the highest turnover rate in the game.

Players aren't the most interactive either, as if a player shows up and you have a larger fleet, they do their best to not interact. In fact, whole beginning game guides are instruction guides telling new players how to limit their interaction.

So, go ahead and re-read that, and then read the forums. Talk to your friends. Ask yourself, "Does CCP, and have they ever, understood their own game?" That's the most common refrain I've read, that CCP has no idea how their game even works, that they're throwing hopeful fixes at the wall hoping to bring their game back to life, and that they very often trip over their own feet.

So what makes you think they know what is good about their game? Or even games in general? We give companies like Blizzard ****, and in fact most players here look down their noses at the unenlightened masses, but those companies and those masses aren't just making and playing more successful games, they've made Minecraft, not EVE, the buzzword sandbox game.

Why, if nobody thinks CCP knows what they're doing, are you so adamant to assume that they know what sets their game apart? I just gave you perfectly sound logic for why I think that the idea that only a core PVP sandbox is central to the game, so I'm not sure why you then say that CCP saying so makes that any less reasonable.

Why should I think that CCP, having squandered media publicity, hype, and reputation to never rise farther than a few hundred thousand subscribers, are righteous and correct?

I'm sorry, I think they're wrong. Dead wrong. And the proof is right there, in their concerns. Their major concern, right now, is that they aren't getting people into nullsec to join corps to experience their PVP sandbox. If that's true, right now, and a core concern behind their development, how can the above statement be in any way true? If the essential core concept of EVE Online is it is a full time PVP in a sandbox environment, as they said, then what are all these people doing avoiding it?

Eve isnt a game for everyone. It does not have to be the most 'successful' game ever made. It just has to be the game CCP want to make, and the players looking for that bad-ass, survival of the fittest, no mercy environment will play it and have been playing it for years. The players that come looking for another theme-park quite rightly lose interest. Hence the 'WOW is that way -->' mantra.

To change the core principal would be to alienate its core player base (see Ultima Online). And If you noticed, the safer the game has become, the more 'stagnated' it has become and the more players that have gotten bored. So CCP had the game right to begin with, and subs consistently grew, but they started to screw things up when they got soft, and people started leaving because the game was less hard core and the theme-park players are never happy anyways unless they have an impossible amount of new content updated impossibly frequently. (see blizzard)

Far better than changing the existing EVE to pander to theme-park players, would be if the theme-park players went to the games that were more suited to them. You said there was plenty.

As for people avoiding PvP, 100 000 kills in seven days., 4 000 players in one fight.

edit- oh and i also hear that when new players are ganked, they actually stick with the game longer than those who aren't.

Again, think about this. Literally stand back from the game and examine what you're saying. If PVP actually IS the core of this game, and the failure is that EVE game someone ANYTHING else to do, and you think that taking that away is going to be the answer?

How does that, in any way, make what I said less of an issue? I mean, is any of that actually wrong? Is the idea that people don't want to play with us, so we should make sure people have less reason to get away, making any sense? If people are already choosing NOT to engage with your supposed core dynamic, is that really what you want to hang your hat on?

I mean, how often does WoW have a crisis where people aren't taking their characters to places to kill things? How many people are avoiding their linear progression and causing Blizzard to think about how to get them to play the core part of their game? When was that EVER a good sign?

What I'm trying to get at here is that CCP might not only be unaware of its own weaknesses, they may also be unaware of their own strengths. That's also a major reason why people have a tendency to respond to my post with just "No," rather than a functional argument. The problem is that all this works. It isn't hoping for anything, it isn't trying to even make the world nicer for everyone. It's giving people an alternative to us, and the sad fact is that it works when you have an alternative to anything.

As an aside, Final Fantasy XI released in 2002 and is still operational. It is currently seeing its last major content patches this year (Square Enix have another Final Fantasy game that's largely taken its place). So it's not as crazy as you might think. It's also still a subscription game (color even me personally surprised). And that game had a LOT less going for it than EVE did or does.

I mean, look, we can keep telling people on CCP's behalf to take their business elsewhere, but if nothing else that seems to now have become very effective. In 2003, EVE had a LOT less competition on offer. There weren't a lot of Sci-Fi MMORPGs, even fewer were in ships. The entire sandbox v. themepark fight was in full swing. But that argument's passed us; most gamers went with option C and decided to have both. That fight ended a long time ago.

Why not discuss options? Or question our old stereotypes? Why wouldn't we get a BETTER PVP experience out of it?

It seems like, before we ever tried even discussing specific proposals and really questioning if it was a bad thing, people get defensive. It's not necessary. It's especially not necessary to make sure we're telling people who don't buy our anachronistic issues that they ought to just leave. They've got plenty of MMORPGs, plenty of sandboxes, plenty of PVP, but there is only one EVE. I can't see the good in calling it our lawn.

I mean, it isn't like I just proposed plopping the two spaces next to each other equally. At this point, I'm pretty sure the PVE area I outlined would be more dangerous than nullsec PVP is now. Treaty Space is, at least, specifically designed to try to kill you to various degrees, not give you a piece of territory that is safe. A major issue is now that PVE is nothing more than a ship-shaped ore site and PVPers are waiting and wanting for soft targets in hisec rather than clashing with each other.

I said it's a major part of the problem, and unfortunately, not only don't I imply the problem is older players, I think that's completely wrong. I think the problem is the system that does it. Why do you think you all are so sensitive about the game? You're set up, by the game, to think and act a certain way. Seriously, did you tell yourself that subscriptions were soaring when you could kill anything you wanted? That was back when WoW still outnumbered this game on an order of magnitude that was hard to imagine. So why do you apply "soar" to subscriptions? Because it was high? Seemed high? Subscriptions for EVE have never been "high", as was pointed out earlier. The way it's being described here, it wasn't even the point to have subscribers.

The reality is that there were a lot of players because what used to be a subscription business was then going through a huge fight over how we fund games. As the subscription pool eddied, people showed up in the last subscription games available. Unfortunately, that means that subscriptions are also going to lose their war soon. WoW is down in numbers, FFXIV is down in numbers, and EVE is fairly well drowning.

One of the major conversions we're seeing is subscription gamers to F2P games, and a major reason that's happening is that the difference between a subscription game and a F2P game, in any of its forms, is growing slim. Is EVE giving us anything Elite:Dangerous isn't or that Star Citizen isn't promising?

Despite that, EVE survives not on the strength of its PVP, which has recently failed, but on the strength of hisec, which now has a huge disparity in population. And that's very crazy when you think that not only is hisec the antithesis to what you and CCP both think of the game's strengths, but that it hasn't received a lot of development. That's why the idea that "the game got soft and then everyone left" doesn't seem to make sense, the softest part of the game is right now the most populated and CCP is desperately trying to get people into the "harder" game.

That's why this is so tough. People are, very literally, picking hisec life over nullsec. To say that nullsec is the game's core and the game is failing because the game got more diverse doesn't make an awful lot of sense, unless the problem is that it isn't core players supporting the game while theme parkers file through, the problem is that nullsec players are very busily looking for easy targets that are slimmer pickings.

If only older players are the ones in nullsec shying away from each other and turning to suicide ganking in hisec, this would be the first I've heard of it. And the biggest problem, by far, is that there's nothing you actually CAN do about it. The game itself, despite what you've said about its nature, is wired to make the players in this game into exactly what they are right now. All CCP did lately was throw hisec players a bone, Sansha Incursions. And if Drifter Incursions are coming (as has been mentioned), CCP might be burning both ends of the candle.

My proposal might not be popular with you, but it doesn't seem to be because of things you don't like about it, it's because of things you don't want other people to engage in. Even though the proposal very specifically makes living in Treaty Space less profitable, gives you less options for advancement, takes away your ability to have capitals, and is very literally more lethal simply by making the NPCs a voracious consumer that wears you down as you travel, you're afraid of it because it might change your core understanding of the game.

It shouldn't alienate you. It doesn't take anything away. By all accounts right now, it would be a blanket improvement and would give you all the reason in the world to go into Free Space that people simply are not taking going into nullsec. I simply think it's a bad idea to put pride on the line and say we shouldn't have anything that isn't in the game right now because other people will get something they might enjoy better than us.

And you can feel free to dislike that ideology of inclusion; you wouldn't be alone. But that's not turning EVE into some feathery themepark, it'd be making it a damn sight more dangerous than anything CCP is proposing to turn the players into. At least I'm not just threatening newbie freighters with my proposal, I'm threatening everybody and everything to different degrees. If you don't think I'm making it threatening enough, I'm perfectly amenable to making it more lethal.

The problem is that, even at its height, 4000 ships in a once-in-a-while battle and 100,000 ships in a day is candy floss to the dead bodies people are leaving in other games (a game with just 20 different 20 man raiding teams would do 4000 deaths in ten wipes), and we can't say that dying is costing us any more than a percentage of our money and a run back either. The problem isn't fear, or ship loss, or anything you've been conditioned to think.

They just don't want to play with us.