EVE General Discussion

It's called EvE Online, not Drug Addicts Online, I'd rather CCP focus on the space ships than the drugs.

Personally, I'd say you are a Demigod because the drugs can kill you and still you come back.

CCP should forget about new modules and focus on ship skins and pretty nebulas? Boosters have enormous impact on flying in space, you should read up about them.

As is with all ignored game mechanics from CCP nowadays, drugs have a huge potential and can create a great deal of strife and turmoil, dissent and anger, war and dissension, and even economic boom and bust if used properly.

Boosters are a joke for most players, even at the capital level - why care about a boost in shield strength or armor strength when the benefits are so low and the cost for boosters do not nearly overcome the cost for another sieged capital? The alpha and the sheer numbers in fleet fights negate booster use. All this must be considered in the face of massive capital buildups especially with Supercarriers and Titans.

I would personally think that most of the stuff that the OP suggested would fall into the category of bad game design.

Negative effects that last weeks? Being forced to spend millions of isk to continue to get short term benefits, that would get shorter and shorter as I continued to use them and making me spend more and more? Some of you actually thought that would be good?

Drugs don't have negative side effects while you're on them? Uhm...
Personal experience says you're WAY off on that one.

I'm pretty sure that the zombie dude who just got shot while chewing on another mans face would seriously disagree with you on that one!

Or how about the dude doing life in prison for eating half of his girlfriend while on PcP?

Ever met a ******* tweeker? Trust me, they're experiencing negative side effects!

WTF kind of drugs do you take?

The only reason I don't use boosters in game is because of the price and availability. Jita price for Improved Blue Pill is 15M. I don't feel like throwing away my isk for a very temporary performance improvement. I also don't feel like making them because its so damn hard for too little gain.

Too few people are even aware that there are skills that reduce the chance and severity of side-effects.

Also, the variety of boosters is somewhat lacking. There are 3 booster slots. Slot 1 is used for shield boost, armor repair, cap capacity, and signature radius improvements. Slot 2 is for 3 turret improvements, and slot 3 has but 1 missile improvement. We could do with some more variety, especially for slot 3 and missiles in general.

The boosters themselves are a mish-mash of effects and drawbacks that make little sense. Why no agility booster? Cap recharge booster? Boosters are, like much of eve, unfinished.

Only ever tested it solo on SiSi, but with triage, Exile, and OH, I was laughing at those dreads til they ran out of stront

Then a Bhaalgorn showed up

Yes and no, it all depends on what you mean by "gameplay".

Suggestions for more "realism" in games constantly crop up, but if you're at all interested in game design you'll know why "realism" has to be limited. Generally, you only need enough for suspension of disbelief, to get into the spirit of the game and its lore, otherwise, gameplay has to be tailored to several things (e.g. balance of gamer types - achievers, PKers, etc.; and having mechanics that can't be exploited or used to grief).

However, there's another way of looking at it. The "rules" of real life, which include our intuitive (or "folk") sense of physics, folk psychology, folk economics, etc. These are already inbuilt; and to some extent life is already a game. It's just a game it's quite hard to be successful in - or rather, it's a game in which the thrill of success doesn't happen as often.

Hence games: they give us a stream of little virtual successes, and the part of our brain that processes rewards is stupid enough to give us the same feeling when we're successful in a meaningless game endeavour as we would be in a meaningful rl endeavour.

So, that said, there's another way of having games - or at least, games that have a "realistic" component - and that is to make them simulators, where everything is like real life (but with time and space highly compressed), plus dragons, or spaceships, or other counterfactual fun things.

IOW, I suspect that part of the reason designers don't go for a more "simmy" route in games is because computers just haven't been up to it, so the level of abstraction has had to be quite high. However, computers are constantly getting more and more powerful (partly as a result of peoples' desire to play "realistic" videogames!).

I suspect that as time goes on, the yearning people have for "realism" will be fulfilled, and that won't present a problem for game designers at all, because actually they'll hardly have to do any "game design" at all, just world design and situation design, and sandbox-tool design.

Because if the virtual world is set up so that it answers the intuitions we have about real life, such that as soon as a person tries something in the game the game responds for the most part just like the real world (only compressed, and made easier to be successful in), I think that would make a lot of people happy.

So, e.g., for a mediaeval sim, you'd be talking about taking about crafting being a miniature approximation of actual crafting methods (only taking a highly compressed amount of time - say 10 minutes to make something instead of a day as it might be in the real world), you''d be talking about much more "realistic" fighting techniques based on musculo-skeletal virtual modelling and physics, etc.,etc. For a space sim you'd be talking about real physics, virtualization of real distances (but again compressed somewhat in terms of time) - fortunately in a space sim you've also got virtual computers aboard your spaceship, so the virtual interface within the game could handle all the difficult calculations.

Like that.

Drugs, in the way the OP suggests, might well be part of such a simulation.

However, I agree it's never going to happen in EVE. EVE gameplay is what it is, it's never going to change significantly in a way like the OP suggests.

Didn't consider that, +1 to you

Quickly skimmed through responses but will go back and read.
Fascinating post and I love the idea of introducing addiction as a guaranteed side effect of continued use.

Guess what? A new eve 12 step group just for Booster Addicts....

Boosties Anonymous

Meetings at 6 in the abandoned cathedral basement.
Smoking allowed at all meetings except on wednesdays.
Please donate 1 isk if you can.
Free coffee too!

S