Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Edit: Please note that I am not suggesting that the existing command be removed! If you think I am, you haven't read the whole post. It should be renamed, and a new command added to perform the 'stop' function correctly.


Imagine for a moment that you're driving a car, but this particular model of car has no brakes. You have two options for reducing speed: Putting it in neutral and coasting, relying on drag to slow you down (would not work on a downhill slope, obviously), or use engine braking (the closest equivalent to how a spaceship in EVE would operate).

Now imagine that this was a drive-by-wire car, and that the designers for some reason chose to make your 'stop' command simply put it in neutral and coast. Stopping faster than that (or on a hill) was possible only by skilled manual gimmickry.

The Stop Ship command, as it currently exists, is mislabeled and/or misleading.

What the command actually does is to shut off your ship's engines and let it coast - as if you had put your car in neutral - as far and as long as its momentum will carry it, until the drag from EVE's funky 'space resistance' gradually brings you to a low enough speed that it might as well be zero (and in a heavy ship that can take quite a while).

It is possible - but tricky - to bring yourself to a halt much, MUCH faster by setting a course opposite the direction you are currently traveling (by looking backwards and double clicking in space), and then - if you can compensate for lag and time it right - use 'stop ship' when your speed is as close as possible to zero. This method can be difficult to pull off, especially in a faster ship, on a slower computer, or under high lag conditions. The result is that it can be unreliable and the level of success can vary widely, from a near-perfect stop to going nearly full-speed in the opposite direction, or even missing your intended stopping point by kilometers. It also has you looking away from your target or destination, and takes much more time to perform than a simple, easy keyboard shortcut like 'control-space'.

You should not have to mess around with gimmicky tricks like this just to perform such a basic and simple form of navigational control.

Please... Fix this command so that it does what it says it does, and what any halfway decent spaceship pilot should be able to do easily. Remember, we're not just 'halfway decent', we're capsuleers - we should be able to do this in our sleep!

If you, as a player, or as a developer at CCP, feel that you must have a command which makes a ship coast slowly to an approximate halt the way the current Stop Ship command does, then please, by all means, add a "Shut Off Engines" or "Coast" command for that purpose! But please don't try to use "players like the current behavior" as an excuse to not include brakes on our cars - sorry, I mean internet spaceships.


On a closely related topic, other navigation commands could benefit from similar fixes. The 'keep at range' command should also apply thrust more intelligently, for example to avoid colliding with the target, or passing it / 'bouncing' off to the side if the target is moving transversely. And both that and the 'approach' command should make your ship compensate for your target's transverse velocity, and apply thrust correctly to create an intercept course. (Approach should, for obvious reasons, not reduce your closing speed toward the target.)

This stuff is not rocket science - well, I guess it supposedly is... But you know what I mean: The calculations needed are well understood and not terribly complex. I can google keywords that tell me how to program this in a matter of minutes. Heck, I could give you a decent first draft of the necessary calculations off the top of my head. It doesn't need to do anything difficult like take into account the target's acceleration or try to predict the curvature of its flight path if it's orbiting something or approaching something that's moving; just base it on the target's current velocity and distance from your ship and the difference between your ship's and the target's velocities. (There has to be some room for the pilot of a maneuverable target to evade, after all.)

Edit to add a couple of examples in the form of demo applets I found online:
http://www.red3d.com/cwr/steer/PursueEvade.html - This is what "Approach" should do.
http://www.red3d.com/cwr/steer/Arrival.html - Combine this with the above and a distance offset for what "Keep at Range" should do. The result is similar to: http://www.red3d.com/cwr/steer/LeaderFollow.html

If everyone's connection to the EVE servers was identical, the servers always responded with minimal latency, and everyone's computer ran at 60 FPS - or if EVE was a different sort of game - I'd be much more inclined to give some credit to the "player skill = manual piloting; you want to take that away" argument. Alas, the world is not so perfect, and EVE is what it is, and improvements to the navigation commands would merely serve to help balance the playing field. The need for skill would not be reduced.

Skill is not necessarily about having the best reaction time with the mouse and keyboard like some FPS game. It is much more important in EVE to know what the best course of action is for a given situation and to keep a cool head than it is to have the best mouse-twitching reflexes and such.

Regarding the primary focus of my suggestion, stopping your ship would still take time - less time, yes, but you're certainly not going to bring your Megathron or even your Machariel to an instant, screeching halt. If you intend to stop at a certain position, you'll still need to time it properly. That's still going to require skill. And if you have a plan which involves to come to a halt (IT'S A TRAP! comes to mind), your foes would have less time to realize what you're doing before you do it, without you having to micromanage the simple operation of stopping quickly. On the other hand, not moving makes you easier to hit. A skilled player understands the conditions in which coming to a halt would be... unwise... and would not use that command. A less skilled player might not understand this, and if used improperly, it could lead to bad things happening to them. (And as I mentioned, there's nothing preventing the current stop command's "coasting" behavior from remaining part of the game, under an appropriately altered name.)

As for the additional changes I suggested, remember that a skilled player also knows how to use the various navigation commands to their best advantage. If you're orbiting a target too closely or too quickly for your guns to track, for example, you won't be as effective. If you're trying to approach a faster target which is orbiting you or otherwise controlling the range, no amount of computer-controlled intelligent navigation is going to make you match course, much less catch up. Using the right commands and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of you and your opponents' ships is arguably much more important than focusing on manual navigation, and it frees you (or at least your mouse) up to be managing other things. And knowing which command is the right one to use is also more important than the exact details of how those commands work. Thus, making them work better is not going to unbalance the game in terms of player skill.

You may also want to consider not only what a skilled player would supposedly lose, but also what they would gain and how it would benefit them. Manual piloting can be klunky, unreliable, and subject to lag, as stated regarding using it to stop your ship. Even if you're the best manual pilot in the game, you simply cannot navigate your ship as accurately or efficiently as the game itself could. And that's hardly the only benefit to be found.

Finally, consider what the purpose of manual piloting should be. Should a player be required to manually control their course when they are engaging with an opponent? Of course not, we wouldn't have any automatic nav commands at all if that was true. Then should they be required to pilot manually in order to engage their opponent effectively as you claim?

I believe the answer to THAT question should be 'No.'

EVE is not a game where you fly your ship with a joystick, whether it's a physical joystick or a virtual one simulated by rapid-fire mouse clicks. It never will be, for both technical and game design reasons. Trying to hold on to the supposed "benefits" of manual piloting is not the direction EVE should be taking.

Setting a straight line course should be required only when you're attempting to (a) set a straight line course (duh) in a direction where there is no object to approach, or (b) you want to perform some creative maneuver which does not already exist in the form of an automatic navigation command.

Besides, I don't think you really need some artificial advantage like having "less skilled" players (or less technologically advantaged players, as I referred to in my first paragraph) being relegated to using poorly implemented, decade-old navigation commands in order for your skill to put you on top.

Yes, it would be a change, and if you are among the people who think it is unnecessary or would reduce the advantages of your preferred play-style, I can respect that opinion. However, I believe it's a change which would be beneficial to the majority of EVE players, of all skill levels, and that the decade-old, rarely touched navigation controls are in sore need of improvement.

Yes having developed certain skill is an advantage. How is it artificial?
You can do the same you know.



It would be beneficial for those, who refuse to learn how to pilot their ship and those, who are too lazy to do so.

Tomcio, your point of view is more interesting than your initial flat-out "No" led me to believe. I disagree with you on the major point - but rather than turning this into a back and forth argument between just two individuals and getting nowhere, I'd like to wait and see what other points of view other players might have. So I'll keep this (relatively) short and try to focus on where we seem to have the biggest lack of communication.


Surely you aren't claiming that manual piloting is the only player skill involved in EVE, or even a significant fraction of the skill involved in EVE! That would be a gross exaggeration.

It is true that such changes would be of greater benefit to pilots who are "less-skilled" at manual navigation than others, but certainly not to the degree you fear. It would not "remove the need for skill" or "make everyone as good as a skilled pilot for free". And what about accessibility concerns? If someone is simply incapable of using input devices as well as the average person, for whatever reason, why should they be penalized for their "lack of skill" in a game where the use of that type of skill is not one of its core, defining features?

I already said that skill in EVE is much more than knowing how to make your ship perform a function that it should be able to perform for everyone, automatically and accurately. No spaceships of the sizes capsuleers can pilot would have a navigation computer incapable of performing even the simplest of intercepts. The ability to work around this limitation of the game is hardly worthy of being glorified as "skill"! Yes, it is a skill, meaning something most people can learn to do, but that is not even a major portion of "what skill is" in EVE!


Capsuleers with their neural interfaces are supposed to be able to control their ships effortlessly, as if they were simply moving their own bodies. So why should the game interface be allowed to have controls of such poor quality? Why should this old, imperfect interface not be improved upon? CCP is doing that all the time with all kinds of aspects of the game. There was a whole slew of UI improvements not that long ago.

I do strongly agree with one thing you said - EVE is about thinking, not clicking. That means that the less work the pilot has to do to turn their thoughts into actions, the better. The more smoothly you can control your ship, with the game helping you instead of hindering you with outdated, overly simplified, and unrealistic controls - the better. We may not be real capsuleers, but that doesn't mean the game should make it painfully obvious that we are so lacking in comparison to the characters we play.

Your argument seems to boil down to the idea that ironing out those imperfections in the game and making your ship easier to control would eliminate an element of player skill which should be integral to EVE, making it less than what it should be. But EVE, at its heart, is not really about the type of player skill you're referring to. Nor is it supposed to require significant effort or skill to cause your ship to do very simple, straightforward things, like fly efficiently.

EVE is about other forms of skill, and you seem to be mostly ignoring them - which is understandable, considering that their overwhelming importance really undermines the 'less skill' argument. "EVE is about thinking, not clicking" - I couldn't have said it better myself.



As I said at the start, I'd like to hear others' thoughts on this subject as well, so I'd like to avoid revisiting the "skill" topic unless somebody adds something interesting to it. I think we've both made our opinions clear on it now.

So, you want a 'reverse' command, not a 'shut the engines off' one?

Spin the camera around, double-click behind you, then hit stop.

You have a thing in space called inertia. Its common physics and well know facts about space travel. Your lucky you do not have the real life physics involved like Elite did if you find navigation difficult.

Example.
Ship traveling forwards at 100m/s would need the same amount of thrust going forwards to stop it, but this would take time to achive. The bigger the mass the more opposite thrust is needed to slow the ship down and stop it which means it will take longer to stop the ship.

You can actualy make the larger ships in Eve slide if you use a AB or MWD and turn them quickly this is also inertia in effect, and it will take longer for you to align to your target and warp away due to the sliding. In Elite this was a tactic used in combat set a forward motion cut engines and spin the ship to strafe the target. You don't need to do this in Eve as we have turrets that do that for use.

so it is STOP engine or STOP ship ?
I choose STOP !

I'd rather prefer a real joystick command for piloting ships than others automatic commands...

If the ship that you are in stopped too quickly your clone would be splattered all over the inside of the pod.

Of course not, that would be ridiculous.



It is "significant fraction" as far as small scale combat pvp ( even pve with certain ships ) goes. I have no experience with huge fleet battles but I assume that this skill is not as important there.



No but it would greatly reduce the impact of this skill. It would be severely lessened.



All games place certain requirements on the players. If someone can't ( for any reason ) fulfill those requirements they will simply not play such game ( people with certain disabilities cannot play most games ). There are different activities players can undertake here and most of them do not involve manual piloting. Even combat ( both pve and pvp ) can be done without it.



Oh, but what is this "imperfections ironing" if not a skill?
Give one sculptor a simple chisel.
Give another sculptor a full set of state-of-the-art sculpting equipment.
If both of them achieve the same effect in the end then - which one of them is more skilled than the other?
Knowledge, thinking and "imperfections ironing" - skill is composed of all those things

'Ridiculous' is exactly my point. That was a rhetorical question, you know.

Even claiming that it is a 'significant fraction' of the set of skills involved in PVP is going way too far. Take it away and most people wouldn't miss it - in fact, I'm betting most people would be pleased to have the ship controls function better.


Of this one skill, yes. You're absolutely correct in that. The entire point of this suggestion is obviously to lessen the need for such a skill. I think that's been made abundantly clear, and there is no need to continue beating that dead horse.

Your narrow focus on this one individual skill out of the large set of skills involved in EVE, and PVP especially, only makes it look like you dislike the idea because you're afraid it would significantly reduce your advantage over people who don't know how to use manual control to make up for the deficiencies of the automatic controls. Try thinking about all the other skills you are better at than your opponents. If you have trouble listing them, then your fear may be valid, but I doubt you'll find it very hard to come up with at least a few if you put your mind to it.

Also, let me make something clear: This change would reduce my advantage as well! I'm not proposing this because I'm QQing or "bad at manual piloting" - just the opposite. Let me try to put this in as non-boastful a manner as possible: I'm skilled enough at manual piloting that I am highly aware of the significant difference between the performance our ships are capable of and the lackluster performance granted by the built-in navigation commands available to all pilots.

I find this performance gap unacceptable as well as distasteful. The built-in navigation commands are there to serve a purpose. They do not serve it nearly as well as they are supposed to. EVE is not primarily a game based on direct, manual control of your ship. Therefore, it shouldn't take significant effort to pilot it, and the navigation commands should be improved so that players have less need for manual control. Having to resort to it any time you want the best performance possible is shameful, and shows just how broken the automatic navigation commands are. Well, they need to be fixed!

Do you have anything else to say about the suggestion that isn't 'oh noes, less skill'? If so, by all means, offer some constructive feedback. (Otherwise please refer to rule 1 of this forum.)