EVE General Discussion

For me it's because it's a character building game one of the old style space type games in MMO form.


It's spaceships.


There's no character levels and as such no end game.


It's sandboxish.





Those are reasons I return to this game.


It has nothing to do with the UI although the changes they've done are welcome changes although not strictly necessary.





Edit: One other reason, it's one universe.

Whoa my thread got necro'd. Glad to see people still care though.



The Simple Answer: Double left click on any point in space. Your ship will fly towards it.


The Long Answer: When people say manually piloting, they're not saying that you use that to the exclusion of all else. Good pilots will decide whether they trust their ship's navigational computer or need to override it for a given situation. Generally, on high eccentricity fights or situations where you need to break an orbit(by ******* with your enemy's nav computer) you'll manually pilot.

Just cause I want to give an example, he's a summary of the last fight I got into in factional warfare:
I was flying a Republic Fleet Firetail and I was being pursued by a Sentinel and a Caldari Navy Hookbill. I ran into a small complex where the sentinel couldn't enter, and manually flew in the opposite direction of the Amarr militia ships. Hookbill came in and started to follow. Before he landed I manually lowered my speed to make it look like my ship was slower than it was, and switched to RF EMP rounds. I let him slowly come towards me and then turned and aligned to a celestial to bait him into overheating. Once he overheated his afterburner I overheated my afterburner and flew straight at him. He was set to orbit, but I was manually flying straight at him, so his nav computer didn't react quickly enough, so I basically reached 2km from him right off the bat. Then he turned on a tracking disruptor. I was going to orbit him at about 3km to keep my speed up to reduce his missile damage, but I switched to approach at 500 to minimize transversal. Since he'd just selected orbit a 8km or 6km or whatever he set, his ship just flew in a straight line away from me to try and reach 6km before orbit, which meant my guns were basically firing at him at optimal range, and transversal was low enough that my guns completely destroyed him despite him using a tracking disruptor and rockets. Fun fact: I had a tracking disruptor too. I still won.

I hope that gives an idea of how you use manual flight. There are tons of other uses besides just initiating a fight.

Someone mentioned something like this during the Art Panel Q&A. I think it was Torfi who stated that something like this is planned for future UI overhauls.

Screenshot

While this screenshot doesn't display anything like what you're suggesting, it does show that there are plans in making the tactical overlay a lot more useful than it currently is. The UI, overall, is in need of a major update. It should be accessible, look cool, animate in cool and useful ways, and always keep the player aware of what's going on.

To respond to the OP, I feel that the sort of readouts/indications he suggests would only be of any use if the ship is being flown joystick-style rather than point and double click as we currently do; he's asking for info more suited to a flight-sim than EVE.

I gotta disagree with you here. People ARE stupid, but the sad fact is that people are stupid by choice. Have a conversation with people who watch crappy reality TV shows. A surprising number of them(in my experience) are actually surprisingly intelligent, but watch them as their guilty pleasure because it makes them feel better about themselves. People smart and dumb prefer to take the path of least resistance in most situations, because that's generally logical. Why is Angry Birds so popular? Because it's the sort of game that can appeal to dumb people, but smart people can derive enjoyment from it as well without too much effort. Personally, that sort of intellectual laziness annoys the crap out of me, but I've seen too many absolutely brilliant people who enjoy the dumbest crap cranked out by ******** studios. Hell one of the smartest people I've ever known IRL, a complete ******* grade A genius played eve to MINE. She enjoyed mining over anything else in eve because after an extremely stressful day she just wanted to unwind.

So working along that train of thought, consider the following surprisingly common scenario: a player, we will refer to him as "Dumbutt", starts playing some crappy MMO(we will use WoW as an example because everyone has tried it and nobody likes it). He starts playing the game, and because it is easy, he enjoys it. For a while, he plays relatively casually and doesn't do much. But even the most lazy of minds eventually do seek some challenge. Dumbutt gets bored with soloing, and starts learning how to do instances. Fast forward. He hits max level, gets geared, develops that minimal mental stimulation that passes for "skill" in WoW, and enjoys himself for a time. Then he realizes WoW is terrible and quits, because even stupid players hate that ******* game these days. But before he quit, Dumbutt started theorycrafting and messing around with ze maths to optimize his stats and try to create optimal talent builds and whatnot. The reason he quit was because he realized that he had reached the absolute limit of what he could do, and everything was the same after that.

For you see, Dumbutt was not actually a dumb player, he was simply lazy. In the stretch of time he played WoW, he did actually slowly increase the amount of mental energy put towards it. Very slowly, but he did try. Driven players(the kind that play eve) tend to advance up a skill curve extremely quickly. The near infinite possibilities of eve are perfect for players who want to keep learning new things, developing new skills, and becoming better in some way. But even the derpiest of players WANT to get better at something. They want to feel that sense of progress and development. They just want it to come in smaller, more bite sized chunks. They want to take their time, and splash around in the kiddie pool for a while.



So the point I'm trying to make here is in regards to learning curves. Look at eve, and look at the rate of new player retention. There's a GIGANTIC cliff when eve first starts out. I'm sure you've all seen the picture, but I'll link it here:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3088/2335016192_6003c39c4c.jpg

Thing is, that entry cliff isn't the only cliff in Eve. There's a second major learning/skill cliff which occurs when leaving high security space. I can't recall the exact statistic, but it was somewhere around the range of 85% of players in Eve had *never* left highsec. Hell, I dicked around in highsec for a long ass time before I grew a pair. The great thing about this interface change is that it smooths out BOTH cliffs, and would actively help players not only to stay in Eve, but also to feel more comfortable entering lowsec and nullsec. Consider factional warfare and players just starting out in PvP. That knowledge would allow them to understand WHY they're losing their fights, which would help them develop faster as a pilot. This would give them the push they need to keep taking ships to lowsec, rather than just giving up like I've seen happen with countless pilots in the past.


Sorry for the rambling post, but I just can't agree that everyone is fundamentally stupid because I have seen tons of intelligent players who don't stick with eve. They try it, find it intimidating or don't see the nuances and intrigues of it, decide it's a stupid grindfest or has boring combat, and finally leave. I did this twice. I saw several successful eve players do this cycle multiple times over the course of YEARS. This needs to change.

I'm pretty sure that's not the case. Throwaway PvP ships cost fuckall, but people still give up after one or two lowsec romps. It's not the financial cost people care about, but the psychological cost of wasting resources without learning anything or improving at all. I think even highsec players understand that isk comes and goes. Why else would people still shoot at me on the rare occassion when I ninja? Hell I've actually seen mission runners openly engage me, knowing full well I'll be back in a battleship 2 minutes later. Yeah a lot of highsec players are geniunely cowards. I won't deny that. But most of them just don't want to spend day after day losing ships and feeling that they've been wasting their time without doing anything productive.

I kind of like the suggestion, I'm not certain I like the proposed execution.

Yeah - EVE needs a lot of polish. I know I don't need the polish. Most of us don't need the polish. We play EVE because of what it presents as a single-shard sandbox, not because the gameplay and interface are amazingly fluid.

I get that.

That said, I don't think that simply ignoring quality-of-life changes is a good mode of operation for the long-term longevity of the game. I'd love to see EVE stick around for at least another decade, but I'd love even more to see it go beyond that and really flourish.

Not all just most. And I back that up with over 6 years experience.

RvB offers a lot of pvp on demand which is why so many join up. You can find them in low sec as much as high sec and even invading 0.0 for giggles. The people who want to try low sec and 0.0 will try it, the UI doesn't stop them. A massive bulk however have no interest in pvp and thus no interest in entering low sec or 0.0. These are the people who you see whining in local or the forums when they get blown up in their safehaven of highsec and who want to change EVE so they can be safe.


If you want to make 5% of highsec nubs to make the leap into low sec or 0.0 you have to grab them when they are a few days old, provide them ships and get them fighting. Kill the idea that they cannot pvp untill they get x amount of skills before it sets in and keep them away from the NPC corps which are full of horrible advice and whines. Get them into a FW corp or do what the goons did and just roam around attacking anything and everything in rifters. Dumbing down the UI will never get more people into low sec.

The problem with EVEs UI is that it is not like most of the other MMOs out there so people are not used to it. Once you do get used to it then it becomes rather easy. Not to say improvements cant be made, the new inventory sytem has made things a hell of a lot easyer and the change to the info shown while hovering over your guns is nice.

I do not believe that let's say 25 - 50 k or in the extreme even a doubled population of players would necessarily be a bad thing. The more players eve has the more money would be available to reinvest into eve's hardware and development. That said, the population wouldn't double over night so there'd be plenty of time for ccp to predict at what point the afore mentioned beefier hardware would be necessary and act accordingly (I know, ccp and acting accordingly, a real classic).

I firmly believe that the more crowded HighSec gets, the more players will move into low or null.