Jita Park Speakers Corner

Posting to confirm that I am against player submitted designs.

Except for ship skins.

I don't place any particular emphasis on spaceship content. It's nice, and CCP should by all means continue to publish it as a fairly high priority, given that it makes up most of the available gameplay.

Incarna, the expansion, was a disaster. I don't believe anyone disputes that. But when they were teasing people with player-owned pubs, and walking along concourses to meet other pilots, it had a lot of support. What didn't get support was freezing all other gameplay development to release a single, non-interactive, single-player room while proclaiming that "greed is good."CQ isn't even single-player content.

As soon as you bring other people into the picture, and take CONCORD/faction police out of the picture, it becomes much more interesting. People in your own alliance pulled off the FW exploit by sitting around and talking, they just did it out of game because in-game communication support is anemic. Why would they suddenly sit around and talk about the weather if their avatars were together in a room? No, of course not. The PVE content you're suggesting all sounds great, but the most compelling game in EVE is the metagame; all WiS has to add to that are faces and voices. The rest will take care of itself.

I love the idea of "dark" agents, by the way. +1 to that idea.



Yes, there are currently band-aid and duct-tape solutions. They either carry serious compromises (text chat in the far future? please), or they take you completely outside the universe that EVE is trying to model comprehensively. None of that is nearly as compelling as doing communication in-game and in-universe. The best you can say about it is that it does the job.



Sure, but some things need fewer tools than others.

As I recall, there has been plenty of emergent gameplay from Second Life, despite the general aimlessness of the platform. Creative people create. I'm not as familiar with Sims Online.

Y'all don't need that modern tel-eye-fone, y'all got that pony express ta git the word through to y'all's family in a hurry.

Is that a bug, or a feature? Is it better that way, or is that just how it's done?

Or, if you guys are dead set on playing Jabber rather than EVE, can you respect that maybe some people would prefer to conduct in-game business in game, even if it's "metagame?" Certainly, there's no possible way to stop people from getting on VT100s and using talk to run an alliance (that's all any text chat client is, finally), I just wonder what the appeal is.

Well, the obvious appeal is that you can run the game from work. For us casual players who work at work, it would be nice to play more of the game in the game. I would hope that in the far future, we have gotten beyond plain text and phpBB, because we have Skype now.

Also, you're hung up on "need." This is a game. Nobody needs anything. The only question is whether a feature would make EVE a better game. For me, this would. And so would the other things you've suggested.



I can't get immersed in EVE when I'm looking at a bulletin board. Sorry. It looks like the 1990s. All I need (ha!) are the in-game tools to replace #%*&@#ing Mumble, and I will be much happier. Because, see, Mumble sucks. TeamSpeak sucks horribly. They're unreliable, insecure, and their user interfaces were designed by clueless idiots. I would love nothing more than to delete them off my machine. An in-game system would be much more elegant and much less hassle, and able to add information such as only people in a room hearing you speak, or being able to hear speech and noise from where another person's avatar actually is in relation to you. Done right, it would be a straight upgrade. You don't need it, in the same way that you don't need any of them, either. You could just as easily play your metagame over the post.



In a fleet battle, Incarna doesn't matter. Trivially. That's... an easy point to concede. If you're walking in station, you don't give the slightest damn about the fleet interface, either. It's still something you'd like to have.

As to the latter, CCP is actively looking for better voice synthesis software. Given good enough voice fonts, problem solved. In the meantime, you could send some goons over to the man's house and give him a swift kick in the family jewels.



The closer it is to actually speaking in person, the better. It is possible to conduct a conversation over text, it's just that you lose so much information, between expression, tone of voice, and body language. You gain the ability to spend time thinking about answers, so it's not all bad, but let's not pretend that text is anything other than a lossy compression of language.



You probably know more about what the Goons do with Second Life than I do. The things I've heard about are cooler than that. It's a pretty bad metaphor for Incarna anyway, because the emergent gameplay in Second Life emerges from its vast ability to be user-customized, which is something that we will never see here. If SL is too chaotic an example, consider LambdaMOO (which is text-based--I don't deny that text has its advantages). But again, that's user-programmable in a way that EVE will never be. Any emergent gameplay in Incarna will be driven by the metagame.

(As to bizarre body modifications, SL is actually getting more conservative as more people join and the social pressure to not be "weird" ratchets up. And, well, some of your alliance mates have taken EVE's character creator out to its design limits in rather creative ways. Maybe CCP will offer a free re-customization when they roll out Incarna content.)

I went and tracked down the original post this is from and am following it up.

Skills should be the basis of WiS- we need to know what we can do... what we are capable of doing and how to go about doing it.
Maybe they ought to be called "Abilities" -but something other than "Skills" so as not to confuse them with the spaceship skill trees.

I think they should also be able to be trained at the same time as spaceship skills, with a sliding bar to adjust the concentration of training between "Skills" and "Abilities". Set it at 50/50 to train both your 'skill tree' and 'ability tree' at half speed... 90/10 to focus mostly on "Skills".... 0/100 to completely focus on "Abilities" alone if you plan on being a station dweller- and that should be a viable playstyle. People SHOULD be able to spend their entire EvE career inside a station if they so desire, and there should be ample enough things to do therein... PvP should be a possibility via combat clones in designated areas that could have gambling pools set up in the local player owned establishments -in which you COULD buy a virtual beer if you'd like (why the heck not) and also play some poker or darts or GO, or any other game that someone comes up with- but it'd be your Abilities that would give you the advantage you need - talents in hand-eye coordination and bluffing and luck and your imposing presence and your precision at wielding a firearm or experience fistfighting...

any ability that can be thought of needs to be represented in a way so as to be trainable for WiS.

Without a way to do something better than someone else there is no EvE, THAT is exactly what Incarna missed the boat on... EvE is not about being able to just do stuff - it's all about being able to do stuff better than the next guy... give us that aspect and we will do the rest.

Thanks for linking that, Rinn.

Just to chime in - yes, that post and the follow-up by CCP Unifex was the direct result of the CSM saying, "Ya'll need to get in front of this."

To re-post something I said in another thread, this is something we've poked the hornet's nest about a few times now and the best I can tell you is that you probably shouldn't hold your breath expecting much in the way of ~Incarna~ advancement in the near future. Unless CCP pulls something out of their ass at FanFest that the CSM is unaware of, I have heard nothing that would lead me to believe we are going to see much iteration on space dolls or their living quarters soon. I have mixed feelings about it because, on one hand, it seems like there is a lot of potential there. On the other, CCP is very laser focused on getting the 'spaceships' side of the game working as well as possible. I hate to be a Debbie Downer about it but short of a full blown player rabble about how CCP needs to stop working on spaceships in the next 12-18 months, I'd be surprised if CCP does much with this stuff. But, as I said, maybe I'm wrong and there is just something they are not telling us.

If the walking in stations get a fleshed out FPS style engine for hit boxes before they fix / implement line of sight issues in EvE I will make it my goal in life to shoot down every station I see.

In all fairness we are taking about adding a separate game altogether while there are some outstanding problems that need to be addressed in the main content first.

Warcraft did this, the Cataclysm expansion literally changed the face of the world that remained unchanged for nearly 6 years. New areas, every old area was revamped, cities moved / destroyed.

Making the sub-game of walking in stations would be good to new players but bad for old ones. With all the stickies listed in the features and ideas forum that deal with game engine issues, there needs to be improvement of the main game first!