Player Features and Ideas Discussion

lol

This idea is popping up quite often recently..

And somehow bad people keep thinking its a good idea.



Autopilot being slow is an intended feature. You're getting risk/slowness in exchange for being lazy.

While shorter autopilot warp-to distance would cause fewer people to risk botting, the net effect of it on Eve is the same. This is why CCP didn't implement a "make my mining lasers activate automatically when I'm in range of an asteroid" feature in order to fix mining bots.

One does not "fix" botting by building bot functionality into the game.

I (or any other scrub with a minimally-trained hauling alt) could get my freighter from Jita to Rens several times in an evening without any manual piloting on my part. Do you know what that would do to the Eve economy, regional market differences, and space feeling big and varied?

Nothing really changes as you can still do that today, prices might even out a bit, but isnt that what the trade hubs are for? People want steady prices, and the haulers and manufacturers are there to deliver it. Actually this might be a buff to low-sec, or at least expand the scope and feel of the world as peoples "home" area increases as travel becomes slighty more convenient if you invest the skills in it. For most people the world probably seems small today, because they pretty much live in the same systems and cant be bothered to go far from their home due to the current means of travel

Convenience.

It is a determining factor on whether you pick up that hull and modules locally, or travel to a far distant hub which might be a little cheaper.

It is the reason convenience stores exist in so many places in real life too. That supermarket is too far away, and only open between certain hours. The convenience store may be more expensive, but it fits into your schedule so much better, that many people consider it a good trade off.

If you make travel to that distant trade hub too easy or convenient, the local markets either dry up, or become carbon copies with pricing very close. This is BAD for trade, as it devalues the efforts made by transport pilots to move goods at a profit.

Uh... what? That makes no sense.


SFI prices are weird right now (probably because of giant surplus of supply leading to wide distribution), so they were probably a bad offhand example of a regionally-sourced good. I do know that I have made hundreds of millions of ISK simply hauling them from Abudban to Jita in the past, and that's the kind of thing I was referring to. I don't think this change would affect manufacturers much (if at all), but rather it would harm smalltime for-profit haulers by driving profits down. This may drive them out of the market entirely, leaving the business only to big groups like Red Frog.

DO YOU WANT TO HURT SMALL BUSINESS?! (heh.)

Would they? I personally think the recent inflation has been great, as it's giving more meaning to having bigger ships, and an incentive to not lose them (for example, Maelstrom or Abaddon blobs not being super-affordable anymore). For wealth to retain its value, it needs to not be widely available. Cheaper ships lead to a more boring game.

Yeah, but just like there wasn't much money to be made in mining before CCP Sreegs started hitting bots in the face, there wouldn't be as much money in hauling anymore after a change like you're proposing.

I think this skill is a bad idea because it ignores the actual problem with flying in space, in particular for people flying big slow ships

it takes between 36 and 42 seconds for a freighter to align with max skills and no implants. i can fly a freighter on several accounts, but i always use an orca with a 100MN MWD because i can't stand the time it takes to fly the damned freighter around. i will aotopilot a freighter every time i fly it and go make dinner or something. i don't need a faster autopilot trip, i need flying my ship(s) from point a to point b to be faster and more efficient, and actually require me to do something.

these giant ships that tend to be the most autopiloted are flown this way because the incentive for manually flying them is frankly not worth the time to do it. point a to b is as bad as grinding XP in other MMOs except with less to do. freighters should be fittable, and all these large ships should have an increased warp speed and be more agile. i am sorry but if the only way to get places faster is by making 2 clicks and then waiting 3 minutes to align and warp so i can do it again, i would rather autopilot

this brings me to another issue. the general hauling/transport capabilities in eve suck. its to much of a pain in the ass to move **** around. rigged ships are a hassle. large volumes of expensive **** is a hassle. flying any ship that can haul a decent volume in a reasonably safe way is a hassle. what it isn't is a challenge.

i agrea with one componenet of each side of this argument
attentatively doing stuff should be rewarding (from the nay sayers)
hauling is no fun and needs buffed (from the people who misguidedly think this skill might help)

as it stands manually piloting almost any largish ship (short of the Orca, and even this is not great) is a tedious boring unchallenging and unrewarding waste of time compared to autopilot. which takes none of my time.

what is actually needed is to make manually piloting big ships better and more fun. i want to actually have a fair chance to dodge ganks and camps in my hauling ships, and do it without having to cripple my transport efficiency. a lot of players say its about trade offs between safety and efficientcy, but when it comes to hauling (and mining) the tradoffs are unbalanced. you are basically garaunteed to die if you get caught, and it is very easy to get caught if you are trying to be efficient.

A story to illustrate how hauling can be fun:

I was hauling in a maxed cargo bestower with a cloak. i had a pretty standard fit with a cloak no ECM burst since i was in highsec, a MWD and a bunch of shield mods. i was hauling a bunch of packaged faction frigates and faction modules (this was before i could fly a blockade runner) i got scanned at a gate passing through a major trade route, and sure enough i jumped through the next gate and there was an alpha fit apocalypse sitting on the gate. i double checked his guns (artillary) while i held cloak and he was about 15 k from me. i knew i would not be able to align and warp before he popped me, but i knew i could cloaky MWD and stand a chance at dodging the lock. so i did. he actually slowboated after me for the decloak. it was an intense like three minutes as he passed within 2172 meters of mebut i made it. i had to continue flying towards my intended gate cloaked until i was out of alpha range even after he returned to the gate and he had some friends in cepters show up and try decloaking me so i had to stay and be ready to hit warp if it happened. i managed to get out of range and warp eventually, but it was an intense fun and rewarding experience.

the only time manual piloting any hauler should take longer than flying a battleship between gates is when something like this happens. i don't like getting ganked, but i don't hate people who do it, and if i could still efficiently move goods and have fun dodging these types of ganks even in places like lowsec i would be risking bigger ships and having more fun doing it. this type of thing is how CCP should work on balancing the industrial ships and side of the game in general i think, not introduce skills to make autopilot take less time

TL:DR
the fun factor of hauling/industry type ships needs a buff, not reduced autopilot speed

Wait . . . Auto-piloting is ONLY for low sec.

Try auto piloting a frigate/shuttle through high sec with even a few tens of million of cargo in the hold. You get popped every time.

You can autopilot through most of low sec all day with no problems.

In fact my auto-piloting shuttle got a vengeance kill last night (with a little help from some gate guns of course). That was awesome.

I have an idea concerning sec status drops and how hard it is to unpirate yourself. My suggestion is when you get popped in PVP activity that the sec status drop the person that popped you gets, you get that as positive sec status. This would do several things for the pvp world. With this idea being -10 sec status now means you are scary...before it just meant you would agress. It would also make pvp an easier thing to jump in and try out as a new player because instead of getting down to -2 and sec status grinding forever just to get back up to a place where you could do missions/mining whatever carebear stuff you want. I think it would be great way to see how good someone is instead of just how long someone has pvp'd. It would also (from popular opinion) result in less -10 toons being abandoned due to frustration with pirate restrictions. Love to hear opinions on this as I have been passing it around my roam territory. And have been getting favorable feedback. Thanks all