Player Features and Ideas Discussion

If you have a short attention span, just move along. Otherwise, read on.

Eve's physical game environment is abysmally boring. The gameplay space in Eve is just three empty directions with some background visuals (that don't even make sense). Places that have actual objects such as asteroids or gates hardly change this because they don't even block gunfire from turrets or missiles. Environmental hazards are completely lacking.

When you look at war from the dawn of time to the present you realize that the environment within which the conflicts take place is just as important as the actions of the belligerents. Think of Hannibal having to cross the alps, or the Werchtmacht losing thousands of soldiers to the Russian winter. There are countless examples that I can use to prove the point that the physical environment has always been a powerful force in determining the outcome of armed conflict. It's almost like an unspoken third party that can be either foe or friend. Eve is completely robbed of having this same colourful potential because of its sterile environments.

Here are a few implementations that would really spice up Eve in terms of graphics, gameplay, realism and fidelity to the back story:

a) Please, no more generic nebulae of various colour shades. Eve is supposed to be set in a small, tightly knit star cluster. It doesn't make sense that each solar system would have its own nebula. We should have one large galaxy or a large nebula (or some other celestial object) as a backdrop in every solar system of New Eden. It would obviously appear differently as you travel through the Eve universe and your visual perspective becomes altered. This would improve the visual environment quite a bit and make New Eden a more cohesive place. Right now, when you see one solar system, you've pretty much seen them all (because the rest are a copy-paste x ~7000 job).

b) No more generic painted stars in the background. Make the background stars correspond to actual solar systems, positioned the way we see them in the Eve map.

c) No more nonsensical solar systems. If you are going to have comprehensive stats on celestial bodies then please ensure that they make sense (I'm looking at you, tropical planet 50AU from its star). Make sure that the visual style and stats of celestial objects actually correspond to their place in the solar system.

d) Get rid of static solar systems. Make sure that the planets and their respective orbiting bodies like stations and moons behave realistically (proper orbits and rotation). This means that we would need both relative (based on moving bodies) and absolute (based on static coordinates) bookmarks in space.

e) Make the stars dynamic. Give them a chance to erupt with massive flares that can shut down station services and destroy ships that are close enough. To make it fair there should be warnings and timers for the large destructive flares (i.e. when you enter a system you get a message telling you that there might be a coronal mass ejection of xx scale, and how far you have to be to avoid it). The smaller unpredictable ones that might just cause some shield damage should not be predictable and will take some user action to avoid. A more dynamic environment like this would break-up the monotony and clockwork routines that people are used to in high-sec.

f) Celestial objects should have gravity wells. If you get too close to a planet, for example, without having much speed, and you fail to recover your trajectory, then your ship should fall into the atmosphere and burn up. This should be relatively easy to avoid unless you are brain dead, but it will serve as another environmental hazard that can be used creatively in engagements.

g) Completely change the asteroid belt system. Make sure roids are sparse, and are found in actual belts around the central star. This way they would have to be actively scanned down and chased as they hurtle through space in order to be exploited by miners. NPC rats would then scan down miner locations and warp to them.

h) Make the resource base in high-sec non-renewable. Start by saturating all of the solar systems in Eve with enough resources (in terms of system-scale roid belts) so the carebears can happily mine in high-sec for a few years. After the resources start running out in the most concentrated high-sec locations, people will be forced to move outward, closer to low sec space. Eventually all of the major resources in high-sec will run out and people will be forced into low-sec and null-sec.

i) Lightning clouds that require manual navigation and active hazard avoidance. Since we can't make all of the resources in the game non-renewable (Eve would actually die), there should be hazardous places such as lightning clouds that contain resources which get renewed (like the current belts after downtime). Once the static resource base starts to dry up, more and more people will be fighting for control over these territories (which would be in null and low sec). To better picture what I have in mind, imagine a large 3D cave system in space, except the walls are made of electrified gas/plasma and constantly shift. There would be certain "caverns" inside these clouds where roids would regenerate. This type of environment wouldn't permit large gangs (because space would be limited) and it would promote small gang and solo combat by fast, agile ships.

j) Allow us to go in space without our pods. Now that we don't need entire pods to safely beam our consciousness back to another clone (see Dust), we should get small ships that we can enter and fly with our avatars. We should also be able to suit up and go on EVAs in space to explore random structures.

…maybe you should read up on some of the things that have already happened, and some that are about to happen. Also, you should probably read up on the economy of an MMO.

Good post with nice and interesting suggestions.

However, I've moved this from EVE General as this subforum is a better place to discuss these ideas.

Thanks.

I stopped reading here:



to quote a man who gets space:

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy


PS: ok, I skimmed your other suggestions and here's the deal: they are all PVE related, solo gameplay changes that have no real affect at all on the core of what EVE is.
does a tropical planet 50AU from a star make sense? no it doesnt. does it affect anything at all regarding EVE game play? absolutely not.
in general, it sounds like you don't like what EVE is and have spent what I assume is a decent amount of time finding insignificant things to complain about.

I think that my last few suggestions have huge implications for PVP and Eve as a whole. If the only renewable resources were found inside hazardous environments that only permit small gangs then we would see the nature of PVP change completely. Industrialists and fighters would have to work together in small groups to get resources. Large allianes could still have their blobfests but their overwhelming numbers wouldn't be able to stop small gangs from entering and exploiting the resources in their territory.

a) Nebula's are not really this colorful anyway. its for show. Its a game.

b) too much effort for the return. We already get brighter individual stars that line up specifically to the next system.
The painted background is fine, we would not just see the singular systems the empires bothered to map out

c) All created from a seed. To go around and specifically change the stats for the little problems as there are 67253 planets. No point.

d) Would require a total rebuild of the games base "fluid" physics engine. Its too much trouble for gain.


e) Could be made simpler. A random solar event could trigger a short term wormhole system effect, like a pulsar shield perk or Wolf-Rayet armor perk stats depending on the star color, no reason for realism if its fun.

f) back to d

g) New ring mining. how it actually looks and functions not yet provided.

h) re-setting the game for a set life-span on resources is bad mmmky?

i) you can pretty accurately double click your butt around, yet there would have to be such a large leeway for the poor manual navigation and unplanable orbits making large storm structures in missions and such pointless (would be neat though)

j) You don't need to get rid of pods to do EVA activities as planed in the station EVA prototype thread. The Pod is our own escape vessel, and is our capsulars only way to plug directly into all ship systems to fly the ship with a minimal crew. Not just to transfer our brains. LRN2LORE.