Player Features and Ideas Discussion

There are two areas of Eve that I'm having difficulty overcoming my reaction to.

The first is the completely unrealistic space physics, easily seen the instant you turn off an afterburner. That's not how spaceships move in any universe, so why does it happen that way in Eve?

Oh, I've heard the "arguments" against reality - it would take too long to turn ships around, etc, etc, etc. But that's the whole point of inertial modifiers - more numbers means your ship handles less and less like a real ship. Currently those numbers mean absolutely nothing.

I also realise the physics are a huge compromise with hardware restrictions, easy playability for new players, and so on and so forth.

But we don't need to include planetary gravity in these equations - just zero-gee. It would make the game so much more realistic, and would drastically level the playing field against the cartoon-capable "players" who treat it like some sort of Mario Kart in space.

The other aspect of Eve I'm having to fight against is the 4th-grader-based naming systems and resource usage of all ship modules.

As a physics nerd, I find it difficult (to say the least) to comprehend how improving a rocket's range, for a piece of equipment that is independent from my ship, could possibly cause my capacitor or CPU to decrease (note that I'm not talking about the silly CPU usage, but an actual removal of a resource).

And how does a missile's targeting improvement require powergrid, but not CPU? Or projectile weapon falloff deplete shield capacity? It's just ridiculous.

I think we would all agree that naming a piece of equipment is a privelege, and when that privilege is wasted, to the detriment of the playability of the game, then I think we all agree that that's a big problem.

If Eve can move away from the Saturday-morning-cartoon physics and 4th-grader naming conventions, and move into real physics and realistic resource usage, we not only learn something useful for ourselves, but the game becomes far more immersive and realistic - and that can only be a good thing.

I think the developers have spent tremendous amounts of skill and energy and dedication getting the market, trading, and skills mechanisms to the point where there's nothing else out there that comes close to the detail, sophistication, and sheer realism of those features.

But enough is enough. It's time for physics to take a driving seat. Sir Isaac Newton would not play Eve, I'm sure of that. He'd be laughing too hard.

Right now, Eve feels more like a lipstick-on-the-pig turn-based board game. Oh, the lipstick is gorgeous in every way, and gets prettier every release. But the pig still stinks.

I'm sure that few players will want to relearn how the game mechanics work, and maybe it's too late to actually turn the juggernaut around. But I'd like to see if it could be done. I'd like to see Eve reflect more of the great things in our universe, instead of fewer and fewer. Oh, I'll keep playing - Eve is one of the very few fun things in my life at the moment. But I'm hoping it can be greater than real life, rather than the dim, and ever dimming, caricature it's turning into, physics and reality-wise.

Thanks for reading. I hope this generates some discussion and good ideas.

Cheers everyone,
Cephas B.
P.S. I made a copy of the post before consigning it to the Sansha Waste Disposal System! :)

I hate to break it to you, but EVE already is a board game. Not satisfied with only being a board game, EVE is a TCG, too.

EVE: Conquests and EVE: The Second Genesis, respectively.

as far as 1, we also move with the same engine adn fields we use to intiiate warp travel, meaning our ship is ALWAYS in some way not interactine with JUST the physical universe, so assuming that a sub-space or other multi-dimensional field is affecting our ship, it cna be reasoned that maybe its energy is similar to a liquid when interacting with normal matter.

2) your ship still ahs to POWER everything, make those work, and that kind fo stuff requires your ships computer to run

2) its a separate computer ADDED to your own computer to enhance the tracking and guidance capabilites of the remote rockets receiving orders from the ships targeting computer, it doesnt require CPU ebcause its an ADDED computer, but it does require power to be turned on.

sorry for spelling mistakes, on a mobile.



and as far as "physics" go, black holes, pulsars, etc. all sorts of anomalies in sapce where normal physics dont apply, whos to say soemwhere out there there isnt a localized (still huge or near-galaxywide) area of space affected by a field from some ancient spatial phenomenon causing distortions/disruptions in phsycal space causing physics tog et wonky?

as i started playing ship turrets where black cylinders and missiles launched from the center of the ship. Weapons always hit, there was no graphical difference between hit or miss. And i only play for about 2 years.

so yes CCP initially didn't spend much time for those "details" but they are slowly catching up. Yes your ship is still a point without orientation on the server and the collision system uses spheres... and don't even start to discuss movement or weapon tracking ;)

some fake newtonian physics would make me very happy too... but i am somewhat skeptical that we will ever see those.

That movement we see in EVE is indeed one of the thing I do not like as well. I once made a topic about this which would make a nice compromise (I think). All we would need is to fool the brain a little and not any huge physics overhaul.

The suggestion to make this "submarine" feel to go away is to stop the engine animation upon reaching the set speed. The engines would fire up again with every vector change.

To add even more realism maneuvering and reverse thrusters might be added to the ship models. So when you set your ship to stop reverse engines fire up instead of the mains... This might ofcourse be quite hard on some ships, although doable I believe.

Some thinking about AB and MWD would be necessary as for if the cap is drained on the set speed or not and so on, but that isn't really the point here...

All I'd like to see is some graphical realism...

As for the naming and moduLe fittings.. the only problem I have here is those meta4 prototype modules... "Prototype" being the most used module... Anyone see the paradox here?

nexus: the jupiter incident did this graphical realism very good. a game, i recommend to play. at least for true virtual spaceship fans :)

regarding cutting thrusters upon reaching "maximum" speed: this is already implemented in eve. when you fly your ship in a straight line and let it accelerate to the max. it shuts down engines. not completly but significantly.
it does not happen often, because nobody flies for this extended period of time without changing direction or using prob-mods (which overrides this nice little detail). beware, the last 2%(ish) of speed take very long to reach ;)