EVE General Discussion

I was thinking exactly this as I was reading all along. There is something just off about this new mechanic, and I think everyone realises it. Let me explain.

Now I think the idea of removing the NPCs from exploration sites and adding the hacking mini game is an absolutely great idea, and I think it could add a lot to the game. Instead of fighting NPCs now, we are using our brains, along with various ship modules and hacking skills, to conquer the hacking mini games.

One thing I would suggest as mentioned in the previous post, perhaps certain hackable cannisters could drop various loot depending on how successfully they are hacked. So for instance if you have a group of players, you could make use of combined equipment and skills to go for the most advanced loot, but if you are solo then you could go for slightly easier loot but you don't have to share it.

The thing that is just completely off is the looting mini game at the end. I mean seriously CCP? Looting cans is pretty much the most boring activity in the game, I hate it and would kill to get looting drones along with the new salvage drones. But now you are making it into a mini game! At least I can just skip missions and rat loot and simply blitz it, but explorers will have no choice. I can just imagine getting lag or misclicking a can and then failing to get the contents. Just like how annoying it is right now when you overshoot a cargo container as your trying to loot it and then have to slowly burn back into 2500m and loot again.

Seriously CCP, this will be awful. Please work on advancing the hacking mini game as that sounds great, but scrap the loot pinnata at the end.

Cause of your friend can't hack he's useless right? I can list off the top of my head a bunch of ways a friend can be useful without hacking.

1. Watch gates for hostiles in lowsec.
2. Bring ecm to bail you out if you get ganked.
3. Cooperative scanning. Before you laugh it IS a thing. There's many ways. You can divide a system by planets or quadrants and cover more ground faster.
4.Chasing off other explorers.
5.General purpose recon.

You guys need to try harder.

You will receive maximum reward when you're alone. The system is simply set up so that working with someone else doesn't reduce your individual reward.

…and all of that remains in the new system. On top of that, they've added two more process layers that will matter: being able to open the containers, rather than just wait for a timer to run down, and chasing the loot and trying to pick the best pieces before they float away.

Lead-up that matters + looting that matters > only a lead-up that matters. So yeah, flat better pretty much sums it up.

No. I am sorry but I disagree. They have “cobbled in” two mini-games with twitch elements and magically vanishing loot that fail to play out as logical extensions of piloting a ship inside the simulation while detracting from a player’s role as a manager of resources in favor of attempting to turn them into handicapped badminton athletes where you swat “birdies” by any other name, hacking nodes or loot cannisters, before a time limit expires...

“This” does not a recipe for meaningful looting create and it is a detraction from meaningful build up by souring potential reward. Being more entertaining than the current system in your view still does not actually make it the right system for EVE as it runs contrary to too many established conventions within the game. They can do better and now is the time to mention it.

Bump

Some more thoughts from me.

--The exploration site wrecks are locked and can only be unlocked and opened by playing that minigame. Can I lock up my own ship so when I get ganked the person trying to loot my stuff has to play the same hacking-and-lootsplosion minigame? And if not; why not?

--My ship now has a free tractor beam. How? Why? Can I use it to scoop stuff outside the exploration sites? And if not; why not?

--Will the lootsplosion grab-what-you-can-before-it's-gone mechanic be implemented in all lootable objects? And if not; why not?

All these 'this mechanic only works here and not in similar situations in the rest of the game' is what makes the whole affair feel so much like tacked-on patchwork to me.

I'm liking this less and less the more I think about it tbh, before if you had poor skills you wouldn't be able to scan the site, bit more skills and it would take you a long time to access cans. But once you were in the sites you knew that it was a successful explore, provided you can kill the rats (not really an issue, I started with a magnate with 3 hob ii's, no probs in hi or lo). Now, once you get into the site you may fail the mini game or miss the few cans that contain the more valuable things. The fact that the cans disappear is really jarring, it would have been much better if you could chase them, making it a lot longer for solo players but without the sense of failure where there should be success. Mini games are out of place in eve. Even a puzzle in different locations in or out of system, like a mini-escalation with a bit of lore based note taking or collecting audio logs etc would have been great, but this is really wide of the mark imo, sorry.

you weren't guaranteed before? many a time I've set my dscan to 3AU and bailed when a friendly hurricane appears. It's just now there are an extra 2 things to fail, mini game and loot barf. I like the sense of excitement you get from finding out the name of the site, then getting it to 100%, knowing that something is good in there (as long as you don't get ganked). Now you can spend ages scanning, get the site coordinates, fail the minigame (I mean if the minigame is so easy everyone with a level 3 skill passes it what is the point of it?), or pass the minigame and then miss the loot. A lot of meh all round.

I think mainly as a full time explorer I was hoping for a LOT more depth and scope brought to exploration like I mentioned, as this is odysseys 'thing', as well as fixing things (The old system needed something doing to it, no-one is arguing against that). This really seems like a cop out in a lot of ways. Disappearing cans, magic no module tractor beam, hmmm.

Also would have been a great opportunity to introduce some basic WiS like in last years awesome trailer, where they like, explore stuff.

Hi everyone, thanks for the reams of feedback. We'll be releasing a devblog/devblogs over the next few days detailing exactly whats coming and how it works so you'll have a lot more information in your hands. I'm going to answer a few specific points that have come up a lot here though:

Colourblind People
We're absolutely aware that we need to make the interface work for the colourblind. All the visuals at the moment are WIP. We have software internally that lets us simulate how the interface would look to you and are using that during development.

Soloing
We are doing nothing to prevent people from soloing. We obviously cannot predict exactly how players will end up using this feature but there is no intention of making it impossible to solo explore and successfully make money from it. CCP RedDawn is a solo explorer and he'd be most upset if we took away his favourite activity!

Twitch Gameplay
We totally understand your concerns about how the scattered can collection will work as it is a departure from how the rest of EVE works. The mechanic itself comes from a mining prototype developed by CCP Veritas and does work well within EVE as far as we can ascertain from our user testing of it. It's not a crazy clickfest as it will take several seconds to pull each can in. We are in a phase of playtesting and refining how long, how fast and how many cans will scatter. The 'twitch' side of it is no more than exists in EVE interacting with the UI now, the main difference is that you are interacting within the space scene itself.