EVE General Discussion

you could see the dust link as jesus feature. However it is so difficult to implement/balance properly without destroying one game or the other that it will take a few years to have full trading and cash/item flow between both.

In that case new ships wouldn't really be anything "new" since they'd just be ships that have more or less the same kinds of features that other ships already have. Thus the "new" Armageddon is really just a Dominix with a shiny gold skin, and the "new" rookie ships are just weaker versions of their faction frigate.

The rebalance is effecively giving us dozens of new ships, since historically speaking things like the Moa and Ferox were not widely used, and who would ever use a Cyclone when you could use a Hurricane or Sleipnir? Or who would use a Navitas for anything?

What I would love to see is the idea of star gate construction and destruction extended to cover all existing stargates in EVE. I would also like to see players being able to "swear allegience" to particular empires, paying taxes to those empires in return for the privilege of voting in elections (or taking part in the selection of Government leader + policies). I would like to see conquerable empire space, so that faction warfare would lead to 0.5 Amarr systems becoming 0.4 Amarr systems, becoming 0.4 Minmatar systems, becoming 0.5 Minmatar systems, for example. Or even having 0.5 mission hubs gradually increasing to 1.0 due to the number of pirates successfully driven off. Imagine if running missions continually, day in day out, would actually reduce the possible income from that agent/that system? What if agents could migrate? One day they decide they've had enough of Motsu and move out to Saikanen.

But this isn't a little things thread.

I am hoping for a new industrial expansion - incorporating Dust and enhanced planetary interaction, as well as introducing more diverse supply chains to make trade (and therefore piracy) more popular. The economy has too many bottlenecks (nanoribbons anyone?) and too little reason to move stuff around at the moment. (Ie. use a diverse mix of previously low value items in new manufacturing, such as low sec gas, high sec salvage, PI products, wormhole salvage and common moon minerals in the same recipie.) The enhanced PI would really help EvE and Dust to interact more, and would also form a platform for low sec missions, possibly using the contracts system and other PCs, rather than NPC agents.

Maybe not the most flashy expansion, but a really useful one to both make the economy more interesting, and to promote small scale conflicts... And PS - ban planetary interaction in Hi-Sec - those worlds are already spoken for...

And from the devs perspective, it would be good if the developers at least had the perception that management was pursuing features that the users would be interested in. Is there any doubt that the players would be interested in high resolution texture packs, or the future vision that CCP Seagull teased us with at the tail end of the keynote? Was there any doubt in anyone's mind that a great many EVE players were very excited about the scenario of "Future Vision" when we saw it at FanFest 2011?

I imagine that the reception that EVE players gave Incarna has resulted in a number of CCP developers developing PTSD. They probably cringe every time they see a full-body avatar poster (like the big banners at Fanfest). So before any further work is done on WiS, there will need to be a massive amount of therapy applied to those devs to convince them that it wasn't WiS itself so much as WiS-to-the-exclusion-of-everything-else, combined with "Fearless: Greed is Good" and the misunderstanding about the Noble Exchange being a Luxury store rather than a microtransactions store for the unwashed masses.

This is where I see a great deal of value from the CSM: you guys need to keep in contact with as many devs as possible to keep telling them, "Yes! We will love what you are doing when it is done! Keep it up!"

They're playing it safe, it seems. Giving us little incremental improvements to keep the bittervets quiet and regain subs.

I think that our time of necessary catch up is coming to a close. From now on I think that the new direction of basing expansions around a particular theme is going to mean a proper mixture of iteration on existing features along side new area's of game play... instead of one or the other as has been the case up until now.

Ah hell yeah, Nomad ships and space whales!!! Fantasy and Sci fi both seem to be exhausted of ideas and new direction. where is the truly weird? Eve may be one of the the only places left where it can be interacted with and created.

A "Jesus Feature" is one where the Profit comes down from the mountain and proclaims what the new expansion will be. Faction warfare, wormholes, incursions, and Incarna are all examples. In the case of CCP, the "Profit" is a small team that got together and decides what they think is cool.

Now the plan is to add things that the player base seems to want. At the time of Incarna, and for years before players were saying iteration and fixes of existing content were needed. And we have had several expansions centered around fixes and iteration.

Now more and more I'm seeing that the players would like new stuff to do. So would I. It seems that it is time for CCP to do a balanced development of iteration of existing content and adding new content.

But if CCP is really devoted to adding things the players want, they should have a poll. Looking at the forums just tells them what forum posters want. Talking to the CSM just tells them what those who have contact with a CSM member want. A poll would reach a greater percentage of the player base and give them a closer idea of that everyone wants.

So I do not want Jesus Features, but I do want new stuff to do.

Being able to build stargates to uncharted systems is probably the very definition of a Jesus Feature. If CCP can pull this off it will be yet another coup for game design.