EVE General Discussion

So I thought about why I feel about sound the way I do. And I thought the results are interesting enough to share:

First of all I don't hate sound in EVE as such. After watching the EVE keynote on the livestream I actually enabled sound in EVE for the rest of the evening because ohmygod all these feels.
The next day I disabled sound again because it seemed to assume an unrealistically close zoom level (I don't want the view of my battleship to block half my screen in order to hear turret sounds and environmental effects) and because it doesn't play well with multiple clients.
I give sound a try once or twice a year and on some level I want sound in EVE to be good enough that I can actually use it all the time.

Second, the question is ultimately whether you want EVE to be a high impact/immersion or a low immersion game.
As a customer I don't really care - I currently play EVE as a low immersion game and as a result run multiple clients simultaneously, play a completely different game (e.g. Civilization V) while running missions, watch the 4th season of The West Wing during pvp, ... but in games like WoW, RIFT, GW2 I have never run more than a single client or switched our of fullscreen mode and I did/do greatly enjoy them.
As an artist you are probably strongly prejudiced towards making EVE a high immersion game - which artist doesn't want people to pay as much attention to his work as possible?
From a business POV making EVE a high immersion game is difficult.
E.g. I have one (inactive) WoW account, one GW2 account, ... and five active EVE accounts. That may partly be due to the skill training system of EVE but it is also due to me running 2-4 accounts a lot of the time (as a single EVE client just doesn't fill my attention).
On the other hand new players will try EVE with a single account in fullscreen mode and many of them probably say "this game is so boring ... it doesn't manage to capture my attention at all ... and the IGB is a poor substitute for engaging gameplay". So making EVE more engaging/immersive would probably help with retaining them.

The question of sound is very much a question of immersion.

The problem is that sound alone is not enough (which is not entirely true - if I listen to some symphony or opera the music requires my entire attention - but hiring Beethoven to do some EVE soundtracks is probably out of the question), nice game sound isn't enough when the gameplay just isn't there.
Sound is super important to support the immersive properties of the gameplay but it can't create immersion from nothing.

If you encourage/force me to run single client with sound I am not only left asking myself why I pay for the ability to run 5 clients simultaneously, you also leave me bored and dissatisfied because the gameplay doesn't (imho) support the level of single-minded attention that comes with running just one client.

Yeah, as a sound dev you can't do anything about gameplay requiring my attention for only two seconds out of every ten. But that's at the core of my anger.

I'd just be happy if the "Audio Enable" checkbox actually worked...

Checking out the new sounds for a day every month or so would be much easier!

LOL that sounds about right

f'ing CCP you guys are like the stupid blonde chick that is so fun to f*ck you won't get rid of her but my god does she do some stupid sh!t sometimes

I still love you long time though

Regarding having sound give an advantage, here's an idea:

Allow us to attach to a ship, let's say an afk miner, and cut open their ship to physically go in there and kill the pilot (perhaps with a Dust merc). If they have their sound on and are not afk, they can break free and fly away. If not, well, their loss

So we waited a few years to have the bug acknowledged in the first place, then just a few weeks for a fix that didn't work... Hope the next iteration will be a bit faster.

Your efforts are appreciated, and I'm pretty sure that most of us realize that sound is EvE has been snarled up so long it's going to be tricky to sort it all out permanently.