Assembly Hall

TLDR: minigames for carebears

Background

I played Eve when it first came out in 2003, again in 2008, and again now. In the other cases, I got bored fairly quickly and I'm pretty close to that point now.

I like the idea of Eve. I like the cutthroat hyper capitalist scammy PvP based MMO. Eve is probably the only PvP based MMO of any consequence since Ultima Online, in fact, but I don't have the time/interest to play that kind of MMO. For my PvP needs I usually play something with a more structured format with known time commitments, like LoL or Left 4 Dead.

However, Eve is also the only MMO with anything approaching a proper economy. That part of the game does definitely interest me, and there isn't really anything like it anywhere else. But there's no content for industrialist/carebears. You can mine, but that's boring. Really mind numbingly boring. Which would be okay if you could do fun things with the minerals, but you bring them back and either sell them immediately (a few minutes of fun looking up sale prices) or refine them (literally a button press) and then sell them or build something with them (by loading up blueprints and... pressing a button).

Higher level mining with a group is possibly less boring, but I wouldn't call it fun either.

The problem is that the whole process from start to finish involves no creative effort or strategic thought beyond finding good prices. But it doesn't have to be like that! It's possible to make the process far more interesting.

An example of an MMO that has taken a stab at this sort of thing is A Tale in the Desert. Some of the high level crafting essentially requires playing minigames, where if you win you make the product you expected, and if you screw up you lose some amount of raw materials. See this youtube video of alloy creation, for instance.

It reminds me a lot of the probe scanner in Eve, in fact.

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Proposal
I'm not actually suggesting this happen specifically, but just to give a flavor for what I'd like to see:

Imagine something like the probe scanner, but instead of a solar system you had a look at some raw Veldspar. In order to refine veldspar, you'd need to find a preexisting "seed crystal" in the ore. You'd be able to "ping" the raw veldspar with an ore probe, which would return the distances to possible seed crystals from wherever you set the probe (but not the vector from the probe to the seed crystal), similar to the probe scanner, but you can only do one probe at a time and old probes don't move. Once you manage to triangulate a 100% lock on a crystal, you can refine the batch of veldspar in to trit.

If you had a high refining ability, you'd get a certain number of starting probes on a batch for free. But if you run out, you have to burn through some number of ore for each additional one (to represent loss of material as you keep shoving probes in to a pile of raw ore), or scrap the batch, recover what ore is there, and start over. You'd also have a certain "fuzziness" to your probes' readouts based on your refining skill, similar to the probing skill. And you'd only be able to do a certain number of veldspar per batch, so the sheer time it takes to go through a large batch of ore would be reflected in the price of trit (which is the main reason I'm saying I'm not suggesting this specifically, as I don't know what sort of effect this'd have on trit prices, and through that the rest of the game for all other occupations).

Perhaps larger batches are possible with better skills. Perhaps larger batches have higher stakes, with fewer seed crystals that are harder to find, and more ore cost if you use up your free probes. Maybe you can't scrap the batch and start over for large enough batch sizes. It adds a risk/reward element to refining based on material efficiency and player time and the soft skills of players.

In short, I think it makes something that's just a single boring button press right now in to an actually interesting game mechanic, and one that's well suited to the sort of casual player that makes up the carebear population. Each batch wouldn't take more than a few minutes for an experienced refiner.

Hell, you could have people play bejeweled with no ante/risk involved at all. Just connect 4 and turn veldspar into trit. It'd still be an improvement.

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Conclusion
I really want to play a carebear industrialist, as it fits my time and interest, but it's just not fun :/ This is just a direction I'd like to see CCP put some resources in to.

Also sorry for the wall of text :) I at least proofread it for you guys :P

Do you have fun doing industry? Maybe I'm just missing something. I like spreadsheets and math; I think they're fun. But I need more to keep me engaged.

Unfortunately you need a fair bit of capital to make playing the market take any significant amount of play time. It's fun, sure, but it doesn't take more than 15 minutes a day as a new player.

PvP is interesting in Eve because there's an amount of soft skill to it. If you're clever about it, your skills hardly matter. But there's nothing in industry that requires player skill beyond finding good prices, which I think is a shame.

If the existing player base likes the current state of affairs, that's great. But I probably won't play much, and I know a few friends IRL that feel the same way ("Eve is boring" was the common refrain when I started playing at lunch in the office).

You're fixating on the minigames aspect, and I think you're missing the forest for the trees.

My point fundamentally is not just that industry is boring, but that it's boring and there's no room for creative expression or strategic thinking; there's no room for player skill. Which is a fundamental asymmetry from PvP content.

I want to get in a flow while I'm building wealth, and there's no way to do that. For flow you need an activity that's fun, takes skill, and requires some non trivial time input (it's hard to flow in a single hand of poker, for instance). I flow playing Minecraft, League of Legends, Go, Starcraft, Skyrim, XCom, Simcity, Civ 4, and a whole host of other games. I don't flow playing Eve.

I choose to use "minigame" to mean "add some element of risk/reward for player skill". By that definition manually modifying your approach vector to spiral in to an enemy ship keeping your transverse high is a "minigame". Choosing different ammo types after you break an enemy ships' shields is a "minigame". But I don't think anyone would argue that making approach spirals automatic or automatically shooting the optimal ammo type would make PvP better.

Also, I actually really like how the combat scanner works. I think it's interesting. I could see how it'd be annoying when you just want to find someone to gank, but playing around with the scanner is the closest I've come to flow in Eve.



Other issues aside, I'm not sure I see how that'd help. From an industrialist's standpoint, aren't they still just building modules that players combine to produce ship hulls?

The part of "exploration" i always enjoyed, was going into a hostile system, doding the locals as i scanned down the sites, then getting in, grabbing the loot, bouncing between celestials, and coming back onto grid fo a bubbled gate with 3 guys landing behind me and barely escaping with the 200+ mil i may ro may not have been able to score off the cans.

now its, enter local, if theres reds, ******* forget scanning because by the time i can even finish the hacking minigame theya re on-grid killing me. you cant BE in dangerous sapce post-odyssey, because it forces you to be vulnerable for far too long, not saying on some higher-level sights i havent tried for it anyway and still gotten out, but thats only because the other guys had horrible scanning skills and so couldnt get the sight, anything common gets probed down so quick i might aswell be AFK next to their station.

i like exploration, basically, for the interaction with other players, now with post-odyssey, that interaction becomes something to avoid because of how long the site takes.

my arguement is tehir is a difference between "mitigating risks" and "oops, someone decided to start scanning your site down, guess you have to drop hacking and let the wreck blow up with all the loot in it"

my problem is with the loot spew and hacking minigame, it takes forever, and has absolute consequences if you are interupted for any reason.

as for living with risks, i spent a year in high-end wormholes, i dont have a problem with dodging locals and ninja-looting things, its when the mere appearance of a threat causes me to permanently lose any chance of actually getting the loot because it BLOWS UP that pisses me off.