EVE General Discussion

I used to really wish CCP did something about avatars but since they can't even release clothing items they have ready for the last 2 years I just give up. They can do what they want, the fire I had for Eve is gone. There will be 2 other games out there that will give me what i'm looking for, SC and Elite. And no, you can't have my stuff Rhes ;)

And this game/meaningful gameplay is?

If he means WiS exploration then yes, that was interesting, but pretty much everything CCP show on their events are interesting and cool looking. For example you might remember when they showed bloodline blending at fanfest 2012 it was awesome and what we got was this, which is meh.

A question for all the "Oh God! Avatars and dancing and emotes and Barbie and RARAARAAAAAAHHHH!!"-people:

Let's say you're flying around in your pretty spaceship, see a juicy target and:

1) Blow him up.

2) Harvest tears in local.


Wouldn't it be way more fun if you could dock up at the same station as your victim, go to the public area and find the dude, do a little victory dance and say "Yeah, that's right! It's me. Whatcha gonna do about it?", and then do an obscene emote?

I resubscribed recently and promptly checked out the new mobile depot for it's "immersion factor", so to say. Sadly, there was hardly one, in my opinion.

Looking at the depot, i thought: wouldn't it be cool to have you own little home with a spectacular view at all the pretty nebulas - from the viewpoint of an avatar/person and not of a ship-entity? Literally through a window into space.

And then it hit me - all the small fragments and pieces of "proper", "meaningful" WiS are already there. We have the mobile depot to store your stuff and refit your ship while you are away from a station or a starbase and maybe somewhere deep into Nullsec. We already have a somewhat working prototype for walking in a room and interaction with objects in 3rd person view. We have got a new ship with some serious firepower to allow players sneaking into low and null for ratting, exploration or pvp more easily. There is also some general focus on exploration lately, with various new loots.
And there is constant demand for some vanity items and avatar decorations.

Putting these fragments together creates a logical(from my standpoint, at least) evolution of the WiS concept - one that serves a game purpose involving direct interaction with FiS content.


Therefore my suggestion:

Restart WiS in a smaller, more controllable environment, that does not carry the burden of a gigantic vision about hundreds of wildly emoting players on your screen at once - or even the horrors at Jitat 4-4 - and gigantic, varying station environments.

Start with a personal outpost - not unlike a mobile depot - with a room, similar to the current WiS one and a big window into space to remind you of what game you are playing .
Allow players to dock to it and store 2 ships there, limiting it to the cruiser size. Allow players to decorate their home - look at Mass Effect captain's quarters for a very simple way. It would be already enough for a start.
Create some useful holoscreens with some interesting information for the 3rd view: for example display of PI reactor time, production etc.
And now allow players to invite one(1) another person into their home, if they keep one of the two hangar slots free to dock to.


From here it's easy to slowly go up in size:

A 10 people outpost for small corporation, stores 20 ships, may be decorated. Several rooms(where you are able to encounter all other inhabitants inside at the same time) and at it's heart the war room where you can use a map tool to mark places and discuss ship movements etc in a graphical way.
This outpost would be hard to locate and, compared to a moon tower, would be ideal for groups that do not like to see their installation being scouted and hotdropped by 100 capitals on their first day in nullsec.


Next would be a 30-40 people trading outpost/casino/amusement park involving some sabotage, wild 3rd person shooting, FiS pewpewing and bank robbing - and all sorts of profitable ingame buisiness opportunities.

I would like to write more as i have a couple of ideas on fairly easy money for CCP, but this post is already a bit too big and i just wanted to see if there is general interest in the ideas above. If you liked what you've read and found that interesting, just comment here or like this post and i will add more details on hows and whys later.

I suggested a similar "baby steps" approach because I was fully aware that otherwise we would end up here: "it's too big, we can't implement it, but only for our games that start with an E". If Valkyrie got any avatar content, my manic laugh would be heard all the way to Reykjavik...

RTFT already. The CQ does not work on 1 second tics, it is an instance of sorts inside the server, meaning it does not work straight through Tranquility which is why having a realtime vista to the station undock is hard if not impossible to implement at this time. This has been explained before. A lot of stuff that people who say WiS is too hard to implement and too time consuming has been refuted time and over again in this thread, usually at maximum ten pages back. This thread just keeps going in circles and it is tiresome.

~correct~

In a way.

The moment you attempt to transfer the current single player version of CQ into MP environment, you start having problems. Let's take a station env for instance. You have to plan for scaling:

- Deadend low/null system: 0-5 people. Doable with acceptable framerate at the current standard, possible instanced environment.
- Small alliance capital system: 30-100 people. Things get hairy when you have to render 50 rather detailed characters (and that's done by a base mesh being transformed mind you, not a preset model being just dumped in).
- Coalition staging point: 300-700+ people: Escalating the above problem.
- Jita: 1k+ people: You should probably get it by now.

So let's instance it by alliance!

Example:
Goonswarm Federation: 11k people. Even at 10% of that logged in simultaneously you're getting over 1k people to render.

...by corp?
Goonwaffe: 3k people. With optimistic 10% logged in simultaneously you fall to the second case of 300 people to render.



Sooner or later the devs will have to face the complex mess and fix parts of it. It's better that instead of new jesus features that end up as another mess anyway they actually took it on and are fixing things.

Everything is invented long time ago: building floors (i.e. instances) with 50-200 toons limit and ability to switch between them (example: SWTOR). Don't like word "instances"? Make them permanent (Jita = 30 floors x 100 toons, "provincial" stations - 10 floors). Just CCP prefers not to do anything having zero competition on sci-fi sandbox MMO games market.

What he said.

The graphic load is all client side. It's embarassing having to explain this stuff in a forum where are supsoed to be gamers (and experienced generally).

Also is not rocket science, I see people talking about avatar based gaming as some new frontier where nobody dared to go before :)

Is actually the most standard, trivial and well consolidated gameplay, mostly on the MMORPG scene.

Tell us great one, about your experience in software/games design, that renders our views irrelevant.


This already happens in sov warfare. What exactly is your point?

The rest of your post was the usual trivial crap. No points in there not already covered thousands of times before in this thread and others.