EVE General Discussion

There's the originally promoted idea of smuggling, black-market deals, and other things you want off CONCORD's radar, which is a good one--for one thing, it has the potential to bring an additional layer of depth and intrigue even to high sec. After all, the kingpin doesn't live in the slums, right? He has a penthouse in the nice part of town, where he rubs shoulders with important people.

It makes stations into something other than 100% safe, insta-repairing magical safe boxes, and brings them more into the game proper. If docking a ship in a station was actually as significant a process as docking a ship in a harbor is, say, then stations wouldn't be nearly as cheesy as they are now, tactically, which would encourage the use of tools like the new anchorables.

There's good old immersion. Approximately half of all gamers want to identify with their in-game avatar, which EVE makes nearly impossible: you never see them, except in LOL Captain's Quarters, and in that context you never get them to do or say anything meaningful.

Along those lines, it's a way to move more of the metagame into the game proper. If you're more of a roleplayer, as I am, then being able to inhabit and express my character is hugely preferable to hopping on a third-party comms program and talking as myself while my erstwhile character disappears into a ship.

It opens up the possibility of far more compelling storytelling through video than obscure captures of purple and red tiles, or battle reports. And they don't have to be scripted, either. You can infiltrate a corp and stream your betrayal on Twitch, or just record to your computer and make a short movie of your efforts.

Remember, EVE's primary appeal is as a sandbox. For some unfathomable reason, people who want to ask what you do in avatar content automatically gravitate to PVE. Sure, there should be some PVE--there is in space, after all, and PVE locations can provide interesting backdrops for PVP, too--but if CCP does for Incarna what they did for space, then it will be sufficient to establish an environment, let people loose in it and see what they create. (It's not an accident that most of the fear-mongering in this thread is about what players will do if their options are not carefully managed and restricted. Nothing is more terrifying to some people than a sandbox.)

It adds more depth, more breadth, more character, and more options. And the best part is, it takes nothing away. Hate roleplayers? Treat your ship and your pod as chess pieces (it's what the original roleplayers did!). You prefer TeamSpeak? It'll work exactly as well as it did. You'd rather stay in space? You can! You like nullsec PVE as it is? Well, um, better tell that to CCP, because from the noises that the devs are making, PVE will see changes long before Incarna sees any new content.

And as I have repeatedly stressed in this thread: EVE is not. A game. About spaceships.

EVE is a sandbox, and the spaceships are just the chosen shape of the icon with which we interact with that sandbox.

It hasn't helped that a great deal of WiS advocacy talked in great length about how weirdly excited they were at the idea of things like 'setting up a bar in a station somewhere'. Because, you know, if I was an immortal posthuman able to fly a mile-long spaceship and trigger barrages of artillery shells the size of a family car by plugging the controls directly into my brain, the thing I'd really be looking forward to doing would be pulling pints and cleaning up vomit in the toilets down at the King's Arms on a Friday night.

Now, exploring the deep space wreckage of long-lost civilisations with nothing but a vacuum-suit and a flashlight, negotiating malfunctioning security systems and making off with rare and precious artifacts? That's something I can get behind, and if/when CCP gives the greenlight to working on a release for it I'll be interested to see what they can come up with. But that vision wasn't even on the table until CCP had already had two failed stabs at the WiS concept, so its hard to take seriously those who were so eager to see WiS when all it had to offer was a Second Life clone and $70 monocles.

Something tells me that the owner of a club/casino catering to millionaire immortal clientele probably pays somebody else to do all the dirty work for them and just enjoys good company, the house take from the roulette wheel and the profits from the back-room trade in outlawed boosters.

The casino owners in Vegas hardly have to pour the drinks at their casino's bar, do they?



This is the point. There's so much gameplay potential to EoF. Own a casino, hack megacorporate databases, smuggle boosters, explore nightmarish ruins, plan military campaigns, get in a shootout with booster smugglers, meet up with Guristas agents in the bowels of an Ishukone station, or hell, just chill out in a bar and RP if that's your thing.

Just because a given person wouldn't themselves want to do any of those things doesn't mean it shouldn't be in the game.



Because it is.

Either without the other will get you nowhere. Idealism without realism is naivety - realism without idealism is cynicism.

I like to think what I'm proposing is both idealistic and realistic.

This seems to be some kind of gospel among the people who dislike WiS, or any new features at all for that matter.

Was EVE's code written sixteen years ago by enthusiastic amateurs? yes.

Has it since been polished and replaced piece by piece by enthusiastic professionals? Also yes.

Is that process complete? No.

Is it perfect? No.

Is code EVER perfect? Also no.

Does it work? Yes.

Do improvements to the code tend to come along when there's a new feature in the pipeline that demands them? Emphatically yes - very much so.



And why shouldn't we also be able to log in each day to do dangerous and exciting things in the space stations that compliment and contribute to the vast and amazing things among the stars?

Besides, my day-to-day experience of the vast and amazing things has involved lots of little and dull things that accumulate and grow into the vast and amazing thing with time and effort. behind all those capital ships exploding in the big nullsec battles is a lot of highsec miners shooting the breeze on voice comms while doing nothing terribly exciting.



Which is exactly what I want too. I think that adding the ability to do sandboxy stuff on foot in a station will add complexity, interest and dynamism.



What, as opposed to docking games while your enemies plink away at you with their pulse lasorz? Sometimes you get camped in EVE - shazbot happens. You may as well be able to play poker down at the bar where they confiscate your weapons before letting you in while you're docked.

On the other hand, a visceral firefight where merely poking your head out of cover carries a real danger of it being shot off, and every move you make is a calculated risk in pursuit of the advantage that might just win you the battle? How does that not sound appealing? Relative to orbiting some dude for ten minutes while you play a game of numbers and vectors.

Don't get me wrong, PvP combat gets my pulse going just like everybody else, but you can describe any combat mechanic in any game in dismissive tones - doing so is not an argument, it's arrogance.



You really haven't read a thing I've written, have you? I'm talking in terms EoF being HUGE. I'm talking in terms of EoF doubling the size of the sandbox or more.

How is that not "thinking big" enough for you?

Gotcha. Textbook bittervet.

But whatever, I'll answer these in turn...

There is no such thing as perfection. There IS such a thing as "good". As the old saw has it, you can either please all of the people some of the time, or some of the people all of the time. In practice, it's not even that - the best anyone has ever done is please some of the people most of the time.

Just because a thing will not be superamazingepicwinballs does not mean that it will be awfulsuckterribadfail. Nearly everything falls somewhere between those two extremes. I don't ecpect my ideas for EoF would be as awesome in practice as I picture them being in my head, but that fact does not mean they shouldn't be at least given serious consideration and discussion.



I know that. I'm saying that some of those finite resources should be devoted to EoF, at some point. You disagree - that much is obvious - but I'm not asking for the impossible here, merely for a prioritization that you don't share.



The in-space content would still be there and still be good, so no. That wouldn't happen. Half a million players wouldn't suddenly abandon everything they'd already built, all the ships they'd acquired and all the SP they'd trained just because the opportunity presented itself to do stuff in a station instead. Especially not if the rewards for doing the station stuff were implants and boosters only useful in space.

But even if that did happen, so what? If that's the way people wanted to go, so be it - so long as the players are having fun and continuing to pay, where's the problem? Adapt or die.



I really don't think that it would be half as difficult as you claim, and even if it was - so what? EVE is difficult - difficult is rewarding. Difficult is an opportunity waiting for somebody to HTFU and seize it. We don't remember all the guys who looked at Mt. Everest and said "blow that, I'll have a cup of tea instead".



Fine, we've found our fundamental disagreement. I think you're wrong, short-sighted, unimaginative and a killjoy, you think I'm wrong, naive and misguided. I doubt we're going to get past this point. We've both made our cases as clearly as we can: would you agree that this is a good point to amicably end our argument?

Well, speaking as an old schooler who's never burned out even once... I find your lack of enthusiasm upsetting.

It would interest me to know why you feel a version of walking in stations that was thematically, mechanically and content-wise pure EVE and which contributed to both the size and available content of the sandbox would not enrich the game, however.

Setting aside any doubts about its feasibility - if CCP managed to make EoF in a way that completely justified and even exceeded my enthusiasm, and that people didn't abandon the spaceship side of the game in favour of it... what possible objection could you have?

I have removed some rule breaking posts and those quoting them. As always I let some edge cases stay.
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I miss the buffs from watching the exotic dancers in Star Wars Galaxies!