Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hi there,

today I was bored a little bit and I tried an Incursion. Bad mistake, lost a Tengu. Yes, yes, the EVE-veterans laughing about my stupidity. Yes, I was stupid. Stupid to think that you could do the cool things alone. Although "cool" is the wrong word because it is nothing else than a harder mission.

EVE Online is still no game for people which like to play solo. Yes, you can mining and this stuff. EVE has a very good working economy. But this is all. Missions become boring with the time. Mining is boring if you do it more often. And for what advandage? Money? For what? And there is the great low and null sec, the PvP. Yes, I like it to buy a ship and than losing it against some high skilled players which web me from all sides, disturb my warp, drain my energy and shot me to scrap in a second. That is fun.

The possibilities are very low if you play alone. There is not a single advandage you could use because everything has its stupid limits. You cannot use the cloak like the Klingons or the Romulan for your advandage. I recently used the micro warp drive to give me a shove so I could deactivate it and fly with the initial speed. The ship becomes slower and I realized: Oh yes, this is no physics simulation, this is EVE Online, because I gave no command to activate the braking engines.

The EVE-universe has nothing to explore. No nebulas, no endless asteroid fields, no anomalies like black holes. Nothing. i know that this is not possible with servers and such mass of people (especially not if you spam the game with mobile structures). Only this curious site stuff. You spend minutes to scan the anomalies only to realize that there is already someone there. The haul is poor and not very interesting or useful. It is more like a paper chase than exploring to find something what someone puts into space for you. I have another imagination of exploring than to haul stuff in space. Map uncharted regions as example. If you could at least find some alien weapon or artifact weapons from old wars. No, you find blueprints. As a combat pilot very useful, really. And I will not start to tell you what I think about these looting mechanic where you have seconds to collect the stuff and than it vanishes. I will not ask whereto the stuff vanishes. Or why I must hack a wreck if I could simply blast a whole into the hull. I mean, with some magic technology I can beam cargo from one cargohold to another in space and a firewall preventing me from doing it?

Everything feels so artificial and not like an living and breathing universe. I miss these alone feeling of "Freelancer" if you explore the outer systems, this "Final Frontier"-feeling. I miss it to fly in the direction I want and not form station to gate and gate to station.

Why is there no nebula which disturb the sensors so I could use this as advandage like in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan? Or some nebuals where you must search save routes through it like the "Briar Patch", so I can use the environment to balance my weaknesses and maybe escape an enemy. Nothing. You come into this dungeon, fire from all site, warp disruption (I hate these things because I think they are not only annoying but also stupid, together with these energy drain things) and bam. You are dead. Congratulations, again something what I will not do again. Level 5 skills, heavy ship but no chance. I can scan anomalies but I cannot scan mission sites to show me how many and which ships are inside. A little bit more intel would be nice before. You invest months and years to train skills and there is no real advandge than that you can use weapons with higher damage. I a second your are dead.

These damn ships have not even real maneuvers. Nice, that CCP in their trailers always present the game mechanics in the way that you could think the ships are high maneuverable and fast . But fiddlesticks! Fast maybe, but you have no real advandage from it. It is mostly a fight between jet and biplane. The ship is so fast that you exceed your optimal range plus falloff in a second. Because of the slow reaction time and the slow maneuvers it is a strain to fight like this. I even had a ship which was so fast that the orbit-maneuver could not keep the optimal range plus falloff. The turret was useless. Flying manual was impossible with this speed.

Than these whole module stuff. For everything you need a sperate module. A wonder that the ships has its own scanner and shields. Personally, I find these module mechanic out-dated. Why can't I simply "tune" my ship and its systems as whole? Or the turrets to give them better tracking instead installing a tracking enhancer. I think this would give the game a wider variety in ship builds, so every can customize his or her ship like they want. You can in this way still change parts like the engine or the power core. But you also can optimized this modules in the way you like. And do you think of redirecting ship ressource during battle instead of thes overload? Like energy from the shields to the weapons or from engines to shields. THIS would create interesting combats.

Sometimes I see this tournament stuff or fleet battles. But never to the end. It is simply too boring. No real maneuvers or tactics. Only ships firing on eachother until someone explodes.

Another thing what could give advandages. If you could target specific parts of a ship. Like the engines.

I find it unfair that the micro warpdrive consumes so much of the ships ressources but not warp disruption. Every small drone can use warp disruption. Or these stasis webs. I spare me the question to ask how both technologies works. Realism was never a strenght of EVE Online. But it is annoying if you creep to space with ships which have no good maneuverability by nature.

So please, CCP, could you please give us solo player something to do and more possiblities to use ships, weapons and the environment to balance our weaknesses. Would be nice.

Regards.

ranting is prohibited, inb4 lock.

If you want to complain about a lack of solo content, you shouldn't make constant comparisons to star trek, or complain about the physics model. Those can have their own thread, but here it will just make people not take you seriously.

Hisec caters to solo players, lots of the industrial or trading pursuits can be done or are best done solo, and best done in hisec. It is true the solo-PVE opportunities here are limited. You're basically looking at blitzing 4/10s, running level 4's, COSMOS missions, and Epic Arc missions.

If you want tougher solo PVE, you need to go to wormhole space or to lowsec/nullsec. The PVE here is more challenging and rewarding, but part of the difficulty is doing it without getting killed by other players. Doing this well also requires access to advanced ships. Maybe look up 'ninja plexing.'

Many players who wish to be solo expand their horizons by having multiple accounts or using dual-character training.

Solo play is viable, even if it isn't easy. And even then you're not by yourself.

I got a great idea. Lets make a massive multiplayer game for a solo player.

Lots of solo players around they just have 2-5 accounts

The OP is right. EVE doesn't lend itself towards solo play other than M&Ms (mining and missions). However you want to spin or rationalize it, this is currently one of the major sticking points in the game.

You want someplace to explore, where there's solo content, fun to be had by single players, and always something new? Where everything is unpredictable, content has a scale of difficulty from moderate for a solo player to difficult for a fleet?

Find a wormhole. Problem solved.

Seriously, W-space is the answer to your qualms. Variable system class, variable system effect, variable system entrances and exits. No local, just descan and your whits. Solo content for PvP and PvE, 2500 systems to explore with no map (and no possible map that's valid for more than few hours to a day), and always something new and exciting past the next jump.

Solo play is the antithesis of what makes EVE great. While there are a few activities that can be sort of done alone, all of the really amazing moments only happen when you bring people together. Just like real life.

During FanFest 2013 one of the DEVs said something interesting about EVE that has stuck with me. I'll paraphrase...

"If you put a person in a small closet and watch them, it's kinda boring... if you lock two random people in closet and watch them, interesting things happen."

if ccp balances around making solo more uber for lack of a better word....all the people who actually partake of this MMO aspect of this game (damn odd behavior that...mmo and being social, wtf is up with that) get stronger as well. This would mean your gate camps get stronger, roams get stronger, blob hot drops get stronger, even gank dessies get stronger if empire based. Still not helping solo...probably making it harder in fact.

Kind of why much of the stuff you mentioned is in the game as is. Solo own mobiles of doom become wtf fleets of mega doom.

*snips*

This bit isn't actually true.
You don't need to add systems to add additional stuff to explore.
You can add significantly more content to a system itself. Especially if you create a dynamic content creation system rather than the current statically coded anomalies.

Referring to the OP's thoughts, you could code for example, mini nebula, that move through a solar system. They could be blowing out from the sun, or in from the edge of the system caught by the sun. A tick every 30 or 60 mins can recompute their boundaries. These appear on the system map/probe map. And anything inside them, be it planet, mission, or signature, comes under certain different conditions of space. (Much like WH space). Ships inside could be invisible to deep scan but unable to deep scan. Deep scan might only work inside to inside.

Anomalies & missions would feel new & interesting if you no longer got 'Rescue a Maiden' 100 times, but got a randomly generated mission that created different objectives inside, that called for different tools also. And maybe even allowed some objectives to be left. Making shared mission running (Sorry Op, but this is a multiplayer game) much easier since you get bonus objectives as a result, without making it compulsory.

A lot more 'bonus room' type acceleration gates for instance, except since it's dynamic content, you don't know what you will find on the other side. It could warp you into a carrier + escort fleet, a rare gas cloud, or you could follow a chain of 8 bonus gates to..... Nothing.