Issues, Workarounds & Localization

So Eve online is a pretty complex game, it is also pretty harsh at times. The steep learning curve of the game has become almost iconic. The game relies heavily on players to learn from their mistakes and successes. Player experience is at the heart of becoming "good" at this game and in some cases you cant even read your way to how a specific mechanic works. It therefore should follow that the game design is strictly consistent, when a lesson is learned it needs to stay learned. You cant lead your players down a spiraling path of unexplained exceptions, if some part of the game does not work as you would expect from experience, then that needs to be explicitly explained. Right, so!

This is the unexpected exception I learned the other day:

In every other situation, Whenever a client disconnects from the server, all modules with auto-repeat turned on, will run their cycle and then be turned off, with the exception of a Bastion module, which will in fact cycle indefinitely or until the ship is destroyed. This means, that the ship will not be able to emergency warp as you would expect when you get disconnected. Because the other modules on the ship does not keep running, it is very likely that the player will not be able to log back in before the ship is destroyed.

A GM has assured me that this exception is absolutely working as intended. Other players have told me that this is in fact not the only exception, it is also true for the cyno generator and my logic tells me that this should also be true for the siege module.

The thing is that when you are learning the game, you will, from experience, learn that if you get disconnected, your modules will finish their cycle and turn off, and the ship will attempt to emergency warp your ship. And there is nothing to suggest that this is ever NOT the case.

From a design perspective, I cant think of any reason why this should work the way it does, it only seems like a razorblade hidden in the candyfloss waiting for the player to discover. There is nowhere this is explained, the tooltip for the Bastion module does not explain it, the wiki skips lightly over the whole thing and doesnt even have an article about the bastion module OR how emergency warp works, neither can you look it up on the forums, you will find threads about it, but no blues have commented on the matter. The posts Ive read from players are either entirely incorrect or inaccurate, as you would expect.

The painfully easy way to avoid the problem, is ofcourse to turn Auto-repeat off, this will cause the cycle to end, everytime. Unfortunately, because the Bastion module and the other modules with similar immobilizing effects are absolutely exceptions to a rule established by player experience, the only way to arrive at that conclusion, is to allready know.

And that my friends is that, either the information should be readily available or the way those modules work should be changed.

okay so, bastion module is the only module with immobilizing effects that will auto-repeat the cycle during a disconnect. Dunno about cyno, but since its a 10m mins cycle i think most people turn auto-repeat off anyway or run out of fuel or log back in or get destroyed before the cycle ends.

Its not so much the fact that its poorly designed and doesnt seem to have any sensible reason behind it, its also
just this one isolated exception, which is not advertised anywhere and absolutely no one knows about. Pros/cons not withstanding, if I had the information I could decide!

I mean if it was right there in the tooltip, then anyone who lost their ship were just not paying attention.