Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hey there,

I got an idea which was going in my mind for quite some time. I recently quitted playing EVE for various reasons (mostly time related) but I wanted to suggest it anyways.

I don't know whether this was suggested before but I will take a shot:

Basically, I suggest a more detailed ship damage system. In all science fiction movies and most games, there are issues of ship modules being damaged. I wonder why this isn't part of EVE, in my opinion the most detailed space simluator.

Imagine, you are in your ship, and you are fighting something. Then various modules of your ship can be damaged, for example the ship drives, sensors, shields, targeting systems or whatever. It should be possible that these modules take damage. I don't talk about various additional fitting options for these modules, that would be too much, but I think such a system, well ballanced of course, could have a major impact on the gameplay and opens up more tactical depth to the combat in EVE.

The impact would be both on Nullsec and Highsec PVP and PVE. It would end the situations like find the enemy, sit face to face and shooting each other. The FC could maybe plan to disable the manouvaerability of the logistics and then kite the enemy. Or even in PVE, no more AFK Ratting (admit it, ratting is one of the most boring parts in EVE). It wouldn't suffice anymore to stick some armor reps to your ship and let them be activated all the time, you would have to deal with crtical hits to your drives, or weapons and have to repair them in order to continue shooting your enemy.
I would even go so far that your ship could be completely disabled, forcing you to leave your ship in your capsule. Then you have to go back and repair your ship remotely. This would be interesting for pirate players, finding those ships and recover/ steal them.

I think this system shouldn't affect smaller ships in a deeper way, because it doesn't matter where you are hitting the small frigate with your broadside. But it would make bigger fights interesting. Battleships, Dreads, Carriers and Titans are a really big targets, so it should matter where you hit them. Like I've said, it would make those hour taking TiDi Fights a bit more intersting, small encounters in a similar way. The fact that smaller ships aren't affected so much by this system is also nice for beginners because in that way they are not that overwhlemed by this system. And as they progress to use bigger ships, the have to deal with this system, which keeps up the learning curve. I could even imagine that some ammo types are more effective against different parts of your ship (ion charges for shield and electronics and more massive projectiles against the hull itself), but that would be a second step, I think.

With this system you would have a deeper tactical experience and even a bit more interesting PVE experience in both Null and Highsec. I'm just seeing the guys, finding your ship, are able to disable it and then leave you the choice, leave your ship behind or go down in flames with it. Would make pirating more interesting.

Personally, I don't see any disadvantages in such a system, it would only make the game more interesting. Of course it will be a big chunk of work and testing to get such a system well balanced. But it could be worth it. Also there might be an impact on larger scale fights because there would be more user interaction and more recalculations on the server, but I think it would make the already bad situation much worse. One bad disadvantage would be for the narcotic pilots (I was one of them, sometimes) which fly more in a dream-like state, that they actually have to do something while fighting. Also the AFK-ratters have to wake up and do something against their disabled drives or targeting systems. But I doubt that would be that bad.

Yeah, that was what was going around in my mind. I hope you like the suggestion.

Fly safe

P.S. I am no native english speaker, so please forgive me some gramatical mistakes =)

So it would be even easier to implement it =)

Yeah, maybe the modules on your ship take damage, but I think you understand that that I mean a bigger impact. The modules are basically (apart from weapons and other active modules) just upgrades for the ship. I talk about that the very core-modules of the ship can be damaged, so that you can't hit anything when your internal electronics are disabled, or you can't move your ship completely because your ship drive was damaged. Also nice would be the senor module, so that you can't use your overview until it is repaired. There are loads of features.

Some issues would be that it completely discourages solo players from venturing very far from home, and makes small gangs that rely on active tank with no logi much more fragile. It would also introduce a more randomness into the combat, which people tend to frown upon in general. It's one thing to lose the fleet because one pilot made a mistake and broke the synergy of the ships. It's another to have that synergy just randomly disappear without anyone's fault due to a throw of the dice, and doubly so if you're on a streak of bad luck and this happens several times in a row.

Random mechanics do less to encourage more tactical combat than they do to encourage damage control, and damage control often means reducing one's exposure to dangerous situations.

You get where I'm going with this?

No matter how nice it might look or how much immersion you would get out of it, I think it won't work unless you change damage application itself, because the more damage you take, the faster your ship deteriorates.
If you take as an extreme lets say a shield tank with 100k ehp in shields, 5k armor and 4k hull (lets assume dps oriented, no DC). The moment he hits armor, he lives maybe long enough to align for warp before he hits hull and then is probably dead before he makes it into warp (no scram assumed). With failing modules this deterioration will exponentially shorten, since resists and regen fail, buffer gets killed and maybe even align speed and warpdrive itself. You exponentially increase the effect of damage taken.

And if you even insist systems start to fail once the aspect they are attached to like shield hardeners, boosters and extenders failing once shield takes damage, or EANMs and plates, active hardeners a s well as armor reppers fail once you take armor damage then you are going far beyond what a pilot can manage once he gets in trouble just by the usual values.

Just imagine hanging on the edge of low armor and suddenly your repper pops out along with a plate and an EANM - say hello to the fridge.

So no!

Imagine a game where you have 2000+ships all loaded in at the same time as far as damage is all the server needs to track is three hours values the computer is happy now implement this system computer kills itself top escape it's cpu melting into the motherboard