Player Features and Ideas Discussion

My personal feeling is that on the one hand the game should be playable without relying on out-of-game tools, which is currently only marginally true at best for capital travel, but on the other hand that there's a social cost to essentially shutting down player-run services by out-competing them, and that makes me somewhat uncomfortable, as well as a clear developmental cost to solving a problem that players have already sold.

Are we hitting the right balance, here and elsewhere? No. Jump planning in the client could do with being a lot better. But it's prioritized against other stuff - and both the advanced nature of jump travel and the generally unintuitable nature of jump mechanics mean that this isn't a new-player problem and the accessibility isn't solved just with a jump planner. We'd also need to, eg, let you figure out you need a cyno lit in a nearby system by a player in your fleet, too :)



Underestimated/understood, yes, entirely possible. That's what we're testing here :) For what it's worth, my experiences lead me to believe that supplying combat pilots with worthwhile targets is a core requirement for stable military alliances, but obviously YMMV, and we'll see how it plays out!

As to human nature, sure, but it's not the only thing that's human nature. There's a desire to get bigger, but there are other desires (such as, in our context, the desire to do interesting things in the game) that are also strong, and if we can set one against the other, something has to give.



This idea I have been bouncing around, and still am... when I have time, seems to address the large entity projection issue with much less collateral effect than across the board range nerfs:




The operational range nerf here is intended to REPLACE the single jump range nerf in ALL ships.

All existing ship Jump ranges will remain unchanged.

Under this mechanic all ships will be treated EQUALLY.

(There has been input suggesting JFs, Rorqs and Blops be exempted. What do YOU think?)

Naval ships and aircraft in the real world all operate out of home ports or bases. There is plenty of practical realism here as a premise for this mechanic.


The JUMP BASE

1) Each pilot must stipulate a JUMP BASE station on his character sheet.

2) A pilot may only use his jump drive within 32ly of this base, and he may not jump...

Has any thought been given to trading the Rorqual's drone damage bonus for a 10LY range?

Is it just me or do others also see that Rorquals need to be nerfed?

This gigantic mining ops boat is in every fleet, no matter what and makes all mining barges and exhumers why too strong for the game.

The way the Rorqual adds to the mining madness all over nullsec and now even in lowsec must be stopped.

Yea, yea, I know, e2 is raving over miners and wants stability for Orca boosted mining ops and sounds like a carebear (with guns).

Maybe I am. I have been a carebear for about five years before I changed my mind- oh well someone else changed my stand on pvp in general and after smelling blood the first time it is something you do not want to get rid of.

Anyhow, a tiny bit of 'carebear' still exists and some of my adventures to low or nullsec could not have been done without mining or level 4 highsec missions :P:P:P:P:P:P

Now back to this monstrosity.

The Rorqual and the insane combat abilities that ship has makes miners in all soverentiy based super-mega-tidy fleets unbeatable.

Something must be done.

Any plans to decrease the duration, or at least the ozone use of cynos, now that we have to use a lot more of them?

Years ago I was playing with a devout crowd of modelers and wargamers. We were using Empire Rules, the popular Napoleonic system at the time, and the game manual itself strongly suggested the its rules were only guidelines and players should feel free to experiment. Historical realism was very important to us , so when a couple of guys came up with a more geometrical ranging and enfilade system than the one in the book, we agreed to try it, and put together a custom set of combat tables which we used for the next two weekends. We found the realism satisfying, but also discovered that that we had created a time hog. Battles that would take a good part of Saturday afternoon weren't getting finished till late Sunday.Much of the fun was gone. The added realism wasn't worth the hassle, so we went back to the old way.

For us it was easy. But the MMO world runs on an unprecedented scale, and changes on the fly are very difficult. Companies that place happiness for the majority of their players first are far more successful than their counterparts. I'm not suggesting CCP make Eve a WOW-like candy store - the seven year old girls who want their unicorns an fairy godmothers can go elsewhere. But the drastic loss of player freedom and added economic grind the jump changes will bring about will lead to a sharp reverse in the recent empire to null migration trend. We are already already seeing office closings. This is directly counter to some of the stated objectives here. My continuing theme will be that it is much easier not to put yourself in a hole than to have to dig out of it later.

No kidding. How about displaying the distance in light-years to a certain system somewhere in the interface? Anywhere. Preferably on hover or in the info box but buried in 5 submenus would be an improvement. For bonus points, a tool to check the distance between two arbitrary systems.

Jump limiting is based on 2 separate timers - jump cooldown and jump fatigue.
Simply have one of those timers be toon related, and have the other timer be SHIP related.

That way, yes. People can use industrials to jump to the system where their caps are cached a lot quicker, but once there, when entering a cap, they then get the full penalties of jump fatigue applied using a multiplier based on their ship.

1X for industrials
5X for BLOPS
10X for Caps

This way players would have to balance risk Vs reward - 'should I REALLY use my Industrial to jump all the way when I am gonna be screwed in my CAP ship once I get there??'

Disagree here immensely. The only thing at this point the rorqual does better is boost. This is not without added cost as constant roqual boosts equated to about 1 mil m3 heavy water per month.

Good call Polo, they like the collateral effects. Shut down industry in null sec by any limiting factor in logistics.... one more step towards pay to win game.

I still think you're overestimating the effect the jump changes will have on coalitions, as the sov system still rewards shoving as much EHP and DPS into a system as is possible. While the jump changes do open the door for someone to kick someone in 2 places and force them to actually either split their forces, spend a day travelling or risk losing a system/some other resource, I'm still pretty certain that the real difference in the political environment between/internally in the coalitions will come with the sov changes.

I'm so certain about that that I'd bet a beer on the sov changes bringing about more tumult than the jump changes.