Assembly Hall

Couldn't agree with you more.

A good option

I think instead of trying to add elements of Second Life to EVE, CCP should focus on the things that actually, I don't know, improve the game. It's a game about blowing ships up in space. Focus on that, not some useless feature. Incarna was a horrid expansion; alot of dev time and resources dedicated to catering to the RMT crowd, and the game suffered heavily as a result.

WiS was a bad idea from the start and, in its current limited iteration, remains a bad idea.

It should be simply tossed into the bin like so many other things that continue to languish without any further work or consideration (COSMOS, et al).

They launched it, came up with the horrible idea that players would pay hundreds of dollars for cosmetic gee-gaws no one else would see (since you cannot interact with other players outside of your ship - which is what EVE is all about) was a huge waste of CCPs time.

And - since that implementation a sum total of almost nothing has been done with it (I left for almost three years and when I returned it was all exactly the same).

Oh. And meanwhile Star Citizen demonstrates a ship docking with a derelict station which players explore with their avatars.

Gun fights and zero gravity follow.

Try OP for heresy.

On a serious note, when can we expect iteration CCP?

This has been done to death in the F&I forum already.. They ain't doing it, no matter how small or how much real gameplay the improvement may contain.

Wait for Valkyrie and Legion both with "Games of the Year" back to back so CCP has the cash flow to throw at Ambulation again.

I think that it is inevitable that CCP will have to revisit WiS within a couple of years.

The reason for this is that players of space games will be socialised into expecting avatars, and given that avatars already exist in Eve, the pressure will be to expand on them.

Players will be socialised into expecting avatar play by the ‘competitors’ of Eve that are coming out in 2014 and 2015.

In December the grand-daddy of Eve, Elite, is launched as a cooperative multiplayer game, and it already has systems for avatar play. At launch the avatar will be locked into the cockpit, but that doesn’t mean that the avatar isn’t there. It is, and David Braben has said that the systems has been coded with avatar gameplay in mind. Then in 2015 you will, hopefully, also see Star Citizens launch, finally. It too has Avatar play, and it has from the start.

Space games will see a rennaissance over the next few years, and like Elite set the floor for games like Eve and Wing Commander, their pedigree will set the floor for CCP too. With the player churn that goes on always, that floor will make players come to Eve with certain expectations formed by those existing standards.

I believe that avatars will become standard. Therefore, CCP will have to expand on WiS.

I'm torn. I love the idea of avatars, and I love the idea of bringing EVE into stations--bringing stations into the game, really. The potential to make the game much larger and much deeper is huge.

However: the avatar in fact is a very difficult thing to pull off, because humans are incredibly diverse things, and so much social interaction depends on things like unconscious cues, body language and tone of voice that are either caricatured as /emotes that you have to type out, or absent altogether. When I played on text-only MUSHes this wasn't a problem, because my character could do anything that I described (within reason, obviously). In space it's not a problem, because a ship is just a big hunk of metal; nobody expects much individuality or expressiveness out of them--though, in my ideal EVE, there would be room for that, too.

As a result, much of the communication between players is either done the same way I did it in MUSHes in the 1990s and through talk and VT100s in the 1980s: text chat--except that the MUSHes have vastly more sophisticated options than any MMO does, so it's more like the 1980s than the 1990s. The only enhancement, if that's what it is, is that some graphical MMOs put the text in a speech bubble over the avatar in addition to updating the chat window.

The rest of the communication is out of the game entirely, and much of it is private and inaccessible even if every single one of the people talking are sitting on the Jita 4-4 undock.

This is not an easy problem to solve. CCP could probably start by really committing to EVE Voice, which will incidentally become much better when CCP has single-sign-on for all a person's accounts and EVE Voice at the top level, so that you don't have to leave and come back when you change characters. But making avatars seem alive and human is a very hard problem, and I have to say that, as a veteran roleplayer, I can't get terribly excited about avatar gameplay if it means my avatar standing dumbly in a room looping through his standard collection of fidgety behaviors while I type into a chat window.

I can get more excited about avatar gameplay that involves doing things, because running around wielding various items and interacting in specific ways with the environment is a mostly solved problem--at least, game developers have figured out how to fake it reasonably well.

It's not like he's going anywhere.

I'd prefer if CCP had a fatigue timer on running and the sort of public transportation options that any huge, sprawling airport offers, so that you don't have to walk or run everywhere if you don't want to. Trains are faster anyway, and the equivalent in the far future should be awesome.

One of the major irritants for me in any avatar-based MMO is the overcaffeinated jumping-bean guy making a joke of himself because he can't take 10 extra seconds to reach a location--something that's not really helped by the fact that you're expected to get everywhere on foot. But then, I'm the guy who actually turns on the walk option and looks around.

And on that note, rather than running everywhere, I'd like to have much more customization of gait and posture. The current everyone-is-a-runway-model default is fine for what it is, but a whole station of runway models is going to look strange.