Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hi guys,

I've had some ideas for a simple but effective, general improvement for EVE.
Maybe those ideas have been mentioned before, but I could not find anything using the Forum Search.

I'll first explain three of those, since the other ones may not be entirely implementable.

1.: Market Search
The Search Function in the Market is extremely annoying and unintuitive.
It's a simple string comparison, i think even the simplest form existing.
I work as a search engine developer for online shops myself, and I know how easy it is to improve the current market search function.

a) Extract the first characters of each seperate word in an item name. For Example "Energized Adapative Nano Membrane" -> "EANM" and use it for comparison. This way players could search for items by using known shortcuts.

b) Use a function like PHPs "string_contains(needle, haystack)", so you could find Items by just typing a few letters of its name.

c) Don't just compare full item names, but break down item names to its single words, and do that same thing with the search string. For Example, let "Arm Rep" be "Arm" and "Rep", and check for items that match those words most.

d) Use relevance, give each item a "boost", depending on how well it matches with the search string. This way, the most relevant items will be shown on top.

e) Also include the item description into comparison, and give it lower relevance. Searching for "bonus for armor repair amount" would return a Deimos, for example*. Awesome.

* Since the item Description has lower relevance, it won't show up if you search for e.g. "Armor rep"

There are a LOT of free and open source search engines you could use too.
I think there are a lot of players also wanting this.
Also do this for all other Search Functions, if possible.

2.: "Want to Duel" - Flag
Add a possibility to flag yourself for a Duel, so Players don't have do invite every single combat ship undocking in hope for a Fight. Mark them with something like a tiny red flag icon** on the Overview or something.
This may not concern most players, but it's not much work a few people will really appreciate it.

** This does not mean that they will auto-accept an invite. It's just a visual mark.

3.: "Recently bought Items"
Who doesn't know that feel when you just bought some items after fitting half your ship, and then they are just spread in your inventory, so you have to either use the search function or look for them in your inventory, which is, in my case, extremely huge.

The Idea here is, that recently bought Items should be shown ABOVE all others in the inventory with a fine line as seperator. They will disappear as soon as you undock or log off and then get sorted into the normal inventory. Also stack those Items with existing ones in your inventory so you can put 8 Turrets on your Megathron if you just missed 3 and bought those.

Those Ideas should not annoy any player, because they are mainly adding smoothness to the game.

I'd love to hear your feedback and improvements, and how important those things are for you!

Yea, good point, CCPlease move thread.

The other 2 Ideas are too small for one thread imho.
i'll add a tl;dr if people are actually too lazy to read a few lines of text.

How should #1 cause trouble? You can still search the old way, if you want, and have the same results.
#2 No? Do you just not care, or would it affect you in any way? Not flaming, just curios.
#3 Nope, if you put items out of your inventory into your ship, the bought items get placed in the free slots you took them from.

In before the move

1. Have you SEEN what CCP is capable of with their patches? (e.g. boot.ini) Really meant it in a "probably will take more dev time than is worth spending" -- no diea how godawful the market code is though. POS Code (and SOV, and some other "big things") is so awful, it causes the devs who look at it to join the Blood Raiders.

2. It's more of a "no need" type change. Don't like getting the spam, just auto-deny all. This is not to say that the mechanic itself is "fine", but that an "auto accept" function is probably no better than the current situation.

3. Well "first open space" for me is typically "end of the inventory list". Agree that things are different (although, I tend to buy stuff in the hub stations, and then fit elsewhere ... or have everything on-hand in said market station). So depends on how ugly the inventory code is.

Thread has been moved to Features & Ideas Discussion.

Dave is a seks god.