Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Here are five changes I personally think EVE needs in order to move further away from being boring and be a more fun experience that feels rewarding. The game has potential, but still hasn't address those core issues that plague its gameplay and appeal.

1. Gain SP from playing the game. While keeping the time-based training, every action in the game should reward bonus SP. 1 hour hour of doing something, anything, in EVE should at least give 1 hour worth of SP, essentially doubling training speed.

2. A flat maximum velocity across the board for all ships, maybe some class exceptions, but moving a battleship 50km shouldn't be so frustratingly slow and take minutes, let me get going after a minute of acceleration. Slow crawling ships ruins the excitement of upgrading, flying anything below 300m/s destroys the game.

3. Increase loot range to 10km, increase the small tractor beam's range and speed. This is as slow and cumbersome as Diablo 1.

4. Let me use a module when I know the cooldown is over, not when the server allows my client. The server is probably double-checking whether that turret is on cooldown or not anyway. Everything should be done to hide latency.

5. Non-courier mission should ALWAYS be within solar system. Security mission should NEVER be about delivering something to another system. Traveling between systems is neither great nor fun to justify being part of a mission. If you want people to do something else than what they signed for, that is what they will end up doing.

tldr; EVE is too slow paced for me. Make everything faster and more convenient so I don't have to wait.


Now for the rundown:

1a. This was once part of the game. It was removed.
The reason it was removed was threefold:
-------- Players learned to "game" the system. They fit their ships in such a way that they could effectively perma-fight a friend without killing each other. They would then go afk as their ships continued on and rake in the Skillpoints.
-------- Grinding in this manner distracts players from actually "playing the game." It instead promotes people to do something they don't really want to do in order to gain an advantage over other players (and no... when something gives you tangible and permanent rewards like Skillpoints, it ceases to be an "optional" thing).
-------- How do you define an "action?" There are many jobs and roles a player can perform that won't necessarily constitute an action in-game. Leadership roles are a good example. People in these roles will spend most of their time organizing things and little time actually in space. An "active grinding system" the way you are imagining it effectively penalizes such players.

2a. This was done for balance reasons. Bigger ships with their greater fitting, tanking, and damage dealing abilities need to suffer from greater penalties (in this case, mobility) in order to keep smaller ships viable.
Pro-Tip: moving to a bigger ship is not necessarily an "upgrade" in EVE. Bigger ships have their roles. Smaller ships have theirs. Speaking from experience, there are many situations where even the greatest of Veterans should opt for a Frigate rather than a Battleship.

3a. And? Get friends. Or come back in a Noctis. Your impatience is not necessarily a good enough reason to make a change like this.

4a. Sorry... but all calculations and actions are on the server itself. The client (the thing you interact with) is nothing more than an visual interface interpreting what the server is doing.
So if the sever says your cooldown is not over... your cooldown is NOT over. You can't override that without also opening up the game to hacking/glitching shenanigans.
Hint: the server runs at a 1 second "refresh rate." This means that the server will only accept, process, and execute a command (or any series of commands) once per second. This is done because the game is not broken up into shards and the game is trying to keep everyone more or less on the same page.

5a. Impatient much? I will very much enjoy seeing your reaction when you jump in PvP and come back from a 2 hour roam where you got no fights.
Or a fight where you were the first person to die. Mere seconds after you entered it.

1.) This seems like a good idea for a new game, but it's a big change for such an old game as EVE. CCP is trying the idea but on a much smaller scale.

2.) I disagree, I think small ships should be much faster than large ships both sup-warp and in warp. The real problem as I see it is that large ships are too good at killing small ships. In PVE there are many NPCs in ships of varying sizes and the best ship for taking them all out, not counting tech 3 ships, is a battleship. It's all about range control. A battleship can hit frigates just fine at the outer ends of its range, and this goes for player frigates as well. I think the solution is to make battleships more resistant to frigates but also less able to combat them--less able to launch small drones and less able to track small ships even at long range. Then make different kinds of PVE scenarios for different ship sizes, battleship PVE should have you mostly fighting other battleships. There should be level 4 missions made for cruisers or frigates, in which you mostly fight other ships of the same size. If the NPC difficulty is scaled sufficiently higher than level 1 or 2 missions, it will justify calling it level 4.

To recap: the problem is not that large ships are too slow. The problem is that small ships don't have enough viability. If you don't like moving slow, switching to a small ship should be an option in more than 10% of content.

3.) We don't need to increase loot range. The problem here is that PVE puts you against a whole bunch of super-weak NPCs. It would be more fun and less tedious if instead you fought just a handful of tough and powerful opponents. They could have a capacitor and be vulnerable to EWAR, perhaps. It wouldn't take very long looting the battlefield if it wasn't littered with a cloud of NPC wrecks.

4.) This is an excellent suggestion. The issue is that the client sometimes denies you the option to do something until the server reports back that it is ready to be done, rather than querying the server to see if you can. On the one hand, this reduces the number of server queries. On the other hand, it forces you to lose at minimum 2x latency every activation operation. A good compromise is if the client allows you to send activation queries early, based on latency.

Many games have good tricks to hide latency, World of Warcraft being an excellent example of one that's been doing it for a long time. Just the same, there are plenty of games out there that hide it rather poorly--and in some cases World of Warcraft is one of them. EVE Online seems to be one of the worst games in this regard, however, and it might do CCP some good to take a few hints from other games as far as combating lag. A lot of it is a trick to hide the lag, rather than use expensive hardware to make it actually go away.

5.) Sending players outside of the solar system is a way of getting them into non-consensual PVP. You don't know what's in that system or along the way unless you have someone to tell you. There could be a trap, and that's the grim beauty of the situation. Fortunately most security agents don't send you very far away. But if you want missions in the same system, you'll have better luck with mining agents. Even they send you out and about, however.

1) injectors implemented - CHECK (eve such a better game now, what do you mean the playerbase did not increase tenfold?)
2) fit accordingly - 4 km/s Machariel and what not.
3) MTU - Mobile Tractor Unit - it's in the game for over an year now, use it
4) Maybe. Would not prioretize but this is valid.
5) Predictable. -> Boring. -> Not fun. <- Getting ganked on the gate cause wardec and no scout. <- Having to fly around.
Point taken, you can go for predictable with the correct system set up though.
-1

Injectors don't convert trial accounts into subscribers.

A battleship should go as fast as a frigate, it simply takes more time to accelerate to that speed. Afterburners and jump/micro warp drives role isn't to fix the game, if something is mandatory, it's a design failure.

What some of you call patience is actually masochism. The same kind of voices who claimed Diablo 3's loot should take months to "earn", reality shows you should be the last person to listen to for the game to thrive.

High-sec agents send you into high-sec, at least from level 1 to 4, traveling is unnecessary and I already need to dock in order to accept and turn missions in. Sending someone to the next system doesn't introduce PvP, it moves it. Essentially, what you guys are telling me is : "PvP happens at the gate", and I'm the one being called impatient and lazy...

I checked before responding to this

"No Character/Corp/Alliance by that name could be found!
Please search again with the search box at the top"

dont talk about pvp if you haven't actually any experience of it whatsoever .

More about the top speed thing: I think this could be done with a combination of tracking and mass/thrust changes. For example , a hyperion with a Cold-Gas 500MN MWD should accelerate at 5 m/s. If I'm doing the math right (can't see all the stats cause I'm not ingame). With a rate like that, and maybe a nerf to turning speeds, something like this might be possible.

But it would be a balancing nightmare.

I'll fix your balancing nightmare: let them accelerate as normal until they reach 80% velocity, then they accelerate at a constant rate equal to how fast that ship accelerates at 80% velocity.

5 changes EVE needs to be a better game... for my particular playstyle, while completely breaking game mechanics and going against the game's core values in the process.


People above me already said it in more detail, but I will still post this:

1. Oh yes, and let's also make it so that you can see how many skillpoints other players have! Maybe not the exact number, maybe only how many millions. Let's call that "Character Tier" or something like this. /s

This will go completely against everything that EVE is. EVE's skill system is one of it's defining features, and it is what sets it apart from most other MMOs out there.

2. "I don't know how/don't want to fit a prop mod."

3. "I don't know how to use an MTU."

4. This would actually be a good change, only if you phrased it better. It's going to be impossible either way, because ~ legacy code ~.

5. Or how to make mission running even more monotonous than it is already. But seriously, how is it even remotely troublesome for you to travel one or two jumps to a neighboring system for a mission?




"I want an extra free mid-slot for my Raven, why is it so slow without a prop-mod?"



What you call normal attention span, I call instant gratification game design-induced ADHD.


Overall, my advice to you is as follows: quit mission running, and find a corp that does literally anything besides missions/mining, and lives anywhere outside of hisec. If you don't want to quit mission running, at least find a mission running corp that will have other people who you can then chat with, and maybe even do something together(I know I know, player interaction is scary).

EVE has plenty of fast-paced activities, like frig/dessie PVP, but mission running is not one of them.