Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hi there.

Since PI materials are now more important than ever, maybe it's time for at least a litte UI improvement pass?
It has been improved in the past, but doing PI on a regular basis still quickly ends up in a mindless, repetitive clickfest - which is meh.

From my personal experience, I would recommend 2 changes at the very least.
A) while in most cases a doubleclick saves you a lot of time (doubleclick node opens schematics, doubleclick schematic installs it...) there is ONE odd case:
If I open the storage and doubleclick some stack of goods, I instantly get the "create route" dialog - very good!
But if I set up a colony, naturally there are no stacks yet - the first things are just being harvested. So... I naturally go to "Routes" to set up from there. But if I doubleclick a route of incoming stuff, I don't get the "create outgoing route" dialog, but a "show info" on that specific PI item - which is completely useless.
Please make it so that doubleclicking an incoming route lets you create an outgoing route. This will save a lot of clicks.

B) please, please, please let us COPY&PASTE configurations of nodes with Ctrl+C - Ctrl+V! That would be huge. Currently, changing production in a colony with 5-20 processors is very painful, costs a gazillion of click and is zero meaningful gameplay once you have taken the decision what to produce.
By COPY&PASTE I mean: select the same schematic as the origial has and create incoming and outgoing routes with the exact same items, target nodes and quantities. If anything is not possible (e.g. due to link overload), just display an error message and do nothing else.

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more suggestions:

-the ability to create routes by dragging&dropping items from routes or storages onto a processor/storage node.
Even cooler would be if we could drag&drop a node onto another and that would cause a route to be created (i.e. directly on the planet view, drag an extractor onto a storage or a processor to route the extracted goods there, drag a processor onto another to use the outputs of the first as inputs for the second, storages likewise and so on)

-when setting up colonies, it takes the most time to precisely place nodes next to each other at minimum distance (minimizing link length). Please have the nodes behave like they have a "magnetic" outline (like windows that are easily moved next to each other because of "magnetic" borders).

-when interacting with POCOs, the "Access Customs Office" dialog very often closes for no reason at all whenhitting "Transfer". Very annoying. Please fix.

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debatable (bigger changes, touch balance/game design):

- abandon the arbitrary limit of 6 colonies. If that is too radical, please give us another skill "Advanced Interplanetary Consolidation" to turn it up o 11. If you need the fees from the extra accounts desperately, please sell colony licenses for Aurum.

- to make harvester colonies more engaging and less afk, increase the ressources on all planets, but make them deplete faster and respawn in different locations (more emphasis on nuggets). It should not be possible to have permanently stable harvesting setups. Instead, the decision process where to set up extractors should be required more often.

Reasoning behind this:
Players should not be hindered to access any parts of the game they enjoy. PI has such limitations. In theory the feature allows to use it more intensely by selecting shorter cycles, but that does not really work well if you e.g. want to do PI 2-3 hours per day ever other day - the feature only supports very regular patterns.
Example: I can roughly double the output of harvesting colonies by going from 72hour cycles to 24h cycles while quadrupling the required work - there the design holds as we have diminishing returns.
But any attempts to use even shorter programmes typically fail since the harvesters will be idle most of the time (during work/sleep).
Mixing cycle times is hell through the current interface...
In addition, players can circumvent the limitations by creating otherwise meaningless PI alts which is imo bad design (albeit creates extra revenues).

Note: this is mainly regarding harvester colonies. Factories are fine here as they create a constant need for input and output handling which uses more playtime. Changing the production however is again a clickfest from hell, but could be amended by the above suggestions.

The click madness is there for a reason

Also nice ideas, albeit some of them seem to require a lot of programming...

I have more:

- the ability to create routes by dragging&dropping items from routes or storages onto a processor/storage node.

-when setting up colonies, it takes the most time to precisely place nodes next to each other at minimum distance (minimizing link length). Please have the nodes behave like they have a "magnetic" outline (like windows that are easily moved next to each other because of "magnetic" borders).

-when interacting with POCOs, the "Access Customs Office" dialog very often closes for no reason at all whenhitting "Transfer". Very annoying. Please fix.

Nope, no hate from me on this. While I dislike the mini game idea, it has kind of taken root thanks to hacking/archeology and project discovery, and quite likely the best option for removing the AFKness from PI, which I support 100%.

The interface could be a lot better, it's almost impossible to see stuff on ice planets https://i.imgur.com/CHu3aPd.jpg

You could be able to setup planets with less clicks as well



What would be that reason ?

Or we can have a serious conversation and not bring up stupid ****

Come on man. Do you even play this game?

No hate, but I dare say that the discussion if AFK/Passive income is bad or good is not the topic of this thread, which is rather on how to improve a part of the game which is not so good (but maybe on PI we mean the same thing with different wording ).

Btw, is PI really AFK/Passive income?
You need to act on it, regularly, to get any income, in fact, if You consider actions and resulting income:
1. no action = no income
2. income is delayed w.r.t. actions
Your bounties for killing rats are delayed, Your LPs from incursions are delayed, ofc You don't normally call these AFK income?

Now, You set up Your POCO and You could get infinite income forever (is this correct? got no experience, lol, for the sake of argument lets assume it is)... that is passive income!... ok, until they wardec You!

Back on topic, PI is "not so good" in a bad way, because the actions required to keep the income are:
1. routine
2. boring
3. more boring (ie often) = more income
result: "feel forced to do something boring" ... "I need to get out of this!"

This is really a bad cycle for a player to settle into, and conversely for CCP to allow in the game.
If the player does not learn to take it easy (e.g. blow things up in the meantime!), the other way out is quitting.
CCP allowing such mechanics in the game? No! No! No!

That's why I salute any suggestion to improve the quality of life of PI, first and foremost for the sake of EVE Online!

Or, take Sonya's suggestion and get rid of it!

o7

No real argument from myself save for costs and similar similar enough to this that I'll just repeat:

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=6417250#post6417250




However Rivr made a good point that the CC isn't really needed except as a flag planted on the heatmap, anywhere.

**ed: as an addon the ability to rename certain modules like rocket platforms and silos for transfers would be a quite a convenience. Normally I'd bicker about the easiest in game isk and you needing to be in space longer so you can be a target for bad people and their content, but PI workings are enough of a pita.

True, except for one case: when there is no POCO or the owner denies access, you need the CC to launch rockets.
But the CC could be changed into a rocket launch pad and the PG/CPU bonusses rolled into the skill CC Upgrades.
Although... this would mess up the mechanism for deploying colonies... :-/

Well, I don't share this perspective. PI is definitely not creating afk money or goods.
It's even in the name!
Planetary Interaction - not planetary afk-sitting!
No clicks = no money.