Player Features and Ideas Discussion

As we anticipate the upcoming industry citadels, I think it would be useful to discuss the state of industry in EVE.

I enjoy pvp in EVE quite a lot: both in nullsec fleets and solo in lowsec. It's a nice way to be challenged and pass some time. But I often find myself playing other games when I feel the urge to build and create. I wish this were not the case. I think EVE has the potential to be a really gratifying creative experience in addition to letting us enact our little playground bully scenarios. So when I hear EVE players discussing building their Europa Universalis empires while waiting for a ping to get the next Thany kill, I feel that something ought to change.

Some current problems:

* No room for expertise. All ships/items are created equal. No matter how much skill, time, devotion, or high-end material you put into building your ship/item, it's going to be as good as that built by any other industrialist. This is odd and counter-productive. I'd like to see high-end materials make a difference to the outcome. And I'd like to see the search for those materials become competitive. An enyo with 2% higher or 2% lower resists certainly makes a difference.

* Geography. Where you source materials should make a difference. This would help make the map even less of a homogenous space. Individual systems should have real differences that you can feel. (Booster production actually implements geography reasonably well. But other types of production often do not.)

* Personal skill. Some people are gifted designers of industrial processes. Some lack the intelligence or the dedication. I'd like to see a lot more room for mediocrity (and hence for excellence) in industrial process design in EVE. The new citadels are an excellent opportunity to allow players to research and tweak their production. Make it interesting and people will play with it.

* Scale. A fair chunk of truly rewarding industry atm involves moon-goo and is, for that reason, out of reach for small-gang oriented players. To my mind, industry is like small business: let EVE citizens build small industrial operations first. The big stuff will emerge dynamically. Instead we have a model that depends on the largesse of Alliance leadership to distribute goo. This results in a business ecosystem with megacorporations but few small businesses. Unhealthy.

* Aesthetics. PI is ok. But it's very far short of really building an infrastructure on a planet. Compare PI to SimCity. If our PI colonies were towns, they'd be 3rd world mineral extraction outposts with no concern for the location. It's hard to get motivated to do PI except for the sake of the isk. And, honestly, that's not very motivating. I'd like to be able to build a richly detailed planetary colony or an orbital outpost for the sheer aesthetic joy of it (and for the profit too).

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I can't take blame or credit for these ideas. They've all come up in comms at various times. But I did want to write them up and see if CCP would take them into account when revamping industry later on in the year.

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I swear that industry was just overhauled, or at least it seems that way...

• No room for expertise. That looks good on paper, but like many other games that originally had this kind of system, they found that only the highest end product would sell, and all other versions were scrap.


• Geography. This kind of already exists. You still aren't making Supers in HS... or drugs for that matter. And while you can generally put the parts together anywhere, some ship parts are made with material only gathered from different areas of space. Also, They tried a similar idea with the ill-fated teams concept.


• Personal skill. Right now, the personal skill is in using the tools that are available to everyone and doing better then them. I don't think there's a place for actual player created new items. The skill factor comes in how ingenuitive a player can be with the items and information already at hand.


• Scale. Meh, I buy parts made with moon goo, and I still turn a profit. That said, moons are lucrative resources, and as far as I remember, they are NOT found in HS. This requires resources outside of a single player's usual capability to protect. As far as I'm concerned... this is working as intended.


• Aesthetics. More or less agreed on this. PI is the necessary chore, not the fun thing.

--Gadget

Geography: They tried with R64 moons and had to introduce alternate materials so alliances wouldn't have monopoly.

Personal Skill: Whatever works best due to "skill", similarly to "how to kill boss x" in other games, ends up on the internets. At that point it's no longer "skill", but rather just a blanket 2% or 5% bonus that everyone gets.

Scale: CCP hasn't added any gameplay restrictions that would prevent the small business from working. Players, on the other hand, do follow economies of scale and price, and do band in alliances that act much like gangs rather than being nice. But you're asking CCP to police the entire playerbase in order to achieve "be nice to the small business", and I doubt they'll want to do that.

Aesthetics: Shrug. They'll probably say, just like with mission arcs, if you want epic mission arcs, play WoW or SWTOR. If you want detailed surface building, play simcity or minecraft.

Then you have to shift attention from having the numbers to having the brains. As It stands today, everyone can invent items and do industry. For small capitalism to work , you need to be unique at what you are producing.Unless they change the model, or introduce a way that allows players to create unique items, there is no way to go against large alliances. That would place value to the individual, rather that the collective. And Eve focuses on the collective mostly.



It goes back to the unique things. R64 availability is what makes large alliances excel in industry. If you were to introduce some randomness to materials, then alliances would probably crumble.

One thing is true, whether you are a small corp or a big alliance, there is always a select few that have certain abilities and take things forward, the rest follow. Likewise, there is a need for a way to distinguish smart capable industry players from the rest. It doesn't matter if you have access to materials like moon goo, unless you can produce the t2 bpcs, you will be forced to sell them on the market. And market can be manipulated to one's benefit or detriment. So yes, invention could be the key, creating variations of ships and modules with unique abilities, modified versions of them, that would add uniqueness. But difficulty to make would be off the charts. It follows the paradigm of tournament ships and commander modules. Their scarcity is what makes them valuable.

That will add a lot of complexity to the game, I don't know whether it would be feasible to do. As it stands today, you can still buy t2 materials from the market , build and sell at a profit, but you will have to be picky what and where you sell. Access to materials from the source give you more degrees of freedom.

Yes, but this is a game, even in RL small businesses with good unique ideas get something out of it, before getting bought out ofc. Willingly or forcefully.




Of course its a game, and there are smart and dedicated players, a lot of them obsessed indeed. And good at what they do. All Im saying is that even if you are equally dedicated and willing, the only way to differentiate between how good players can be, is volume and resources. Nothing else. There is nothing you can do to bring a personal touch that will shift the balance. Take pvp. FCs that come up with unique fits based on Intel and intuition, turn the tide around. There are multiple ways to counter another fleet. Industry is a bit linear. PVP and market pvp requires wits. Inventing stuff is just a clicking fest on multiple accounts. There is no real notion of invention. No pressure or time limit, no strategy and tactics to be followed. No problem solving, forcing you to either make a connection or lose everything.

With regards to geographic differences, you can already achieve this by removing ore anomalies and instead improve the standard belts. Depending on the security level of a system, the standard belts contain certain ores; generally the lower the security level of a system, the better the ores are. This would create an onion like structure in null sec where the best ores are always only available in the best systems deeper in null sec and security levels of systems do not just influence how big the ore anomaly spawns are. This does not only create a bit of a strain between different sov holders, it also creates more trade opportunity for shipping compressed ores around and deal with your neighbors more. (Ihubs would obviously improve the standard belts with more rocks/better yield rocks/special rocks.)

Ore anomalies could again return to their signature status and become a special candy worth looking out for in your home mining system/constellation.

Industry works as intended more or less, I would like to see some changes with invention as it is too linear. Having production lines without have to babysit them is ok. And the t2 production part is fine too. Maybe CCP could do something with t2 materials availability to a small degree, so as not to disrupt already established practices and territories, I don't expect anything too drastic too soon.

Perhaps invention also works as intended, since a lot of people can supply a lot of modules and ships, keeping prices low or commanding premium prices, if they can form a cartel. An idea would be to take a t2 bpc and through some modification process, get it to faction specs. To use the OPs name, you would end up with Yana Shakti's modified heatsink for example, giving you the same damage multiplier as a dead space counterpart that doesn't really exist in the game. Then you can go on and sell it to the market for a faction premium price (I don't know whether database managers will be happy about this). A unique item that gave its inventor some limited fame in New Eden and some money well earned. You could turn it into a faction or commander grade module, but these things already exist.

It shouldn't be an easy process, but at least sounds like invention. How feasible this is, I don't know, but Im sure you get the point.

Nobody is going to "invest" a year. This is a game. By definition, CCP will have to tell us what to do when they release the feature.

And as far as "freely advertise", there are SPIES in this game. And we share. As an example of how much we share: the next exploit that's found, pay attention to reddit and other forums, look at how many people know about it before CCP emergency-fixes it.

But in any case, it's not a new idea that hasn't been implemented by other MMO's. You want it chance-based? You want players to manually input the quantities and types of mats, and "play" until they find a formula? You want effects selected at random from a list of possible effects? You want a points scale, where your thing can have +3 speed but you must pick -3 agility to zero-sum it?

You are talking about new items necessary to do the invention, input different values and desired outcome and generally more non-linear gameplay around invention or manual creation of new items/existing items. I wonder how you want to squeeze that into 5 clicks: 1. Select the BP location; 2nd select the sub-location (containers), if you have; 3rd select the decryptor, if desired; 4th select the output location; 5th press Start
or 8 clicks if you involve Copying as well (select the Blueprint location, scroll for runs and jobs; select output location; press start)

Every additional click to that turns the process into a more extensive, bigger click-fest than it currently is.

I really like the idea. To be honest, a sufficient number of computer programmers, engineers and scientists play this game that even if you made the puzzles quite a lot more advanced than first order logic, you'd probably get enough people trying to solve them.

The challenge would be to make the invention process non-repetitive so that someone who became proficient with it still faced a challenge each time. The 'general idea' should be learnable but no general solution should exist.

Also, I wonder if invention should require extra exploration materials for the process? I mean beyond decryptors. Dunno. That would certainly reinforce exploration as a valued lifestyle in EVE. It might also be a way to reinforce geography as a feature.



I don't think CCP 'owes' the players anything close to an explanation of top-tier content whether that be in exploration or in invention. Or in solo pvp for that matter. It's up to the individual to figure things out. Some can and some can't.

Notice that recently there have been a number of additions to the game, especially in exploration, that are not written up anywhere. New items, new areas, ... This has encouraged the rise of niche communities that have discovered a way to access / use the esoteric content. I feel that this strengthens the game, its depth and its appeal.

So regarding invention: So long as the middling player can obtain a decent invention result often enough, that should be just fine. Even the below-average explorer can hack a can often enough to get something out of it. Same should go for invention. But what's tricky to figure out is how the invention of really elite (deadspace equivalent) modules should go. I think that's what Persephone was addressing.

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