Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hi EVE players and WiS enthusiasts!

Now that we know that there is a new team dedicated to some Incarna and WiS related things, we should help them a bit . For anybody who doesn't read it until know, have a look at this thread and the posts from CCP Bayesian:
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=662340#post662340

The most important Quote from him in the othetr thread I have linked:


So I thought it would be a good idea to gather all the ideas, tweaks and enhancement related to the captains quarters in one thread. Let's have a look what the current installment of the quarters might need, what is missing and what could be done to make them "awesome". That is hopefully something Team Avatar can flesh out the most at the moment.

We can look at different aspects of it. I just give some short questions for starters.

Bugs & Performance: Do you know any reproducable bugs that need to be addressed? Do you have any major problems with performance, textures or the functionalities?

Visuals & Artwork: What can be done to make the captains quarters more visual appealing? Any artwork missing? What about the lighting?

Enhancement: How could CCP make the screens better, what could be added to them? Any options needed?

Additions: What additional features can you imagine for the quarters? What would make sense and what not?

General & Misc: Do you have any other ideas not related to the aspects above? What do you think might be the general future of the quarters? What role could they play in a full fletched WiS enviroment and what role could they play now?


I know that there might be some threads out there about some of those aspects. If you have any links to those threads, please post them also . And of course feel free to post any ideas and problems you have with the quarters here! The more the better and maybe we can have some interesting discussions about those ideas.

Note: If you have any ideas or suggestions related to for the avatar itself, we should make another thread especially for that.


Edit: Link updated and glue applied, CCP Phantom

Nice of you to start a thread like this. Just wondering would ideas for various station interiors be included here as well?


I haven't checked out any Gallente or Amarr CQ's yet but the Caldari CQ seems rather empty, especially when compared to the Minmatar CQ. I'll have to check them out and edit this post later with more feedback on this topic.

I think the CQ should remain a private sanctuary that we can customize anyway we want with plants, pets, trophy's, servants, etc. To show it off to other players, it could have a Vid Phone option in the CQ which would allow others to view you in your CQ. That way the CQ will always be a safe heaven. The station should have other areas set up for more personal Avatar interaction.

I like your ideas for the screens. Also like your idea to stream various Videos related to Eve. I think the center screen should have a drop down menu to select various station services available in that specific station, such as Bounty Office, Market, Medical, Science & Industry, Refinery, Agents located in that specific station, etc. Basically everything that's listed in the station services panel. I think that panel/window is an immersion breaker and I usually just minimize it when in CQ. I think the drop down menu for the center screen should also include option to view your Items Hangar. Maybe later when station interior environment is available, those specific station services would end up being accessed at that specific area, truly giving WiS the 'Eve is real' effect.

Don't know if it's already available but the Ship Hologram should also include option to select Repair if it's available in that specific station. Anyway, I'll add more info here later after I do a bit more inspection.

Just to add the thoughts of someone with an opposing viewpoint -

While I like the overall goal of Incarna, I would like to stat that I (and probably many other pilots) will NOT use my CQ until fully multiplayer station environments are implemented.

When that happens and we can walk around a station and interact with other players & NPCs, i will happily use it, and maybe even customize my characters to get a 'look' I like.

But until that day, I am 100% spinning my ships in my hangar.


I wish the teams involved in this the best of luck, its a daunting challenge. However when it's FULLY realized it will enhance the Eve universe a great deal.

A communications panel would be great to have, especially if it was tied to your chat windows, or a visual representation of it. like a floating screen.

I think the floating screens need some of support/thingies/hinges to make them fully realistic, or a display source, like the one your ship has.

FIS people wont use WIS unless theres a gameplay reason to.

Heres one: Intel.

THe main screen could host video feeds from cam ships at battles, or access "public" feeds from Jita etc - so you can sort of see what the deal is.

I emphasise "sort of" because of course you wont have the local list, so you cant check for wartargets camping jita undock.

Cam feeds dont have to be data hogs. YOu can degrade the video and pretend its 'space interference' instead of simple compression.

Live video will pretty much make WIS a compelling thing to do and it will knit eve together a bit more.

Enhancement
I think they could start by removing the redundancy of buttons and shortcuts in our CQ screen. Now that we can chose which screen we want, it's not necessary to keep such a conservative approach.

About additions:

• Battle Simulator
in an hologram fashion without leaving your CQ screen, select your fit, select your dummy type, fit, speed, angle and stuff and see some approximate numbers popping up.


• Custom videos
Alliance, corporation and player adds, announcing their services, recruiting or just bragging by paying a fee depending on the range of the add (system, constellation, empire, global and so on). I loved the idea of displaying a market movement information.


• Intel tools
As said above plus a display of players in the system list, upgraded through undocked corp/alliance mates.


• Conversation with Agents
It'd be nice if we could contact Agents to learn random stuff about EVE's lore or get specific information.

General & Misc
Further customization of CQs would be nice, but I think it should be restricted to our "main CQ". We could acquire several CQs to personalize in different stations, or move them. The reason is that it'd be an immersion breaker to dock in distinct stations with the same personal stuff.

The thing I'd like to see most of all is customization, right now captains quarters mean nothing to me, they are my quarters simply because you tell me they are, there is nothing of me there, it's something new and shiny that I spent maybe 10min looking at, then I turned it off.

My hanger in Jita feels more like home to me then the quarters, the items I have stored there represent who I am, where I have been and what I have done, from my can of old never used ammo looted in my mission running days to my hoard of exotic dancers, the stack of offensive subsystems for the legion (a ship I can't fly) to my personal collection of T2 Purpetual Motion units. That is home, these are my things. In contrast the captains quarters are like a hotel rooms, or staying around someone elses house, interesting to look at, but ultimatly something that belongs to someone else. Not mine.

One of the best "home" systems I have seen are the houses in Everquest II, you buy and pay rent on a set floorplan and get to customise it with various things bought from shops, given as quest items or just made by the player. I think something like this would create a far better experiance than the current "hotel" system, given that EQII came out nearly 8 years ago it's an experiance that CCP should be quite capable of not only matching, but surpasing.

While walking in stations is the ultimate goal of incarna a far better place to start would be "corporate offices", this would not only be a smaller world that needs to be rendered but in most cases it would also involve far fewer characters, be they NPC's or players and is therefore a better platform to iron out the kinks of having more than one avatar in the same room than a full station. It also gives great opperunity for personalisation, a place for corporations and alliances to show off their trophys, to commemorate great victories, to have dancing girls to sooth the pain of defeats. Ultimatly what determines whether or not the Incarna project is a success is not how many varieties of quarters there are, or whether or not two people can share a room. It's whether or not this new dimension feels like something we can shape, mold and make our own.


PS.

As a WH based pilot the only time I choose to dock up in a station is when I'm doing a trading run or if I got stuck outside and have to wait for a new connect, I think that incarna can be a great thing if it's done properly but even if it was I have no way of interacting with the new features for the vast majority of the time I spend logged in, us WH dwellers need a way of getting out of the pod and taking a walk, and this is the important bit, if we choose to.

The current hotel room like CQs could be the standard version, and one could pay (ISK, not AUR) to get one's own quarters in a particular station.

I like your corporate office as transition and testing idea, and I think the dev's will appreciate too. This is brilliant !

Why only dancing girls? While I, and most of the community would only look at the girls, I am sure some people would appreciate an equally well-built dancing young man along with the girls.

I also like the idea from an earlier post about making the CQs a place to build implants and make drugs.

As to the station interface, I think it could be removed. There is no reason to use it, once the neocom has all of it's features integrated into it. Another good exemple would be outposts with no market button in their station interface, while you can access the market from the neocom.

Inside the captains quarters, you could remove all UI, and replace it with additional screens, interfaces and holograms in the CQ, if only to fill the empty space.

Oh, and please, do something about clone jumping resetting your caracters apprearance.

Hmm, yeah that works, I seem to remember when CQ's where first being hyped that the current offering was just going to be the basic low end cabin. Though given how shiny the Amarr quarters are it seems they may have moved away from that.

Feel free to have dancing guys, on a game mechanic note, it's probably best if there's something in the options screen that will auto convert the exotic dancers from female to male so regardless of how much flesh is on display there's always something for everyone. The other two options would be "Amarrian"(no flesh) and "Mixed"(random gender).

I quite like my station interface, UI too, turning it off should be optional, not forced.

Nah, more CQ's shoudln't bother the database in the slightest. If you do anything maybe have a limit to the number of random things you can have laying around your cq's, 50-100 objects in a basic hotel room style CQ going up as the rent goes up. If it ever gets to the point where it becomes a database issue then the ISK sink caused by all that rent will make it worth it.