EVE General Discussion

It's deliberate, so you have to learn it and acquire "skill" at playing the game.

Other MMO's do the same. For example, in World of Warcraft, your screen says "Onyxia takes a deep breath..." not "Onyxia is about to hit you with 3500 points of fire damage in 3, 2, 1, boom."

For EVE, there are only 5 weapon types, and only 4 damage types, so it's not that difficult to learn:

Lasers = EM, Thermal
Hybrids (rails, blasters) = Thermal, Kinetic
Projectiles = depends on ammo, various amounts of explosive, kinetic, EM, thermal

Drones = each drone type has its damage type
Missiles = each missile has its damage type

Its a good thing. Apart from anything else it would be very immersion breaking to magically "know" the make up of damage that was hitting you.

And what do you want? "angel hijacker hits you for 100 explosive damage, 30 thermal damage, 60 kinetic damage and 10 em damage, from a turret that wasn't tracking you very well and about halfway into fall-off" from 50 different enemies coming in every few seconds? I am sure new players would find that really helpful .....

The immersion thing. Well it already tells us the numerical damage amount Instead of just looking at my shield/armour/hull icon to try and guess I get a numerical amount of damage. That's not very immersive. Adding what type to that would make no difference on the immersion scale.

You second point makes sense. If there is too much information it could be overwhelming. Maybe a compromise could be something like:
Angel hit you for 90 mostly explosive damage.

Yes, so it is with every suggestion/question :)
Some people just don't like change.

I think the devs are really trying. I love Seagull's give the players the tools and they will create the content way of thinking. Eve is huge and complex, bits of it are very old. It's a gargantuan task to keep it moving forwards continually.

You forgot smart bombs.

Not sure I agree. In fact, that's exactly what I would call "dumbing down." Pilots, regardless of age or experience, benefit from doing the research and figuring out the right combination of weapons and modules to facing each foe. Having the client figure this out for them, in my opinion, removes the sense of effort and encourages complacent reliance on the system to do the work for them. There's a line between it being too automatic and simple and being so where it makes sense and this, as little as it sounds, is a little too much I feel.

Just my take on it anyways. It wouldn't be the death of Eve if it were implemented nor would it ruin the experience that much, I just think it's a step in the wrong direction nonetheless and the fact that you have to put forth some effort to maximizing your ship's efficiency based on your adversary is worth keeping such information obscure like it is.

You can change what shows up on the damage or scrolling messages somewhat. Go into your "logs and messages" in your Eve menu area and fiddle with what shows up.

This gives you a LOT of information if you want to clutter up your scrolling messages a bit as to who, what, and for how much you got hit for. But a dps break down IS a bit much.

The other thing like Shallanna posted are VISUAL clues based on what it looks like to be hit or if you look at the ship itself you can see and visually figure out what weapons they have fitted thanks to CCPs awesome art departments work there.

Information is handy, knowledge is power and wisdom is knowing a tomato is a fruit but not to put it into a fruit salad.

This is one of those things that I've been wanting for a long time. The information is available -- just not via the game itself. I know some people are talking about the subtle clues of sparkle effects, but that's not a really reliable way to communicate information. If this were an actual ship the sound of the blasts hitting the hull would differ and there would be all sorts of clues.

No one has said the game should tell you this specific ship is going to do this kind of damage -- though that's not a crazy idea. I would love to see scanners give you a profile of the ship -- something nice and visual and not just a dump of modules. At this futuristic technology level, calculating the physical effects of incoming damage should be possible.

As for reporting it in the log, you could have icons next to the damage. The primary type of damage would have a full-opacity icon. Other damage types would be next to it partially transparent. If damage is omni-damage a special icon could be used or all four could be present.

Even beyond that, it would be nice to see a summary of incoming damage and the effect of mitigation. Four simple, small bar graphs could handle that duty.

I am glad that CCP has finally come around to the idea that information should be present in the game itself. For one, there's a ton of old, out-of-date information out there. Client information is just about guaranteed to be accurate since the game is calculating them from raw data.

My frustration comes from, what feels like, a confusion over what constitutes skill. The ability to lookup something on a third-party website isn't skill. Nor is copy/pasting content into a third-party program to determine if the loot is worth it. Is skill the ability to process information and formulate strategy? Or is skill the ability to google something? I can tell you I, personally, don't feel skilled when looking stuff up. It's a rote activity. It's busy work. And I think CCP can do better.

It's also not an actual ship. Visuals tell you you're being hit with a rail gun. Not that rail guns do thermal damage.



Not sure what you mean here. And damage proportion doesn't change with skill level except in drones maybe. Everything else is the same.



If the information is available in the game you save the hassle of looking it up. The information is still available either way. But in game it can be presented in real-time and let people learn that way rather than reward players for not playing the game. It's a pretty dumb idea to force players to spend a lot of time outside your game for basic activities. CCP would be saying, "hey, reading about our game is more fun than actually playing". And I think we know how far that's gotten them.

But I think you've nailed on why people object. They had to do it so other people should have to do it too. But that's what kills any activity, including games. The game can't improve or become less cryptic because the people who wasted time on the shittier parts will be upset? It's a recipe for never improving, which, for a long time, is what we had.

You misunderstand me. When talking about sound, I was imagining a real ship in space. I was imagining that different weapons would make different types of sounds on the hull. It has nothing to do with the sounds made in game.



Yeah, but the presentation could use way more flair. Also that's an area where I would like different levels of detail depending on equipment. Some basic scanning equipment should at least tell you, "hey, they got weapons". Just to make it more sci fi-y.



There are lots out there, but they cover strategy and builds, which I'm fine with. I've never complained about the presence of battle clinic or general strategy guides. What I'm complaining about is the missing information in game. EVE is one of the few games out there that seems to make an effort to not tell you what's going on. The visual effects are often subtle, especially zoomed out. It might be nice if your targets not only told you what affects were being applied by you on them, but what beneficial effects were on them as well.

And I'm not disputing the need to put effort into something to get better. I'm disputing the need for EVE to make some information only available out-of-game. What other game is so obtuse about even the basics of doing and receiving damage? Even in the new NPE they still don't go into what transversal is and how it affects your damage. Would it be so hard (or bad) for EVE to tell you the percentage likelihood to hit or even color-code it? Is there a reason that EVE, set in a super scifi world gives you some of the least information when it comes to making decisions? CCP can do better and make the game more about thinking and less about remembering.



The argument that people are asking for the game to be dumbed down is a nice straw-man, but it's not what's happening. People are asking the game to change to be less dumb. The game you're asking for is one where more time is spent looking at the instruction book than actually playing the game. And I've played my fair share of games and the ones that were more enjoyable were the ones that didn't require living in the book (D&D 3e grappling rules, I'm looking at you). You may want a game that has a huge rote memorization component -- I don't. And It's not dumbing down the game. It's making it a better one.