Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I am head of a long running booster syndicate. My alliance, The Hedonistic Imperative, were the very first smugglers in EVE, smuggling contraband before combat boosters were even a part of the game. When combat boosters were introduced we were the first and most significant players in the game. In the many years sense we've mostly legitimized our business and turned to other ventures, but we've been known to be involved in booster trafficking from time to time.

Recently, CCP flirted with revising combat boosters. At first we were enthusiastic that this long neglected business was finally being revisited, but as we learned more about what CCP was considering it quickly became clear that the proposed changes would not only destroy the booster industry as we know it, but it might also severely damage the game of EVE itself as boosters were on the verge of becoming "pay to win" items.

CCP wisely backed down from implementing these disastrous changes, but rumor has it that changes may still be in the works. To the extent we've been long time players in this industry, we'd like to propose a set of changes that we feel would improve boosters significantly… and also lay the stage for a very interesting black-market underworld accessible via walking-in-stations!

This is going to be a fairly long post, as the tweaks needed to make boosters better involve a lot of moving parts. The various changes really need to be considered together as a whole instead of one piece at a time. For those of you who don't want to wade through it all however, here's the TL;DR version.


1) synth boosters need to be a better 'gateway drug'
2) there need to be new booster types, with a greater variety of effects
3) information on side effects need to be improved (but sideFX should remain)
4) instead of making boosters legal, the illicit aspect needs to be built upon
....... smuggling should be a PVP activity
....... illegal boosters should be tradable only via walking-in-stations
....... NPC underworld agents, also accessible via walking-in-stations, should teach smuggling dynamics
5) gas needs to be better distributed
6) gas needs to be less bulky
7) a smuggling contract needs to be introduced professionalize smuggling



Anyway, we hope you enjoy the ideas.


Cheers,

Shadowy Figure
CEO, Es and Whizz

Better Boosters - New Types of Boosters
Another issue with boosters, not just synth, is the benefits are focused on a narrow set of ship combat attributes. This is particularly true in the tanking department. The two major tanking boosters--blue pill and exile--for example only give bonuses to active tanks. That's a problem because many players use other tanking modes.

For example, let say you are flying a 1600mm plated PVP harbinger. The armor tanking booster, Exile, is of no benefit because you aren't using an active tank. If you're in a spider tanking gang, there's also no benefit to using exile. You MIGHT get some benefit from using X-Instinct, which reduces your signature radius, but since plated ships are slow the benefit would be marginal.

The same goes for a passive shield tank Drake… a VERY common ship. The shield tanking booster, Blue Pill, if of absolutely no benefit to you since your tank is based entirely on resists and passive shield regeneration. A shield boost bonus is of absolutely no value to you.

The solution to this problem, in my opinion, would be to simply introduce multiple versions of a particular family of boosters. For example you could have:

* Blue Pill, version A -- active tanking bonus, same as existing blue pill
* Blue Pill, version B -- improves shield resists, benefiting all types of shield tanks
* Blue Pill, version C -- improved shield regeneration, benefitting passive shield tankers

Note: The boosters would all use the same 'booster slot' (booster slot 1) so they couldn't be used concurrently.


Additionally, I think it would greatly increase interest boosters if more types of effects were available. For example, booster effects that would be nice to see:

* probe strength (synth only) -- for more efficient exploration and combat probing
* mining yield (synth only) -- an extended duration booster (2 hour max) that increases mine yield
* sensor strength -- for better resisting ECM
* sensor range -- longer targeting range useful for snipers and offsetting sensor dampening
* scan resolution -- for faster lock times
* drone effects -- increase drone damage and hit points

Better Boosters - Building on the Illicit Nature of Boosters

Another issue with illegal boosters is… well, they're illegal. Moving them around is inconvenient and since many players don't know how the mechanics work, many people don't try them.

Yet at the same time the illegal aspect of boosters is exactly what makes them COOL and I implore CCP not to do away with them. If boosters become legal there's no reason to smuggle them, and a whole interesting sub-culture within EVE will be suddenly and forever destroyed.

Instead we should BUILD upon the illegal aspects of boosters. If they seem more edgy, people will be more likely to see them as exciting/interesting instead of inconvenient/not worth the trouble. Some examples:


1) Turn smuggling into a PVP activity where players are the customs enforcers. This, I believe, could make boosters much cooler than the are today--make smuggling a PVP activity. Basically you could say that customs officials have concluded that capsuleers are too powerful to be apprehended by normal humans so they've decided to enlist the aid of other capuleers to stop them.

I've thought a lot about different ways this could work and here's my best shot at it:

STEP 1: NPC customs officials randomly scan ships passing through gates (it's not 100% the way it is today). There's just a 10-25% chance of customs scanning you per gate (but there must be customs officials at that particular gate), and maybe the odds can be decreased by a covops cloak or special 'smuggling module' of some sort.

STEP 2: once a smuggler is detected they receive a special flag similar to GCC that makes them a legal target for other players to attack

STEP 3: once a player is flagged as a smuggler, customs ships only do one thing: they prevent flagged players from cloaking at gates. This would prevent the smuggler from simply slipping away using a covops cloak and would give PVPers a decent chance to catch them. (In fact, you can think of popular places where players might set up regular 'road blocks' to catch smugglers).

STEP 4: once flagged a smuggler player also gets an aggression timer, so if he logs out his ship remains in space and customs-enforcing players can potentially probe him out.

STEP 5: once caught the players any players who were involved in destroying the smuggler's ship gets an ISK award equal to 1-5% of the total value of the booster interdicted.



2) Make boosters tradable only 'off grid' via the Incarna/walking-in-stations functionality. Another thing that would greatly increase the allure of illegal boosters would be to make them only tradable only "off grid" in stations via the walking-in-stations introduced in Incarna. This would really reinforce the feeling that the character is involved in something illegal and would also give players a compelling reason to get out of their ships and walk around.


3) Introduce criminal agents, also only found via walking-in-stations, who can issue smuggling missions that explain smuggling game dynamics to players. This is straightforward… if players don't understand how smuggling works, explain it to them in a mission and they'll understand it. Just make those agents hard to find or everyone will be doing it… :)

Better Booster Production -- Reduce Gas Bulk

Another major factor affecting booster production, maybe surprisingly to those not familiar with the business, is the incredible bulk of booster gases. A single unit of mykoserocin or cytoserocin gas is 10 m3, and you need 22.66 units of gas just to make ONE standard or synth booster (that's 226.6 m3 of gas per booster!). Improved and strong boosters contain even more gas. Having worked in boosters for a long time, I feel that this is manageable, but it *is* a fairly logistics-intensive workflow that many players simply don't have the resources to handle.

When CCP introduced wormholes and fullerite gases for some reason they made those gases half the size as k-space gas (just 5 m3) which seems to make it a lot easier to manage. If CCP were to make k-space gas 5 m3 instead of 10 m3 booster production would be much, much easier to handle and it would likely make it easier for lower sp pilots to get into the booster production game. This would increase supply and keep booster prices down.

Booster should also yield a visual effect.
When i take a Frentix i should see colour shift and increased bloom. Blue Pill blue tint over everything.
The sky is the limit for client side effects. Pink elephants...

Something other than just an attribute boost to my ship.

I rarely agree 100% with an entire series of posts but this is one such case.

Well done. This is the man to listen to CCP.

Lots of interesting ideas here.

CCP has expressed interest in making boosters more widely used, and bumping synth up a bit is something they were looking to do, and might yet again do when they look at boosters again. New booster types would be lovely. There are options when choosing silo type for Quafe products, perhaps in the future we will be able to make some sort of Quafe products?

K-space gas at 5m3 p/u? +1
More booster types? +1
Better description of side effect mechanics? +1

I had a nice big post but the forums ate it when I tried to preview it!