Player Features and Ideas Discussion

What is local supposed to be? It seems like its some sort of combination between a tool to gather intel and a simple chat. What if local was changed into a chat for the whole region? It will make the chat come much more alive. Possible downside is problems with spam, particularly in The Forge, where they spam contracts etc. constantly. Thats not to say there are not solutions for that. Either players are going to make a Jita Trade chat. Or the most persistent spammers will be ignored by others. Devs could also intervene by putting a stricter timer on how often you can link the same contracts.

The reason i like this idea is particularly because the chat would come more alive. This would be a big benefit to the game, especially for new players who will be attracted to an active chat. It also solves the problem of chatting while jumping. The downside is that people who use Local as an intel gathering tool will lose this mechanic, unless local is kept as a separate chat. But that kind of defeats the purpose and having two default chats on top of corp violates the KISS principle which im a big fan of.

So what will happen if local is completely disabled well in some aspects the game will become more risky. But in other aspects it will become more safe. Do i really need to go into this?

Anyway it seems that there is a problem in EVE online in that the chats are very dead. And dead chats are not good for any kind of service that exists today. Be it game, or livestream or what have you. An active chat adds more to the experience that you will think.

--- edit --

After getting ALOT of feedback on this idea i have adapted a bit. It seems like players are really unhappy to lose the free intel of local, which was expected to be honest. So my idea was to merge the list in local with the directional scanner. So when you open the directional scanner, theres a list of all pod pilots in the system on the right. Arguably you should be able to make the window very small so it doesent have to take up the entire screen.

Theres a quick mockup here.

The benefit of this change is that Chat window becomes more like chat, and the directional scanner window becomes where you gather intel. That seems like the right way to do things.

An example of how people could be using the new chat here


-- Minor detail --

Maybe you should not be revealed in chat unless you have spoken. After thinking a bit about it i think everyone should should show up in the chat. The idea behind the change was to give more life to the chat/game, so by making everyone show up this is accomplished and I think players will enjoy getting the number of players in the region.


PS. Reddit thread for reference with a stunning 132 comments at this time of writing.
PS. Mods decided to permaban me without warning and remove the original post. The comments still full of interesting discussion and feedback.

you know there IS a regional system channel already, right?

edit- hell, one for constellation too

edit2- those channels are often unused primarily because a single alliance, or friendly groups of alliances, DONT control the entire region, and anyone who enters the region can join the channel as well.

You shut up. And read the post before you reply. This idea is about consolidating the default chat channels to give them more life, and you start blabbering about wspace.

I'd make the proposal simpler. Stay away from the mess of "remove/keep local free intel grrr." Keep local. Whatever. Make the region channel (which exists already) open by default. That's all. It's already recent speakers only, it's not an intel tool. They'd have to fix it so it doesn't keep closing itself on every session change. Maybe make it easier to join back into it if you do close it, but mostly just change the default settings (maybe make the default blink setting on it set to 'off' as well) to make it more available.

I like region chat. It's like sitting in a dark room and talking to someone who's not there. It gets eerie.

1.) it would not be an additional chat, because it already exists for use.
2.) If you speak in local (system) chat no it does not transfer to Constellation or Region chats.
3.) If you speak in Constellation or Region they do not transfer(copy) to local (system) chat.

So basically please learn to EvE........

STFU
and quit shiptoasting the forums.

The channel already exists. Try opening it.

Because you've got some comprehension fail, let me be clear:

Your idea is not novel. It's not new, it's not unique. Whether or not it's a good idea or a bad idea is somewhat controversial. You will make absolutely zero progress on it. That is a guarantee. However, if your claim of it being about fun rather than intel isn't an outright lie, then your idea becomes outright bad. It's bad because it fecklessly wanders into controversial territory with zero self awareness. To turn your bad idea into a good (viz workable) idea, basically your only option is to get people to join the existing regional chat.

Spend some time in Region so you can actually have some understanding of why nobody uses it. Then (assuming you weren't lying in your assertion that your proposal was about conversation) you can come back with some ideas that have a greater than 0% chance of implementation.

hahaha. you cant be serious. So now you will have Local, Region, and Corp chat open. Thats one additional chat. You cant count it seems.



The idea is to replace Local with Region. And someone says why not keep both herp. In that scenario, what happens? The idea falls the ground if you just add anoter chat window. The idea is to consolidate the chat and liven it up. You dont accomplish this by half-assedly adding region chat next to local chat. Keep it simple. One chat to rule them all.




How about you take your own advice? You are contributing nothing interesting and you dont even understand the idea. So why are you here?

I think dropping local and making regional/constellation chat work like local is an excellent idea. Here is what I think that would do.

For players at the keyboard actively playing the game.
1. They could monitor regional/constellation chat watching the numbers rise and fall.
2. They could make informed decisions as to their course of action on a chat channel spike or change.

a. keep mining, ratting or whatever you are doing
b. dock up because bad doo doo is coming
c. form a defense fleet / set a trap for hostiles that have entered your region/constellation. (wait what? consensual pvp???)


For players botting and lazy players. Bot would become ineffective. You could program your bot fleet to continue to dock when a baddie enters regional/constellation chat, but you'd be docking a lot more frequently and many times when no threat exists. Lazy folks would get used to having baddies in the larger chat area, become numb to them and then die horribly to ganks and such.


Good attentive players are rewarded and bad (botting and lazy) players are punished. I'm not really seeing a down side to this. You don't lose intel, you just take the intel value away from bots. This is one of those simple and elegant fixes that does a lot of good and no real harm (to active attentive players).


Well done OP.

(the least you will get out of this is the joy of watching those terrified by the prospect of losing their intel crutch as they franticly denounce your idea with counter arguments of little to no substance)

Fair point - Jita has it's own server, so it could get it's on chat channel as well. I'd be OK if this mechanic was only limited to null - kind of like bubbles are limited to null. Having this in HS would be a huge boon to player farmers as they could more quickly search regions for helpless players to wonk up on. Much of HS is so densely populated that it would quite possibly harm gameplay in that part of space.

It's been discussed. It's an old, tired idea. It's stopped being an interesting idea because of all the baggage and ulterior motives people always bring to the discussion.

Speaking of which, I'm still convinced you're lying about this being all about the conversation and not about the intel. I'm convinced of this because you haven't actually tried to make your bad idea better.

Or, maybe you're a kid and this is your first "big idea." In which case, let me tell you something. Ideas are cheap. Most ideas are worthless. A big part of growing up is gaining the experience to make the mental connections to formulate ideas that are worthwhile. By that time, most adults will have had thousands of ideas and realize that even most of their own ideas are not sacred; they can just be thrown out if bad or reworked if flawed.

You are putting all your effort into defending your idea. That tells me this discussion is DOA. The idea isn't good enough to defend itself, and you're not putting in the mental effort to come up with a good idea. So, take the feedback, throw out your original idea, come up with something new that doesn't need defending.