Science & Industry

It might not bother someone who has run a pos for 3 years, but as someone who has run a couple for a couple of months, the numbers were dense, irritating and impossible to remember, and extremely irritating to fill evenly into pos fuel bays or into a hauler. It might have taken me 12 months to get "used" to the numbers given that pos fueling is an infrequent task, and on at least one occasion a fuel didn't make it into the hauler at all.

now if you are building your fuel, the manufacturing quote will give you a quote to buy with, and the cargo drag will evenly distribute it to your hauler, and you can top off the fuel bay evenly in 1 step - ie it makes good use of existing interface mechanics to meet the desired goal of reducing clicks and dumb repetitive mental arithmetic and do checks and balances for you.

Having either type of fuel would just be terribly confusing to people anchoring their first pos.

Based on some of the more recent changes (such as renaming of modules) I would say that this game is in the process of being dumbed down for newcomers.

Dumbing thing down in terms of simplifying certain things. If you were a new player and you get into POS, wouldn't you be overwhelmed by the math of figuring out what fuel you need, of much of everything? Now, all you gotta do is just look up fuel requirement and multiply it by how many hours you want to run it. The new player can take the extra step of reducing cost of fuel by producing those blocks himself, and even produce the PI if he wants to.

So.... good for new players means bad for old ones?

By that logic, ccp should have doubled the number of things used for POS fuel to include food-sources for the POS residents, and other vital supplies. Got to have food in each of the food groups, vaccines, antibiotics, construction blocks, first aid kits, ect.

I must admit I don't like the renaming of modules & missiles. On the other hand I quite like the fuel blocks. In a way it is more complication which is good. 'Dumbing down' is not a route we should be taking.

I no longer need to update a spreadsheet to refuel a control tower \o/

Now I only use a calculator, and I spend a lot less time refuelling:
* Required Fuel Blocks= (699 hours * 40 block per hour) - Fuel Blocks Present
* Required Charters = 699 - Charters Present

In manufacturing the fuel blocks, I just make 2000 runs at a time, which is also simple math for the materials required. I have 10 fuel block BPO and manufacture the blocks with a low-skill manufacturing alt (can't build T2) in just a few hours.

I only maintain 2 control towers (one is mine) and given how very annoying that was for me, I really can't imagine how painful it was for those managing tens or even hundreds of control towers.

I don't really care about the increase in cost for Heavy Water and mostly Liquid Ozone. The POS still pays for itself many times over.

I wouldn't call it "dumbing things down for newcomers" so much as "making the process less abysmally painful for everyone concerned". Yes, it does simplify things a bit, but that benefits everyone, not just newbies. It adds one simple and easy step to POS fueling (dump all the fuel in a station and hit "manufacture") and saves a TON of pain with regards to balancing fuels in the fuel bay (which was effectively impossible without causing you to turn suicidal before the block change).

Also, IIRC, I thought someone calculated that it's actually cheaper to run POSes in general now (with the exception of L POSes running very low CPU/Grid loads), especially with small/med towers.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=875831#post875831

Under the old fuel system, the small towers were about 1/3 the cost per month of a large tower due to the way the old fuel math worked out. Medium towers were about 55-60% of a large tower per month.

Large towers got somewhat cheaper or broke even depending on LOz usage, medium towers got cheaper, small towers got a *lot* cheaper. Now a small tower is almost exactly 1/4 the cost per month of a large tower, and a medium is almost exactly 1/2 the cost of a large.

And LOz prices haven't really changed all that much. Last summer they were 300-ish, now they are 400-ish. Back in April/May 2011, they were bouncing around 400 ISK/u. At 420-ish, they are 45M/30d for a large tower, at 300-ish that is about 32M/30d.

http://www.evemarketeer.com/item/info/16273

Two things really,

First being that every ship in eve has a CPU and Powergrid limit, and fitting with the spirit of the game that limit would require the same amount of "fuel" if ships had "fuel" regardless if you used all, or only part of that limit.

Now given that POS use the same amount of fuel to use all or none of the grid makes sense actually when thought of in terms of how ships work.

Second I am sure that I am not the only person who traveled half way across the universe and dumped all that robotics, and enriched uranium and oxygen into a pos fuel bay just to realize that my 4 weeks worth I thought I put in was only 2 weeks because I had misplaced a 2 somewhere in my calculation for coolant or something.

It was mind numbing mathematics work in a game that already has a sub-industry of Microsoft Office warriors making spreadsheets and java apps for everything from fitting a ship to researching a blueprint.

I for one applaud CCP at taking a time consuming, hair-pulling and needlessly difficult process and making it streamlined and simple without breaking the game. I don't like most of the changes in this game, but this one was needed and done well.


Now if we could only make T2 invention easier???

[The following is an academic discussion of whining, complexity, richness and dumbing down ... skip it if you're not in the mood for that].


CCP has been dumbing down the game for quite some time now.

1) Ending all meaning to blood lines.
2) Getting rid of Agent Quality
3) Making Agents give out only one type of mission
4) Eliminating Learning Skills
5) Simplifying module names

Plus, I'm sure, any number of other things I have either forgotten or am unaware of ... in addition to making the POS fueling process easier.



Now ... in each case there were reasons why it was done and a lot of people wanted it. Never the less, in each case it also dumbed down the game.

Each time you reduce complexity - you reduce richness as well. Each time you had to really work to learn how to do something - it made the task more involving. You didn't just push a button and get something for it. Games that are more involving tend to be better games. You have simpler types of game play - but then you have more complex game play that will keep people interested after they've mastered the more simple activities and keep them from getting bored.

Unfortunately, many gamers have a tendency to be a bunch of whiney little *****. "I want what I want when I want it and I want it NOW! NOW! NOW!"

[Note here the use of the words tend and tendency ... look them up if you don't understand their meaning].

As anyone who's been around MMO's for a good long while knows - Whining Works.

The thing with the Whiners is - they are incessant. They know nothing of complexity or richness - all they know is that they want.

Mindless desire will eventually wear down intellect every time ... (unless countered by mindlessness as well) ... it's just a question of being able to apply that mindlessness for a long enough period - and you will get what you want. Restraining orders being a mitigating factor for some people in frustrating their desires, other times it works if the object of the unremitting deluge of pestering can't put an end to it.

Of course ... once they get what they want ... they're bored and move on (either to something else or to whiing about something else) - so that giving into them got you nothing in return. Whiners have ruined any number of games because the developers got tired of listening to them and gave in. Look at SWG ... everybody wanted to be a Jedi ...




Now ... all that said ... there are issues where including to much complexity or realism can make a game unplayable for many people. The question is - where do you draw the line? For example - the docking and undocking process could be vastly more complicated than it is now.

Never the less ... when you do decrease complexity - even if with good reason - you are still dumbing things down. Note here though, that reducing mindless clicking is not the same as reducing complexity that requires more thought.

Reducing the complexity of maintaining POS's might be something worth doing ... while simlifying all the names of things only served to remove richness and some cool names from the game. In each case though - the game was dumbed down.

Sadly ... developers will generally err on the side of trying to keep all those new people who are going to quit anyway ... from quitting ... to the detriment of their games. It's one of the reasons games don't last. Developers give the players what they want - the players get bored because the game is to dumb and then they leave. EVE has survived as long as it has because it is a niche game. Attempts to move it up into the truly massive markets inhabited by such as EQ and WoW - will not only fail but ruin the game for what it is. That is to say - you not only don't get all the little dummies to play - you lose the smart people you already had.


*shrug*


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