Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I, like most people am firmly in the FiS camp and want it to ALWAYS remain a priority. But also like most others, I would like to see WiS some day. But at the moment I can't think of ANY good ideas for it, and I don't think anyone else can either, that's the problem. I don't think CCP know either, otherwise they'd have come up with something better than NEX.

So, let's come up with something original and unique for CCP to think about. Forget about Casinos, while it would be fun I just can't see most countries allowing it. I know that the UK government would have a serious problem with it, ISK may be fictional money, but it can be bought and sold with real money. So forget it, it's not going to happen. we can also forget about any kind of FPS game, it wouldn't make sense and the sheer amount of development to make it stand out against the many brilliant FPS games out there would be an almost impossible task.

The trick is, it needs to be something that warrants walking around to perform a task rather then just using a decent console. The CQ is a perfect example of how pointless you can make something which can be done much quicker using something like ship spinning.

So, while I don't have an overall idea, here's a few concepts I've been thinking about to get the ball rolling.

1. Let's lose the restrictive thinking that WiS should actually be JUST WiS. This is the future after all! Within stations let's have 'Micro-gravity' areas, where people can enjoy the thrills of near weightlessness, and give them the means to traverse it with 'Grav Belts' or some such device. Also, let's have running in stations!

2. Politics and NPC interaction - I'm picturing not just Avatars walking around, but NPC Civilians as well. I thought it would be cool if us players could exert influence over these civvies. The more influence you have over them, the more political influence you have over the station. Quite what privileges this could bring you I haven't thought out. But I'm picturing a world a bit like 'Syndicate' that awesome Amiga game where you ran around with 'Influence Injectors.'

3. Wide open spaces - some station models show huge Bio-domes. It would be nice to be able to walk round these if nothing else. I can also picture gigantic cathedral type rooms where maybe you can play in 'Micro gravity'.

4. Limit WiS to only a small amount of stations. One of the biggest problems I see with WiS is that you are going to end up with thousands of generic stations. I think WiS should be limited to a small amount (whatever seems reasonable), and make those stations unique. The idea of thousands of cookie cutter, generic stations bores the hell out of me.

5. Real Estate - Not an uncommon suggestion, but we should have the ability to either buy rooms/stores/facilities/whatever, and we should be able to make them work for us so that they increase in value. Making a finite amount of real-estate would make things more interesting too. More can always been added later down the line if prices get stupid.

6. Labs - These could be areas where you could experiment with genetics/robotics/nanotech. Maybe this could be something to do with the 'Crew Members' idea that so often been kicked around. You design your crew members to suit your needs, whatever that might involve - I don't want to diverse too much as to what they might be. Or here's possibly an even better idea, you can use your labs to design your own organic ships!

7. In station missions - Anyone ever play Flashback? Another awesome Amiga game, anyway there was one segment where you had to go to the job center and the machines there would spit out random missions for you. Everything from bodyguard duty to rescuing scientists that had been kidnapped by mutants. Anyway, something along those lines might be interesting, as long as it doesn't try too hard to be another contemporary game.

These are not fully fledged ideas, nor are they meant to be. But I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts on how to develop them, or even better put forward their own ideas.

Over to you.

Let me shoot people, especially that red market alt that got in station somehow and is dicking with prices while 100% safe.

On a Dust514 note let us launch angry dudes with rifles at an enemy station and then start up a Dust match for them to try and damage the station services.

A line dancing club would be nice.

Considering the number of eve gambling sites that already exist, I doubt anyone's government is going to have a problem with us playing space-poker.

I suppose CCP could always go full ****** and rip off star trek online's third person system? :V

Apart from micro gravity all of the ideas have been presented in one way or another before that I am aware of. But the micro gravity aspect would take a hell of a long development cycle I'd expect.
I believe in cheap and effective solutions as far as time to implement goes since the Dev team is very small (and probably always will be). Things like opens spaces, NPC's, missions, will help to make a station feel alive when it's actually quite dead. Somewhat like a Final Fantasy situation. I would mostly go with designing very very beautiful or intense locations for people to stand around in and chat for one easy addition. Any kind of physical interaction takes a lot more development time, so that limits us to a very old click and point adventure in game-play mechanics. Unless the WoD team can pass the EVE team some sweet collision detection and interaction code.

The best thing I have seen is implant trading from the dead bodies collected after pod kills. That adds to the FiS to make pod kills more important and gives a very specific and worthwhile activity to the WiS side. While it could be excluded from WiS, if it is added, people would use it. This is the direction I think we should take. What would you add to the market, science, research ship spinning part that we could restrict to WiS that makes you RICH!

Yeah, and whenever you die it mutes you in local for 10 minutes.

Don't want to be muted? Fight back.

^^^^^THIS!!

One word: COMBAT.

WiS should be no safer than FiS. If you're at war and docked up in a station, leaving your CQ to make use of the WiS services should be just as risky as undocking. Nullsec station security should be determined and enforced by the owners.

This is what I see in every thread. It would take ages, and be very difficult to convince the player base it is more important than fixing and improving ship combat. This would be more likely to happen when WoD is a proven success. Also it would most likely have to be time based like 90% of the other MMO combat in 3D games.

Now to get what we really want
I suggest adding a shooting range mini-game first. This would allow a small dev team to iterate and prove that CCP can do WiS combat to a larger section of players who currently don't care. There would be more time to fix bugs and could provide a strong stepping stone to the real combat we want. Players could point out flaws (whether we want FPS or over the shoulder) and so on. It would also give a small incentive to gun manufacturing for Dust players. All this with a MUCH shorter implementation time. Expand this to NPC or animal killing before dealing with balancing issues. Then give us the whole kit-n-kaboodle.

I agree, I wouldn't say most either. But that could change given the right circumstances. After all people expect a lot more from RPG's these days. The same is happening in MMO's, look at the directions Rift and Guild Wars 2 are going. Why do EVE mission agents give me a wall of ****** text instead of some nice voice acting with high quality animation which is actually enjoyable to watch?
If more games are made like SWTOR in the coming years then EVE will only loose players and never gain because new expectations will be added. And EVE will never meet them with only new ships.