Test Server Feedback

Well then we just have to try harder to get their attention, because this is bad for the game, and anything bad for the game is bad for CCP.

We've been right before. We were right about how terrible an idea racelocking character creation content was. We were right about how terrible an idea the NeX prices were. We were right about how terribe an idea releasing CQ/WiS in a completely unfinished state was. We were right about the Sanctum nerfs. We were right about Incarna. We were right about a whole lot of things.

If CCP wants a test server, they should listen to the goddamn testers.

I find this post disappointing given that players have been vocalising their problems with this system in depth for over 40 pages across two threads for nearly a month at this point.

In summary:

1. The loot pinata system is not fun. This is the most important and most essential issue with the mechanic. It's not fun. It's not enjoyable. After having expended the effort to play the minigame (which is fun but somewhat limited), having the loot that we worked for scatter everywhere and vanish after far too short a time feels... disappointing. It doesn't feel rewarding, it doesn't feel like you've accomplished something. It is irritating to chase after the cans, it's irritating to have to click on all of them individually, it's irritating to have them disappear, it's irritating to have little to no idea what you're picking up until you have it. The entire system is irritating, and irritating isn't fun. You've made a mechanic in your game that does not serve the player's enjoyment of it, and this is a bad thing that game developers should not do, because one of the core principles of good video game design is that each and every element of a game should further the player's engagement with and enjoyment of it.

2. The loot pinata system feels arbitrary. The fact that we have a magical tractor beam that can only move these specific types of cans and nothing else feels incongrous. The fact that you can't add the cans to overview and that they don't "stack" when you mouse over multiple items at a time feels incongrous. The fact that I'm apparently a masterful enough hacker to get past super-powerful Guristas mainframe security but not skilled enough to simply stop it from spewing everything everywhere feels incongrous. The fact that there's very little way to tell what's in the cans you're trying to pick up makes the system feel random and deeply unpredictable, like I'm playing Magic: The Gathering with someone else's deck. Please don't think that removing the arbitrary nature will actually make the spew itself fun, but it most certainly does make a bad idea worse.

3. The loot pinata system does not encourage teamwork, but will encourage theft. There is literally nothing else a fleet member can do while someone's hacking other than keep watch on D-scan and shoot any rats that appear (which, if the hacker is good, will not happen). The only useful thing a fleet member can do is pick up the cans after the hack is finished, which means that in terms of exploration you're only able to bring fleet members along for help with the least interesting parts of the experience. However, a random thief can sit cloaked off the object someone's hacking and then immediately start scooping spew cans with no penalty - no aggression timer, nothing. I'm not in any way against thievery, but when you make it easier (or at the very least no more difficult) for the thieves than the other members of a team, it doesn't send the right message.

4. The loot pinata system disrupts the flow of the exploration profession. You have to spend a fair amount of time sitting relatively immobile in space doing the minigame. This isn't a problem. The hacking minigame is fun. But then you have to spend another minute or two randomly flailing around trying to get the cans before moving onto the next minigame. This seriously breaks the flow of the experience. This might seem a weak point in comparison to the other three but it's yet another irritation.

Bayesian, most of the things you're addressing in your post are symptoms of the loot pinata mechanic. The problem is the mechanic itself.

I would like to take this particular moment to say that I, for one, find the hacking minigame to be fun and interesting.

The loot spew is .. less fun .. but it's not altogether impossible to adapt to.

Now if only we had those new mini-containers that "hint at what might be inside".

Doubtful, what you just said is the general consensus.

Hacking = good, room for growth.
Loot pinata = can jump out of a tenth-story window.

Thanks! Fingers crossed we get something like it in the future


It shames me greatly that I started playing WoW when they added the archaeology mini-game and after reaching max level with a paladin and completeing all the Archeology sets I left the game as it got really dull. Not gone back since, but I always come back to EVE.

If multiboxing is the enemy there's a simple solution: ban multiboxing.
Of course that's not gonna happen because it's massively important to CCP's income stream. So let's not get all hypocritical and implement game mechanics against multiboxing to the detrimental of those who like a profession that never was a multiboxing heaven to begin with.

Seeing as this thread has become a little chaotic and it's hard to follow what everybody stands for here is a sum up of my opinion:

- hacking has potential, can be enjoyable with some tweaks and should be the center of the new sites
- spew = bad. I don't see it ever to become fun and feeling rewarding since the design is flawed on a fundamental level and not a matter of fine tuning
- average income should be higher then on old sites because profession sites are now a more specialized activity and require to decide between focussing on them or combat sites.

As it stands i'm gonna stop doing profession sites on TQ and focus solely on combat sites. It remains to be seen what the overall effect is. Whether it stops a lot of veterans to run the sites or excites a new generation of explorers. My money is on veterans being put off. When someone like Jonny Pew, who many new explorers look up to has not much positives to say about the new sites that should give you a hint.

good, it is well that there is variation in exploration

Cross-quoting from the other thread.

However, I feel that T3 subs should have a different bonus (if they get a bonus), perhaps to coherence, so that it's a choice rather than clearly better... especially as T3 is not intended to be "clearly better" than T2 anyway!

However, since a strength bonus is effectively a coherence bonus (by letting you kill defensive modules faster), a coherence bonus would have to be rather large to be competitive...

First off, so this doesn't come off wrong I want to say I'm a big supporter of you guys on the CSM, you've volunteered for a thankless terrible job. Now here's why I think your view of this is completely wrong

I don't multi-box, but since when does Eve discourage multi-boxers? Where else in game does the game design try to eliminate the use of two accounts? Why is it perfectly fine for some poor guy to loose his shiny ship in a 1v1 that turns into a 3v1 when a multi-boxer jumps his two alts through a gate, but that same poor guy can't run two accounts to make back the isk for that ship if he happens to do exploration?! Are you going to support a new fleet window that is designed to discourage multi-acounts from coming to fleet fights now?

As someone wonderfully pointed out to you on the original thread, how big a supporter of this would you be if the loot spew mechanic was added to moon mining, something a person can pick up solo right now. You know to encourage group play. Have the POS spew out the moon goo in cans that drift away and disappear so you need to bring a friend to grab it all before it's gone? Are you pushing for that to go into the game once exploration is done? Should market orders now require one to be present in two stations to place a region order to encourage people to trade with a friend? Should research now require two people to start a job or then get less of a chance to invent? Why are we singling out exploration for special encouragement mechanics?

The simple fact is CCP is playing social engineering with the exploration profession, something that is extremely unsandboxy. I honestly feel the only reason this is getting CSM support is because we are not a political block ourselves. And what's really annoying here, All this is just a few weeks after CCP Seagull stood up in front of everyone at Fanfest and said that solo play was a play stye they support when designing the game. Yet the very first expansion since then the major feature is a mechanic design specifically to make a solo play style a pain in the ass! I guess the nod to solo at Fanfest was just a way for Seagull to buy some cover?

But here's the big problem "bringing a friend" has always been a more efficient more rewarding way to do exploration! The way the system works on TQ now, it is much faster for one person to scan in a scanning ship, and another person to run the site with a combat ship while the scanner grabs the loot. The incentive has always been there to do this as a team. Two people scanning is faster and makes more isk than one, and that's the way every other activity in Eve scales with group play. You are more efficient, have more firepower or both. This loot spew was never needed, encouragement was already there just like it is everywhere else.

The simple fact is exploration has always been kinda a solo activity with the types of players it attracts. Why are we now suddenly making their play style more frustrating for the sake of the mythical gang of explores? If CCP looked at exploration and wondered why so many do it solo, then perhaps they should have oh I don't know, asked the exploration community first why that is and then worked out a better way to encourage more groups from that (hint: dungeon design!) rather than throw together this awful mechanic that is not fun, is an awful clickfest, makes you feel as though you loose even if you win and is generally just a bad game design.


Look I get that this is happening, it is far too late in the process for this amount of work to be scraped, but the people against this are not "whining", they are trying to limit the impact of this terrible gameplay that is being thrust on them for social engineering reasons in a supposed sandbox game.

Perhaps a +5 bonus to Strength on par with a T1 frigate, but with the ability to have four (or perhaps five) utility slots instead of three. Possibly a 30% reduction in Coherence lost during attacks if extra utility slots isn't a viable/good idea.

According to the chart I can absolutely never find when I need it (the one shown at Fanfest this year detailing the relationship of T1, Faction,Pirate,T2 and T3 in terms of "Improvement", "Specialization" and "Generalization"), T3s are supposed to be generally better than T1s and overwhelmingly more versatile than anything else in the game. Kind of a of a Swiss Army Space-knife.

Just slapping some kind of Strength/Coherence bonus onto the subsystem doesn't seem suitable, IMO. A T2 scanning ship gets a bigger version of the same bonus as a T1 because the T2 ships are direct improvements over T1 ships. T3s are unique, however, and so their bonuses should reflect it by being equally unique and equally focused on superior versatility.

Ultimately, I would say T3 bonuses should wait until the appropriate team has had an opportunity to iterate a little more on the minigame. It will give some time to see what sort of bonuses might be useful as well.

EDIT: I saw this and couldn't just leave it alone. How typical of me.


This is probably the worst thing I've ever seen you post.

T3s should not have a superior-to-T2 bonus. Ignoring that it's boring and absolutely will make T3s even more of a go-to "optimal" ship, it's completely against the spirit of what a T3 is.

I love my T3s and I will do horrible, horrible things to the person who tries to take them away from me, but I do not agree with "T3 should be flat-out better than T2 at hacking" and the general idea that everyone should be forced to fly T3 for everything because they're the super-best.

T1 should be good at hacking because you chose a ship that has a limited capacity to defend itself. T2 should be amazing at hacking because you trained for the hull and sacrificed more defenses. T3 should be just as amazing as T2, but for entirely different reasons and in an entirely different way.

By the way, people will still fly cloaky T3s for lowsec hacking. They're still perfectly viable as all-in-one ships; even more so now that you don't need that blasted Salvager II taking up a weapon slot.