EVE General Discussion

Ambulation is one of the features of EVE I've been waiting for since I started playing.

At this point, I would like to see something simple: meeting spaces where we can just hang out in "person" and talk. This would be more than enough for the RPers amongst us, with the rest of the acting being done through imagination and emotes: "/me puts the drink down and gives Frank an incredulous stare". Ideally we'd be able to talk to each other using voice fonts in the invisible "spatial" channel, and further awesomeness would be present if the voice could be placed in 3D space corresponding with avatar location.

Having the ability for certain emotes to translate to avatar action or posture would be awesome. Set my mood to happy, I'll start bouncing along as I walk, head raised, shoulders square. Set my mood to depressed, my shoulders slump, I look at the ground, and drag my feet instead of lifting them when I walk.

There doesn't need to be anything fancy about "establishments" further than being a room that I rent from a limited set of rooms in the station. Later on we should be able to add decorations (and of course, exotic/tribal/interpretive dancers who will dance for ISK or Aurum).

For me, ambulation will be "Minimal Functional Product" when I can see other avatars in the same space, use voice fonts for acting to each other and have some level of animated emote system in place. And heck, the ability to "whisper" to each other, so this small huddle of people can conspire to play a trick on that stiff over there (i.e.: spatial conversation would have real-world inverse square law applied to audio signal strength).

Other features like contraband trading and gambling can come later (i.e.: interaction with the environment isn't so important from my perspective).

Here are some ideas:


1. Have missions which require players to extract item/persons from pirate stations (shooter mode).

2. Corp rooms must have a purpose, please include tools for corps to plan operations with and a briefing room to explain the operation to others. It would also be nice if the briefing room can double as a theater.

3. Create WiS shops. Those would allow players to trade without having to pay fees or taxes, but at the cost that both buyer and seller need to be online in the store to make the trade.

Thank you for the blog CCP. I agree taking a step back and trying to figure what we as players want to have in ambulation is important.

Objectives and tasks that force players to interact in competitive environment is the back bone of Eve Online...

before anything... Falow the last CSM meeting minutes... and also make that cloak Hunter ship!

i agree wis would be cool, but they still need to focus on the ui and mechanics, once they get fis down then they can move onto wis

A lot of people are arguing against WiS because they say players only FiS and fight. This is very inaccurate. I know of a lot of players that play market related EVE and almost never leave the station. I personally would like the ability to "sit at a bar" while in station. Maybe while waiting for a fleet to form or while talking to corp mates or contract surfing. I think WiS could be an extremely amazing addition to the game, especially if released properly. I don't want FiS to be abandoned by any means, that is the integral part of the game that I enjoy most. I just wouldn't mind more.

To me it would seem that "physical form" interaction is all about communication and information. If I was to imagine some useful stuff for WiS I think it might involve something like the following..

Lets consider the context, you're inside a big f-n space station.. most sci-fi stuff I've been exposed to formulates; the bigger you are = the more badass your situational awareness is. Its a big station, likely with massive communication arrays, system sensors, radars, etc. We've all see the trailers for Dust where you have a group of people strategizing on massive displays: war-tables.

Lets suppose your corporation has an office in a station. You buy/build/rent a war-room. These war-rooms have these group strategic war-tables. Think of it as like a meta-logistic ship, being the station - they need to be manned by corp/alliance players. Skills dictate how effectively the reach/range of the sensors are or something, or based on what you/your corporation can afford. This gives you active radar information of the system and/or nearby systems to be able to monitor enemies and allies. You get a free-form drawing board to cooperatively conceptualize an attack strategy and then have that compile into some sort of briefing that can be broadcast to a fleet. Maybe with active/real-time updates. Players in space open a system map and can see attack timings, locations, flight paths, maybe even get a tactical information link to a station to get real-time locations of enemies in the system.

Make it so that others in the station can sabotage your corps tactical information systems/links in the stations, or even hack their frequencies to give them mis-information.

Basically imagine the station as one big logistic ship that is manned by a handful of high level corp/alliance players: commanders. They sit in the war-room and debate strategy at a very high level. Think the next level above the Fleet commander. Skill books could include how many fleets you can manage, the system reach/range of your tactical sensors and communications, encryption/security quality to resist sabotage. Corp/alliance wealth can dictate how big your war-room is, how many "pilots (commanders)" can be in attendance, quality/quantity or sensors (think types, I'm seeing 4 sensor array types for detecting racial ships), quality/quantity of firewalls/security etc.

The bars and stuff proposed so far seem more secondary and there only to manage downtime, but having war-rooms gives WiS a primary objective and something, in my opinion, that would fit nicely on top of what already exists. Sure something like this would give an advantage, but having some sort of sabotage mechanic to balance it out would be ideal. Nothing like coming in system with a crack squad of blackops to deploy decoy probes that look like a fleet titans ;)

I definately support WiS and the whole new perspective of eve it will provide. Anyone not wanting wis is just narrow minded and selfish worried that all their pew pew targets will vanish inside a station to have a cup of joe. Lets face it initially there will most likey not be any instation combat, but im pretty sure ccp know about the fact that people will go to ground err station to avoid pvp when the odds are against them and plan to do something about it. Maybe station combat will only be applicable in null sec, maybe only in the new war system coming out soon, i dunno but i have trust in ccp. And for all those people saying its a spaceship game. No its not! its New Eden mofos!!!! A universe and from day one ccp had this on the agenda, i definately support WiS for all the new elements of gameplay it can and will eventually provide.

I have no intention of arguing with the forum crowd over whether WiS should or should not be in the game. Each one of us has their opinions, and there's nothing I can write that will make someone change their mind.

I do have some suggestions:

CQ was a massive disappointment for me. I spent a lot of time putting an avatar together, and then I got in the CQ and said "That's it?". It needs to be more. Especially if you want to sell the nifty things in NEX.

The danger of WiS would be that there may be things in stations that you can't do from your pod. IMO, that would be very bad. Eve is a game about FiS and you don't want to alienate the space gamer (the core population in Eve) by making game-affecting content exist somewhere that they don't want to be.

I would love to see each station start out with a common area, and doors leading off to each of the Corp Offices located at that station. The door to the corp office could be controlled in corp settings, and could be locked/barred, open to public, open by standings, password protected, etc. Each CEO could choose the level of involvement for each of his stations as he sees fit.

With this, corpmates could have out-of-pod conversations, show off their pretty avatars, and hold whatever kind of social meetings they like inside their own office. Corps that don't like it can just lock their doors. Corps that really want to get involved in the little RP that happens in Eve could use this and expand their experience in a way that they find meaningful.

There are plenty of players in Eve that would find this enjoyable, and there are plenty that would never use it. So be it. I like to mine, haul, and manufacture, and don't engage in PvP other than to avoid it. I may be in the minority here, but I enjoy myself in my own corner of the sandbox. Make WiS another portion of the sandbox, but don't try to force content into it - the community just won't respond well as a whole if they HAVE to WiS to get things done. Likewise, trying to create some kind of sub-game inside Eve that would be done by WiS is just a distraction from the main game, FiS.

Please expand the CQ into something that RPers can use as a sandbox of their own. No need to cram a lot of junk in there - just let it be a sandbox where people can interact and see what requests the community has at that point. You might be surprised at how creative and thought-out some of the responses may be a that point.

Thanks for listening.

To Team Avatar and CCP:

Although I applaud you for wanting to do a 'Slow Burn' (Inferno reference?) approach for developing WiS content, it seems to me that CCP is now quite a bit 'Gun Shy' due to last years events. I must say that Dev Blog was very disappointing to say the least. I mean it didn't even introduce the members of Team Avatar. What's up with that?

As someone else pointed out, having Arm Tats for Avatars isn't something I would consider as new WiS game play content. As it is right now, that Dev Blog basically doesn't do anything to help generate an interest to participate in WiS or have the CQ active.

Being able to 'Personalize' the CQ with various items (Foliage, Medal's, Pets, etc.) either purchased from the NEX store or gathered from personal items hangar as well as different 'Lighting' accents and 'Save' that layout for that specific Racial CQ is a step towards introducing WiS game play content. Also having an option to use the main view screen as a 'Vid Phone' to view and communicate with other characters in their own CQ would help make the CQ seem less of a prison cell. This has been mentioned a few times in various different threads and would be a good step in the right direction towards developing future WiS game play content.

Speaking about the main view screen, why doesn't it have a drop down menu to select the various services available in that specific station? Also why isn't the official CCP videos streaming on it or all of the previous Alliance Tournaments? How about the option to 'Tune In' to Eve Radio? These should be easy enough to incorporate into the CQ. It would definitely help generate much more interest for players to have the CQ active while doing activity's not related to FiS, such as research, manufacturing, trade, waiting for Fleet Ops, reprocessing, etc.

Anyway, I guess I'm done venting for now.

DMC