EVE General Discussion

don't mind the 6 week patches, especially if it helps the devs keep a watchful eye on the game.

What I do grind my teeth over is the content of said patches, and the blogs that announce "new features" such as notification changes. How much dev time/water cooler time/pub doodling on beer mat time is spent on all these miniscule and largely insignificant developments that perhaps only a dozen players will utilise?

I used to be in business with someone who arrived at work every morning and instead of developing the core business - i.e ringing clients to sell stuff, would spend hours drooling over envelopes and stamps (I kid you not, this guy had a serious office stationary fetish) and enjoyed nothing more than extolling the virtues (to me usually) of placing a stamp in the correct position to reinforce uniformity across the whole business. The business lasted 6 months.

Ok, I love some of the new stuff - the visuals and sound effects are particulary striking. And I like the new indy interface. But come on....look at pi for example, so much can be made of it so why fanny around with notifications. Give us proper colonies to build and own and lose to roaming gangs - like the ones you see in missions. I want to see drones build my colonies. Damn, I want to live in one ; I want to be scorched from the fires belching out of my processing arrays. I want a Jovian dissident to arrive one morning in a beaten up old rusty tin can of a ship seeking refuge and at night...oh the beers we will drink...and the stories I will hear. Of course I will help you on your 500 mission-chain hub, I say to him as I fall off my stool into a pool of beer froth...

Sometimes I feel like I'm wading in sludge.

But, yeah the 6 week cycle is ok....

I'm giving you a huge, HUGE +1 for your comment on the NPC Convoy system.

That little, often completely overlooked, mechanic could be turned into one of the most recognizable features of EVE.

If it were expanded (and very soon that might be possible) to include regular... escorted.... NPC convoys through gates and across regions of space to other stations to trade relevant goods it would be outstanding. Particularly if those NPC only transactions actually created, filled, and otherwise affected outstanding NPC (or even player created) buy and sell orders.

One NPC corp is selling livestock, another NPC corp is purchasing livestock, and convoys steadily traverse space to conduct that business. Of course these convoys should be attackable in some way, and often have their own defending escort ships. A player (or group of players) that knows what they are doing should be able to make a decent living preying on these shipping lanes.

More importantly, the streams of these convoys traveling across space and jumping into and out of systems... docking and undocking from stations... and trying to fight off player (or even NPC pirate) attacks, would create an even more vibrant image of a living, breathing universe.

Our current version of NPC convoys are very anemic in comparison, and most folks don't realize that if done correctly those NPC haulers can be destroyed and looted.

Patching is an ongoing process for all online games, distinct from the 'expansions' and big 'We're drastically changing this thing." ones. I mean look at the "Oceanus Release". New colors for wormholes! Oooooh!! New Music in the character creation screen! Aahhhhh. Support for French language! Whoaaa!

Keep going.

My biggest concern is that they're gonna run out of nifty names for each release...

Having to keep up with changes more frequently somehow doesn't fit in with my currently very busy RL. So I'd rather have quarterly updates... sorry, expansions .

While it can be argued that the (limited number of) things you listed are not really what normally would be called a major expansion, neither are they something that is typically classified as a patch... especially when all coming together.

Probably the most accurate term would be to call them a "Release", which would indicate not only bug fixes but also updates, new effects, perhaps some new content, balancing, new game mechanics or capabilities (like the new notification system), etc.

Most likely we won't see what other companies would call a "Major Expansion" (big, complicated new game mechanics... new area's of space opened up, new professions, etc.) more than once a year or so... just like every other game company. However we will get a bunch of "Releases" that cumulatively give us a ton of fresh game play in the mean time (ship balancing alone has accomplished that).

Keep in mind this isn't a simple contained game like most are, this is a huge snarling beast of a game... far, far more complex than anything else you are likely to compare it to. It can't (and definitely should NOT) handles it's expansions like other games do.

So far, so good from me. Really looking forward to the next year of mini-patches. Lots of "little things" updates seem underwhelming to people who prefer new, shiny [probably broken] content. Which is understandable. Expectations and preferences differ, and I'd imagine trying to find the sweet spot will take a few tries. *mumbles something about rl*

Notifications are one of the most horriable parts of corp/pos/alliance management. It might sound boring to tweak it, but it's a massive quality of life improvement for the most miserable admin-slave-monkeys ingame. If you haven't been there, you won't appreciate it. If you have, you will. Same for Kronos (which I think is being spectacularly undervalued as a major patch). Even if you don't participate in heavy Indy, these are seismic gameplay shifts that will affect everyone. It's interesting how few people are really assessing how far/deep these recent patches hit. Maybe CCP is underselling them, deliberately, to force through changes they can't get through via a major patch cycle (because of sammich board trolls).

I used to find the major expansions a bit overwhelming in terms of checking all the patch notes and glancing at the feedback threads to see issues being raised - to the point where I largely gave up and waited for summaries from others, but then missed small (and sometimes important) stuff. This feels a bit more manageable to monitor, consider and give constructive feedback towards. Although hopefully longer term the announcements regarding the next patch can be pulled back from 14 days, which is a bit tight. There's still changes from older patches people keep pointing out to me, not sure if anyone else has this problem.

It would be nice to see pencil plans for the next quarter or 6 month of cycles, although I quite like being surprised. Devblogs about WIP seem to have dropped a little, which is understandable, but it'd be nice to see them pick up again. Hopefully timescales will shift as the cycle solidifies. Considering the way people tantrum when things aren't delivered to tight deadlines in perfect form, I can understand why CCP are chosing to only announce things when they are reasonably certain they can be delivered. Massive well done for opening a dialogue on Nullsec changes though, even if most of it is gibberish it'll be an amusing read.

Overall 7/10 optimism. Might be 8/10 tomorrow if they give us more hats in Oceanus.

Release schedule is good, development schedule isn't even bad - it's non-existent. For example - when do I expect to see new type of space with procedural content in EVE? Never. When do I expect WiS? Never. When do I expect scaling public quests in EVE? Never. And so on.

(these are 7-30 years old technologies by the way)

p.s. Mentioned NPC convoys (a.k.a. NPC-driven economy) are presented in almost every space game - from 10+ years old single player top-down games to modern space MMOs.

I don't think you understood exactly what I meant by NPC convoys and having them actually have a real world effect on the market.

I don't want an NPC driven economy, the primarily player driven economy is far superior to the feeble attempts at a real economy that other games offer. However it would be interesting if the NPCs interacted with the player driven economy in a more direct, action oriented way.

IE: If that convoy can actually, physically make it to its destination it will fill buy orders that you might want to fill yourself, if it's destroyed it might generate others. The key being that it has to physically do so and can be helped or prevented by player actions. and player inaction (waiting too long to attempt to fill that buy order) might mean that the NPCs remove or alter the players opportunities... if left to their own devices.

Having the NPC's simply list items for sale from a predetermined spreadsheet and having them magically appear where they need to be (which is mercifully minimal in EVE) has little to no appeal, and the less necessary it becomes the better.

By the way, NPC interaction (especially procedurally generated) is a wee bit more complicated in a game where 40k people are interacting in the same environment than it is in a single player game.

Which probably explains why CCP Beyesian's team is devoting so much attention to developing just that, as well as far better tools to allow other development teams to do the same.