Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Summary of complimentary changes to make manual control that much more awesomer

Several of these were already mentioned by others in the devblog thread:

1- Add a camera reference that provides first person tracking of sorts (simply seeing in front of the ship without having to fiddle with the camera)
2- Some form of orientation reference when zoomed out, either on the tactical or a mini hud/zoom-in ship window, or both
3- Decouple an orientation for the ship so that there is no up or preferred orientation
4- Add two additional key-maps for roll (most joysticks allow you to twist for yaw control, while left and right determine roll)
5- Allow sliders or other inputs to determine speed (not sure if + - can be mapped to a joystick now or the mouse wheel)
6- Toggle mouse override hotkey option for fine mouse adjustments as needed

'Spinal' Guns in Light/Medium/Heavy variants for ships up to Battlecruiser size, with a fixed 45-90 degree cone of fire dead ahead. Implement a 'line up on target' command to the piloting AI, and allow pilots to manually fire in manual mode. These guns have higher alpha DPS, but more chance of missing the target the larger your ship is. Could give the players a chance to punch above their weight in certain situations, but requires them to have actual skills in piloting their ships to take advantage of these hard to use weapons.

And if the rokh isn't just a big barrel shroud already, it would make a great one if we're making spinal the new meta.

is allowing you to choose the direction of your orbit a thing? Test server too complicated, dunno. If not, it utterly should be.

So you want to make large arties/rails/beams track like small weapon systems?

Stop destroying the game with your fixation on turning eve into a twitch-based first person shooter.

Let's remember what EVE is, it's not a first person flight sim, the WASD controls are fixing a fairly terrible manual movement system but shouldn't be taken to that much depth. That said, cockpit view might be a cool gimmick for pretty views...

Colour me genuinely curious, why do you play Eve? All your suggestions seem to involve completely changing fundamental parts the game, guess I'm wondering why you don't play something else instead?

trolling other trolls on the forums how original. Quick gather my tears!

I agree that alot of the manual features eluded to here would add some spice, but in terms of baby steps, the changes I captured were trying to keep in spirit with what eve is now, and just make the joystick control more relevant, and actually easier. Having the ship want to rotate to a set position (when at rest and it settles back to the system orientation) actually makes minor navigation quite annoying. I spend most my time zoomed out, and never really have situational awareness of my direction at any given time (unless ofcourse I am aligning for the gtfo, or trying to kite of course).

The changes mentioned above have short term changes in mind, that will allow manual control making sense and getting us from a submarine captain mentality, to a space ship captain mentality.

However, all that being said, the add-in commentary regarding manual spine like weapons are not game breaking right now anyway, they are just different variations on what bombs are now. A bomb goes in a straight line vetor out the front of a ship and blows up at a range without ever locking or tracking. No reason not to have a variety of those types of weapons in the form of the weapons types we use now (projectiles hybrids, lasers, missiles). I welcome a low transversal ship approaching me as a nice juicy target for my drones or targeting (requires locking on) weapons ;). But at the same time would find it equally compelling to try and line up and fire manually at folks. It wouldn't be a first person shooter, just a different type of weapon and another element to game play like the stealth bomber is now.

....and finally, yes, we are in pods in the belly of the ship (even though frigs and other ships clearly have cockpits...derp) and are fed neural data to more effectively control our minimized crews. So all perspectives would follow that they are from the external camera or fixed cameras on the ship to provide reference for the pod pilot. There is no reason this can't be mega-awesome and add all kinds of variety to the game for future scope features, that allow for the point and click commander as well as the manual control pilots among us (Ryker did use the Enterprise as a crop duster for the love of God ;) ).

I agree for the most part, however, that is the purpose of main point number 2 in the OP. Where someone is zoomed out scoping the battlefield (well, fighting grid to be accurate) you are more focused on macro-movements and will more likely orbit, align to, or even use manual but much less liberally to make adjustments to obits etc. In cases where you need to see the bigger picture, such as FC's or anchors you have an alt providing a cloaked perched set of eyeballs anyway.

Off-Topic Warning
That being said, it is nice that CCP acknowledged our use of multiple accounts and supported it, but I do think all mechanics that are negated and or done easier with multiple accounts are bad mechanics and should be moved away from. I personally have three accounts and feel to be any good at anything you absolutely need multiple accounts. In arguing for removing clone costs, one of the devs said mechanics that provide a choice that really isn't a choice (i.e. there is no benefit to not choosing one over the other, and you pretty much only ever want to pick a certain one) is a bad mechanic and should be removed or changed. I feel very similarly if not the exact same regarding multiple accounts. Most of what I do with alts can be achieved through other means (remote surveillance probes for cloaky eyes/scout, NPC hired help or remote control ships for moving stuff etc). All mechanics we use to be better while using multiple accounts (that aren't force multipliers) could be made irrelevant by new or modifications to mechanics.

The reason I think alot of people are resistant to the idea of a first person perspective is that EVE is more about space commandering, over fighter pilot jockey type fighting (in most cases, where fast tackle frigates and bombers would be examples of exceptions). I agree that for me, what makes EVE unique and always pulls me back, is that I am not just a space pilot, but a commander of an empire as big or small as I make it. My alts represents extensions of that empire. Any implementation of WSAD would need to keep this in mind, and I think the summary captured does this.



Keymapping can be pretty much done according to user preference anyway, and CCP would just be unlocking/creating the ability and setting default keys, so they don't have to be WSAD. I say that so it is clear they are mutually exclusive control mechanisms. I think this would be another feature entirely where essentially what you are really doing is creating hot keys for how we already navigate (i.e. right click - align, orbit, or keep at range etc). So perhaps adding a menu option to hotkey the action when right clicking might be a simple way to implement it, but I think that is an entirely different feature, and deserves its own topic. I like the idea by the way.