It is Banter Time once again, and with the winter expansion just around the corner Seismic Stan from the Freebooted blog (and the most awesome "Fever Dream" mini podcast) has this question for us bloggers to banter about:
"With the Winter expansion possibly being named 'Crucible', it certainly is a melting pot of refinements and tweaks aimed at making the EVE experience smoother and more wholesome. If the developers suddenly found themselves some spare resources and approached you for an additional feature to include before release, what single concept would you pitch them and how would you implement it?
For bonus points, the one thing lacking from this "patchwork" of iterations is a cohesive storyline to package "The Crucible" together. How could this expansion be marketed to potential new customers?"
Link to Stan's original post here.
I haven't done any serious testing on Sisi lately so I cannot have a well-defined idea of all the changes and new stuff Crucible will bring, but apart from the Tier 3 Battllecruisers of Gankiness the thing that I find makes EVE a better and more comfortable place to spend quality time in is the simplification of some of the mechanics. I can already hear the Bitter-Old-Vet purists crying out loud "Why are you dumbing down EVE?", "EVE is supposed to be hard!", "HTFU!", "WAAAAA!". I have only one thing to tell those BOV's: shut the fuck up. A game that is hard doesn't necessarily mean that every single action one can undertake needs to be a complete pain in the ass. When I saw the image of an open wreck with a little button that said "Loot all" I was elated. Dragging and dropping could only go so far; this is supposed to be a sci-fi simulator, not a computer operating system. The same goes with the new POS fuel system. Having lived in W-space I knew how our little back-water cabin had to be maintained, and I was really happy that someone else was taking care of this. But now it's been simplified so even an impatient schmuck like me could easily set up a tower and maintain it. I dare any of the "EVE has to be hard" crowd to tell me that this is a bad thing.
And there are other things I would like to see that go along the same line of thought. The "Loot all" button is a step in the right direction, but I've been thinking, now that we can save fittings for various ships, wouldn't it be awesome if on the fitting browser there would be another button next to the "Fit to ship" button: "Buy all". This would only buy modules in the station where a ship is docked of course. I'm sure a computer can tell pretty easily what to buy between a mod that is 750k ISK, one that's 1 million, and a dorky sell order at 7.5 million. Computers today can do it, so I cannot see why they couldn't do so in warp drive/cyno jump society. I'm sure the scammers would cry rivers at the loss of scam revenue, but my message to them would be to never underestimate the stupidity of the human race; just read this very blog every Wednesday!
The announcement of the eventual reduction of the session timer was also some good news; so far it should be only from 30 seconds to 20 seconds, but I'm sure they could put it as low as 5 seconds and maybe even remove the timer completely. And do not get me started on the atrocity that is called the Global Criminal Countdown, CCP's way of saying "You did a dastardly deed, well sorry, you cannot play our game. Oh you tried to dock up? You cannot play our game some more." Pathetic.
What I'm getting at is this: anything that slows down the game to the point where you cannot even play (and I'm not even talking about lag here) is something that needs to be looked at closely to smoothen the gaming experience all-around. EVE is hard and complicated enough as it is, there is no need to have mechanics that only feel like jumping through hoops on fire, while you're on roller skates, juggling 5 Rubik's Cubes that you're also trying to solve, while singing the national anthem of 5 countries in their original languages.
I have to add that I'm turning down any bonus points. The changes that are coming were too long coming, and as I understand it this is the "please fix everything" expansion every EVE player has been wanting for over two years. EVE doesn't need another half-finished storyline spin. That's my opinion and everyone is entitled to have my opinion.
Fly dangerous; flying safe means you're not trying hard enough.
o7
3 comments:
Great points, soberly presented, with just a dash of 'bah, humbug' ;)
I like half-baked stories.
Thnx sir!
I always half-bake; I like my meat bloody >:)
I look at the GCC as a way to get to kill guys who GCC with no penalty. And to find out who in the system is aggressively PvPing (e.g. pirating) so I can go and kill them.
If I do GCC myself, I look upon it as a time to go ratting in the system and restore my own sec status.
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