Shotgun Random

As I mentioned last time I was having a bit of brain frenzy going on and to be quiet frank it made it difficult to keep track of where I wanted to go with my last post. In no particular order or degree of completeness here are some of the things that were running through my head.

Simplify and clean up the archaic and confusing parts of the game. CCP has done a great job in the last year of trying to bring the game forward in terms of giving players useful information to play with. The new crime watch system provides useful information not only because you have a clock for each time, but when you mouse over the clock in question, you are given relevant information for the timer you have activated. The unified inventory is in line with the simplification that CCP has been doing. Those of us who live in wormholes or run POSes just have to bide our time until the day where instead of having several corporate arrays, labs, and industrial modules each having their own set of seven hangers we will have one hanger to rule them all. Or maybe two...my stuff, and the stuff that belongs to everyone else.

Let alliances manage their space as if they were an empire. In line with more structures to bash and fight over imagine there was a tower/structure that was the transponder for the system. If the transponder is on there is local. If the transponder is not functioning, no local. Let's say you want to camp the pipe and don't want a big red blob on the map, shoot the transponder out or if you own it, shut it down. The system is no longer updating the map. The map probably should show that the transponder is suffering from technical difficulties so if it happens at regular times you maybe can guess what is going on. If however it is always down, then it may be time pony up the sacrificial noob toon.

Let alliances rent there space to pets via the contract system and make it like renting as simple as renting a station office. The alliance can stipulate behaviors that are expected and mark red line items that will automatically make the pets contract null and void. Upon a corp, or smaller alliance accepting the contract they have an additional umbrella of standings from space holders alliance. The serf corp/alliance would show up as a color other than blue to show their status, I think pink would be nice. An additional trigger on the safety would be in place to not shoot pinks or lord members. There should be some consequence for the lord, but it's Eve, let the Goons have their fun.

POSes should be unified into single structures and simplified to be more ship like then they are now. CCP should use the UI metaphors they have already in the game as a basis for POS/station structures. The single structure should not be monolithic, but instead somewhat dispersed so that a player looking at the structure can identify what it's probable purpose is at sight. The larger the structure more monolithic it may become. It should be possible to disable the functionality of a POS without destroying it. An POS that is dead in space should be salvageable. If a POS/Station is destroyed, depending on the size of the explosion, some things should be destroyed, some things should be dropped, and some things should form new exploration site loot.

P.S. Who wants to buy platinum insurance on their BPO stack.

Dreadnoughts have a role, siege trebuchet. Black Ops, their role is less defined, I would like to see both these ship types fleshed out. I really don't think Dreadnoughts need a role change so much as for what they bring to a siege to matter. CCP Fozzie has done a great job breathing new life into ships by defining roles for each cruiser and frig to fill. The Dreadnought has a role, what it lacks is a reason why it is better then another ship in it's place. Dreads are great for grinding time out the equation of a POS bash. With POSes changing from many individual targets to maybe a few or just one, how can this blunt instrument be the tool you want to grab.

If Dreads are the blunt instruments, why can't Black Ops be the scalpel. I've pick up AI-War recently and it has a lot of similarities to Eve. Jump gate/Wormhole style traffic, a shield to pound through etc. I had played through a few games to get a feel for how to play and begin coming up with an order of upgrades and ship types that I felt would conducive to my play style and I was finally making some headway. I had taken my fourth system and managed to capture a big system in turns of resources to build from. Then I noticed my home base was under attack, from one ship. A ship that I had access too as well. A ship that could ignore my shield and thus not giving me the time I needed to respond. I lost, and I was amazed that I had been decapitated. That ship filled a role that Black Ops ships would seem to be designed for. They ignore a lot of barriers that other craft have to deal with. They can jump past gate camps, they can ignore cyno jammers, and they can cloak off D-Scan. What they can't do is compete with a line fleet, nor can they do enough damage in a short amount of time surprise an enemy alliance. Being able to knock offline a key defensive structure or make a window of opportunity for the main line fleet, that sounds like Black Ops to me.

Yes, a lot of crazy ideas and as Jester says, “Gamers make bad game designers”. I would agree with that as most gamers forget that their needs to be balance for the game to function correctly. Looking back on this article it looks like a wish list. All design starts off as a wish list. Then the wish list needs to be developed into something that functions within the the scope of the game. If it does not enhance or make the game better, why add it. The best games are simple, easy to understand, and yet complex in their re-playability. Most modern games undergo feature creep as developers want to continue selling a product as a revenue stream. All these games then at some point need to simplify the Christmas tree of features that have been kludged together into a more stable structure.

I think that is where CCP is going right now. It's painful, oh how that inventory was painful in the wormhole at the beginning, but if we don't give CCP the time to get it right and bring the other structural elements in line then it's just Jesus Feature central.

I saw nearly 50,000 people on-line this weekend and it wasn't for an expansion pack of Jesus Features. It was for a patch. The game is better then it was a year ago. Let's hope the next patch begins to iterate on the other long standing issues that plague null-sec and wormhole players.