Alpha clone feedback after 10 months+

7 - News presentation is „suboptimal”.
In the comment section of Sept 5 This week in EVE post Evocationz Adhera mentioned that “this week in eve” should be emailed to all active accounts because a lot of people don’t open the this week in eve as it is presented now.
CCP Phantom asked:
„Do you know the reason for that? Do they simply not know about it, don’t they care? Are the topics not interesting enough? Too much to read, too spammy?”

90-95% of the time i don’t open the This week in eve. This is why:
I see This week in eve link in the eve launcher when i log in to the game or a few times i see the news popping up in the game itself.
When i sit down to play the game i want to play the game. I don’t want anything to distract my attention or delay my joy of playing.
Reading This week in eve can be interesting but it can not be done next to my gaming activity. So i have to choose whether i read the news or play the actual game. (Exception could be mining but i rarely do that.)
So if i sit down to play i obviously won’t choose reading anything.

On the other hand there is a period of my days when i sit down to read e-mails and news on newsportals.
I am not playing any game during that because i spend my time on reading and focusing on news. That is the aim of that activity and that time period is for that. Now I explain it like i explain to a 5 year old kid because to me it is obvious and i wonder how can it be a question.

To make it more clear:
You like reading interesting news on your mobile phone.
You like making love with your lover.
But you do not open up the news on your mobile phone while falling into the arms of your lover, don’t you? You put down your mobile phone somewhere and don’t care it anymore because your attention is focused on something else.
Now that’s why people do not care the This week in eve link when they sit down to play the game itself.

My solution would be the same Evocationz Adhera mentioned, make it an e-mail.

8 - Music is repetitive and low quality.
I have the option to listen to music on youtube while playing but it lowers the net speed for the game and can cause lag.
It would be nice to listen to the music of the game itself, it could be another emotional bond to the game, but music seems to be the bastard child of game development for CCP.
There are games not mentioning their names which pay lots of money to professional composers to compose game music and to orchestras to play those grandiose masterpieces with choirs singing songs in the background.
Eve music is far from these epic soundtracks.
It feels wrong to listen to an another game’s music while playing eve but for now that’s the best option i have.

My solution would be to create better music for eve…

9 - Slaves can’t be freed.
I am a minmatar and every time i loot amarr slave trader shipwrecks i see slaves in their cargo.
I am not allowed to loot them because it is illegal to hold slaves as minmatar.
I agree with it but why can’t i free them?
Why do i have to leave them behind in a container in the middle of nowhere in deep space?
That is crazy.

My solution would be to have the option in their item menu to free slaves and turn them into tourists or whatever other entity for free as Minmatar and Gallente.

While Amarrs and Caldari could have the option to turn tourists into slaves, as they wish, i don’t care.
It would be optional and would not change the gaming experience (except for the market of slaves and tourists) for others not wanting it.

10 - The gap between alphas and omegas is too big.
You have mentioned it in the 2017 Las Vegas Keynote video and i don’t know all the details about your planned actions on this topic so i mention it at the end of the list because i can be completely wrong here.
To me it is not only about the firepower of ships. It feels pointless to salvage or mine as an alpha clone when an omega can loot items worth tens or hundreds of millions on a single day while an alpha has to farm it for weeks and months depending on the amount of time spent in game.
I know you want to make omega worth the real life money but you should not make solo alpha efforts worthless and symbolic at best because you need the alpha players to stay in game even if they don’t upgrade to omega, right?.. Hard to find the balance between overbuffed or overnerfed alpha clones i guess.
I have also heard in the video that free alpha skill limit will be increased to 5 mill and they also can buy skill injectors to increase skill limit to 20 mill. That is something i haven’t checked yet but on first glance it looks like omegas with alpha alts can buy skill injectors easily with the omega main to boost alpha alts while true alphas without omega mains will not be able to reach 20 mill skill points on their own. Someone who can’t buy plex for gametime can’t buy plex for making isk out of it as well. Farming the amount of isk needed to increase skill limit from 5 to 20 through buying skill injectors is harder than farming the isk to plex an account and than farm isk with less effort on higher skill level as an omega. Maybe i miss details here, i hope so, because it feels like alphas will run after a carrot too far.

One of the best things in EVE:
At the end i’d like to give a positive feedback too. Previously i’ve been playing a game for many years and stopped playing it because the developers went too far on making it more simple for new players, pruning abilities, removing core mechanisms of the gameplay so much that i could not recognize the game i loved anymore.
To me one of the best characteristics of EVE is the complexity of the game. I love that after more than 10 months i still have many things to learn and lots of things to discover. I like that this game is not about „endgame” rather about the journey itself. Please keep the complexity of the game and don’t remove anything, don’t merge items, don’t prune skills or implants, keep it rich and complex.

Now these were my feedbacks. Thanks for reading it!

1 Like