Autopilot Needs Attention

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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I have been playing Eve on and off for around 12 years now (mainly on) and the autopilot has always bugged me. I tried echoes out when it released and noticed that the autopilot would warp to zero, which was very very nice as you had the freedom to do other things inside Eve and out (for example Market trading or playing on another eve client) without having to constantly hit the warp and jump button.

I am writing this now as I am still not finished doing an R&D Datacore run again with 2 main characters which has required me to jump both characters over 300 jumps each including the agent missions required at each stop (I only do this once every 3 years as it is a massive chore for very little passive income).

It has taken me over 6 hours without using autopilot and I vow to never ever do an R&D run again! My main issue is that autopilot! If it dropped at zero I could’ve been concentrating on say playing Faction Warfare or doing project discovery or many of the other things to do in Eve and out, but I had to click every single jump.

I understand that there are players out there that hunt to gank players that autopilot because it’s a good opportunity for kills but, I feel it makes going places to do things in Eve, or to even just to explore a massive chore and I feel it is among the top 5 least exciting things to do in all games right now. I can’t honestly even recommend Eve (My most loved game) to anyone due to this as the travelling is something most pilots are doing 80% of time and it’s just not entertaining at all and you have to be glued to the screen.

I had a couple ideas pop into my head as I was trying to stay awake during my space journey though:

  • Could autopilot warp to zero each jump but, depending on how many jumps it was, upon arrival or autopilot cancelation the ship has a cooldown timer and cannot dock till it’s over? The player can still warp manually to safe spots if needed, and it still gives the gankers chances to kill and have their fun n’ games at certain hot spot locations.

  • Could the distance you land when using autolpilot be determined by the sec status of the system?

  • Could there be a modual that has to be fitted to the ship that makes the autopilot land at zero?

  • Or could we just please make it so we land at zero regardless?

I got a reply while asking around new eden, the convo went like this:

"I’ll bring this up, but I’m not very optimistic that they’re going to consider changing it. They’ve been pushing to get rid of AFK gameplay, and while this would relieve some tedium, it would also make AFKing travel an easier thing.

Thanks for reaching out! "

"Hey thankyou for the quick response,

I understand they might not want to have AFK travelling but it’s 2021 and we all have ■■■■ to do that might be a little more important than spaceship game space travel =p What is wrong with being AFk or alt-tabbed to another eve client? More players in space is more players in space right? If autopilot was good I would personally have more accounts doing more things and give CCP more $$$.

The way I see it is,

A new player joins Eve and tries the autopilot as it is convenient, They quickly find out it takes way too long to travel or that they ended up getting ganked during the flight by an experienced pilot and told ‘Don’t ever use Autopilot’. The new player then either never uses autopilot ever again or leaves the game.

To me that is a pointless feature that needs work. I doubt there are many players in Eve that enjoy jumping around New Eden but it is a HUGE part of playing Eve. We need as many new players to stay as possible, and generally people don’t want to play a game that is pretty much a 2nd full time job, they want to have fun. What used to be complex and cool is now just monotonous and boring. I feel Eve needs to change to progress or we will forever be stuck at the 20k daily players that consists of mainly die hard fans like me that will never leave.

Thankyou again for taking the time to read this, I just had to ask around to see if I was the only one thinking this is helping new players leave the game.

o7"

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Don’t use autopilot.

And no, autopilot does not need attention, it’s working perfectly fine as it is. It’s a lazy and worse alternative to manually piloting and in certain scenarios it can help players dock up more safely.

If autopilot was made less bad it would compete with actually playing the game, which is not something that should ever happen.

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I don’t… why would I use a broken feature? And thankyou for your very productive reply. You are an asset to the Eve community

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Autopilot isn’t broken. It’s working perfectly fine: it is designed to be worse than manual piloting.

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This is your mistake. You should have planned out your agent locations better if you had wanted to do their daily missions. You should have only picked guys that were spread out all over the place if you had no intention of doing dailies.

Second, Autopilot provides convenience at a cost of time and risk. Don’t want to pay that cost, don’t use autopilot. I’m sure many would argue that it is a quality of life issue, but it is much more than that. It is a choice between being lazy and potentially becoming someone else’s content, or being attentive and being safer. Personally, I like that that choice is in the game, and don’t think that players should get it both ways. You shouldn’t get to be lazy AND be safe.

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Long distance traveling…probably the only activity that is popularly regarded as even more boring than mining.

Let me tell you the rules about changes:

  1. Literally nothing is perfect and literally everything could use improvement and everyone will tell you so.

  2. Rule number one does not apply if something has been deemed “sacred”.

Confused? Yeah. Most of the people who claim they believe in rule one actually don’t.

The best course of action might be to offer a fascinating idea that works around the issue; something the Devs will look at and say “WOW! I like that idea so much I want to see it in action!” …because AP is sacred.

I am not saying that this is that idea…but its only there to give YOU an idea:

****Add the equivalent of gate superhighways. These would be gates that connect systems separated by what is usually the equivalent of between 5 and 10 jumps. The lore could list these as newly developed tech. They could either be NPC owned and run, or player owned and run. They could operate for a fee. And so many other ideas could be attached.

If you want to go the direct route to changing AP, I think I also somewhere suggested that AP could warp to zero to and from gates to celestials but NOT gate to gate. So AP would work by warping you from a gate, to a celestial object and then to the next gate. Therefore AP might be safer but slower. On the other hand if people keep warping to the same celestials on AP, people might set up gank camps there.

One more idea is to only allow AP to zero in high sec, which could be explained that only high sec is charted well enough to afford that convenience. Of course that will make hi sec gate gankers howl with fury, but I want to add an extra security level to this game and overtake some null sec to do it, so this idea works for me as my version of hi sec would be gank free anyhow. Anyway, all told, gankers of all kinds might like my ideas for the other security levels, but I just can’t be bothered to explain every detail anymore.

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Which means it’s a bad idea.

There shouldn’t be a part of space that is immune to player interaction. One of the main selling points of EVE is player interaction - if there is a part of space where people can avoid player interaction, all sorts of people will flee there reducing the amount of player interaction and fun in the rest of the EVE universe.

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Which means you didn’t read my entire post. I have ideas to facilitate and perhaps even increase ganking but I am not going to go into that here. You will just have to accept that my ideas don’t come in pages…they come in PAMPHLETS at least. And since CCP doesn’t read them, I have no incentive to write them.

So put your assertations of “bad idea” back in the jar, and put the jar back on the shelf.

It saddens me that you equate ganking with player interaction.

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It saddens me that player interaction in high sec space is reduced to ganking as people can opt out of all the other forms of player interaction. Other parts of space are much more fun.

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Here’s a good use of autopilot.

When lighting a cyno, you can set the cyno pilot’s destination as the Station/Citadel they are currently sitting next to.

When the cyno goes out they will dock automatically.

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Why would CCP change something just because you’ve decided to do something once every 3 years and felt a little annoyed about it?

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12

Autopilot dropping you 15km from the gate is the cost of laziness. Working as intended…

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Autopilot dropping in 10km is relic of the really REALLY old times when ANY warp dropped 10km short of destination.

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This is true, but as I recall the change was due to the system load caused by everyone bookmarking the gates at 0 and using these to warp to 0 manually. CCP effectively gave everyone free bookmarks to every gate while no longer having to deal with the overhead of storing them in a database for every player who wanted to use them.

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If i recall correctly when CCP were buffing the AU speeds of Crusiers BC and BS they also buffed auto pilot jump in from 15km to 10km? Just to remind everyone here.

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I never use auto-pilot, so I can’t say with certainty that you’re wrong, but I don’t recall ever hearing about such a change.

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It is true. Autopilot warpin was changed from 15km to 10km in October of 2019.

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Lazy player uses ap and dies. Working as intended.

But I still say ap is great for docking if you have a warp in bm.

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I don’t know where you are getting your info but…
I have 3 lvl 4’s very close to each other and 1 lvl 3 20 jumps away. Decently close and I had no intention from day one (10 years ago) to even bother doing the daily missions regularly there is bugger all isk in it and its such a monotonous and boring feature. I only intended to do them and collect the passive research points every couple years. The main reason this was such a long R&D trip this time was, I received 3 missions that required me to 50 jumps to drop off spot and 50 jumps back.

The R&D was an example of why I think Autopilot needs attention. My main issue is new players leaving the game out of boredom. This has bugged me since I first started playing Eve and I finally decided to have my say is all.

What’s lazy about wanting do do more in Eve and out? What’s wrong with having a life? Is it even AFK if I am still standing by the screens and using 2 other accounts??? Some people don’t just sit on their fat sweaty butts all day playing only Eve, there are players like me that get home from working hard all day at their 1st job and would like to play a little Eve between working their 2nd home job.

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Oh, you know what, I bet I know why those missions sent you so far away -the creation of Pochven removed systems and/or you have your route planner set to avoid minor triglavian systems.

Regardless, i stand by what I said. Pick new research agents that minimize travel time if you want to do dailies. You should also learn your hotkeys and improve your execution, then you can rather easily manually pilot one toon while doing stuff on other characters. For example, I used to run courier missions (plus the occasional combat story line mission) on four accounts at the same time (in order to grind standings for market hubs). So, I know for a fact that it can be done. Of course, I applaud you for trying to make good use of your time, but I don’t think that the game should be made subjectively (and possibly objectively) worse so that things can be a little easier for you.

I mean, you do realize that your particular circumstances don’t apply to everyone, and that there can be second and third order effects of a change -right?

  • Most people use autopilot because they’re lazy and/or want to go afk.
  • Changing AP would nerf ganking and reduce content availability.
  • This would have a significant effect on HS destruction, which would have a ripple effect for traders, industrialists.

Multiple play styles would be impacted, and for what? Seems like it goes against what Eve is supposed to be. Eve is supposed to be, and I quote, “harsh, but fair.” This change moves Eve a step away from that. It eliminates a reason to be actively engaged with the game. It reduces player interaction in a game built upon player interaction, and reduces emergent game play opportunities in a sandbox MMO. It hurts the income of multiple play styles, and would nerf the ever living ■■■■ out of solo and small gang gankers that like to hunt on gates. I mean, people frequently complain about CCP “ruining” their play style, but this would most certainly be a real kick in the balls for a lot of gankers. I mean, I’d understand if it made the game better -if it improved balance or something. After all, I have actively defended nerfs to myself on these forums and elsewhere (i.e. I defending the nerf to EC’s during invasions chapter 2, and the drone aggro changes that got rolled back -do a forum search). So, this isn’t just a matter of me not like nerfs to myself. I’m against this change because it buffs inattentive, afk, and lazy game play, at the expense of player interaction and emergent game play opportunities in a PvP-centric, sandbox game.

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