I think the best implementation of WiS gameplay would be something that enhances our spaceship-game - While being fun and not too repetetive.
Perhaps the easiest way to do this is have WiS in just a handful of stations, and then have some incentive to come to these stations for everyone. That will generate more space traffic, thus improving upon the spaceship-part of the game. A balanced incentive is probably the hard part to get right, in all aspects. But lets say, for example, that you get some kind of temporary ship buff and some decent amount of ISK after participating in some station activity (PVP? podrace, paintball, massage) And/or just a small bonus for stretching your legs outside the pod for 15 minutes.
These systems should be in lowsec and have enough wormhole connections to make that a viable route to most players. This way, WiS can be the cornerstone of revitalizing lowsec and wormhole space.
I forget where I read it recently, but I liked the suggestions that avatar gameplay could include things like the hacking minigame, as used in current exploration sites, to target another playerâs structure-based activities.
A successful hack could impact:
Manufacturing (cost, materials, timescales, etc.)
Invention (success rates, etc.)
PI (as above)
Trading (skim a % of profit, taxes, etc.)
The structures themselves (fuel usage, etc.)
And of course if one player has been successful, then the targetted player/corp should receive a notification and have the opportunity to negate the attempts.
I suppose, some of these are an avatar equivalent of the old siphon modules people used to drop next to POSes.
Which makes avatar play mandatory and just another grind in the industrial process â provided itâs a large enough bonus to be worthwhile in the first place.
No, once again, the trick has to be finding something that doesnât kill existing play. The structure fuel bonus is a maybe? PI possibly? Trading and industry are right out though.
So if this is good gameplay, why restrict it to avatars? Why not do it with ships or entosis mods? Wouldnât that be easier than making a whole new section of the game, figuring out the ins and outs of how it will work JUST to hack peoples structures? Wouldnât it be easier and quicker for the players to do it from their ships rather than having to leave their ship and walk around?
Making the game unnecessarily tedious just so people will use the avatar feature is not fun. And that goes for dailies as well. Players will feel forced to use avatar gameplay to get their bonus so that they can be competitive.
We could also strip out all the spaceships and extraneous graphics of ship travel for a âpureâ instantaneous excel spreadsheet simulator. Thereâs a blurry subjective line between necessary welcomed immersion and pointless task work.
I bet the old Captainâs Quarters is still on the servers and has not been deleted, they have just closed the door to that code.
They could easily update the coding and make it more usable and more up to date, open that door which was never open and extend it to a restaurant and bar and other entertainment.
Update the avatar engine which has not been updated for ages and give us more options⌠(make it more like sims with more clothes, etcâŚ)
Add a couple of windows so that you can see outside the station and look into space.
We also should be able to decorate the captain quarters how we want toâŚ
As far as I know, the avatar engine is the same as the spaceships engine - Trinity, boosted by the Carbon technology that helps avatars. But this engine has some trouble when it comes to displaying multiple characters at one place, or at least that is what I remember reading somewhere.
So it would be reasonable to make an engine overhaul, something that our devs are considering and have announced on twitter. It would be really great if there is a symbiosis between Trinity and Unreal Engine 4 (that is used for Nova) so that both EVE and Nova become more interconnected in the future. Not sure if rewriting EVE entirely in Unreal Engine would work, but that is also an option. I am sure CCP has had talks about these things in detail.
And customizing our quarters, be it personal places or corporate places, public places, would be awesome. It is a lot of work though.
Personally I feel that just communicating in bars and stations will not be enough to give all players an incentive to play with avatars. When playing a game, we are in for the action. So if there are activities, like missions involving shooting, fighting and exploring, be it on stations or on the ground, it would be more interesting.
They indicated they were cutting all that code away because it was a drag on performance.
And you are right, the engine couldnât display more than one char at a time, and even one char was laggy.
The problem is the char creation is so detailed, right down to body/face sculpting, that displaying all those unique toons was way to much for todays hardware.
There is a reason MMOs donât let every single player have a unique face and body.
That was the problem. It was a lot of work to update and had to be repeatedly touched upon to keep up to date with the rest of the game. This wasnât worth it with such a tiny amount of people using it. It was decided the time keeping cq up to date could be better spent else where.
The first problem that you need to solve is giving people a reason to use it.
Just being pretty wasnât enough. Coming up with gameplay merely to justify cqâs existence that could actually be easier/faster to do from a ship or menu is going to be tedious. Anything that doesnât deeply connect or easily transition with space ships enough may as well be a different game.
I would rather compare this to the âRestedâ bonus you get in other MMORPGs, rather than dailies.
To me it seems lore-friendly that most capsuleers would enjoy some time socializing face-to-face with other capsuleers and humans.
Lets say you get a choice between several bonus after participating in a non-lethal activity or contest with other players inside the lowsec WIS-station. Lets call the bonus/buff âRelaxed capsuleerâ. A non-stacking but repeatable buff you get after doing something with other players in the station.
For example:
Buff 1 - x% increased turret rate of fire and tracking, x% increased armor hp.
Buff 2 - x% increased missile damage, x% increased shield hp and shield regen.
The buffs should be good enough to attract players from null and highsec. Without being OP. The duration should be long enough that a player can get the buff and use it for PVP or PVE with their ship for a few hours or so.
Also, ISK rewards and/or LP to make it worthwhile for new players or others who arenât there for the ship bonuses. This should be a smaller amount than if you were farming ISK with your ship, for obvious reasons.
For these WiS lowsec-stations i think there should be a new faction running them similar to Sisters of EVE. SOE are aligned with Minmatar and Gallente due to the humanitarian thing, so the new faction should stand with Caldari and Amarr. The focus of this faction would be these capsuleer-specialized stations.
Some advantages of all this:
Incentive to regularly travel to lowsec/through wormhole space for most null and highsec players - This could be a major part of a solution to fix activity in both of these areas without big changes to the current game - Or adding unecessary large ISK-faucets that disrupt the game economy.
Avatar gameplay that is rewarding and at the same time encourages and creates more space activity.
More lore-friendly than extravehicular activity, and similar things. (As if a capsuleer would get out his pod in the middle of nowhere. All ships have crews.)
I get your first point Salt. However, i think your concern is connected to balance. Not the feature of a buff in itself.
Lets say this buff is only strong enough to fall within the category of âmin-maxingâ. I should have explained this better.
The incentive travel to this WiS station should not be the buff alone - At least to some. I do not know how many min-maxing players exist in EVE.
Why do you say it is a problem if WIS have anything that is unique to it?
If WIS was ever released without anything unique to it⌠it would be bad design indeed.
Because we hashed this out in endless threads at the time WiS was introduced, every point here was hashed out in endless detail by some seriously upset people
The WiS revolt was one of the biggest player revolts ever, it is still legendary.
This thread is like an echo of the past!
Honestly if the title was less obscure and just had WiS in it, this thread would be different.
I was part of that revolt, but I still want to see WiS. There were lots of reasons to join the revolt. It would be simplistic to say the revolt was anti-WiS.
Edit:
Every WiS thread Iâve seen has had a majority of Pro-WiS, some neutral anti-WiS and like 1-3 very vocal anti-WiS. Feel free to make an appropriately titled WiS thread, but I doubt it would change anything.
I know a guy that wants the option to own his own bar in a station in EvE, be able to cut the heads off the corpses of his most thrilling kills and mount them on the wall of said barâŚhe literally would like to be a bartenderâŚmixing/creating drinks, foods, and stuffâŚand regale in stories of times past and stuff with those that would frequent his establishmentâŚ
And this guy i knowâŚhe was a very avid Combat PvP only playerâŚwho we have lost to Star Trek online for the past few months to get his WiS fix.
As far as I remember, the Jita Protest - the revolt itself, started because people were upset about the prices of the cosmetic items for avatars and other market related stuff around that. But overall people were anticipating avatars and welcomed them.
