Avatar Gameplay Polls and Discussion - WiS & Beyond

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
121

I have some more ideas about the WIS-faction i mentioned above. Particularly in how it can combine wormhole-space with WIS. And increase wormhole ship activity in a good way.

So the organization is independent, but politically aligned with Caldari and Amarr. This faction is the polar opposite of the pleb humanitarian Sisters of EVE. The reason for this
is of course that capsuleers are superior to filthy mortals. Lets call this organization Nationalsozialistisc…Eh… Calmarr for now.

Calmarr set up their capsuleer resort-stations (WIS) in lowsec to use their secret new wormhole technology - A machine called the “Wormhole Resonator”
Maybe it was developed as an investment to allow faster travel to their stations for capsuleers from all over New Eden.

These machines increase the number of wormholes that appear in the system. But more importantly it cause the wormholes to resonate. The resonance sends a signal through the affected wormholes and into the next.
The signal continue in a line of wormholes leading to the exit in high or nullsec. Creating a “pipe”.
Players would still have to scan to find the wormholes. The system-wide signal would only tell them that they are in a system with a wormhole pipe to a WIS-station.
The signal could just be a small notification that the ship is detecting a “Faint Resonance” or perhaps even a slight humm or resonance-like sound that immersively plays in the pipe systems. (I heard EVE has sound)

Maybe this Calmarr machine would have some effect on the sleepers too? Perhaps they attack the WIS-stations to stop the wormhole resonators. Then players have to help defend
the stations both inside (in some horror/fps/action, 1st/3rd person gameplay) and outside, sending fleets in to stop the source of the sleeper attackers.

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122

We Fly, we dock… we can park our ships in the hangar. Then we are inside each NPC controlled dock running around and finding mini games, PvP areas, lore. So each Dock can have a minimum allotment so quality can be controlled. Different servers so it is like a different game, part still wildly part of New Eden. Limit to Dock Time.

Would not take long to implement a couple simple lore options like gathering, FPS, etc… would add so much to the integration and gameplay.

We have the best Space MMO by far… fans of RSI and ED live in piloted messes. So the more we add, simple quality structures with avatar options is key to New Eden holding the crown for another 15 years.

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123

Suffice to say; WiS could be the grand savior EVE needs. Ships in space are great, but alone -it’s not a true space simulator or even an accurate “space-ship” simulator. No other operator of anything operates solely on whatever mechanism they work with. The resistance i’ve seen to WiS has lacked any rebuttal beyond simply acting contrarian. I think we definitely should and can do the thing with no negative effects for the rest of New Eden. Not to mention the massive influx of players who will come for space barbie and blackjack hooker casino and end up flying ships, as well. It’s honestly the perfect move at this point.

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124

Avatar gameplay opens so many possibilities and increases vitality of EVE in a long term.

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125

Just reading the last few posts here and it’s the same nonsense.

‘it will be cool’

‘it will save eve’

‘it will complete the space-sim’ (it’s not a space sim :upside_down_face:)

Seriously?

I like the idea of walking in stations, but still no gameplay suggestions that makes sense to be part of eve. You’re still all describing a whole new game at best.

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126

Name one specific thing.

127

Here is one: Immersion.

When reading the EVE Chronicles and other Fiction and Lore, we feel and see how the action is fluid, with seamless transitions between planetary/space station/ outpost action and action in spaceships, including spaceship interiors that go along the spaceship battles.

When I warp above my home station and park my ship there, some muffled station chatter can be heard, possibly the ship picking up various communication frequencies that serve the station. And I have always wanted to get my avatar there, to mingle with the civilization, so to speak. If we have some gameplay around that, this would help with immersion.

Some people take the “Just a game” approach and do not immerse that deep (but they still create content, which is awesome). Others, like Roleplayers (me included), do immerse themselves deeply into the game. They go and read all the lore they can find, some even write fiction pieces and articles that are now accepted as canon in the lore. For them the game is more like a lifestyle, a second life. So it is natural for them to ask for more ways to immerse themselves in the game.

And this is where some Avatar Gameplay can come in handy. When implemented correctly, this will even attract more players, who would want to immerse themselves in the game at various levels.

Want spaceship action? Get it. Want to meet with your friends on a planetary mountain and have some Dropsuit skydiving with the help of the gravity harness? You do it. Do some station missions that involve shooting NPCs in the face? Done. Fight over a player owned planetary installation in order to capture it? Go for it. Or just spend some time at a bar, looking for shady agents that would give you special missions. Immersion.

All of this would help with making EVE feel like a full Sci-FI experience.

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128

None of those things have anything to do with EVE.

All you have described is a space based FPS which EVE is not.

Space Barbie.

Bottom line is if it has anything to do with EVE it is either a duplicate UI or it is something that forces EVE players to WiS who do not want to.

We already know this because this feature was tried and FAILED already once.

129

Immersion doesn’t have anything to do with EVE? :thinking:

Well looks like you are just in for the spaceship experience, that is fine.

Out of curiosity, what do you normally do ingame? If it is not opsec of course.

Actually mistakes from the past have been noted, I believe. Everything can be done in a way that doesn’t make ship or avatar game mandatory.

Yes, Space Barbies. More than 70% of the polls voters want them. Personally I would pay to have things like that.

Project Nova is avatar action and it is naturally set in the EVE universe. A lot of people want it to be. And it is a natural expanse, because all the other games in the genre are going for something similar - avatars and the like, and EVE has to deliver. It is a competition more or less, and there are new standards set every year.

Repeating the same argument will not make it weight more.

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130

Immersion is not enough. It needs to actually do something.

Keep in mind you are calling for a feature that cost millions and failed once already, you need REALLY COMPELLING ideas.

131

Alright Salty, from what I can tell throughout this thread, you have set out two simple requirements for avatar gameplay to be valid from your perspective.

These are:

  1. Avatar gameplay must not introduce unique gameplay, thereby “forcing” players to participate in a feature they do not want to; and,
  2. Avatar gameplay must not duplicate existing gameplay, already accessible via established methods.

Your personal requirements are impossible to meet. You can’t achieve one without contradicting the other, but then you know this because you’re not actually open to any meaningful suggestions or serious conversation about this topic. You don’t have any interest in avatar game play, which is completely valid and understandable in itself, but what isn’t valid is that you believe your own preferences to be superior to someone elses.

Your approach would be like me applying your two requirements to… I don’t know, say nullsec, and declaring sov mechanics, etc. to be completely invalid.

Applying your logic, sov mechanics are invalid because they are unique to a particular section of EVE Online, and I don’t want to be “forced” into having to play in nullsec and deal with sov and everything that entails, just because I might want reliable access to particular ores, or to anchor certain structures, or I want to build supers, and, still using your logic here, it’s just not fair that I can’t do that where I am in lowsec :sob:.

I guess I’m just not that arrogant.

Setting aside all gameplay, if CQ had included the ability to simply share a space with other avatars - just to sit around a table in a room with our corpmates, for example - I believe the fate of WiS could have been very different.

What you’re failing to understand is that, for those of us who do support CCP’s original vision for a complete Sci-fi experience, the idea of greater immersion through avatar gameplay (and playing “space barbie”) is “REALLY COMPELLING” in itself!!

Additionally, you really are underestimating the amount of money to be made from vanity stuff for avatars. It’s been said before, RPers are the biggest bunch of clothes horses you can find. In fact CCP might have a reasonable metric to gauge this, by looking at SKINs.

But admit it, Salty. You do like to play dress up really. After all, you went shopping and bought yourself a nice beret for your profile pic. And very nice you look too :wink:

You might not take it seriously. People out there might make hillariously ridiculous looking avatars, but the bottom line is… well CCP’s bottom line, isn’t it? And why would any of us want to deny CCP what could be a lucrative revenue stream?

However. If you’re right, and the WiS engagement was so low because it was a failure, if demand is so low, the question you need to ask yourself, is why do players keep raising this topic?

Why have there been countless threads, for years, spanning multiple EVE forum iterations, and elsewhere, each growing into hundreds of posts (just like this one) about WiS?

Why do they look back to that early CCP vision and still cry out for it?

My answer to you is that there are some of us who are still aspirational about EVE Online. And I’m not some bright-eyed newbie, fresh from some other candyland MMO.

I’m over eight years deep into EVE Online, and I can tell it’s still got more to give, and that includes avatars.

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132

These are not my personal requirements, These come from the community, people do not want to be forced to WiS just to play spaceships.

Duplicate is duplicate, that is just expensive and one of the stated reasons for taking WiS offline.

And yes they are impossible to meet, that is why WiS was and will be hopeless.

133

Immersion is enough for a lot of players, especially the female ones (who currently only make up a small percentage of the EVE player base.)
It was enough that even though WiS was abandoned after deploying only the CQs, you could not use it outside NPC stations, and you had to manually turn the feature back on from the default “Off” setting if you had docked in a citadel, 3% of the player base still used it while it did not actually do anything other than provide immersion. I would not call that a failure.

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134

Immersion was here when they took it out, apparently not enough to prevent cancelation how do you expect it to be enough to get them to redo, ESPECIALLY since they no longer have the staff?

135

Guys, you are so uncreative… Especially Salt Foambreaker ! Yeah you…

I didnt read all, because TLDR;

but, i love the Vision of a Walking in Stations. I do not talking about that running in station like it was in Star Trek Online, where i dock with my huge enterprise, and the station, who contains it, has only a space like a villa. Ridiculus.

I think the Approach of Captian Quarters, was to guess, what the desing should look like, and i think they succeeded at that point. I loved the Designs, and really hope, that the door is opening soon.

Anyway. you say Walking in Stations is Uncreative ?

Let us imagine following Situation.

There you are, with your Badger Mark II, arrived in Jita. Docking Procedere is like always, and you entered the Capitain Quarters. While you reached the Door, and entering your Pin Code (that unlocks the door from inside), because, its posible that bad guys, waiting outside (maybe some Dust guys ?) .

So after all is clear, and you was leaving the pod, you are vulnerable. You may wear some weapons (where is a lot on the market right now, have some high tech arm bunkered), but in Jita no Weapons are allowed (as always in highsec) to wear inside the station.

After you arrived the first floor, you decide to check the market. You openend your Mobile or tablet, or whatever you wished. In that case, The User Interface of Eve zooms in, and you can use eve as usual, for that case, you standing around.

you decide, to take a look at the market itself. I will say something to this later. You see some nice stuff there, but the Marines left and right from the door, looks suspicous on you. You decide to watch further, you see the first time, how a Excavator Drone is look like. He has 2 here. (For explanations. These Markethalls has to be rented. And this guy is offering this on that floor for example. He has completely (Like Housing in Dark Age of Camelot) organized that room. The desks (10.500 ISK) and the stuff, you can see in that room, had to been applied by players, bought by players, and maybe also get stolen by players.

After you decided, not to buy from that ugly guy (maybe he is looking like Innominate) - you go further and go to other places…

You will realize that this kind of connections you can gain over personal contact to other players, will increase the possiblites of your reputation.

The station is huge (not as huge as a keepstar). And the inside design of the station can be created procedural. Like the leveldesign in diablo 2 (which every games looks different, but you are able to follow the story).

Can you realize, what happens, if you entered the station, that huge (if you want) - you can lost hours, to explore it completly.

Maybe there are possibilities to hack into a corp office, which is atm closed. Or other stuff… Like Dust 514 ■■■■ or so.

Depends on you. If you have no Imagination. You deny all the other guys, who needs this imagination to keep this in video, for further usements. There are so many possiblities here, but it has to be created correctly.

If the user itself, can define, what the station is look like. maybe throw away an empty Can of Quafe… There is waste too.

This waste you will see… What to do with that waste ? reprocess ? How to get that organized ? Thats the question you should ask, and not saying, no … this is not possible, or not used.

If i give you a single stone of lego, you cant do nothing. You maybe can suck it. Thats all. Or jump on it.

But if you create a whole set of lego pieces of different kind, your imaginations starts.

And dont tell me, thats not immersive or something like that. Minecraft wouldnt Work without that. Or other games too.

Thrust me, if ccp is want to do this right, this will come in time

And then, its done.

Hopefully

136

And 90% of the players scream “YOU ARE FORCING ME TO WIS”.

It is a no win situation.

137

I can tell you haven’t been reading.

  • Must not be tedious and unnecessary. (i.e. not quicker and easier to do from a station panel)
  • Must lead to actual game play. (this is the whole point of the feature. People don’t stick around for JUST for immersion)
  • Must not be overly restrictive to existing game play. (i.e. don’t say you can invade structures to ignore reinfi timers)

Of course immersion isn’t enough. The captains quarters were immersive, but less than 10% of the playerbase used it.

And before you say; ‘cause it was just one room’, you could have 100 rooms. If they don’t do something that is engaging/useful you will get tired of wandering around the same rooms doing a whole load of nothing, over and over and over again.

You think ccp are going to frequently iterate on avatar gameplay? With less than 10% interest in it? It took them 6 years to get back to pi, and most of the playerbase takes part in pi.

You guys still don’t have anything even approaching concrete game play. You’re plucking at straws to shoe horn in some feature, ANY fearure, to justify the existence of wandering around not doing anything.

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138

Oh I’ve been reading, and I completely understand where you and the others who don’t agree with the concept of WiS as a valid feature are coming from.

Your preference is to have a purely spaceships in space focus. And that’s a perfectly valid opinion to hold.

What you’re not doing though, is understanding our position.

Let me try again to explain (again) with an example:

I can’t think of anything less fun than taking part in the huge nullsec fleet fights, under crushing tidi, with huge balls of capitals and supercapitals resulting in billions of ISK being lost. It just doesn’t do it for me.

And apparently I’m not alone, because sov nullsec is home to a minority of EVE’s population. Many, many more people play in highsec.

But that doesn’t invalidate it as a feature. It has it’s audience, and even though other areas of the game are enjoyed by a majority of the playerbase, CCP are perfectly right to give it the attention it deserves.

Why is this relevant?

Because, I’m happy to admit that avatar game play may only appeal to a minority of the playerbase.

Where your position and mine differs is that, just as with nullsec mechanics, catering to a niche audience doesn’t invalidate something as a feature deserving of CCP’s attention.

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139

Two of the oldest (if not the oldest) alliances in EVE Online that are still active to this day are roleplayers (CVA and Ushra’Khan, both founded in 2004), who are exactly the kind of audience this kind of feature would be catering to.

Just two alliances with over 2,000 players between them.

How many other customers are CCP missing?

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140

Well, again, let’s take a look at Project Nova. Since CCP works on its development, it is safe to say they have probed the market, made surveys among the EVE playerbase and they know there is an interest in a shooter set in the EVE universe. Lots and lots of people want to play it.

And when implemented correctly, upon release, it will attract even more players. Who will naturally ask for more avatar interactions, like social ones, not just bars in stations, but building houses on planets, corp and alliance quarters, armory rooms, briefing rooms, hideouts, huge planetary outposts that can shoot a ship in orbit, as shown in some of the official videos etc. etc., with all the combat and capture and sovereignty gameplay that comes around such things. Just like EVE has missions, Nova players will ask for missions in stations and on planets, space outposts etc. All of this is avatar gameplay.

It will have nothing to do with the spaceship experience, will probably not be obligatory tied to it, since you guys express this requirement so vocally, it can be done this way. But don’t think that only a selected few want such things. There was a presentation about Nova in the last Fanfest. There were roundtables, the interest in this is high.

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