TL;DR: CCP, love you all. The Resource Harvesting tab is a bad idea (so is Exploration, but I hope you’ve got that idea). Thank you.
CCP, EVE is a great game with a great player base, truly one of a kind in my experience. I take time away for RL but I come back. I always come back to challenge myself. To use the new skills I’ve racked up. To try a new career, or feel the ease at my freshly-leveled up current career. This is a great game.
The Resource Harvesting tab in the Agency is a poor idea. Some of it has already been in the current Agency, and I’ve had to ask myself: why do I need to be notified that there are asteroid belts in my current system? I don’t know of any systems that don’t have asteroid belts; maybe some do, but mining is my primary career, and I don’t recall any.
Why do I need a dashboard to follow a switchboard to learn what ores can be found in the system I’m in? I have an Overview! I didn’t have this Agency functionality to get me where I am. I asked in the help channel, “Where do I find Pyrox?”
Later, because a fellow pilot sent me a link, I found Eve University Online, and then I started all kinds of Google searches with “eve online ore …” and now I have a folder of bookmarks that I pop open for everything from market analysis to threat assessment (thanks zKillboard!).
I don’t play EVE Online because I want Mario Cart or an 80s coin-op arcade experience. I play EVE Online because for a little while, I want to get lost in space. Space, that glorious dark scary exciting void surrounding Earth. Yeah, that kind of space. Where you try to identify friendly people quickly – even if you don’t become friends – because you can relax your sphincter just a little bit more when you know they didn’t gank you the last 4 times you’ve encountered them.
I never wanted a popup with EXCITING GRAPHICS to tell me there’s an asteroid field around the planets in this system. I never needed an in-game wayfinder to ice fields …and I agree with the suggestions of others that if anything, maybe Ice Fields should spawn in different places – new systems. Maybe THAT would have a positive impact?
I didn’t come out of the gate as a newb wanting to mine ICE. Or GAS. I mean, yeah, the agent mission was cool, but I understood that those are “down the road” kind of things. Something to work for. Recently, I lost a Prospect mining Mercoxit in null. The Resource Harvesting tab would not have helped prevent that loss, nor would it help me choose that system, nor assess the level of trust (misplaced, in this case) I was showing to previously un-aggressive locals.
It was expensive. It was frustrating. It was glorious! I learned something… discovered something… from the event. That’s the purpose of exploration, the discovery. The risk makes the discovery exciting. The price - in terms of skillpoints and time and ISK (and one more loss against me LOL) – make it valuable.
I’m monologing. This is just one story. I have many that are exciting and valuable to me. Most every pilot does, regardless of their career. The Resource Harvesting tab of the Agency window is not going to help build exciting stories. It’s going to reduce the value of the story, and in many ways also make it less exciting. The result is players who feel less satisfied about their mining experience (don’t EVEN get me started on anomalies and sigs, but this same is true for Exploration tab) and possibly more important, are learning to rely on crutches instead of relying on their own intellectual capacities.
The Activity Tracker is a brilliant tool for suggesting career exploration, if the agent missions are lacking. Many combat sites already show up in my Overview; until I’m ready to go exploring, I don’t need to know about the hidden ones. That’s why they’re hidden! And now we can search for composition and location info on any type of ore, or anything else, thanks to global search.
Please stop making the game easier. Please don’t take the exploring out of exploration. Thank you.
