It’s interesting that while I liked the CQ, I didn’t use it much. Not because of performance issues, because I didn’t notice any, but because, as some have said, there’s not much to do in there, and the interface was clunky. I have better control over the sprites in the 1998 era MMO I still play (Clan Lord) than I do over my avatar in the CQ. OTOH, regarding performance issues, I did try to switch to CQ a couple of weeks ago, and the whole game just froze up. I guess you could call that a performance issue, but from my viewpoint it was an all of a sudden change in how the game works (or doesn’t work).
I understand the business reasoning, and yeah, it might be better to remove it now. It does feel though like a betrayal of sorts, even though the devs tried to imply, sort of, that WiS is not dead. It may not be dead, but it feels like it was comatose and CCP is about to remove its respirator.
Hard to put up any decent argument when you put it like that.
I’m one of the few that do use the ol’captain couch, I thought it would have been excellent to have the AT, footage from large sov wars or some of the chronicles running on the screen.
While a little sad for this news I see it for the necessity it is.
Please, one day, bring back this feature. When you do, do it with bells on.
Make yourself and us proud. let us finally have kilts and codpieces to strut our stuff under in house disco balls to a million motes of cavorting light.
edit: When you disable the CQ, Can you tell us how many times the red button has been pressed please. Up to the last day. For posterity.
I was all ready to be angry about the removal of CQ, but after reading the explanation, I’m not. I dearly hope WIS will be picked up again someday but right now removing CQ makes sense.
Every day and with each passing “rebalance” and “update” announcement I find fewer and fewer reasons to bother logging in. Oh well, I guess after almost 10 years of giving CCP my money I’ll find something else to waste my time and disposable income on. Hell, most of the folks I started playing with back then have long since moved on anyway.
I know most of you are cheering and love the spreadsheets in space stuff but I sure miss the old CCP that had a larger vision for the game and the next big feature was more than a new structure to anchor in space or a ship remodeling.
[quote=“Daichi_Yamato, post:147, topic:9940”]Like most im not sorry to see the back of this. There wasn’t anything that was ever gonna make it useful.
You don’t need wis to have a pinball mini game. Or to socialise with people. Or go over strategies etc etc
[/quote]
Retiring captain’s quarters frees up a significant amount of development
time that can be used elsewhere to focus on preparing the EVE Online
client and the graphics technology used within it for a long and
visually stunning future.
Obviously depends a lot on actual implementation, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
If all it does is provide the same gameplay we can already conduct from our ships, then you’re statement is spot on. Why would I go into station to buy from a market when I can just do that quickly from my ship? That wouldn’t make much sense.
However if it was implemented with its own unique gameplay (not just walking around and sitting), then it could be something else.
In the last couple of years, there’s been several requests to make DUST/Legion/Nova the WiS for EVE. Go from ship to planet seemlessly. That wouldn’t be WiS exactly, it’d be something else, but certainly offering unique gameplay we can’t access from a ship.
But taking that idea and extending it to WiS, a fully implemented concept could offer unique styles of gameplay like in station missions (eg. assault a Serpentis/Sansha/etc. station and fight it out against pirates, earning LP just as we do with shooting ships). A game within a game (like many of the minigames are), but it would be a huge development effort (and I’m not sure that as a community we’d trust CCP enough to cut them the same slack we did back in 2007-2011)…
Well, I can’t say that I didn’t see this coming. I am definitely going to miss the Captain’s Quarters because I love to see my avatar stretch its legs every once in a while when getting out of the ship.
But in the end you had no choice but to remove it for the reasons you stated in the blog. I never realized that development of a 64-bit client for Eve Online was stalled mainly because of the Captain’s Quarters having such an outdated middleware that was never properly optimized to begin with.
Also, no surprise that usage of the Captain’s Quarters was practically insignificant. You’re likely not going to lose any subscribers because almost none of us were using it for more than 10 minutes at a time and we will still be able to see our avatars in the “show info” windows and character creator anways.
It’s like an appendix to the human body. Doesn’t serve any function and it’s not going to be missed once removed.
But I like to think that maybe in the future Project Nova can continue using the assets born from all this.
Well, this is definitely disappointing and sad news indeed, not to mention the BS reasons put forth were expected. Obviously over the past few years CCP has shown they have no clue and turned a blind eye to how their in-game changes are negatively affecting player log in numbers and retention.
I for one miss the CCP Devs of old, at least they tried to create and buff new content for the game. This new breed of CCP Devs only know how to nerf stuff in the name of re-balance, they constantly redo stuff that actually works and remove stuff that actually requires rework.
All this crap about freeing up resources, try applying that to other useless in-game features such as weapons animations on ships while entering and exiting warp. Also the animation preview in the modules show info box. Hell I’ll bet less than 1% of players actually engage with that content.
Also as others have stated, remove all the graphic bling of docking lane lights and billboards from the stations, talk about useless content requiring resources.
Other resource aspects of the UI can be trimmed as well, such as the system scanner sweep showing exploration sites that require a probe launcher to find and the navigation course lines showing in space after setting destination. Quite frankly in my opinion the camera tracking option is also both irritating and useless.
There’s a lot more items that can be removed without adversely affecting the game but as usual CCP will ignore that and continue to add more useless graphics fluff to the game in the hope that it will attract and retain more players.
Gotta say after 9 yrs of playing this game I’m now seriously disillusioned with CCP and the game overall.
I like the CQ. Why not just leave it be? I connect better to a game seeing a person than an inanimate object like a ship. Even if it is just inside the hangar.
I know, why don’t you bring back the old character generation features that EVE had when it first came out, since you’ll be regressing the game.
CCP promised walking in stations, then they scaled back to strutting in broom closet with more work to come when they decided that they had a compelling gameplay feature to add.
Then, seeing as so few people were using the feature, they are removing it.
I would flip it around: one in thirty players were using CQ even though it had no compelling gameplay.
It really bothers me, actually. Like, I don’t understand why CCP cuts content that they never iterate on. It’s a seven year old product of a dream that came too early for its time; a product that was literally never touched again since implementation. Of course no-one uses it. The fact that it took seven years to decide to throw it on the wood pile is sheer amazement in itself, but what’s more amazing is the recurring theme:
Implement feature
Doesn’t work out as expected
Never iterate on it to breathe new life into it or have it work as expected
Get frustrated and cut the feature
EDIT: “While some of these man hours will go into producing new content, a large proportion of them will be dedicated to new engineering efforts that will improve and advance the technologies that we use, bringing better visual fidelity EVE Online client and allowing the team to build on technologies that improve its performance and reliability.”
right decision, but this should have happened sooner. If nobody is using a feature and you would have to rewrite it anyway if you would want to expand it, there really is only one option: to remove it.
If it allows features like an improved hangar, a 64bit client and less maintanance cost for CCP - even better.
