I decided to start a thread for Eve gamers to put forwards their ideas for making Eve better. This should not be a thread where people criticize Eve or complain about gankers (There are threads for that), but instead here you can have your say about what you think could make this awesome game even more awesome for everyone.
I’m going to use salvage drones as my example for an idea that could make Eve more interesting. In my submission in this thread I will propose the idea of drone AIs “learning” and also “wearing out”.
My Salvaging Skill is at Level 4, but my salvage drones are still rather dumb when it comes to salvaging and quite often they return from a wreck with nothing. So I propose that an “old drone” should be able to salvage a bit better than a nice shiny new one just due to the AI having the benefit of more experience. In essence, the more something is used, the better it gets at what it does.
Basically a new drone would have it’s own inbuilt set of skill points. Despite my own Salvage Skills, it would start with zero XP points. As it’s new and bright and shiny it’s structural “integrity” would be 100%.
Over time and with use this drone learns. The more it is used the more skill points it gets and the better it gets at its job. But on the other hand it also gets older, gets scratched and dented and a bit beat up, and eventually will need to be replaced. This could be reflected in it’s “speed”. 900m/s is the speed of a shiny new salvage drone. What if as hull integrity fell this was reflected in a loss of speed and perhaps even efficiency till eventually it was time to reprocess that old worn out drone and buy a new one? It just wore out.
This concept of “entropy” through constant use could also be reflected onto ships such that over time they become slower and handle not as well. At these times some well earned time spent in a repair shop having an overhaul might be needed.
Just a thought. Has anyone else had one of those “Eve would be awesome if…” moments? If so do share here.
not keen on the drone idea
entropy for ships doesnt make much sense seeing as we constantly repair them and get free repairs while tethered
they do get dirty if you dont use them though
also there is a board for player ideas
Skills and other salvage modificators don’t affect what salvage you get, only the chance to successfully salvage a wreck (higher chance → less tries → overall faster).
As an industrialist, I would love to have stuff wear out or go obsolete and the database already keeps track of thermodynamic damage from overheating …
The question is whether it’s a good use of limited development resources. Every time we suggest a new feature we need to ask 2 questions:
What are the interdependencies - what else needs to change in order for this to work.
Of the things the development teams are currently working on what do we want them to set aside to make the time to work on our idea.
Better AI management for drones (salvage) sounds like a better ‘idea’ but adding history to a drone looks a bit over complicated (unnecessary)
But having options like only one salvage drone per wreck (option configure distance) when using multiple salvage drones would be great for example.
My idea for a better eve are more fancy looking UI, I like the old eve UI icons, they were small pictures, now everything is going towards skeleton 2 tone colored objects.
They look much nicer, but they’re way less indicative of what each thing is unless you already know what they do. If you hand those icons to a newbie they’re going to confuse the insurance and fitting icons, the industry, research, and repair icons (or is that reprocessing?), and I honestly have no clue what that person with a target on them is for. The only one of those that I can pick out at a glance is the market.
i was a noob once and i had no problem with the old icons
the new icons are hard to distinguish i have to rely on tooltips to see what they are
and that target was for bounties
Nah, had an easier time with the old icons as a noob. With them being different colours they were easier to goto at a glance.
I’d even argue its just as hard, if not harder, to tell what the new icons do at a glance. Fitting is just a ship rather than a ship with mods pointing to parts of it. The old icon is more intuitive and because of colour more memorable and easier to pick out in a hurry.
Same with assets vs inventory. Both square, but the old ones were different colours and different shapes as well iirc. Contracts and journal are now fairly similar now too. Used to be different colours as well.
Like look at the new icons for fitting and insurance. Same ship, same colour. Just a shield or a halo.
Compared to the old. Different ships, different colours. So easy to distinguish.
Just because you had no issues doesn’t mean no one did. I worked with newbies for a long time well before these icons changed and explaining “no not that ship, the other ship” while not as common as some issues was still common enough to be memorable.
It’s really not. The fitting icon is used pretty consistently throughout the game and even superficially resembles the actual fitting screen.
The colours are pretty much irrelevant unless you already know what the icons do and most people who are familiar with a UI remember it by position first and things like color second.
This whole thing about “different ships and different colours” completely misses my point about being able to tell what the icon does without explicit knowledge. Reprocessing has just a recycling symbol, no weird extra clutter. Market looks like a market, repair has a very visible wrench, the industry is very clearly a factory, ect.
