EVE Online - Revelations tomorrow

[Jape]

Looks like CCP wants more noobs in game because new chars start with around 800k skill points after revelations.

Rest of the stuff here.

[HRose]

As I commented months ago when the features were announced, it's fun to see at them from another perspective, The WoW perspective.

Even Eve-Online can be inspired and "copy" WoW. And what it is incredible is that they are doing this without making look things out of place. I mean, you would think that adapting fantasy game mechanics to spaceship game wouldn't be trivial.

So, this is what we have:

Rigs - In Eve "rigs" are modules that change a ship's setting in a permanent way. So they aren't modules that you can switch on the fly, but adaptations to the structure of the ship that till now weren't possible. In WoW these are the "socketed items" that Blizzard is going to add with the expansion. They also involve the "hardware" (in WoW: your gear), they allow to specialize it more and they are also permanent.

Contract system - In Eve this is a powerful tool that allows to set auctions but also tasks that can be seen as player created quests. Obviously in WoW this is the Auction House, made a bit more powerful and deep.

Combat Boosters - In Eve these will be temporary bonuses that will likely be used during combat. Combat Boosters are crafted through some new mini-professions. In WoW these are the "potions", they are crafted through the professions and have a temporary effect.

And there's also a mix of enchanting & disenchanting (invention & salvaging in Eve) made functional to the game.

So yeah, Eve-Online is adding auction houses, socketed items and potions :)

It's actually odd that even CCP didn't use those comparison to explain better how those new toys work. Maybe they want to appear original ;)

[JM]

HRose: Horseshit. Contract system equivalent to the AH? Don't make me laugh.

[HRose]

A part of it, sure.



"Current bid", "Buyout price", and a vague "Time left".

It is obviously inspired by WoW, then made much more powerful (as I wrote) because it will become the backend for the Factional Warfare system that they'll add later (where NPC corps will offer missions and where CCP will take out another feature from WoW: the battlegrounds).

CCP guys have always admitted that they are huge fans of WoW. It's pretty obvious that they are trying to play with those concepts.

[Cougar]

Rigs are to ships like Implants are to clones.

~C~

[Jape]

HRose is talking like WoW devs invented every feature found in games.

Socketed items/boosting item stats? WoW sure wasnt first to use these. And this is just addition to ship modules which has been part of EVE since the game launched.

Potions/drugs? Yeah. obviously wow was the first ever to use these, if we dont count about every single roleplaying game ever created :p

Salvaging stuff? Right... WoW was again first to use this feature. (lol). Which btw, has been in EVE for years (modules -> minerals), they just improved the system.

Sure, _part_ of the contract system has similarities to wow AH. But thats about it.

EDIT: BTW, you forgot the new seamless starmap, its obviously cloned from WoW too because WoW map can be zoomed in/out :)

[HRose]

Oh well, I need to explain everything?

OF COURSE it was a provocation. The point, and a general one, is that you can always abstract game design till a point that you CAN compare apples to oranges.

I used WoW as an example simply because it is the one more widely recognizable. But what I meant is that influences come from everywhere, even between a fantasy and sci-fi game.

The point is that is silly even to say who copied what, and my tone was ironic.

By the way, even the exclamation marks on top of NPC heads weren't invented by WoW, but it's after WoW has used them that everyone else also added them.

You can find all kind of ideas represented in older games, but it's obvious that the power of influence of a blockbuster is greater, even if it didn't invent anything.

[HRose]

Btw, there's a new dev blog that explains the reasonings behind the character creation changes:

Until now, people have been able to create over 1.400 possible character combinations. Thereof, 126 characters yielded under 6000 SP, but a player who got lucky (or knew the game enough to know what to pick) could get over 303.000 with one of the combinations. Furthermore, hundreds of combinations resulted in less than 20.000 SP, while only about 20 resulted above 275.000 SP.

A player realizing 4 weeks into the game that they could have started with over fifty times more SP with a few different choices (perhaps made in ignorance or by mistake) is bound to become a little miffed.

The new character creation does not punish those that are unlucky or don’t notice or realize the importance of SP this early on, since the maximum difference between the high and low of 800-810.000 is close to 1%. It is in line with the EVE vision that the gamers should be minimally subject to luck and maximally subject to skill. And it is not reasonable to assume that every potentially skillful pilot gets exposed to the correct data before booting the game up for the first time.

[Lorini]

Originally Posted by Jape

Looks like CCP wants more noobs in game because new chars start with around 800k skill points after revelations.

Rest of the stuff here.

Hmm, those look pretty good! Wonder if it's worth re-subbing.....I quit because it seemed like it would be years and finding an uber guild before I could get anywhere.

Lorini

[Soapyfrog]

Originally Posted by HRose

Contract system - In Eve this is a powerful tool that allows to set auctions but also tasks that can be seen as player created quests. Obviously in WoW this is the Auction House, made a bit more powerful and deep.

Yes true... except that the original market system is actually the "equivalent" to the WoW AH only better, since you can also buy NPC items from it. So The originla and current market system = WoW AH + all npc vendors. Also the Market allows you to post lots of any size for any amount of time (i.e. you can have a stack of 900k items up for sale for a year if you want).

Lastly the market does not suffer from extortionary fees like the WoW AH does. So in the case of the Market, it was already better and deeper and more powerful that the WoW AH.

The contracts system is there to replace Escrow and player made Missions, plus add a whole pile of new functions so you can make limited trust inter corporation deals. This doesnt have anything to do with the WoW AH, except for the feature which also allows to auction extremely high value or incredibly rare items which cannot be sold on the market.

So you inital blanket statement was quite inaccurate as I am sure you will admit.

[Aeon221]

How complex are these contracts? I've been having a running argument with a few friends that contracts are (or are going to become) essential in a ton of mmos.

One use I could think of for EVE would be corps issuing bonds. Can that (or does that) actually happen?

[Soapyfrog]

I am curious to find out since I have not been able to get on the test servers and see the new system personally ahead of time.

[Jape]

Originally Posted by HRose

...and my tone was ironic.

Sarcasm and irony are two things that dont work very well on internet gaming forums :)

[Mark Asher]

This stuff all sounds cool, but the idea of starting over in a new game and the sheer block of time I’d have to devote is just really offputting. WoW is probably my last MMO for some time. I’d rather just spend my time in it than play a new game.

[JM]

HRose: Forgive me if I'm being dense, but isn't that basically ingame eBay rather than a WoW-ripoff? Both games taking from the same source?

EVE's had ingamebrowser auctions for a while, of course.

Aeon: I believe there's a bonds system, yes.

Lorini: Several corps will happily take all sorts of newbies - GoonSquad are the most famous of those.

[HRose]

Originally Posted by Mark Asher

This stuff all sounds cool, but the idea of starting over in a new game and the sheer block of time I’d have to devote is just really offputting. WoW is probably my last MMO for some time. I’d rather just spend my time in it than play a new game.

Actually looking and learning a new game/world is the fun part. It's when you got a grasp of things that it becomes duller.

Yours is the mentality of the one who would go after RMT and buy a good position in the game, instead of playing through.

It's like you say: "What? Diablo 3? I don't want to start again from level 1 and whack mobs."

[HRose]

I'm patching.

[Ryan A]

I always hated HRose for his grandiouse pronouncements but this one really takes the cake. He's actually telling somebody what is fun for them.

[HRose]

Well, I guess I'll try tomorrow:

Your credit card could not be validated.

* Unable to contact card authorizer. No Route. Please try again in a few moments [0048]

[Soapyfrog]

Give me your credit card number and I'll see if I can fix it for you ;)

[ridge]

The market system for Eve is more akin to the looking for group system of wow. bad.

[Backov]

Originally Posted by ridge

The market system for Eve is more akin to the looking for group system of wow. bad.

I'll agree with this nonsensical troll entirely if by "bad" you mean "better than every other one ever implemented in any game, but still not the one that Jesus would program."

Otherwise you're just wrong.

[Lurb]

The market system of Eve is really The Market System. You can play just that, sitting in a station, with an occasional short shuttle trip and have lots of fun and win Eve, yeah!

The supply/demand/price/availability dynamics are awesome to watch and the market game is both deep and wide. It has a very "organic" feeling to it: whereas other implementations are full of arbitrary and artificial constraints that never seem to work, the EVE markets survive farmers, macroers, ebayers and monopolists without using gameplay kludges like "bind on pickup".

I'm starting to think I stopped playing because I started having second thoughts about my socialist-leaning point of view on real economics. That's how well it works.

[Unicorn McGriddle]

Psh, the EVE market's all right for EVE, but if housing in real life was T2, you'd start wondering what the fuck was up with those blueprints pretty damn quick.

[BlindSwordsman]

Originally Posted by HRose

As I commented months ago when the features were announced, it's fun to see at them from another perspective, The WoW perspective.

Even Eve-Online can be inspired and "copy" WoW. And what it is incredible is that they are doing this without making look things out of place. I mean, you would think that adapting fantasy game mechanics to spaceship game wouldn't be trivial.

So, this is what we have:

Rigs - In Eve "rigs" are modules that change a ship's setting in a permanent way. So they aren't modules that you can switch on the fly, but adaptations to the structure of the ship that till now weren't possible. In WoW these are the "socketed items" that Blizzard is going to add with the expansion. They also involve the "hardware" (in WoW: your gear), they allow to specialize it more and they are also permanent.

Contract system - In Eve this is a powerful tool that allows to set auctions but also tasks that can be seen as player created quests. Obviously in WoW this is the Auction House, made a bit more powerful and deep.

Combat Boosters - In Eve these will be temporary bonuses that will likely be used during combat. Combat Boosters are crafted through some new mini-professions. In WoW these are the "potions", they are crafted through the professions and have a temporary effect.

And there's also a mix of enchanting & disenchanting (invention & salvaging in Eve) made functional to the game.

So yeah, Eve-Online is adding auction houses, socketed items and potions :)

It's actually odd that even CCP didn't use those comparison to explain better how those new toys work. Maybe they want to appear original ;)

I think it is such a disservice to say these CPP are copying WOW. They were out before WOW and were one of the few MMOs that were not effected by WOW drastically in numbers. In fact their numbers went up in a steady fashion since WOWS release - what other MMOs can say that? I played EVE for about 2 years and would still be playing if it were not for work. It is by far the best MMO out there in my mind.

The wow auction house could really use some pointers from the EVE system - infact all games designers should take a look at this system as it actually provides for a very robust economy.

[Lurb]

I might have gotten a little bit carried away, but I sure wish CCP could come and fix "real real state" in these parts. With autocannons.

[Hanacker]

Huh, looking through the patch notes, it's going to take a while to figure out how exactly things have really changed. Looks like combat is going to be very different. Too bad I can't play for another week or so. I'm going into withdrawl.

Invention may be interesting since I have 3 or 4 Research agents cooking at the moment with nothing to show for it.

I'm actually considering going through some of the new tutorial sections (Boosters, Kill Rights, Cosmos, etc.) even though I've been playing the game for over a year.

Advanced learning skills prerequisites have been lowered from 5 to 4

Awesome, even though for the most part it's too late for me. Advanced Charisma here I come!

Jump Clones now require either 8.0 personal or corporation standing, not both.

Thank god, not that it matters for me anymore.

Oh, and I forgot a big one - Warp to 0km and no more insta bookmarks. I'm not sure that's the solution I would have chosen but I certainly don't mind.

[HRose]

From the perspective of a noob character not much seems changed.

The new map system is nice and, as CCP would say, "classy", but it isn't more useful than how it was. I find annoying some decisions with the UI, for example the constant pop-up as you move the mouse around, sometimes when you are just trying to pan the view and instead the mouse pointer loses focus to one of those menus. An option to turn off the mouseover actions and just trigger them on a mouse button click could have helped a lot.

The other two things you notice right away are the wrecks instead of the loot cans and the contract system.

The wrecks need work because as they are implemented right now are just an added annoyance. Before you would blow up a ship, go loot it, and the loot can would disappear. With the new system the wrecks sit around in space and it's really hard to know what you looted and what you didn't. You know, the kind of problem that in WoW was solved with the sparkles ;)

The contract system is what I expected. Right now most of the offers I saw were scamming attempts (courier missions where the "collateral" cost was hundreds time larger than the reward, hoping to get rich quickly in the case someone gets the mission and then forgets about it), and some legit auctions. All the other types of contracts aren't possible if not for your corporation or alliance, so not open for the public.

I still don't see what is so much better than WoW's system. Yes, it's more powerful. For example instead of selling one item or a stack (as in WoW) you can bundle all kind of stuff together as a custom package. And there are more "freeform" contracts only available to your corporation or alliance (by the way, is it possible to create logistic groups within the same corp and open a contract only to that group instead of the whole corp?). It will become more interesting when, with the Factional Warfare late in 2007, NPC corps will open contracts and all sort of missions for the players.

For now it's one of those features that sound "cool" but that I doubt will be used all that much. Outside of the standard auctions and scam attempts.

Oh! I forgot the insta-jumps. In this case I'm curious to know how they'll affect PvP...

[Waltzer]

Originally Posted by Hanacker

Oh, and I forgot a big one - Warp to 0km and no more insta bookmarks. I'm not sure that's the solution I would have chosen but I certainly don't mind.

Well, Warp To 0, anyways. They didn't remove any bookmarks.

[Waltzer]

Originally Posted by HRose

Oh! I forgot the insta-jumps. In this case I'm curious to know how they'll affect PvP...

On the alliance level, not much at all, since really, who travels without instas? For lowsec pirates, well, they'll continue to prey on the young and stupid in the belts. :-P