Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Looking Ahead into 2014

Happy New Year! Hope you aren't suffering too badly after last night.

So what does 2014 hold for us? Well we don't really know. CCP these days are keeping their cards close to their chest. Since "POS-Rage-Gate", CCP has been really careful about suggesting any plans. Fanfest 2012 was "Look at this that we would like to do, isn't this cool!" but Fanfest was 2013....... 

"Details on anything? Nope! Not after the POS revamp rage! You'll only cry if we throw an idea out there, you love it and then we find we cannot do it!!! Instead here is Seagull with some flowery words and lots of mentions of the word 'imagine'."

We do know in 2014 that capsuleers will get more 'power' and do stuff that NPC's used to do. There is that SoE battleship. We are also getting new space... where ever that may be. So what could 2014 hold for us? Here are my hopes and my fears for Eve Online in 2014.


Hope - T3 Frigates
CCP has said they wanted to do more T3 hull sizes and that frigates would probably be next as they would be accessible to most. As a Faction War pilot I spend most my time in frigates and destroyers. A T3 frigate sounds fun!

Fear - Fanfest is DUSTfest
My personal opinion is that Fanfest 2012 was better than Fanfest 2013. 2013 had far too much DUST, and certainly very little information about the future of Eve. I swear if I see that picture of Badgers building stargates again or hear the word "Imagine....." again I'll scream.

Hope - Player Created Skill Books
Currently all skill books are either seeded onto the market or bought by LP. What if players could buy 'blank' skill books and could 'download' a copy of the skill into them. You'd need the skill to download at level 5 and you'd need special skills to 'write' the book. But that could be an interesting side-line for many players especailly in low and null sec.

Fear - More Help for the Risk Adverse.
The Mittani.com leaked a post someone made after getting some data off the developer server 'Chaos'. This guy previously predicted RHML and the SoE ships before CCP announced them so he has been right in the past. The deployable structures of D-Scan disruptor and decoy unit appears to be another step to reducing risk in low-sec. The stabbed and cloaky farmers are fapping themselves silly at news of these potential new deployables. People defending their home system will have to warp and enter each plex in turn potentially to check for targets. Pain in the posterior of the highest order.


Hope - DUST514 Becomes a Good Game
I dusted off my PS3 on Monday (pun intended). I had 10gb spare bandwidth at the end of the month so was time to try DUST514 again with its 2.4gb patch!. I enjoy console FPS games and have a 360 too. I started playing DUST in January 2013... and I didn't like it. December 2013 and I still don't like it. I want to like it! I am an Eve Universe fanboy! But the fact is the controls are clunky, the skills and fitting too complicated especially fitting using the gamepad. Movement is not fluid. Grenades behave 'oddly' and teams are not balanced. I played a few games, came to the conclusion its not really gone anywhere in the last few months and packed the PS3 away again. Will try in March time again.... if it is still running. Eve-Offline shows its maxing out at 3,500 peak users. Not a lot for a free "AAA" game!

Fear - Faction War gets no Love
Currently the risk vs reward of Eve Online is very broken in Faction War. You can make 100m ISK per hour easy with a one week old toon, on their Alpha Clone in a stabbed 1m ISK frigate. Currently CCP don't appear to care, and with the development plans moving on, I fear nobody is going to look at Faction War for a long time. We're up to our necks in farmers who won't fight. It's more Benny Hill Online than Eve Online most nights.

Hope - Incarna
I know we'll not get proper walking in stations in 2014 but Hilmar did make reference that we might hear something "May be next year." at Fanfest. I don't want meaningful Avatar gameplay. I don't want anything complex. Just open that door, give us a communal bar where we can deal boosters and shoot the breeze. Put a population cap on the bar (just like the Celtic Cross) if the technology isn't there! Instance the bars! Create corp only bars. Do something!

Fear - The New Space is 0.0 Mk II
Will the 'new space' to be introduced just be 0.0 mark II? The decent areas will be taken by the huge power blocs and the useless areas will be left for the smaller alliances. Will there be wonder and excitement like when wormhole space was opened up.... or will it just be an empty waste land?


3 comments:

  1. About D-Scan disruptor, it was just a typo and intended to be CAN disruptor, so you can relax a bit: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=4012555#post4012555

    As for space barbies, Fozzie and Rise both clearly stated in their interviews, that CCP has a lot of work to do on flying in space and creating Incarna environment takes way too much of their resources. Rise's Reddit Q&A: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1rhv8y/iama_ccp_rise_game_designer_for_eve_online_ama/cdnfa59

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No, no it wasn't.... https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=310620

      Delete
  2. I had a nice idea at one point for player-created skillbooks, as follows:

    When you have a skill at level V, there is a new way you can invest skill points in that skill: writing skillbooks. Each kind of skillbook takes a variable investment in writing time. During this time, you cannot train any skill: your "study time" is being used instead to write books. We have a very good idea on how much ISK skilling time is worth, namely: the price of a PLEX for 720 hours. Therefore, we can calibrate how long it should take to write a skillbook. With PLEX at 600m ISK, an hour of skilling costs 833k ISK. Thus, a skillbook that currently sells for N ISK should require around N/833k hours of "skillbook writing" to create.

    For example, consider a skillbook that currently sells for 1m ISK. A character should be able to write a 1m ISK skillbook in roughly an hour. If exactly a hour, then there is a good profit margin built in. We might set it at 2 hours, under the assumption that the ability to back-convert from subscription cost (which allows many things beyond writing skillbooks) into ISK is not a 1:1 conversion.

    ReplyDelete