Saturday 25 May 2013

Cliffs Notes: Background material for discussion of Odyssey Hacking

Hacking Minigame

Officially, the design influence was games like Rogue and Munchkin. During FanFest a few of us had a brief conversation on Twitter about the hacking game: during that conversation a couple of different games were mentioned, being Deus Ex and the old Amiga game Paradroids.
What follows are my "Cliffs Notes" on these four games: Deus Ex hacking, Paradroids hacking, Munchkin and Rogue.

Odyssey Exploration Hacking Is Broken By Design

Here's the official feedback thread for exploration hacking. This is a rare case where the players are actually better at game design than the CCP devs.

Thursday 23 May 2013

On The Forums Today

On The Forums Today

Here are some galnet postings I stumbled across today.

Features and Ideas Discussion

Discussion about changing lasers to allow a capsuleer to bias towards EM or Thermal damage. The basic idea is that all crystals currently focus on EM damage which most armour is more resistant to, while other weapon systems are able to select for explosive or thermal damage, which typically isn't as highly resisted in shields or armour as other damage types.

Some people need help learning how to manage new players in PvP corporations.

There is still more to be done with revamping EVE's PVE. A long time ago I was keen to have all missions tuned to be flyable with PVP style fittings, and to have NPCs behave a little smarter. We now have the Level One AI, it would be nice to have NPCs flying more player-like ships rather than wimpy things that can only beat you by throwing superior numbers and spamming DPS. CCP still need to follow up on providing more storyline missions so that people flying Distribution missions can get a Distribution storyline instead of Shipyard Theft or Materials for War Preparation.

There is (another) thread discussing the removal of attributes.

Tora Bushido would like alliance-level player notes. That is, alliance-wide versions of the "notes" tab on a character's info window.

No feedback on IRC-style chat highlighting since CCP Sisyphus responded at the end of February. I did raise the idea of having alliance, corp and player-created chat channels available as an IRC service during the Web round table with CCP Alice at FanFest 2013. We also raised the idea of mail available as an IMAP service (and potentially as an SSMTP service) and calendars available as a WebDAV iCal service. No doubt CCP will decide to follow the NIH route to awesomeness though :(

The Escort Carrier proposal is still bumping around in the darkness of F&I. The ability to fly 10 drones would allow an escort carrier pilot to "assist" two rookies with firepower and reppers during PVE, and I believe would fill the hole between Logistics cruisers and Carriers.

People still don't like space camouflage.

That foolish notion of separating all empire space with lowsec borders is still bumbling around.

Someone thinks the Mining Foreman Mindlink is too expensive.

The idea of scaling damage as fleet size increases has reared its head again.

It would be nice to have an agent finder for locator agents. Locator agent locator maybe?

CCP needs to sort out their thinking on the issue of logging in to change skills. I am convinced that what will encourage players to stick around in the game longer is remote chat: if there is someone to talk to you are less likely to log out. If there is someone in game chatting to you you are more likely to log in to start with. Exposing the skill queue to the web (or mobile applications) can come after remote chat, but it must be delivered. Yes, I wrote an essay in response to that thread.

There is a suggestion that the undocking animation should involve the ship leaving the pad and slowly moving down the tunnel.

Aquila Sagitta would like audible prompts to warn of fleet broadcasts.

The idea of hacking abandoned POSes raises its head again.

Allow players to build, probe down and destroy star gates.

No word from CCP yet on the topic of off grid boosting.

As for the rest of the threads in Features & Ideas discussion today? The forum continues to demonstrate that many players make really bad game designers.

Tuesday 21 May 2013

Account Consolidation: Mara's Way

CCP has announced that they will allow players to pay a PLEX to allow training a second character on the same account for 30 days. I'd like to go further than this, with the ability to consolidate accounts and pay for specific services as they are needed.