Blog Banter #65–Attributes

Welcome to the continuing monthly EVE Blog Banters and our 65th edition! For more details about what the blog banters are visit the Blog Banter page.

[stextbox id=”black” caption=”Blog Banter #65″]

This months Banter was suggested by Jakob Anedalle

“I liked the discussion on The Neocom’s recent “Tinfoil Factory” on the future of attributes in Eve. Perhaps piggyback on that and invite those folks into the banter as well?
http://theneocom.com/2015/06/21/the-neocom-presents-the-tinfoil-factory-pilot-attributes/

Attributes and Skills
Does Eve need attributes? It’s been discussed a lot recently. Unlike other MMO’s your characters attributes don’t make a difference in day-to-day gameplay. They simply set how fast you train a skill. Is it time to remove attributes from the game or totally revamp their purpose? Do they add a level of complexity to the game that is not needed? If you really need to use a 3rd party application to get the most from it should it be in the game? Should they be repurposed with each attribute adding a modifier to your ship? Are attributes a relic from the past or are they an important part of Eve – You make your decision and deal with the consequences?

Banter on!

[/stextbox]

 

What I remember from creating my first character is that I had no clue what I was doing. Which probably sounds familiar to a lot of people. I thought intelligence sounded good so I went with a somewhat balanced Caldari character. I gave some more thought towards the next characters, they had more perception and willpower so gun skills and the like didn’t take as long.

Anyway, I think the system seem to be outdated now and it needs a revamp. It would be nice to keep in a little rpg and replace it with something else instead of getting rid of it altgether.

I was thinking something along the line of damage (dps), damage reduction (tanking), logistics (healing), learning (to speed up skills marginally, to keep a little bit of the old system in this new one) and tax reduction (for the merchants among us). Maybe some sort of discovery attribute as well for a scanning / loot bonus ?

That would just about cover it all. You can even keep the current attributes even and give them a new meaning. This would also be nice for alts, you can specialize them a little bit.

Of course these would all be somewhat marginally better, otherwise you get into the situation where you must have a certain spec to do something and I would think you would want to avoid that as a game maker.

So those are my thoughts, you can read more here :

Cloaky Bastard – Useless Attributes
Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah – Attribution
Eveoganda – My Brain Hurts
Notes from New Eden – At Rebukes
The Ancient Gaming Noob – Not for Attribution
Torchwood Archives – Attributes and Skills
Sand, Cider and Spaceships – Useful Attributes
Target Caller: BB65 – Easiest One Ever
Lexx Jonlan Tweets. I don’t think he gets the BLOG Banter bit!
Low Sec Lifestyle – Blog Banter #65 – What is Interesting?
Crossing Zebras http://crossingzebras.com/a-farewell-to-attributes/ and also http://crossingzebras.com/cz-minutes-attributes/
Jakob’s Eve Checklist – Attribution Needed?

Eve True Stories

Never heard of it before, but the comic Eve True Stories is part of the new Humble Gamer Comics Bundle. You can pay what you want in order to get it, as it’s in the Tier 1 selection.

Tier 1
Artbook: The Art of Remember Me by Aleksi Briclot
Comic: EVE: True Stories by Daniel Way
Comic: Fallout: New Vegas – All Roads by Chris Avellone
Comic: Plants vs. Zombies: Lawnmageddon by Paul Tobin

Tier 2 Beat the Average
Price: 6,94€ | Price may change over time
Artbook: The Art of Bioshock Infinite by Julian Murdoch
Comic: Halo: Initiation by Brian Reed
Comic: The Guild Volume 1 by Felicia Day
Comic: Valve Presents Vol. 1: The Sacrifice and Other Steam-Powered Stories by Various Artists

Tier 3 Beat the Average + $5
Price: 11,45€ | Price may change over time
Comic: Dragon Age Volume 1: The Silent Grove by David Gaider
Comic: Mass Effect: Foundation Volume 1 by Mac Walters

 

Blogbanter #63–Modding

Welcome to the continuing monthly EVE Blog Banters and our 63rd edition! For more details about what the blog banters are visit the Blog Banter page.
* * * * *
Super Kerr Induced Nanocoating, new structures that can be fit like ships with modules, the promise of player built stargates… the ability to shape your space and change the look of your ships is finally coming to EVE. What other customization options of EVE would you like to have? What would you like to do to be able to shape space and environments? What would you like to change just for you in the client or in any 3rd party tools?

First thing that came to my mind was modding. Modding as in mods for the client. So you can basically make your own UI. Like some other games and MMOs have, for example world of warcraft. The biggest problem with this is that the best mods would become mandatory in PVP. As they might give someone an unfair advantage, or put yourself at a disadvantage if you don’t use them. For example in wow, everybody uses Deadly Boss Mods, you put yourself at a serious disadvantage if you don’t.

I don’t think we’ll see this happen in the foreseeable future. It would take a lot of development resources to adapt the client for mods and even more testing. Also it’s a bit of a support nightmare. Mods can screw things up, especially outdated ones. First thing in wow to do when something goes wrong is ‘disable all mods’ and see if it happens again.

Would it be cool ? Yes, especially because the things people will come up with is amazing. Things added to the client you might never have thought of. Some mods in wow became standard in the default ui, because everybody was using them and were a serious improvement over the default.

More participants over at ninveah.com.

Fanfest 2015

In case you missed it (yeah right ;)), it’s that time of the year again, it’s Eve Fanfest 2015. For those not able to go, CCP has provided a live stream over on twitch. Of course you should also follow #tweetfleet and / or #evefanfest on Twitter :). Don’t forget about reddit either !

Here is the program for the coming 3 days:

Fanfest 2015 FREE HD stream schedule

Thursday 19th March 2015

10:45 Warm up for Fanfest!
12:00 Welcome to Fanfest & the Future of VR
13:00 Sovereignty 5.0
14:00 Game Design Panel
15:00 Meet the Valkyries
16:00 Bro, Do You Even Test?
17:00 Eve Online Keynote
18:00 Eve Symphony orchestra performance from Fanfest 2013

Friday 20th March

10:45 Stream goes live!
11:00 Concept Art Live Session
12:00 Make Eve Real – Creating Planetary Civilizations
13:00 Survival Guide in Legacy Code
14:00 Ship & Module Balance
15:00 CSM Panel
16:00 The Future of Spaceship Rendering
17:00 World’s Collide Tournament: Tranquility vs Serenity

Saturday 21st March

10:45 Stream goes live
11:00 UI Modernization Panel
12:00 Art & Graphics Panel
13:00 Future Vision of Structures
14:00 Using Science to Help Newbros
15:00 CCP Security – Better Safe than Sorry!
16:00 Valkyrie Tournament Final
17:00 Closing Ceremony

 

Phoebe

The website for Phoebe, the patch that will be released next week, as I write this, is up. Of course the biggest change is the 0.0 movement change as it’s called on the site. It stirred up a lot of unrest on the forums. But since I have no involvement in 0.0, the Sensor scanner change is the most interesting one for me. Living in a wurmhole means you do  a lot of scanning, so this change, well it’s more an enhancement really, is welcome.

Scan and display bookmarks, missions and other locations relevant to your day-to-day play. Color-coded markers and display filtering makes it easy for you to quickly spot the marker you are looking for.

And finally an endless skill queue ! About time really ;).

BB #59 – Terrain

Welcome to the continuing monthly EVE Blog Banters and our 59th edition!

[stextbox id=”black”]

For more details about what the blog banters are visit the Blog Banter page.
This month’s version comes from commenter Zappity who asks:

Probably been done before… What about local force projection (as opposed to the longer distance force projection that is often talked about)? I think of ‘terrain’ in EVE to be how systems are mapped together by gates. Strong tactics which exploit terrain have historically been extremely important in deciding battle outcomes. How does this apply in EVE in the presence of cynos?

Related to this, you have the option to explore the topic of wormhole systems with effects (Black Holes, Cataclymismic variablestar, etc) and if similar environmental effects on certain grids/deadspace or system wide should be explored for known space?

[/stextbox]

Terrain and space is a little hard to simulate. As Kirith mentions line of fire in his entry using structures and such, that would definitely be interesting, but usually, space is very empty. I don’t know the first thing about Cynos, so I won’t be going there.

Now regarding the effects, like wormholes have. Over at the Eve wiki you can check out the various effects. The pulsar and wolf effects would most noticeably change the environment for the battle. This will decide whether you are going in armor tanked or shield tanked. It will give the ‘home team’ a definite advantage I’d say. Other effects will affect ammo type and or weapon types.

Would this be suitable for known space ? Maybe in 0.0. In hisec if you would implement this in a system with agents, it would make mission running very trivial, or very hard. People would flock to the system with the generally known best effects, creating new over populating problems. You could of course rotate the effects, not sure if that would work. I am sure someone would come up with a website where you can check the best effect with lvl 4 agent and such.

All in all I think implementing something like this in K-space would spice things up, but in Hisec it would create new problems, and also make things more confusing for new players. Maybe try it out in a few systems first ? Or would people flock over there then ? Eve is so complicated sometimes Winking smile.

More participants at http://www.ninveah.com/2014/09/blog-banter-59-terrain.html.

Wormhole Colours

This devblog from a couple of days ago explains how the wormhole colours will get updated in the upcoming ‘Oceanus’ patch. Importantly, you can still see the nebula of the system you are traveling to in the middle of the wormhole and the wormhole will still wobble to indicate how much life it has left in it. In case you’re wondering what those colours are, check out Tigerear’s blog post on the subject matter. It has everything you wanted to know and more :).

You can read more on Oceanus in this blogpost. No big changes as far as I can tell. The new cloaking effect might be nice though.

UPDATE: Patch notes have been released. The update will come out at sept. 30th.