Von Keigai
9
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Posted - 2013.05.23 14:28:00 -
[1] - Quote
First, I agree with others in that this is not a system to be spending a lot of developer time on. But given that you appear to want to spend developer time on it anyway, here are my opinions.
Since the cert system is not connected to anything in-game, there's no reason to get them other than to stop EVEMon from bugging you. (That's the only reason I know about them.) One thing I'd like to see done is that certs are awarded automatically. That way, EVEMon does not bug me and I don't have to waste time in-game getting certs just to shut it up.
Certs should not be public. Having the option to publicize them is fine, given that it is already there, although I cannot see why anyone would use it. It would be much more useful, though, if there could be the option to restrict publicity to useful groups. Particularly to corp and alliance, but also maybe by standings.
I love the idea of allowing players to define certs, making them a cross between a medal and an achievement and a diploma. However, I also think doing this would require a lot of developer time. Too much for what it gets. However I would use it if it existed.
Others in this thread have given good analysis and criticism of the cert system. The existing certs have no clear purpose and are not very useful. This has to be priority #1: no matter what fancy UI you come up, if the certs aren't good your work is wasted. So, I think one pretty easy thing you could do is go to the CSM and get them to review every certificate, revising and updating the set of skills in each one. Remove certificates that are not useful. Add certs for useful things. This does not seem like it should take much developer time at all; you just need to twiddle a database. No new code is needed. This seems like just the sort of thing the CSM would be really good for.
To get to solo newbs, I'd like to see you implement some limited in-game uses of (some) certs. The obvious thing to use here is missions. Make all agents require increasingly difficult certs. If you don't have a cert that an agent requires, he should be able to tell you about it and point you at the cert system, and give you some snotty message like "You don't have the skills to complete a level 1 mission. Come back when you have learned [link]Core Basic[/link]", or whatever. Thus, newbs would get an in-game pointer to the cert system. And assuming that you've revised the certs to be useful, this should actually help guide the newbie in the right direction. |