Prop Wash
GoonWaffe
Goonswarm Federation
79
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Posted - 2013.06.26 11:52:00 -
[1] - Quote
Dear CCP guy,
Don't mistake correlation for causation. The Sparking Transmitter was a particularly bad example for you to pick and here's why.
The pre-patch Sparking Transmitter was ten kinds of a mess. First off, the loot was awful. Just awful. A couple datacores, maybe some parts to make data interfaces. So it wasn't worth the time, but even if you did give it a try, the site itself was particularly painful for a few reasons. It was clustered around an eye-rending sort of nova thing, ensuring that you could barely look at your screen, and it had a whole bunch of structures littered around and so it was very easy to get stuck on one. This was a bad thing, because the site itself was programmed to spawn an overly large amount of elite guristas frigates and cruisers, and it would drop them right on top of you, and so if you got stuck on a structure you'd be in some very big trouble. As a point of reference, my Tengu has never been as close to blowing up as it was doing one of these sites (due mainly to the mix of elite webbing frigs, ECM cruisers and elites doing thermal damage). You couldn't take care of the site from a distance, because the spawns would only happen once you'd accessed a container. You had to do it in a tanked ship, which since it was Guristas meant you had to do it in a kin/therm tank, which is the shields special, but using a shield tank meant you had only one or two slots remaining for a hacking module, and since no tanking ship has a hacking bonus (until Odyssey) meant you were sitting on each individual container for minutes at a time waiting for it to open. When it did, you could loot your 3m worth of datacores.
So that was long, but the point was that Sparking Transmitters were so bad pre-patch that they weren't worth running. So to compare your new Odyssey sites to those old hacking sites simply means that you now have a site worth running, rather than a site that is well-designed or well-balanced. For the record, there's a long way to go with data and relic sites. The idea of the spew container could use some work, but there's also a lot of work to be done with loot tables. Do you know why people like relic sites more? It's because t2 salvage is valuable. Hacking isn't as popular because it isn't as valuable, because there's really nobody left in EVE that wants a data interface that does not already own one. You kindly gave us cans with hundreds of m3s worth of data interface parts, and I promptly jettison those parts because they aren't even valuable enough to ship back to Jita. Nobody wants rigging skillbooks, or racial encryption methods skillbooks, and they're worth about as much room in my cargohold as the datasheets that nominally are the "gag gifts" from the data mini-containers.
I don't mind the new hacking minigame. This is an MMORPG, and any money-making activity in an MMO necessarily has to involve a certain amount of tedium. As far as tedium goes, the minigame compares favorably to "shooting red crosses" and "shooting rocks" and has a lot less swing than combat sites, where you can go for hours and have nothing to show but tags and ammo.
So this was an extreme effortpost but the tl;dr is this: Congratulations CCP on upgrading data and relic sites from "non-functional" to "somewhat worth the time." Don't look at rising numbers and mistake it for a compliment. Oh, and in terms of practical suggestions - shorten the amount of time it takes to click on a node. Currently the interface restricts those of us who know what we're doing from going at a comfortable speed because you have to wait the several seconds it takes to reveal what was underneath (and therefore blow through powerups). We're meant to be fighting the game, not the interface.
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