Wondering why CCP should waste dev time on something that has no real valuer to the game as a whole?
In fact outside of your corp they are completely worthless.

Wondering why CCP should waste dev time on something that has no real valuer to the game as a whole?
In fact outside of your corp they are completely worthless.

Hi,

I am in the awful situation of setting up a program to issue a few thousand medals to players across multiple corporations.

These are my suggestions on how to improve the medal mechanics.

Popularity
IMHO medals aren't that popular in the game as in contrast to corp titles they aren't that visible.
When a player does a Show Info on any other player, the title is displayed prominently at the top while medals require another click to be discovered.

Suggestion
Give medals a prominent space on the character sheet, see http://i.imgur.com/xbnUeuX.png

Handling / Alliance
While the mechanics for creating and issuing medals works fine in small corps, it becomes unmanageable on a larger scale (mass-issuing) or alliance operations.

Alliance
Assume you have an alliance with a few thousand players and want to issue a medal for a large scale operation. Due to the existing mechanics, you need to coordinate with every corporation in the alliance to replicate the medal. Then have people with roles in each corporation to issue the medal to their members.

It would be great if the alliance executer corp could:
a) Create a medal which is automatically available to all member corporations.
b) Issue medals to players on behalf of a member corp.

Medal Creation
Creating a medal is straight forward, the editor is fine. Not sure why there is a 5M ISK sink, but whatever.

Medal Issuing
The issuing of medals (on a larger scale) has a few pitfalls.

(Current) Situation
Assume you have a large corp and want to honor them for achieving a long term goal (VFK by xmas or something). You have 500 pilots who are eligible to receive the medal.

You compile a list of eligible pilots or let them apply to an out-of-game system. Then some poor soul has to issue them one-by-one. To make things worse, medals can be issued multiple times to the same pilot, so in order to prevent duplicates you either need to check each pilot before issuing them or use out-of-game tools to keep issued medals in sync (and they are on a 6h caching interval). Once all medals have been issued - thanks to medals being ISK sinks - the corp lost 2.5B of their funds.

Now multiply the effort for an alliance wide medal.

ISK sink
Not sure why medals have a cost attached, if this mechanic is wanted for some reason, it would massively help if medals could be issued where the player needs to pay for them. The player receives a medal and when selecting to make them visible, they have to pay the CCP fee. People are proud of their achievements and are willing to pay for the fee themselves.

Multi issuing
Medals can be issued multiple times to the same pilot. This makes mass handling of a to-be-issued list a complicated operation (for each pilot you need to make multiple clicks to check if a pilot already has the medal before issuing). It would be nice if the client would warn the issuer that the medal has already been issued before.

Mass issuing
In a perfect world we would either have an interface where we could paste in a couple of hundred names and issue the medals all at once or even better have a CREST API where we could issue them automatically.


@CCP: Feel free to reach out in case you have any questions

kiu