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Neutrino Sunset
KDM Corp
Firmus Ixion
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Posted - 2007.12.13 13:48:00 -
[1]
This post originally started life as a response to this thread:
http://oldforums.eveonline.com/?a=topic&threadID=659076
But I veared off topic far enough and quickly enough that I figured I'd start a new thread rather than derail that one. Plus I'm an attention hore so I figured this would be a far more effective way of getting everyone to take notice of what I think.
With regard to the scanner nerf mentioned in the above thread, my somewhat sarcastic response was this:
I believe it's all part of the plan to try and make Eve as dull and bland as possible. CCP want you to have to manually fly to every single belt in a system to rat or mine. It's also a nerf to PvP since pirates can no longer jump a player when they see him engage a particular rat spawn.
It's in line with other such changes like:
'Balancing' all ships so that they are all exactly the same in that each can only have one or two useful setups.
Nerfing carriers in order to make 0.0 logistics even more hard work than it already was.
The scanner change also has the additional bonus of reducing immersion and creating even more ludicrous game mechanics. Not only do NPCs not warp in and out like players, use and/or be effected by ECM, NOS, neutralisers, scramblers, drones (basically every combat mechanic in the game) like players, but now they also fly magic unscannable ships. Brilliant! I've never before seen a space combat game before where the apparent objective was to make the NPC opponents seem as unrealistic as possible.
Personally I'd have preferred it if they made NPCs behave more realistically before they started farting about with improving graphics and adding even more ships, to me the NPCs as currently implemented are one of the biggest things that makes Eve seem like nothing more than an alpha game prototype 4 years on. I mean rats just despawning and winking out of existance while you're actually in the middle of shooting them, how totally crap is that?
Bit off topic I know, bit of a rant, perhaps. It's just one of those blatantly obvious intrusive shortcomings with Eve that really drives me crazy, and CCP's approach (bringing in changes that makes it even worse) indicates to me that they don't seem to consider it to be a problem at all. So I fear it's a situation that will probably only deteriorate. I believe this fear is justified considering the current development roadmap. Specific example: they are going to be bringing us ambulation asap while there is no mention of fixing NPC rats.
And now to totally derail the thread. Where the hell did Marauders come from? All of a sudden every race in the game simultaneously develops a special battleship that when you put weapons on it that have been in the game for years, they all of a sudden do twice as much damage as before, as if by magic! But just to keep them balanced they have the sensor strengths of cruisers. Oh that's sooo belivable. If the Eve back story were actually real I'm sure that's exactly what would have happened, pfft!
If the objective here is to create an immersive MMORPG in which there is richness and variety the content designers need to stop messing about with spreadsheets and wondering how can we quickly and easily add more of the same, and instead start reading more SciFi, get some kind of a vision and start asking how can we start evolving the Eve universe into something rich and vibrant. Because it is my impression that too many changes are instead turning it into some sort of bland samey EFT and spreadsheet driven balanced to buggery FPS.
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Second4ry
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Posted - 2007.12.13 13:48:00 -
[2]
Edited by: Second4ry on 13/12/2007 13:49:00
Edit: Stupid forum settings, this is a continuation post.
And now some positive points in an almost certainly hopeless attempt to ward off all the trolls who will likely jump in here and start whining and boo hooing about 'oh I'm only seeing the negative side blah blah blah...'.
Exploration and encounters. Great, good idea, makes sense. NPCS sitting at belts doing nothing at all or sitting there in haulers full of already refined minerals obviously makes no sense at all so encounters and exploration is a step in what imo is the right direction.
Convoys. Yeah, kinda good too.
And now a couple of suggestions in a probably equally hopeless attempt to ward of the rest of the trolls who might like to whine on about 'oh you're just being unconstructively critical and not putting forward any suggestions to actually improve anything! Whaaa'.
1. Concentrate on making the basic game mechanics believable. Make NPCs behave intelligently and like real players. Make them warp in and out normally, make it so you have to scram them to stop them excaping. Instead of having them sat at belts doing nothing have them actually mine or ambush player miners or just anything that is remotely believable.
2. If you want to add some more ships, instead of just creating blanket ship classes and giving every race one of each type all basically performing exactly the same role exactly as effectively as each other but with slightly different weapon systems. Why not instead refer to and develop the back story and develop each race's vessels in the light of RP as well as technical differences, and bring out ships with different roles for the different races. Then perhaps which race's ships you specialize in will mean something more than whether you use projectile weapons, drones, missiles or lasers.
Well that's what I think, I'd be interested to hear what everyone else thinks.
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Wild Rho
Amarr
GoonFleet
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Posted - 2007.12.13 13:51:00 -
[3]
With regards to NPC AI it has to be kept fairly simple as it requires processing time by the server. The more complex the AI is the more processing required by the server for each NPC spawned meaning a much bigger increase in lag.
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rixtim
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Posted - 2007.12.13 14:00:00 -
[4]
By the way is you actually read the news cronicals ect you will see that all the new ships introed into the game do have an element of backstory to them. I seem to rember an eve cronicle that introed rigs quite nicely.
so CCP does make an effort to have a story element to new things in eve you just need to look.
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Vrabac
Amarr
BALKAN EXPRESS
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Posted - 2007.12.13 14:02:00 -
[5]
I agree with op in most regards, but keep in mind it's and old game. Facelifting like new graphics is easy, drastic changes are near impossible by now. And yes, backstory is there on the character selection screen, but it plays next to no role in actual game for most of us, except when joking.
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Snowcrash Winterheart2
Gallente
Concordia Discors
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Posted - 2007.12.13 14:34:00 -
[6]
 Originally by: Wild Rho
With regards to NPC AI it has to be kept fairly simple as it requires processing time by the server. The more complex the AI is the more processing required by the server for each NPC spawned meaning a much bigger increase in lag.
Hopefully when they get the super computing cluster running it'll allow for an expansion to the AI... as to be quite honest, they are laughably stupid and if NPC's are going to play a part in factional warfare (if it ever arrives) they need to get smart.
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Four paws... four sets of claws. |
Rodj Blake
Amarr
PIE Inc.
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Posted - 2007.12.13 14:52:00 -
[7]
NPC AI doesn't really need to be that much of a priority as humans will always behave more smartly than an NPC for the foreseeable future no matter how many resources are put into the task of making them act believably.
Dulce et decorum est pro imperium mori.
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Jackal79
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Posted - 2007.12.13 15:00:00 -
[8]
Conflict in this game is exclusively centered about fighting other players, because other players can think and AI can't. Fighting AI players is about making isk, if you have some sort of vision of fighting hordes of evil pirates when you rat NPCs... There are better games out there for the purpose of wasting away at your computer as you pointlessly shoot a bunch of computer game bots.
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Zinras
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Posted - 2007.12.13 15:40:00 -
[9]
If you read the news update and backstories, you'd know that major breakthroughs in technology pretty much have to be shared among the empires as the peace treaty says.
Also, it was a corporation that invented the new smaller drives and such, so they can of course sell it to whoever they like and thus everyone gets it eventually anyway.. Not to mention it would only take one person in a multiracial corp to sell a blueprint to an empire NPC navy for them to make their own designs from anyway, if you want a beter reason for them to spread.
For more RP/story related gameplay, I suggest you join an RP corp of sorts.
Regarding NPCs, like previously mentioned, it will require a lot of extra computing power to make rats act more intelligently, and besides that it would ruin the mission runners economy if the rats they fought would simply warp out when they got damaged since they'd get no bounty from them. NPC rats pretty much serve as a way to make ISK and not much else, since the skills you're training are more oriented at shooting other players instead of rats.
I do support the point that the races should have more unique ships. The problem they'd face if all ships were like that is that they'd probably be completely screwed vs certain ships from another race and it would become rock/paper/scissors between ship resists/bonus instead of unique setups. Maybe just add a few T2 unique faction ships that would not effect the game as a whole to become rock/paper/scissors could be an idea.
Just my 2 cents anyway 
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Ed Anger
Weekly World News
Derek Knows Us
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Posted - 2007.12.13 15:43:00 -
[10]
Originally by: Second4ry
1. Concentrate on making the basic game mechanics believable. Make NPCs behave intelligently and like real players. Make them warp in and out normally, make it so you have to scram them to stop them excaping. Instead of having them sat at belts doing nothing have them actually mine or ambush player miners or just anything that is remotely believable.
agreed, most of the npc content now is awful. i dont think you would kill the pvp focus of the game by having a more believable environment around it.
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Pitt Bull
Caldari Naval Reserve
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Posted - 2007.12.13 15:53:00 -
[11]
Edited by: Pitt Bull on 13/12/2007 15:54:59
I didn't manage read it all because you have terrible writing skills. This extremely long run-on sentence caught my eye:
Originally by: Neutrino Sunset
If the objective here is to create an immersive MMORPG in which there is richness and variety the content designers need to stop messing about with spreadsheets and wondering how can we quickly and easily add more of the same, and instead start reading more SciFi, get some kind of a vision and start asking how can we start evolving the Eve universe into something rich and vibrant.
This I agree with. NPC need a lot more work than ship designs. Many new people quit the game because the missions are just plain boring and repetitive. You guys really need to sort that out before adding more bells and whistles.
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Hannobaal
Gallente
Igneus Auctorita
GoonSwarm
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Posted - 2007.12.13 16:03:00 -
[12]
Edited by: Hannobaal on 13/12/2007 16:03:36
Back in winter/early spring CCP were talking about having less NPCs that were stronger (more like player ships in dps and tank), but with bigger bounties. Nothing has happened with that for some reason.
You don't have to really add AI to the NPCs to make them better, necessarily. Just make it so that NPC battleships are not equivalent to a player cruiser in strength, and reduce their numbers (which would help reduce the amount of work the server has to do).
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Rakshasa Taisab
Caldari
Sane Industries Inc.
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Posted - 2007.12.13 16:16:00 -
[13]
I don't understand the comments about NPC rats in belts...
They often spawn in belts while I'm mining or doing some target practice, and they seem to have a pretty decent AI. I'll admit the AI tactics often lack finesse to be expected in real human pilot, I wouldn't really consider them _that_ bad.
Still, it would be nice if they fixed the bugs causing the NPC's to spew random misspelled words, numbers and exclamation marks to local.
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