Blog Banter #65: Iteration

I saw the Blog Banter recently about Attributes but didn't have time to respond.  But when I'm at the pool burning swim laps, I have a lot of time with my head face down in the water to think.  And one of the thoughts that came through my noggin was half-realized response to the Attributes post.

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?

I'm way late to this Blog Banter party, but here goes, in three separate but related thoughts:

I.  I get the logic behind wanting to nuke the Attributes system.  They're not used as intended, and really aren't a meaningful differentiator between your character and mine.  People wave the flag of character customization, but it's not really that either, and kind of never has been.  Past a certain point, what determines if I'm a better pilot is a) my time invested in skillpoints and b) how good I am at the nuances of EVE and whether I can put together a decent fit or not.  Attributes go into the first bucket (a), but given the age of the game and the ability to buy characters on the bazaar the value of the Attribute system is diluted greatly.

I'm still against (in general) ripping them out.  It's a slippery slope.  The learning skills don't add much, nuke them.  Attributes don't matter, so rip them out.  With Attributes gone, the +3/+4 implants are just a tax on clones, so let's just toss those in the bin too.  Wait ... "Everyone" has max gunnery skills, so they don't matter either ... let's crap on those too.   Shield vs. Armor tanks really don't matter, (hitpoints are hitpoints after all...) so let's get rid of Shields entirely and just have Armor and Hull points from now on.

The game would be much simpler, yes?  Then why not do it?

I come from a 5+ year stint of WoW.  To me, Homogenization is a very dirty word.  Blizz spent years making it so the classes were "balanced" and evening the playing field so that new players could enjoy the same endgame that veteran players had access to.  Patch after expansion after patch trashed old systems and replaced with shiny and new that promised to be "better" but really didn't make the game any richer or deeper.

In the end, it was a boring, watered down mess.  Having a few antiquated warts in the combat system is fine. Stop making it "better" and work on new content instead of reinventing the old every patch.

Better is the Enemy of Good Enough.


II.  Originally Attributes mattered because you badly needed skills.  Now everyone has the skills they want and the skill queue is something they load up once a year.  Rather than nuking Attributes, I'd be in favor of making them meaningful again.  I'm sure I'll get shouted down on this, but perhaps it's time to add another layer of skills across the game.

Don't remove content just because people have conquered it. Removing old content nibbles at the soul of the game, bit by bit.  


II.  I worry about the iteration going on.

Here's an analogy:  When you live in an old house, some upkeep is expected.  But if that's all you do, you never get ahead of the curve and won't turn your old house into a charming piece of property.  (Trust me, all I've done this year is cut the damn grass and haven't done ANYTHING to improve the 10 acre spread).

I know there's big things on the horizon, but beating CCP up to iterate on old stuff, banging pots and pans about the "useless" attribute system maybe isn't the best use of their time.

We should be careful what we ask for.

Burner Difficulty and Real PVP Fits

I've been trying to get words around this topic for awhile now.  I should probably save this draft and proof it a few more times, but what the heck.

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One of the complaints I see about Burners is that they don't fully emulate "real" PVP fits.  Burners fly faster than they should.  Ships dps AND tank AND fly fast AND have high resists.

I remember some comment from CCP that they were shooting for a balance point that would emulate a fully faction fit hull, with every module having a green icon, and max skills.  I've not messed around in Pyfa to know if that's still true, but it feels like in some cases they're cheating.

The reason why the difficulty is kept high is simply this:  In a real PVP encounter, you never really know what you're up against.  Sure, you know who's on local, and you know that based on what the target is flying what you should expect (in big terms, like: drones or not, armor vs. shield tank, kite vs. brawling).  And sure, certain groups tend to fly certain doctrines.  But if you're roaming around looking for a solo fight, you really don't know what you're going to run into until you find the target on a gate and you dive in.

Unlike the real world, Burners are predictable.  I know that the Burner Worm is going to orbit me under high mwd at about 40km and bombard me with missiles.  I know his damage profile within a percent or two.  I know that in order to beat him, I need a fast ship with good web to pin him down and take him at close range.  And once I have that ship fitted out, I leave it in my hanger until the next time the Worm is offered, because the Worm never adapts to me, and never learns from the tactics I use against him.

Every time the Worm is offered, I know exactly what I'm up against, unlike the real PVP world.

So, CCP has two options: dumb the encounters down, using a lower balance point, knowing that they'll be min/maxed within a day or three by the masses(1), people will yawn and farm them, or keep the difficulty very high, to at least keep things interesting for a little while longer. They've chosen the latter, resulting in a smaller pool of people doing Burners (due to skills, percieved risk, and cost investment), but yielding maybe an overall longer lifespan of the content.  It's the lesser of two evils.

On the horizon, though, is some hope.  CCP has stated that they are developing dynamic/procedural PVE content.  This should mean that content scales in difficulty, which would offer up these kinds of fights to a wider range of players. Instead of a fixed balance point of an arbitrary "fit" the targets will adapt.  If true, and if it works out, that could be a very cool thing.  It won't ever replace the true PVP experience, nor should it try, but offering a range of difficulty balance points would hopefully bring a wider audience to the content.

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(1) Some will say "heck, they're min/maxed before they're on the live server!"  True.  But compared to the number of mission runners overall, that min/max group is relatively small.  My point is if Burners were easy peasy, everyone doing lvl4s would be kicking their teeth in as part of normal farming, which kind of isn't what Burners were about.

Blog Banter #62 - Rebel Without a Cause

I'll summarize the question for Blog Banter #62 thusly:  "What is and/or should be the future for walking in stations?"

Ahh, Incarna.  Walking in Stations.  The feature without a purpose.  The rebel without a cause.  The game's single most infamous feature, never finished and left to rot in full view of everyone.  Sigh.

Incarna, if it had been done as part of the game's original development, could have been cool.  Case in point:  Earth and Beyond had WiS back in the dark days of 2002.  And it didn't suck.  You docked.  You walked over to the job terminal, or you walked to the npc vendor.  Maybe you stopped to /disco with your friends.  If you were in a hurry or doing repetitive tasks (trade runs) it was perhaps grindy, but so are a dozen things in MMOs.  It was part of the game, one of the fundamental truths of the game, and (imho) the tedious-ness was outweighed by the aspects of social interaction, attachment to an avatar, and checking out the nuances of each station layout.

The desire to develop Incarna came from a noble place.  New players especially have complained for years that it's easier to identify with a human avatar rather than your ship.  New player retention has always been a problem, putting systems in place to aid player retention isn't an evil thing, especially if it adds fun things for bittervets too.

Patch Panic

Every patch, I have a little panic attack that Burners will somehow change, ships will get nerfed, rats will get buffed, or other ripple effect changes will upset the apple cart of my fit lists.

Based on the stats of this page, many of you are finding me via Google and most of those Google hits are in search of strategies and tips for Burners.  Although the internet as a whole gets tagged "use at your own risk" and there's a constant churn of old/obsolete data, I'd feel a little responsibility if by some inaction or some inattention I somehow led people astray.  The whole point of this mess is to help people, not get them on lossmails.

Right now, based on what I'm seeing on forums, there are two missions I'm worried about:
- Team Jaguar
- Single Serpentis Daredevil

However, I'd like to get everything else verified as well and see where we stand.  There was apparently a nerf to light missile launcher Rate of Fire (RoF) in the fall.  I blatently missed the change.  Missile fits in general may have more trouble with burners than other weapon types.

I did the Team Hawk burner mission last night.  I went into the pocket with a Crow first before risking the faction-fit Garmur.  I found that this mission was unchanged in layout and tactics and was thus still a kite-able fight.

I returned with the Garmur and melted his face.  No overheat, no reloads, no drama.

Now, the Team Hawk is arguably the easiest burner mission and by far the easiest Team burner mission.  So I'm not claiming victory yet.  But it makes me feel better that it was largely unchanged since the last time I'd faced it.

So, I will go into the battle report for that mission and mark it *** VERIFIED PROTEUS JANUARY 2015 ***.

Other missions will get a tag of *** WARNING NOT YET VERIFIED FOR LATEST PATCH ***.

Ok, enough typing. Now I need to go edit all my battle reports. :)

Blog Banter #61 - Rules to Live By

I think I've maybe missed a few Blog Banters, but let's tackle this one:

"What would we encourage ALL new players to do in their first month to get them to subscribe long term, if we had to give out one set of advice for everyone (which we do if we're giving general advice)?"

Usually my advice for new players is entirely functional - what skills to train, what modules to buy, what ships to aspire to, what areas of space to migrate to.

But the question has me thinking:  what's the hook that brings you back, year after year?  What's that intangible mystery extra something that makes EVE our home?

And how do you give those measles to a new player?

And how do you avoid the false hook - the temporary high - that causes players to flare rapidly and then burn out after 4 or 6 weeks?

Blog Banter #59: Force Projection and Terrain

Blog Banter #59:

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?

I'm going to dive straight sideways and sidestep the dev blog about force projection, and the associated threadnaught.  I'm framing my response at a potential future state, far down the road, and talk about a general direction I'd like EVE to take.

Bell Curves

I'm a bit late to respond to the June Blog Banter, but I figure I may as well jump in and get the practice.

This killmail spawned this month's question:

Obviously that is a not just a bad fit, its horrific. But the guy might not know any better. We get these all the time circulating social media and corp/alliance chat. How do we educate players on fitting? This guy has been playing four months and can fly a BC, but has no idea how to fit one. What could be done to help bro's like this?

Furthermore, what (if any) responsibility do veterans players have in finding these players and instructing them on the finer arts of ship fitting? If it exists, does it extend beyond them into teaching PvP skills, ISK making skills, market skills, social skills, life skills...

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There are all kinds of players in EVE.  The spectrum from complete expert to oblivious idiot no doubt maps to some sort of Bell Curve.  Most of us are average, or near average and pile up in the big bulge in the middle.  At the tails of the curve are the outliers - the truly gifted people on one side and the people who struggle to find the undock button on the other.

This poor chap, assuming the kill is as bad as it appears to be, is apparently part of the second area.

Here's the thing:  nothing we (players) nor CCP can do can fix this.  There will still be a bell curve.  If we make things idiot proof, a better idiot will just present himself.

Any attempt to improve the situation needs to keep this fundamental truth in mind - anything we attempt will ultimately be futile.  And eventually, if you dumb the game down enough, you'll alienate the old skool playerbase *cough*WoW*cough* and suffer a mass exodus of the old guard.

There are things CCP can do without pandering to the short attention span kiddies.  Examples: continuing to improve tooltips, expanding on the ship fit window, and expanding the Mastery tabs will provide useful info. Adding a popup that says "hey dude, you're undocking with all your low slots open. Continue?" wouldn't offend me.  These things are generally useful to everyone inside the bell curve and aren't only targeted at oblivious players.

I'd like to say that the Community can help, but realistically I think we already are doing most of what can be done.  We'll continue to support E-UNI and similar projects that scoop up noob players.  There will always be growth opportunities for Corps willing to make the time investment.

So, in summary:  CCP can continue to fix little things that will help provide information, but shouldn't pander to a lower IQ pool.  The Community is probably in equilibrium, like any supply-demand market, and I wouldn't expect much more from it than we already see.  But because bell curves apply to our player population, this won't be the last faction ship you see killed in a 0.3 with a civvie shield booster fitted.

And now the bonus question:

And another question you can think about is this: do purposely wrong fits, aka comedy fits or experimental fits or off-meta fits, offend you or your corp? Would you, like Rixx Javix when he was in Tuskers, face expulsion for fitting your ships differently than the accepted standard?

Officially official answer:  "Meh, It depends."

If there are minimum fits required by that particular FC or that particular community, then don't be a douche and try to sneak in a lesser fit or experiment on someone else's dime.  Pull your weight. Don't assume someone else will take up your slack.

Under those circumstances, I get mighty offended when someone gets outed for not meeting X-up requirements.  If an expectation is set in advance, I expect folks to meet it.

But there are tons of circumstances where a min/max'd shiny Fleet isn't a hard requirement, and under those looser terms I'm very okay with experiments that might not work out.  As long as there's some advance agreement, we're cool.

Said another way:  I'm a big proponent of ship fits that aren't copy/pasted from the "accepted" list.  I like it when people rely on skill rather and knowledge of a combat system rather than a meta-du-jour.  I think it's fun to do things that couldn't/shouldn't be done by "accepted" norms.

But in order to dare to be stupid, your alternative lifestyle needs to be cleared in advance with the FC.