Change is a concept that is either liked or disliked, you
either like the difference or you wish to maintain the status quo . Change can be for the good or it can lead to
the detriment of the people it affects.
It has the ability to revolutionize the culture, or revert it back to
the stone age. Being affected by change
is something we all experience in our lives.
Daily changes gradually affect what we are going to do. Often times a drastic change is quickly
rejected. Eve online is a game that thrives
on change. It receives two major
expansions a year and minor updates to tweak game assets with updates. CCP has the hard job of trying to change
things people don't like and produce something they do like. They also have to judge if the loss of
interest of people who performed an activity before will be an acceptable loss
if more people participate in an activity.
CCP is trying to create a more engaging game something
where people want to participate, a game that encourages you to be at the
computer. In some instances you need to
force the player to participate, in most cases you want to encourage player
participation. CCP has all the
statistics on activities throughout New Eden.
A prime example of this was during the battlecruiser rebalance when they
showed the use of the various battlecruisers in eve online. There seems to be this
weird idea that when a discrepancy like this happens you need to nerf the
popular choice into the ground to "rebalance" and in some cases a
little reduction is necessary. In my
opinion a better approach to look at it is not that the popular choice is
overpowered, it's just that everything else sucks. So why not bring everything else up to a
similar level? This solves three
problems, the people who fly the popular ship don't feel like they have had
their wings clipped, and the people who want to fly other ships feel like they
are viable, and you are encouraging the use of the other ships. There should be a lot less discontent with
this type of approach.
I bring up a quick summary to my thought process of game
balance because one of the new Odyssey changes is to hacking/analyzing. The old system involved targeting a can,
activating a module, and then sitting there while it ran it's equation of
opening to allow you access to the can.
All in all a very boring process in high sec, a very stressful process
everywhere else as you spammed the d-scan button hoping to catch people before
they got on top of you and fuming at your module as it failed over and over and
over and over.....
CCP probably looked at this and went, "well, that's
pretty boring let's make it more engaging".
ENGAGE: To hold
the attention of.
To solve this issue CCP decided to introduce a mini-game. To this I say "AWESOME!", I think
it's a great idea and when I heard that they were going to do this I was pretty
excited. But there are some criteria
that should be met for a repetitious activity of opening dozens of cans while
exploring:
·
The game needs to be somehow randomized so that
you don't do 5 puzzles and then you just go through the motions after that.
·
The game needs to be thought provoking.
·
The game needs some mechanic to allow the player
to win through some skill instead of making it a random process.
·
The game needs to reward the player for the
increase in time and participation.
I believe this covers the basics for introducing an
engaging process for an otherwise boring activity. The reason being is that you don't want
something that repeats what the first mechanic already does.
So let's move on to the new approach that CCP has
presented and which is currently available on the test servers. I was going to go through a play through of
the mini-game but decided that needed a separate post in and of itself.
The new mini-game concept looks great, on top of that,
the visuals which they have to go with it, look pretty neat. Now it hasn't been released yet so there will
be bugs to iron out such as the loot piñata canisters not showing up on the
overview when you have them selected to, and that some of the sites
relics/debris/databanks etc... spawn inside large structures
so that you can't even get to them. Even when playing the mini-game sometimes
when you click an empty node your virus takes damage. So with these being bugs I will try not to
let them interfere with my analysis of the new system.
Now this weekend some things worked out in real life and
I was able to sit down and put forth a lot of time to testing these
features. I believe I did enough to give
me the ability to make an educated analysis.
So let's start with the numbers of what I was able to accomplish.
·
15 hours of moving from system to system,
scanning, playing the mini-games, and looting.
(I only did low security systems.)
·
20 sites visited, 3 of which I was unable to
access due to structure bug above, so 17 sites total.
·
I earned ~$60.3 mISK which is higher than the
$50 mISK that Eve's price estimation gives me.
This gives me a nice $4 mISK an hour ratio. But what about all the other junk? Well being generous I will round it up to a
million from $750,000 which would give me an ~$4.1 mISK an hour. \O/
To explain the game, you are given a pop up window with a
bunch of nodes on it. You start
somewhere among all these nodes. You may
only click on nodes that are next to ones that you have activated, then click
on an unrevealed node to gain access to it.
Many things can happen:
·
EMPTY NODE:
Yeah! It's empty, move along.
·
POWER UP:
There is one of various power ups available, snatch it up.
·
OPPOSITION:
A defensive mechanism appears and blocks your way.
·
DATA CACHE:
You are presented with a highlighted circle, click it for a surprise! (It will either be a POWER UP or OPPOSITION.)
·
SYSTEM CORE:
Wooo! You found the end,
hopefully you have enough life to kill it.
This is pretty much what I encountered in one form or
another.
So the game seems to be randomized and it doesn't seem to
repeat itself frequently enough to catch a quick pattern on how things are set
up and where things are located. This is
good because you have solved the problem that this is going to be done hundreds
if not millions of times by a player.
Here is where things slide downhill.
The game isn't thought provoking in anyway, you just need to click stuff
till you can't click no more. The only
mechanic that requires skill is being able to compare your virus health and
damage against the opposition's or system core's health and damage. If your virus' health drops to zero you fail
and when you are blocked by more than one node of opposition and you have no
power ups the end result will be failure.
So really there is no mechanic in place that requires any type of skill,
just the ability to click and hope you have enough life.
This type of game isn't engaging because you
can't see where you are going, what's in your way, or where you may need to
divert your path to grab a power up. So
it's completely random, WOOO....wait....isn't that the same thing we have
now? Why yes it is,
yes....it....is. Only this new process
requires you to pay attention to the mini-game instead of watching d-scan for
approaching enemies. While it could be a
problem, the mini-game is not timed (thank heavens) and so you can click a
couple times on the nodes and then switch to click on d-scan for a bit.
When it comes to rewards CCP stated that they have
increased the loot table, HOORAY, but wait on a successful hack the loot is
packed into little canisters and spewed forth into space with no apparent rhyme
or reason to which loot is located in which canisters and if you are alone,
you'll need to pray to the loot fairies that you can pick the right one. Also unless you have one or two friends
sitting around doing nothing until the loot explosion, you will not be able to
gather all the canisters because they spread out through space quite rapidly. You need to make sure that you aren't in a
big ship that can tank the surprise rat for failing a hack, or you'll get even
less loot as stuff slips through your fingers.
Overall I like the concept and think it could be a very
engaging and rewarding play style. But
with the way it is implemented, it just makes my head hurt.
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