Idiocy Incarna(te)

So the CCP devs have revealed that there are currently 70 devs working on people wandering aimlessly in stations and somewhere else there’s four teams totalling 15 devs, some of which are working on fixing lag. But not all 15.

Great priorities.

Let’s be direct. Incarna is a complete waste of CCP’s time. There are a lot of people who do not play Eve and many of them will tell you it’s because they’re not a person in the game, that they’re just a face and a spaceship. So the reaction has been to make a completely unrelated feature where people can wander around stations.

What the CCP devs are missing with Incarna is that the people who say they don’t like Eve because they don’t feel like a person aren’t asking for an add on to the game where they can walk around. They’re saying they don’t like the basic content of the game. It’s a way of summing up all of what Eve is about: Internet Spaceships. Eve will still be internet spaceships after Incarna, except there will be a lot of empty stations and one one full one, probably in Jita, that like The Reets Retreat in AO or Pocket D in COX is full of a couple of dozen G.I.R.L.’s cybering guys for isk.

Once the newness is gone, the only reason anyone else is going to venture into stations is if they’re forced to by game mechanics and doing so would be an enormous mistake. I dealt with being forced to use stations in Earth and Beyond, which was at its heart another Internet Spaceships game. In order to do anything in stations, one had to leave ones ship and go to the relevant room to do it. This additional “feature” of having to run around a station in order to get to the button to do something was not exactly a plus.

Instead of docking and hitting the fitting button, imagine docking, hitting the leave ship button, and running through a maze you’ve memorized for each cookie cutter station, so you can get to another room where you can press the fitting button stuck on a wall. Or “talk” with the “fitting sergeant.”

That’s not a social experience, it’s just a really really bad interface. And if you force them to do that, you aren’t going to get meaningful social interaction, you’re going to get silent zombies standing around like the mob of “bank alts” you find in every Auction House in WoW.

To sum it up simply. Incarna is not going to bring girls to Eve. It’s not going to bring people who want to play people not internet spaceships. Those folks? They’re just not that into you. Get over it and work on finding more people who are.

1 comment

  1. I actually liked the stations in Earth and Beyond. It makes sense to me that you’d wouldn’t spend all of your time in a ship, that you’d have to leave to buy things from people, etc instead of just sitting there while invisible station personnel get your stuff and bring it to your hangar for you. It lets you get a feel for the game world more than just staying in a ship all the time. I’ve often wondered how the inside of a large station would be different from a remote POS tower, or the inside of an extractor deep underwater on an ocean planet. Of course, all that still doesn’t necessarily mean that whatever CCP’s idea of station interiors will help the game any though.

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