The Annoying Thing About Eve

I haven’t had much time to play Eve recently, what with planning the RL move and all.  But as I’ve had less and less time to play, I’ve found that I value that time much, much more.  And I realized something about this game.

There are large parts of this game I do not enjoy.

Yes, I could mention the need to fly my ships – one by one – through space.  I think it might be interesting for CCP to introduce a modules you can fit to your ships which would let you fly multiple ships at once, to help with shipping multiple fitted ships from one destination to another.

I imagine a “master controller” module and a “subsidiary collar” module, both of which would nullify the effects of all modules fitted to your ship.  This way, you could warp, dock, jump, align, but nothing else – essentially, do only what out-of-the-box ships can do.  That way, none of these ships could be used for PvP, they’d die as quickly as unfit versions, regardless of what they have fitted, and they’d be generally useless for anything but travel.  But moving from one system to another… yeah, it’d definitely help make life easier.

Because, let’s face it… having to move ships one-by-one (or repackaging and destroying rigs) really doesn’t make much sesne.  With immortal capsuleers, I’m convinced there are enough unemployed people in the universe that you could find one of them to pilot a ship from point-A to point-B.  Why make Eve boring for large periods of time? I can see no real value to making people move things one ship at a time; it’s just annoying.

But that’s not the most annoying thing about Eve.  That honor falls to buying and fitting ships.

Seriously?  We can’t find a way to click on a saved fitting, set your buy range (want everything in the Jita station?  3 jumps?  The whole region?), and let the client determine the cost of all the goods from the cheapest-priced sell orders?  You want a fitted Rapier?  That’ll be 240 mil, please, all modules available in Jita 4-4.

How hard can that really be?  It’d save about 15 minutes, as well as multiple user-generated server queries.

Some of you may, no doubt, be arguing that, “this isn’t worth CCP’s time, Tal.  Is this really an inconvenience?”

Let me put it to you this way.  If you do logistics for an alliance, do you really want to spend all your time building ships?  If you only have 2 hours a night to play Eve, do you want to spend it fitting ships you’ve already fitted before, or do you want to spend it blowing things up (rocks, rats, renters, etc.)?  What can possibly be gained by making players do long, boring activities before getting to have fun?  I don’t really see the value to it from a business-model perspective.  If I was CCP, I’d want players to spend their time getting killed and killing others.  That generates players who both need to buy and sell plex.  Buyers are the ones killing rats.  Sellers are the ones getting killed (and no matter how good you are at PvP, you do die eventually).  I see nothing but upside for CCP.

Answer this question honestly… if you had the ability to use a “buy this fitting in its entirety” option, would you seriously pass on it?

I didn’t think so.

A mechanic change that every player would take advantage of and would allow them to more-quickly engage in the activities that affect the PLEX cycle?  How is that not worth CCP’s development time?