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What makes EVE online so unique and cool?  How could we improve upon the core gameplay?
Key features:
-Zero-Security space: lawless territory with ruthless PvP
-intricate gathering/manufacturing/combat mechanics
-huge fleet battles
-territory control
-dying sucks

Improvements:
-make gameplay simpler and more accessible

Anything else?

[Skofo]

How could we improve upon the core gameplay?

By including a free copy of Microsoft Excel.

[SidM]

Eve online is boring and a grindfest.

It feels more like WORK than fun.

[Lazer]

I find the idea of placing such a high value on everything to make risk vs. reward a serious idea to be intriguing. The economy forces players to band together and essentially "write their own story," most serious conflicts are inter-personal which is infinitely more interesting than any scripted event in a video game.

I guess insulting a game because it's not a flashy shooter instead of examining it's design like the topic encourages is cool too, though.

[Kekskiller]

I will testplay it the next week, so I will definitely be able to say whether it's awesome or not. And damn you if not.

[Mipe]

Tried to get into it three times. Failed three times. It is not for someone who doesn't have large time blocks to spare.

[Pishtaco]

Having everything on one server?

[Mipe]

No, they're using some sort of cloud for one persistent universe.

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Improvements:
-make gameplay simpler and more accessible

Wouldn't making the gameplay "simpler and more accessible" (which, nowadays, equals consolization and dumbing down) cause most of the players to get frustrated or leave, assuming that the player base likes the game because of its "hardcore" elements? I think it is only the extent of freedom EVE gives to players that makes the game fun, much like UO, which I always regarded as the best MMOG.

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Wouldn't making the gameplay "simpler and more accessible" (which, nowadays, equals consolization and dumbing down) cause most of the players to get frustrated or leave

I didn't ask for a dumbed down, console version. I'm sure some of the purists would get pissy and leave if we refined the gameplay, but you'd also get a lot more users wanting to play.  The hard part is finding the sweet spot of hardcore + accessibility.

My main question is, which features in Eve are core, and which features add nothing but complexity?  The good kind of complexity adds emergent behavior/politics, strategic combat, and adds to the economy.  The bad kind of complexity makes things harder for no good reason.  Eve has plenty of both.

[Lord Tim]

Why can't there be games with giant spaceships that don't require horrible long boring work to get?

Someone make an mmo with only giant spaceships and gianter ones, and no resource management.

[J. R. Hill]

I assume most of the positive points of Eve Online come from communities, because most of us that tried just sitting around and mining got bored and quit.

[Tom Sennett]

I've never actually played EVE, but I worked on a research project a little while back that had me doing some deep digging into the community.

At one point, I posted on a corporation's forum explaining who I was and what I was doing, and asking if anyone would be willing to talk to me.

Most of them thought I was a spy.

The insanity and dedication of the people who play EVE seems to be what makes it great.

[tim-bo-jay]

I've failed many times to get into Eve Online for the exact reason JR Hill mentioned, I wasn't part of the community thus I didn't feel the benefits that Eve has. What makes me want to get into it though is exactly what Tom mentioned above, the fact he very much could have been a spy for all they know adds an excitement to the game other MMO's have been unable to harness, factions and pvp is one thing, but encouraging dirty tricks like spying and the fact a lot you interact with in the Eve world isn't scripted gives it a much deeper and organic feel.

I think they could improve it by somehow drawing new players into this kind of thing from very early on, it is a horrid grind from the word go otherwise.

[Dragonmaw]

I propose we start a TIGS corp

[Calabi]

More mining and forcing you to click the button every so often, oh wait...

Or how about a mass culling of all the older players, a degenerative virus, that sweeps the cloning vats, of those over a certain age threshold.  Anyone that uses them ends up horribly disfigured and loses a ton of skill points, and money.  Clone more than three times, you lose everything.

[SirNiko]

You want to improve upon EVE? Make it so that mining is actually fun. Fun to the point that players will join the game just to mine. They'll spend hours doing it, and actually enjoy doing it.

That, and make it so space isn't so boring and bleak. Seriously. They need more landmarks in space so you feel like you're exploring, not running around looking for randomly generated waypoints.

Needs more Super Mario Galaxy style planets.

-SirNiko

[Lazer]

Reasons why mining and high prices are good:
- Makes the super expensive ships Death-Star awesome (the Death Star wouldn't be that cool if there was more than one (or two I guess)).
- Makes the stakes higher for losing ships.
- Encourages more planning for think-minded people.

Reasons why mining and high prices are shit:
- Takes forever.
- Mind Numbing.

My thoughts on the matter:
- Rig n' drop auto miners, that have no defense (perhaps they try to find the nearest dock and hide), but alert the user when they're under attack. This encourages economy management in a different way, you accumulate money over time but only if you can defend your assets. Also makes attrition wars more interesting. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

[nihilocrat]

Why can't there be games with giant spaceships that don't require horrible long boring work to get?

Someone make an mmo with only giant spaceships and gianter ones, and no resource management.

I had an idea somewhat like this a little while ago which would take a loooong time to make, but might be fun.

It would effectively be two parallel games that influence one another. One is a space economic management sim, where you manage extractors and factories and stuff and ultimately build ships. The other game is a game where all you do it blow up other ships with your ships in an action environment. Either game appeals to vastly different kinds of gamers, but lets them cooperate indirectly in a persistent environment.

[AndyKorth]

A lot of people here have mentioned the tedium and high learning curve for Eve. I tried to get into it twice, but I never really could. I really believe the reason I couldn't get into it was the painful UI. It's the source of much of the learning curve, and it adds a lot to the tedium (Yeah, mining would still be tedious anyway. So I wrote this when I canceled my subscription:

I really have two reasons for quitting Eve. First of all, I found poor performance on a Mac. Cider is simply buggy. The game works great when I boot my Macbook into windows, but even on my new Mac Pro, Eve runs sluggishly under Cider and has rendering bugs (screen flashes black, etc).

Secondly, the user interface is unwieldy and complicated. I understand that the game by it's nature is complicated, and the client-server communication further complicates things, but I feel a better job can be done. I find myself spending a lot of time doing "meta-work": stuff I need to do in the game that gets in the way of me playing. This is primarily UI manipulation- I find myself reshuffling windows more than anything else in the game. When docked, my station item window overlaps my cargo and needs to be moved. I open the fitting screen and need to move all the windows again so I can drag the item I want to fit. When I set up my chat channels and overview the way my corp recommends, a very significant part of the screen is covered, leaving little room to work with the other windows I need to leave open. There are redundancies between the context menu (right-click) and the circular action selector (click and hold). These redundancies are sometimes inconsistent. For example, open cargo is in both lists for wrecks, but for special mission specific objects, it is often only in the context menu. As a software developer myself, I understand the technical reasons for some of these inconsistencies, but I think it's a major turnoff for a lot of people.

I'd really appreciate it if you'd pass my opinions on to the UI designers in particular. For more information and opinions, try googling "administrative debris" or maybe "meta-work ui"

tl;dr: Too much futzing around with windows all over my screen. Also the UI feels unresponsive since nothing displays until you get a reply from the server with the data.