Doer
Marauder
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2005
- Posts
- 7,004
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- Muddlin' Through
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- Avatar Name
- David "Doer" Falkayn
EU and its UI has evolved over the years so that we are given more information about game mechanics, especially when the user community has figured out the particulars of that mechanism already. This makes sense, because what was once a mystery or a "community effort" game of sorts has been reduced to simply a menial exercise in tedium. The problem is that the changes are sometimes only enough to kill off the community effort, without giving us all the benefits they should.
Let's look at some examples and what i think should still be added.
1. Professions and skills
Before we had a professions panel, all that we could see were skills. The idea that these skills combined in different ways to make up professions was discussed and progress was being made on figuring out the contribution of skills, especially for the hunting professions by using the unlocks as a gauge. About that time a VU brought us the professions panel, and now there's no mystery about what level an avatar is. Using that extra precision, we have now assigned the contribution of skills to almost every profession. On the one hand, it's much easier to track progress and goals, but on the other hand, the number of tools for doing this has decreased afaik.
A parallel effort provided us with an approximate function to map skill level to tt. This function is still an approximation and the behavior at very high levels relatively unknown.
We fortunately have jdegre's wonderful skill scanner and calculator, but that's about it for full-service tools.
what's left undone...
IMO there are two things that MA should do to free EU from pointless limitations for skill calculators and avatar trackers.
2. Auction history
pe-trade, my2pecs and similar sites were developed to track the expiring auctions and provide a record of sales. These were incredibly useful tools only hindered by the lack of data about buyout sales. Then MA added the auction tracking information in game, and we have again lost our 3rd party utilities. Now we have even less accurate approximations for current markup outside of the universe, and this makes tools that require accurate markup information (like weapon charts, etc.) somewhat pointless.
what's left undone
It's time to provide a feed of auction data, or at least a database dump. Not only will this allow 3rd-party utilities that need price information to be updated automatically and accurately, it will permit developers to present the data in much less atrocious ways than the in-game system does, and develop filters for removing manipulating sales, etc.
3. Decay stats
Once upon a time there was no information on the decay of an item. Then, the incredibly useful "Durability" rating
was introduced. About a decade later and everyone understands what decay is, and information on how to accurately measure decay is freely available. It was fine to just give a hint about decay when there was a relatively static number of tools and weapons in game, but the recent trend of a new tool and weapon a day makes the burden of maintaining information sites (like the wiki) too great. It doesn't serve any good purpose at this point to not list the exact decay on a tool.
what's left undone
Simply change the Durability rating to the actual decay, in millipecs.
A discussion of this particular history is actually what brought up the idea for this thread. Here's my reply from that thread.
Then there are other areas where new systems come along and bring great new features, and sometimes older systems suffer breakdowns or (intentional or circumstantial) nerfs, making them ineffectual or weak in comparison...
4. Weapon scopes/sights
Ah, the attachments... few items within the game are so subtle and so ignored by MA. What exactly do they do and how much? Well, we have some ideas. But this is not about those ideas, although it might be good for more definitive words on the matter.
No, this is about making attachments cool again.
what's left undone
Well, we've lost our red dot, we now have a much cooler "team target" feature that requires NO attachments to use but gives the exact range, and we can't even get that with our high-tech scopes and sights! We may also have lost some of the benefit of the skill mod with the change to the HA (haven't been able to test this yet), making an already marginal bonus even more morginal.
So...
5. Antigrav / hightech boxes
"The what?" you ask. That's right, nobody remembers these things because they were nerfed and left to fade away. In fact, the increase in avatar carrying weight and the advent of vehicles make the current stats of the boxes almost useless. But, what's more sci-fi than an antigravity box? (Okay, well at least they didn't just call it a "bag of holding"). We need more cool sci-fi gadgets around!
I hunted troopers years ago in the hopes of looting one of the high tech boxes, but alas, i think they had already stopped dropping.
what's left undone
There's no reason the boxes can't be un-nerfed or at least new, similar gadgets introduced. Maybe a mark 4 version of the box. Maybe some higher tech boxes. Let's have more sci-fi swag on our sci-fi planet...
6. Regen and unused attributes
Okay, you all knew this one was coming: plugged here.
Continued in this post.
Let's look at some examples and what i think should still be added.
1. Professions and skills
Before we had a professions panel, all that we could see were skills. The idea that these skills combined in different ways to make up professions was discussed and progress was being made on figuring out the contribution of skills, especially for the hunting professions by using the unlocks as a gauge. About that time a VU brought us the professions panel, and now there's no mystery about what level an avatar is. Using that extra precision, we have now assigned the contribution of skills to almost every profession. On the one hand, it's much easier to track progress and goals, but on the other hand, the number of tools for doing this has decreased afaik.
A parallel effort provided us with an approximate function to map skill level to tt. This function is still an approximation and the behavior at very high levels relatively unknown.
We fortunately have jdegre's wonderful skill scanner and calculator, but that's about it for full-service tools.
what's left undone...
IMO there are two things that MA should do to free EU from pointless limitations for skill calculators and avatar trackers.
- First, make the avatar's skills and professions downloadable using an API. The requirement that a new tool have a screen scraper functionality or require the user to manually enter skill values is a pointless barrier.
- Second, release the exact function for skill level to tt. We have a couple of good approximations afaik (mine and jdegre's), so the "mystery" of the mechanism is gone. Just make it possible for whomever wants to to make an accurate new tool.
2. Auction history
pe-trade, my2pecs and similar sites were developed to track the expiring auctions and provide a record of sales. These were incredibly useful tools only hindered by the lack of data about buyout sales. Then MA added the auction tracking information in game, and we have again lost our 3rd party utilities. Now we have even less accurate approximations for current markup outside of the universe, and this makes tools that require accurate markup information (like weapon charts, etc.) somewhat pointless.
what's left undone
It's time to provide a feed of auction data, or at least a database dump. Not only will this allow 3rd-party utilities that need price information to be updated automatically and accurately, it will permit developers to present the data in much less atrocious ways than the in-game system does, and develop filters for removing manipulating sales, etc.
3. Decay stats
Once upon a time there was no information on the decay of an item. Then, the incredibly useful "Durability" rating
was introduced. About a decade later and everyone understands what decay is, and information on how to accurately measure decay is freely available. It was fine to just give a hint about decay when there was a relatively static number of tools and weapons in game, but the recent trend of a new tool and weapon a day makes the burden of maintaining information sites (like the wiki) too great. It doesn't serve any good purpose at this point to not list the exact decay on a tool.what's left undone
Simply change the Durability rating to the actual decay, in millipecs.
A discussion of this particular history is actually what brought up the idea for this thread. Here's my reply from that thread.
Then there are other areas where new systems come along and bring great new features, and sometimes older systems suffer breakdowns or (intentional or circumstantial) nerfs, making them ineffectual or weak in comparison...
4. Weapon scopes/sights
Ah, the attachments... few items within the game are so subtle and so ignored by MA. What exactly do they do and how much? Well, we have some ideas. But this is not about those ideas, although it might be good for more definitive words on the matter.
No, this is about making attachments cool again.
what's left undone
Well, we've lost our red dot, we now have a much cooler "team target" feature that requires NO attachments to use but gives the exact range, and we can't even get that with our high-tech scopes and sights! We may also have lost some of the benefit of the skill mod with the change to the HA (haven't been able to test this yet), making an already marginal bonus even more morginal.
So...
- bring back the red dots.
- bring us a range finder function in our scopes. We should be able to see the range to the mob we point our fancy attachments at.
- And make the attachments more useful. We want more bang for our decay.
5. Antigrav / hightech boxes
"The what?" you ask. That's right, nobody remembers these things because they were nerfed and left to fade away. In fact, the increase in avatar carrying weight and the advent of vehicles make the current stats of the boxes almost useless. But, what's more sci-fi than an antigravity box? (Okay, well at least they didn't just call it a "bag of holding"
). We need more cool sci-fi gadgets around!I hunted troopers years ago in the hopes of looting one of the high tech boxes, but alas, i think they had already stopped dropping.
what's left undone
There's no reason the boxes can't be un-nerfed or at least new, similar gadgets introduced. Maybe a mark 4 version of the box. Maybe some higher tech boxes.
Let's have more sci-fi swag on our sci-fi planet...6. Regen and unused attributes
Okay, you all knew this one was coming: plugged here.
Continued in this post.
Last edited:
