Call Me CCP Ishmael…

This month’s EVE Blog Banter, number 67 in the series, asks us to assume that, through some tragic yet unspecified set of circumstances, we have been vaulted into the leadership of CCP and now have our hand on the tiller of EVE Online.  We are then to chart the course for the company from there.

Oh, and we were supposed to pick our official CCP handle.  I probably put more thought into that than the rest of this post, eventually landed on CCP Ishmael.  The Ishmael from Moby Dick, not the Old Testament Ishmael.

And so I have set myself up to beat to death both a metaphor and a literary allusion in a single post.

Hilmar never looked so good… wait, that’s Ahab…

Because, if nothing else, you could spin the story of CCP and EVE Online as one of overriding obsession, the search for the white whale that is perfection in balance and fun and savagery in New Eden.

Remember Incarna?  A white whale if ever there was one…

Furthermore, like Ishmael, I have found myself something of a narrator of the progress of the game as the years have gone by.  Like Kirith Kodachi and EVE Hermit, my main character recently passed the nine year mark, and over that time I have written a lot of words about the game and spent a lot of time in my internet spaceship.

And, like the Ishmael of the book, while I am part of the story, and reflect upon it frequently, I am still on the outside of what really goes on in the brains of those steering the ship.  I can speculate, but I can never really know.  This is pushed further by my own tendency to be a tactical, rather that strategic, thinker.

All of which means that if you put me on that ship in a position of responsibility, it is as likely a not to go under, with me floating around on a coffin or in a pod or some such.

A small pod in the vast ocean of space

Anyway, this Blog Banter seems designed to let people come up with broad, sweeping strategic changes… why else would I need to be put in charge… to fix null sec or low sec or industry or simply to chart a new path forward into the future, as oppose to tactical level features and the like.

But all I have got is tactics.  If you ask me to fix Fozzie Sov, all I have is tweaks and adjustments, most of which have been brought up already.  The only one I haven’t seen is to have attackers dispense with the Entosis Link module and just shoot command nodes when they come up in order to take an objective, so we get to go with guns and kill mails as opposed to the magic laser ship.

I have a platform and no real big agenda.

So I am going to go back to tactics and request a feature I want.  Or, I guess that since I am in charge in this scenario, make CCP implement it.  Go me.

A while back CCP added in icons above your capacitor display to indicate if you were being jammed or webbed or pointed.  Something debilitating, aside from damage, is being applied to your ship and a red highlighted warning icon comes up to notify you.

A great, simple feature, necessary information put somewhere you can see it.

What I want are some additional icons.  Icons for non-debilitating items.

I want an icon to go up when you are getting shield reps, another for armor reps, a third for hull reps… heh…, an icon to show when you are getting capacitor, and that sort of thing.  Highlighted in blue or green or some other non-red, generally means good, color.

I want to know when good stuff is hitting me as well as bad.

Yes, you can see that if you have enough free space open on your screen and are zoomed in on your ship.  But a lot of people fly with their screens nearly covered and zoomed out far enough to see the whole battle as opposed to individual ships.

I don’t want an individual icon for every person hitting you, just one icon showing that you are, for example, getting shield reps which you can mouse over to list out who is applying reps to you.

This is, of course, a small and very tactical feature from somebody who flies logi most of the time, so it scratches an itch for me.  I want people to know when they are getting reps so they’ll stop pounding on the “need shield!” button and I want a quick visual indicator as to whether our cap chain is running or not and if the right person is chained up with me.  All things that I could figure out in other way, but which I want up front and easy to see.

That’s it.  That is all I’ve got.  Clearly if CCP ever had to depend on me, it would be doomed.

Anyway, others are taking a crack at this topic as well.  I will list them out below.

• Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah – CCPTurkDMC
• EVE Hermit – I am CCP Hermit
• EVEOGANDA – CCP Underpants