Soooo... which agent am I choosing from here? Uh huh... and why? Oh you don't know either? Ok.
So I’ve been playing Eve a bit more recently after my brother started playing… and decided I needed to run some missions after a friend told me that I should be getting rep with NPC corporations so my refining profits are higher.
Fair enough I thought, so off I went to try and figure out which agent I should be using.
This is where the “final frontier” part of the title of this post comes from.
Eve agents must be the most impenetrable aspect of Eve online. Sure, learning Eve’s basics can be a bit daunting for non gamers (and its not really a game for non gamers.. yet), but Eve’s agent system is truly unweildy.
Eve’s agent system is like an impenetrable veil of secrecy, what corp should I do missions for? What type of missions? Does it matter what faction for? What about rewards?
I only started playing Eve (albeit on a very off and on basis) 12 months or so ago. I’m a hardcore gamer, yet after searching through hundreds of menu’s I couldn’t figure out which agents I should be trying to contact.
Even reading the Eve wiki on the subject didn’t exactly leave me feeling illuminated.
Can you tell I’m frustrated?
I am!
I’m so frustrated with Eve’s agent system that I came up with a new way for CCP to rework how players find their agents.
Here’s some screen shots of my pre-pre-pre alpha (ok its me scrawling in Gimp 2.0) UI for Eve’s new agent system.
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- Which agent to choose from… and why??
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- Epic graphics show an in-game interface light years ahead of current systems
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- Further questions to refine what you’re after…
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- Eve agent star map – lead the way!
So would you agree this is a revolutionary new idea that should be implemented right away?
This is obviously a little tongue in cheek, but look, CCP… I’m a hardcore gamer and I’m struggling to work out:
- Why I even need agents, past the obvious isk rewards.
- Which corporations give me what rewards without having to manually search for NPC corps I don’t even know exist.
- What reputation does with a certain agent/corp/faction.
- When I do know what I want, I can’t easily filter for it and show nearby agents… I don’t want to fly through .3 space to find an Amarr mining agent…
- Probably another 10 things I can’t think of right now.
Lets get the agent system into the 21st century. Make it more obvious where, why, who and what agents are, and how they’re helpful.
What do you think? Am I (obviously) some clueless noob that needs to put in another 100 hours to L2P?
If you have any ideas on how the system can be improved, feel free to share. We like sharing here!
And just for good measure here’s one resource that helped a *little* bit! http://eve-agents.com/
